The four-posted palanquin supported a sumptuous bed of white blooms exuding a potent scent. The pale figure of Antinous lay along the bier atop his white cloak, his arms crossed to each shoulder in the Egyptian style, in seeming relaxed repose.
He was dressed in his silvery parade-ground hunting uniform of leathers inlayed in white enameled decors. His white-crested Companions’ helmet in the Attic style and silver cavalry mask won as a trophy at the Trojan Games of Athens, were stowed to one side. His gladius sword and dagger lay belted at his right hip as befits someone disposed to left-handed action. A finely-worked silver filigree corona wreathed blond coarse-chopped locks.
Suetonius noted there was no jewel on his hand, especially not the vivid lapis lazuli Abrasax ring gifted by Hadrian.
Only the unhealthy pallor of skin’s complexion suggested Antinous was other than taking his ease. His powdery hue confirmed it was certain to be eternal. Six Egyptian canopic jars, three along each side sealed with sculpted stoppers in the shape of the goddess Isis, attended him in his eternal slumber.
Suetonius, Clarus, Strabon, and Surisca approached from Vestinus’s chambers led by Companions’ grooms holding torches high. Thais and Lysias followed close behind. Lysias was holding Thais’s hand.
Both gasped at their first sight of the palanquin and its occupant.
Thais distractedly continued walking towards the funerary carriage but Lysias drew her back by one elbow and a gentle squeeze. Suetonius detected tears welling at the rim of her eyes, and perhaps Lysias’s too. Neither had seen their friend since the memorable day prior to his death. The spectacle of his eternal repose unsettled them.
The Augusta, Vibia Sabina, with several female courtiers accompanied by Julia Balbilla and a brace of Horse Guards, approached from a laneway leading from The Dionysus moored offshore. The band of women moved collectively as a cabal of somber, shrouded black veils.
Sabina took her seat in a high-backed matron’s chair on the dais with Balbilla standing a pace off nearby. Both demurely retained their head cover in such a public place.
Suetonius cast his eyes around this taciturn, brooding ensemble. He made mental notes of several of the attendees in the light of the recent testimonies. Here, he contemplated, were the governing elite of Rome with their assorted hangers-on, all arrayed in rank order in an improbable silence in the desert’s deep dark several hundred miles distant from any real centre of civilization.
Governor Flavius Titianus and his consort Anna Perenna stood to one side on the official dais accompanied by a cohort of Alexandrian Praetorians. The consort’s ashen face-paint and bleached powders with striking kohl outlines and scarlet highlights pierced the night’s gloom. Centurion Quintus Urbicus, stood ahead of his troop to one side of the consort, his fish-scale armor, crested helmet, and weapons glinting beneath the flames.
Arrian, Vestinus, Alcibiades, Phlegon, Favorinus, the astrologer Aristobulus, and even the ever-elegant Lucius Commodus risen untypically early, arced around the other side. Each was garbed in the black cloth of formal Roman mourning. Fellow-travelers from the Senate, advisors, Legion commanders, administrators, and accompanying academics, poets, architects, writers, or artists were arranged in a scaled priority around the platform.
Tribune Macedo of the Praetorians and Decurion Scorilo of the Horse Guard stood ahead of a detachment of their respective corps. Scorilo’s face markings, though similar to others of his Guard, now had a disturbing effect upon the biographer. Suetonius’s recollection sifted through the manifold impressions of the interviews of the past forty-eight hours, and such facial inks now communicated ambivalence.
He also noted how Scorilo’s right arm, which crossed his body to permit his weapon hand to lie in readiness upon his sword hilt at his left, disclosed an unexpected object of interest. The jewel upon the Bastarnae Celt’s right index finger attracted the Special Inspector’s eye immediately.
“Surisca, my dear,” he whispered, “carefully look to Decurion Scorilo’s right hand and describe the jewel you see. My eyes can’t quite perceive its details. Be discreet. Describe it to me.”
Surisca provided an informed description of the ornament. Suetonius emitted a soft “Aha, I see!” Its implication had relevance, he realized. Useful connections were falling into place speedily in his mind now, though their full implications were uncertain.
Salvius Julianus was accompanied by four lictors bearing their fasces symbol of justice, Rome’s punishment axe embedded in a ring of thrashing rods. He arrived with four Companions’ grooms bearing torches. They were late, and so hurried from the direction of the river. Julianus was nursing a bulky globular shape in his arm’s crook beneath his cape.
He nodded a gesture of affirmation towards Suetonius as he approached. Suetonius responded with a smile of appreciation. The quaestor’s efforts were gratefully received, especially as he had also brought with him a uniformed officer of the Alexandrian auxiliaries. This was the jetty clerk who monitored activity at the approaches to The Alexandros.
The fellow was obviously unnerved to be in the midst of such exalted company until his eyes settled and fixed upon the supine figure on the bier. Then they were wide in dismay.
When a time-caller announced the final hour to dawn of this third day of The Isia, the Imperial marquee’s curtained enclosure hoist open and Hadrian’s retinue stepped forward in single file from within.
Hadrian was wearing the robes of his office as Pontifex Maximus, the supreme high priest of the Romans. The voluminous white toga with its frontal and rear scarlet flashes and its priestly pallium draped dramatically around, all edged in gilt eagles, glistened beneath the torchlight. He tossed back his head cowl to reveal a slender wreath of leaves of gold surmounting his head.
Suetonius drew his eyes back to Scorilo. The object of interest adorning the decurion’s right hand was no longer evident. It had been removed sometime during Hadrian’s arrival and probably stored in the leather pouch at his belt. Suetonius made a mental note of this odd event.
In his thoughts he canvassed a number of speculations deriving from these newer perceptions. Patterns of possibility now appeared which dispelled some of the murk surrounding his investigation. Yet a definitive vision of why and how Antinous died still eluded him.
Hadrian stood beside Sabina’s chair in silence. He did not look well. He was gray with mourning, and his eyes had lost their usual spark. At a weary wave, he signaled to Geta the Dacian to step forward to proclaim an announcement. Geta raised his hands to the night to make a public announcement into the skies.
“People of Rome, senators, equites, officers of the military, staff, and friends of the Household on this dawn of the third day of the Festival of Isis, greetings on behalf of the Princeps and Pontifex Maximus!” Geta declaimed loudly. “We are here to honor the life and death of Antinous of Bithynia!”
The assembly shuffled momentarily in uncertainty at this declaration about a foreigner of no substance or status. Geta continued.
“The Household will progress behind Caesar to the Temple of Amun beyond this enclave. The mortal remains of Antinous of Bithynia will precede the procession, led by the High Priest, Pachrates of Memphis. All in attendance, proceed!”
Pachrates struck his scepter to the earth with three rousing blows. His pall-bearers heaved their palanquin high onto their shoulders ready for procession. With a swinging rhythmic gait led by the two hierarchs, the bier carriers stepped forward in unison. In a stately march accompanied by priestly voices intoning a somber liturgical chant, they ushered the cavalcade through the lanes of the Encampment. The mass of courtiers began to surge into a processional formation behind them.
The funereal throb of tambours with the scintillant rattle of sistra pulsed each phrase of the priests’ chant. Caesar’s party followed behind the bier as the entire assembly channeled into a streaming cortege. It filed methodically through the lanes of the camp towards the hulking, fluted, lotus columns of the Temple of Amun brooding beyond the en
campment amid the palm trees. The temple too was bathed by its own braziers of firelight.
This squat, fat-pillared Temple wore its hoary antiquity without shame. It was a stained pile of eroded stones, faded paints, and surfaces covered with massed carvings of hieroglyphs. It spoke of an edifice which had been weathering tiredly at this site for untold generations.
As Caesar’s cortege progressed towards the temple compound, great gates swung open to reveal a further line of priests streaming from its interior yard bearing night lamps high.
They too were draped in veils of mourning promenading beneath guttering braziers. A deeply booming gong repeatedly sounded a throaty resonance from some place deep within the bowels of the structure as the cavalcade came to rest before its columned porch.
Priests surrounded the palanquin to bear Antinous into the interior of the shrine. The entire procession followed behind as the priests maintained their sonorous chant and rhythmic march.
The interiors of these Egyptian temples can be scary by night, Suetonius mused to himself. Their halls and chambers are spectral with shadowy spaces sporadically illumed by torches or tripods. Lurking demons, ghouls, or specters must assuredly be their hidden inhabitants, he wondered?
Upon entering this cavernous structure the cortege’s nostrils were assaulted by an intense charge of cloying incense. Indecipherable inscriptions danced across the pillars in the shifting light, while the upper reaches fading into shadow were stained by centuries of incense and torchlight smoke, suggesting the sheer burden of time itself.
The procession trailed in repeated zigzag directions along pillared corridors and down sloping ramps until they reached a final goal. The narrow corridors of honeyed stone eventually opened into a capacious sacramental chamber. This voluminous expanse was sealed on three sides by lofty cedar doors secured between columns rising into the heights above.
Three towering statues in the Greco-Roman realistic sculptural style, not the stolid style of Egypt, stood looming upon pedestals in the central well of the chamber. Suetonius felt decidedly uncomfortable beneath their stony gazes.
One statue was of the Holy Mother Isis herself, swaddled in her mantle holding a systrum aloft and carrying an urn symbolically containing pieces of her dismembered husband Osiris.
A second statue was of Osiris in the guise of Serapis, the most revered deity of the former Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt. It was beloved of the Alexandrians of the Greek quarter.
The third was of Amun, the chief divinity of the old Egyptian pantheon, but here in the guise of Ammon, a Greek adaptation of Amun into Zeus Ammon, the highest god.
Between these three icons, Suetonius estimated, the entire mythology of Egypt’s archaic religion was encompassed and dressed with an acceptably Roman face. Their divinity was expressed in human figuration, not the fantastic menagerie of grotesque animals Egyptians revere. Had these priests, he wondered, decided it was time to update their imagery for wider consumption? He sensed there was more to this occasion than met the eye.
A fourth pediment lay bare, its platform naked of any deity. Suetonius wondered at its implication.
The priests lowered the bier to the flagstones beside a low podium paved in glazed faience tiles. Antinous’s pallid, unearthly hue now became the focus of the shrine. Torch light was reflected off polished mirrors to stream a shower of beams onto the bier, highlighting its occupant.
As the assembly silently filed into the chapel and arranged itself around the tiled podium, the two senior priests Pachrates and Kenamun intoned melodious incantations and wafted incense censers towards the bier. Meanwhile Horse Guards and Praetorians took defensive positions around the chamber as the assembly rambled to a halt.
Two grandiose thrones of ivory and precious stones worthy of Pharaohs were standing to one side. They were accorded to the Imperial couple as Pachrates performed fluid oriental genuflections of obeisance. Hadrian and Sabina took their seats while Geta, Arrian, Macedo, Commodus, Balbilla, and other notables arranged themselves close by.
A gigantic platter of beaten gold embossed with arcane symbols was carried by two priests and placed onto the faience-tiled podium. Suetonius did not think he had ever before witnessed so large a single object in pure mellow gold even among the lavish trove abducted from the Temple at Jerusalem generations ago and still displayed at Rome. The sheer weight of the platter required two men to carry it to the platform. This gleaming treasure must have been worth a nation’s ransom.
A hush fell across the throng as it awaited the Pontifex Maximus to make his presence and purposes known. The corpse of the Bithynian youth lay in calm ceremonial repose.
The Special Inspector was impressed how, in such a parched climate, the cadaver appeared to retain its normal shape, textures, and color. Neither bloating, mottling, nor corruption was discernable, and only the pungent odor of blue lotuses and wafting incense exuded across the space. Mortician Kenamun was certainly a master of his craft.
Pachrates, ever the showman, took his staff of office and brandished it majestically before the bier. He wafted the wand across Antinous while chanting mysterious formulae towards Ammon as he tossed handfuls of grasses of wheat and barley into the air. His gestures implied some ancient holy harvest rite of truly awesome sanctity, which none of those attending either understood or heeded.
Two of his assistants removed from the bier two of the clay canopic jars which lay alongside the body. Unplugging the stopper of the first, one assistant carefully poured the contents into a shallow indent at the rim of the golden platter. A visceral internal organ the size of a pomegranate, glistening with emollient, plopped into the platter with an audible slurp.
On unplugging the larger jar and tipping its contents onto the basin proper, a bundle of well-oiled variegated tissues slid and tumbled into the centre of the dish with an unctuous slush. Everyone in the chamber immediately realized their origin. The first was a human heart and its connective veins; the second was the intestinal complex of gut, stomach, and associated tubes.
Caesar sunk back heavily into his ivory throne, his discomfort palpable.
Pachrates assumed an air of great solemnity and waved his staff over the viscera with profound gravitas. He uttered loud incantations in the old liturgical language in a harshly guttural voice. Handfuls of igneous powder were tossed into braziers, making flashes of flame and fume spurt into the chamber’s gloom. The bursts projected multiform shadows in a neurotic dance upon the surrounding pillars. Their reeks sank into nostrils and invaded the bloodstream.
When he had performed this spirited display the priest peered closely at the glistening innards lying on the platter to give the tissues a studious inspection with the tip of an ivory pointer. Prodding carefully at the entrails, he nodded appreciative mutterings to himself and shared approving glances and mutterings with Kenamun. The assembled priests voiced choral responses confirming his wise discernments in their native language.
Suddenly with a gasp and an exclaimed “Yes, by Amun!” he sighted something significant among the fleshy debris. It demanded closer inspection.
Calling on Kenamun to respectfully hold a section of delicate gut to a lamp between his fingers, Pachrates peered closely at a bump in the connective tube of an organ. He reached to the innards and rolled the bump delicately between his venerable priestly digits.
“Yes!” he cried in his heavy-accented Latin, “A miracle, my lord! Great Caesar of the Romans, please allow me permission to incise your companion’s remains to retrieve a special boon of the god Osiris himself.”
Hadrian grudgingly nodded to Macedo to inspect the priest’s claim. Macedo, not usually squeamish about matters involving corpses, moved to see what Pachrates was talking about. He gingerly fingered the intestine at the place the priest was holding, and turned to Hadrian with some apprehension.
“Caesar, there appears to be a scarlet jewel within the entrails,” he announced. Do you wish me to retrieve it?”
“The gut is sealed by Nature’s han
d, so it can’t have been inserted into the tissue,” Pachrates declared.
Hadrian again tiredly nodded. Macedo took his hip dagger and carefully incised the diaphanous tissue. Something small and hard popped out into his hand. A priest came forward with a small bowl of perfumed water and a towel to rinse the object, which was then passed carefully to Pachrates. Pachrates held the object high between finger and thumb to the light of the nearest torch to inspect its features closely.
He turned to Hadrian and uttered an impressive exclamation in his inscrutable language while holding the object high to display to the assembled notables.
“Great Caesar, your humble servant of Amun, Pachrates, Sage of Heliopolis, offers proof to vindicate the death of the youth Antinous. In divining the auspices of the entrails of the young man I see no messages of despair or disease or death. No, not at all. I see no imperfection, no dire omens, no divine warning. I see nothing but health and wholesomeness, healing, and future hope!”
Pachrates paused to assess the effect of his pronouncements upon the assembly. Their eager eyes and engrossed attention were very winning.
“Yet further Caesar, on inspecting these entrails more intimately I discover this miraculous trophy. Concealed within the entrails at a place no mortician can reach, inches beneath the heart of the boy, lies a blood-hued gem generated spontaneously within the organs of the youth. Behold! I raise it high!
It is a likeness of the god Osiris himself fashioned as a blood jewel. It is just as our ancients prophesy of a Nile sacrificial drowning! The youth’s own bloodstream has transfigured into an icon of the god Osiris himself! Within the very organs of the drowned victim is the visible sign that the youth metamorphed into the god Osiris, the Dionysus of Egypt, the dying and reborn god of the seasons! It is a holy, sacred apotheosis!”
Pachrates was warming to his role. His voice rose higher in increasingly joy.
The Hadrian Enigma - A Forbidden History Page 46