The month of the ox-eyed goddess and, round about its ides, the weather has improved sufficiently for me to move my chair out of doors and admire the fat thrushes or enjoy the wink of the sun in the leaves of the planetrees. I have been reading in a rather rare book which appeared during the imperiate of Galba, brief and perhaps apocryphal, its title A Dialogue Between the Emperor Nero and His Friend Gaius Petronius. Petronius you will know from his scurrilous but witty Satyricon, which I sometimes think to be a mockery of Luke’s ‘Pauliad’, but this dialogue, more of a monologue, for Nero interjects only phrases of wonder or agreement, has been recognised as a dangerous work and copies have probably been privily burnt by censorial decree. It presents a philosophy which I have already made the young Nero adumbrate in a discussion with Seneca. This philosophy is said to have been derived from Gaius Petronius’s youthful indoctrinations by a poet exiled for blatant sodomy in the unequivocally heterosexual Claudius’s reign, his real name unknown but his sobriquet Selvaticus. Briefly, the philosophy states that everything must bow down to beauty, and that the artist is above the regular moral concerns of ordinary humanity. As the laws of the state are hardly likely to concede such a transcendence, it follows that only the individual whom rank has raised above the law is free to pursue beauty to the limit. Beauty in nature is admirable but too sensuous to satisfy the totality of man’s aesthetic nature. The beauty of art is far higher, and art is permitted to rearrange the forms of nature into new and often intricate patterns, entailing – and this is the point where moral freedom enters – a curtailment or a perversion of what may be thought of as natural rights. The basic natural right of all living things is to subsist and to fulfil what is sometimes termed their vital cycle. In Petronius’s aesthetic, which became Nero’s, this right was denied, and human life was to be regarded by the imperial artist as living wood is regarded by the carpenter – namely, fissile and susceptible of new shapes. It was necessary, in cultivating this aesthetic philosophy, to nullify such natural sympathetic responses as make the ordinary anaesthetic man wish to avoid giving pain to others, especially those close to him, and to regard what ordinary humanity calls cruelty as a morally neutral means of procuring new aesthetic transports. To understand this philosophy of beauty is partly to understand the enormities of Nero’s imperiate, which, by Petronian standards, were not enormities at all but wholly legitimate devices for flushing the imagination with a hint of a higher reality. As Petronius’s own skill as a verbal artist lay in the creation of imaginary personages who could be manipulated freely and freely annihilated, so Nero’s special artistic achievements lay in acts of manipulation which operated in the realm of actuality, not imagination. In one sense he was the finest artist of his time, in another, and this was partly due to the enforced absence of salutary criticism, he was not the worst but merely one of many mediocrities. His verse was bad, his music tuneless, his singing deplorable, his dancing ridiculous, his acting painful. Petronius, who could have been a useful critic, was so enthralled by the Emperor’s total moral freedom, one of the Petronian requisites for high art, that he tended to ignore the wretched results of this freedom in the creative realm.
I mentioned above a certain higher reality invoked by art. Petronius, following the tradition of Plato and indeed of Aristotle, accepted the notion of a supreme being, though one remote from the Hebraic and Christian concepts. This being was amoral, and hence he did not acquaint mankind with his essence through acts of justice or the inspirations of the natural philosophers. A whisper of his quality was heard in manmade works of beauty. The more cultivated Romans of the time accepted with good humour, and even sometimes with vindictive persecution of their rejectors, the gods of the state as useful and perhaps diverting personifications of social virtues and natural processes. But, like the Athenians whom Paul failed to convince, they took a mystical pleasure in brooding on an unknown god whose greatness lay in his capability of definition through negative means. Beauty, said Petronius, was his one sure attribute, and the pursuit of beauty was the highest of human activities. Nero believed this too, since Petronius had taught him when his young mind was blank and open to eloquent influences. Seneca, who taught only moral obligations, found him either contentious or deaf.
Being young and concupiscent, Nero naturally found the orthodox outlets of sexuality quite as important as art during the first five years of his reign. Indeed, having read Ovid, he accepted that there was an art of love and assiduously cultivated it. A young and eager ruler without frustrations, he arose from his multiple orgasms to acquiesce in the just running of the state and the efficient administration of the provinces. His mother, who was primarily concerned with ridding herself of her enemies, actual, potential or purely imaginary, did not at first greatly interfere with either his duties or his pleasures. Soon, though, she had leisure to consider how best to assume the control of the Empire herself behind the mask of her son. Her son, whom she had considered wholly controllable, she discovered to have a will of his own.
One sunny afternoon Nero disported himself in the imperial bedchamber with his latest love, a freed slave named Acte. She was vulgar but her limbs were supple and her skin gave off a maddening odour. Nero, naked, still sadly pustular, breathed like a runner at the finishing tape as he relaxed in the convalescence of achieved orgasm. Acte admired the furnishings, which were all Greek, the hangings, the Pompeian pictures of human and bestial dalliance, and said:
‘Well. Just think. I’m here.’
‘And why not? Isn’t the Emperor’s bed the only place for the most beautiful woman in Rome?’
‘I’m not that beautiful,’ she said conventionally. ‘But I know things, don’t I? Don’t I know things?’
‘You’re a mine of wisdom. There’s more wisdom in your left buttock than in the entire gloomy library of Seneca.’
‘Who’s Seneca?’
‘An old man who thinks he knows everything. He used to teach me. Virtue, self-control, what they call the stoic qualities. What he didn’t tell me is that true wisdom lies in the nerves and in the arousing of the imagination.’
‘Did I teach you that?’
‘You give me practical demonstrations. And now I have to go to the Senate.’
‘Have to go? You?’
‘Courtesy. Discretion. Pretend you’re letting them have their own way. Lower taxes. Make yourself popular. Tricks, really.’
There was then a knock at the great double door. Acte covered her delicious breasts with the coverlet and said: ‘Would that be your wife? The Empress, I mean.’
‘My wife is reading Seneca with Seneca. I don’t know who it is. Yes, I do. Get dressed. Go out that way.’ He pointed to the new egress he had had knocked out of the wall, a plain doorway covered with a tapestry of Odysseus multiply assaulting the screaming Sirens.
‘The other Empress, is it? Your mother?’ She dressed far more quickly than she had undressed.
‘Go on – come tomorrow. The same time. You have the ring to show the guard at the gate?’
She thrust out a winking finger and thrust and thrust, blew a kiss and left. Nero put on a fringed gown, went to the double door and unbarred it. Agrippina came, neck stretched forward like a hen, into the bedroom, sniffing. ‘Has that slave been here?’
‘She’s not a slave. Not now. What if she has?’
‘You’re slow to learn. The whole household knows. If you must conduct these unsavoury affairs, get out of the city.’
‘Like you and Pallas, you mean? You have to go very far out of the city to conduct that unsavoury affair.’
‘You will not,’ Agrippina said, ‘speak to your mother in that way.’
He picked up a flute and blew three derisive notes on it. ‘The Emperor will speak to anyone in any way he wishes. The Emperor will do what he wishes – within reason, and subject to the gloomy advice of Sextus Afranius Burrus and Lucius Annaeus Seneca. The sending away of Pallas was not such gloomy advice. The Emperor’s mother should conduct herself like a respectable matron.’ He blew three more notes, lower but still derisive. She said:
‘Put that thing down. Listen to me.’ He sat petulantly on the bed. She sat beside him. ‘This woman Acte is not so stupid as she looks. Nor is she as enamoured of you as you seem to think. She plays a slow game. She’ll drag you into situations and places where your title and status won’t help you. She’s in the pay,’ she suddenly decided to invent, ‘of Britannicus.’
‘I don’t believe that. I don’t. Oh, no. You’re making that up. Britannicus is not that kind of stepbrother. Britannicus accepts the situation.’
‘Britannicus has friends who don’t accept the situation. Britannicus was publicly named as his father’s successor. Rome has only the word of Pallas and myself that Claudius nominated you. I see something in your eye that bodes no good to Pallas, but be careful. I’m not above speaking out whenever the time comes. If you don’t ride the imperial horse like a real horseman you’ll be thrown.’
‘That sounds like something from one of Seneca’s plays,’ he said, examining the nails of his right hand and pushing cuticles back with the thumb of his left. ‘By the way, you know that place on the Rhine that the divine Claudius named for you? Well, I’ve decided to rename it. Not Colonia Agrippinensis but Colonia Actensis. Less of a mouthful, don’t you agree?’
He was biting a bit of scarfskin off his right little finger. She struck him on the face. He was surprised. He said: ‘You’d better not do that again, oh no.’ She struck him again. He struck back, though with an instinctive filial diffidence. ‘No boy,’ he said, ‘likes hitting his mother. Except, that is, in those bouts of loveplay one particular mother taught her son. I think you’re jealous of Acte. A younger body and she knows more. But you may be right about her being dangerous. I sometimes trust your judgement, the judgement of an older woman. You’re not jealous, I notice, of dear Octavia.’
‘I’m jealous of no one. I’m jealous only for your reputation. Get rid of that slave.’
‘I’m young,’ he pouted. ‘I’m entitled to live my life.’
‘Meaning, to use Seneca’s words, to indulge in flagrant promiscuity.’
‘Did he say that? About me?’ The pout grew ugly.
‘I don’t doubt he says it. Though not to me. Part of your claim to the purple, remember, rests on your marriage. Humiliate Octavia with this slave of yours and her brother will take action. Britannicus adores his sister.’
‘You mean,’ he said with wide eyes of innocence, ‘that they go to bed together? I don’t think I’d mind that really. It would show that there’s a bit of life in them. And it would be useful to have the charge of incest hanging over them. As, dear mother, it hangs over you.’
‘You can be a filthy little brat, can’t you?’ she said. ‘No capacity for love, for the natural expression of love. The extent of my love has been shown sufficiently by the danger I’ve put myself into to secure the title for you. And the thanks I get, the thanks?’
‘Yes,’ he said blandly, ‘you poisoned Claudius. You poisoned several people, good people. You made the faithful Narcissus commit suicide. With impunity, total impunity. Protected by the Emperor, dear mother. Still, it’s another thing you’ve taught me. The first and best imperial lesson. Get rid of those who flaw the artistic pattern of one’s life. Rub them out like bad drawings with breadcrumbs. Quickly. Thoroughly. I think I must get rid of Pallas. Exile isn’t enough. A son has a right to protect his mother’s reputation for virtue. Hasn’t he? Hasn’t he?’ And acting a panting beast in rut he thrust his left hand into his mother’s deepcut gown and fondled her right breast. ‘The greatest of all virtues, isn’t it? A boy’s love for his mother.’ She struck the hand away. She got up and looked down at him. She said:
‘I sometimes think I was wrong. I think that more and more.’
‘So stuttering limping old Claudius should have turned into a god at a ripe old age? And dear decent virtuous Britannicus should have put on the purple? Or have you some idea of his putting on the purple now? Poisoned mushrooms for your son. Get your stepson into bed and teach him all the lambent and ictal joys. You’d overwhelm him, mother. He’d be wax. I see I must go very very carefully.’
‘You’re a loathsome little boy, aren’t you?’ Agrippina said, gasping in her distaste.
‘You’re a beautiful woman, mother, though not quite so beautiful as my Acte. She has youth on her side. I plunge into honey with her, I writhe in a snow of petals.’
Her hand itched to strike him again, but she merely said: ‘The character of a slave and the manners of a snotnosed urchin. The Senate awaits you, Caesar. Try to behave like an emperor.’
‘Oh, I will, I can. I can act anything, dear mother. A considerable artist, you know. Leave me while I dress the part. I don’t think I want you to see me naked any more.’ But then, in a kind of unbidden poem, he saw himself lying naked before her, stabbed in his choicest parts, and the poem said something about if a mother could seduce her son she could kill him as well. Looking at him now, she seemed to disengage the seed of some fruit from her teeth and spit it in his direction. Then she left, and he performed a short savage dance in her dishonour.
A week or so later he saw her sitting with Britannicus in the audience ordered to attend his performance of the role of the soldier Pyrgopolnices in Plautus’s comedy Miles Gloriosus. The imperial dining room had been turned into a theatre for the occasion, with a platform of wooden slabs as a stage, and curtains swagging at the sides to cover entrances and exits. Gaius Petronius played the part of the parasite Artotrogus. He said, sycophantically:
‘Novisse mores me tuos meditate decet
Curamque adhibere, ut praeolat mihi quod tu velis.’
Nero-Pyrgopolnices asked: ‘Ecquid meministi?’ He was got up in armour of pulped papyrus and a little helmet. He was trying to make his voice fruitily pompous like that of Britannicus, a miles, yes, but not at all gloriosus. He saw Burrus and Seneca sitting at the back, looking and listening with little show of pleasure. Gaius Petronius-Artotrogus listed the killings of Pyrgopolnices:
‘Memini: centum in Cilicia
Et quinquaginta, centum in Scytholatronia,
Triginta Sardis, sexaginta Macedones
Sunt homines quos tu occidisti uno die.’
But how many altogether? ‘Quanta istaec hominum summast?’ And Artotrogus gave the total: ‘Septem milia.’ Some of the audience loyally laughed; Agrippina, Britannicus, Seneca and Burrus were stonyfaced. A very old man whispered to another:
‘If I pretend to die will you carry me out?’
At the end of the play Nero said to Petronius: ‘I forgot some lines. Did you notice? I had to improvise.’
‘So that’s what it was. I thought old Plautus had inadvertently let the spirit of poetry in. You must forget more lines, Caesar.’
‘You’re too good, my dear. It’s not terribly good comedy, is it? Some of the laughs sounded a little, well, dutiful. I have a fancy for doing something tragic. A real Oedipus, with nothing hidden. Incest on stage, and real suicide and self-blinding. Britannicus in the lead and the Dowager Empress as Jocasta. I could be Creon.’
‘I appreciate your joke,’ Petronius said doubtfully, seeing little spirit of fun in Nero’s spotty pretty face. ‘As for the kind of realistic approach you suggest, you or I will have to write something with real deaths in it, so you could bring on condemned criminals and have them beheaded as part of the action. You have unlimited artistic scope, dearest Caesar.’
‘They wouldn’t have to be speaking parts. I mean, you can’t tell a man to learn lines to speak before he’s chopped.’
‘Oh, you underestimate your own ingenuity. Give him a free pardon and exalt him by letting him perform in one of Caesar’s own tragedies, and then the chop, as you so exquisitely term it, could come as a complete surprise.’
‘I must think about it, dear Gaius.’
When Nero, demilitarised and dressed in a green robe with artificial gladioli sewn on it, sat later chewing sweetmeats and wiping his sticky hands on the plentiful hair of a Greek slave, his praetorian prefect and his former tutor spoke serious words at him. Burrus said:
‘I must, forgive me, employ what authority I possess to beg you not to make such an exhibition of yourself in public.’
‘You think I act badly? Sing badly? Dance badly?’
‘Aesthetic judgements hardly apply, my boy,’ Seneca said. ‘It’s a matter of the dignity of your office—’
Nero said, acting the part of a dangerous tyrant: ‘My boy? You call me your boy?’
‘I beg Caesar’s pardon,’ Seneca said. ‘Force of habit. You’re not long out of the schoolroom. Forgive me. And forgive me for pointing out that actors, singers and dancers are a low breed, and Caesar should not associate with them, let alone practise their craft.’
‘You know nothing, you old fool,’ chewing Caesar said. ‘You’ve seen nothing of the real world.’
‘With respect, Caesar, I’ve seen a little too much of it. That’s what has turned me into a Stoic. With respect again, do I have to remind you that I’m considered a competent playwright myself and that I can have nothing against a private reading of one of my tragedies, say, to a limited audience? It’s these public performances that worry myself and your praetorian prefect. And your proposal to ride in chariot races – that, surely – well, apart from putting your inestimable life in danger—’
‘Caesar,’ Caesar said with well-enacted weight, ‘will think about depriving his people of wholesome and uplifting entertainment when he is ready to do so. At the moment, I merely require your advice on a matter of state.’
‘Caesar,’ Burrus said cautiously, ‘sincerely seeks our advice?’
‘Yes. But two questions first. First, did this reign begin in murder and terror and a return to the horrors of the imperiate of the undeified Caligula?’
Seneca said carefully: ‘There were too many people summarily removed, if I may say so, Caesar.’
‘You may say so,’ with right condescension. ‘I like your euphemism. You mean murdered. Second question. Who was responsible? Come on, don’t be afraid to answer. You know well enough. Very well, I’ll answer for you. My mother. The Dowager Empress Agrippina. Come on, what do you say, Burrus?’
‘You expect some advice from me, Caesar?’
‘Not exactly. I merely seek your approval, as the mentors of a boy who has just begun to shave, approval of a course of action. My revered mother must go into exile – Tusculum or Antium, she has estates in both places. Do you endorse my decision?’
‘The decision,’ Seneca said, ‘must be delicately worded. Retirement from Rome on grounds of ill health – something of the sort.’
‘Ill health, I like that,’ unfilial Caesar said. ‘She was healthy as a sow. But her ill health could, of course, be arranged. She knows that. She knows my feelings. Yesterday I took her guard of honour away.’
‘Something of an insult, if I may say so, Caesar.’
‘You may say so, Burrus. She knows the situation. There’s not one sword that can be drawn in her defence. Seneca, I remember something you made me read once. Let me see. Yes. “Nothing in human affairs is so—”’
‘“Transitory and precarious—”’
‘My pause was not a signal of bad memory, you old idiot. It was for dramatic effect. Let me conclude. “—as the reputation for power without the ability to support it.” There, am I not a good pupil? So, a fond farewell to the Dowager Empress Agrippina, the bloodthirsty old bitch—’
‘Your mother, Caesar,’ Seneca reproved.
‘I don’t have to be reminded she’s my mother. The former suckling is now weaned. That reverend womb has served its purpose. Out of the way with her, cross her lines out of the comedy, let her rot alone in Antium or Tusculum. I say, that’s not bad, that has a reasonable dramaturgical rhythm. All right, you’re dismissed.’
Few of the chroniclers of Nero’s reign have been accurate when relating the situation that obtained between the Emperor and his mother from the time when, reft of her German and Pannonian guards, she lived in a more or less solitary rage on one estate or another. Nobody knew what had happened to her lover Pallas, but she feared the worst. She was no nymphomaniac and summoned no slave or bought incubus or succubus to her bed. She merely brooded on her son’s infamy and sent the story about that he had tried to murder her by arranging for the roof of her bedchamber in the mansion at Antium to fall in on her. That the roof had fallen in was no lie and she kept the room for all to see in its wrecked condition, dust and plaster and bricks lying on the bed and the imprint of her body, which she had providentially removed to the privy a few moments before, on the dusty mattress. An old elm had in fact collapsed on to the roof, but there was no sign of artful sawing to incriminate either her son or any other of such of her enemies as she had still kindly allowed to survive. When Gaius Petronius heard of the incident he had no doubt that his imperial master and colleague in the arts had tried to arrange an ingenious quietus, and he deplored the failure of the attempt, saying: ‘Very frequently the best thought out of our dramatic devices come to nothing. That is not the fault of the scheme itself but rather of the interposition of the mischievous goddess Chance. But one tries again.’
‘Do you,’ Nero said wide-eyed, ‘honestly believe these stories that are going around – that I would wish to kill my own mother, bitch though she is?’
‘Oh, dear Caesar, some of us kill our mothers when we are born. I killed mine, you know, she died of having me. A comic situation in a way, a chance that women take in their lust for maternity.’
‘You say comic?’
‘Well, it can hardly be tragic, can it, if we hold by the Aristotelian rules? In a sense, you know, dearest Caesar, you rather disappoint me with this conventional posture of shock at the mention of matricide. Caesar is not as free as he ought to be. You’re always complaining, loudly and often very beautifully, of maternal persecution. Dramatic soliloquies unresolved in action. Still, Caesar knows best. Your mother may be the necessary irritant that produces the poetic pearl.’
‘Do you think I ought to kill my mother?’
‘Ought? Ought? What are you invoking now, dearest one? Moral duty, peace of mind, some law of artistic economy?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘If we are thinking of life as a drama we cannot overcrowd our stage, can we? Enough of that for the moment, though this aphorism of dear dead Selvaticus is worth imprinting on the imperial brain – True freedom begins only when we have slain the gods of biology. I have a boy for you.’
‘A boy? What do I want with a boy?’
‘What you want with a boy is what you want with the removal of a mother – release from the biological tyrants. To put it bluntly, liberation from the womb.’
‘But I like girls. And I adore dear Acte.’
‘Liberation, dearest Caesar. Come with me.’
They had been sitting together in one of the imperial gardens, among winking leaves, speaking loudly as though on the stage, surrounded by undeferential birdsong. Now they were carried in the wide litter that had once belonged to Messalina to a little house just north of the Theatre of Pompey. Here Gaius Petronius knocked thrice and was welcomed by an old Greek satyr who cordially embraced him. When the Emperor was introduced he went down on the marble and kissed the imperial feet until Nero grew embarrassed by the sight of a bald crown turned into a lateral pendulum. Then it was the best of the host’s Falernian with little snacks of toasted cheese on fried bread, and the boys were brought in. Exquisite, this one, a German lad, all the way from Colonia Agrippinensis. Take the little horror away. Or this, Greek of course, or this Syrian beauty. Finally the Emperor went to an airy cubicle, exquisitely clean and delicately scented, with a blond boy named Sporus. It was, really, a revelation.
If his mother was not permitted to come to Rome, nothing prevented her from using the internal courier service and berating her son for unnatural practices (of these, presumably, incest was not one):
… I am almost tempted to start believing in one of these crackpot religions of Asia which posit an eternal struggle between the forces of light and those of darkness and show plausible enough evidence that evil beings get into human brains and force them to perform filthy things. Do not think that Rome does not hear of the abominable perversions you and your friend Gaius Petronius the dirty poet are getting up to. If Rome hears I hear too, and, more pertinently, the faction that supports Britannicus hears very clearly and plots measures to cleanse the imperiate of monstrosities that were thought to be done for with the death of Gaius Caligula. Your stepfather the divine Claudius, one of the finest men who ever breathed, and not one ounce of perversity in him, must be turning in his grave or weeping on the shoulders of his fellow gods to think that the Roman Empire has been delivered into the hands of such a monster. Yes, I have begotten a monster and do not know in what way I have offended that such a shame and a misery should fall upon me in my exile and loneliness. If a mother’s curse carry any weight with you know that a mother’s curse is radiating from Tusculum. You have disgraced the Empire and yours, etc.
Nero was reading this when Gaius Petronius, the dirty poet, was carried to him on an open litter by his slaves, genuinely dirty from the mud of the Roman gutters, with cuts and bruises untreated on his face and limbs and, in his hand, a large carrot that he alleged had not merely been stuffed but hammered up his anus. His exquisite robe was torn and his hair, which he wore long and over whose dressing he spent an hour at least every morning, was hacked off in places by, apparently, a butcher’s knife. Nero nodded as he listened to the loud plaints. More than mother’s curses were radiating from Tusculum (probably Antium; his mother was a foul liar): she was sending a slave secretary to Rome with ready gold to pay nocturnal bravoes. ‘Yes, yes, dearest Gaius,’ the Emperor soothed. ‘It is time to put on a comedy of the kind you have frequently suggested. Let us celebrate the feast of Minerva at Baiae and arrange something really exquisite to crown it all. My poor dear friend.’ Then he wrote a letter and had two copies made, one for Antium and the other for Tusculum. In it he said:
Dearest mother, your words strike to my very heart. I see all too clearly now how I have been led astray by unscrupulous companions who, while professing both friendship and loyalty, have been in the pay of Britannicus and other enemies of the state. I have been a fool and beat my breast for my folly. The Empire needs your wisdom and political gifts; your wayward but repentant son desperately needs his mother. Let us be reconciled under the aegis of the goddess of wisdom and celebrate our reconciliation with wine, kisses and the public self-abasement of your always loving, etc.
Petronius had been made responsible for the arrangements of the entertainment at Baiae, but it was deemed prudent to keep him out of the way when Agrippina (as she did, as she was bound to do) arrived on her hired galley from Bauli, beautiful as ever, dressed as Minerva with a live owl on her shoulder. There was an unfortunate accident as her craft pulled into the shore: one of the decorative barges, on which nymphs and satyrs swayed demurely, singing a song of the Emperor’s own composition on the beauty and wisdom of the honoured guest, rammed the galley, and a boatman with a boathook, trying to push the galley away, made a hole in its flimsy side. Underwater swimmers, some of them from the choral party of satyrs, made further holes in the hulk and the vessel, visibly letting in water, was towed away rapidly for repairs. ‘It is as well, dearest mother,’ Nero said, embracing her. ‘I have a boat more in keeping with your status waiting to take you back.’ She suspected nothing; her long dull exile had made her wish not to be suspicious; she genuinely wished reconciliation and the commencement of new intrigues in the centre of imperial civilisation.
It was a fine party, with no ephebes or catamites, only decent adulterous matrons and staid senators who got quickly drunk. There were boars roasted whole on spits, the members of swans and peacocks in sharp sauces, tarts and flummeries and much wine. The company begged Nero to sing, but he said: ‘Ah no, my friends, totally unseemly in an emperor. I have learnt my lesson, ah yes, and am ready to join the grave and judicious, submitting once more to my blessed mother’s influence.’ And he kissed Agrippina lovingly. At nightfall lanterns were lighted in the trees, and a host of owls were loosed from cages. Agrippina’s own owl, frightened by the collision, had flown away to roost and did not reappear: at least nobody came across a bird with little golden anklets and tiny bells. When it was time for Agrippina to leave, Nero escorted her with trumpets to the landing stage, where he prepared to hand her into the barge he had provided, its superstructure hung with gold curtains. ‘Dearest mother, it was a joy to have you. We’ve been apart too long,’ he said.
‘No doing of mine, my son. You made it clear that I was not welcome in Rome.’
‘All over, all all over. Make your arrangements for return. I need you.’ Quite how these words were meant was not clear, for the son kissed his mother not only on the lips but on the breasts, gently pulling her robe from her shoulders to do so the more sincerely or intimately. Then she got aboard, and the rowers pushed the land away before settling to their strokes. Agrippina lay on the couch thoughtfully placed under the canopy, a couple of servingwomen and her freedman Lucius Agerinus with her. It was Agerinus who first noticed something irregular about the canopy: two of its wooden supports were beginning to crack under the weight of something hidden under the golden cloth; moreover, the craft was lower in the water than it ought to be. He said: ‘Somebody’s been playing tricks with this boat. Let me—Oh, no. Out, madam, quick.’ And he pushed her into the water as a lump of what looked like lead came down, braining one of the two servingwomen. The struts of the canopy broke entirely and more lead hurtled. The rowers dove overboard, but few of them could swim. The Dowager Empress, however, disclosed an athleticism Lucius Agerinus had never suspected, and, himself swimming, watched her ply lustily, hands joined and then circling away in a steady rhythm, strong legs paddling, towards the shore. He looked back, spewing water, to see the boat sink and desperate arms weave at the air before going under. Touching the shore at last, he found Agrippina sitting in her wet and dredging for breath.
Lucius Agerinus splashed along the coast to Baiae, where he found the festive lanterns doused but lights still on in the canvas pavilion where the imperial party had got drunk and done honour to the name of Minerva. There he found Nero fondling rather absently the limbs of a Syrian catamite. Gaius Petronius, whom Lucius Agerinus had thought to be banished, was also there, wearing a yellow wig. ‘Caesar,’ the freedman said, ‘I come to report an accident. The vessel in which the Empress Agrippina was being conveyed—’
‘Yes? Sunk, has it? My poor mother. My beloved wretched mother.’
‘The gods be praised, Caesar. Your mother and myself are the only survivors. We swam ashore together.’
‘Where is she?’ Nero asked, with an excessive show of relief.
‘In a workman’s hut three miles down the coast.’
‘Brave mother. Lucky mother. And you – what is your name?’
‘Never mind. She sent you to kill me, didn’t she? Thinks it’s my fault. Vindictiveness to the last. Aufidius! Crespus!’ Two bodyguards came running into the pavilion. ‘An assassin among us. You know what to do.’
In the workman’s hut Agrippina sat wrapped in a rough blanket, sipping hot wine. The old man who lived in it had built a small fire in a brazier. He was lonely and garrulous, saying: ‘A question of workmanship, lady. Things are not half so well made as they were in the glorious days of the Emperor Augustus. A falling off, if you catch my meaning. And now they have this mere lad as an emperor, up to all sorts of tricks. Encourages a falling off in everything – bad behaviour, dishonesty, rotten workmanship. Sorry I can’t give you better hospitality, lady – you see how things are. A poor labourer not used to receiving visits from the gentry.’
‘You’ll get your reward.’
‘Oh, what I say is ordinary decency is its own reward. Not that I wouldn’t be grateful for a good word put in for me with the Office of Works. A good worker – look at these hands – tough like leather and hard like horn. I get on with the work and no fooling—’
It was then that Aufidius and Crespus came in, daggers drawn. She looked at them and nodded. ‘A charge of conspiracy,’ Aufidius said, ‘with the pretender Britannicus. Your attempt at assassination failed. Come as you are. Don’t resist arrest. We have orders to take appropriate action in the case of—’ What she was doing now: leaping for the door with her blanket around her. Crespus struck and she lay moaning. Aufidius finished her off with two more stabs. The workman, terrified, said:
‘See – I did nothing. I know nothing about who she is or anything. Just took her in half-drowned, that’s all. I don’t meddle in high matters. I won’t say anything, honest.’
‘True,’ Aufidius said. He held him and Crespus cut his throat.
Later the son, drunk, had the body of his mother brought to him. He looked at it, naked, the wounds cleansed and dry. ‘I think of that time when Messalina had the axe,’ he said. ‘A beautiful body. What, Gaius, should be the aesthetic approach to the corpse of one’s mother? It’s only a matter of form, colour, isn’t it? She’s dissolved into – what’s the term?’
‘Morphology.’
‘Beautifully proportioned. Fine skin. What do I do now to prove my conquest of the gods of biology, as you call them? Rape the corpse? No. Prepare a eulogy, I suppose. Or do I mean an elegy?’
The histrionic grief, Gaius Petronius thought later, deceived nobody. Nero stood in deep but highly decorative mourning. Acte smirked behind him; the Empress Octavia looked embarrassed. The Emperor cried: ‘I will write an elegiac poem and perform it publicly, whatever my learned mentors think. Has a son no right to lament the loss of his mother and present to an unfeeling world a salutary model of filial grief? She was everything to me – the womb that bore me, the breasts that nourished me, the care and wisdom that watched over my growth. There will never be another like her. Dearest mother, consigned to the shades, look down on your son, bring him guidance in dreams, watch with shadowy pride the progress of his reign and the growing glory of the Rome you loved. I would that the dead rose again, but alas – cities are destroyed and rebuilt to a newer glory, empires perish and rise again – but, once gone, we mere human creatures become dust, ash, nothing. Dear mother, live on in memory. A mother’s love is eternal. So is the love of a son. I weep, I weep – and nothing can console me. Vale, mater.’ Somebody at the back ironically applauded. It was suspected to be Burrus, but nobody could be sure.
This, then, was the Emperor whom Marcus Julius Tranquillus was serving in Palestine and to whose justice Paul was to appeal. Julius was not long in becoming unhappy with his assignment. He had no confidence in Poncius Festus, who was inexperienced and infested with a number of prejudices, the chief of which was against the Jews. ‘Caesarea,’ Festus said, as the ship eased in. ‘Felix told me to stay here, to go to Jerusalem as little as possible. At least we breathe the wholesome air of the ocean at Caesarea. Not the stifling stink of Jewish superstition. They’re bad enough in Rome. What they’re like here – I shudder to think of it.’
‘So you start off with a prejudice.’
‘Oh, there’ll be no nonsense while I’m procurator. Keep them down. Remind them who’s master. No, I don’t like the Jews.’
‘You know I’m married to one?’
‘Yes. Of course. I’d forgotten. Well – the women may be all right. They probably don’t take this religious nonsense seriously. I’ve nothing against Jewish women. Very seductive, some of them. Good in bed, they say. You’d know more about that than me, of course.’
‘Procurator, with all respect, I don’t like your tone.’
‘No? Well, with all respect, you’ll have to put up with it. As long as we work together. I notice you didn’t seem keen to bring your wife with you.’
‘She prefers to stay in Rome. A year is not for ever.’
‘Better that way. She’d bring you too close to these people, get you absorbed. You have to stay aloof, that’s important. Know the language, do you?’
‘Enough.’
‘Avoid speaking it too well. Keep your distance. Make them speak Greek or Latin. I suppose Felix has left a lot of unfinished business behind him. Jewish law, Jewish taboos, trials that go on for ever. Why can’t they learn to think like Romans? That’s what we’re here for, anyway. Bring Roman clarity of thought, Roman reason, Roman manners. A civilising mission.’
‘And, of course, we collect taxes.’
‘That too. After all, civilisation has to be paid for.’
Paul was still at Caesarea, waiting for Poncius Festus to deliver judgement. His cell was commodious and he was permitted visitors. The chief of these was Luke. To Luke Paul dictated a letter about ‘Charity, which is another name for love. If I speak with the tongues of men – and of angels – and I have no charity, I’m nothing more than a cracked trumpet or a bit of struck metal. I may be able to prophesy, to understand mysteries, to have immense knowledge of all things, be able to move mountains indeed, but if I have no charity I have nothing. Nothing. I may sell all my property to feed the poor. I may submit to execution, burning, martyrdom. But if I have no charity it means nothing at all. Let me tell you what charity is like. It’s ready to suffer. There’s no envy in it. It isn’t – puffed up. It’s never unseemly, never selfish, thinks no evil, isn’t easily provoked. It submits, believes more than doubts, hopes more than despairs. It never fails – not in the way that prophecies fail, or words fail, or even knowledge fails. We know a little, we prophesy a little. But when the perfect thing comes – and that is charity – we don’t need even that little. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, but when I became a man I put off childish things. So the business of knowing more goes on. Now we see through a curtain, darkly and imprecisely. But some day we’ll see reality face to face. Now I know in part, but some day I shall know thoroughly – even as I’m known. And all this will come about through the power of love. There are three things as you know, all great – faith and hope and charity. But the greatest of these is charity. Got all that?’
Greatest of these is—’ Luke put down his tablet. ‘You believe all that?’
‘They’d better believe it, the ones who are going to have it read out to them. Yes, of course I believe it. You’re not staying to eat something?’
‘I have to see this new man again. Trouble in the belly. Cramps. Diarrhoea. Newcomers just will not leave the fruit alone.’
‘You’re his official physician?’
‘No. Just called in. I ply the trade. A man has to live. We can’t all enjoy the hospitality of a Roman prison.’
‘Rather excessive hospitality. Two years.’
‘As long as that? Everybody must have forgotten what the case is about.’
‘I don’t think so, Luke.’
He was right. Festus and Julius met the leaders of the Sanhedrin at the confines of the Temple, which the two Romans duly admired. Ananias said: ‘We appreciate the courtesy visit, procurator. We’re glad that Roman law is in operation again. It’s been asleep for too long.’
‘Blame the functionaries of Rome for that,’ Festus said. ‘A change of Emperor, a reorganisation of the civil service. If you have cases for me to judge, bring them to Caesarea.’
‘There is one particular case that has slept since the departure of the procurator Felix. The man Paul. He lies in jail in Caesarea, as you will know. We humbly request that he be sent here to Jerusalem for the further investigation of his crimes.’
‘Crimes? Somebody mentioned these crimes to me, but I still don’t know what they are. Anyway, it’s the task of the judiciary to determine whether there are crimes or not.’
‘Oh, we’re sure.’ Festus looked at them, and he saw one of them lick his lips. The physician Luke had fed the procurator more than a white medicine. Festus said:
‘Did you have summary justice in mind? An accident on the road to Jerusalem? I’ve heard of these tricks before.’
‘We do not perform tricks, procurator. We leave those to the Nazarene enemies of the Roman state. We are at one with you in our love of justice.’
‘He’ll get justice. And he’ll get it in Caesarea.’
In the open courtyard outside the praetorium in Caesarea Marcus Julius Tranquillus looked with great curiosity at Paul, whose wrists were chained together at the back, who was bald, ugly, ageing but, it seemed, much at peace with himself. He knew all about Paul, or rather Saul, fellow student of his brother-in-law, murderer turned Nazarene fanatic, traveller, religious orator, Roman citizen. He had read the file on Paul in the praetorial office. He did not at all understand the charge which the pompous Greek Jew Tertullus was enflowering with compliments to a Roman official who had as yet done nothing to deserve either praise or blame.
‘So, to conclude, most illustrious Felix—’
‘Festus is the name. Porcius Festus.’
‘I apologise. I’ve been speaking from the original brief. Most illustrious Festus, this man not only profaned the sacred Temple of our fathers but persisted in teaching false doctrine to the scandal of all true worshippers.’
‘This,’ Festus said, ‘is an internal and local matter and does not concern Rome.’
‘But, illustrious one, his acts and words have been much to the detriment of public order and tranquillity, and those are very much the concern of Rome.’
‘What,’ said Festus, ‘does the defendant say?’
To Julius’s ear what the defendant now said was spoken in admirable if provincial Greek with a rise of the voice at the end of each phrase, doubtless a device to ensure clarity but conveying the lilt of a question. ‘I have done nothing amiss – neither sin under the laws of religion nor crime under the laws of Rome.’
‘It’s that second part that concerns this court. You say that you’ve committed no crime against Caesar?’
‘I repeat: neither against the law of the Jews, nor against the Temple, nor against Caesar—’
‘Will you,’ Festus asked, ‘go up to Jerusalem and be judged there – before me – of the things of which you are accused?’
Julius thought he saw a glint of complicity in the glance that the procurator cast at the man in black robes who was called the high priest. He certainly saw one of his own troops make a thumb-rolling gesture at a colleague; the colleague sagely nodded. Paul saw too. Paul said:
‘I’m standing before Caesar’s judgement seat, where I have a right to be judged. I have done no wrong to the Jews – this you know well. If I’m a wrongdoer and have committed some crime worthy of death – well, I resist neither the charge nor the execution. But if none of these things of which I’m accused are true – then no man can hand me over to these accusers. My appeal is to Caesar.’
‘You say you’re a Roman citizen. Centurion, is that confirmed in the records?’
‘It is.’
‘Very well. You’ve appealed to Caesar. To Caesar you shall go. Wait,’ as the Jews started crying to heaven. ‘Less noise there. This is a court of justice. I hadn’t finished, had I? You shall go to Caesar when it’s sufficiently clear to me what precisely this whole case is about.’ The Jews relaxed: there was still a chance of putting the knife in. ‘Take him away. Clear the court.’
What image of Caesar possessed Paul’s still provincial mind is not at all clear: probably some gaunt figure cruel but constant as the north star, lifting a judicial finger towards Olympus, in billowing toga and goldsmith’s laurel crown, unaware that conspirators were ready to strike. The real Caesar, pretty but pimpled, was, in that Neronian time which does not quite correspond with Pauline time, marauding in mask and green wig with some of his old schoolfellows in the Suburra district of Rome, among the shops and brothels that lay between the Vicus Longus and the Vicus Patricius. He was, in a sense, trying to escape into a happy adolescence from a matricidal guilt which would not leave him. Rome congratulated itself on the removal of a figure made more rather than less sinister by her undoubted beauty, and Rome guessed where responsibility for that removal lay. Eventually Rome would, when it was convenient, speak of the second most abhorrent crime in the calendar; at present it rejoiced in the liquidation of a monster whose monstrous enactments had been unmitigated by masculine compassion, masculine lethargy, masculine rationality. Rome’s citizens slept sound, but Rome’s ruler woke sweating. He heard her voice calling him at night; by day he saw her momentarily resurrected in audiences at the theatre, making him forget his lines when acting or, when singing, croak. He was beginning to learn also that one murder always leads to others: her assassins had, in their turn, to be assassinated and the new knifers knifed. He saw that murder could not properly be delegated unless he wanted the whole world to be killed. He was led, which was tiresome, to the study of poisons and the acquaintance of that Locusta (here in this very district of Suburra) whom his mother had vicariously employed to his own ungrateful aggrandisement.
Gaius Petronius, of course, had praised the device of the leaden galley as most artistic, deplored its failure, accepted the subterfuge of an imagined treason as inferior drama but legitimate, if banal, improvisation. He dismissed the bad dreams and waking apparitions as what he termed, in his refined Greek, mere epiphenomena, comparing them with the tiresome ghosts that encumbered the tragedies of Seneca. He chattered too much and Nero had sent him away on a long paid holiday to Athens, there to prepare the way for his master’s participation in the singing contests. In the meantime, nightly raids on shops and brothels in the company of the yelping friends of his youth. Panting after the beating-up of a grocer who had just been shutting up his emporium for the night, they turned a corner and found a closed fish market still open. They had an enjoyable time running after the shop assistants with their own knives for gutting and scaling, flailing each other with sea bass and octopus, slipping and recovering on the slimy floor, whooping and roaring. When the apparent owner of the market appeared, calm, indulgent, even smiling, a huge flounder in his arms like a sleeping child, they paused in their play: they were meeting a reaction past experience had not led them to expect. The man, dark, broad, in early middle age, went up to the disguised Nero and tried to hand the flounder to him, saying:
‘Hail, Caesar. A gift from Neptune to the ruling divinity of Rome.’
‘How do you know who I am?’
‘The imperial light shines, despite that elegant mask, from your worship’s countenance. You smell of divinity as this flounder smells of – whatever it smells of. On second thoughts, it’s past its first youth. I have fresher fish within. Already in the pan, with garlic, sweet butter, cloves and capers.’
‘You dare to invite the Emperor to supper?’
‘Humble duty, sir. The pride of a subject. I can bring in dancing girls. Or boys, if you prefer. Naked.’
Wigged Nero smirked at the man. ‘So there’s money in fishmongering, is there?’
‘Money in a lot of things, your celestial goodness. I’ve come back to what I started as out of a certain nostalgia. I plan to make a monopoly of the Roman fish trade – fresh fish, rushed from the coast in cool tanks, sold cheap and hence sold quickly. I already have a monopoly of the Sicilian horse trade. Money, yes. But to be spent, sir. I hate hoarding. I like life. Strong flavours, if your Olympian sagacity knows what I mean. Fish blood is thin, but some blood is as thick as cassia honey. The juices of life, sir – blood and semen. Let them flow.’
‘The Emperor,’ Nero said with mock dignity, ‘is pleased to consider you a man after his own heart. Your name?’
‘Ofonius Tigellinus, at the Emperor’s service. A euphonious name, would your holiness not agree? Euphonious Ofonius. Tigellinus the little tiger. Ever ready to give your supreme imperial divinity most earthly pleasures. An Epicurean is what I am, if I may put this business on a philosophical level.’
‘With no love for the Stoics?’
‘Stoics? Seneca and his crew? I spit on this fishy sawdust. Hypocrites, I’d say. Pretending to virtue and practising secret vices. I hate the hole in the corner. Let’s laugh in the sun.’
‘Ofonius Tigellinus, I can smell that frying fish from here.’
‘Good, isn’t it, sir? It’s the garlic. Nothing like garlic.’
It was on the Vicus Longus that Aquila had his shop and, behind the shop, the living quarters where, with his wife Priscilla as hostess, he sometimes gave hospitality to fellow Jews. They had made money in Corinth but were glad to be back in Rome. Except that these days, nights rather, it was unwise to go out much. They could hear the loud bravoing of the youthful wreckers and wondered when their turn would come. But there was nothing to wreck except a bare workshop, and the shutters Aquila put up were of hard pine with metal bars. Aquila said now, hearing whoops and smashing:
‘The times we’re living in, eh? You need somebody to shout out against it. Like your old friend, Caleb.’ For Caleb was there with his wife Hannah and their son Yacob, also Sara, who had that day received a letter from her Roman husband telling her about Caleb’s old friend, and Ruth, who was now ripe enough for a husband. They were a handsome party. Hannah, who in Gentile company sometimes gave her name as Fannia, was the orphan daughter of a moneylender whom one of his senatorial clients had indicted and convicted on a charge of defiling a statue of Vesta. She had been quick to learn cynicism from Sara, who trusted neither God nor man and had a slight ancestral contempt for the pretensions of Rome: for all that, both ladies could pass as Roman patricians whom a sun more southerly than Rome’s had touched. Caleb, whom Rome’s sun had made swarthier with the years, caught Aquila’s reference and said:
‘Preaching wouldn’t get him far here. When there’s a bad smell you run away from it, you don’t try to hide it with civet.’
‘You can get used to a bad smell and call it roses.’ They had both somehow got off the point. ‘Like you with blood.’
‘Blood honestly spilt. Nobody orders a gladiator to open his veins. Blood’s his trade.’
‘How about the Britons?’
‘Yes. That’s giving me a few bad dreams. Untrained men and boys being hacked to pieces. But the crowd loves it.’
‘Because,’ Priscilla said, bringing out some of their store of Corinth raisins which seemed to last for ever, ‘the Emperor does. Corruption always starts at the top. Why don’t you get out of it?’
‘And do what? I’ve a living to earn.’
‘You see how it works out, Caleb,’ Aquila said. ‘You start off by thirsting for Roman blood – oh, in a good cause, may God bless the Zealots. You end up by accepting the shedding of any blood at all – Roman, British, Syrian, anything.’
‘We’re fed full of blood,’ Priscilla said.
‘Saul’s people,’ Caleb said. ‘Paul’s, I mean – they drink it. And they eat flesh.’
‘That’s horrible,’ Hannah said. ‘Let’s change the subject.’
‘Now you talk like a scandalmongering Roman,’ Aquila said. ‘Look, neither Priscilla nor I is a Christian yet. But I made a bargain with Paul. If ever he got to the Tiber, I said, he can plunge us into it. Both of us. What I’m trying to say is that it’s the body and blood of Christ they eat, but it’s in a different form. Bread and wine. It’s a very subtle and intelligent idea. You eat the soter and he becomes part of yourself.’
‘And then,’ Caleb said coarsely, ‘you void him.’
‘You’re not with your circus friends now,’ Hannah said. ‘Can’t we talk about Octavia’s new hairstyle or something?’
‘Religion,’ Sara said, ‘is not merely useless. Religion is dangerous.’ Aquila comically groaned, having heard this from her before. ‘To get through the day without a headache is the important thing and to breathe a sigh of relief that you’ve made the long journey to your pillow.’ The noise of juvenile disruption had been still for some short time. Now it began again.
‘It sounds as though they’re—’ Priscilla began. ‘Oh, no.’ For there was loud fisting on the shutters of the shop, yells to open up, a grinding that suggested that crowbars were at work on the iron binding of the stout pinewood. Caleb’s neck seemed to have thickened by a good two inches. He said:
‘You and I, Aquila, are going up on the roof. I get very tired of the Romans sometimes.’
‘And what do you propose we do on the roof?’
‘That tub of yours should be full of rainwater by now.’
‘Oh, no. It won’t stop them, you know, what you seem to have in mind. They’ll only come back again.’
‘I think I can manage that tub by myself.’ And Caleb made for the stairway, more of a fixed ladder, that led to the loft. ‘You stay there, Yacob.’ He raised the hatch and found himself under Roman stars. Below, to the right, the yells and hammering continued. The wooden tub was only half full, but his muscles strained to the lifting of it. He carried it to the parapet, panted, paused, looked below. Stupid boys of the patrician class, one of them in a green wig. He tilted the tub on to them with care. There were screams and threats, round holes of mouths howling up at him. He picked up the emptied tub and raised it. He threw it down at the green wig and struck. The wig came off and its owner circled like a drunk howling before he fell. His companions, much concerned, bent over him. One of them looked up at the roof and cried:
‘Do you know what you’ve done? You fool, do you realise what you’ve done?’ Caleb made a coarse noise with the back of his throat much used by gladiators to express contempt and loathing, wiped his wet hands on his buttocks, and then went down back to the company. He did not hear his victim, who had merely been stunned, emerge from blackness crying ‘Hic et ubique, mater?’
Nor, some weeks later, did he recognise that recovered victim in the Emperor who paid a courtesy visit to the performers in the games. Caleb, calling himself Metellus, stood to attention with the men he had helped to train when the pretty pimpled young man, no longer a boy, came down from the imperial box in his purple to the performers’ well which debouched into the arena. From the arena came the noise of Rome seated, chewing sausages, waiting for blood. A number of exotic captives, not yet fully aware that they were to shed blood to please Rome, lay and sat around, pale-skinned and fairer of hair than the Emperor, unresponsive to the games editor’s barks that they should jump to their filthy feet in Caesar’s presence. Caesar was much taken with a freckled boy of about fourteen years who stood bewildered by noise, fuss and his own ignorance; he embraced him lovingly. ‘What do you think, Tigellinus?’ he said. ‘Much too pretty to be turned into mincemeat, wouldn’t you say?’
Where, Caleb wondered, was the prefect Burrus? Another one sent into exile for yawning during an imperial recitation? The man addressed as Tigellinus wore no uniform but he seemed to have come into a kind of praetorian authority.
‘Caesar is too soft-hearted. Caesar’s subjects like to see young flesh torn to tatters. You,’ he said to Caleb, ‘what’s your name?’
‘Metellus.’
‘If you’re Metellus I’m Cleopatra. Does this one know enough daggerwork to make it look like a fight?’
‘He’s a child. He doesn’t stand a chance.’
‘He’ll have armour on, won’t he?’
‘They don’t understand what armour is. And what chance is he going to have with Tibulus there?’ Nero beamed at Tibulus, a chunk of handsome stone from Liguria, more massive than supple, ponderous to kill and too stupid to feel pain. The games editor said:
‘He’ll hold back, Caesar. At least five feints before he comes in for the kill.’
‘Just like that,’ Caleb said hotly. ‘The kill. And this boy doesn’t understand what’s happening. He can’t speak Latin and we can’t speak British.’ He made a coarse noise at the back of his throat much used by gladiators to express contempt and loathing. The Emperor was charmed by the sound, which he did not seem to have heard before.
‘They’re only animals,’ the games editor said. ‘Great Caesar, we wait on your pleasure.’ So the Emperor and his entourage climbed back to the imperial box and air unpolluted by rage, sweat, fear and kindred emanations. The Empress, stupid bitch, was there. She rose on Nero’s entrance and, as he did, remained standing to bow to the loyal roar of the crowd. The crowd was huge: sure sign of a prosperous Empire, this massive afternoon leisure. The hydraulis or water organ was footed and growled chthonian thunder. It was the voice of a coarse and pampered citizenry wearing the collective blue cap of a flawless placid heaven. The weak voice of Vergil’s ghost called them to collective virtue, but they wondered what team Curgil or Purvil had played for. Nero smirked and bobbed and said aloud but unheard of them: ‘Filthy inartistic lot, what do they know of the agony of forging flawless hendecasyllables?’ Then he sat. Britannicus came in late, mildly drunk from his complexion. Nero frowned, Britannicus beamed. When the bewildered Britons came on, hefting unfamiliar weapons against (at first) prancing playful professional opponents, he beamed less. He had a kind of proprietorial concern with these pallid naked northerners. ‘A mockery,’ he was heard to cry. ‘They fought well in their own way. They’re still fighting well and rightly after we’ve raped and beaten and burnt them.’ Nero heard all this treasonous talk with pleasure. He saw bare Britons hack unhandily, hacked back efficiently when the general howl for blood grew loud. Bare bloody Britons lay in blood and sand. Then the freckled boy of fourteen was pushed on, looking at his dagger with the puzzlement of one who handles his first lizard. Tibulus gave stolid acknowledgement of the crowd’s welcome, which was to say he looked at the crowd much as the boy looked at his dagger. The boy, assuming he had to use his dagger against this one here, stuck it into his arm. A trickle of Roman blood primed a roar of patriotic affront, dirty little foreign bastard, even babes in arms in that northern mound of dogturds are trained to be treacherous to our brave boys. Tibulus watched the red drops trickle with the sincere interest the elder Pliny might bring to a march of fire ants, then he swished his sword terribly to the mob’s delight. The boy now performed what this mob took to be a barbaric filthy wardance round and round the brave Roman and, which was totally against the rules of fair play, nicked him in the buttocks not once but twice. Nero was surprised not to hear Britannicus crying against the current; he looked round and saw that Britannicus was no longer there. Tibulus stood blinking at the dancing boy, then he downed with his sword at the lad’s dagger. The lad seemed happy to be rid of it but seemed also to wonder whether, in the rules of a sport he was beginning dimly to understand with the crowd’s help, he ought not perhaps to pick it up from where it lay at Tibulus’s feet. He decided instead to run away from Tibulus’s sword, which flashed unpleasantly in the sun at him, but this, according to the crowd’s rage, was not in the rules either. Running, anyway, he stumbled over a British corpse, disclosed a tearful and impotent anger, and appeared ready to be hacked, that was the crowd’s evident but mysterious need, best get it over. It was then that Britannicus appeared in the arena and stopped the fight. At first the crowd did not know who he was and they howled down what he was trying to say. Then, to the horrid amazement of the Emperor, Britannicus sang.
Sang. Sang. Opened his throat and sang, in a clear and altogether audible and apparently trained tenor, two or three wordless measures which had the effect on the crowd of a minatory trumpet. The crowd hushed and heard what followed. ‘I am Britannicus, son of the divine Claudius. Where, I ask, is the ancient Roman spirit of mercy to a brave enemy? I fought the Britons. I helped conquer them. It is enough. Let them not be humiliated as well.’ And, as Nero had done previously but in the impulse of a very different velleity, he took the boy in his arms. The fickle mob howled its joy. You could never trust the mob. Caligula, Nero thought, was right in wishing the Roman people to have but one throat and himself the satisfaction of cutting it. After, that was, the duty of slashing more particular throats.
Any mob likes to howl, though it does not always know why it is howling, any more than a dog knows why it bays at the moon. The Jewish mob, away in Jerusalem or, having transferred itself segmentally to the mainly Gentile port, as near as it could get to his cell in Caesarea, still howled at Paul, having forgotten or never having known precisely why. It was time for the new procurator to be himself sure why this bald-headed one in chains had incurred both high and low displeasure, and what relevance this had to Roman governance.
He was lucky to receive about this time a courtesy visit from King Herod Agrippa II and his sister Bernice. For this son of the dead and unlamented monarch of Judaea knew all about the Jewish law, so it was said. He had been ruler of Chalcis, which lay between Lebanon and Antilebanon, and afterwards took over the tetrarchies which Gaius Caligula had granted to his father before his elevation to the greater throne. Nero, in his early conscientious days, had added a few scraps of territory around the Galilean lake and, in gratitude, the little king had changed the name of his capital from Caesarea Philippi to Neronias. Bernice, or Berenice (that being the original or Macedonian form of the name), was a pretty young widow who had been married to her uncle Herod of Chalcis. There was a fair number of avuncular espousals in the Herod family, and it is curious that nobody thundered against them, the Jews being hot against violations of allowable marital limits, while the Roman Senate, not a notably moral body, had howled against Claudius’s proposal to marry his niece, until, that is, his niece had stopped their howling with an assassination or two.
The neatly bearded little monarch, in his fine black and gold thread, sat with his sister, recently groomed and coiffed in Alexandria, on little thrones set up on the procuratorial rostrum. It was a blue and gold day, and Bernice’s sharp little ears were concerned with analysing the components of the birdsong about them more than with attending to the harsh Greek of the procurator’s exordium.
‘We are met in order to clarify the issue yet again of the accusation brought by the Jewish people against the man Paul. The Roman law operates in the sphere of secular action. It is fitting that a monarch greatly experienced in the Jewish law should, of his graciousness, assist the Roman arm in the elucidation of the issue. King Herod Agrippa, here is the man.’ There indeed was chained Paul, bowing slightly in the direction of Hebraic royalty. ‘The Jews of Judaea have made suit to me, protesting that he must live no longer. I myself have found in him nothing worthy of death. He has requested appeal to the Emperor in Rome, and this has been granted. But the question is this: what must we write to Rome? Perhaps, at last, we shall find out. Let the prisoner speak.’
The Jewish prosecution then clamoured to put their case in Aramaic, since probably the situation had not been made sufficiently clear in Greek, a pagan tongue, but Festus said that he was satisfied that the accused would make the accusation as clear as the defence. So Paul set sail on a wide sea of self-justification with an eloquence honed by enforced repetition. Marcus Julius Tranquillus listened with great care and, though he had made a Jewish marriage, his head swam with the Oriental subtlety of it all. That business of Paul’s having desecrated the Temple no longer seemed to come into it. He was being set upon by the Jews for preaching heretical doctrine, and the Jews hoped to bring the Romans into it by laying at his door the disruption of public order which they themselves, rejecting the logic of what was not at all heretical, had caused. Paul appeared to give an elegantly concise history of the Jewish nation, their hope of a redeemer, the fulfilment of that hope in a form which, since they had got used to hope and did not particularly want its fulfilment, they stubbornly rejected. Paul quoted massively, and names like Ezra, Nehemiah, Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai and Zechariah evidently registered as mere uncouth noise with Festus, who stared stonily in a Roman intellectual sleep. Paul ended by saying:
‘I have taken my mission to Greece and to Asia, to Jew and Gentile alike. For this cause I was seized in the Temple and men made attempt to kill me. Having obtained the help that is from God, I stand to testify to all, small and great, saying that I have preached nothing but what Moses and the prophets said would surely come: how that the Christ must suffer and by his resurrection from the dead proclaim light to both the Jews and the Gentiles.’
Both Festus and Herod Agrippa began to speak at the same time.
‘I beg your pardon—’
‘No, please—’
‘All I was going to say was that he’s mad. He’s read too much. Too much brooding on things makes a man go mad.’ Julius felt a reluctant sympathy. Life was hard enough without bringing Habakkuk into it. All the Romans wanted to do was to make life simpler for everyone: a sufficiency of meat and drink, the odd afternoon at the games, taxes, a few memorised tags from the classical authors, una nox dormienda. ‘Seen a lot of it in my time,’ Festus added, untruthfully. Paul, good-humoured, said:
‘I’m not mad. I speak the truth in all sobriety. The king here knows of these things. Nothing’s been hidden from him. Nothing of what has been done has been done in a corner. King Agrippa, you believe in the prophets. I say no more.’
Herod Agrippa said: ‘If you’re right, and you preach the Jewish fulfilment, what have the Gentiles to do with it?’ Very shrewd, Julius thought.
‘Would you have the word caged?’ Paul answered. ‘Would you have a limitation on it? God made more than the Jews. He may even be said to have made the Romans.’
Festus did not quite like his race to be bundled into the same creative arena as subject peoples, but he contented himself with muttering that Paul was mad. Agrippa grinned at Paul and said:
‘You’re persuasive enough to make me see the road if not to follow it. You’ve persuaded yourself into a particular situation and I can quite see how you’ve persuaded others.’
‘Yes. I would to God everybody could take the stand I take, standing here as I stand. Except, of course, for these chains.’ And he shook them. Julius laughed and Festus looked at him, wondering why.
‘I would say those chains should come off,’ Agrippa said. ‘If the defendant would be good enough to retire and have them removed, the procurator and I have a word to say to each other.’
So Paul was rattled off, and Festus said to Agrippa:
‘It seems a lot of nonsense to me.’
‘Not Roman, you mean. No, it makes good enough sense. The point is that he’s done nothing wrong. He can be set at liberty.’
‘Then he’s torn to pieces. A pleasant start for my term of office. A Roman citizen torn to pieces, and then I have to have one of those massacres to quieten the tearers down, troops brought in from Syria, oh no. Besides, there’s the question of his appeal to Caesar. That’s gone through, that’s on record, that can’t be rescinded.’
‘If he hadn’t made the appeal you could have put him on a boat going to Corinth or somewhere. Now you have to send him to Rome. I have the feeling that he wants Rome more than he wants Caesar. A chance to spread the doctrine in the imperial capital. At Roman expense. The man’s no fool.’
‘Not mad, then?’
‘Far from it.’ Bernice now unexpectedly spoke. She had a lovely low voice, and both its trained resonance and the information she imparted reminded her brother that that school in Alexandria had been a good school. She said:
‘In Rome, of course, he’d be preaching a religio licita.’
‘A what?’ Festus said, as though he did not know Latin.
‘The Nazarene faith is permitted on Roman territory. Gallio established that precedent.’
‘Who is or was Gallio?’
‘Come, procurator,’ Herod Agrippa said, ‘he’s the brother of the Emperor’s tutor and speech writer. You know, Seneca.’
‘Spanish, aren’t they?’ He knew that Seneca was, it followed therefore that—
‘My sister’s right,’ Herod Agrippa said. ‘Of course, the priests won’t accept the precedent, and this man Paul knows it. What he’s after is imperial confirmation, which might make the Sanhedrin grumble but think twice about throwing stones. I think he might well get it. Rome takes kindly to new things. Anyway, my advice is that you get him aboard a ship as soon as you can. With a military escort, naturally. He’ll still officially be a prisoner. Then he ceases to be your responsibility. He belongs to Rome.’
This seemed to imply that he, Porcius Festus, was not Rome. But he saw the point: real Rome.
Tigellinus, so Nero had discovered, was a blunt and somewhat brutal man but not lacking in a philosophy. He listened to his imperial master expound the doctrine of art learnt from Gaius Petronius, who was still away in Greece, and he grunted and nodded, though in no gesture of affirmation, before saying: ‘I see the point – an image of reality and so on, but what do you want with an image when you, so to speak, are the reality?’
‘I don’t quite see the—’
‘Oh come, Caesar, art is for the impotent. Dreams of manipulation are dreams of power. Why dream when it’s more satisfactory to be awake? The reality is potestas.’
‘Of course, but potestas to create pulchritudo.’
‘The pulchritudo, as you term it, lies in the potestas. There’s nothing beyond that.’
‘How strange. Just what my mother said.’
‘In one of your dreams, Caesar?’
‘Don’t despise dreams, Tigellinus. Dreams are a fantastic way of putting things into focus, sharpening them, showing you what you’ve been thinking without really knowing it. I’ve had a lot of nightmares with my mother in them. I wasn’t all that good a son, I suppose. But what happened only the other morning just before I woke was that my mother stood there, very beautiful as she always was, even when she was nagging at me, and smiling and saying: “Everything is right in the name of potestas. I forced that lesson on you, son, and became a martus to it.”’
‘Became a what?’
‘She meant a witness, I think, it’s a Greek word. Then I woke up and felt very well and no longer a bad son.’ He smiled in complacency and leant back on his cushions. The two were sitting together in a loggia that caught the dying light, sipping a drink that Tigellinus had imported: wine fortified with bitter herbs, a sharpener of the appetite. Tigellinus said:
‘You must clean up your life.’
‘Morally, you mean? You sound like Seneca.’
‘No, no, no. There’s too much of the last imperiate still hanging about. You can smell its stuffiness. And I don’t mean Seneca. Not yet.’
‘Will you invite us to dinner, Tigellinus?’
‘Us?’
‘Oh, me and the Empress, and, yes, Seneca, and, of course, my stepbrother. Perhaps,’ he said bitterly, ‘he could be persuaded to sing for us.’
‘Swanlike.’ It was not a question. And then: ‘Honoured, naturally. At the villa, of course?’
‘Oh, none of them could tolerate the stink of the Suburra. You know this woman who lives there, Locusta?’
‘I’ll know her before the dinner takes place.’
The villa was, as Nero had expected, somewhat vulgar in its opulence: the self-made rich man showing off. But dinner was served away from the clutter of ornaments in a paved court next to the piscina. On the table, which was heavily cluttered with flowers of a heavy sweetness, there was a real piscina or fishtank. In it swam little fishes. Tigellinus had served his bitter appetiser before dinner, but only his chief guest was drunk. Tigellinus was aware of the artist’s weakness in him: he had to be drunk for what was to come. The host, he was permitted to chatter away, saying:
‘Brought up by barge this morning from Ostia. I supervised the cooking myself. And there, you see, are some live fish. It is a pleasant sensation to feel them slide down your throat raw and alive. They nibble as they go down. Would Caesar like to essay the painful pleasure?’
‘Try it on old Seneca first. He needs pleasures. A man who’s lived a long life without them.’
‘I doubt that, Caesar,’ Tigellinus grinned. Seneca did not feel especially uncomfortable, though he ate little. His stoicism served him well. The butler brought in wine. The wine steamed. Nero said:
‘Our host has considerately remembered that the lord Britannicus was, on his British campaign, introduced to the comfort of mulled wine. Try some of this. You too, Seneca, cold fish as you are.’
‘This cold fish prefers cold water, Caesar.’
‘Oh, clever. Water’s a dangerous drink. Try this delicious hot brew, Britannicus. Garnished with rare herbs. Come, it’s a cool night. Oh, I see your problem. How terribly insulting. He fears the Emperor may poison him, Tigellinus. But Tigellinus has no such fear, see.’ And indeed their host took a few sips. ‘You see, harmless, wholesome. But perhaps you would prefer to wait a while, Britannicus. Tigellinus may be a kind of Socrates, and some poisons are slow to act.’ Without changing his tone he added: ‘Octavia, you’re an adulteress.’ There was shock. Octavia stammered:
‘That’s right, do beg it, not that you’ll get it. Closeted with old Seneca there, pretending to study philosophy. Scratch a Stoic and you find a lecher, isn’t that so, Tigellinus?’
‘That,’ Seneca said, ‘is a joke in very bad taste, sir.’
‘Bad taste? That sounds like an aesthetic judgement. Leave such judgements to an artist, Seneca, like your lord and master. Artifex, artifex. Very well, Octavia, I know you wouldn’t touch old Seneca with a ten-foot strigil. Hot in the blood calls for hot in the blood. I’ll find him out yet, never fear.’
‘Bbbbritannicus,’ Octavia stammered, ‘at least have the ccccourage to pppprotect your sister.’
‘Oh, that would be dangerous, wouldn’t it?’ Nero jeered. ‘That might offend the Emperor. The good kind Emperor who persuaded our kind host to prepare some mulled wine for the conqueror of the Britons. Taste it. Our host has done so and smiles unharmed.’
Britannicus obeyed, rage trembling in his forearms. ‘Too hot.’
‘Easily put right. Add some cold water, somebody.’
Tigellinus was quick to obey, using the blue jug by his plate. Britannicus drank more copiously, though with little pleasure. Tigellinus said: ‘Because you are neither hot nor cold but merely lukewarm you shall be vomited out of my mouth.’
‘That’s rather good,’ Nero said. ‘That’s very good. Who made that up?’
‘It’s attributed to the unkillable slave Chrestus. Around whom a cannibalistic cult now centres. They eat each other, you know. And they swive each other with no concern for lawful relationships. Sister with brother, mother with son, father with daughter—’
‘I’m afraid that’s a libel,’ Seneca said. ‘I know differently.’
‘You always do, don’t you,’ Nero jeered, ‘old Senna Pods? Whenever a thing sounds moderately interesting, as this Chrestus business does, you have to throw cold water on it.’ Britannicus retched. ‘What’s the matter, you sweet singer and lover of British boys? Is a little live fish nibbling your little grape? Heavens, not at all well.’ For Britannicus tried to speak, but could not. Tried to breathe, but could not. Tried to rise, but Tigellinus said:
‘Perhaps a little cold water?’
‘Too late. Choked on a fishbone. A shame. Not much of a singer but a fine soldier.’ Octavia and Seneca got up from their couches, their hands flapping in useless concern. Britannicus gasped like a landed sea bass, then stopped gasping. ‘Sit down, both of you. Seneca, I thought the Stoics took this sort of thing in their stride. Vomitorium on the left, I think,’ as Octavia blindly staggered. Tigellinus looked closely at Nero, though keeping his distance. He clicked fingers for one servant to clear the plates, four to remove the body. Nero, he thought, was acting well the part of the amoral monster. But he did not really have the stuff of the murderer in him. He would not sleep well tonight. He would have bad dreams. The artist’s hysteria without much artistic talent. But he, Tigellinus, would look after him.
The wind blew fair at Caesarea. The sails bellied. The ship was a coastal vessel that had put in from Adramyttium, not far from the island of Lesbos. Commodious enough, but needed a lick of paint, some of its lines frayed. Cranes creaked as bales were hoisted aboard. Porcius Festus said: ‘You’ll be seeing Rome sooner than you thought.’
‘I’d be seeing it sooner if we waited for a ship bound straight.’
The procurator, eyes slit to the sunlight, looked at the mob held off by the entire Caesarean garrison. ‘You’ll pick something up at Sidon. Or Cyprus. Or Myra.’ The owner-captain yelled at two new crew members in an obscure Greek dialect and cuffed the ship’s boy. ‘We have to get him out of here. I’m sick of stones being thrown and gibes about Roman friendship for heretics, whatever heretics are. I wish I understood what it was all about. Or perhaps I don’t. Whatever it is, it’s well – dirty, not Roman. You have that letter safely stowed?’ Marcus Julius Tranquillus tapped his breast. ‘My thanks for writing it. Of course, you understand these things better, what with having a Jew wife. You’ll be in bed with her soon. Well, not too soon, of course.’ More affable with his senior centurion, knowing that he was now rid of him. Transferred him, with permission from Syria, to the corps of couriers or frumentarii, but still in command of troops, also responsible for prisoners.
Paul was already below. Luke was with him, gladly posing as a personal slave. That would make a difference. There were other prisoners, riff-raff but Roman citizens, a soldier who had attacked his decurion in drink, a captured deserter, a Tiberside murderer who had escaped to Syria, picked up in Damascus. Paul was an appellant, not a prisoner, but you could not expect the troops aboard to see the difference. Give him a slave going yes master no master and it might get into their thick heads that here was a bald and hooknosed gentleman. A gift of new robes had come through from Bernice in Neronias. He often impressed women of the higher class. The officer in charge, who had introduced himself as plain Julius, had allotted Paul and himself, Luke, a two-bunked cabin next to the one, privilege of rank, he occupied alone. This Julius had, unheard of deference but he made all clear, apologised to Paul for what looked like being a lengthy voyage. ‘I fear it’s very roundabout. Rome by way of little Asia.’
‘A mad voyage for a mad man. Not so mad a man, not so mad a voyage. The procurator was eager to get me away, but doesn’t seem so eager to get me to Rome. A procurator’s relations with Rome should be very simple – taxes delivered on time, nothing more. Now he has to get involved with the legal department. I’m afraid I’m an embarrassment to the procurator. I have a feeling that he’d be happier if we were shipwrecked somewhere.’
‘We’ll be sailing into the season for shipwrecks.’ Julius smiled. Paul smiled. Seagulls crarked. Paul said:
‘Tell me, do you understand my situation? Do you understand what I’ve been preaching and teaching and doing? Your superior officer clearly doesn’t.’
‘I have a certain advantage over him. My wife is Jewish. My brother-in-law claims to have known you. You were students together. In those days they called you Saul.’
‘Who is he?’
‘His name’s Caleb. In his revolutionary moods he calls himself Caleb the Zealot.’
‘Oh, I remember. But what’s a Zealot doing in Rome?’
‘Finished with revolutionary politics – for the time being, he says. Married with a son. A trainer of wrestlers and gladiators. I look forward to your reunion.’
‘I look forward to a number of reunions. Including one at Sidon – if you’ll permit me to go ashore. Ironic. I persecuted the Greek Nazarenes of Jerusalem, and some of them flew off to found a church at Sidon. In a sense, I founded that church. The ways of God. You don’t think me mad when I say God and not the gods?’
‘Sara says God too.’
‘Sara? Caleb’s sister. I can’t remember their parents. I remember an uncle, though. The twelfth disciple.’
‘The name Matthias is sometimes mentioned.’
‘And there was another girl—’
‘Ruth. A name that lives on in our daughter. Ruth died. Oh, why hide what happened? Ruth was slaughtered. Rome was vicious under Gaius.’
‘And under your new Emperor? The one I’m petitioning?’
‘Too soon to say. He’s young. But he has Seneca to keep him on the right road.’
‘Seneca, yes.’
Seneca, yes. Nero was at breakfast and already tipsy when Seneca achieved at last a long-requested interview with him. Tigellinus sat apart from the Emperor’s table, a small one befitting a small meal, though it was covered with silver dishes – crayfish stewed with saffron, plover’s eggs hardboiled, a piece of cold braised beef in a crust, cold water he did not touch, warmed wine he did. ‘I would prefer to make my request in private, Caesar.’
‘No secrets from the praetorian prefect.’
‘I – don’t understand.’ But he did.
‘The lord Burrus has unaccountably vanished. I was in need of a replacement. What better man to fill the post—’
‘Than a fishmonger. I see.’ Tigellinus took no offence, grinned comfortably rather. ‘And when you say that Burrus has vanished—’
‘I mean that Burrus was not well. Was not happy. Was dissatisfied. Was not greatly efficient in his office of praetorian prefect. Don’t disparage fishmongers, Seneca. They know how to sell fish. What you and Burrus tried to sell found no market. Not here.’
‘My request comes opportunely then. I’m growing old. I have books to write – ideas to contemplate. I need to go into retirement.’
‘To which of your many estates? See, Tigellinus, this egg is undercooked.’
‘I don’t doubt that I’ve accumulated more property than is perhaps fitting for a – Stoic philosopher. I’m beholden to Caesar for his gifts. Now I wish to return them.’
‘So at last you become really a Stoic. You were right, Tigellinus. They’re all damned hypocrites. Preaching the virtues of the simple life and cramming their chests with gold and silver and title deeds. I don’t think I want to let you go, dear Seneca. You write me good speeches. They impress the Senate.’
‘Yes, Caesar. You’re right to talk of hypocrisy.’
‘And what,’ sucking a marrow bone, ‘precisely,’ blowing a hoarse note through it, ‘do you mean by that?’
‘I’ve discovered that politics and morality have little to do with each other. I beg you to let me go into retirement. I can’t cleanse the Empire, not with mere words. But I can do something for myself.’
‘Shall we let him go, Tigellinus?’
‘It would be useful,’ the new praetorian prefect said, ‘if Caesar knew precisely where he is going. A man as talented as Seneca ought not just to vanish – as Burrus did.’
‘So stay in Rome, Seneca, or on its immediate outskirts. I may call on you to write me the occasional speech. And, of course, it would be pleasant if you would say a few words at my forthcoming marriage. Something about the virtues of marital love and the glory of a woman’s fidelity to her husband.’
‘Marriage? I don’t understand.’
‘You never seem to understand anything, do you? For a philosopher you’ve precious little understanding of the real world. Your protégée the Empress Octavia learnt nothing of virtue, for all your lessons in moral philosophy. Adultery is always a crime. When the Emperor is cuckolded it becomes the crime of treason. To which, of course, there is only one answer.’
‘You mean,’ Seneca said, appalled, ‘you propose to marry that – I assumed that – I thought that was—’
‘Get it out, man. You’re as bad as that clown Claudius. No, not Acte, delectable as she was. Acte’s finished with. A lady, sir. The Emperor is to marry a lady.’ He belched in finality. ‘All right, go.’
They sailed north, hugging the coast, to the old Phoenician capital named Sidon, seventy miles of calm. Two bales of Galilean grain were unladed, and a rift in the rigging had to be repaired. Paul and Luke were permitted to go ashore, with Julius accompanying them. There were two harbours here, and they anchored briefly in the one called Leucippe. Here members of the local church assembled to meet Paul, under a screaming sanhedrin of gulls. It has been Luke’s task to get the message through. Some of the Sidonese Christians believed that Paul was long dead, and they fingered his limbs as in a meat market. There were tearful embraces badly interpreted by some of the low soldiers at the taffrail, who knew all about the Christians as cannibals and perverts, and then Paul spoke urgent words he had already dictated to Luke in their cabin:
‘The Holy Spirit has made you overseers or bishops of a flock always in danger from wolves. This flock, this church, he bought with his blood, he who, in conjunction with the Father, maintains this Spirit to guide you. I know that already the enemy is at work, trying to draw Christ’s followers in the direction of lewdness and bad habits and spitting at what they formerly reverenced. Work hard, help the weak, give of your strength and love, remembering that it is more blessed to give than to receive.’
Then they had to get back on board. But, following Julius, Paul suddenly turned and cried words to the faithful not, it seemed, previously meditated. ‘I know how things are. You think Christ’s blood has bought you from sin for all time and that you’re free to sin without reproach or punishment. But Christ’s ransom works only retrospectively. You think you’re special, rightly aloof from the sanctions of both Jewish and Roman law. You think you can sleep with whoever you wish and eat garbage if you want to. Well, you can’t. You’ve seen a light which others haven’t, and that gives you a moral responsibility the rest don’t possess. I shan’t be around here again, and you’ll hear my voice only in the ghostly form of letters I shall write, but remember what I want from you, what Christ wants – purity, purity and again purity.’
‘We have to get aboard,’ Julius said apologetically.
‘All right. I’ve said my say.’ Some of the troops at the taffrail were making a little song about purity, a word that had clearly carried. Paul grinned at them, but his eyes were angry. Julius gained the notion that he was angry with himself: work not well done, mission not well understood, the voyage a voyage towards the realisation of failure. But he could not be sure.
They sailed east and north of Cyprus. This was summer, and the prevailing winds were from the west, so they kept to the lee of the island. Paul lay on his bunk, hands joined behind his head on the filthy straw pillow. Luke sat on the edge of his bunk, looking at him. Nothing to dictate? Nothing. How is your stomach? Well enough. On the deck some of the troops were playing the game of trying to ring a peg with rope quoits. Their coarse shouts rang in, the cabin door being open for the breeze. Pone in culum. Fili scortorum. Luke went out and saw they were letting the west wind carry them to the Asian coast. It would be a matter of creeping north, embracing the land, dropping anchor in inlets when the wind defeated the coastal current and the little breezes from the Asian landmass. A slow long journey. By the rights of it Paul should get up from that bunk and start preaching the word to the troops or those genuine prisoners who lay in the dark brig in chains. Somehow God seemed landlocked, a thin voice high in the rigging, slave to tide and winds, overawed by the sea he had made. What did the God who hammered the universe together have to do with virtue, redemption, the strange doctrine of hypostasis?
Everybody except the chained was up on deck to see the port of Myra dance sedately towards them. Here they were to change ship. ‘That,’ Julius said, pointing, ‘will be ours. One of the grain fleet.’
‘From Alexandria.’ Paul had reduced himself to the mere knowledgeable traveller; he had sailed more than anyone here, except for the captain-owner. ‘They all put in at Myra. Due north. A good bay.’ Their ship danced towards dancing Myra, unpestered by bum-boats; these flimsy craft, laden with fruit, small idols, gaudy trinkets, yelling vendors and a rowing boy, swarmed about the grainship. Prostitutes, their faces modestly veiled, languidly pulled up their skirts to tempt the jeering troops. The gangplank went down. The chained prisoners came up painfully blinking. The sun was a hot bath; slave breezes shook cooling towels. The soldiers, making finger gestures at the whores and crying bad Aramaic, humped their gear to the land. Civilian passengers in robes, who had remained nameless even on the communal messdeck, shouldered nameless goods in sacks and waved at greeting knots by the godowns. Paul and Luke stood patiently by bales for loading, under the eye of a soldier who spat out datestones like dirty words. Marcus Julius Tranquillus handed money over to the captain-owner, who wailed to heaven about Roman sharp practice. Then he went to look for the master of the grainship. Sacks were being craned on board. ‘Look out,’ Luke cried, as one of them split and discharged its content. Paul dodged. It was yellow, a very fine and quite unknown grain. Luke let some run through his fingers.
‘Sand?’ he said.
‘Sand for Rome,’ the foreman said, ‘believe it or not. It’s a mad world.’
A pair of wrestlers stirred up sand as they fought. One of them was Caleb, muscular still but carrying too much weight round the middle. The crowd swallowed sausage gristle and roared and booed. All Rome was there, as ever, doing no work. Wheat from Egypt and sand from Myra. The world paid tribute and granted leisure to watch blood being spilt, less precious than sand. Not that blood would be spilt now. A mere interlude. The Emperor had asked to see Jewish wrestlers. Well, here was one, somewhat past it. His opponent, whom he had trained, was Sicilian and knew when to hold back. Caleb would yield when he felt tired.
The Emperor sat chewing dates and spitting out the stones petulantly. Behind him stood Tigellinus in uniform. Next to him sat his new wife, whose husband had been banished to Lusitania. I note that in this chronicle I have not mentioned one ugly woman. I would, for variety’s sake, make Poppea Sabina ugly if I could, but I cannot. She was of the jet and ivory race of Messalina and Agrippina, her perfection of face and body rendering description a bore, but she was, unlike those ladies, good. She was also clever, but not in matters of intrigue. She read the poets and philosophers. She had even read the Septuagint. Nero frowned at Caleb’s performance and said:
‘Too old. I like to see young bodies.’
‘That man,’ Poppea said, ‘has a reputation. He nearly strangled the late Gaius Caligula. In a wrestling bout like this. Caligula challenged him. It was his own fault. The Jews fight well when they have to.’
‘You admire the Jews, don’t you? An intransigent people. Riots again last week outside one of their what do you call them—’
‘Synagogues.’
‘Something to do with this crowd that worships Chrestus. I think that Claudius’s idea was a reasonable one. One of his few ideas that were. Throw the Jews out. They’re a nuisance. They spit on the gods of Rome. And that’s a way of spitting on Caesar.’
‘Such Jews as I know are respectable and intelligent. They read books instead of going to the games. They regard the games as bloodthirsty and childish.’
‘Do, do they? They’re also too rich. I think the imperial exchequer might do a little dipping there. Oh, that was well done.’ Meaning that the pseudo-Jew had caught the real one in an excruciating armlock, and the real one hammered the sand to show he yielded. They stood, bowed, ran off quickly for fear the Emperor might order the diversion of throat-cutting, and then Nero said: ‘What’s next, Tigellinus?’
‘Elephants, Caesar.’
‘Ah, elephants. “Proud with his pachyderms piling the perilous passes.” Part of a poem I once started on Hannibal. Never finished it. Poppea, dearest, I think I could profitably use your friendship with these people. Find out how much they’re storing up. Rifle their whatdoyoucallthem synagogues. Rome needs money. I have the most gorgeous plan for Rome. Art. I can’t finish my poems. I sing, I act, I dance, and it’s all spent, gone, impermanent, smoke on the wind. “Do not expect again a phoenix hour.” I couldn’t finish that poem either. I dream of a lasting work of art.’
‘I’m not adept at using friendships. The Jews trust me.’
‘Do, do they? Ah, marvellous beasts. And so intelligent.’ The elephants had come lumbering on, grey, wrinkled, clumsy. They began to dance very heavily, whipped and cursed by their mahouts, as they are called, to the elephantine music of the hydraulis. The Romans chewed their sausages. Grain, sand, elephants.
It was slow going from Myra. The smell of the grain from the hold was sickening, but not so much as the ship’s roll. The sea, Luke thought, when he had given breakfast to the waves, was like dissolving marble, as though Rome had melted in Tiber. Still something of the poet. Paul lay groaning on his bunk. They shared the cabin with a certain Aristarchus from Thessalonica, who had embarked at Myra and proposed leaving the ship at Cnidus on the Carian promontory of Tropium, if they ever reached there. He was a man of strong stomach who talked much of the kitchen of Tropium, which was said to be exceptional. He also had the grace to be curious about his messmates, and was ready, when Paul’s stomach allowed him to be rational, to hear all about the great Christianising mission. The eating and drinking of the soter seemed to him to be excellent doctrine. ‘A good religion,’ he pronounced, ‘itself eats and drinks of what it supersedes.’ He seemed to have no religion. ‘I’ve heard from certain travellers about what is called anthropophagy in certain primitive places which the Romans have still to colonise. People eat people. Crunch their bones, chew their flesh. Cooked, of course, probably with herbs of the country.’
‘Please. Not now.’
‘My belief is that it’s the salt they’re after. The human body contains salt. If you’re far from the salt of the sea the corpses of your friends and relations, enemies too of course, may well be the only source of that vital mineral.’ He felt he himself at that time had no particular need of a religion. ‘What I need now is cheaper labour and higher profits.’ But he would, when he retired, take a close look at the claims of this new faith. He had the impression that it was popular among slaves, which was no recommendation to free men. While he snored and Luke tossed out of phase with the ship, Paul lay on his back and heard the timbers creak and the waves lurch and wash. He tried to conduct a colloquy with Christ, but Christ was coy and would not come. Only when at length he slept fitfully did answers flow out of a kind of inner marine phosphorescence.
‘What will happen to me in Rome?’
‘Unseemly to ask. Time is a road that is all high gates. Even I had to engage them.’
‘Are you satisfied with what I’ve so far done?’
‘You chose the easier way. You have not sufficiently hammered at the Jews. Seeing me turned into a Lord of the Gentiles, they will the more readily reject my messianic function. It is all a great pity.’
‘Do you still consider me to be a murderer?’
‘Of course. That will not be forgotten. But your murderous energy was needed.’
‘I think I am going to be sick.’
‘You will find a canvas bucket hanging on a peg at the foot of the companionway.’
It took several queasy days to reach Cnidus. Here, hale and crackling with energy, Aristarchus of Thessalonica descended by a net to one of the passenger boats that bobbed in the roads. His packages were hurled down at him; one went into the water and was boathooked out. Then he waved his way to shore. The captain, who had the simple and engaging but not altogether suitable name Philos, for he was misanthropic and had a vile temper, debated with Julius the advisability of putting into one of the two harbours, the eastern one being the larger, among the massed Egyptian shipping, there to await a change of wind. Julius, though a soldier, was granted a certain authority by virtue of his representing the Roman state, while Philos was a mere concessionary, and he prevailed when he said: ‘I see what you mean. Cythera lies due west, but it may take weeks for the wind to veer. My instructions are to consult speed more than safety.’
‘And how about my ship? And my crew? And the cargo? And the passengers who pay out of their own purses not the almighty Roman state? I know how it is, you want to get those bits of jailmeat off your hands and into bed with your everloving. In this trade you go careful.’
Julius jabbed his forefinger on the chart and slid it to the right. ‘We make for the eastern end of Crete.’
‘Cape Salmone.’
‘Is that what it’s called?’
‘I don’t like this one little bit.’
Philos grumbled that he had been right, that the damned northwester was going to crack them like a walnut against those rocks there as they crept south of the thin wide island. By dint of yelling and appealing to thirty years of seamanship, fifteen of them as owner-master, he got his way and steered into Limeonas Kalous or Fair Havens, the first sheltered bay they came to after rounding the cape, there to wait till the wind changed. Julius said:
‘It’s not going to change in a hurry.’ They stood on deck, watching the crew bring skins of fresh water in the launch from the little quay with its highcharging chandlers. The ship laboured at anchor. Paul said:
‘Centurion, captain, if I may speak. The bad time for sailing’s already begun. This is the month of Tishri.’
‘Of what?’
‘October. I may be a landsman, but I’m not unfamiliar with the seas of these parts. You’ll have to winter here.’
Philos grew redly truculent. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t need the advice of a lump of Jewish jailfodder—’
‘You’ll take that back,’ Luke said.
‘I think you’d better take that back,’ Julius suggested. ‘You’re speaking of a Roman citizen appellant to Caesar.’
‘All right, I take it back. What none of you gentry seem to know is that this is a bad winter port.’
Julius surveyed the small islands that half ringed the harbour. ‘Those break the wind, don’t they?’
‘It’s more open than you think. Broadside on, smack – look at those rocks, all teeth. What we’re going to do is make for Phoenix, or Phineka as some call it. See it there on the chart.’ He sniffed as at a good dinner cooking. ‘There’s a change on the way, I’m getting it in both nostrils. With a decent southerly we’ll make Phoenix with no trouble. One step at a time. We’ll think what to do next when I’m anchored safe at Phoenix.’ And without waiting for the approval of the Roman state he gave his orders and the boatswain whistled them. Paul smelt the softness of the south wind. Soon they were coasting gently westwards, and the sailors sang to the wind as to a fickle woman, spoke tenderly to it, prayed that it waft them safe across the mouth of the Gulf of Messara. And, Paul asked himself, was the prayer idolatrous? God was up there, the wind here; you had to pray to something that behaved with the capriciousness of a god and a woman but was palpably down here. Monotheism was not for the anxious daily woodtouching business of the world. A luxury like art?
Then the wind changed. Swiftly, without advance notice. East by north-east – anemos typhonikos, typhon, typhoon. He heard a sailor curse the woman that had changed into a beast called Eurakylon. Greek Euros and Roman Aquilo conjoined into a hybrid like a centaur, though this one winged. They could not head up to the gale. Clouds rolled against each other from opposed quarters of the sky and lightning wrote a brief signature. For those who could not read thunder gave hollow voice some instants after. They went scud before Euraquilo twenty or more sea miles, under ink clouds and the rain’s first bucketloads. He held to the rigging with Julius; Luke fumbled his drunken way below. That island dimly descried to leeward? Cauda. Some called it Gavdho. Thank God or the gods for the shelter of the lee. All hands to the securing of the dinghy. This they had still been towing astern, full of water. The forward sloping foremast served as a derrick; all hauled the lines and helped with the belaying of the boat. Then came the undergirding with the frapping cables.
Paul watched fascinated as the work was done. The cables were dragged out of their locker, hypozomata, a word he had not heard before. Hardy sailors dived overboard and passed the cables under the garboard strake and up again, binding the timbers like a magistrate’s fascis. That wind would smash spars and hull and all if left unbraced. The captain said seriously to Julius: ‘This wind’s going to drive us to Big Syrtis. You know what that is? No. Well, it’s those quicksands west of Cyrene. We’re going to drop the tophamper and set the stormsails. Then we’ll lay to on the starboard tack and do a slow drift north-west.’ He looked fiercely at Paul and said: ‘You a religious man?’
‘You mean a praying man, I suppose. I’ll pray.’
‘Pray to the right gods. Poseidon and Aeolus and the rest of them. We don’t want that Jewish one. He never did the Jews any good and he won’t do us any either. We’re going to need all the help we can get from up there. And,’ he flapped his hands helplessly, ‘all round here.’
Next day Philos ordered the jettisoning of the cargo. The gale was fierce and vindictive. Nobody’s gods had been listening, or perhaps they had. The first thing to go was the bags of sand for the Roman arena. These were dragged from the hold and hurled into the wind, whose cunning fingers picked holes in the sacks and threw the sand back. The grain went over ungrudgingly. The day after the spare gear had to go. ‘Spare gear?’ asked Paul. He soon discovered what that was: the mainyard, a spar as long as the ship. All hands, crew, passengers, prisoners all united to cast it over. There was no more that they could do. The storm did not abate in days. There was no east nor west nor north star, the whole firmament blacked out as with coarse sackcloth, and the sea sloggering and churning and buffeting the bound oaken staves of the ship. The entire company was assembled on the messdeck, battened down but leaks in the bulkheads showing the sea’s impatient intention to establish full possession, a sloshing mate first, then master, god, all. Philos was hopeless about their situation:
‘If I knew where land was, I’d run us ashore, wouldn’t I? But I don’t know where land is. If this goes on we founder, so make up your minds as to that.’ Some of the passengers wailed. Paul said:
‘Forgive my saying I told you so, but if we’d wintered in Fair Havens—’ Philos would have raged thoroughly at that had he not been exhausted. ‘As things stand,’ Paul said, ‘I think we all ought to eat something. It’s been days now, and if we have to meet God we’d better do it on full stomachs.’ Julius would have smiled if his risor muscles had been capable of action: this ageing bald-headed man had been sick in what would pass now for fair weather; he seemed now, near the limit of their desperation, to be in good health and humour. Paul said: ‘One thing I know is this – that I shall reach Rome. You may scoff at dreams, but experience teaches me that dreams are God’s way of breaching the wall. If I am to reach Rome the rest of you will certainly see land. We are, so to speak, all in the same boat. Let’s see now what provisions the sea has left us.’ The ship’s cook, a greatnosed Phoenician, rolled in nausea like the rest of them, but there was nothing more to come up. Two of the company tried to heal the leaks in the starboard bulkhead with bits of soaked sacking. Another baled incoming water into a cask which sloshed over the deck.
Paul and Julius found in the store next to the adjoining galley a sack of wheaten flour whose top half was unsoaked though infested with weavils, a sealed tub of stale water, dried beans no longer dry. The livestock – poultry and two sheep – had long been washed overboard. With flint, dry tinder and green wood they got a fire going. Rough dry unleavened bread and boiled beans. The pitch-sealed amphorae of wine were broached. With many the food stayed down, the wine enlivened to more lively fear of what was to come. Paul sang a cheerful hymn in Aramaic. The comfort of the Lord’s love, his infinite goodness: it was all an outlandish metaphor of men’s obdurate will to survive. ‘Oh, shut up,’ the captain moaned when Paul got to his fifth verse.
Some friends I have had knowledgeable in sea matters have told me that the mean rate of drift of vessels laid to in such weather is something like thirty-six miles in a day and night. Thirteen days and something over an hour would take this ship from Clauda to Koura, which is a point on the east coast of Melita or Malta. With a slight abating of the gale, Philos and his boatswain opened the battens to find scudding cloud and the roaring song of shore breakers. They were drifting in to rock, the breakers told them. Philos ordered a sounding.
‘Twenty fathom.’ Very faint on the contending winds.
Paul and Julius had followed the captain up to night wind which was sweeter than the closed-in odours below. Julius said: ‘I think I believe. If we get through this water I’ll be ready for a drop more.’
‘Baptised? You? But you know nothing of what you have to believe.’
‘Oh, yes, I do. A God who accepts pagans as well as Jews. A fellowship of all people caught in a storm. You broke the bread and poured the wine and said what they’d become. I believed. What more must I do?’ He howled the question over the gale.
It was not a true question. Paul said nothing and listened to the new sounding:
‘Fifteen fathom.’
That meant they were closing in to the unseen rocks. They could smell stale driftweed. The captain shouted for the dropping of four anchors from the stern. Clutching the taffrail, Paul saw the two cables pour from the port hawseholes: they would keep the prow pointing shorewards. Four of the crew then began furtively to cut the lines holding the launch to the deck. He called: ‘What are you doing?’
‘Laying out anchors from the bow.’
‘I didn’t hear the order.’
‘Never you mind about orders.’ They were clearly intending to make for that shore in a safe company. Paul called Julius. Julius called his troops. The troops grappled with the sailors and sent the dinghy splashing overboard to go adrift. That was unwise: they would need that dinghy. For the moment the ship would hold by its stern anchors. They tried to get some sleep, but it was difficult.
At dawn Paul brought out not only the remains of the hard unleavened bread but a basket of hard tack he had discovered nestling behind the last of the amphorae.
‘You’re going to need your strength. Eat. Drink.’ In the sick light, the rocky shore ahead of them, the wind anxious for its morning work of pushing the ship to its last disaster, he broke his own bread and said: ‘Thanks, God, for this gift. Lord, we are children in your hands. We trust, we love, we hope. Amen.’
‘Amen,’ Julius repeated.
Now they saw the shore more clearly. It was the western side of the bay that was rocky, and to this they had been driven. To the east was a creek with a sandy beach. Philos called his orders: ‘Slip your anchors. Jettison what’s left of the cargo. Foresail up to the wind. Unlash the steering paddles. I’m going to run her aground.’
Julius’s under-officer said: ‘The prisoners, sir. They’ll get away. We’ll have to kill them.’
‘The prisoners, sir. Starting with this one here.’ And he nodded at Paul without menace.
‘What sort of a man are you?’
‘It’s the regular thing, sir.’
‘Get out of my sight.’
The man was puzzled. ‘Sir?’
‘No, wait. Pass on this order. Prisoners and troops alike. Let those who can swim get overboard now. The rest—Ah. It’s happening.’
They struck. The foreship hit not rock but a bottom of thick mud which grasped it fast. The stern was left to the pounding of the green dragons with the wind riding their scaly backs, salivating rabid foam in the rancour of the kill. Paul leapt, Julius, Luke, stout as Julius Caesar with his chronicles encased in a leather roll lashed to his waist with part of a ship’s line. Others screamed soundlessly, grabbing at splintering beams. Rari nantes, Vergil’s phrase. Strange, Julius thought swimming, how the brain can remain aloof and pick at the past, the boring schoolroom, coolly testing old useless knowledge in the light or dark of crisis. The rare swimmers fought for the shore. Those who could not swim and thought they were drowning were borne with rough care loving and vicious to the beach, offered couches from which, panting, they could watch the spine and entrails of their ship torn by the sea’s teeth and go into the green maw, while the foreship burrowed deeper and deeper into deep clay. All were saved.
Pauline time, Neronian time – they will not come together, not yet. No matter. That company of stricken voyagers may not even have seen the marine disintegration of marble below or about or above them at the time when Nero was addressing the Senate about enduring monuments of marble. ‘What I seek I seek for Rome only. The city as it is affronts my artistic soul. I would leave behind me – you know what. The expenditure can be furnished from many sources. The people are ready for an increase in taxation after so long a period of fiscal clemency. There is gold lying unused in the city temples. That fine device of the late Empress Messalina, of offering Roman citizenship for sale, could be revived with even larger profit – to the state, I say, to Rome, to Rome, I must make that clear. Moreover, there are communities within our cities that reject Rome, its virtues, its gods. I refer to the Jews and the sect that follows Chrestus or Christus. It would be a gesture of Roman clemency to permit these groups to continue with their barbarous rituals and insolent beliefs – but, of course, to make them pay for such permission with heavy imposts. There are various ways in which the financing of the building of a new city worthy of its citizens could be effected. I put them to you as a matter of imperial courtesy – reminding you that power rests where it is meet that it should rest but that, as a good son of Rome, I acknowledge senatorial wisdom and experience without necessarily having to abide by senatorial advice.’
Gaius Calpurnius Piso stood, a young steely man breasting the muffled response to imperial insolence without fear. ‘The Emperor’s artistic ambitions are well known to this assembly. To rebuild Rome in his own image is an ultimate ambition some of us have long expected. But I would remind the Emperor that there are greater urgencies which cry for his attention. I refer particularly to the situation in Gaul and Spain, where the loyalty of our armies is now being openly attached to their provincial commanders and being removed from Rome. The situation in Britain is appalling, with seventy thousand of our Roman citizens slaughtered by the barbarians and no punitive act yet undertaken—’
Nero was outraged. ‘No! No! It is not for this august body to act as the Emperor’s conscience. The Roman provinces are mere discardable extensions of Rome which may drop off, for all we care, like lizards’ tails. Rome first, Rome last—’
An ancient senator, C. Lepidus Calvus, stood to say: ‘Rome is the provinces. Rome is her Empire. Rome is the imperial world peace and the great flower of order. Rome is not sickly songs and obscene dances and degrading spectacles and a city rebuilt according to the emetic tastes of a mediocre would-be artist. I speak out, Caesar, without fear of the consequences. An old man whose physicians have granted him short time to live has little to fear. But for once the Emperor shall listen to the truth and not the sycophancies of toadies and catamites.’
‘I will accept many affronts,’ Nero said indulgently. ‘But I will not tolerate an attack on the divine spirit of beauty which in my short life I have ever endeavoured to honour. You will see your new Rome whether you will or not. Greybeards, tottering imbecilities, impotent hypocrites – who needs you? I speak for Rome. You speak for outworn notions of civic and imperial virtue, grey and tattered like old sackcloth. I speak for the new age. Gentlemen – you’re dead – all of you.’ He swept out in his frilled purple between his two lines of guards, Tigellinus after him. Part of his retinue stayed behind to perform the dumbshow drama of frowning menacingly at the assembly.
‘Refuge,’ Paul said. ‘Nothing to do with honey.’ He was referring to the name of the island that had given them shelter – Phoenician or Canaanite with a Hebrew cognate. They watched from the deck of an Alexandrian ship called Dioscuri or The Heavenly Twins as it nosed out of the harbour. Golden rock in the sunlight, golden buildings. Publius, the Roman governor, stood with his old father and waved vale from the quay. Luke and Paul together had cured that old man of a fever. All the Roman help imaginable in the brisk conversion of a good part of the island. And Julius himself converted in an inland pool of salt water, Paul explaining: ‘A symbol of cleansing, no more. But symbols are important. The human spirit lives in the world of water and fire and bread and wine. We must not be cut off from the world. The world of things. But things are sanctified by faith. The water of the sea is sanctified by your baptism.’ He waved at a waving group of Maltese or Phoenician converts, squat brown people, quick with their gifts of fire and hobz and ilma.
In calm weather they reached Syracuse after a day’s sailing. The southerly wind which had carried them now fell. They tacked in a northwester towards Rhegium, Italy’s toe. Julius said:
‘I had a strange thought last night. Here stands a soldier who never expected to be converted to the faith. What could happen to one pagan Roman could happen to many. And Rome, without knowing it, makes things easy with her roads and her sea-lanes between province and province. We never know the true purpose of what we do. An empire maintained without swords. I suppose it’s a preposterous idea.’
Paul said: ‘We’re all instruments. My great desire was to go to Rome – voluntarily, a free instrument of the faith. Yet I come to Rome in chains.’ He did not mean that literally, though he knew that real chains were waiting for him, a kind of decorative symbol of an appellant’s bondage to the law.
‘They mean nothing. You’re still a free voice. A prisoner who converted his jailor. Could anything be more improbable?’
‘What will happen in Rome? How will my case be judged? How long must I wait? What will be the outcome?’
‘If you want my opinion, the case will go by default for absence of accusers. You’ll be a sort of prisoner still. But then the courts will wash their hands of you.’
‘Yes. That happened before. Very ominous, this talk of judges washing their hands.’ Julius did not understand. A south wind rose after one day in Rhegium and bore them towards Puteoli, the main port of the south, well sheltered in the bay of Neapolis. Their ship was one of the Alexandrian grain fleet. It had precedence in the crowd of mercantile vessels that crammed the roads. They had to strike their topsails or suppara, the wheat ships not. It was a sign watched for from the quays. The Heavenly Twins eased into its moorings. ‘Italy,’ Paul said, unnecessarily. Luke too looked at Italy, less impressed: he was a provincial Greek but still a Greek. The quay was busy, and the work of the loaders and unloaders, the port officials with their manifests, seemed somehow obstructed by the great statue of the Emperor as the seagod, pointing his trident out at the bay. But the plinth of the high bronze edifice was home to the beggars and the women who sold bruised fruit. The gangplank was lowered. Julius’s troop waited for his orders. Julius said:
‘I have to report to the office of the frumentarii. Then we have a long march.’
‘Is there time to contact the local Christians?’
Julius was apologetic. ‘I’m afraid you have to stay with the rest of the prisoners. We march you in chains and the march starts soon. You can’t go into the town, I’m afraid.’
‘I can,’ Luke said. Whereas most of his fellow voyagers had lost weight, Luke seemed to have put on quiet muscle and his neck had grown somehow taurine. It was as if he had to show these Romans what a Greek kin of Odysseus, who had also been shipwrecked, was supposed to look like. ‘There’s a bunch of Jews over there. They’ll know.’ There was indeed a group of bearded men in striped robes, flashing rings in the sun as they chaffered over carpets and ingots.
Elders of the Neapolitan faithful took the Appian Way with Paul, his fellow prisoners, the military escort. Paul said: ‘One must always question motives. A slave becomes a Christian because he has no hope from this life. He dreams of a heavenly kingdom, a kind of perpetual soothing bath with somebody handing him grapes. He has nothing to lose, everything to gain. I’m more encouraged to hear of the rich giving all to the poor, men in high places risking all, even the Emperor’s displeasure. What’s the official attitude?’
Old Simon, whose family had come to Neapolis from Galilee at a time unrecorded, stroked his brown beard and said: ‘The faith is tolerated. Chiefly because it’s mainly a faith of the poor. There are absurd stories about our cannibalism and incest. We set ourselves free from the constraints of civilised society – so men like to believe. I foresee danger.’
‘When?’
‘Every society has to have an outcast minority to blame – for floods, famine, low wages, the rheumatism of the praetorian prefect. The priests of Rome don’t like to see defectors from the worship of the old gods. Conservative senators grumble about unroman activities. It’s still a faith of upper rooms, cellars, dark corners. But it germinates.’ They had reached Appii Forum. ‘Those look like members of the Roman church. The message got to them – how, God knows.’ There was indeed a knot with welcoming arms, and not all Jews by the look of them. And there, their agedness a mirror of his own ageing, were Aquila and his wife Priscilla. They had come in a cart drawn by an old donkey. Aquila said:
‘In the Tiber, you remember? God, man, you’re in chains. Why?’
The Roman faithful, being, after all, of the metropolis, were greeted with both deference and resentment by the Neapolitan faithful. It was after all, to the Romans that Paul had written three years back, promising a fiery and loving visit sometime, not to the Neapolitans. But Simon and his contingent, politely taking wine with them all and Paul at a waterside tavern, the soldiers standing aloof and wondering with their wondering jailmeat, affirmed Italian Christian unity before being glad to take the road back. The road forward brought Paul and the Romans to the place called Tres Tabernae where, in fact, there were five taverns and more joyous Christian Romans waiting. Julius was divided: what was he – an official of the state or one of this exuberant party, mostly Jewish, extravagant in gesture, full of jocular bufferings and smacking kisses? He decided that he would not properly be a Christian until he had told his wife, and that would not be until the morning after their reunion. She might be annoyed, derisive, indifferent. It made no difference: a man’s soul was not his wife’s property as his body was.
They entered Rome by the Porta Capena, and Julius marched his prisoners to the Caelian hill, headquarters of the stratopedarch or princeps peregrinorum, who was in charge of the imperial couriers. The criminals were sent to jail pending trial; Paul, pending his hearing, had a young soldier literally attached to him by means of a thin long chain and then was told to find his own lodgings. He knew where he was going to stay: with Aquila and Priscilla in the Suburra district. Julius saluted him, Paul sketched a blessing. They would see each other again soon. Meanwhile Julius would himself, on the orders of the princeps, deposit the procuratorial papers concerning Paul with the imperial legal department. Paul dragged his soldier to the Vicus Longus and introduced him to his host and hostess:
‘This young man is Sabinus. He finds this chain as embarrassing as I do, but the law is the law. I understand that you’ll receive a lodging allowance if you’ll take him in. Sabinus, these are Jews. Do you have any objection?’
‘All one to me,’ in the Greek of Calabria. ‘But I don’t like Jewish cooking. I’ll cook my own rations.’
‘Back to the old trade,’ Paul said.
‘Not tents here,’ Aquila said. ‘Canopies. Much more delicate.’
The elders of the unreformed faith were quick to visit him. He sat chained to gawping Sabinus, who understood not one word of Aramaic, while he told them his situation: ‘Brothers, I did nothing against the Jewish faith or the Jewish people, yet I was delivered a prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans at Caesarea. The Romans set me free because they found no cause of death in me. But the chief men of Jerusalem were against me, and I was forced to appeal to Caesar. I have to make it clear that I have nothing against my nation. I’m in chains, as you see, or rather bound with a chain because of the hope of Israel.’
The rabbi Ishmael said: ‘We hear nothing against you. We received no letters from Jerusalem. None of the brethren has come to me with reports or accusations. All I know is that the sect you lead is spoken against. From your own mouth we would wish to hear why this is so.’
‘Or rather – why it should not be spoken against. Very well. Listen.’
While still chained to Sabinus, Paul performed a number of baptisms in the Tiber, the river not running strong at that season. Luke, who had set himself up in the physicians’ quarter off the Via Lata, came to help. Good pagan Roman citizens watched the ceremony and spoke bad words: Cannibals, motherswivers, defiling Father Tiber with their uncleanliness, disgusting I call it. Sabinus said: ‘Listen, friends. I’m his official escort, got that? Imperial orders. Interfere with him and you interfere with me. Now bugger off.’
‘I baptise you, Aquila, in the name of the Most High, the Son who proceeds from him, the Holy Spirit that proceeds from both. To the new life of that Spirit you are now admitted.’
Argument was hot most evenings in the house of Aquila. Sara, who had accepted her husband’s conversion with a shrug, was nevertheless curious to see Paul, as was her brother, who still called him Saul. She shocked the Christians if not the Jews by saying:
‘God forgives all sins, you tell us. What I want to know is – who forgives God?’ Neither Luke nor Julius had read the Book of Job. ‘A good God wouldn’t have allowed what happened to my sister. An innocent girl torn to pieces by a madman while all stood by and saw it. I stood by, Julius stood by, but, most of all, God stood by. God looks after his own, does he? God has never yet looked after his own. The Israelites call him abba – father – only to be kicked in the teeth.’ Paul said:
‘God gave man freedom – for evil or good. A terrible gift but also a glorious gift. God will not interfere with the freedom of his creatures. For good or ill. There is much suffering still to come – for Jews, for Christians, for those who profess no faith. History is a record of human suffering. God knows it, and yet God will not interfere.’
‘But,’ the rabbi Ishmael said, ‘according to your belief he did interfere. He sent down his son – blasphemy, blasphemy – to enter the stream of human life – meaning (oh, blasphemy) that he came down himself.’
‘To die, to suffer, but to rise again. Human evil does not prevail for ever. Death at the hands of human evil is itself a victory, for if a thing does not die it cannot rise again. We share birth with the animal creation. Resurrection we share with God.’
‘I cannot accept it. None of us can.’
Paul spoke up. The parting of the ways. ‘The Holy Spirit spoke through the prophet Isaiah, and the Spirit spoke well. “Go to this people, and say: By hearing you shall hear, and shall in no wise understand. And seeing you shall see, and shall in no wise perceive. For this people’s heart is gross, and their eyes are shut, and their ears stuffed with wax. They do not wish to perceive with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts. Be it known therefore that this salvation of God is sent to the Gentiles: the Gentiles will hear.” Brothers, strangers rather, the Gentiles have already heard.’
‘I think,’ the rabbi said, ‘we have heard enough. I think there is little point in staying to hear more.’ Courteously enough they bade the company good night, these courteous honest Jews set in their way of living in a state of unfulfillable expectation. Paul felt deeply depressed.
Julius was summoned, still in his uniform but in a state of official suspension, waiting for discharge, terminal leave and the piece of land that could be converted into cash, to the office of the jurists Holconius Priscus and Vettius Proculus. These were old men learned in Roman law and they were brisk to elucidate the legal position of Lucius Shoel Paulus or Paullus.
‘That Shoel has a fine exotic ring. Where is he now?’
‘Under a kind of house arrest,’ Julius said. ‘A chain on his wrist. Awaiting your lordships’ pleasure.’
‘The Emperor’s pleasure. The pleasure of the people of Rome. Already detained at that pleasure for – how many years?’
‘Two and a half. That goes beyond the statutory period for bringing an action.’
‘No. His status has changed. He’s an appellant to the state. The period begins from the moment of his appeal – when was it lodged?’
‘Over a year ago.’
‘No record of any accusation being brought here in Rome. Not yet. One more month. If nothing happens we file a writ of Liberetur.’
We come now to an episode possibly apocryphal, though my informants were very circumstantial and most corroborative in their accounts of it. It seems that the Emperor Nero was in the district of Suburra in daylight and in disguise – that is to say bewigged – having called on the sorceress Locusta (still flourishing and too discreet not to be so) about a matter of giving an immediate and painless quietus to the Empress’s ailing pet panther (this story you need not, of course, believe). His guardsmen were also in disguise, meaning cloaked and their daggerhands cloaked too, and they kept their distance from their master five yards behind and ahead. Tigellinus was not with his master, nor was Gaius Petronius who, fearing Tigellinus for some reason, was writing on his estate ten miles down the Via Ostiensis. Nero seemed to remember a particular shop: surely water had been poured on him from that roof there? Who had had the effrontery to do it? It had given him a slight chill and he had not forgotten. He did not propose punishment, which would be an unworthy thing as, after all, he had been dissimulating his status at the time and accepted what came in the way of buffets (a citizen of the equestrian order had beaten him for molesting his wife and with total impunity) as part of the game. Indeed, he looked at the shop with some respect and then with some curiosity. A very old man was stitching away at what looked like sailcloth, and an oldish bald one was working on a recognisable bed canopy. Chained to this one was a Roman soldier. ‘What is this?’ he wished to know. ‘Who asks?’ asked the bald stitcher. Nero said:
‘No ceremony, please. Caesar sometimes likes to walk among his people.’ And he doffed his wig. The two workers recognised a face omnipresent on coins and medallions and started to rise. ‘I said no ceremony. Be seated. Though that soldier there may remain on his feet. Have you a cup of something cooling for your Emperor?’ Thus it was that Paul, who was still an appellant to an abstraction called Caesar, met Caesar face to face and was encouraged to talk to him.
‘A Christian, you say, a Christian? A dangerous sect and an unnatural one, so I’m led to believe.’
‘A religio licita, Caesar; you will find that in the imperial records.’
‘Cannibals, indulgers in unnatural acts of love, is that not so?’
‘Unnatural love is expressly forbidden. As for cannibalism, we do not eat little children, as is too often alleged. We eat merely the body and blood of the Son of God under the disguise of bread and wine. A harmless ceremony which promotes solidarity and has a wholesome mystical meaning.’
‘The son of which god?’
‘There is only one God, Caesar. His simple nature is fracted and diversified under various forms that pass for divine among the Greeks and the Romans. When you think of Zeus or Jupiter you are trying to grasp one aspect only of this single simple God’s essence. The God we believe in made the world and loves it, made man and loves him. He is a highly moral God, detesting evil and approving the good.’
‘What should morality have to do with divinity?’
‘God is of a radiant purity who wishes his creation to attain to a like purity. The smallest sin makes his purity scream out with pain.’
‘That is absurd.’
‘No, Caesar. His infinite perfection must of necessity be appalled by evil.’
‘What do you mean by evil?’
‘Acts of destruction, of corruption, of selfishness.’
‘And by good?’
‘Love of our fellows, even of our enemies, acts which demonstrate that love.’
‘But it’s impossible to love one’s enemies.’
‘Difficult, Caesar, but we have to try. It’s a way of turning our enemies into friends.’
‘A way of life, then, rather like that ridiculous stoical one the ill-starred Seneca taught me.’
‘No, Caesar. We live the virtuous life in order that we may be worthy of standing in the presence of God.’
‘How?’
‘In the next world. After death. The good attain the divine vision and the evil are cast away from it. Their pain consists in knowing what they miss. It is like a million fires burning them for ever and ever.’
‘And all this was taught you by a slave?’
‘No, Caesar, that is another error. God so loves his creation that he was willing to come to earth and live like a man. He taught us, yes, and he was punished for teaching us, strange as that must seem. He was nailed to a tree in Judaea and died. But he rose again from the tomb.’
‘Stuff and nonsense. Dead men don’t rise again. Or women.’ Having affirmed that he nevertheless shuddered.
‘There were too many witnesses, some of them still living, Caesar. He was seen after death. His resurrection bids us believe in our own. The righteous rise again after death. So do the wicked. Both are judged. The sheep are separated from the goats. Eternal bliss or eternal fire. We take our choice. We are free to do so.’
‘So you people see death as a gateway to a better life. If you have been good.’
‘Caesar puts it simply and well.’
‘The destruction of the body is nothing?’
‘Painful perhaps, but acceptable – more than acceptable to the just.’
‘Una nox dormienda. We’re taught to believe that. That is what I believe.’
‘Catullus was wrong, Caesar. The being destroyed rises to a greater beauty. The pagan legend of the phoenix is an apt illustration. The thing must die in order to rise again. We sow in death, we reap in life. Death is no problem.’
‘All you tell me – what is your name?’
‘Paul, Caesar.’
‘All you tell me, Paul, sounds like a negation of life. No wonder there are some who fear you and even more who despise you.’
‘We accept that, Caesar. To be vilified, to suffer execution for the sake of the faith – what happened to the Son of God is not to be feared by mere men and women.’
‘The phoenix, eh? To perish and to rise again. To burn grey, then to burn gold. And what does this Son of God you speak of decree for Caesar, who is not like ordinary men?’
‘Caesar as flesh, blood, bone and spirit must face divine judgement like the rest. Caesar as a ruler must be obeyed. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”’
‘And if it be considered that Caesar is above God?’
‘The made cannot be greater than the maker. There is nothing above God.’
‘If,’ Nero said, ‘there is what you call an eternal maker, there ought to be an eternal destroyer.’
‘God has his enemy, Caesar. What you say is well said. The story goes that God’s most beautiful angel Lucifer the lightbringer rebelled against God’s rule and was cast from God’s presence. God could not destroy him, because God is committed to creation. God could not prevent this evil one from being committed to destruction, because God made his creatures totally free. So evil stalks the world, but evil cannot eventually win. Good is too powerful.’
‘This sounds as if your God wills himself to impotence.’
‘A measure of his love, Caesar.’
‘Interesting.’ Nero got up to go. ‘If I accepted your religion – no, please remain seated – I would have to be good. But an emperor cannot always afford to be good. He cannot love his enemies. It is regrettable but unavoidable that he should have to destroy them. A ruler is forced into what you would call the commission of evil.’
‘There’s always forgiveness, Caesar. God forgives everything. God responds at once to the least gesture of repentance. God, as I told you, is good.’
‘And yet he throws people into fire and emptiness or whatever it was you said?’
‘No. The sinner throws himself into the fire. Choice, Caesar, is free to all. To slaves and to Caesar alike. Even Caesar is free to live the good life. A life that is no more than a shadowy preparation for the true life which begins with the death of the righteous. But,’ and now it was as if he were thumping away at the Ephesians, ‘if we identify ourselves with the fallen forces of destruction, then be in no doubt as to the nature of that ultimate punishment. For, though the body dies, the body rises in a transfigured form for bliss or for punishment, whichever we ourselves choose. Punishment, Caesar – loss, darkness, emptiness: filled with pain greater than the pain of fire for ever and ever. Not even an emperor is exempt from the logic of his own acts. As a man sows—’ And he bent to a different sewing. Nero felt himself to be dismissed. He said:
‘And the first step to the faith?’
‘Baptism, Caesar. The washing away of past sins.’
‘Washing?’
‘In water, water transfigured into a sign of redemption.’
‘Ordinary water?’
The old man who had been stitching canvas looked uncomfortable. Nero nodded, put on his wig, sketched a kind of confused imperial blessing, then left. He walked rather shakily towards the Imperial Forum, his cloaked guards before and behind. An old woman in a shawl turned and grinned at him. It was Agrippina with blackened teeth, her hair scorched, back from that place. Hell. And then it was not. There was no need for his mother to come back in brief visitations from the outer blackness. Nor Britannicus. Nor Octavia. Nor all the others whose names he had forgotten. The vision of fiery emptiness was probably enough. Stain the illimitable candour of eternal beauty or goodness or whatever it was with splashes of crimson. The pure white screams aloud in pure white pain.
It might be said that Paul sowed certain notions in the mind of his Emperor. That there was an ultimate creator seemed totally logical, maker of Jupiter and Apollo and Mars and Priapus and the rest of the comic pseudopantheon: it always had seemed so, having much to do with the deathless principle of beauty. But that there should be an eternal principle of goodness and an everlasting system of reward and punishment was not so acceptable. Seneca had droned on about it or something like it, but he had never propounded the possibility of an elected damnation. Nero found it easy enough to see this as eternal fire. He saw it: an eternally blazing city full of the screams of the blazing. But the property of destruction which did not destroy was hard to accept. It seemed more logical to pass from earthly time to a region which might be termed parachronic but not achronic: the fire could burn out guilt and the purged being rise from it to the purity of the eternal vision: beauty, the Platonic idea of it personalised, deified into a kind of work of art that moved and breathed as a deathless organic being, never-ending music that offered also a never-ending act of love. Absurd perhaps. Certainly indeed absurd. There was time and there was not time. In not time you went to bliss or to eternal punishment. Nero did not at all like the notion that there were in his Empire perhaps thousands who already had an image of him, the Emperor, burning in hell. For ever and ever. While slaves with names like Felix and Chrestus leered down at his fiery screaming from a cool abode that was all poetry and music. It was not right, it was not just, it was a situation of laesa maiestas and he was not going to have it. Rid yourself of the believers and you were rid of the belief. He saw the fire and then, through the grace granted only to the artist, he saw the phoenix rising from it. That was different, that was encompassable. And then again he saw the pure illimitable candour. It was offended. It screamed and its scream filled eternity. It was all nonsense.
Tigellinus thought so too. ‘Goodness. The summum bonum. Each man has his own. Each living thing has its own. There is no single summum bonum. What is the summum bonum of the hungry lion? The lunge at the throat of the helpless hind. Goodness as divine order? Balderdash. Order is expediency. Order is a dead body. For the common people it means tomorrow being no worse than today. The exceptional break order in order to see the blinding light. You don’t understand me? The sharp truth of pleasure in the act of outrage. Tonight, say, we deflower the Vestal Virgins—’
‘Oh no.’
‘Oh no? A new thing and a shocking thing. The fires of another power breaking out of the destructive act. A door into a reality the generality of men cannot know. Only through certain modes of destruction can the new visions be attained.’ He paused, then he said: ‘We didn’t build the Empire on notions of tolerance and brotherly love. And yet is not the Empire the greatest good the world has ever seen? There are forces ready to break it not through action but through inaction. Love one another, and that means those unwashed tribes on the Rhine and the Danube. Let’s have them in, taking Rome, toppling the gods. The Jews, the Chrestus people – they’d let it happen.’ And then: ‘The Empress is too friendly with the Jews.’
‘She’ll get money out of them yet. Rome needs Jewish money.’
‘She doesn’t want Jewish money. She’s fascinated by their dark eyes and olive skin and their sexual knowledge and magic handed down by their desert prophets. The child she is carrying is certainly not yours.’
Nero, enraged, hit out and left red ringmarks on Tigellinus’s left leathery cheek. ‘That’s outrageous. That’s treasonable.’ Tigellinus always found it a good thing to see how far he could go. Then, as now, he prudently drew back.
‘I’m probably wrong. My devotion to Caesar is such that I sometimes see harm where there is none. Think no more of it. She’s an estimable lady. I beg pardon for my unworthy suspicions.’
That night Nero’s dreams were, as so often, of the next world, whose geography, climate and social organisation had been clearly defined by the epic poets. A thin place that lacked blood. He, Caesar, joined the thin phantoms. There was no rancour among ancient enemies. It was not a question of love or forgiveness. There was just not enough blood to feed the violent emotions of the living. Then he saw another next world and there was nothing thin or bloodless about it. Fire. Nerves strung like lyrestrings to the snapping point but unable to snap. Pain. The snow, maddened by its defilement, screamed. Nero screamed and liberated himself from the dream. That damned Christian.
That damned Christian was informed that the writ of Liberetur had gone through. He and Sabinus were no longer chained to each other. Paul, having spoken to the faithful, many of them newly created in Tiber water, on the Esquiline, Caelian, Viminal, Aventine and Quirinal hills, and even on the Campus Martius, made ready to sail for Spain, ample travel money clanking at his girdle. A large crowd attended him on the quay at Puteoli – Jews, Gentiles, patricians, slaves, the miles Sabinus – and some wept, emotional lability being a property of the temperament of the peninsula. Luke told Paul he had come to the end of his story and had had ten copies made by professional scriveners. He needed a dedicatee, some fictional personage who might be imagined as requiring elementary instruction in the faith and the spread of the faith. ‘Any lover of “God”,’ Paul said. He grinned. ‘To the Emperor? No.’
‘I’ve become rather friendly with one of my patients – a poet named Gaius Petronius. Sincerely interested. He’s read my little book with flattering avidity. A former friend of Caesar’s, looking for the light he says. Call me Theophilus.’
‘Theophilus will do. Theophilus could be anyone.’
Embraces, kisses, tears, women’s wailings. A song, pagan but appropriate: ‘Come back again, come back.’ Paul waved from the deck as his ship, bound for the Spanish port built by Hamilcar Barca, nudged its way out of the throng of shipping. He noted distractedly another ship easing its way in. An old gnarled man with an unkempt beard sat on a coil of rope on that ship, distractedly watching Paul’s ship ease its way out. ‘And where would that be off to?’ A sailor told him. ‘Aye, it’s a big empire they have. A big world altogether. I’ve seen little enough of it.’
‘I thought you’d been in this line yourself. You know the knots and the tackle.’
‘Boats on Galilee lake. Mending nets. Fish. My line.’
So Peter came hesitantly down the gangplank, a knotted bundle on his shoulder and in his gripe a roughly cut stick of blackthorn. He was old and unwell and he had to get to Rome, wherever that was. There were a lot of people around, Jews, Gentiles, who seemed as though they might be Nazarenes, but they chattered in Latin or Greek, languages he had never learnt, and it was too late now. But ‘Rum?’ he asked a lounging dockworker, who pointed vaguely. All roads led to, they said. After an aching mile or so he came to what was called the Appian Way. Much traffic passed him – nobility or gentry in litters, slaves carrying bundles under the lash, maniples of sweating troops under barked orders. Covered in dust, he hobbled to the roadside and sat under a tree of a kind he did not know – beech, pine, plane? He ached, his joints creaked. He should have stayed in Joppa but James was urgent about this mission. The man he had to see in Rome was named Linus, a Graeco-Roman or something, a real foreigner but a Nazarene. Had to see him, and they didn’t speak each other’s language. Peter whimpered to himself. There was a ship leaving for Caesarea in a few days, and he had the money for the fare: the Jerusalem brethren had given him more than he needed. There was a curious sense in Jerusalem of things moving away, closing down, of the faith losing ground, of apostasies and a general slackness. It was all a matter of the Jews and the Romans now. The Nazarenes were outside it all, preaching peace when all the talk was of an impending struggle. Peter hungered for Joppa, where he combined leadership of the local church with membership of a fishing syndicate. But he was head of the whole church: he had been told that a long time ago. Not James. The man Saul who became Paul had been given no real instructions, and it was he who, with his fine Hebrew and Greek and Latin, had seemed to regard himself as in charge. He, Peter, was the rock, scared of cocks crowing, scared of his own dreams, his limbs weak and his head fuddled. From his scrip he drew the comfort of some dried fish and bread and a little flask he had filled at the fountain near the docks, spring water gushing from the grinning gob of a creature with horns in dull metal. He had to go on and would when he was rested. The dream he had had on shipboard had been as clear and as sunlit as that old one about goatmilk and pigs and lobsters which had caused so much trouble. He dreamt he sat under a tree like this and then made up his mind to go back to the port and wait for the ship back to Caesarea. Good summer weather and plain sailing. And then he appeared, he, jauntily carrying a crosspiece on his immense shoulders, smiling at Peter and shaking his head as if at his foolishness, crowing briefly like a cock and jauntily lightfooting it Romewards. That meant that he, Peter, had to go too, though on heavier feet. He sighed, rose, set himself to trudging north, seeing a foreign sun go down and a dangerous foreign night coming on with strange slowness, then he settled himself under trees, wrapped in his cloak, hearing owls and other tsiporim of the laylah, including one that poured out song as if its heart would break. He saw known stars but felt desperately homesick. The wrong man. He had always felt that.
But he trudged another day and another. Nobody spoke to him. He bought food at stalls by pointing. At the place where the taverns stood he heard what sounded at first like Aramaic but turned out to be some other tongue, Phoenician probably. On his brain he had imprinted a name and a vague location. Linus. A fountain on a street near the Via Labicana to the east of the city. At length he saw the outskirts of a great town, bigger than Jerusalem, playing hide and seek with him through a grove of what he took to be pines. He asked a donkey-driver at once for the Via Labicana, but the man laughed at him and made wide arm gestures. A long long way away. He slept another night under trees. Hot dry weather, perfect for sailing home. In a morning that began faint green and oystershell with eventual gilding, he ate the breakfast he had bought of an overyeasted loaf and a half pint of thin and acid wine. He took breath and, under a company of quarrelling crows, limped towards the city.
Breathtaking. Not a place for him. There was the faint smell of the brutality of nobody caring for anybody else. Via Labicana? An old woman emptying a bucket into the gutter of a street that was a dark valley to toppling tenements could not at first understand him. She pointed. He was no wiser. So people lived here, climbing stair after stair in order to dry their wet garments on the sills. And hurrying down, chewing hasty bread, to go to work. Everybody had to work.
He walked squinting towards a sun still low on the horizon. He looked for fountains, finding one in every piazza, Rome’s benison of spring water to its citizens. Women were up early washing clothes, filling buckets to carry up all those stairs, though some ingenious families hoisted them by rope and pulley to the windowsills. There was quarrelling, very Jewish, with arms raised to heaven, over the price of the fish that a vendor slapped on his handbarrow. Peter asked a woman with a dribbling child on her hip his one-word question. She understood, a small morning miracle, and pointed.
The same question again as he mounted in pain the many worn steps of the tenement. Linus? Sum Linus, ego. A youngish swarthy man, beardless, rather bald, looked down the stairwell. Petrus, Peter said panting, at least knowing his own name. He went up. Petrus the piscator in Rome, entering a single room seven storeys up, seeing a bed and a table and a dead oilstove. The two Nazarenes or Christiani looked at each other, a faith in common but no tongue. But Linus offered yesterday’s bread, watered wine, some cold thin slices of veal, garlic. He remembered something belatedly: he went down on his knees for Peter’s blessing. Then he went out for an interpreter. Peter was left looking at a tableload of scrolls, all in Latin. He looked for a place to void water, not fancying a trip down (and a struggle up again) to look for a public latrine. He found a bucket behind a curtain and emptied, with some little pain but more relief, his old bladder. Soon Linus came back with a young Roman Jew who was popularly known as Canis because of his bark. His real name was Shadrach ben Hananiah but he was used to Canis, call me Canis. It comforted Peter to hear his own speech again, the accent not far off the Galilean. He said:
‘Peter, head of the faithful, appointed by Christ. You are the man I was sent to see. What, by the way, is your trade?’
‘I work for a publisher of pagan books. Poetry, history. I copy. I am a good copyist. Why am I the man?’
‘James in Jerusalem showed me your letters. I couldn’t read them, nor could he, but there were some who could and they made translations. Rome is to be the mother. A mother, James said, hiding behind the skirts of a whore.’
‘Why me?’
‘Right, I come to Rome, appointed father of the faithful but a fool who knows neither Greek nor Latin. But I’m old and it won’t be long for me. Age or the axe will do for me. I have dreams just as James does. He sees it all over there, and I think he’s right. The man Paul saw it too and he’s right, though I fought against it. But you won’t know this man Paul.’
‘Oh yes. He wrote a letter to Rome then he came to Rome. He’s been gone less than a week. Oh yes, I met Paul. Remarkable man.’
‘But not one of the twelve,’ Peter said. ‘A Jew who found no luck with the Jews. Well, so he was here. And now he’s gone.’
‘He’ll be back, he promised. What you say disturbs me. We look to the mother church in Jerusalem. Rome is just another pagan city.’
‘Two faiths in Jerusalem,’ Peter said, ‘and they can’t live together. It was a faith for the Jews we taught, but it wasn’t a faith that taught rebellion and bloodshed. The Romans have played into the hands of the Zealots. Slack, corrupt, cruel. There has to come a breaking point. This Nero you have here has let things collapse all over. Now the Jerusalem Jews want to get in and drive out the Romans. They think Rome will do nothing about it, and they may be right. But they don’t want the Nazarenes with their peace and love and strike the other cheek. Look, it’s obvious when you come to think of it. The faith has become a faith for the Gentiles. Some day the Gentiles will teach the Jews, but not yet. None of us ever thought it would be like that. And here you have the centre of the big Gentile Empire. This is where the mother church has to be. And you its first true father.’
‘I’m totally unworthy.’
‘No. You’re a Roman. You know Rome. It’s your city.’
‘A Greek in fact. But long in Rome.’
‘Right, you know the Rome of the streets and the squares and the fountains. And the Rome of the cellars and the dark places.’
‘We practise the faith in the sunlight. We’ve no need of the dark places.’
Peter shook his head several times. ‘No. You’ll be glad of the dark places. I can feel it coming. Smash the Jews for revolting and smash the Nazarenes while you’re about it, the Nazarenes being only a kind of Jews.’
‘That’s not true any more.’
‘I know it’s not true. I know only too well it’s not true. Something went wrong somewhere.’
‘This is a great moment for us, your coming here. You must speak to the church.’
‘In Aramaic?’
‘The language of the master, the authentic voice. Heavens, it’s still hard to take in. You knew him, worked with him, saw him crucified in that place, on that hill—’
‘Golgotha. No, I wasn’t there. God help me, I wasn’t there.’
The meeting was held in a disused gymnasium, not far from the Garden of Maecenas and the Mansion of Aulus, at the corner of the Via Labicana and the Via Tiburtina. Some of the Roman Christians were Jews and remembered their Aramaic; most of them were uncircumcised, some fair-haired; some were of the patrician class. The Gentiles looked with a little awe and a certain contempt hard to hide on this unkempt ancient, a pioneer from the mists, unable to explicate the mystery of the Trinity or relate the coming of the Messiah to an obscure prophecy in Vergil’s Eclogues, talking about the genesis of the Paternoster in a remote and uncouth tongue: ‘For Jesus himself taught me this prayer, me and my companions, common fisherfolk, when we were fishing in the lake of Galilee. A storm arose and we were afraid, but he told us never to feel fear. We must trust in the father who keeps us in his care, praying: “Our father, who are in heaven, may your name be blessed …” They joined in, some in Greek, most in Latin. But the Gentiles were all a little embarrassed.
When the meeting broke up after the blessing and munching of the sacramental bread, those whose sense of smell was well developed sniffed at smoke coming from the south on a hot dry wind from the south. Peter could smell nothing.
Nobody knows how the fire began, but there are still some who swear they saw Tigellinus setting a brand to an oilshop all of dry wood just north of the Servilian Gardens on the Aventine. Nearly all the dwellings there were of wood and, in that dry summer’s night heat, it was pure tinder. Accius owned the oilshop but did not live in it. Seeing it blaze from his door fifty yards away, he yelled for men to draw buckets from the fountain, to form a bucket emptying chain, but the yellow and blue tongues licked the water and asked for more. The heat brought sweat and the sweat blinded. Black flinders gyrated in the fiery air like bats. The fire climbed the hill and crunched the pines, ate the wooden summer house of Lucius Aemilius and grew fat on it. The family of C. Aeserninus was trapped in its small brick mansion when the fire entered and climbed the stairs, eating as it went. A child was thrown in mother’s panic from an upper casement and was brained on the stone surround. In District XI on the borders of the Tiber the tenements near the Circus Maximus sang a blazing song to high heaven, invisible in the smoke, and the hundred families within fought each other with claws out, coughing more than screaming, as they blocked the stairwell. Those who survived the desperate tearing saw the fire coming in for them at the main tenement entrance. Some yelled their way through it and then ran till they dropped, having turned into fire. The black flakes danced and rode on the wind and dissolved like black snowflakes into the river, what time men waded in the river with their canvas buckets and passed up water which was a mere dandelion in the jaws of a cow. A warehouse near the crossing of the Via Ostiensis and the Via Latina was crammed with jars of olive oil which burst their stoppers or cracked in the flames and sent out a fiery aromatic river with squeaking rats swimming on it, tails little torches, pelts singed. The library of the Aequiculi on the Aventine was housed in marble, but fire was puffed in through a casement whose wooden shutters were speedily devoured, and then a treasury of Greek and Roman history was a swift meal like frozen fruit juice to the thirsty jaws of the gang of flame. The librarian Bogudes made a longer snack, but he joined his manuscripts in ashes.
The fire spread east as well as north, as far as the Caelian. The Temple of the Divine Claudius was the core of a terrible conflagration in which the houses of priests and augurs went up in spite of prayers that the flapping of the flames drowned. Men and women in undress or full dress blackened and smoking at the hems ran the streets moaning, carrying household treasures of no value. The Temple of Isis seemed to put out a hand of Egyptian magic to forbid the passage of fire further to the east; it was obeyed. To the north of the city, in the area enclosed by the Pantheon, the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Castra Urbana, fire raged that seemed to owe nothing to the colonising zeal of the scarlet empire to the south, for the Baths of Agrippa, the Temple of Jupiter, and the headquarters of the city vigiles were a zone untouched by even the tips of the fingers of the terror.
Pagan Romans, those who had sat with their gristly sausages and skins of watered wine howling for the real red at the games, stacked and ranked in a semblance of mock civic order, were now thousands of ants scurrying from the fist dinged and dinged and dinged again on their hills. What do we care about them, Canus and Capys and the Casca brothers, Cestius and Crassus and Domitilla and Fausta and Augusta and the dancing girls just in from Alexandria, Polla and Vettius, the brothel madam Omphale, Macro and Marius, the Salnatores and Livius and Livilla and? Little, since we do not know them. But Caleb and his wife Hannah and their son Yacob we have at least met. They were tenement dwellers in the north of District XII, with two rooms on the fifth floor. They were in bed, and they woke to strange light and heat and noise. ‘The skies are on fire!’ Hannah screamed, and she grasped the sleeping boy. In their night attire they fell over each other to the door and saw men and women scampering, all tangled hair and bare legs, down the stairway, children clutched and howling. Caleb ordered his wife to stay behind him, clutching his robe with one hand and their son with the other, as he proceeded brutally to fist his way through the gasping and coughing throng that grew thicker at each new landing of the stairway, all eager to crush each other and be crushed and then to be eaten by the flames that waited at the great door of the tenement building. ‘Now!’ Caleb cried, and they thrust down to the second landing, clawed back at, clutched, bleeding. In the wall was an open casement and beneath it a clutch of young arbutus well lighted by flames from the left but itself as yet untouched. ‘Now!’ he yell-coughed, then he leapt out to the air. The bush broke his fall and he stood barefoot on hot earth. ‘Throw him!’ She threw the child blindly, and Caleb as he caught him had no time to be puzzled that the boy was not a yelling wheel of limbs but strangely still as though sleeping through it all. He placed the child on the ground while Hannah hurled herself at his arms from the high window. He caught her. She picked up Yacob. The boy bled heavily from the head. Was that bare bone showing through? She could not scream, only cough her heart out at the hidden heavens. They ran with the body south and hardly stopped till they reached the triple junction of the Via Ardeatina, the Via Latina and the Via Appia. Here there was no fire, only a huddle of moaning mourning bereft.
Marcus Julius Tranquillus and his wife and daughter were safe on the Janiculum, as most of the Christians were safe on the Viminal and Esquiline. The Jews had suffered down there in Districts XII and XIII, their shops ruined, cheap wooden houses charcoal fringed with fire sated. Those on the outskirts of the fire on the Caelian saw Rome burn to the north-west, the Palatine too. Some, looting, were drunk and saw more. Julius Caesar marched a flaming legion through the streets, Romulus and Remus sucked fire from the dugs of a wolf that was all fire, it was rumoured that the Tiber was all aflame with the oil that had rolled heavily into it from the store south of the Circus Flaminius. Jupiter rode a flaming winged bull over the flames, picking up gobbets of flame in his hands and hurling them high in joy. The Vestal Virgins held up flaming skirts to show flaming pudenda. Over the bridge that led from the Capitoline to the Naumachia Augusti the screaming ants scurried, with no eyes for the imperial barge moored to the Tiburine island just to their north. There the Emperor and his entourage watched the fire march and blare over the Circus Maximus to the Palatine, indifferently crunching and swallowing the fine parkland and the gorgeous palaces. Tigellinus said, deeply moved by the purple and gold majesty of the invading army of flame, that there was virtue in catastrophe, that now Rome, or Neropolis if that was to be its new name, had to be remade, even the Senate must see that. Nero said, trembling as if on the brief road to orgasm:
‘There’s no art like this. No music or lyric verse or tragedy like this. At last I see what I’ve only sung before. End of the second Troy, birthpangs of the third and last.’ And he sang:
‘Richly enrobed in the flames of her funeral,
Ilium yielded her limbs to the fingers of fire,
Lovingly, lustingly, cooing like columbines,
Roaring like lions and howling like wolves of the wood …’
But he felt the despair of even the major artist at the inadequacy of words. The huge smoke pall had blotted out stars and moon, the tiny smut bats flew in massive disorganised hordes, smoke choked, Rome was eaten steadily, the blackened marble not yielding but the hidden supports of wood chewed to nothing, the metal struts buckling in their white heat. And all the time, across the river, the screams and groans and manic coughing of a city that had suffered before as all cities must suffer but never before like this. Rome had had her fire watch for two hundred years, trained men with water-pumps in their station just west of the Via Lata, but the strong dry wind blew fire up at them from the south and they retreated hopeless. Only with the sudden shift of the wind to the north-west did it seem possible to shove the fire back from the threatened Forum and the northern edge of the Palatine. But it was too late for the rescue ladders and the damp blankets huge as fields in the stricken streets of the tenements. The citizens of Suburra, the Quirinal and the Esquiline came down with slow timidity to the Gardens of Maecenas and the fringe of what was to be the Domus Aurea to see those who had flung themselves north of the horror with a kind of sick wonder but also the desire to help, but they felt helpless in the face of maddened women with charred hair screaming over the charred bodies of their children. The smell of Rome had become the smell of a barber’s singeing multiplied a manic millionfold.
Peter, whose new home was the shop of Aquila, since he could no longer face the climb to Linus’s apartment, spoke of Sodom and Gomorrah, but the Gentiles did not comprehend the reference. It was the task of Christians to give aid to the stricken, but what help could they give except prayer? Those who lay stricken in the Gardens of Maecenas or in the streets in the triangle whose base was the Via Praenestina looked up in weak bewilderment to see an old bearded man with a staff raise spread fingers over them and mutter magic spells in an uncouth language. Luke the physician brought his scrip of ointments but stood impotent over hard dry blackened flesh beyond mere soothing. There was terrible thirst about and it could be slaked, but too often it was a viaticum before a sleep from which there was no rousing. Catullus strode glowing like a cinder muttering about una nox dormienda.
Dawn fought its way through the pall, which was drifting to the south-east. It would have been better if the night had continued, hiding the poor blackened corpses, the timbers whose dying glow could be roused to a brief curse of flame in the dawn breeze. The stench was insupportable, the black flinders flew languidly, burnt-out groves sent, in the stronger wind of full morning, flurries of skeletal leaves, substance eaten but veins miraculously whole. The nakedness brought a new obscenity: the city had cast off the clothes of its foliage to glory in the visible horror of its mutilation. For two days corpses lay untended for the rats to gnaw. In the dying smoke a smoky figure or two could be seen stumbling bowed over and through the ruins, searching and not finding or else, in crazed automatism, affirming life through aimless locomotion. On the third day the Senate called itself together and found some of its members missing. None knew where the Emperor was: it was rumoured that he had transferred himself and the remnant of his court to quarters in the Castra Praetoria. Gaius Calpurnius Piso was elected head of a small body of inquiry into the causes of the fire which still smouldered and occasionally flared. The group glumly trod rubble, jumped away from sudden disclosures of healthy flame beneath it, put togas over noses in the presence of black cadavers. On the Aventine they met, as they thought they might, Tigellinus and a maniple of Praetorians. He was waiting for Caesar. Who arrived in a litter. With him was the Empress, clearly pregnant. Piso introduced himself, stating the Senate’s business.
‘—And, of course, to supervise the provision of places of refuge for the unfortunate victims.’
‘I know you, Piso, don’t think I don’t. You rebuked me in the Senate for various derelictions whose nature I can’t clearly remember. Can nobody do anything about this stench? See, the Empress is being made sick by it all.’ A senator made a token gesture of waving the stink away. ‘Well,’ Nero said, ‘as to the homeless, poor souls, your Emperor has already made certain arrangements. The imperial gardens are at their disposal, and carpenters and tentmakers are already providing temporary shelters. Also, of course, the Campus Martius is being made ready for housing what I fear must be an incomputable number of sick and homeless. Messengers have been sent to Ostia to bring in emergency supplies. Things are being taken care of. Did you anticipate otherwise?’
‘We marvel at the speed with which Caesar has put things into operation.’
‘Reverend senators, we shall meet tomorrow to discuss the raising of finances for the rebuilding of the city. There is not a moment to be lost.’
‘Has Caesar,’ Piso asked, ‘any notion of how this disaster may have started?’
‘Oh, Rome has always been a terrible place for fires. These wooden shops and tenements, oil lamps, sudden strong winds. On this occasion we have been more unfortunate than usual.’ But he could not help seeming to smile. ‘But think of the phoenix, the resurrection, that sort of thing. We must always look on the bright side. One of these days, and it may be soon, you will look on a Rome to be proud of.’
‘The trouble is,’ Tigellinus said to his master, walking beside the northward-jolting litter, ‘they will want to fix the blame somewhere.’
‘Why? An act of the gods, an accident. Rome has known it before.’
‘May I put it another way. They will feel happier, if you can talk of such an emotion, if they have someone to blame. If I may say so, Caesar, you’ve talked too much about the great phoenix Neropolis.’
‘Every emperor has talked, and freely too, of finding brick and leaving marble.’
‘This Emperor is no darling of the Senate. It is the Senate that will want to fix the blame in one particular direction. Your trouble will begin with the finance bills. The Senate will talk of starving the legions in the provinces to pay for Caesar’s folly.’
‘It is no folly. You have seen the plans. The plans are a masterpiece of ah planning.’
‘I’ve seen the plans. You have not been backward in showing the plans. Everybody has seen the plans. They have not been rushed into being to meet an emergency. Those plans have been around for more than a year.’
‘Oh, longer, longer, Tigellinus. I’ve had the dream a long time.’
‘I think Caesar will have to pay a little money out of his own purse before he can even dream of putting those plans into operation.’
‘Money? To whom?’
Tigellinus sighed deeply, then coughed: there was still acrid smoke about. ‘Well, I would suggest a certain senator named Vettius Caprasius. Quite an orator. He will implant some of the right ideas.’
‘Where?’
‘Leave all this to me.’
It was a week later that a demure Nero sat in the senate house, listening to an eloquent Vettius Caprasius, a lean man in early middle age, who told Caesar and the Senate who were the people who started the fire.
‘Caesar, reverend senators, I rise to report on the findings of the special commission appointed to enquire into the causes of the recent devastating conflagration that struck and crippled our city. Documents, letters, depositions – all of which the Senate is encouraged to examine at its leisure – point to an inescapable conclusion. The fire was an outrage perpetrated by a dissident group of this city, one that despises Rome, flouts the gods, regards the traditional Roman virtues – including those military virtues which built and sustain an empire – as totally derisory. Not the Jews, oh no. The Jews have suffered as much as any yet have been quick to contribute lavishly to the reconstruction fund. I refer to the Christians or Chrestians, a sect favoured by slaves, plebeians, perverts and foreigners, to whom vice is virtue and virtue vice. Well known for such hideous secret practices as cannibalism and incest, for refusing patriotic service of all kinds, including the taking of arms against Rome’s enemies, they are at last revealed as terrorists and incendiaries. It is proposed that a new commission be formed to drag these loathsome reptiles out of their holes and to deal with them not according to the dictates of the law but in obedience to our impulses of disgust and outrage. We do not try mad dogs in courts of justice; we kill them outright. They bade our city suffer. They must suffer themselves.’
‘Oh, surely if we fined them,’ Nero put in over the growls and murmurs, ‘heavily that is, justice would be satisfied?’
‘As always, Caesar is too soft-hearted. Let just indignation take its inexorable course.’
Not all the Senate agreed. Many of the Senate had a fair idea of what was going on. But there was no harm in letting the suffering people get at the Christians; it stopped them from clawing at the senators, who had already been inveighed against by mob orators as defective fathers and cold-hearted self-servers with villas untouched by the fire. Why, even Caesar himself had suffered: he wept bitterly over the ruined Palatine. Tigellinus quietly paid a mob to howl against the Christians and augment itself in a march on a house insolently near to the Imperial Forum. They knew the day to choose – Dies solis, when this atheistic lot got together to stew babies and eat them. The house belonged to a Greek master tailor named Lemos because he was goitrous, and the mob was delighted to find him presiding over a meal of white meat and Greek wine with others, men, women and children, of his filthy persuasion. The white meat, they swore, was really bread: taste it. It tasted like bread but the mob knew it was really meat. They spat it on the floor then went into the kitchen, where they made brands out of firewood and then began to inflame the house. Let these bastards get burnt like poor decent Romans did. They went further; they made a fire in front of the house, feeding it with furniture, books and bedclothes. Then they threw on it the smallest Christian child they could find, save the poor little swine from these bastards’ cannibalism. The adult Christians, who were supposed to turn the other cheek of the arse they’d been battered on, turned very nasty and clawed the righteous mob. They were thrown on the fire too, some of them.
It was then that the military took over. Christians had deliberately burnt this house which belonged to a decent Greek Roman named Lemos, who had a contract for making uniforms for the Praetorian Guard. Ergo they were incendiarists. Ergo they had set the city on fire. The soldiers set up under orders ten-foot stakes at six-foot intervals in the charred earth of the residential areas that had suffered most, and to these they bound Christians, men, women and children, soaked them in pitch and set light to them with torches. It was not hard to find the Christians. They did not deny what they were and they made a cabbalistic sign in the form of a cross when they were arrested. But of course they did not get all the Christians: there were too many of them.
They did not get Marcus Julius Tranquillus, for instance. As they packed, Sara scolded him. ‘I said from the first, you should never have got mixed up with them.’
‘Nonsense. Paul warned us we’d be scapegoats for something. Thank God we got the warning in time.’
‘Paul – Paul – First he’s responsible for a shipwreck, now for a fire. I didn’t like the look of the man.’
‘You’re talking foolishly, woman. There’ll be time to knock the nonsense out of you when we’re safe in Pompeii.’
‘How do you know we’ll be safe in Pompeii, wherever that is?’
‘Because my uncle will make sure we’re safe. Respected, discreet, a reader of books, kind, lonely – I owe him a visit. The story will be I incurred Nero’s displeasure for something trivial. He’ll be glad to shelter us. He believes in the old republic.’
‘Disaster, nothing but disaster. God makes the fire, God makes the wind blow. Blessed be the name of the Lord. All through our history. Escape, exile, wandering in the desert.’
‘For once the Jews are nobody’s enemy. It’s the Christians this time. You know, preachers of love and tolerance. We’re the enemy.’
Aquila had an urgent order for tents to be pitched in the Campus Martius and had to take on more help. Nobody thought of him as a Christian. Luke, leaving copies of his ‘Pauliad’ with his patient Gaius Petronius, left for the Adriatic coast. Linus was just discreetly no more around. But Peter, beard stirring in the wet wind, staff in hand, went weeping round the corpses of those he must think of as his butchered flock. Linus could postpone his paternity, papa of Rome to be, but Peter owed God a death and defied the morning cockcrow as he went about the city blessing and mourning. He was taken at first for an old foreign madman and left alone.
Tigellinus said: ‘If Caesar would care to read the report. Here is a list of some of the more unexpected members of the ah sect.’
They were seated on that north-western segment of the Palatine which had missed the fire. Here were living quarters enough, though not for an emperor. The work of reconstruction had started: engineers consulted their plans and foremen bellowed at sweating slaves. ‘I’d no idea,’ Nero said, ‘there were so many of our pureborn aristocrats. Lucius Popidius Secundus – he was one, and I never knew. A fine eater and drinker.’
‘Well, of course – some of the enemies of the state have been listed as Chrestians. That makes things a lot easier. But most of them are the real thing.’
‘The term is Christians, Tigellinus. And I’m rather sick of these allegations of anthropophagy and so on. I can’t bear ignorance. I learnt a lot, you know, from that man.’
‘And that man, unfortunately, has left Italy. But I’m assured that he’ll be back. These people talk very freely. They don’t lie, or they don’t seem to. They seem rather pleased at being arrested, some of them. They’re mad, even the Romans have lost their Roman qualities. It’s a debilitating sort of superstition.’
‘You don’t understand, do you, Tigellinus? They don’t mind dying. To them death is the gate to eternal life, if they’ve done right. If they’ve done wrong they go to a place where the fire burns without consuming. And that goes on for ever. But if they’re executed because of their faith, then that turns them into witnesses for the faith, and all the wrong things they’ve done are cancelled out.’
‘You speak, Caesar, with a certain wistfulness. Not a pleasant thought, is it – eternal fire for having murdered and raped and tried to castrate a boy to turn him into a woman and turned yourself into a bride losing her maidenhood and thrust at the Vestal Virgins? Not a pleasant religion to have about the place. We’re better without them. And the dear Roman people are having the time of their lives burning and robbing. Ah, policy, policy. We’ll get them all, including the bald Jew who took your fancy.’
‘It won’t do, though,’ Nero frowned, ‘all this burning. I’m sick of the stench of fire. It’s not aesthetic. It’s disordered. Gaius Petronius thinks so too. His sense of beauty and order is deeply offended.’
‘I thought you’d banished that waterlily.’
‘That waterlily, as you so rudely term him, has more sense of beauty in his little toes than you have in all your burly fishfed carcase. You’re a coarse man, Tigellinus.’
‘Caesar, of course, knows all about coarseness.’
‘Caesar knows a lot of things, Tigellinus. That’s why he’s Caesar.’
One thing Caesar knew was a little book written by a Greek physician which described the early struggles and triumphs of the Christian faith. Gaius Petronius had been enthusiastic about the strength of the narrative line, the almost Homeric terseness of the phraseology, though he regretted what the Greek language had lost since the time of the great ancients: it had, as the second language of the Empire, become a medium tending to the utilitarian, commercial, political, sentimental. It lacked the old marble and fire. The book was addressed, see, to a certain Theophilus, lover of God. Gaius Petronius had it on the word of the author himself that it was assumed some day Caesar would be Theophilus: what man better endowed with the insight to be washed in the pure light of the emergent truth? Nero knew Gaius Petronius was about his old game of extravagant flattery, but he was complaisant. Nero the darling of the ultimate god of truth and beauty and goodness: it was a pleasant idea. Unfortunately there was this doctrine of eternal fire. Given time, he might repent of his dastardly acts, acts thrust upon him by the destiny of the imperiate, but there was no guarantee of that. It was best to have the una nox dormienda, after all, and this meant having no Christianity in his realm. He burnt the little book with his own hands, not knowing there were other copies. He would kill the upstart faith and all its adherents, so that none could prate to him of eternal fire, yet he would enable those adherents to believe they were going to eternal bliss. It would cost him nothing. But the whole business had to be carried out aesthetically. He conferred with Gaius Petronius as to how this might best be done.
‘You’re so right, Caesar. It offends one’s senses to see and smell all those corpses along the Appian Way and, indeed, the streets of the city.’ Nero was with Petronius on a garden seat in an arbour of Petronius’s leafy estate, whither the stench of smouldering Rome had never travelled. ‘Refine the taste of the people – has not that always been our aim? Confine the deaths of these fanatics to the arena but in no brutal manner. Let them be drawn into representations of Roman myth and history. Greek too. It’s a marvellous opportunity. Will you leave it to your humble friend and coadjutor to sketch a programme?’
When the Roman people filed in from their temporary shelters to sit with their garlic sausages and children and wives, twenty thousand strong under awnings to hold off the sun, having become most sensitive to burning, they did not quite know what they were going to be given. The hydraulis boomed at them the usual purple music which conveyed vague emotions of death and glory, but then it abruptly ceased as a hundredfold of men and women marched proudly into the arena singing. The auditors were prepared to applaud the chorus, which resounded with what sounded like the poetic expression of the good old Roman virtues, but when the name Christus came into it the crowd reacted very unfavourably. Indeed, the brains of the less intelligent whirled with the terrible notion that things had become inverted, that the Emperor had gone suddenly mad and wished to present the Christians not as Rome-hating fireraisers but as a sect to be admired for their fireraising courage (always said the bastard wanted the city burnt, didn’t I, but he won’t get away with this). But everything came right when a portcullis whizzed up and a pride of starved lions was thrust into the arena by men in Etruscan masks with five-thonged whips. The lions snarled back at their keepers, but then the portcullis clashed down and the lions began to show a vague interest in the Christian chorus. They were very hungry and they sniffed human sweat. They crept forward on their furry bellies, expecting resistance from their prey. All that happened was that the Christians, at a signal from a brawny young man who seemed to be their leader, went down on their knees with total unanimity and began to recite what sounded like a poem in Latin to their father in the skies. The phrase panem quotidianum raised some laughs among the vulgar; no more daily bread for this lot. When a lioness, with the instinct of a mother needing flesh for her cubs, made a leap on the Amen, a fighting spirit arose among the Christians, some of whom leapt on the lioness, to her apparent surprise, and rolled on top of her, pinning her to the sand with her paws up, roaring. Some of the lions looked languidly at this, but then one of them seemed to resent this human attack on one of the pride and walked, not too quickly, towards an old woman still on her knees. She screamed but remained immobile while the lion licked her left arm with his rough tongue. He clawed off the sleeve to get at the flesh and then blood started. It was enough. He had that old woman down on her back, lay on her and began to tear her throat out. A couple of young men who might have been her sons beat at the lion’s rump and pulled his mane, but he kept to his meal, impervious.
And now a number of the predestined victims ran away from the knot of feeding lions, rebuked by the crowd for poor sportsmanship and a failure of solidarity. But, clearly, the lions could not eat everybody. They were doing well enough with their concentrated bone crushing and limb tearing, though most had the wit to get at the softer parts first – a good clawing of the belly and the spilling of the guts and an easy meal of bloody puddings. The limbs could come later. But this was not art. This was no gladiatorial display. It was only butchery. Gaius Petronius in the imperial box shook his head: the overture had gone on too long; it was time for the aesthetic part to begin. The master of the games must have thought so too, for the masked keepers with their whips reappeared, lashing the beasts back to their enclosure. Most of them objected, being engaged still in heavy feeding, and they snarled, raising one paw while the other held down their meat. At length they were persuaded, having tasted the whip, to go to their den, some of them carrying chunks of Christian in their jaws, while the rest of the mess, blood, bones, skin, flesh, sand, was pushed with them by men handling wooden pushers on long poles. The uneaten Christians were lashed towards the gate opposite. They had no need of the whip, for they marched firmly, singing as before, some of them waving to the sausage-chewers. The cheers they got were not all ironic. Things were not going quite as they should.
Gaius Petronius had found little useful Roman myth or history to dramatise: it was all conquering people or betraying them, and to dress up Christians as Etruscans or Carthaginians and to put swords and spears into their grips was not necessarily to make them fight. Very clear round yawns were to be heard from some of the gristlefed mob. There was wheeled on a catapult, of the massive kind for hurling stones at enemy fortifications, and male Christians were shot into the air, it having been explained to the four corners of the arena by a bullvoiced announcer that Christians expected to fly to heaven: well, see them fly. So the steel bow was bent by means of a windlass, the cord was released by a spring, and Christians went flying into the audience without the permission of the audience having been obtained. This resulted in the grave injury of certain good Roman plebeians, who rightly grumbled that they had been hurt enough by the damned Christians without having to be hurt more. The Greek myths would perhaps go down better.
Caleb, very sour and vindictive, explained to a young Christian what was now to happen to him. ‘You know the story, do you? Daedalus was the first man to make wings and fly. He made wings for his son, too. His son’s name was Icarus. But Icarus flew too near the sun and the wax on his wings melted. So he fell. You’re Icarus. You’re going to fall. You’re going to have your skull split open. And that goes for the rest of you,’ he said, raising his voice to a group of other potential Icaruses.
‘You’re a Jew, aren’t you? You speak to a fellow Jew.’
‘No, you’re a Christian. A killer. You killed my son. Blast you to hell.’
‘So you believe what you’re told?’
‘As you do. Get out there, blast you.’
In the centre of the arena a very high wooden tower had been placed, eight strutted feet holding it firm to the ground. There was a ladder to the top, and at the top was a platform on which Daedalus stood, having, by an acceptable fiction, flown there by means of his wooden and sackcloth wings. His task was to grasp each Icarus as he arrived at the top of the ladder and then hurl him off. To ensure that the skullcracking would be effectual, a scree of rocks lay at the bottom. The game did not go well. Some of the Icaruses refused to mount: if they were going to die anyway, why should they have to suffer physical exhaustion and humiliation first? When they had their heads clubbed at the foot of the ladder, Gaius Petronius wrung his hands: these Christians had no sense of art; how could their god be a god of beauty? But it was with relief that he saw a muscular Christian Jew, heavily bearded and bullnecked, gladly climb the ladder in his thin wings of wire and cloth. On the high platform he nodded at the sight of a skin of water to relieve the thirst of the circus performer who played Daedalus, took it, grabbed Daedalus by the neck, then solemnly baptised him. With one hand on nape and the other on fat arse, he sent the father of flight yelling into the air and to a messy, though presumably holy, death below. Gaius Petronius chewed his nails: that was a lie, that was not the ancient legend, it was a perversion, no sense of art – Circus hands mounted the ladder to get at unfallen Icarus, but he kicked them easily down or hit them with the club Daedalus had intended to launch the more reluctant fliers. Eventually the tower itself was, through the combined muscles of a dozen circus hands, toppled into the dust, and the young Jewish Christian, having blessed the populace, spilt his brains for its delectation. A spectacular ending to the act, but, even the dullest could tell, it had not quite followed the devisers’ intention: a lack of sportive justice in it, somehow.
Various naked Christian women were made, successively, to ride a vigorous white bull. If that bull was meant to be Zeus, then this was a blasphemous parody. When the Europas fell into the dust screaming and were duly tossed and gored, the blasphemy was somewhat mitigated. ‘Watch. Watch,’ Nero ordered Poppea. She had been hiding her eyes in her veil. She dropped it now only to bunch her lovely face in nausea. Then she left the imperial box, vomiting on Tigellinus as she went. Some noticed this and a faint wave of approval arose from, it was supposed, the plebeians of her sex. Nero was angry and spat viciously at Gaius Petronius.
As an amythic interlude, several Christians were brought on dressed in animal skins. Then wild dogs, their jaws adrip with hydrophobia, were loosed on to them. These creatures were frightened by the sudden unleashing of a confident Christian hymn, and they were confused when some of the Christians tore off their skins and threw them at the snarling teeth. The dogs assumed that it was these skins they were intended to devour, and they did so for a time despite the crowd’s remonstrance. Then, finding no nourishment in the aromatic pelts, they leapt at the Christian throats, of which there were enough to go round. Finally there came a carefully organised set piece, in which Roman troops were dressed as barbarous Britons, complete with stuck-on yellow moustaches and yellow wigs. The male Christians were comically dressed as Roman troops, armed with wooden swords and spears. The pseudobarbarians had bows and arrows and, with fine style and accurate aim, they transfixed at their leisure the pseudoromans. Now the crowd was placed in something of a dilemma. It appreciated that the show was intended to remind them of the recent British revolt against well-meaning Roman colonialism; it understood that the Christians were, in a sense, being butchered for mocking stalwart Roman troops; it knew that the arrow-aiming display demonstrated Roman skill even with barbaric weapons; but they were confused because the final image – warwhooping of bowmen with moustaches coming unstuck and wigs awry under the dying sun – was not really one creditable to the Roman Empire. Gaius Petronius’s patriotism, it seemed to Nero, was of a highly qualified kind: it let art, and mediocre art at that, get in the way. It was to be hoped that the second day of the games would go better than this.
The duty officer at the city council offices, which stood at the junction of the Via Tiburtina and the Vicus Longus, was puzzled that evening when an old man who spoke neither Greek nor Latin seemed to demand to be arrested. The officer searched for an interpreter, having at least established that the old man was Jewish, and found a wounded soldier who had served in Palestine, now working for the municipality as a limping messenger between departments, who understood the old man well enough.
‘He says he’s Petrus, sir, and that he’s not only a Christian but the head of the Christians. He says he got that appointment from the man himself, Christus that is.’
‘What does he want?’
‘He says he doesn’t see why he should go on living while so many of his friends are being seen off, so to speak.’
‘He wants to die, you mean?’
‘Well, it’s reasonable, sir. He’s a Christian, he says.’
‘This isn’t a military headquarters, Crassus. It’s nothing to do with us. He’d better be sent to the Castra Praetoria. They’re in charge of rounding up Christians. Strange, though. Wants it, does he?’
‘You can see his point in a way, sir. He’s had his time, he says. When mere children are getting the knife stuck in, he says, why should the father of the whatdoyoucallit go free. He’s done his best to attract attention, he says, shouting the odds in the street, but nobody’s taken a blind bit of notice.’
‘He seems harmless enough. Take him there. You don’t need any help, do you?’
‘Well, it’s not really in the way of duty, is it? And me with this bad leg. We could get somebody from the Vigiles to take him. That’s only round the corner.’
‘All right, get somebody.’
There was no shortage of speakers of bad Aramaic at the Castra Praetoria. The interrogating officer was as puzzled as the functionary at the municipal offices by what sounded like a calm acceptance of a sort of collective guilt on the part of the old man. But guilty of exactly what? Of burning Rome or of belonging to a superstitious sect which had been declared illegal? All the old man would speak of was two outlandish places called Sodom and Gomorrah, which had been burnt by the Lord God for their sins, and he said that Rome was worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. That sounded very much like an admission of Christian responsibility for massive incendiarism, and the old man was asked if he would sign a statement to that effect. No, he would sign nothing. He had never signed anything in his life. Crucify me and get it all over with. Crucify? Who are you to specify your mode of dispatch? I’ve given myself up, haven’t I? I have certain rights, don’t I? I want to be crucified, but not in the usual way. I want it to be done upside down. The old man was clearly crazy. Perhaps they ought to discharge him with a caution. Upside down, indeed. That made the whole thing vaguely comic. Well, they could wash their hands of the business by sending him to the master of the games. Christians had become material for popular entertainment. Undignified, somehow. Rome was losing its reputation for punitive dignity.
Peter was locked in a cell for the night and taken to the games master early next day. The games master saw possibilities in the inverted crucifixion. It was comic, yes, but that was in order. The carpenters had better start work right away on a gallows that could be affixed inverted to a kind of cart. The remaining Christians at the end of the day’s sport could drag the cart in, with this old fellow upside down on the cross, they could sing a hymn, and then they could meet, as planned, the gladiators and be mown down. Meanwhile the old fellow could be set alight and the announcer could announce that the burning of Rome had finally been avenged. And that was the end of the Christians.
Gaius Petronius had contrived very complicated set pieces for the day’s entertainment. But, again, the Christians did not seem to recognise their duty to art. A ship on wheels was dragged on to confront an artificial island of singing sirens – men, or properly halfmen, in fair long wigs with melon breasts stuck on their chests. They wore gloves with honed razor talons, and they were to tear to pieces the naked seamen who were really Christians, these to be thrust off the boat to their doom with very sharp spears. The siren music was provided by a chorus of genuine women hidden beneath the wooden rocks. Some of the Christians preferred the spears to the claws, and others fought the sirens very viciously with their fists until, their eyes mostly torn out, they could fight no more. But many of the spectators objected strongly to seeing men dressed up as sirens. There was enough effeminacy in the city without making a public glorification of it. The Cretan labyrinth went down rather better, with the more massive gladiators in Minotaur disguise clubbing the Christian wanderers through the wooden maze. And the Trojan horse, into whose door in the flank two hundred Christians were impelled, there to be burnt alive, was considered ingenious. But the penultimate item of the day was thought to be in very bad taste.
All the Christian children that were left, some hundred of them, were clothed in lambskins. The very young ones thought this a fine sport and gambolled gleefully into the arena among others, less young, more doubtful, led by a prancing shepherd. This shepherd was quick to make his comic exit when the wild dogs, their heavy meal of the previous day long digested, leapt out and savaged the lambs. There were murmurs from the more reasonable of the audience: these youngsters had committed neither cannibalism nor incest and it was doubtful if they had had any part in the burning of the city. This was, not to mince matters, gratuitous cruelty. Many left. It was to a half-empty arena that the final show of Christians sang their song of faith and courage, dragging on the cart which displayed the nailed and bleeding old man who looked like anybody’s grandfather, absurdly inverted, seeing, if he could still see, the world fading as the world was not. This man, the announcer bellowed, had ordered the burning of the city. Few believed it. When burning pitch was applied to the poor old devil he was clearly already dead. The Christians had not responded with any zest to the swordsmen: they let themselves be cut down. No sport and a weak ending to two days of entertainment which could not properly be called games at all. The audience left murmuring.
That night Nero, in his lonely bed as big as a barge, dreamt of hell. He woke screaming and spent the rest of the night awake, gloomily drinking warm wine without water. He was in a foul temper when he met his Empress at the breakfast table, and she herself inflamed and concentrated his diffused rage by inveighing against the brutality of the games, a brutality, she would point out, which would have an effect the reverse of the imperial intention. ‘You and the Roman people. Spasming under your togas to see men and women and children torn to shreds. So easy, is it not, to give way to the beast inside us. History is supposed to record the taming of the beast. The Roman Empire takes over history and trumpets the victory of reason. But it’s the trumpeting of a rogue elephant. The beasts are with us, and they have names, but mine shall not be among them.’
‘It was your duty as imperial consort to cry out for the blood of the criminals like any good Roman, do you hear me?’
‘For the blood of Tigellinus and his accomplices, you mean. My lord, I have performed the last office of an imperial consort. I carry in my womb what may be the next Emperor. I can only pray to whatever god there is that he shall have more of the blood of my family than of yours.’
‘Your family and what other? That of a Jewish athlete running to fat? Some bearded mumbler of Hebrew mumbo jumbo? You’ve tasted of uncircumcised meat and I presume you like it. I cry the cry of all fathers – how can I know, how can I know?’
‘This child, to my shame, is yours. I would to God it were some other’s.’
‘God, eh? Which god? You whore, you loathsome hilding. You’ve named the beast, you say. Go on naming him, go on—’ And with this he knocked the Empress to the hard floor and viciously kicked her belly. She writhed and screamed and then she stopped screaming. Nero gave her one last kick. There was no response of fear or pain, and he grew frightened. And then he was not frightened, recognising that, being on the side of the destroyer, anything was permitted him except fear or compassion. There was dignity in destruction when that urge to destroy was seen in the context of a kind of cosmic struggle. The religion of the Romans failed there. There was a kind of holiness in fighting God.
We must not be surprised if the sufferings and courage of the dead Christians and, indeed, one element, in their eschatology furnished images in the furtive talk of virtuous Romans who were heartily sick of their Emperor and wished to be rid of him. Gaius Calpurnius Piso had picked up the word martyr and, in the view of Subrius Flavus of the Guard, overused it. ‘Very well,’ Flavus said, ‘some of us will have to die, but to dwell on that is morbid and not in the Roman tradition. Stick to solid positive action and forget the refinements. If we die, we die, and it’s damned bad luck. But we go into battle to win.’ The two of them sat in Piso’s house, one of the many senatorial mansions untouched by fire. From the terrace one could see the work of reconstruction proceed, slave labour unlimited, the fiscs of the provinces heavily ransacked for the quarrying and transportation of the marble, the precious stones, the gold, the filched statues of Greece. Piso said:
‘How are things with the Guard?’
‘The Guard’s behind you. Those who aren’t scared.’
‘There are too many scared.’
‘You have the look of one of them, Piso.’
‘For me it’s in order. To denounce Tigellinus publicly was not the most discreet of acts. Nero has grown accustomed to being denounced and takes little notice. Tigellinus knows that I know certain things. I have sworn affidavits from some who saw him on the night of—No matter. The question’s very simple – who? And, of course, when and where?’
‘You mean the head and not the right arm?’
‘Root and branch.’
A slave named Felix heard all this while he was serving wine. That night, in the sordid quarters he shared with other slaves, he lay awake meditating on what the nature of the reward might be – manumission, of course, but what besides? – while two fellow slaves, male and female, groaned in the act of love. He waited until the transport had finished, then he got up and put on his single simple garment and his sandals.
‘Where are you going?’
‘The cloaca. Ate something I shouldn’t.’
He went into the city, seeing in moonlight mountains of marble slabs, cranes, cement mixers. He ran and walked alternately to the town villa of Tigellinus, which lay south of the Castra Praetoria.
Tigellinus was in bed with a boy. Lamps glowed on either side of the bed: Tigellinus liked to see what he was doing or having done. There was a knock at his door. At this hour?
‘Gnaeus, sir.’
‘What do you want?’
‘It’s something urgent, sir.’
‘It’s always something urgent. Come in, blast you.’
He motioned to the naked boy to leave by another door. He yawned, settled himself on his pillows. Gnaeus, a portly bald freedman, came in. ‘There’s this slave here, sir. He’s got information. He wants a reward for it.’
‘A slave? Whip him and stuff his information up his. Whose slave?’
‘He says he’s the slave of the senator Piso.’
‘Piso? Send the scoundrel in.’
The scoundrel came in, trembling. ‘Every day, sir. They mention different names. People they’d like to have in on it but aren’t sure about.’
‘Such as?’
‘One name was Seneca, sir.’
‘I see. And you say Subrius Flavus was there. Are you sure? Think carefully. Subrius Flavus is a high officer in the Praetorian Guard.’
‘It was he did most of the talking, sir.’
‘You’re a good boy,’ Tigellinus said, ‘and a fine patriot, not, of course, that you have any of the rights of even an unpatriotic citizen. But a slave should always be loyal to his master. Go and see Gnaeus out there. He’s got the whip ready.’
‘But, sir, I thought—’
‘Slaves aren’t paid to think. Slaves aren’t paid at all, are they? Get out.’
Get out was what he wished to say next day to Gaius Petronius, seated in his exquisite violet robe and soft leather boots with Caesar in an arbour from which one could hear the heartening din, sufficiently muted by distance and greenery, of Rome’s rebuilding, the creation of Neropolis. Petronius was talking of Nero’s voice – ‘a poignant sword that strikes to the very pia mater, that impales the centres of love like an almost intolerably potent aphrodisiac.’ And Athens: the Athenian judges had given the award to their Emperor in absentia: they knew, with their Greek subtlety, the invincible excellence of Caesar’s voice without having to hear it.
‘Some day,’ Nero said, ‘they shall hear it. They shall have The Burning of Troy.’
‘But not, I trust, with the pyrotechnical accompaniment that distinguished your last performance of that immortal work.’ Petronius saw from his master’s scowl that he had been indiscreet. ‘I refer, naturally, to the burning of the aesthetic passions of those who heard you.’
Tigellinus could stand no more of this. Besides, there were urgencies. He strode from the leafy flowery trellised entrance to the arbour into Caesar’s presence and said:
‘News. Urgent. Does this waterlily have to stay while I give it?’
‘My butterfly? If I let him flit away I may not be able to catch him. You’re rude, Tigellinus, you’re coarse. Oh, I’ll come over there if you have things to whisper.’
They spoke together, and Petronius could not hear, nor did he wish to. A spot of birdlime had disfigured the toe of his left boot. He wiped it off with a sycamore leaf. Nero called: ‘Petronius!’
‘Dear Caesar?’
‘You know elegant ways to live. Do you also know elegant ways to die?’
‘Oh, suicide,’ Petronius said promptly. ‘In a hot bath preferably. A gentle slashing of the wrists. The water reddens to a delicate rose and deepens to a royal purple. One fades out as in a dream.’
Tigellinus said: ‘This you know?’
‘This I imagine.’
Tigellinus nodded. ‘That will do for Seneca. But no delicate rose and royal purple for Flavus. Not for Flavus.’
When, some days later, Flavus stood with his hands bound, ready for the axe, which was ostentatiously being sharpened on a whetstone, he insisted on speaking. A word.
‘You will say no word,’ Tigellinus told him.
‘I wish to address the Emperor. I have nothing more to say to you, except that you were more acceptable when you smelt of fish than now, when you smell of blood.’
‘Oh, let him speak,’ Nero said. ‘He has a certain rough talent for rhetoric.’
‘Caesar, I was loyal to you when you deserved loyalty. When you ceased to deserve it, I gave it still. But I began to hate you when you murdered your mother and your wife, when you paraded yourself as a second-rate singer and actor, and my hate brimmed to overflowing its cup when you turned yourself into an incendiary. You have ruined the Empire, and that Empire is now withdrawing its loyalty from Rome. The provincial governors proclaim their independence from Caesar. The barbarians revolt. We needed a ruler, and all we were given was a slovenly singer and dancer, a slovenly murderer, a matricide, an uxoricide, a sodomite, and a fireraiser.’
His grave, six feet away, was still being dug.
‘A slovenly job, like everything perpetrated under your rule. I shall be glad to be released from that rule. Strike, when you’re ready.’ Nero and Tigellinus watched. Nero said:
‘One stroke. Half a stroke. Hm. Slovenly, he said. Very nasty, Tigellinus.’
Seneca received his orders for suicide, and the precise mode in which that act should be performed, with little surprise. He had been mentioned as one asked to conspire, and he had refused. But the mere mention was enough. It was typical and wholly fitting. He lowered himself into his warm bath with arthritic care: his slaves wept to see his shrunken body. There was not much blood in it, and the arteries were reluctant to flow. ‘Don’t weep,’ he said. ‘Life is a hard burden, even for free men and women. Leave me now.’ He used the razor again, but the blood flowed sluggishly. Soon it responded to the heat of the water and Seneca faded into sleep. Medea superest. Seneca superest. It was not true: nothing remained.
When Gaius Petronius’s orders came, he protested that he had done no wrong. He was Caesar’s friend, was he not? But therein danger had always lain: Tigellinus did not like Caesar to have friends, especially friends of the exquisite ability of Gaius Petronius. He put off the act until he heard that the praetorian prefect was impatient, that armed troops would come to dispatch him more brutally than a mere razor could. Petronius was no Stoic. He had been charmed by some of the more poetic aspects of the new faith but disappointed in its adherents, who had a brutal concern with morality that overrode the delight in beauty which was civilised man’s most characteristic trait. They worshipped a god whose visage was still to be revealed to the brutish world. Ah, well.
Petronius duly cut his wrists, admired the rich red flow, but then ordered his new medical man to bind them up for a time. He had lost Luke, who had exquisite Greek hands and some remarkable Asiatic potions and salves. Ah, well. His suicide, exquisitely prolonged, was to be in public, that was to say among his friends, who drank and ate and made love all about him. Life, he was leaving life. This admirable chamber, marble, hung with flowers of the season. This beautifully set table, at whose head he lay encouched. To his friend the young poet Hortensius he said:
‘Those exquisite lines of Catullus.’
‘Of course.
‘Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.’
‘Exquisite. Suns rise and set. When our brief light has sunk and died, there remains only a long long night to be slept through. Do you believe that to be true, Hortensius?’
‘A thin life whimpering for human blood. Hardly worth having. Or else nothing. Nothing is best.’
‘Life was sweet, you know. And I did no wrong.’
‘I think it’s time now, Petronius. There are soldiers waiting outside. They will want to ride back to Rome with the news.’
‘Keep them out of here. Rough soldiers. Will you do it for me?’
‘You know I can’t.’
‘Very well, then. We will unbind the mortal wounds and see the blood flow. I will even cut again. I will pretend that I am going to shave this delicate golden flue on my forearms and render them as naked of hair as a eunuch’s. Oh, but a little more wine. Some more Catullus.’
‘No. Now.’
‘Louder music, please.’
It was soft music that Nero was plucking from a lyre ineptly tuned. Tigellinus said: ‘He’s gone.’
‘Who?’
‘The waterlily that had a snake hiding under it.’
‘The only man who truly appreciated my singing. And you had to have him killed. You’ve had everybody killed, haven’t you? You turned Rome into a prison and then into a bath of blood—’
‘A rather banal metaphor, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I didn’t foresee that things would be like that at all. All I wanted was to make people happy. I never wanted to be an emperor. A great artist, that’s all. And I was a great artist – am.’
‘With no audience. I leave you now, Caesar.’
‘You leave me? You?’
‘The games are finished. The slaves sweep fruitpeel and nutshells out of the empty arena. I have to go. The Senate wants my head.’
‘Your head, yours? Who’s master here? What is the Senate that it should want—Does it want my head too? Does it?’
‘Get out of Rome is my advice. Now.’
‘Why does the palace seem so empty? I can hear my voice echoing. Where is everybody?’
Tigellinus grinned sadly and said: ‘Vale.’ He left quickly.
‘Where are you all? Lepidus! Myrtilla! Phaon!’
Phaon, a freedman, neither insolent nor deferential, came in, saying: ‘Caesar called?’
‘Oh, thank heaven you’re still with me. Where are the others?’
‘Gone. And it’s time for us to go. The villa. Only four miles. There aren’t enough slaves to carry a litter. I might find a couple of horses.’
‘Leave Rome? My Rome? My great gift to the world? Oh, very well. My cloak, Phaon, my riding boots.’
‘Caesar knows where they are. I have my own arrangements to make.’ He went out. Nero cried to an invisible auditorium:
‘Phaon! Phaon! I’ll have your head for this!’
In the Senate the leader of the house had given the latest news. ‘Vindex, the legate of Gaul, has declared his allegiance to only the Senate and the people of Rome. The legate of Spain, Servius Sulpicius Galba, has made a similar declaration. The Emperor is left without allegiance, either civil or military. The revolt has begun in the provinces. Galba, old as he is, stands as the only reasonable imperial candidate. But first things first. Is it resolved by this august body that the present incumbent of the imperial chair be declared a public enemy and an outlaw and most meet for apprehension, trial and execution?’ Piso should have been there, it would have been a great moment for him. But Piso was not anywhere.
Nero was very much in the scarcely used villa four miles out of the city, breaking jars and tearing curtains. His only audience was Phaon, who sat on a stool, chewed nuts, and watched and listened with no visible reaction as his master ran up and down, calling for people long dead, screaming. Then Nero said: ‘They won’t dream of looking in the slaves’ quarters, will they? They’ll find this place empty, then they’ll leave. Isn’t that so, Phaon? Isn’t it? Show me where the slaves’ quarters are, Phaon. Quickly, quickly.’
Phaon got up at his leisure. His sharp ear caught a sound outside, some way away, horses. ‘Come with me then, take a torch.’
He went out, not too hurriedly, and his master followed eagerly, stumbling, till they came to a dark and dusty area beyond the kitchens. Those kitchens had cooked no food in a long time. ‘Safe here then, you think, Phaon? Quite safe?’ His torch showed him a wall-sconce. He fitted the torch in. He did not like all these shadows. He did not like Phaon’s shaking his head and taking a dagger from his kirtle. He handed it to his master, with a slight bow. ‘I do that? Never, never. It’s a coward’s act, Phaon.’ But Phaon insisted. ‘Show me, then. Show me how to do it. You do it first, Phaon, then I’ll follow.’ But Phaon wrapped Nero’s fist around the hilt and guided it towards his throat. So great an artist and he had to die. No, not so great: this was not the time for self-deception. If there had been the chance to learn, and to learn humbly. A martyr to the art in a sense: testifying to the future that one had to give up all for art and he had not been permitted to give up all. As he began to choke on his blood he saw a page of perfect sapphics not now to be written. He heard them sung in some phoenix version of his own voice, but the voice did not get beyond the first line and a half. Up to the caesura. The arriving squadron was loud about the house.
There is irony in the fact that Paul’s death came after that of Nero. He arrived from Spain in an interregnum, but the law still ran, like a mad horse beyond curbing. He was unaware of this. Christianity was a religio licita. The ship came in at Puteoli, a grainship that had docking precedence. It was unladed of its bales and passengers. A couple of port officials asked the ship’s master to show them the manifest of these latter.
‘Leave men from Spain. Private passengers. Who’s this Paul?’
‘Roman citizen.’
‘That doesn’t look like a Roman name.’
‘He’s just known as Paul. A Christian preacher. Made a lot of converts in Spain. Including some of these leave men. Why, anything wrong?’
‘How long have you been away from Italy?’
‘I’ve been doing the run from the Spanish mainland to the Balearics for three years. Why?’
‘Christianity’s a proscribed religion. Punishable by death. Where is this Paul?’
The ship’s master pointed to a very brown, very bald, very lean but quite old man in a brown habit, shouldering his pack and preparing to leave the dock area. The port official who had spoken spoke again:
‘And he doesn’t know either?’
‘No more than I did. What are you going to do?’
‘We have our orders.’ A maniple was summoned; it moved in to arrest Paul; he could not understand why. He tried to resist, but strong arms grasped him. He was taken to the offices of the quaestor in Neapolis. Paul spoke first.
‘I seem to be under arrest. Is it permitted to ask why?’
‘I suppose you’re entitled to an explanation. The religion you preach has been proscribed. You oughtn’t really to be surprised.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s an antiroman activity. You’re cannibals, buggers, incendiarists and Jupiter knows what.’
‘Very good. And I personally am to be tried on those charges?’
‘No. The state dispenses with the formality of a trial.’
‘Even for a Roman citizen?’
‘There were plenty of Roman citizens who burnt down their own city.’
‘So what happens to me?’
‘I have to order your instant execution. That’s the way it’s done these days. Look,’ the quaestor said, a man as bald and brown as Paul but much younger, ‘I don’t like this. I don’t even believe all those stories. It’s not the way we did things before. But we have our orders.’
It was always a matter of orders. Rome would choke itself on orders. Paul said: ‘Crucifixion?’
‘No. The axe. It’s quicker.’
Paul had an unworthy thought. Crucifixion ruptured nothing. Nails ran through the wrists, sometimes without even breaking the bones. A corpse could be taken down from a cross and be seen later to be not a corpse. Pockets of air in the lungs. Resuscitation. If Christ had been beheaded, would the disciples have noticed a thin red band, like a delicate necklace, marking the miraculous rejoining? But Christ had not been beheaded. ‘When?’ he asked.
‘Now. Best get it over. We’ve had to set up a block in that yard there. I’ll have to call the axeman. Sorry about this.’
It was proper that Paul should meet his end in a seaport. Rome had never been his city, and it is irrational to search for his bones there. He died in the seawind. For the official record he made a statement:
‘I must make one final protest against a flagrant miscarriage of justice. I am a Roman citizen. I am guilty of no charge. I was exonerated by the state of what previous charges were held against me. I am a Jew and I am a Christian and hence profess beliefs acceptable to the Roman state. I have a right to demand justice.’ These words were not taken down. He was taken to the block and, before laying his bald head on it, he prayed: ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Now to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit I commend my soul and the souls of my enemies. Amen.’ He prayed in Aramaic. Then the axe fell.
In Rome, despite the death of its imperial architect, the work of rebuilding went on. Caleb, who had left behind the butchery of the arena, worked as a foreman responsible for the carting of blocks of marble and travertine. A jagged wall was being demolished to make way for something thicker, higher, nobler. Something seemed to have been carved on the wall, near obliterated by dust. He brushed the dust away and saw a crude drawing of a fish. He nodded: he knew the sign. That man Peter had been a fisherman, but Tigellinus had merely sold fish. Now Christ had actually turned into a fish. Caleb had no great love for fish: his muscles had been built on meat. But he looked at the crude drawing with a certain tenderness. These people were not going to give up in a hurry. The faith they practised was, after all, of Jewish provenance. The Jews were not going to give up in a hurry either.