Master and God

by Lindsey Davis

  No one else will touch it, thought Gaius. Luckily, keeping his private thoughts hidden was one of his talents. It was essential to his job. Being one-eyed with a wrecked face gave him every advantage in appearing inscrutable. With the Prefect, he played on it shamelessly. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  His tone was so benign the Prefect shifted on his seat, caught by a riffle of uncertainty. He suspected that under the grave veneer, this Clodianus could be a subversive bugger.

  The new committee was official, yet it was secret. Clodianus was given to understand that the Emperor was aware of its existence. That implied Domitian approved. Perhaps he had even suggested it — always a worrying aspect.

  ‘May I ask who chose me, sir?’

  ‘Abascantus. Know him?’

  ‘Vaguely. I know who he is, obviously — chief correspondence secretary. I have dealings with his people.’

  There were hundreds of palace clerks, specialising in either Greek or Latin paperwork; Abascantus sat at the top, supervising both. The cornicularius received documents from various officials who had worked out that he was a safe person to push queries out to (where ‘safe’ meant, if the item looked harmless, he would not bother to relay tricky questions back but would diligently lose the original). He had even seen bumf with Abascantus’ signature on it, especially while the Emperor had been away in Pannonia, taking his chief officials with him. A lot of dross had floated back to the Camp then. Gaius had pigeonholed it with good-nature, though he could always be relied upon to find it again if unexpectedly requested.

  Indeed, should that happen, he would even add a note or two, prettying up the document so it looked as if trouble had been taken to deal with the matter. Usually that sufficed to get the bumf lobbed back to him harmlessly for filing. He would put it away in the cache he had labelled very neatly with a Greek word for round objects. His symbol of two circles, he would explain sombrely to new clerks on their first day, meant the documents filed there had already been on two full circuits for comment, or as the cornicularius called it ‘chugging to Pannonia and back’. If the new clerk had not twigged the code by the end of the week, he would be transferred to granary records.

  Perhaps Abascantus, who came from a family of imperial scribes, had noticed the devotion with which Clodianus tended the altar of bureaucracy.

  ‘An old-style freedman,’ said Casperius Aelianus. ‘Younger than you might expect, horrible hairstyle, you must know him by sight… I have him down as one of Domitian’s personal choices, not inherited from Titus.’

  ‘He involves himself in postings?’

  ‘Don’t they all?’ The Prefect looked demure. ‘I think he prepares most of the Emperor’s personnel suitability briefings.’ That was a new definition, which the cornicularius noted approvingly. He collected jargon.

  ‘Right,’ said Clodianus. ‘Well, better than having a ballet-dancer in charge of promotions, as that dodgy poet once claimed.’

  ‘Oh quite!’

  ‘I once rashly asked my predecessor what happened to promotion on merit.’

  ‘Oh merit works,’ the Prefect told him, in an offhand tone. ‘So long as you back it up with a large enough thank-you package for the freedman who gives out posts.’

  ‘So what exactly is my remit, sir?’

  He thought the Prefect looked slightly embarrassed.

  Aelianus explained that the superstitious Domitian regularly had the hour and manner of his death foretold by astrologers. Such prophecies went back so long that even his late father had chivvied him about it on an occasion when Domitian was handed mushrooms — the famous medium used for poisoning the Emperor Claudius. As his leery son refused the dish, Vespasian had joshed, ‘You’d do better to worry about swords!’ But Domitian was becoming increasingly afraid of assassination, and in the near future.

  ‘So when’s this scenario due to occur, sir?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Highly confidential.’

  ‘Right,’ murmured Clodianus, feeling depressed. ‘A few details would have helped with planning. Date and time would have been perfect.’

  ‘Of course. But possessing the Emperor’s horoscope, that would be treason.’

  ‘Understood! If anybody told us, we would all have to be executed.’

  ‘Bloody ridiculous,’ agreed the Prefect.

  He had been in post a good nine years. He thought he knew everything. He and Clodianus had worked together for long enough to develop an easygoing relationship. Although Aelianus saw his chief-of-staff as slightly maverick, he also thought he saw a steel backbone there.

  According to the rule of thumb Clodianus used, after nine years, the Prefect was well past his best. In the Clodianus system, you spent the first year fumbling through everything, the second getting most things right, and the third absolutely tiptop efficient. From then on, you — and even perhaps your superiors — believed you were perfect, but you stopped trying. He himself was at that point. A sad moment to be noticed by some loopy freedman…

  The caustic Clodianus had remembered Abascantus now. Way back, when he used to be on imperial escort duty, before he went to Dacia, he had been present one day when Domitian announced that freedman’s promotion to chief secretary. Abascantus had a pushy wife, Priscilla. She had thrown herself to the marble mosaic in front of Domitian, exuding gratitude for their princely master’s honour to her husband.

  Sickening, Clodianus thought. Then he corrected himself. Flattery was only one way to proceed: you lied. You lied and praised him until your teeth hurt, in case Domitian’s mood changed abruptly.

  ‘We want trusted men to work on this.’

  ‘Absolutely, sir!’

  ‘Abascantus is setting up the committee to put the Emperor’s mind at rest. Domitian should now feel reassured, because you are out there, looking for the people who intend to fulfil that wicked prophecy. He has convinced himself there are enemies who hate him; he suspects a conspiracy.’

  ‘The idea is, I will infiltrate any desperados and observe…?’

  The Prefect looked embarrassed again. ‘Assuming they exist.’

  Which we are assuming they do not, sir? This is all a fantasy.

  Too right. Just keep the stylus-pushers happy. ‘So — are you up for it?’

  ‘I suppose so, sir. Let me go along and give the wise ones my investigative expertise.’

  ‘Good man! That’s all anyone is asking.’

  No formal minutes were taken for the Prefect — or not that Clodianus could see — but he felt convinced that whatever he had replied would go on his record. He was doomed if he did this and doomed if he turned it down. A wrong answer might look positively black. He was a Praetorian, whose job was protecting the Emperor. Any hint that he was lukewarm in respect of this committee would be the end of him.

  He felt secret meetings were a stupid way to go about it. Still, he felt that about most things.

  He had accepted a place on a body that he guessed would mutter away for years, calling for ineffectual papers, reviewing false evidence and vacuous submissions, making lists of action-points that no one subsequently reckoned were their responsibility, generally losing sight of its original mandate. Its mandate was in its title: the Committee to Preserve the Emperor.

  ‘Sheer bloody madness!’ complained the Prefect. ‘Chasing bloody shadows.’

  Encouraged, Gaius suggested, ‘If there’s no real evidence, I could hire a few dodgy characters to look like activists, get them to behave suspiciously; then we could watch them at it and report back.’ Enjoying himself, he grew more inventive. ‘Dress them up in hooded cloaks, buy them all drinks in a seedy bar on the waterside…’

  ‘You are being frivolous!’ grinned the Prefect, glad of any light-heartedness to ease his constant burden of facing up to his emperor’s resolute anxiety. He knew the cornicularius was whimsical only to stay sane in Rome’s deadly drowning-pool where they all desperately dog-paddled. He would do the job. ‘I hardly need remind you how important this is, Clodianus. It is the highest grade
of top secret.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Don’t mention this to anybody — not even your wife.’

  ‘No need to worry, sir. I am a soldier,’ Clodianus assured him gravely. ‘I cannot have a wife.’

  He went straight home and told Lucilla all about it. Lucilla said, ‘Look on the bright side, love. If you cannot be told the hour when the old horoscope says our Master and God is doomed to die — then no plotters will know when to arrive with daggers either.’

  ‘What a woman!’ exclaimed Gaius. ‘What a mind! Jupiter, I love you, girl. Let’s go to bed.’

  Gaius was perfectly right. There was no conspiracy to investigate.

  Well, not then.

  PART 6

  Rome: AD 94-96

  Few tyrants die in their beds

  30

  A bascantus, freedman of the Augustus, ab epistolis — receiver of correspondence — chirruped from the top of the tree.

  Titus Flavius Abascantus — important to distinguish, because there were many Abascanti and they worked for more than one emperor. Imperial freedmen, dedicated members of the palace familia, kept their old slave name. They unabashedly used it as their third, personal name while their first two signified the Emperor who had liberated them. So, in the great tribe of imperial servants, Tiberius Claudius Abascantus had once flourished under the Julio-Claudians, as secretary of finance. He was still alive and would survive to ninety-seven. That put him well above the worn-out slaves who worked on country estates in toiling battalions, let alone the grey-faced workers who were sent to die of hard labour and metal poisoning in Rome’s great silver and gold mines.

  Being the emperor’s slave was no penalty. Living the good life, moving in high circles, gaining influence and property. The long-surviving Tiberius Claudius Abascantus had had a son with the same name who held the same important position under Nero, but predeceased his father. Yet even that son lasted longer than most grocers before earning an expensive terracotta memorial, with two fine winged gryphons to guard his tomb eternally: Tiberius Claudius Abascantus, freedman of Augustus, finance secretary, lived forty-five years, Claudia Epicharis, his wife, to her well-deserving husband.

  Wasn’t there some trouble with Epicharis?

  She killed herself.

  The Piso affair?

  Don’t ask.

  Titus Flavius Abascantus, today’s man, had different parentage. It was unlikely his slave name was a gesture to either past finance secretary, and once scandal attached to them, as it had done, he shunned any connection. He worked in a separate branch of bureaucracy, correspondence. He liked to suggest he honoured a different code of loyalty. Perhaps that was true.

  He had gained his high position at a very early age. He was called ‘this young man’ approvingly by the poet Statius. Abascantus was claimed as a friend by Statius, yet Flavia Lucilla, who knew the poet, his wife and also the chief secretary’s wife, reckoned any ‘friendship’ with Abascantus was one-way. Poets fluttered around the most senior freedmen, desperate to have their work noticed. Even Martial, whose writing Domitian apparently enjoyed, had pleaded with a chamberlain to slip his book onto the Emperor’s bedroom couch at some well-chosen moment.

  Parthenius, another chamberlain, handled such requests now. He organised the Emperor’s personal existence; he lived in Domitian’s company and controlled access to him. Poets believed the Emperor was most likely to browse epigrams when he was secreted in his private quarters. This could have been lucrative for Parthenius, except that poets notoriously had no cash. They needed to extract money from the Emperor, which was why poems were so glutinous with flattery, flattery he believed: he was the new Jupiter, Jupiter on earth. He knew everything, saw everything, could cure sickness; his gaze struck terror like thunderbolts, he could kill with a thought…

  Parthenius had told Abascantus that nowadays Domitian never read poems. They joked that Jupiter was not renowned for having his nose in a scroll. Heavenly Jove was too busy fornicating. People said Domitian did the same (presumably not manifesting himself in a shower of gold or disguised as a swan, else the rumour mill would have gone wild). Parthenius, a highly discreet state servant, neither confirmed nor denied any of it.

  Parthenius was another Tiberius Claudius: the older generation. Even so, he and Abascantus thought the same way. One thing they knew was that the imperial administration would always outlive the current office holder. Emperors might come and go; their grand secretariats would roll on unflaggingly. It could be argued — and was certainly believed by some bureaucrats — that the secretariats, with their archives and forward planning and well-established means of conducting official business, were more important than the Caesar Augustus on the throne. That especially applied during the reign of a bad emperor. To a true bureaucrat, such periods were when the administration really came into its own. A weak emperor would be steered by his freedmen, as Claudius was by the magisterial Narcissus. A doomed despot might even be helped to remove himself, as Nero was by Phaon and Epaphroditus.

  Titus Flavius Abascantus, the youthful high-flyer, was a person of such style he verged on the vain. He had hair he was proud of; he wore it thick and long, so he had that affected way of tossing back his luxuriant locks that always annoys everyone else. He was blond. In a man it never helps. Touch of the playboy.

  Unquestionably one of the Empire’s finest minds, Domitian’s Abascantus had all the traditional talents: an all-round, incisive intelligence, elegant drafting skills, a clubbable personality, astute judgement of when and how to approach a difficult master. It went without saying, he had been educated to high standards at the palace; both his Latin and his Greek were perfect; he could dip into his treasure chest of literary allusions and produce an apt quotation like a jeweller plucking an expensive gem for a rich client. Better still, Domitian liked him.

  Redraft that: Domitian seemed to like him. Domitian never relished having to be grateful to anybody else.

  Abascantus became wealthy. He accumulated money and property. On duty, which was most of the time, he wore the white livery with gold trimmings that was standard at the palace — though he clad himself in a particularly lavish version, multi-thread cloth with heavy gilt embroidery. Plus bracelets and fistfuls of finger rings. Even earrings. And he walked in a miasma of extraordinary oriental perfume.

  Some people disliked him. Inevitably there was jealousy of his talent, even after Abascantus ceased to push himself, merely enjoying his reputation and his position at the top. Minions ran around and did the work; one of his skills was knowing how to choose his juniors, then where and when to delegate, or on other occasions, when to step up before his Master and be seen to give personal attention to some delicate and demanding matter.

  All of Domitian’s slaves and freedmen were celebrated for their calmness and for showing respect to visitors. So, Abascantus had been slickly groomed. He was never obsequious, yet always polite. Nobody had ever seen him lose his temper. He would listen, as if whatever was being said to him was genuinely interesting. He made even idiots feel they had a place. Up to a point it encouraged them to raise the standard of their contributions to papers and meetings.

  Unfortunately, with the truly inept, that could only ever be up to a point. In contrast to Abascantus’ own glittering mind, idiots would always stand out as what they were.

  Abascantus gave the impression the safety committee had been all his own idea. Perhaps it was; perhaps not. He was the kind of administrator who would steal other people’s cherished initiatives without even realising he had done it. (He would also distance himself smartly, once an initiative went wrong.)

  He kept things informal, which meant there were comfortable seats, with cushions everywhere. Attendants greeted committee members by name, as if each was regarded as a special expert. To show how far he was different from normal hidebound bureaucrats, Abascantus served almond tuiles and peppermint tea. That is, he had them served, in silverware, by very polite young slaves.

  ‘
May as well be civilised.’

  Fuck me! My snooty Auntie Viniana would feel at home in this place.

  ‘This place’ was Nero’s Golden House, across the Forum from the Palatine: secure, luxurious, well staffed with clerks and messengers if needed, yet now slightly apart from the main centre of court business. Once past the Colossus which stood in the vestibule, awed visitors entered famous rooms, such as the octagonal dining room with a revolving ceiling from which perfumes had once rained down on Nero’s guests; there were intricate marble fountains; there were tall corridors painted with exquisite designs that would influence European art for many centuries. As soon as Domitian’s new Palatine palace was finished, all these grand rooms had been abandoned as regular office space. The Golden House was then ideal for an official committee whose subject was top secret.

  Apparently serious, the Praetorian cornicularius, the chief secretary’s most recently co-opted member, asked where the freedman acquired his almond fancies. For once, the urbane Abascantus was thrown. He had no idea. A man of his status had probably never bought anything from a street stall or shop; it was doubtful if he even carried cash on him. He managed to mutter something about the work of palace pastry chefs. Still, Clodianus had wrong-footed him; the Guard had slyly established his own credentials as a true citizen of Rome. Abascantus lived remotely; the cornicularius was a regular in the Street of Patisserie Makers. Wherever that was.

  The chief secretary had perhaps presupposed that a Praetorian would wolf food down with disgraceful manners, but Clodianus held a pastry daintily between one finger and thumb, while he talked good sense about anonymous letters: ‘Composed with the left hand to disguise the writing. I used to wonder why these people don’t just dictate their secret note to a slave — but of course if they do, then a slave knows.’