Roman Games

by Bruce Macbain

  The old man dismissed this with a stern look. “I told you once, my boy, that I only wanted to outlive that monster by a day, and I have done so, thanks to the bravery of Amatia and Iatrides and, though I hate to say it, the odious Parthenius—perhaps him most of all. Domitian could kill any number of us senators with impunity. His great mistake was in frightening the creature who put him to bed every night.”

  “Sir, I know your part in all this. Why couldn’t you have confided in me?”

  “And forced a role on you that you mightn’t have chosen for yourself? And a reputation for conspiracy that could follow you the rest of your days? No. It was better this way. You will be a valued senator and a trusted adviser. You have a distinguished career before you. Accept it and put this past unpleasantness out of your mind; that is what a philosopher would do. It’s all over and done with.” He smiled benignly and patted him on the shoulder. And as for that meeting where he himself had voted for his protégé’s death? Well, what good would it do to confess that now?

  All over and done with, Pliny thought ruefully. For the slaves certainly. He had forced himself to go to the Colosseum to view their charred remains, still smoking on the embers of the pyre where they had been burned alive. He regarded it as his punishment.

  There had been no trial in the Senate; Nerva Caesar heard the case in private. Pliny laid out the facts and pleaded for the slaves—he had spent all night preparing his oration. But the emperor stopped him in mid-flight with a peremptory wave of his arm. The transformation of man into monarch, Pliny noted, had taken place with remarkable swiftness.

  “Enough! I will not inaugurate my reign by involving a Vestal Virgin in scandal as Domitian would have done. You tell me the slave Ganymede attacked his master with a dagger. The fact that the man was already dead is a detail. No one wants to know that the Vestalis Maxima has committed a sordid murder. They want to hear that slaves are guilty and will get the punishment they deserve. If I let them off, not a senator in Rome will feel safe in his bed at night and it is crucial that I keep the Senate on my side in these early days.”

  “But in the name of justice, sir…”

  “Senator, justice and the law are rather different things—a lesson you should have learned by now. I will be as just as I can afford to be, no more and no less.”

  Amatia interrupted his reverie. Raising herself on an elbow, she ventured a smile at him. “You were wrong, you know, Gaius Plinius. There is no civil war, no blood in the streets.”

  Pliny inclined his head. “We have been luckier than we deserved. Perhaps the gods have pitied us.”

  “Don’t thank the gods,” Corellius broke in, “thank Trajan, the governor of Upper Germany. He is content to hold his legions in check and wait for Nerva to die a natural death. He knows it won’t be long. I had his word on it.”

  Pliny sighed. How much else was there that he hadn’t known?

  For a long moment a silence hung between the three of them. Then Amatia spoke. “You may ask yourself, Gaius Plinius, why I didn’t destroy the letter and horoscope once I possessed them.”

  He raised an eyebrow. He had wondered.

  “I had a reason. I vowed to burn them at the underground chamber where my darling Cornelia lies buried, as an offering to her shade, so that she would know how I took vengeance for her. And a few nights ago, in secret, that is what I did. And the next day I petitioned Nerva to release me from my service to the goddess—which he has done. I am no longer the Purissima, but only a woman, alone. Nothing remains for me now but to die and, if the poets speak truly, my shade and Cornelia’s will soon be together again.”

  “Hades, they say, is a gloomy place.”

  “It won’t matter.”

  “Even if you encounter the mournful shades of forty slaves there?”

  She stiffened at that. “For what it’s worth, I regret their deaths. Don’t think unkindly of me, my friend. We’re all a mixture of elements, aren’t we?”

  As she spoke, a light burned in her eyes like the last flare of a dying flame. Then she sank back again on the cushions.

  “Madam—Amatia—if I may, I have one question to ask you and then I will leave you in peace. Why did you stop Petronius from cutting off my head?”

  “Ah.” She made a little smile. “Because Rome needs principled, decent men like you. The things I said to you that day—I spoke in anger. You aren’t a bad man. You deserved a better master. And there was another reason too. Childless as I am, I seem to have the soul of a mother. Calpurnia is dear to me, I could not abandon her. What do the doctors say?”

  “She is still very weak.”

  “But she has the resilience of youth. She will live to bear you more sons. And now I have a favor to ask of you. I’m told you are something of a writer, that you record your thoughts and observations of life in the form of letters, which, from time to time, you publish. You will oblige me by omitting me from your reminiscences and leave me to a welcome oblivion. I ask it not for my sake but for the Order.”

  “I assure you both,” Pliny replied with feeling, “that I have no wish to revisit these past two weeks. They have left a bitter taste on my tongue. The world will not learn of it from me.”

  No, the world would not learn of it, but what had he learned? He felt he had grown older, as if those fifteen days had been as many years. Most Romans drank in cynicism with their mother’s milk. He somehow never had. But now he no longer felt the comfort of his old certainties. At the crucial moment, they had turned to water and trickled through his fingers. Would he ever again find firm ground to stand on? He suspected he would be a long time looking.

  Epilogue

  One year later.

  Seagulls swooped and cried in the salt-sharp morning air. Martial leaned on the railing of the Amphitryon and watched the dockhands as they trundled the last of the cargo up the gangplank. The harbor of Ostia rang with seamen’s shouts and the creak of ropes as yardarms were hoisted up masts. The morning tide would soon be running, and a score of ships would depart from the busy port of Rome to every corner of the Empire. This one would take him home to Spain. Forever.

  He was past fifty and felt his years heavy on him. He had spent half his life in Rome without ever achieving the success he dreamed of. He could no longer afford the expense of living in the city and, truthfully, he had begun to miss the hills and woods and rivers of his youth.

  Domitian’s victims were heroes now. In his inaugural address, Nerva had promised to repress the informers and respect the freedom of the Senate. Of course, Domitian had said the identical words when he came to the throne. So had Caligula, so had Nero. Hearing this, Pliny and his ilk wept tears of joy and rushed to heap flatteries upon their new master. Some months afterwards, though, the Praetorians, instigated by their new commandant, Aelianus, rioted and besieged the palace, demanding that Nerva execute the murderers of Domitian.

  The frightened emperor reluctantly handed over Petronius, whom he had already removed from his post as Praetorian commandant, and Parthenius. The former was dispatched mercifully with a single stroke of the sword, but the grand chamberlain had his private parts cut off and stuffed into his mouth before being strangled. Domitian’s empress withdrew to her country estate to lead a quiet life of retirement.

  Pliny had come out of it very well, Martial reflected. He had joined the ranks of the new majority, applauded Nerva, and was now fulsome in his praise of those senatorial martyrs who had died for their republican ideals under Domitian. If he felt any lingering bitterness over the fate of the slaves, he was careful not to let it show.

  But no, this was too harsh. Pliny wasn’t as cynical or as opportunistic as many others. He was a trimmer, but which of us, Martial told himself, is innocent of the charge of flattery and trimming—certainly not I. The age we live in has shriveled our spirits.

  Some things that seemed important at the time now seemed trivial in retrospect. No more had been heard of the Christians, for one thing. As is generally the case with these h
ole-in-the-corner fanatics, they had dissolved back into the general muck, leaving the field to some other gang of lunatics.

  As for Verpa’s charming family, the old man’s will was never challenged since the complainant, Lucius, had absconded. Left unguarded by Valens and his troopers, and with the city in turmoil, he had simply disappeared, taking with him whatever loose money was in the house. By now he could be in Egypt or Britain or anywhere in between. Regulus, Verpa’s lawyer, acted as executor of the estate and, in due course, the legacy to the Temple of Isis was paid. Soon after that Turpia Scortilla disappeared. One night, she attended a nocturnal ceremony at the temple. She was seen entering the private chapel with the priest of Anubis. She was never seen leaving it. Odd. But no one cared to pursue the matter.

  Without much delay, Alexandrinus too left town to pursue his priestly vocation in other climes. How much money he took with him no one knew. The Isiac clergy were grimly silent on the subject.

  Verpa’s mansion was soon sold off to some businessman who converted part of it into a fuller’s works. The odor of piss now made the whole street quite unlivable.

  Martial scanned the waterfront. Pliny had promised to come down from Rome to see him off. Since the day of Domitian’s death they had never discussed the Verpa case and, in fact, the two men had rather avoided each other; there was no open breach, but a coolness grew up between them. Martial felt ashamed of his part in the affair. How much of that Pliny suspected, he preferred not to know. On the other hand, his erstwhile patron had never succeeded in gaining for him his heart’s desire, the position of court poet and, when Martial had, at last, asked him for a gift of money to pay his way home, Pliny had seemed to leap at the chance—though with many expressions of regret—to perform this small service.

  And here he came now, bustling among the bales heaped at the water’s edge and up the gangplank. All smiles.

  The farewell was brief and awkward enough. Martial recited a poem he had written in his honor; Pliny had the good manners to praise it. He overflowed with best wishes and lamented that life in Rome kept him too busy to travel. He promised to write. Of course, he wouldn’t. They bade each other farewell with a feeling of mutual relief.

  And then the Amphitryon cast off and set sail. Toward evening they dropped anchor in the Bay of Naples to take on a consignment of wine before standing across to Sicily. A blood-red sun was setting behind the barren speck of Pandateria. Martial leaned out over the railing and squinted. He thought he could make out a lone figure walking slowly along the shoreline, gazing out to sea. It piqued his poet’s imagination. Could it be Domitilla—she whose letter to Verpa had set in motion all that followed? Still there? Conveniently forgotten and likely to remain so forever. Did she miss her old life or was she content to remain alone with her strange god, the one who forbade his worshippers to make images of him? This made Martial think fleetingly of the familiar Roman gods, nourished with the blood and smoke of sacrificial meat. And that made him think of the Roman Games, although he would rather not have. They had been enacted once again since the fall of Domitian. He had done his best to ignore them; they left a bad taste in his mouth. The Roman Games, he thought morosely: lies, murder, hypocrisy, betrayal. These are the games we Romans play best.

  The wind was turning cold. He shook himself and went below.

  Appendix

  The Roman Calendar

  In the Roman calendar, each month contained three “signpost” days: the Kalends (the first day of the month), the Nones (either the fifth or the seventh), and the Ides (the thirteenth or fifteenth). After the Kalends was past, the days were counted as so-and-so many days before the Nones, then before the Ides, and then before the Kalends of the following month.

  The story takes place during the first part of September (which Domitian had renamed Germanicus in honor of his victories in Germany.) The modern dates with their Roman equivalents are as follows:

  The Kalends of Germanicus September 1

  The 4th day before the Nones September 2

  The 3rd day before the Nones September 3

  The day before the Nones September 4

  The Nones of Germanicus September 5

  The 8th day before the Ides September 6

  The 7th day before the Ides September 7

  The 6th day before the Ides September 8

  The 5th day before the Ides September 9

  The 4th day before the Ides September 10

  The 3rd day before the Ides September 11

  The day before the Ides September 12

  The Ides of Germanicus September 13

  The 18th day before the Kalends of Domitian September 14

  The 17th day before the Kalends September 15

  The 16th day before the Kalends September 16

  The 15th day before the Kalends September 17

  The 14th day before the Kalends September 18

  Roman Time-Keeping

  Romans divided the day, from sunup to sundown, and the night from sundown to dawn into twelve horae. As the length of the day and night varied throughout the year, one of these “hours” could be as short as forty-five minutes or as long as seventy-five. In September, when the days and nights are of about equal length, the hora came closest to our standard sixty-minute hour. The first hour of the day in September was about 6:00 a.m. The sixth hour was noon; the twelfth hour, sundown. And similarly, the first hour of the night was about 6:00 p.m., the sixth hour was midnight, and the twelfth hour was the hour just before dawn.

  Emperors from Augustus to Trajan

  The Julio-Claudian Dynasty

  Augustus, 27 B.C. – 14 A.D.

  Tiberius, 14 – 37

  Caligula, 37 – 41

  Claudius, 41 – 54

  Nero, 54 – 68

  The Year of Three Emperors

  Galba, Otho, Vitellius, 69

  The Flavian Dynasty

  Vespasian, 69 – 79

  Titus, 79 – 81

  Domitian, 81 – 96

  The Adoptive Emperors

  Nerva, 96 – 98

  Trajan, 98 – 117

  Glossary

  Atrium: The central room in a Roman house, lying on an axis between the vestibule and the tablinum

  Caldarium: The hot water pool in a Roman bathhouse

  Capitolium: The Capitoline Hill; site of the temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva

  Cinaedus: A lewd male dancer in the pantomime

  Clemens: Merciful

  Concubina: A concubine. Unlike a casual sex-slave, the concubine had certain legally defined rights. Senators were not permitted to form legal marriages with women from degrading occupations such as actresses, prostitutes, or circus performers and so took them as concubines.

  Culus: Asshole

  Cunnus: Cunt

  Denarius: A Roman silver coin equal to four sesterces (See below.)

  Digitus infamis: The extended middle finger

  Dignitas: Status, standing

  Domus Augustana: The private apartments of Domitian’s palace

  Domus Flavia: The portion of Domitian’s palace reserved for public business and state banquets

  Familia: Not only ‘family’ in our sense but the slaves and freedmen of a household. Freed slaves continued to maintain close ties with their former master, who became their patron.

  Fasces: Bundles of rods and axes, representing the magistrate’s power to punish and execute.

  Fellator: Cocksucker

  Filius familias: The son and heir

  Frigidarium: The cold water pool in a Roman bath

  Fututor: Fucker

  Gravitas: Authority, serious demeanor

  Honoris causa: Honorary

  Impluvium: The shallow catch-pool in the center of the atrium beneath the open roof

  Insula: A multistory apartment building, often in ruinous condition

  Lares and Penates: The household gods

  Lictor: An attendant of a senior magistrate or the emperor

  Lupa: Prostitute (liter
ally, she-wolf)

  Maenad: A frenzied female devotee of the god Bacchus

  Mehercule (may-HAIR-coo-lay): So help me Hercules!

  Mentula: Prick

  Merda: Shit

  Mos maiorum: The way of the ancestors, tradition

  Palla: A woman’s cloak

  Paterfamilias: The oldest living male in a family, even if unmarried or childless (He had patria potestas over his familia, and only he could legally own anything.)

  Patria potestas: The father’s power of life and death over his children and slaves

  Pica: In ancient medicine, a morbid condition thought to accompany pregnancy

  Pontifex maximus: The chief priest of Rome. (In the imperial age this post was always held by the emperor.)

  Popina: A fast-food restaurant

  Praetor: A Roman magistrate with judicial functions