The Splendor Before the Dark

by Margaret George

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes.” She reached for a honeyed date on a nearby platter and handed me one. I refused. “Ah, I was testing you to see how long your resolve would last. You passed this first test. But there will be others. No more honeyed dates for you.”

  She went to lie down. She was at the stage of her pregnancy when she was sleepy during the day. I went to my workroom to tackle dispatches and other matters awaiting my attention. It was the usual pile: reports from various provinces, letters from governors, diplomatic questions involving territory or treaty rights. I was hard at work, surprisingly refreshed after the meeting with Zenodorus and the excitement of commissioning the statue, when a servant announced that Alexandra was waiting to see me. I was always pleased to see my old nurse, but this was an inconvenient time. Nonetheless I sighed and said, “Show her in.”

  The dear lady, still strong with a straight bearing, came in and greeted me. “Dear Lucius,” she said, using my childhood name, the one she had known me as. She had license to say and do just about anything with me. I had been mistaken to have forgotten her and her fellow nurse Ecloge in the short list of people who had known me all my life; how could I have left her off?

  I rose and embraced her. “And my dear Alexandra,” I said. “You are always welcome.”

  “I have received a letter for you,” she said, handing it to me. “I think perhaps it was sent to me to avoid any spying eyes. No one suspects an older woman of receiving important letters.”

  “Ah, don’t speak of yourself that way,” I said.

  “I can say it; I just don’t want anyone else to,” she said. She kissed my cheek. “I’ll leave you to it. We can chat another time.” She had always been practical and astute.

  When she left, I opened the letter. It was from Acte. Just seeing her name gave me a jolt, seeing her handwriting. But the contents were chilling. She was right to have let me know.

  I folded it up, caressing it a bit too long. Acte. I had seen her after the Fire, that day in the fields: another person who had known me for a long time, but so much more than that. She was the love of my youth, something pure and unstained in an ugly world, the memory of which remained almost holy.

  But I mustn’t dwell on that. It must remain locked up in its shrine.

  What was Senecio asking about? And who wanted to know, besides him? Most important, why did they want to know?

  I was so absorbed in thinking about it, with the letter reopened, analyzing every word, I hardly heard Poppaea come into the room, did not realize she was there until she came up behind me and put her arms around me.

  “You work too hard,” she murmured, her voice still drowsy. Then her eyes focused on the paper, the words and the name. She jerked away. “Work! Forgive me, you aren’t working; you are mulling over letters from that ex-lover of yours! So you are in secret correspondence with her!” She backed away, glaring at me, red spots rising in her cheeks.

  “Don’t be foolish,” I said. This annoyed me. “She has warned me about suspicious questions from a supposed friend. Here, read it.” I handed it to her. At first she refused to take it, as if it were a poisonous serpent, but she finally did.

  “This is hardly a love letter, and it is the first I have received from her in years.” Poppaea did not, could not possibly, know I had seen her recently, although by sheer accident. “She is not someone to send such news lightly,” I said, snatching it back from her. “Now are you satisfied?”

  Reluctantly she nodded. “I suppose it was kind of her to send it,” she admitted. “But why would Senecio assume she was in contact with you? Why would your friends think you were still seeing her? There must be a reason they would suspect that!”

  “It’s wishful thinking on their parts,” I said. “They could hardly approach you. So they have cast about, fishing for anyone they hope might be close to me. They may have approached others, men as well as women, who didn’t see the significance of it.” I glared at her. “You should be grateful that Acte, unlike most ex-mistresses, has proved a loyal friend.”

  “What other ex-mistresses of yours are floating about?” she said.

  “It’s a figure of speech,” I said. “I don’t have any other ex-mistresses.”

  Ex-lovers—partners in sex frolics in Baiae, at Piso’s villa, at Petronius’s dinners, courtesans from Vorax’s establishment, yes, but they hardly counted. In most cases I couldn’t even remember their names—and I was good with names.

  “That’s hard to believe,” she said.

  “Believe it or not, it’s true.” I looked at her. “And what about you, divorced twice before you married me? Cheating on your second husband, Otho, with his friend—me?”

  And Otho’s dreadful warning to us, or was it a curse? Why do you want this? So you can be empress? Have power? For surely you don’t love him. You don’t love anyone, not really. I was content knowing that. Will he be?

  “You were my willing partner in that,” she said. “I did not commit adultery alone.”

  “We were willing partners in everything,” I said. There had been much more than that. There had been Octavia as well, Poppaea’s crime against her and my acceptance of it. I took the letter from her hand and put it back on the desk. “Everything. As we still are.” For surely you don’t love him. “Do you love me?”

  “Yes. Of course I do. You should not ask.”

  “You should not force me to ask. And I love you. I tell you without your asking. But of course you know.”

  She was not my innocent love of youth but my guilty one of manhood, a different thing altogether, for someone who knows us and loves the dark side as well as the light is a ruby beyond great price.

  XXII

  I’ve changed my mind,” I said.

  Poppaea looked up from her day couch. “About what?” she asked. She did not seem concerned to know the answer. Her pregnancy had made her languid. Languid and more beautiful than ever, like a vision in slow motion, the sort we chase in dreams.

  “About celebrating the tenth anniversary of my accession,” I said. “It seems too momentous to ignore. And public ceremonies will be a confirmation that Rome has recovered.”

  “Is recovering, you mean,” she corrected me. “It still has a long way to go.”

  Her criticism, welcome sometimes, annoyed me today. “What has been achieved in three months is almost a miracle. So yes, there is cause for celebration.”

  “A heavenly miracle brought about by the very earthly treasury.”

  The treasury. I inwardly winced, thinking of the huge debt draining it. And the accession events would add to the burden.

  But no matter. The people of Rome had borne much and deserved a respite and reward.

  So later that day, I met with Tigellinus and announced, “I will race in the Circus Maximus.” Before he could say anything, I hurried on. “The stands are rebuilt, the track ready. It is fitting that in the place where the fire started, we have our first public entertainment.”

  He knew better than to scowl outright, so he kept his face in what he assumed was an expressionless gaze. Finally he said, “Races, fine. I agree, nothing will signal to the people that life is returning to normal better than a day of races. But they can take place without you.”

  Now he, too, irritated me. “You don’t think I’m ready?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He shrugged.

  “But that’s what you mean.”

  “If you insist, then, yes. But that isn’t the main concern. It’s that your competing will draw all the attention to you. People will be watching every move, every turn, and—dare I say it?—some may wish that you meet with an accident. When you don’t, the idea won’t fade away. Do you want to put that idea into their heads?” He looked hard at me, his eyes mercilessly honest.

  He was right, of course. People watched the races hungry for gore and spectacular deaths as much as to make mo
ney betting. This would allow them to imagine my death anywhere on the seven laps around the course.

  But such thoughts were for the timid. The only alternative was to never take the reins on a public racecourse. And for the rebirth of Rome, the beginning of the golden age, my commission from Apollo, Sol himself, to ride out as his incarnation, was absolute. And so I would do.

  Soon, the decade celebration of my accession ballooned into a bigger and bigger event. I decided to inaugurate the pavilion of the Domus Aurea as well, inviting not only the senators and magistrates but also freedmen and common people. I would throw open all the rooms, finished or not, and at sunset we would gather on the porch and drink in the vista of the New Rome spreading out before us.

  While the dusty work of rebuilding went on in Rome, I practiced my racing out at Lanatus’s track. The horses were working smoothly as a team now, and I was able to concentrate on subtle means of communicating with them, using my voice as well as the whip to guide them. The Iberian, the most important horse in the team, pulling on the left side of the chariot, was the most willful but also the fastest and nimblest. I would have to control him on the turns or all would be lost.

  “Better and better,” said Lanatus, watching me. “I do believe you are ready.”

  I pulled up before him. “That’s not what Tigellinus says.”

  “Tigellinus may have his reasons for saying what he does that have nothing to do with how well you drive.” He walked over to us and ran his hands over the cream-colored Iberian. “I knew you’d be a prize,” he said. “Even as a foal you showed your bloodlines.”

  “I want to be worthy of these racers,” I said. “And bring them to the finish without injury.”

  He nodded. “And yourself as well. How will you race? Will you wear one of the Colors?”

  I stepped off the chariot and back onto the firm ground. “No. I’m not a member of any, and if I singled out one, the others would feel slighted. Of course I’d be a Green if I could. But I’ll wear my own Color.”

  “Would that be gold?”

  I laughed. “How did you know?”

  “What else could it be?”

  * * *

  • • •

  I reveled in visiting the Domus Aurea and following its progress. The hillside pavilion, which would house art and be the venue for state receptions, was structurally complete, but it was a race to finish the interior.

  I strolled through the first row of rooms, the ones opening directly onto the hillside. Sunlight streamed in, beaming on the workmen laying the marble floors. The closer the rooms were to the grand oculus chamber, the more expensive and elaborate the patterns of marble. Gradually they went from black and white to all the colors from the far-flung outposts of the empire—yellow from Numidia, green from Greece, purple from Egypt. The Domus Aurea must reflect the entire empire, advertise its might.

  The air was filled with dust where the marble was being laid, but in the completed rooms artists were busy with the frescoes.

  The senior artist, Fabullus, who had done the frescoes in the Domus Transitoria, was busy on a scaffold. The ceilings were twenty-five feet high and in the passageways, even higher. They made a person feel overwhelmed, small.

  “Fabullus!” I called.

  Slowly he turned and looked down. “Good day, Caesar,” he said.

  “How are you progressing?” I asked.

  “I am progressing as I should be,” he said. “Art cannot be hurried.” He moved a bit to the side, and I could see what he had painted—brilliant blues and reds in a geometric pattern.

  “I am not here to hurry you, just to take pride in your work,” I assured him.

  “I understand you want to open the house for an event shortly,” he said warily. “It won’t be ready by then, if that is what you are asking.”

  “I know it won’t,” I said. “But this will give them a glimpse of the wonders to come. Whet their appetites.”

  He grunted and flicked one fold of his toga. Yes, he insisted on working in a full toga. I did not know how he could stand it. Who would wear one by choice? “Unfinished art is often unappealing.”

  “Promised work has a lure all its own,” I countered. In any case, unfinished was all that was available.

  “The world is full of promised, unfinished work,” he said. “For every completed work, there are a thousand uncompleted.”

  Well, they would not be able to say that about my Rome. It would be finished.

  I kept walking through the long row of rooms—some twenty altogether—until I reached the focal point of the building, the vaulted oculus chamber. The marble floor was already laid and polished, the marble cladding on the walls. But the grand finishing touch, the detachable revolving ceiling, was still to come. It had to be done by October thirteenth. This was where I would lead the guests and dazzle them.

  I spotted a workman at the waterfall in one of the alcoves. Celer, Severus, and I had designed a cascading river of water flowing down into a pool, murmuring and splashing. He was adjusting one of the blocks so the water entered the pool gently rather than with a roar.

  He stood up when he saw me. “Almost ready, Caesar,” he said proudly. “Whoever thought of this design, it makes the room sing.”

  “I am glad it has turned out as pleasantly in reality as it looked on the plans. What of the rotating ceiling insert?”

  “I don’t know. I am not on that work detail. But the last I heard, umm, they had run into a bit of trouble with it.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “It needs to be perfectly balanced or it won’t turn properly. And it takes more water power to turn it than expected. They are redesigning it now. It’s in a shed up on top of the hill if you wish to see it.”

  I hurried up there, scrambling over the steep path that would take me to the summit of the Oppian Hill. Inside a makeshift shelter, a great wooden wheel, about thirty feet in diameter, lay on canvas. On its surface were sketches of the zodiac signs to be incorporated in ivory, as well as openings where rose petals or perfume could be sprinkled on those below. Several workmen were bent over it, measuring and murmuring. They snapped to attention when they saw me.

  “I understand you need to make adjustments to it,” I said.

  “Yes, Caesar,” a brawny man said. “It was unbalanced. We are trying to find the source of the listing.”

  “And I see you haven’t got the designs on it yet,” I said.

  “We can’t do that until it functions properly. Once the ivory is in it, it won’t stand for rough handling.”

  “Yes, of course.” Just looking at the wheel, I could not tell how near they were to solving the engineering problem. “But it needs to be finished soon.”

  “Yes, Caesar,” they chorused.

  “I can dispatch Celer or Severus here to help if you need them,” I said.

  “I think they are busy with the artificial lake,” the burly man said. “Putting the finishing touches on it.”

  “That can wait,” I said. We wouldn’t be needing that for a while yet. “Let me know your progress. If you haven’t solved it in two days, I’ll pull Celer and Severus off the lake project.”

  * * *

  • • •

  But when I saw Celer and Severus, it was not about the revolving ceiling, and I had not sought the meeting. They came to me, rolls of blueprints tucked under their arms, the next day. They looked pleased with themselves and, after the proper greetings, said, “Rome is rising like a fast-growing sapling, and soon the branches will give shelter to all.”

  I bade them sit and offered them refreshments, which they waved away. “Are you pleased, Caesar?”

  “Yes,” I said. From the flattened blackened ground the white buildings were growing, reaching for the sun. “I was at the Domus Aurea yesterday, and from the terrace the city gleamed.”

  Before
I could mention the ceiling problem, Celer cleared his throat. “In all this, there is something we—I, I should say—have overlooked. This must be remedied. And quickly, before the space fills in.”

  As if he had been primed to take the next sentence, Severus said, “Something of great importance,” in a solemn tone. Being the older one, he always sounded sure of his facts.

  “Well, what?” The temples were accounted for, the fountains, the streets—what could be missing?

  “The latrines,” said Celer. “We forgot to plan for the latrines.”

  “Latrines?”

  “A very important part of civic life,” said Severus. “The city depends on them.” He scratched his busy gray hair.

  “It does?”

  “Naturally, Caesar, you would not have . . . have availed yourself of these relief stations, as you have your own in the palace, but most people do use them. In fact, they probably rank next to the games in public awareness.”

  “And how many of these do we need?”

  “I would say . . . at least fifty. Unless you want the new streets to be soiled and stink.”

  More money! More building costs!

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “Where should they be situated?”

  “At strategic places around the city, as they tend to be gathering places. So they should not be where they would cause a bottleneck of human traffic. And they need to be over existing sewers. Those mostly survived the Fire; we just have to map out their exact route,” continued Severus.

  “People do pay to use them,” said Celer. “So the cost of building and upkeep is somewhat lessened.”

  “Upkeep?”

  “They have to be cleaned, and sponges must be provided for the patrons. And if there is a blockage, well . . .”

  I didn’t want to think about it. “All right, all right!”

  “They can vary in size, but the largest ones have fifteen or twenty seats. Usually of marble,” said Severus. “There was a famous one near the Forum of Julius Caesar. It was heated, so naturally it was very popular.”