Master and God

by Lindsey Davis

  For Vinius the most hideous aspect was that he had found himself caught in this scene of watery mayhem, while simultaneously trying to start a furious argument with the love of his life. ‘It is not respectable!’

  ‘What a prude! You surprise me… It’s all Domitian’s sinister showmanship.’ Lucilla released the boy, who ran to be fluffed up and dressed. ‘Can you imagine household after household full of elderly maids and set-in-their-ways secretaries, when they wake up tomorrow to find they have to take in a gruesome little stage child with the morals of a rabbit warren. And they dare not get rid of him.’

  Lucilla reached for Vinius’ hand and dabbed at the paint, but his dark mood reached her; she gave up and threw the sponge at him. ‘Oh do it yourself.’

  As rapidly as the baths must have filled with the blackened boys, they emptied. A parade of imperial gifts, some human, was leaving the Palatine. Relieved officials ticked off addresses on note boards.

  ‘When I said to explain, Lucilla, I did not mean this fiasco.’ Thoroughly self-righteous, Vinius sensed he was making no impression. ‘You got divorced.’

  Lucilla was gathering her equipment, then pushing her way to a changing room. It was almost deserted, since most of the other attendants were still involved in swilling away the grimy water, or just descending into horseplay now their earlier frantic activities had finished.

  ‘Turn your back, Vinius.’ Her undertunic was drenched; she intended to remove it before climbing back into her other clothes, which she had retrieved from a manger above the bench. ‘ Face away! ’ Vinius haughtily held up a towel to hide her. She must have forgotten he had once seen her all by starlight.

  ‘You got divorced!’

  Lucilla shook down her dry gown and, once decent, began forcing on sandals. As the straps resisted, she snatched the towel to dry her feet roughly. ‘So?’

  ‘You bloody well got divorced and never told me.’

  Silence.

  ‘Every pervert in this putrid palace knows — but not me. We had a conversation earlier and you never even mentioned it.’

  Lucilla bundled her wet tunic into one of her baskets.

  ‘ When were you intending to tell me?’

  Silence.

  ‘What — never? ’

  ‘My marriage is private.’

  Vinius was livid. ‘And this sudden split has no connection with me?’

  ‘Causing a divorce would do you no credit.’

  Lucilla was ready to leave. She made her way to the vestibule, gave her name to an orderly, and a litter was called for her. Vinius had tailed her like a hopeful dog. There was no room for him in the conveyance, especially as those who had helped behind the scenes tonight were being sent home with hampers of leftover food and unused amphorae.

  Lucilla gave the bearers instructions for Plum Street. A fraught transport queue was building up behind. ‘Leave it, Vinius.’

  ‘Am I expected to follow you?’

  ‘Do what you like. Go to the Camp.’

  ‘I thought I meant something to you.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake. I only just left one man I regretted — Goodnight, soldier.’

  Lucilla was carried away. Vinius was left standing in the vestibule in his gorgeous array, while hard-hearted imperial planners with rotas to organise openly sneered at him.

  As the litter bumped her homeward, Flavia Lucilla longed to weep unshed tears on his strong shoulder.

  It was the wrong time of the month. For aesthetic reasons, even though her libido was always high, she kept to herself on those days. Had Gaius known her better he might have recognised the signs. She had dark circles under her eyes, she felt uncomfortable in her body, she was prone to making mistakes. Unfortunately, on such days she was incapable of taking precautions against the mistakes…

  ‘You never do my hair as well, dear,’ her client Aurelia Maestinata had told her frankly. ‘Still, once you get to my age you will be blissfully free of all that.’ Aurelia also had a view on the male reaction. ‘Every month is a surprise. The problem is, dear, men cannot count!’

  With three wives and many aunts in his history, Gaius had certainly encountered women’s sudden flare-ups. He never dreamed Lucilla rebuffed him for that reason. He thought it could only be because she did not like him (surely not?) or, more likely, she was a teasing little bitch. He called himself an understanding man, yet he loathed women who were unpredictable.

  Lucilla knew she had just taken a decision she regretted. In the course of it, she had seen Gaius Vinius in his worst light. Petty, peremptory, authoritarian, unrealistic, self-centred and vain.

  Aurelia Maestinata would say, all men are like that, just ignore it. Aurelia’s tart good sense being unavailable, when Lucilla got home she drank too much from the amphora they had given her at the palace, and simply added new adjectives for Vinius to her list.

  Nemurus would have called it hyperbolic auxesis. Vinius would have called that crap.

  Gaius Vinius made one further attempt to court Lucilla: hating himself for giving in first, he called in at Plum Street the next day. Lucilla was not there. (She was curled up among many cushions in the back of the manicure salon downstairs, where Glyke and Calliste had dosed her with hangover and cramp cures; she had done the same for them on many occasions.)

  The dog was gnawing his rush mat because he missed Lucilla. He had already torn down the curtain that normally hid the lavatory. He growled at Gaius, having insultingly forgotten who he was. Balanced on a stool to rehang the curtain, Gaius growled back.

  He waited around as long as he thought reasonable (not long). Then he reckoned the trollop must be off wasting herself on Domitian’s dwarf in some foul palace burrow.

  Gaius gave up on her.

  After that, his life descended into chaos.

  He invited his brothers for a men’s night out. He still did not want to be his father, but he intended to get drunk out of his skull. Felix and Fortunatus were up for it. Their wives tried to forestall them with requests to put up shelves, which they parried with traditional delaying tactics. Gaius also invited his old mucker Scorpus and even his superior, the cornicularius. Luckily the cornicularius could not make it; he always visited a brothel on Wednesdays where he had been going so long the bawd made him supper and most times he just talked to her.

  During many long hours in wine bars, Gaius expressed his current loathing of women so luridly that his brothers thought it was a convoluted hint. They set about what they reckoned they did best on his behalf: fixing up Gaius with a new wife. Soon Felix and Fortunatus were negotiating with a widow who was looking for security; they continued manoeuvres even though their own wives, Paulina and Galatia, cruelly suggested it was a mistake on the widow’s part to expect security from fly-by-night Gaius Vinius.

  He didn’t need Felix and Fortunatus to organise his life, he reckoned. Left on his own in a bar one evening, after those wimps scuttled home, Gaius found his fourth wife for himself. At the time she seemed perfect, being the type of woman who did not mind picking up a new husband in a bar. Just his sort of girl, he thought.

  His brothers went ahead eagerly with their own planning. For legal reasons, the widow needed to act fast. Felix and Fortunatus saw no reason why a bridegroom should be conscious at his wedding so they just supported their drunken brother through the event. The priest who took the auguries looked sick, but a cash bonus squared him. The widow’s need for immediacy outweighed any wish for a husband who could communicate. So Gaius never told her he had married someone else the night before.

  With the lesson of his father before him, Gaius did try to sober himself up. He was helped by the cornicularius. ‘This is what I warned about: Dacia’s left you a mess, son. Either you start sorting yourself out — today — or you can take your discharge. I don’t intend to train you up if you’re going on a bender that will see you out, like your old man.’

  ‘You knew my father?’

  ‘This is the army. You don’t think I’d have any bugger i
n this office whose background wasn’t known to me?’ He always used the term ‘this office’ as a holy concept.

  ‘What about promotion on merit?’

  ‘Less of the filthy language, soldier!’

  A slew of regrettable events threatened to destroy him; Gaius had to overcome his problems. He was supposed to be liaison officer with the military police — a body of investigators, arresting officers, torturers and prison jailers who followed up informers’ reports. In his current state, his superior refused to expose him to this shadowy corps, whose methods were notorious and likely to distress a man who had a five-day hangover.

  Instead, one day a nervous lictor, a magistrate’s escort who attended on Rutilius Gallicus, came to ask for help from the Urbans, whom Rutilius commanded. The three Urban Cohorts were barracked with the Praetorians, though as the City Prefect was always a senator, and so a civilian, he never lived at the Camp. The Praetorian Prefects were quartered there, but a fine tradition of Camp life was that after lunch they were unavailable.

  Deputising in his routine relaxed manner was the cornicularius, who found the lictor, wandering lost. Given the Praetorians’ traditional rivalry with the Urbans, he decided the Guards must hijack the query. ‘I don’t think we want some cack-handed Urban twerp making a mess of this… Sounds like a situation where we might be helpful, Clodianus?’

  ‘Happy to volunteer, sir.’ Even pie-eyed, Gaius knew what to say to an officer.

  ‘Going on what the lictor says, we’ll keep this very quiet. Use initiative.’

  With as much of that commodity as a man with a headache, slurred speech and his feet falling over themselves could muster, Gaius took one Guard to help, choosing a large one. His other equipment included a thin-bladed stylus knife, a large military nail, eyebrow tweezers (one of the centurions had a bisexual servant) and a toothpick (his own). Anyone who had been in the vigiles could open locks, and since discretion was called for, he hoped to avoid having to smash down the door.

  Rome had a problem. Rutilius Gallicus, the City Prefect, had locked himself in his office. He was having a nervous breakdown in there.

  22

  Quintus Julius Cordinus Gaius Rutilius Gallicus had locked the office door himself. He was a man on the defensive, which to him seemed the only acceptable condition nowadays. Either the daily dirge of his office or simply the pathos of life in general had become too much for him. He could no longer cope. He found it unaccountably difficult to carry out the most mundane daily tasks; dressing, going to the baths, dining were all beyond him. Without slaves to attend to him physically, he would be curled up in a corner at home, naked and filthy. Everything had to stop. Since he could not do anything, there was no point in people coming in to make demands of him. So he locked the door to keep them out.

  Having six names was not a sign of hereditary grandeur. Six names meant you had been adopted by somebody with status, because your original birthline was not flashy. Coming from Augusta Taurinorum was no help either. It was pretty well over the acceptable border and into the Alpine provinces. Senators from outside Italy had a hard grind to find acceptability. Julius Agricola had come from Gaul, and suffered for it. Ulpius Traianus came from Spain and didn’t give a damn, but that was the Baeticans all over. A man from a province at least had a province behind him. A man from a north Italian city had to scrabble up every inch of the cursus honorum, schmoozing snobbish freedmen, squeezing posts from emperors’ pockets, entirely on his own with it. You could get bloody fed up with looking solidly reliable. In Rome you could get sick of having to defend a home city that lay on the rim of the Alps. You could become exhausted by your wife always nagging to go north to see her family.

  Rutilius was weary. He could not sleep, yet he was dead tired. He was tired with the heavy weight of the mentally sick, and he knew no way to extricate himself.

  He was sixty. Sixty this year. Nobody of sixty thinks they are old; they know they are at the height of their experience, able to show upcoming young idiots a thing or two. Nevertheless, the start of the body’s wearing out makes itself known. Hair goes. Heart and kidneys struggle. Energy hiccups. Dexterity falters. Sexual intercourse, if called for, becomes touch and go. At the same time, the demands of high office become greater. There is too much to do; the physical frame struggles to hold up. The mind may be overwhelmed by its burden of responsibility.

  Rutilius was a Flavian stalwart. In his early career in the army, he even served under Corbulo, the Empress’s father. Luck fell on him, moreover. On Nero’s death, he had stepped into Nero’s shoes for one useful honour: the prestigious role of priest of the Augustan cult, nurturing emperors who were declared gods. A cynic would say, bloody good training for dealing with Domitian. Later, Vespasian had made him governor of Germany just at the right moment to pop over the Rhine and safely capture Veleda, a German prophetess who hated and tried to destroy Rome. Rutilius never thought enough was made of that exploit. Perhaps by then Veleda’s star had faded. When he captured her and brought her to Rome, now in middle age, she seemed neither mad enough herself nor representative of a sufficiently thrilling danger. As a bogeywoman Veleda was a disappointment.

  The watchword was conciliation now. A new German prophetess, Ganna, had just visited Domitian along with the king of the Semnones; she was well received and sent back to her forest with gifts. If wild women were merely allies these days, the man who once captured Ganna’s predecessor lost cachet.

  Domitian did honour him. Rutilius was governor of Asia, a plum post, one of Domitian’s first appointees. Then came the City position. Who in his right mind would be grateful for a job where the last incumbent had just been executed on a charge of treason? Arrecinus Clemens, a man known for his gentleness. Too close to Titus though. One of the in-laws who had brought up Julia. Too close to her as well, therefore. Even Julia’s influence on Domitian could not save her uncle.

  A typical story was told about the end of Arrecinus Clemens: Domitian, who often craftily pretended affection for those he was about to murder, took him for a carriage ride. Passing the sleazeball who was informing on him, as Arrecinus must have been aware, the Emperor murmured, ‘Let’s not talk to that slave until tomorrow.’ It added to the cruelty. Arrecinus was doomed and knew it; he just had to live out an extra day of suspense while Domitian gloated.

  City Prefect was a post where you had to work with the Emperor on a daily basis. When he was in Rome the workload was intolerable, the pace pitiless, the stress ghastly. You could not give in to it. Plus there was the tricky stuff: never knowing what Domitian really wanted, never sure he didn’t want you dead.

  When Domitian was away, the burden for a conscientious man increased. Rutilius was his de facto deputy. Who could deputise for the divine?

  To be left in charge of the city was immensely important. If anything had happened to Domitian when he went after Saturninus, or afterwards on the Danube, it would have fallen to Rutilius to close Rome’s gates and secure the heart of the Empire. He might have been called upon for delicate diplomatic negotiations or, if it all went wrong, he could have died, as Flavius Sabinus died twenty years ago, torn apart on the Capitol by the Vitellian mob. He was unafraid of death, yet the anxiety subtly damaged him.

  He worked too hard. He devoted himself to curating Rome, from dawn when good senators arose from their beds to dark hours by lamplight when scrolls became a strain to read.

  The Secular Games had been a long trial. Rutilius had to organise them. They were the worst, because they were held only every hundred years, in theory when nobody who had been alive the last time would be still on earth to attend. Domitian altered the prescribed dates; Rutilius had to help fudge that. Then came months of nitpicking detail, dealing with temperamental poets and singers, athletes, equestrians and charioteers, priests, not to mention theatre-sweepers and ticket office staff who by definition chose times like that to threaten to walk out unless they were given a pay increase. There were constantly shifting programme details. New buildings to
be finished on time. Then the sheer bloody logistics of bringing everyone into the city and moving them out afterwards through monumental traffic jams, housing and feeding hundreds of thousands, stabling their damned donkeys, finding extra lockups for the influx of festival pickpockets. And, even though it all happened just the same as every other Games, nobody ever remembered just how much extra shit and pee would be washed into the sewers from the public latrines at a time when the public slaves who cleaned those sewers were hoping for six days of public holiday.

  That was just one worry.

  He was too close to Domitian. He saw the mistakes as they were being made. For a loyal, hard-working state servant it was too depressing to watch a man twenty years his junior wrecking all that Rutilius and his generation had attempted to build and stabilise after the nightmare of Nero. By sixty, you were losing enough friends and colleagues to illness, without watching more sent to their deaths prematurely.

  He was going mad. He had stopped functioning altogether. He was sitting now, with unattempted work mounded all around him. Mighty trays of scrolls and tablets. So much work that he placed the surplus in piles on the floor like the short masonry columns that supported the heated floor in a hypocaust. Work arrived every hour of every day; he could not look at it.

  He was sitting very still. He had been in a stupor for a long time, days maybe. A dagger was lying close upon his desk, though his lassitude was so severe it prevented him even killing himself. Did he want to commit suicide? He could not even tell. He had no energy. He was lifeless. No one could reach his misery. He himself could no longer analyse what was happening, despite a confused feeling that something must have gone awry. Thought had become jumbled at one point, but now there was no thought.

  There was nothing.

  He heard the Praetorians arrive. Irregular thumps indicated vague attempts to break down the door, but that was short-lived.

  He heard a man say not to damage the decor; stand back and let him fiddle. Rutilius tensed. After some scratching and a muffled curse, the double doors swung gently inwards. A Guard came in, sucking a cut hand. He came in alone. He closed the doors after him quietly then opened just one set of shutters to let in daylight. He came over and sat on the edge of the table, still sucking the blood from his hand where the knife he used on the lock had skidded off and gashed him.