The Splendor Before the Dark

by Margaret George

  I waded out onto the floor of the temple, kicking at the ashes. Here I had laid my wreath, awarded to me as a citharoede in the first games in my name, the Neronia. I had given Apollo the credit for my victory. Now the wreath was cinders. Plaster had fallen from the porticoes, and beneath the ashes I saw a blue tint. As I brushed off the ashes, an image of Apollo playing his cithara appeared against a cerulean background. He was gazing upward, his golden hair flowing, his hands steady on the musical instrument. It was just a fragment, but it was a promise.

  Art survives. Art is eternal. I am still with you.

  I picked it up and hugged it to myself. It would have a place of honor in my new palace.

  “Come,” I said to Tigellinus and the guards. “We have one more thing to check.” But now I was oddly certain it would still be there. And yes, beside the Augustus house, the sacred laurels of the Caesars still grew. They had not been vanquished, as Apollo had not been.

  “Here’s mine,” I said, locating it. Its trunk was a bit burned, and many leaves were shriveled, but I had no doubt it would survive. Every new emperor planted his own sprig from the original laurel of Livia, and it foretold his fortune. As long as the laurel flourished, so would he. When he died, it died with him. The stumps of the trees of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius stood in a straight, sad line behind mine with its green leaves. Other descendants of the Livia tree likewise still grew strong, not dedicated to any one emperor but to Rome itself. It and I were still safe, under divine protection.

  * * *

  • • •

  That night I could not sleep. The room was suffocatingly hot, despite the open windows that had both east and west orientation. There was no breeze, and the sound of the refugees on the grounds was louder tonight than usual.

  It was urgent to rebuild the city as quickly as possible, so they could end their exile. What I had seen today gave me a clearer picture of what needed to be done, and in what order.

  Beside me Poppaea was sleeping calmly. The heat did not seem to bother her, although she slept with only the sheerest cover, her only surrender to the heavy air. Either she had been stunned by what she saw when she returned to the city, or she did not realize the depth of it, for she had said little about it. I found her groundedness a steadying hand, but I also felt alone and abandoned to my own distressing state of mind.

  It was no use. I could not lie there any longer, useless and with wasted hours crawling past. I got up and went to the room with the model of Rome, the guards watching me silently from their posts as I passed.

  Inside, I lit the lamps to illuminate the big table. The city-to-be spread out before me, waiting to be created. The lines I had drawn earlier, denoting the vast areas of destruction, now seemed an artist’s opportunity, obedient to my touch.

  The domed market building—the Macellum Magnum—high on the Caelian Hill had survived with minor damage. I put a large block down on the site. The Curia in the Forum survived; I moved its representational block to the correct place. The Temple of Claudius had its block. Then the others followed, all the public buildings and temples that were still with us. Standing back, I surveyed the way the city now looked. Next must come the buildings we were obligated to restore: the Temple of Vesta, the Regia, the Temple of Fortuna, Romulus’s temple to Jupiter, the temple to Luna Noctiluca. These must all go back in their original sites. But when I was finished with those and many others, there was still an enormous swath of free space in the middle of the city.

  I closed my eyes, remembering what I had heard about the legendary city of Alexandria: white marble, grand boulevards, the lighthouse, the great library, the Mouseion. I regretted never having seen it, but Seneca had lingered there, and my grandfather Germanicus had been entranced by it. It cast a spell, they said, its beauty and its learning making it unique. Why should Rome be second to it? We had conquered it, and should not the city of the conqueror be greater than that of the conquered?

  And there was more, a compelling mandate. When I was a child, Cleopatra’s son had given me a coin his mother had possessed, telling me, I surrender her and her dreams into your safekeeping. So did I have a special mission, to transform Rome into something greater than it had been, an enlightened city of beauty to surpass even Alexandria, as she would have wished? To bring in a golden age?

  The center of the city . . . the center . . . what was to go there?

  Feverishly, I began to arrange and rearrange the blocks. A strange urgency seized me, as if I had thoughts I could never recapture, thoughts I must pursue now. The center . . . it should be a thing of beauty, of transcendent beauty. Not for commerce or ceremonies but for all the people to enjoy. The idea I had had earlier about an open woodland now rose again. But not just a wood—a re-creation of the entire Roman empire, with the lake in the middle representing the Mediterranean. Animals from different regions, trees and plants from far-flung parts. And a pavilion up on the hill, a huge pavilion overlooking the lake, a palace dedicated to art. Terraces below, hanging gardens, descending to the lake, then a vestibule next to a lower separate palace, leading into the Via Sacra of the Forum. All seamless, all flowing together. Fountains, fountains everywhere. The Temple of Claudius—its platform could be converted into a giant fountain and park.

  I saw it all, as real as if it were already built. And the glittering hillside pavilion, facing south to pull in the sunlight, would twinkle and beguile, could deserve only one name: the Golden House, Domus Aurea.

  The hours had passed so swiftly I was shocked to leave the room and find the rising sun shining in my face.

  “Thank you, Apollo. I will build it all worthy of you,” I promised him.

  XII

  Poppaea was still asleep when I stole back into the room. Even though we had now lived together for two years, I still had difficulty seeing her as a living, breathing person rather than a work of art, her perfection was so absolute. In my mind she was Helen of Troy; she taught me that Helen was real, that such a creature could truly exist, and not just in the imagination of Homer.

  Now I stood and looked at her. She was turned on one side, facing the sunlit window, the sheer covering now just over her legs. The rays of the rising sun caught her extraordinary hair, illuminating its amber depths, firing them to a honey luster. She seemed oblivious to the importuning beams of Apollonian light tickling her eyelids. That was appropriate. She had once acted the part of Daphne in a pantomime, playing the role of the nymph who preferred to be turned into a tree rather than submit to Apollo. Later she claimed I was the Apollo she chose to submit to, but she was prone to mythologizing, and in truth it was only my blond hair that she was able to cite as being Apollonian. That, and my cithara playing.

  “Stop watching me.” Her drowsy voice rose. “I see you. You still gawk at me like a schoolboy.” Slowly she sat up, turning to me. Her hair tumbled to her waist.

  “You turn us all into schoolboys—or schoolgirls.” I laughed, but she had embarrassed me. Fleetingly I wondered if the people who stared at me were likewise embarrassed when I caught them, although an emperor can expect to be stared at.

  “You look terrible,” she said. “Haven’t you slept at all?”

  “No. Does it show?”

  “Yes. You know that beauty requires a certain amount of sleep. So why don’t you get it?”

  “I am not trying to be beautiful,” I said. “I leave that to you. But let me show you what I exchanged for sleep!” Before she could protest, I grabbed her hand and pulled her from the bed.

  “Wait, wait!” she said, tripping over her feet. “I can’t go out like this.”

  “We are only going to another room. Come, now!” I dragged her along, down to the planning room, past the guards who pointedly averted their eyes to show us they weren’t looking, proving the opposite. “In here!”

  The big table with its model spread out before us, even more impressive now that it was light
ed naturally. “I’ve done it! I’ve laid out all the city plans.” I pointed to each building block, explaining it, and named the new streets, marked out with chalk.

  She just stared. Perhaps she was still half asleep. Finally she said, “You did all this last night?”

  “Not all of it. I had a preliminary talk with the architects and the engineers first.”

  “This remakes Rome entirely. As you said. It will shock people.”

  “My concern is not for the people now but the people yet to come.”

  “Unfortunately we have to live with the ones here now,” she said. She smiled. “But this is marvelous. And what about the palace? I don’t see it.”

  I swept my hand over the area that would be called the Domus Aurea—the hillside pavilion and the lower separate palace by the lake. “Here.”

  She touched the area of the pavilion. “Very well situated. We will have a fine view of the Forum. And I like the long frontage.”

  “That’s only one part of it.” I explained the rest—the lake, the garden terraces, the porticoes, the vestibule. “I will put a colossus up in the open-air vestibule,” I said, just thinking of it. “Yes, one bigger than the one at Rhodes, dedicated to Apollo, to the new golden age.”

  She looked dismayed. “How big?”

  “Big enough to be seen from everywhere. The one at Rhodes was a hundred feet high, so mine must be at least a hundred and twenty. I’ll have it of gilded bronze.” I laughed. “But that will be last, don’t worry. Everything else must be completed before we splurge on the colossus.”

  “Is this wise?”

  “The colossus? I told you, it will be last.”

  “No, turning the center of Rome into your private grounds.”

  “But it won’t be private. It will all be open to the people, except the pavilion. Like the area in Antium that I built, by the shore, with the gardens and the theater. I am giving the city of Rome back to its people.”

  “The people may like it, but the wealthy you are evicting from their property won’t.”

  She had a keen sense of the practical, but at this moment it annoyed me. “Change inevitably brings loss to someone. There is no help for that. Change is both cruel and rewarding—the good and the evil that Zeus dispenses from his jars at each hand.”

  “I need to get dressed,” she said suddenly, pulling her silk garment closer. “Come with me to my apartments. You seldom visit me there.”

  I found them a stifling hothouse of femininity, so I usually stayed away. But today, my head still spinning from the exultation of the city planning, feeling immune from any surprises, I decided to come with her.

  Her quarters were almost as large as mine, and her attendants more numerous. Perhaps it took more effort to look after an empress than an emperor. Or to look after this empress. They were on the west side of the palace, because she did not like morning sunlight.

  “I prefer the late-afternoon light,” she had said. “The oblique slanting rays, the feeling of completion, the excitement of the coming night—that is what I love.”

  True to her wishes, her quarters were still rather dark, even though the sun was well up now. As she entered, her attendants bowed and pulled back the curtains.

  Her bed, unslept in, gleamed with its silks and pillows, a pavilion of pleasure that one would not want to waste in sleeping. I eyed it, but there were too many people about—although Poppaea was not shy at dismissing them whenever she wanted them gone.

  She saw me looking at the bed, but this morning she was disinclined to follow me there. Instead she went to her cosmetics table, which was laden with bottles and jars of all sizes and shapes—truly beautiful vessels of silver and thin glass and alabaster. She picked up a hand mirror and examined her face critically. I came up behind her and saw my own face reflected in its uneven surface.

  “You could see better if you had better light in this room,” I said.

  “Perhaps I don’t want to see better,” she said. “I might see things I wish I had not.”

  “Never,” I said, laying my head on her shoulder, embracing her.

  But she continued to stare at her reflection, frowning. “This was not here before.”

  “What?”

  “This crease,” she said, touching a barely perceptible line around her mouth.

  “Unless you want to stop eating and therefore never open your mouth, there are bound to be lines,” I said.

  “It wasn’t there before,” she insisted. She put down the mirror. “I told you, I hope to die before my beauty fades.”

  “It isn’t fading,” I said. I did not like the course of this conversation.

  “I am thirty-two,” she said. “Thirty-two. It will not be much longer now. It’s beginning. I see it!”

  “Stop that,” I said. “You are fixated on this idea. If you do not stop thinking this way, you will bring it about.”

  “Very well for you to say. You are only twenty-six!”

  “If I could change places with you and let you be twenty-six, I would gladly be thirty-two. It has never mattered that you are older than I am. To me you are a goddess, and goddesses are ageless.”

  “Well, this goddess has lines!”

  Now I laughed. “How do you know Aphrodite didn’t?”

  Reluctantly she laughed, too. “I need the donkeys’ milk again. Do you know what has happened to my stable?”

  “I must confess, checking on your donkeys has been at the bottom of the list of emergencies. But I will.” She kept a stable of two hundred donkeys on the outskirts of Rome to provide milk for her to bathe in.

  “If I had the milk again, it would restore my complexion.”

  “It doesn’t need restoring,” I insisted. “Truly.”

  She moved to another part of the huge room and called for her wardrobe servants. Several appeared, eager to fulfill her wishes.

  “It will be beastly hot again today,” she said. “What are the lightest gowns I have?”

  “My lady, which color do you prefer?” a slender woman with sunburned cheeks asked.

  “Green today,” she said, then called after the woman, “light green.”

  “Do you want the kid sandals or the goatskin?” asked a short woman with penetrating eyes.

  “Oh . . . kid.” Poppaea waved her on her way.

  There were still a number of attendants standing about, awaiting their assignments. One or two stood out because their garments were heavy and concealing despite the heat. I wondered why they were wearing them. But I forgot about them as I saw Poppaea standing near them. Then I looked to my right, and she was still standing by me. I whipped my head back to see the other person: the Poppaea on the other side of the room.

  “Call that person,” I told her, pointing.

  She beckoned to him. “Sporus,” she called.

  The apparition came toward me, walking just as Poppaea did, moving as she did. Unable to trust my own senses, I looked again at her to ascertain she really was still there beside me.

  The person stood before me. Now, close up, I could see it wasn’t Poppaea, but so close a likeness as a Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze original. It was a man, not a woman. His hair was not the lit-from-within amber of Poppaea’s, but it was nearly the same shade. His features, while almost identical to hers, were not so fine. His body was slender, not muscular, but still it did not have her contours.

  “You like my twin?” she said.

  Sporus merely stood there, an object.

  “The resemblance is uncanny,” I said.

  “Of course we are not related, that we know of, but there are many unacknowledged cousins in Rome.”

  “And many unacknowledged sons,” I said. “Nymphidius claims he is the son of Caligula rather than the gladiator his mother slept with. Who knows?”

  “Sporus is my confidant,” she said.
“It is like talking to myself. We have many a good conversation, do we not?”

  Sporus nodded, with an innate dignity. I wondered what his true background was.

  “He knows many secrets of the household,” she said. “But he knows how to keep them.” She looked tellingly at him.

  Just then her attendants came to dress her, and she withdrew into an inner room, leaving me alone with Sporus.

  “They say everyone has a double,” I said. “But it must be odd to find yours. I have never met mine.”

  “Yes, it was odd at first. But now I feel as if she is my twin, my sister.”

  “Yet you are slave and she empress.”

  “We are who we are regardless of our station,” he said. He did indeed have gentility. Perhaps his family had fallen into bad times and been forced to sell themselves into slavery.

  “How did you come into this household?” I asked.

  “My family is long from Pompeii. And we have known and served the Sabinus family for a long time. My grandfather went with Poppaeus Sabinus to Moesia.”

  Then how did you end up a slave? I wanted to ask. But Poppaea would tell me. I did not want to pursue it now.

  Poppaea returned, her green silk gown fluttering behind her. Sporus was dismissed as she fussed with her brooch.

  “Now I know where to find another Poppaea if I need one,” I said.

  “I hope that never happens,” she said. “That you would need another Poppaea.”

  When we were alone—as much as an emperor can ever be alone—back in my apartments, I asked, “What did you mean, he knows the secrets of the household and how to keep them?”

  “I think there are Christians in my household. I told you that, when you were interrogating that prisoner, Paul. When you let him go, I warned you that they were everywhere. Sporus helps keep a watch. There is little that goes on that he does not know about.”