The Splendor Before the Dark

by Margaret George

  “I hope no one answered their calls?”

  “Better hope they did,” he said. “These people long for death. There is nothing left in life for them.”

  “But there is always something left in life.” Death lasts so long. Why hasten to it? Someone, a poet somewhere, had said, Someday you will be dead, and then as time passes you will have been dead for a very long time.

  “For an emperor, yes,” said Epaphroditus. “For others, not always so.”

  “Caesar!” I turned to see Calpurnius Piso standing before me, elegantly dressed, looking out of place among the soot-smudged firefighters around us. Epaphroditus diplomatically melted away. “I praise all the gods you are safe! Someone started a foolish rumor that you had rushed out to fight the fire and even climbed the Palatine when it was blazing.”

  “It was true,” I said.

  He just stared at me. I knew what he was thinking. His handsome face gave it away. The emperor, who loves luxury and sings and writes poetry? He would not dare.

  But the grandson of Germanicus would dare. The great-grandson of Marc Antony would dare. “Yes, true,” I repeated. I thrust out my burned forearm, a badge of honor I prized. “Here is the proof.”

  “I would not have such courage,” he admitted. “In fact, I have just come up from Baiae. I think my property in the city has been spared. But until it is safe to go there, I cannot know.”

  I had always liked Piso and spent time at his elaborate seaside villa in Baiae. But that he was a spoiled, soft aristocrat there was no hiding. He dabbled in the arts, acting and writing, but lacked the focus to dedicate himself to them. He was mediocre in every way except his pedigree, but like many mediocre people, he compensated for it by a charming manner.

  “What of the others in our literary group? Have you heard anything?”

  He tilted his head, thinking. “Petronius is down at his villa near Cumae. Lucan probably is with his father, Mela, and his uncle Seneca at Seneca’s country estate outside Rome.”

  Seneca. The old philosopher who had been my tutor and councilor for so many years, now retired to write. I missed him in many ways, but our parting had been strained. He wanted me to continue following the path of Augustus and behaving in strict Roman fashion, but I determined to follow my own path—the path of Nero, a path that no other emperor had trod. To add to the family disagreements, his young nephew Lucan, a talented poet and eager member of my literary group at court, admired me and wrote paeans in praise of me. And Gallio, his brother, still served me occasionally as an adviser on Judean matters, as he had been a proconsul in Greece some years earlier and had run afoul of local Jewish sectarian quarrels there.

  “I predict that Petronius, the voluptuary, will not return to Rome until the banqueting rooms are ready again in the palace,” I said. “Did you know my palace burned?”

  “Where we used to gather for our literary discussions? The new, lower part?”

  “The very same,” I said. It hurt to say it, to picture it.

  “You will have to build a new one, bigger and better,” he said.

  “I can’t imagine such a dwelling,” I said. “And for now I must worry about building simple shelters for all the displaced people.”

  “Oh, the people!” he said, with a dismissive gesture. “Aren’t they used to doing without?”

  V

  All that evening we celebrated, boisterously, loudly, unbalanced by the strain of the past six days. By the time the waning moon rose—had all this really happened only in the space of the moon going from full to half?—we collapsed, exhausted but dizzy with relief.

  But the next morning the dreaded red had flared up again in the city. The fire had not died; it had merely rested.

  “Like the beast we knew it was,” said Nymphidius. “It slept in its cave, living embers under the ash, and now has roared back.”

  “It looks farther away,” I said, straining to see it.

  “It’s down near the Capitoline,” he said. “Near your estates, Tigellinus,” he called to the prefect, who strode over, adjusting his sleeves.

  “Gods!” he cried.

  “Send men down to rescue the state records from the Tabularium archives on the Capitoline,” I said. All the history of Rome was in those records. “And get any historic treasures you can reach. They are irreplaceable. Augustus’s gold Triumphal chariot, if you can.”

  Quickly the men left, while there was still clear passage. The rekindled fire rapidly leapt to places spared the first time, roaring through open spaces around the Forum, then sent arms north and south, as if to show us it had only held back by its own decision earlier. Later I was to learn it almost reached my family tomb, outside the city to the north. And to the south, almost to the Servilian Gardens.

  It burned another three days, until finally it died away. But no one trusted that it was actually over, and we waited another two days before venturing down from the safety of the hill. Smoking vents in the ash, still hot, made us suspect there were more sleeping fires waiting to roar to life.

  “Don’t touch it for another two days,” Nymphidius warned his men. “Give it four days without a flare-up.” In the meantime, Tigellinus assigned soldiers to keep civilians—both honest people and treasure hunters—out. No one was to enter the city until I allowed them to.

  “After it cools and is safe, we must remove the bodies. We must not allow them to lie there to greet the returning people,” I ordered.

  “A ghoulish task,” said Faenius.

  “A grim but necessary one.”

  “They won’t stink, at least. There will not be much left of them. Just bones,” Faenius said.

  “There may not be much left of anything,” I said.

  And so it proved. When it was finally safe to inspect, the damage was overwhelming. Wearing high boots, I waded through heaps of ash in fields, for the buildings had disappeared and the streets no longer existed. An ugly odor permeated the air, compounded of smoke and stone and charcoal and flesh. The desolate landscape spread out all around. What had been the center of the city was a vast empty space, filled with debris and ash. Plumes of curling smoke rose here and there, tendrils trailing off into the air, light fluffy ash dancing in the breeze. Sometimes there was a charred massive beam, too large to have burned completely. There were metal railings, twisted and curled, or merely melted into a hard disc. The surviving stones that poked through the ash were blackened and split from the heat.

  I stood in the ruins, knee deep in ashes, ashes that spread all around me like the Phlegraean Fields, that hellish volcanic terrain I had ridden through near Naples. The place I had had to traverse to get to the sibyl at Cumae.

  The sibyl who had prophesied Fire will be your undoing and Flames will consume your dreams, and your dreams are yourself.

  Defiant, I surveyed what was left of my city. The flames would not consume my dreams. They would give shape to them. I would rebuild Rome and dazzle the world. I would whisper the secret name of Rome, and it would be reborn.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was time to measure the destruction and its extent and locate the displaced population. My order that no one enter the city until the preliminary cleanup was completed was still in effect. Unlike with earlier fires—and there had been many—we would not build anew on top of the ashes. They would be cleared away, hauled down the Tiber to the Ostian marshes. In addition to giving us a clean platform to rebuild on, it would ensure that there was no hidden smoldering debris left.

  A week after the Fire, I set out with Epaphroditus, Tigellinus, and Faenius to see first the inner city, then the outlying areas. It quickly became apparent that it would be easier to count the areas that had survived than to list the ones that had not. Of the Fourteen Regions, only four remained intact. Regio One, below the Circus Maximus where the fire had begun, had escaped because the wind was blowing in the oppos
ite direction. Regio Fourteen lay across the Tiber, near the Gardens of Caesar. It was where Crispus’s villa had been, so my old boyhood home still stood. Regio Five, the Esquiline, and Regio Six, farther out, were untouched. But other than that, nearly all the central part of the city was destroyed. The saved areas had lain on the margins.

  There was no trace of the Domus Transitoria where it had snaked through the land between the Palatine and the Esquiline. In the Forum, the Temple of Vesta was destroyed, along with the State Household gods, and so was the Regia, the ancient house of the Pontifex Maximus next to it.

  The list went on and on. The Temple of Romulus, mansions of the great with their trophies from the wars against Hannibal and of the Gauls—gone.

  Strangely, some things survived. Most of the Forum, the western slope of the Palatine, and, as it turned out, several buildings on the Palatine itself remained. The Temple of Palatine Apollo was only partially damaged, and the original palace of Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius escaped total destruction. Augustus’s chariot had been rescued, under great danger, from its place on the Palatine and was now safe across the river. Likewise the Capitoline Hill had only been lightly damaged, and the transfer of the precious archives had been successful.

  The wall built by Servius Tullius around Rome five hundred years ago had saved most of the Campus Martius, keeping the fire at bay, as it could not leap the thirty-foot height and twelve-foot width—although it had elsewhere—and I was thankful to see that the public buildings, where I intended to house displaced people, were in good condition, if dirty and ash-covered. There was much open ground there, as well as the large buildings for shelter. The only casualty of the area was the Amphitheater of Taurus, which lay in a heap of rubble and tumbled stones.

  The ashes were still warm as we waded through them. Teams of slaves were clearing them, loading them onto wagons to be hauled down to the docks. It was a race against the weather, for if the rain I had longed for earlier were to strike now, the whole area would turn into a sea of sludge, and when the muck dried, Rome would be encased in a shell of ash. The sky looked clear, but we were in the season of hard thunderstorms.

  “I hope old Jupiter doesn’t decide to send his lightning bolts,” said Epaphroditus, reading my mind.

  “If he did, people would say he was punishing us,” said Tigellinus. “So he’d better control himself.”

  “Isn’t it clear already that he is punishing us?” said Faenius, no playfulness in his voice.

  “Who can know the mind of the gods?” said Epaphroditus with a laugh as he kicked ash before him.

  I would not let it pass. “What do you mean, Faenius?” I asked.

  He stopped and looked at me. “Something like this does not happen for no reason,” he said. “It is too monumental for it not to have been ordered by the gods.”

  “It was an accident,” I said. “Unless an arsonist started it, and to what end?”

  “No matter how it started, the gods were sending a message when they allowed it to continue,” said Faenius. “They could have stopped it at any point. But they chose not to.”

  “We cannot know how they think or how they behave,” I said. “All we can do is proceed as if they did not exist. Do the tasks that are set before us. Fight the fire, even if it was sponsored by the gods. Rebuild, whether they bless it or not.”

  “Are you an atheist, Caesar?” asked Faenius. “For you certainly sound like one.”

  “In practical terms, yes. By that I mean since we cannot know their thoughts, it is best to admit that and proceed in the dark, unlike ignorant people who think they know and make stupid interpretations.”

  He glared at me—was he assuming I meant it personally? Then he turned and kept wading through the ashes.

  But he was wrong in his accusation. I did believe in the gods; I just did not claim to know their motives. And I believed I pleased them best when I followed my conscience and brought my best efforts to whatever I did. That was what they required of mortals; it was very simple.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had moved back into my residence in the Vatican Fields, which bore no marks of the fire, other than the dust and soot that had blown in. Workers were readying rows of shelters on the grounds that surrounded the racetrack Caligula had built and gifted with an obelisk straight from Egypt, a great engineering feat. I had driven chariots there, had trained to compete there soon. But now everything had changed, and my efforts must go toward recovery from the catastrophe. These grounds could house thousands of people, and if that was not enough, I would open the other imperial gardens—the Gardens of Caesar, the Gardens of Sallust, the Gardens of Servilius.

  At last I could send a message to Poppaea, explaining briefly what had happened and telling her it was safe to join me but stressing that I would be preoccupied with the problems of the fire and that although the palace was intact, she should decide if she would rather stay at Antium for a while longer.

  For although I long to see you, it is enough that I know you are safe and will return in due time, when we can be together without care and hardship.

  I sealed the letter and sent it off. This was an example of what I believed: that Poppaea herself would decide what to do, and no god would sway her mind, or keep us apart.

  I needed to make an inspection trip to the outlying fields. This time only Epaphroditus and Tigellinus came with me. I commented on Faenius’s seeming disaffection, but Tigellinus laughed it off. “He’s moody,” he said. “Haven’t you noticed that before?”

  “No,” I said, thinking that I would not have missed it. Something had changed.

  The areas lying north of the city were seas of misery. Clumps of people crouched in the tombs, mausoleums built by wealthy Romans lining the roads leading out of the city. Some had porticoes and shrines that afforded roofs and marble floors to sleep on, protected from scurrying rodents. But they did not have water or food. Hollow-eyed children sat on the lids of sarcophagi, staring out in misery. In the outlying fields, hordes of people dressed in rags wandered the grounds. Some huddled together around cookfires; others lay motionless on the ground. I walked through them, disguised, for I did not dare risk being mobbed by the frantic people. I looked around, trying to take it all in, to grasp the extent of it. First I had to take measure of the problem; then I would solve it. As soon as possible, I would send messengers here to announce a plan to take care of them, to escort them to their temporary location.

  All the while there was a lowing, continuous moaning and wailing from the destitute. Some were calling, feebly. A tall figure was walking among them, bending down and listening.

  “As I told you, some are calling for deliverance,” said Epaphroditus.

  “They will soon get their deliverance,” I said.

  “They want a different sort of deliverance,” he said. “They want death.”

  I looked around, searching for unscrupulous soldiers who might be willing to grant the pleas. But all I saw was the tall figure.

  The tall figure . . . the way she moved . . . suddenly I knew her. And I knew why she was there.

  “Stay here,” I ordered my men. I made my way over to the woman. Her back was to me. She was not a refugee, as she was well dressed.

  “Locusta,” I said, and she turned.

  “Caesar,” she said, bowing. Then she straightened and smiled. “It has been a long time.”

  “An odd place to meet,” I said. “I do not need to ask why you are here.”

  “People need me,” she said. “I do not refuse those who ask.”

  I had once needed her, and she had responded. Without her, I would have been dead. To say I was ungrateful would be hypocritical. To say I hoped I would not need her again was also true. For Locusta was a professional poisoner, much in demand by the royal family in past times, and such was her fame that common people, like these suffering here, knew of
her. She was a woman of integrity, which in her chosen field may be a contradiction in terms. But she had chosen to side with me when I had been marked for extermination, and saved me.

  “They might not feel the same way tomorrow, or the next day.”

  “For them, there is no tomorrow. They do not wish to live with what they have lost. It is irreparable.”

  “I assume you mean people they loved? For no one would kill himself over a house or furniture or even the most precious artwork.”

  “Yes, that is what I mean. The pain of losing their child is too much.”

  But it wasn’t. I had lost my daughter, and although it felt as if I had died, I had not, and I had gone on. The sting had subsided, although the ache never left.

  “If they would only wait—”

  “They do not wish to, and is it our right to hinder them in their hurry to cross the Styx and lose their pain?”

  I shook my head. I did not know.

  “I have missed seeing you, Caesar,” she said, adroitly steering away from the subject. “You promised to visit my farm, but you never do.”

  Ah, yes. After her last completed assignment, I had furloughed her to a farm where she could set up her academy and teach others her skill. She was renowned not only for her poisoning expertise but for her knowledge of medicinal pharmacology, and soon her fame had spread so wide she was overwhelmed with applicants.

  “I have meant to, but—” I spread my hands, helplessly.

  “I work on antidotes, too, you know,” she said. “It isn’t all killing. I can reverse the effects as well. Do not assume I am an expert in only one area.”

  “Oh, Locusta, I would never assume that.” It was almost impossible to overestimate her skills. “You know, I have a physician who claims he has an antidote for animal poisons. You should have a duel sometime. On a goat, that is. But then, you don’t specialize in animal poisons, do you?”