Roman Games

by Bruce Macbain

  He made scarcely a sound but Calpurnia awoke and sat up in the bed. “Dearest, forgive me…” She took pride in always waiting up for him.

  “Don’t be silly. Helen was right to make you go to bed.”

  “Was it a fine dinner? I wish I could have gone.”

  “I am inexpressibly happy that you did not. Go back to sleep like a good girl. We’ll talk in the morning.” He kissed her forehead and felt a surge of tenderness run through him.

  In his own bed in the adjoining room Pliny tossed fitfully. One could have said, before tonight, that if ever a man was pleased with himself, comfortable with his certainties, satisfied with his circumstances, and confident of his future, it was he.

  Now doubts assailed him. He had attended dinners at the palace before but nothing like tonight’s grotesquerie. Was the emperor going mad as some in the Senate whispered? And if so, then where did duty lie? Could a good man serve a bad emperor and keep his own hands clean? Pliny was on the horns of a dilemma. He was a good man. But he was also an ambitious one, and he could not put out of his mind the emperor’s words to him: a chance to emulate his uncle, that paragon of learning, virtue, and dedication.

  He tossed and turned, but sleep would not come. He counted the hours until dawn, when he must rise and present himself for the opening ceremony of the Roman Games, a festival that occupied two weeks in the middle of September—not September—“Germanicus,” he must remember to say! For many senators and lawyers, with the cessation of public business, the Games, which only the priests were strictly required to attend, meant a fifteen-day vacation from the sweltering cesspit of Rome to their estates in the hills. But no such respite for him this year. And all because this wretched Verpa had got himself killed.

  Pliny had known the man only by sight and reputation. The world of senatorial society was large enough that he could avoid meeting people he found disagreeable, and Verpa had never shown any interest in meeting him, the gods be thanked! The man had been a notorious informer all the way back to Nero’s reign.

  Informers were a cancer on the Roman Senate. Every emperor began his reign by denouncing the evil, but sooner or later succumbed to the temptation of listening to the vicious innuendo spread by the informer against his fellow senators and their families. Condemnation was certain, and the informer divided the victim’s property with the emperor.

  Verpa had begun by denouncing a woman of senatorial family for treason because a slave saw her undressing before the emperor’s image, and, on another occasion, he condemned a man for carrying a coin with Domitian’s portrait into a privy. But he had outdone himself when he denounced Clemens, the emperor’s own cousin, and his wife, Domitilla, on a charge of atheism and performing Jewish practices. Verpa had brought this charge openly in the Senate. Pliny had been there to hear him. It was indeed a shocking revelation, but Verpa had incontrovertible evidence to back it up, and the emperor went nearly insane with anger. Clemens was swiftly strangled and his wife banished for life to an island. Sextus Ingentius Verpa was riding high; that is, until someone butchered him in the night. Tomorrow Pliny must poke a stick into this anthill and turn it over. The thought of it revolted him.

  When at last he drifted off to sleep, naked black children invaded his dreams, hanging on his arms and legs, dragging him somewhere he did not want to go.

  Pliny was not the only one whose night was filled with terrors. Domitianus Caesar, Lord and God, emperor and high priest of Rome, sat alone in his bed chamber—his refuge, his inner sanctum, where few ever penetrated. Because he feared the dark, tiers of lamps made the room almost as bright as day. A bluebottle struggled between his thumb and forefinger, waving its small legs. He raised a needle-sharp stylus and ran it through. More flies buzzed inside a baited jar, waiting execution.

  When he was a boy, ignored, despised by everyone, Domitian would while away whole days brooding over hurts and resentments. Lately he had begun to do it again. The Helmsman of the World had sunk into a misery of fear.

  Parthenius scratched at the door and eased it open—the nightly ritual of bringing the emperor his wine and a few choice tidbits left over from dinner on a silver tray.

  “Master, I congratulate you on tonight’s performance. Who but your divinity could have conceived such a stratagem?”

  “I!” Domitian swept his arm across the tray, sending flask and dishes clattering to the floor. The boy with the small head, Earinus, who had been asleep in the corner, sat up and blinked.

  “My plan? You fat turd, this was your plan! Frighten the senators into betraying themselves, you said, with all that childish mumbo-jumbo. Well, you see how well we succeeded. One word from Nerva quelled it in an instant, and we learned nothing. Instead of exposing them, these philosophers and republicans and atheists, we only drive them deeper underground. You know what happened to Epaphroditus, your predecessor. He gave me bad advice. He was younger and smarter than you are, Parthenius. I loved him.” Domitian smiled; his teeth caught the candle light and glittered like knives.

  Parthenius, his several chins quivering, stooped to gather the dishes. He had raised self-abasement to an art. “Cocceius Nerva could be removed, Master. It only takes a word.”

  “And seven more will spring up in his place. I’m fighting a hydra. They all hate me.”

  “No matter, you saw their fear, Lord of the World. Recall the words of Caligula, ‘Let them hate, as long as they fear.’”

  “Yes, and look what happened to him, you donkey!” The Lord of the World squinched his tired eyes, then opened them again.

  Parthenius’ smile never faltered, though the pain in his belly was excruciating.

  “Don’t stand there, grinning like an ape, pour me more wine, and put a drop of laudanum in it. You know I don’t—don’t sleep well lately.”

  “Of course, Master.” Parthenius extended a pudgy hand with the goblet. “Will you require anything else tonight?”

  “Ah, what would I do without you, my friend. Who else can I trust? Come here, kiss me.”

  The chamberlain bent awkwardly to comply, and Domitian struck him across the mouth with his open hand. “Get away, you disgust me, you’re too fat.”

  Parthenius, his face a frozen mask, bowed himself out the door and sagged against the corridor wall. With a perfumed handkerchief from his sleeve he dabbed at the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. He remembered that Epaphroditus had been summoned one night to Domitian’s bedroom. The emperor had made love with him, had dined with him, sent him away with every sign of affection, and the next day signed an order for the man’s crucifixion. Parthenius sighed as the spasm of pain passed off. He smoothed his gown, took a deep breath, and went unsteadily down the hall.

  Ever since Augustus Caesar had made himself Rome’s first emperor a century ago, it was the freedmen of the imperial household who made the wheels of government turn. Senators and magistrates, for all their wealth and pretensions, were really no more than the ornamental detritus of the vanished Republic, honored in inverse proportion to their relevance, or terrorized, depending on the emperor’s whim.

  But the imperial freedmen, too, lived lives of constant dread. Without family, without inherited wealth or status, they were all caught in the hollow of the emperor’s hand. One misstep and it was back to the gutter, if they were lucky. Parthenius had a wife and a small son, born without the taint of slavery, who might make him proud one day if the chamberlain could stay alive long enough. And, if Fortune favored him, he hadn’t long to wait until there would be an end to fear and humiliation, to the stomach aches and the bile rising in his throat. He shook himself and straightened his shoulders. After tonight’s events he and the others needed to talk.

  

  “It wasn’t you, was it, Stephanus?” the empress said. “With your dagger?”

  They sat on delicate-legged chairs around a rosewood table inlaid with ivory. Each had come stealthily along a different corridor to Parthenius’ office in the working wing of the palace. It had
taken time to arrange. It would be dawn soon. Entellus was there. He was the freedman who received petitions to the emperor; his favor was worth a fortune. Titus Petronius, the commandant of the Praetorian Guard, recently appointed and already insecure in his post. Stephanus, still with his left arm in the sling. He was fiercely loyal to Domitilla and her family and ready for anything. And finally the empress, herself, who hated Domitian perhaps more than any of them. They all deferred to her.

  Stephanus was a lean, olive-dark man of about forty, with greasy black hair. He shrugged noncommittally. “You wouldn’t expect me to admit to murdering a Roman senator, a low-born fellow like me?”

  “Well, if it wasn’t you who stabbed him, then who in the name of thundering Jove was it?” This was Petronius, the Guard commandant, blustering as usual.

  “And does his death solve our problem or compound it?” asked Entellus in his quiet, precise way. The man of letters. “We must assume that Domitilla’s letter and her husband’s imperial horoscope are still in Verpa’s house somewhere. What if someone else finds them? Someone more loyal to the emperor than Verpa was—this fellow Pliny for instance? He’ll have the run of the place.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him,” Parthenius said. “A pettifogging lawyer drafted into a police job that he clearly has no relish for.

  “You should’ve seen his face when Fulvus proposed him. Still I’m concerned for the Purissima. We’ve had no news of her yesterday or today through the usual channel. What is she thinking of? I was against this in the first place…”

  The empress raised a finger and Parthenius instantly shut his mouth. “That woman will decide for herself what’s best to do. She always does. We will leave it to her.”

  “Of course, empress, as you say.”

  “And now, my friends,” said the empress, “we had best go to our beds. Tomorrow will be a long day.”

  

  While Pliny tossed in his bed and Domitian brooded in his; while others worried and fretted, Lucius Ingentius Verpa, son of the late Sextus, eased open the door to the family tablinum. Feeling his way in the dark, he located the lamp stand beside his father’s desk and struck a spark. By the lamp’s wan light he pawed through a thick sheaf of papers that lay scattered on the desk. Tossing these aside, he scooped up another batch from the table by the wall, and riffled through them. If only he knew what he was looking for! But he would recognize the papers when he found them; his father had waved them under his nose. The recollection of that scene churned his stomach. What could have made his father so mightily pleased with himself?

  With heaps of papers and scrolls still unexamined, Lucius sank down on his father’s chair and, as he did, heard the scuffle of footsteps by the door. He dashed across the room but found no one. But it could have been only one person: Turpia Scortilla. I’ll see her dead before I’ll let her have them! He thought of chasing her, allowed his imagination to play with the thought of beating her face in. Not a good idea—not yet. Doggedly he returned to his search.

  Chapter Five

  The Nones of Germanicus. Day one of the Roman Games.

  The second hour of the day.

  In the early morning haze a holiday crowd was already gathering in the Forum Romanum, elbowing the homeless who huddled there nightly.

  In Pliny’s mansion on the fashionable Esquiline Hill, the atrium was empty of clients; no time for them today. Instead, slaves tugged and pulled at the buckles of his cuirass while he sucked in his stomach, obedient to the prefect’s orders to appear in full fig. A civilian to his fingertips, Pliny hadn’t worn the loathsome thing in a dozen years and knew that he looked ridiculous encased in those sculpted bronze muscles. When he had served his military tribunate as an army accountant he had never drawn his sword in anger. He finally had to banish Calpurnia from the room when her praise of his dashing figure became too much to bear.

  

  The Roman Games, inaugurated five centuries earlier, were the most ancient festival in the sacred calendar. Amid clouds of incense and the wailing of flutes the procession wound its stately way through the Forum and up the steep slope to the top of the Capitoline Hill and the triple temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Near the head, Pliny, puffing and sweating in thirty pounds of burnished bronze, struggled to keep step with his chief and the other prefects, vice prefects, magistrates, and ex-magistrates of the Populus Romanus who trooped behind the imperial family. Following these worthies marched, or in some cases danced, the priestly colleges: the college of Pontifices, whose chief was the emperor himself; the Fifteen Sacrificers, who interpreted the Sibylline Oracles; the Seven Banqueters; the Bird-Watchers; the Brethren of the Soil; the Leaping Priests of Mars, brandishing their spears; the Etruscan Gut-Gazers; and the Vestal Virgins, the keepers of the sacred flame, their faces shrouded by their long veils.

  But Pliny’s eye took in more than the pageantry and gaiety. The parade route was lined with red-plumed Praetorian Guardsmen, their oval shields decorated with moons and stars and scorpions. And beyond them, he knew, the city prefect’s plainclothesmen circulated in the crowd, ears stretched to catch any treasonous word.

  Behind the priests marched the five hundred or so members of the Senate, Pliny’s friends and colleagues, grave as statues, in purple-striped togas and golden laurel wreaths. And last of all came the pageant’s star performers: a dozen splendid, unblemished white oxen, hung with garlands, horns gilded, going placidly to their deaths.

  A more cynical mind than Pliny’s might have drawn an uncomfortable parallel between oxen and senators. Were the latter not gilded victims too, reserved for a later slaughter? Such thoughts may have lurked behind some of those grave faces, but not his. Senator Gaius Plinius Secundus had by now nearly succeeded in putting last night’s bizarre episode out of his mind like a bad dream.

  Cynicism was simply not in Pliny’s nature. He was an honest man, who never lied to anyone but himself. He needed to believe that his emperor was worthy of him, and to maintain this article of faith he could excuse much. It was lack of funds that made Domitian greedy and fear of assassination that made him cruel. Add to that the crowd of flatterers and informers who brought out the worst in him, and one could understand how a good emperor had gradually gone bad. Then what should decent men do? With so many bad men to serve the emperor ill, all the more reason why good men should serve him well. And as for those senators who insisted upon throwing their lives away in futile acts of defiance, what good had they done themselves or anyone else at the end of the day?

  From the top of the Capitolium, where the procession halted, the whole glorious city lay spread out before him. The greatest city in the history of the world, built by blood and iron, but equally by a native sense of propriety, dignity, and reverence for tradition. Occasions like this always brought a catch to Pliny’s throat, a bursting pride in the majesty of Rome that was subtly blended with pleasant expectations for his own future—a consulship some day, then governor of a province. Sprung from a line of sober and virtuous northern Italians, Pliny was the first in his family to reach the Senate, and already he had received assurances of the emperor’s favor. And soon dear Calpurnia would give him an heir, a little senator to follow after, and there would be more… The cries of the lictors for silence woke him from his reverie. The temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest rose on gleaming white pillars sixty feet high, topped by a golden roof that flashed in the rising sun. At its foot stood the great altar, a massive block of carved marble, blackened by centuries’ accumulation of burnt offerings.

  And now the first ox was led to the altar while a priest intoned archaic prayers in the emperor’s ear and he, with his toga pulled up over his head, repeated them in a ringing voice: “…wherefore, that thou mayest enlarge the dominion of the Roman People, the Quirites, and favor, nurture and strengthen the legions of the Roman People, the Quirites, and preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the Roman People, the Quirites…”

  A single omitted word, a mere s
lip of the tongue, would compel them to stop the ceremony and start again from the beginning. Meanwhile, flute players with bulging cheeks shrilled on their instruments to prevent any ill-omened word from being overheard. A burly victimarius, naked to the waist, swung his hammer, striking the animal between the eyes, then swiftly its neck was stretched over the altar and its throat cut so that the severed jugular spewed hot blood onto the stone. Then the belly was slit open and the Gut-Gazers performed their ancient charade, frowning over the animal’s steaming liver, turning it this way and that, pulling apart the lobes, noting the striations—a map of the heavens written in flesh—searching for the smallest disqualifying blemish. They pronounced it acceptable and the next animal was led up.

  Beast followed beast until soon the altar was a dripping mess and round it the officiants stood ankle deep in slippery pools of blood, each animal spilling about two gallons on the ground.

  If this was how the ancestral religion worshipped the high gods, there was little here to excite the ordinary man or woman in the Roman street, whose grandparents, very likely, had been brought here in chains from the swamps of Germany or the sewers of Antioch, and few of them bothered to attend. Their religion was something else entirely, a grab-bag of popular deities: Isis, Cybele, Atargitis, and a dozen others, who promised ecstasy, secret knowledge, and a blessed hereafter to their devotees. Their priests and priestesses could be seen on any street corner, jumping up and down in some outlandish eastern garb, clashing cymbals, wailing, some even slashing their arms with scimitars. To a conservative like Pliny these cults were contemptible, disturbing, even frightening—the more so because people of his own class, people who should know better, had begun lately to dabble in them. The Flavian dynasty, it was well known, was devoted to Egyptian Isis. The present emperor’s father, the otherwise sensible Vespasian, had actually performed faith healings in her name, and the young Domitian, at a dangerous moment in the civil war, had been smuggled to safety disguised as one of her priests.