“Neither is a shrub,” I shot back.
We dismounted, and the commander of the new legion led us down the ranks of soldiers. The standards, with their newly selected emblem of a boar, stood proudly over them. Although I am tall myself, I had to look up at the men. I nodded as I passed through their ranks.
Returning to a platform to address them, I said, “Greetings to you all. I, your emperor, am proud to welcome you to the company of the twenty-seven legions who guard Rome, knowing you will be equally valiant. You know your name: legio I Italica, having been levied exclusively from Italy, the first in a century. And your other, special name: the Phalanx of Alexander the Great—phalanx Alexandri magni—because you will follow in his footsteps, to a region he visited but passed by—your mission being to the gates of the Caucasian Mountains and beyond.”
So disciplined were they, there was no movement, no swaying, no shuffling.
“And I myself will lead you!” I cried. “I myself will fight with you!”
A great cheer rose in the summer air. I believed it myself. At long last I would embrace the side of me so long suppressed, the blood of Germanicus and Antony calling out to me.
But first, the games in Greece.
And a letter I must write.
LIV
ACTE
So he married again. And so quickly. He was not made to be alone—he always needed a companion, a mirror, a confidante, that I have known always. But I was still oddly disturbed when I heard it.
His new wife is Statilia Messalina, an aristocrat of the first order, coming from an old Roman family, with an ancestor, Statilius Taurus, who served twice as consul and celebrated a Triumph. His name lived on in popular memory in the amphitheater he built, the Theater of Taurus, the first one in Rome built of stone. It was destroyed in the Fire, a great loss.
Her husband perished in the conspiracy, so it is odd that she would marry the man who made her a widow. But if that man is emperor, how easy to overlook a little thing like that!
Oh, I am being unkind. But is it not suspicious? It is hard to think her motives untarnished. And she was known to be a libertine, like her cousin the empress Messalina, Claudius’s wife, only not as extreme—as if anyone could be.
Yesterday I received a message from the palace, as unexpected as the first one from Poppaea. I have let it rest on the table overnight. Not that I will accept the invitation, but I want a little interval to elapse before I say no, a little space where in my own mind I can still say yes.
To the Lady Claudia Acte, in Velitrae:
Imperator Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus sends greetings.
The emperor invites the said Claudia Acte to accompany him to Greece to celebrate the Panhellenic Games there, which will take place in Corinth, Delphi, Nemea, and Olympia.
Particulars: the company will depart Rome on July fifteenth, journeying to Brundisium along the Appian Way. You may join at any point of the trip. From the port of Brundisium boats will ferry the company—which includes government officials, soldiers, artists, and athletes—to Greece. Housing and food are at the expense of the imperial treasury.
The emperor would be pleased if you accept the invitation.
Then, in his own handwriting, a postscript:
My dear Acte,
I am late in thanking you for your timely warning about Senecio, which was all too accurate, and for which I am grateful.
You, who watched my first public appearance, know only too well what my performing in Greece will mean to me. And you can judge best if I have improved since then. There are many people coming to watch, but none as meaningful to me as you.
Your friend and grateful emperor,
Nero, or Lucius
The answer was—had to be—no. I did not wish to be part of his adoring entourage, and besides, I could not take that long an absence from my business. The thought of traveling with a troupe of actors, athletes, and soldiers was unappealing.
But I was telling myself that while knowing that obviously he would single me out of the crowd and bring me into his inner circle. I would not be bumping along with the spectators but part of his own group. How would Statilia feel about that? After my treatment by Poppaea, I had no wish to put myself in the sights of another empress.
Still, still . . . perhaps I could go over separately, see one of the games myself, just to watch, to see him perform. Be invisible. Be there just for myself, as I had seen him previously at funerals.
I had to answer. I had to respond. But I hated to write the words.
LV
NERO
All was in readiness, except my own expertise in the arts, always unknown to me until I actually stood on the stage. I had practiced the cithara until my fingers were raw and my supporting arm ached; I had memorized the words of Oedipus in Colonus so obsessively that one night Sporus came running to my bedside when I shouted “Dread brood of Earth and Darkness!” in my sleep. There were five other plays I had had to master as well.
As I had reminded Acte, I had first performed in public seven years ago, but it was to a small and selected audience, and I had been shaking when I stepped out on the stage. Partly because I knew how shocked everyone would be to see me in a citharoede’s robe but also because I could not trust myself to acquit myself well. Now, at the legendary Greek games, the level of skill required was much higher, and I was left with the same nervous worry as when I was a novice. But always there was before me the stern prophecy I had been given as a child, by the oracle of the goddess of Fortune at Antium: There is no respect for hidden music.
Most of the people who had witnessed that first performance were gone now, but Acte was a link to that early stage in my dramatic career. It would have been meaningful on many levels if she could have accompanied me to Greece. Unlike Poppaea, Statilia would have been unconcerned. But she had declined the invitation. I wondered, truly, if we would ever meet again. Life is long, but meetings can be rare when they are left to chance.
* * *
• • •
We gathered in the south of Rome, at the start of the Appian Way, the famous road called “the queen of long roads” that stretched three hundred and fifty miles from the Forum to Brundisium on the southeast coast of Italy, from whence we would sail for Greece.
There were five thousand Augustiani, three hundred Praetorians, senators, military officers, and men. There were two hundred athletes, including Tullia and the girls who would race at Olympia, and five hundred actors and singers. That made a total of some six thousand, and Phaon, Tigellinus, and Nymphidius would oversee the logistics of this company. For we had, of course, slaves and craftsmen to provide for all these people, swelling the total number to around ten thousand.
Traveling slowly by hundreds of rumbling carts, we would reach Brundisium in around seventeen days. Until we actually sailed away, I was easily reachable by a fast courier.
I stood on a makeshift podium and looked out at the sea of carts and people, primed to start the journey. I had done it. I had brought this about. A dream had been realized, and we would embark for the greatest artistic challenge, not in imagination but in reality.
“We are the select, the blessed, who sail for Greece. You are my companions, all, my brothers in art. Let us begin!” I gave the signal, and my cart lurched forward, down the beckoning smooth-paved road, lined with marble monuments to the dead, sheltered overhead by umbrella pines, whispering above us, Come, come, Greece awaits.
* * *
• • •
We proceeded at a languid pace—how could it be otherwise, with so many baggage carts? But the journey was pleasant enough. The moment we rolled out of Rome I felt a great peace descend on me. I was on my way, keeping a promise I had made long ago to a little boy—myself.
The Appian Way leads first through the causeway over the Pontine Marshes, partially drained but still with foul pools of in
sect-ridden water, then emerges into green country of Campania, a tranquil sight of peaceful fields and trees.
I was letting its quiet beauty soothe me when Sporus, sitting beside me, whispered, “This stretch has ghosts.”
“I don’t feel them,” I said.
“You should. Six thousand ghosts are crying out—the six thousand who were crucified for the Spartacus rebellion. The crosses lined the road from Rome to Capua. A hundred and twenty miles of crosses.”
Yet their shadows had vanished in the sun. I shuddered. “Let us not seek out ill omens,” I told him.
But too late. Now I could see the shadows of the crosses falling across the road, lengthening as the day came to a close. He had called them forth, and they sprang to life after almost a hundred and fifty years.
Once we passed beyond that stretch, the mood lightened and I could hear singing from the carts behind us, felt the air begin to cool as we climbed higher and breasted the Apennines, the mountain spine that ran down the middle of Italy. In the July heat the stretch through the plains, and especially through the Pontine area, had been humid and oppressive, but the mountains offered a respite.
All too soon we were on the other side and halfway there. I had traveled so little, seen so little of my own country, never having gone more than about a hundred miles from Rome. Now I was already well beyond that, and the wide world was opening its arms to me, after I had been held captive in Rome my whole life. I would escape its claws, would go on to taste what was beyond it. Greece. Troy. Egypt. The eastern campaign. I felt my blood sing; I felt like Hercules bursting his bonds.
At last we approached Brundisium, and the Adriatic Sea came into view, a sea I had never seen, that washed our eastern shores and bound us to Greece and the east. It sparkled from the distance, with a white haze on the horizon where sea met sky. Actually glimpsing it meant the journey was real, and I would soon leave the shores of Italy behind.
As we approached the city, I recited to myself all I knew of it. It was founded by one of the Homeric heroes, Diomedes. It had been attacked by Julius Caesar in his war against Pompey. Octavian and Antony had reconciled here, with Antony agreeing to marry Octavian’s sister. And the poet Virgil had died here, returning from—where else would a poet travel to?—Greece.
This was a Greek city in spirit, founded by a Greek, facing Greece. “I am in Greece already!” I cried, throwing up my hands in joy. If the carriage had not been moving, I would have danced.
I remembered the part Brundisium had played in my own begetting, too. Antony and Octavian had made a pact there, sealing it with Antony’s marriage to Octavia. The marriage, a legendary disaster, resulted in two daughters, both of them my ancestors. Two years later Octavian asked Antony to meet him in Brundisium; Antony traveled there, only to find that Octavian did not appear. At that point, Antony sailed away back to the east and Cleopatra and never set foot in Italy again. I wondered how he felt as he shrugged it all off and, like Caesar crossing the Rubicon, knew the dice were thrown.
The harbor was a forked one, with the town lying between the two forks. The deep water made it an important port, as it could shelter a sizable number of boats. The road sloped down, heading directly to the water, where two fifty-foot granite pillars marked the end of the Appian Way, waves lapping against their base.
I leapt out of the carriage and stood at the water’s edge. The land road ended here. Beyond was the sea road, the route to Greece. The salty air ruffled my hair. Seagulls screeched overhead, wheeling and cawing. Soon our sails would imitate them, try to harness the wind, and let us fly to our destination.
LVI
When I finally stood upon the sacred ground of Greece I felt that the very earth beneath my feet was imbued with energy. I smelled a subtle, distinctive difference in the breeze-borne scent, new to me but somehow seeming familiar from poetry. Pine trees of a different shape than Roman ones framed the sky, their dark boughs calling forth legends. It was all true. Greece existed, and not just in the imagination. I stood surrounded by it, a homecoming to a place I had never been but belonged.
Greece, I embrace you. Welcome me as a son.
The crossing had been smooth and uneventful, one glorious day following another, no squalls, no becalming. Poseidon had been kindly, guiding us. It took us only three days to reach Corcyra on the island of Corfu, and then just another day and a half to sail to the mainland at the Gulf of Actium.
We had landed near the site of the pivotal and world-changing sea battle of Actium, where eight years after the rift, Octavian had soundly defeated Antony and Cleopatra, making the whole Roman empire his own. He had founded Nikopolis there, adorned it with the trophies of rams from the defeated fleet, and decreed that every four years, on the anniversary of the victory, celebratory games would be held on the spot. I had arrived in time to participate. I had mixed feelings about celebrating the fall of Antony, but it would be a less demanding event than the four older traditional ones and a good introduction for my first competition.
I stood on the hilltop overlooking the Bay of Actium below, a wide bay with a narrow opening. Once the army of Octavian had been camped here, looking across at Antony’s camp, cruelly located on a site rife with malaria on the other side of the bay. Now on this hillside a theater had been built, as well as a monument with the rams, and temples and a stadium for the games. A clean, tidy commemoration for a bloody and messy event.
The officials of the games swarmed around to welcome us, telling me that special quarters had been built for our lodging. The games themselves would commence in a week, “or whenever Caesar feels rested,” the chief official said in Greek. I spoke Greek as well as my own Latin and had no trouble communicating with him.
They were eager to please and arranged a welcome banquet for the evening. But I postponed it. Everyone was tired and salt-stained, and a quiet bath, supper, and rest would be best for now. They nodded obsequiously.
But late at night, my company being settled in the temporary housing erected for us on the crest of the hill, I rose and stole out of the quarters, allowing only two guards to trail me at a distance. A full moon’s piercing light shone down, turning the water of the bay below into an oblong mirror, outlining the monuments in edged shadows. Supreme silence had fallen over the site like a mantle, cloaking it in hushed reverence, with only a chorus of singing cicadas thrumming in the background.
I walked slowly downhill until I reached the large platform of the open-air sanctuary Octavian had dedicated to Apollo. The flat pavement bespoke the calm that descends after a battle is in the past, its cries and crises now relegated to history, history that is its own mausoleum.
Yes, that was what this was. A mausoleum to a battle fought a hundred years ago, all its participants dead, even those who died a natural death. Over my head a quick darting dark shape, a bat winging past, briefly threw a shadow on the pavement, flitting by and then gone.
Just below the wide pavement was a wall bristling with the naval rams of captured battleships from Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet. I walked over to the edge and looked down. They gleamed in the moonlight, throwing sharp shadows. There were thirty-six of them, of all different sizes, wrenched from ships, now fitted into sockets in the wall. Gingerly, watching my step as I went, I descended to a lower walkway and moved along it, passing the rows of rams. They were affixed at shoulder height, and I could inspect them closely. I ran my hand along one; the bronze was cold and smooth. If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear the ring of the rams striking wooden ships, the anguished cries of the sailors, feel the moment that all was lost.
But all was not lost. I patted the ram. Octavian won the battle, but the war was not over. There was now an emperor who saw the east as equal to the west, who prized the glory of Greece, and who had a mandate from Cleopatra herself: I surrender her dreams and ambitions into your keeping. The dream of an empire that encompassed both east and west did not die with Alexander or w
ith Antony and Cleopatra. It was alive in me. And I would bring it about. This journey to Greece was the first step.
* * *
• • •
We stayed in Actia well over a month, accustoming ourselves to the area. In early September the Actian Games were held, in accordance with the September second anniversary of the battle of Actium. They had never had the cachet that the traditional Panhellenic Games did and did not draw the large crowds or the big-name competitors.
I competed in only one event—the musical composition. I did not sing, only played the cithara, a tune of my own invention. The audience, though small, was enthusiastic, and I felt at that moment that I had been entirely right to strive so hard to come to Greece to compete. Not to win—although I did this time—but just for the joy of it.
These Actian Games were a gentle introduction to the prestigious ancient games that I would participate in later, with one of the most important coming up soon—Delphi.
Delphi. The very word trailed clouds of glory. The center of the world, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses, source of the Castalian Spring. The shrine of the oracle of Apollo. The first contests to include drama and music, as befitting Apollo, in addition to athletic meets. The place where Dionysus spent the winter months in revelry. Site of pilgrimage from all over the Greek world, rich from donations and filled with priceless artworks.
We sailed there on the Gulf of Corinth, that long, thin finger cutting Greece in half, leaving the Peloponnese dangling by a four-mile isthmus from the mainland. The day was fair and the winds high, but not dangerous, and inside the Gulf we were sheltered and slid along the shore. We disembarked close to Delphi and could see Mount Parnassus rearing up before us, blue as twilight, wreathed in mystery.
The Splendor Before the Dark Page 41