Render Unto Caesar

by Gillian Bradshaw

  It should not have been so disconcerting, Hermogenes told himself. Obviously at Rome itself there would be ordinary Roman citizens, men of no particular wealth and importance. It shocked him, nonetheless, to discover that he’d just hired two Roman citizens to carry his luggage. In Alexandria the Roman citizenship was a thing only wealth and power could aspire to gain. He felt obscurely ashamed of the way he’d just flaunted his own citizenship.

  “No’ many like us, these days,” Gaius Rubrius admitted. “Most’a the other fellows you find carrying things these days, they’re freedmen or freedmen’s sons if they’re not slaves outright. Sons of Gauls or, gods hate ’em, Syrians like tha’ bastard Helops.” He spat, noticed Hermogenes’ blank expression, and explained, “The fellow in the red tunic, head groom a’ tha’ livery stable. Has all the drivers send their fares to him, and charges the porters and chair bearers before he’ll send ’em on. Makes trouble about a fellow waitin’ in his courtyard to see if anyone wants a ride. Real bastard.”

  “You tripped him up, sir,” Quintus Rubrius put in slyly, and laughed.

  Hermogenes shrugged, embarrassed. He could see nothing particularly reprehensible in a livery stable groom arranging porters and sedan chairs for customers, even if he did take a cut. At least the customers would have somewhere to turn if the porters made off with their possessions. He would have been willing to pay a little more for that reassurance himself, if he hadn’t been so dissatisfied with the service he’d received from the driver. He glanced back, and was reassured to find Phormion and Menestor close behind, alert, unencumbered and ready to deal with any trouble that arose. Not that he expected any: it was just better to be ready. “My quarrel was with the driver,” he remarked, returning his attention to the porters.

  “Gallio’s a bugger, too,” Gaius Rubrius assured him.

  They walked on for a few minutes in silence. They had passed through the Ostian Gate now, and the tenements rose up hills to each side, one above another, quiet in the afternoon sun. In their thick shade the street seemed narrower and darker. Some of the ground-floor apartments seemed to have been given over to shops or cookhouses, but at this time of day they were shut, their fronts sealed with heavy wooden shutters, giving the street a blank, walled-in feeling. In dirt-paved alleys which twisted from the main road women stood talking in low voices while children played amid the rubbish. Dogs barked and babies cried. The air smelled of sewage.

  A gang of boys at the entrance to one of the apartment blocks watched them go past with sullen dark eyes. One of them shouted something, the words unclear but the jeering tone unmistakable. A man at the window of another building spat, the gobbet of phlegm falling on the dirty pavement by Hermogenes’ feet. It reminded him uneasily of parts of Alexandria’s Rhakotis quarter. He wished he had not put on his best cloak that morning, and that he’d used a copper pin for his tunic. He’d wanted to impress the Romans as a man of substance, but he would never have walked through the Rhakotis quarter wearing Scythopolitan linen, expensively doubled-dyed gold-russet, and a tunic fastened with a gold pin. It was as good as a proclamation: “Rich man! Worth robbing!”—and here the cut of the cloak proclaimed him not merely “Rich man!” but “Rich foreigner!” which was even worse. He glanced uneasily back at Menestor and Phormion again. Even their plain tunics—clean, of good quality linen, and decorated in Menestor’s case with patterned edges—would have been ill-advised in the Rhakotis quarter. And they did look foreign here, there was no denying it. Phormion was too dark, and Menestor’s seventeen-year-old honey-colored grace too exotic.

  “Is this a bad part of the city?” he asked at last.

  “Not so bad, no,” Gaius Rubrius said judiciously. “Nowhere in Rome’s really safe, unnerstan’, but there’s worse than this. Transtibertina, f’r starters: never go there after dark. Subura’s bad, too, and around the Via Appia beyond the Capena Gate. Via Appia itself isn’ too bad in town—main roads, see, they’re better than alleyways.”

  “It is the same in Alexandria.” He had been taking some comfort from the fact that this was a main road.

  “Via Tusculana, now—most of that’s a good area. The top of it’s up by the Sacra Via, right near the Palatine. The bottom by the Caelimontana Gate, tha’s not so good, but not too bad neither. ’Bout like this. Which end is it you want, sir?”

  Hermogenes hesitated. “Probably the better end, but I am not certain,” he admitted. “I have never before been to Rome. I will ask for the house.”

  “It’s a house? Not an insula?”

  An island? Hermogenes thought, then remembered that the apartment blocks were called insulae; Rubrius had even used the term to him before. “I believe it is a house,” he said cautiously. “Crispus is a businessman, like myself.” He used the term Crispus had always employed for himself: negotiator.

  “Sacra Via end, then,” the porter said confidently. “I’d’a looked there first anyway, seein’ as how you’re a gentleman.”

  Well, the cloak had impressed someone, anyway. He hoped the porters had him down as a man who could reward helpfulness generously, and perhaps provide more custom in future—that they would work to please him.

  “Is y’r friend expectin’ you?” Rubrius asked.

  “Yes,” Hermogenes said at once, although he wasn’t certain that was true. He had sent Crispus a letter before setting out from Alexandria, but there was no way to know whether Crispus had actually received it—and of course, even if Crispus was expecting him, the vagaries of ships and winds meant he couldn’t know when his guest might arrive. A foreigner adrift in a strange city, however, was a foreigner who could be robbed with impunity, and he wouldn’t appear any more vulnerable than he had to—particularly not with those valuables in his trunk.

  “Sacra Via end f’r sure,” Rubrius repeated.

  They came out from between the hills, and to Hermogenes’ relief, the neighborhood improved. The wood-and-brick bleachers of what Rubrius said was the Circus Maximus—Rome’s main racecourse—towered above them to their left. To their right, the tenements gave way to more substantial apartment blocks faced with plaster painted to resemble marble, punctuated by the occasional private house. The roadway curved about the end of the Circus Maximus, then ended in a small public square. Ahead of them rose another hill, this one covered with large houses set amid fine gardens. Marble gleamed white against the green of leaves.

  “Tha’s the Palatine,” said Gaius Rubrius, nodding at it. “Where the emperor an’ his friends live, when they’re in the city. The Sacra Via goes past it on the other side. This is the end of the Via Ostiensis, but we’ll jus’ nip across by the lanes. No’ too much further now.”

  “Jus’ as well,” muttered his brother, Quintus. “This thing’s heavy.”

  “Isn’t the emperor in the city now?” Hermogenes asked with interest, gazing up at the Palatine.

  “Na,” Gaius said with resignation. “He’s off in the West, and his friend Agrippa’s off in the East. Nothin’ happenin’ this summer. There haven’ been no games since the beginnin’ of the month, and the circus has been empty even longer. It’ll kill me with boredom; I love the games. You’d think Taurus would put on some games—he’s prefect of the city right now, Statilius Taurus the general, and he loves the games himself; built the big amphitheater for ’em over in the Campus Martius. But everythin’s been dead.”

  They crossed the square at the entrance to that deserted circus, and followed another street right, then left about the foot of the Palatine. The neighborhood became richer still. Now the apartment blocks were faced with real, rather than imitation, marble, and their entranceways were decorated with mosaic titles, while the wooden shutters of the closed shops were painted in bright colors. They joined another road which Rubrius said was the beginning of the Via Appia: here there were no apartments at all, only private houses, large ones with facades of polished stone, doors of carved oak, and torches set in ornamental iron brackets along the road front. The occasional portico of shops or
small temple made columned gaps in a sweep of plasterwork and marble. The pavements had been swept, and even the street was cleaner. The scent of sewage was replaced by that of cook fires, herbs, and stone pavement in sunlight.

  On the other side of the Palatine, as Rubrius had promised, they reached a crossroads with another major thoroughfare.

  “Tha’s the Sacra Via,” said Gaius Rubrius, gesturing left down a wide, marble-lined avenue. “It goes to the forum. An’ tha’s the Via Tusculana.” He jerked the basket of luggage right. “Y’can start askin’ fer yer friend’s house, sir.”

  The first man Hermogenes asked—a water vendor on the corner—had never heard of Fiducius Crispus. They had to go another six blocks along the Via Tusculana, to a point where the houses were far less grand and had been joined by insulae again, before they found someone who knew his house.

  “Crispus the moneylender,” said the old woman, grimacing. “On the right, three blocks north. A big place with a door all studded with iron and dolphin torch brackets. But if you’re thinkin’ to borrow money, think again. It’s always better to sell than to borrow.”

  Hermogenes thanked her and started on. Gaius Rubrius followed more slowly, frowning. “A moneylender, sir?” he asked hesitantly. The word, faenerator, was far less respectable than the negotiator Hermogenes had used.

  Hermogenes shrugged, slowing his own steps to keep beside the porter. “He lends money at interest. So do I. Large sums, mostly, at moderate interest, and only to those who can repay me. Not small sums to poor men, at extortionate rates which are extracted with violence.”

  “Oh,” said Rubrius. His expression, however, said he was not convinced. Moneylenders were cruel and disreputable men.

  Hermogenes sighed, wondering whether to say more or just leave it. Say more, he decided. Gaius and Quintus Rubrius seemed reasonably honest and helpful, and they appeared to know the city well: he might want to hire them again, and if he did he would want their goodwill. “It isn’t always better to sell than to borrow,” he said quietly. “What would you do if your sedan chair broke, and you didn’t have enough saved to buy a new one?”

  “Gods avert the omen!” exclaimed Rubrius.

  “Would you just carry things on your back until you had enough for a new chair?” Hermogenes went on.

  “You’d have a hard job tryin’ to buy a new chair tha’ way,” Quintus Rubrius put in contemptuously. “You don’ make half as much carryin’ sacks as you do wi’ a sedan chair.”

  “Well, then, would you sell your wife’s jewelry, or your winter cloaks, to pay for one?”

  Rubrius shook his head. “Wouldn’ be worth the grief from my wife, and if I sold the cloak I’d have to buy a new one or shiver all winter. New cloaks cost a lot more’n I’d get for the old one. Y’r right, sir, to think that me ’n Quintus’d borrow the money.”

  “And so the man who lent you that money would be providing you with a service that benefited you. If he was a dishonest man who made loans to those who could not repay him, and who sent in bailiffs to seize their goods or their children when they were overcome by debt, you would be right to despise him—but if he was an honest man who never did those things, why should you think ill of him? Carrying luggage is also a useful service. Some porters steal from their customers, or damage or lose their goods. Should I despise you because of them?”

  There was a silence, and then Quintus Rubrius laughed. “Greeks c’n prove that black is white!”

  “All I am saying is that moneylending is an honest trade, even if some who practice it are dishonest.”

  Gaius Rubrius looked at him sideways. “But you don’ give loans for sedan chairs, do you, sir?”

  Hermogenes smiled. “On the whole, no. Most of my money—like most of the money of my friend Titus Fiducius Crispus—is in shipping. The building and equipping of ships for trade is costly, and the risks they meet on the seas are great. It’s customary to defray both by spreading them among syndicates of investors, who may make a great profit on a successful voyage, or lose money on an unsuccessful one: trade benefits either way. I—and Titus Fiducius—also have money invested in buildings, and in some loans to private individuals. But neither of us can rightly be termed a moneylender. If a man handles large sums, he terms himself a businessman. I agree, though, that the principle is the same. We charge for the use of our money as you do for the use of your chair.”

  Gaius Rubrius looked down. He shifted the poles of the sedan chair on his shoulder, then smiled. Hermogenes, assessing that smile, decided that the porter was not convinced that moneylending might be an honest trade, but that he was flattered that a rich Greek thought him worth conciliating. Hermogenes sighed: he should have kept his mouth shut. He never could seem to manage to look after his dignity as he should.

  Not that Romans, from all he had ever seen, allowed much dignity to Greeks in the best of circumstances. Dignity, as far as he could make out, was supposed to be a purely Roman attribute: Greeks were supposed to be clever. It was odd, the way they always exclaimed over Greek cleverness while treating it as somehow inherently dishonest: Greeks can prove that black is white! If you actually asked them about their own tradesmen, merchants, or politicians, they had no hesitation in telling you that some were thieves and liars; likewise, they’d readily agree that such-and-such a Greek banker or ship captain was an honest man—but somehow or other this never dented their assurance that Romans were honest and Greeks weren’t.

  He’d met the attitude often enough in Roman merchants. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised to see that it went right to the bottom of Roman society.

  “Is that y’r friend’s house?” asked Quintus Rubrius.

  It was, unmistakably: the only house in a block of insulae. It was a large, fine house, with a wrought-iron torch bracket in the shape of a dolphin on either side of the iron-studded double door. Gaius and Quintus Rubrius set down the sedan chair with the luggage in front of that door, and Gaius knocked. Menestor abruptly hurried forward from his place at the back of the procession and edged the porter aside. Dealing with the slaves of his master’s associates was his job, and he was always very protective of his position. He rapped smartly on the iron-studded oak.

  There was a long silence, but at last a window in the lodge swung open, and a hideous face looked out—a shiny white mask of scar tissue from which two red eyes blinked suspiciously. It was hairless, and the ears were no more than stumps. A fire, Hermogenes thought, wrestling with his shock: the poor fellow was burned in a fire.

  “What d’you want?” growled the doorkeeper suspiciously.

  Menestor hesitated, then asked hopefully, “Do you speak Greek?”

  The doorkeeper merely blinked at him. Hermogenes sighed and stepped forward: it was undignified to negotiate with Crispus’s slaves himself, but it seemed he had to do it. “Is this the house of Titus Fiducius Crispus?” he asked politely.

  The doorkeeper blinked again. “Yes,” he admitted. “But the master isn’t in. Try again tomorrow morning.”

  “He has invited me to be his guest. He should be expecting me. I am Marcus Aelius Hermogenes, of Alexandria.”

  “He never said he was expecting nobody,” the doorkeeper objected.

  Hermogenes firmly squashed his rising anger and embarrassment. Letters could easily miscarry, or instructions from a master could fail to reach the person responsible for carrying them out—neither of which was a doorkeeper’s fault. “Your master has invited me,” he repeated calmly, “and I believe he is expecting me. If he is out, will you check whether he’s left any instructions about me?”

  The doorkeeper blinked at him some more. “Marcus Aelius Hermokrates of Alexandria, you said?”

  “Hermogenes!”

  The doorkeeper grunted and disappeared, closing his window behind him.

  There was a silence, then a snigger from Quintus Rubrius.

  Young Menestor turned a dusky red and glared at the porter. Then he gave his master a look of angry apology. “I’m so
rry, sir,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to deal with a freak like that. He was rude, wasn’t he?”

  “No,” Hermogenes told the boy soothingly, “merely abrupt in his manner. He said that his master is out, and that no one had told him to expect us. I should have sent a letter from Ostia yesterday.” It had been dusk by the time they’d disembarked from the ship the previous day; he hadn’t wanted to search the streets and taverns for someone willing to carry a letter through the dark, and most likely wouldn’t have found anyone if he had—but still, he should have tried to send a letter.

  “I should have learned Latin,” said Menestor unhappily.

  “We’ve been busy,” Hermogenes comforted him. He looked at Gaius Rubrius, who was watching with an expression of amusement. “As you see, there is some confusion,” he told the man, in Latin. “If my friend has forgotten to leave instructions for my reception, do you know of an inn nearby where we could—”

  “My dear Hermogenes!”

  Hermogenes turned back to the door, and found the sweating, pink-cheeked face of Fiducius Crispus himself beaming from the lodge window.

  “Titus Fiducius,” Hermogenes said formally, “greetings!”

  “And to you, dear fellow!” replied Crispus. He turned from the window and snapped “Dog! What are you standing there for? Let him in!”

  A bolt squealed on the inside of the door, and then the iron-studded oak swung open. The scarred doorkeeper pushed open its mate, then stood aside. Crispus pushed past him—a fat man in his late forties, rumpled in an unbelted tunic and no cloak, barefoot as though he’d been asleep. He reached for Hermogenes’ outstretched hand with both his own and clasped it in two moist meaty palms.

  “What a pleasure to see you here in Rome!” he exclaimed, still beaming. “Come in, come in; welcome to my house!”

  “I thank you,” Hermogenes said, smiling. He extricated his hand and went on, “I must first pay the porters—”

  “Let me!” Crispus interrupted.