CHAPTER FIVE

This is the last time you will have to hear of my bodily infirmities, which have been somewhat soothed by the continuing good weather of the month named for Gaius Julius, no mean Caesar. But I cannot deny, nor do my physicians attempt to, that I have little time left. A crab crawls in my belly and its claws nip more perniciously every day. Of the condition of my bowels I dare hardly speak. I see now, however, that there has been more relevance in imposing my pains on you than I formerly thought. The decay of one small body is a metaphor of the organic corruption of the Roman Empire.

I remember very well the death of the father of one of my friends. The old man had been named Kederah for his rotundity, but the name was now a mockery. His was a death which his ailing organs were only too ready to hasten, but his indomitable mind held it back. Or rather it was the seductive power of a particular book which rendered his mind at least temporarily indomitable. He had worked hard all his life at trade, and only in his retirement was he able to return to the love of his boyhood, which was reading. He had never read the Odyssey in his youth and was unable to find a copy until his last illness. Then he became determined to finish his bedrid reading of it before yielding to the arms of the dark. So he reached the final lines, read them, put aside the book, then composed himself for his pagan end. He died at peace. He had done one thing he had wanted to do, and now let the shades enclose him.

I feel myself to be in something of the same situation. I too have a book to finish – the writing of it (I fear there may be no time to read it through, correct the style, banish inconsistencies, adjust my portrayals of great men evil and good) – and then I shall be content to leave this beautiful and damnable world (last night there were fireflies in my bedroom, and I could see Sirius poised on the tip of one of my Alps), of which I hoped so much and received so little. My friend’s father could at least rejoice vicariously in Odysseus’s final triumph – the defestation of his island kingdom, the lying in sleep and love with patient Penelope – but I can record little but failure. A faith was born and then died. It was slaughtered by Jews and Romans alike. The hopeful words of Linus to his flock, much diminished by martyrdom and defection, ring pathetically.

‘Children in Christ, we have celebrated the supper of the Lord, taking in love and amity the consecrated bread and wine which, by the daily miracle, become his flesh and blood. The body of the Lord was torn and rent and crucified that we might live. But the hard task of proclaiming the word and suffering that it might be proclaimed remains one which we share with him and are proud to share. The Christians of the city of Rome have suffered. They have been a bloody show to gratify a depraved mob and an even more depraved emperor. But their deaths have not been in vain. They have proved to a pagan world that if a faith is strong enough men and women are willing to die for it. The church of Rome is in constant peril, and yet it is in no danger of extinction. Alas, the great men, the founders of the faith in far places, are disappearing from sight and may soon disappear from memory. Peter was crucified in Rome, Paul was beheaded in Neapolis. I, Linus, your bishop, follow very humbly in their wake. I present to you now our brother Cletus, my successor when the time comes for my death at the hands of the executioner or in the jaws of the beasts. I would say now and say strongly that the Church will prevail. The Church is indeed stronger than the empire which assails it. That empire casts around for a Caesar. It is in confusion and may soon be in a state of civil war. We who profess peace have nothing to fear from it but the death of the body. We who profess love may yet see this agonised empire transformed into a vehicle of the universal expression of divine and human charity. Be strong in your weakness and proud in your humility. In the name of the Father—’

Pathetic, yes. Damnably so. We have to imagine Linus and his congregation as a huddle of fearful people meeting, by an irony, in those groves some four miles from Rome where the tomb of Nero was already overrun by coarse grass and bindweed. Prayers were often gabbled, and the accidents of the sacrament all too frequently gulped. The end of Nero was not the end of intolerance. It was a weed that flourished rankly and still does.

Consider Servus Sulpicius Galba in his camp not far from Cordova, the town where Seneca and Gallio were born. The governor of Spain, he hobbled out on aged twisted feet which could hardly bear sandals to the occasional harrying of dissident Iberians. As now. He looked up in satisfaction at three men leaping and gasping like landed fish on three crosses on a little hill. Seventy, hairless, his joints twisted but his spirit vigorous, he had let old age harden a native brutality and bring no glimmer of compassion. His aide Porcellus had some of this last quality and he spoke, albeit nervously, of the Senate’s possible displeasure at the crucifixion of Roman citizens.

‘Look carefully, man, and you’ll see that our delinquent Roman hangs a little higher than our delinquent Iberians. Roman citizens may claim no special leniency. Justice is justice. As for the Senate, the Senate has been loud in its denunciation of the Christians. I am only pleasing a Senate I am called upon to serve and yet not serve. I wish I could have caught that Jew Paul before he took ship. He too was a Roman citizen.’

‘Our Christians,’ Porcellus said stoutly, ‘have been no worse soldiers than the rest.’

‘Careful, Porcellus, go very carefully. Keep your sympathy from my ears and eyes. The Christians are by definition followers of a slave cult, scornful of our virtues and of our gods, haters of blood, unless it is the infantile blood they drink disgustingly at their incestuous feasts. There will be no living Christians in my Rome.’

They had come to Galba’s tent, an elaborate contrivance with a wingspreading eagle high above its central pole on a sort of canvas cupola, out-tents attached to the main body, twelve soldiers on perpetual guard around it. Blue Spanish hills, haunted by real eagles, lay beyond, misted in the dull hot day. Galba paused before going in.

‘You read the letter, Porcellus?’

‘I even studied it, sir.’

‘Oh, very conscientious. You agree that this is the only course? Nero orders my death because our Spanish army proclaims me – though the gods alone know how he thinks my execution is to be arranged. I countermand the order. And there’s only one way to do that.’

‘I must get used to calling you Caesar, Caesar.’

‘Servus Sulpicius Galba Caesar.’ He grinned with few teeth. ‘It rings well enough. Pity I’m old, Porcellus. How many years am I given to clear up the mess left by Nero? Oh, send in a woman for me, will you? Not too young. I’m no longer athletic.’

‘These Iberian women are dirty, Caesar. Shall I have some bathed and then Caesar can take his choice?’

‘Have one of them bathed. I leave the choice to you. Will you be like me at seventy, Porcellus? Asking for a woman to be sent in?’

‘I doubt if I’ll reach seventy, Caesar.’

‘Very true. You won’t even reach forty if you go on telling me that Christians make good soldiers. All right, dismiss.’

The truth is that Galba cared little for the embraces of women, clean or dirty. But the heterosexual gesture worked well in a province which associated homosexuality with a burnt and dirty Rome which it was the destiny of the provincial governor to go and clean up. Galba loved his little boys like all our pagan magnates except Claudius, and one must wonder at this sickness of inversion which was not just an imported Greek cult but a satisfaction deeply rooted in the male glands and psyche of the Roman governing class. They begot children distractedly but had, perhaps, a deep fear of those magical caverns of the female body which had their counterpart in the female mind. They feared women more than they durst admit, and they were content to allow the infantile loveplay of the boys’ gymnasium or the school baths to be prolonged even into old age. When Galba landed with his legion at Ostia, he was, twisted and toothless as he was, eager to engage the perversions of the imperial life that, a grave fault in Nero but, to be truthful, one he had at first resisted, his mother having helped there, had to be associated with other perversities – gratuitous cruelty, arbitrary power. Galba did not cleanse Rome; Rome would never be clean.

A clean-looking Roman met Galba at Ostia. During the complicated disembarkation of troops and war engines, he accosted the new Caesar with a pleasant smile but no servile obeisance, saying: ‘Marcus Salvius Otho, if you remember.’

‘I remember your wife.’

‘Yes,’ Otho said sadly. ‘Caesar’s wife. As she became. You never met her, if I may contradict you. She was not in Lusitania with me. My transfer to the governorship in Lusitania was my official divorce.’

‘I don’t remember ever having called on you in Lusitania. But I remember meeting Poppea Sabina in Rome. Whither I march tomorrow. I suppose it is useless asking if she is well, or even still alive.’

‘Useless. And unnecessary to ask where my loyalties lie.’

‘Yes, I can see where they might lie. So you join me in cutting Nero’s throat?’

‘Of course, you’ve heard no news. Nero performed that necessary task himself. Last week. The Senate approves your nomination. Your march will be a triumphal one, Caesar.’

‘Thank you. You have the privilege of being the first to call me that on Italian soil. Where do I lodge tonight?’

‘Rough lodgings for the Emperor, I fear. The confiscated mansion of an import merchant who was imprudent enough to have himself converted to this new faith.’

‘Imprudent indeed.’

‘But we soldiers are used to rough lodgings, are we not?’

‘You call yourself a soldier?’

‘Oh, I’ve done my share of leading troops. Against Rome’s enemies. Caesar,’ he added. They looked very steadily at each other. Slaves ran up, carrying a litter. Otho smiled at Galba and then looked down, not smiling, at his Emperor’s twisted feet. ‘A painful condition?’ he asked.

‘Old, Otho, old, old, old.’ He confirmed the statement by opening his ravaged mouth in a grin hard to interpret but certainly ugly. ‘I must do something very rapidly, mustn’t I, about proclaiming my successor to the purple? An old man without a wife and without heirs of his body. How old are you, Otho?’

‘Thirty-seven, Caesar.’

‘Ah, youth, youth. And a man of good connections. Very close to two emperors.’

‘My closeness to Nero was, as you may guess, a matter of policy, which may be interpreted as a question of survival. The divine Claudius was very good to me, Caesar, and to my family.’

‘Well connected, as I say. Is it far to my lodgings?’

‘Less than a thousand paces.’

‘So we’ll march together, shall we, Otho? Yes yes, march together.’

The march to Rome that followed the following day should have partaken of the quality of a holy procession in which priests hymned their deliverer and little children strewed flowers of the season in Galba’s way. But the tuba and bucina brayed harshly in opposed tonalities, big drums were thumped and little ones spanked, and a bald old man with twisted feet rode a fine bay and grinned horribly at the crowds which greeted him and his bronzed troops. There were some in the crowd who mysteriously objected to Galba’s succession though they shouted no worthier name, and the new Emperor was very quick to dispense what he called justice. The dissidents were nailed roughly to trees or summarily beheaded. When he entered Rome by the Via Ostiensis he was somewhat disappointed that the ravages of the famous fire should so speedily have been repaired: Nero had left Rome looking rather better than he remembered it. The Palatine was still in process of being made more beautiful than ever before, and the palace which Galba entered on his hideous bare feet, leaving flat damp footprints on the marble, was of a magnificence not, naturally, to be paralleled in Spain. Galba had hoped to create a kind of Galbapolis, but Neropolis bloomed all about him. He called the court together quickly: remnants of the old palace administration including Tigellinus the great survivor. He would see the Senate later. He said:

‘Servus Sulpicius Galba. Caesar. New purple on an old body, but do not be deceived by the signs of natural decrepitude. I am here to rule, not to sing, dance, cavort on the stage.’ Tigellinus seemed to grin at some inner image of Galba dancing on those ghastly feet, and Galba said: ‘Who are you?’

‘Ottonius Tigellinus, Caesar, at Caesar’s service. Praetorian prefect under the late Emperor.’

‘I appoint my own praetorian prefect,’ Galba said. ‘I make my own appointments. But I do not necessarily consider that the servitors of the late unlamented butcher are unemployable. Listen, all of you whom I must consider to be the imperial court. You have lived through bad times and some of you have helped to engineer them. We must forget those bad times and look forward to a future which, in the nature of things, can hardly be a long one for me. I crown my provincial career with Rome’s highest honour, a widower whose wife is long dead and his sons, alas alas, are dead also. I appoint as my heir in my first imperial act the noble Piso Licinianus.’

Galba looked carefully at Otho when making this announcement. Otho reacted only with apparent satisfaction. Piso Licinianus, a handsome empty-faced young man in military uniform, stepped forward to be inspected by the court. None knew him, few had heard of him before, all wondered how Galba happened to know him. He did not know him; he had picked him out rather arbitrarily from the squad of young nobility which had been presented to him in Ostia. Anyone would do for the succession. Galba addressed the army prefects present, saying:

‘To the imperial forces I say this. Look for justice but do not look for special favours. I am all too well aware that the army considers itself to be a maker of emperors and a sustainer of emperors in office. I, with my own decree, make the next emperor. It is my custom to levy troops, not to buy them. I demand loyalty from you all, I do not seek it. Titellonus, stay with me a while. The rest of you may dismiss.’

The court padded or marched out. The two villains, one in advanced old age, the other certainly greying his way towards it, looked at each other. ‘So, Titilinus—’

‘Tigellinus, Caesar.’

‘Whatever your name is, was all that well said?’

‘In what capacity do you ask me, Caesar?’

‘I can see that you’re something of a rogue. Responsible for the burning down of Rome, weren’t you?’

‘That was solely the responsibility of the late unlamented, Caesar. He was an artist. He loved bright colours.’

‘Well, I’m no artist. A plain man. They tell me you were once a fishmonger.’

‘An honest occupation, Caesar. I was seduced into the imperial office I still officially hold by the wiles of the late Emperor. It was an unhappy time for me, but I did my duty.’

‘So you want no more of the imperial service? You’d rather go back to selling fish?’

‘I would wish to serve a true Emperor with every ounce of blood and sinew I possess.’

‘Very well. I’m appointing a new praetorian prefect, never mind who for the moment. A matter of a promise. Call it a matter of honour. But I need the Praetorian Guard well watched. Perhaps you can understand why.’

‘You levy troops, Caesar, you do not buy them. At Caesar’s service. I am to spy on the Guard I once had the honour of commanding.’

‘Somewhat crudely put. You’re a crude man.’

‘I am anything that Caesar says I am.’ Galba chuckled.

When it seemed certain that Galba’s appointment of Piso Licinianus as his successor was to be officially confirmed, Otho gave a party for the senior officers of the Praetorian Guard at his estate on the river. He did not at first produce the cates and vintages they expected; they looked, most of them, puzzled at the lack of the materials of revelry. They were puzzled also at the smiling presence of Tigellinus and the absence of their new prefect Cornelius Laco, but the latter was excused by his being ill of a toothache and the former explained in terms of a nostalgic desire to be with old friends. Otho had severe things to say before his guests became fuddled and lecherous. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told them in a flowery bower where undisciplined thrushes sang merrily, ‘I’ve done enough soldiering to know that it’s a hard life and that the material rewards are nugatory. As a lifelong friend of the Empire’s most distinguished soldiery I blush at Caesar’s ingratitude and, indeed, ineptitude. I think, to be charitable, we may speak of senility.’ Many of the officers looked at each other: this was bold language. ‘Seneca, a great man slain, said something very wise, as I seem to recall. He spoke of the danger of authority without power. Dangerous to the one in authority, he meant. Such a man cuts his own throat.’ He beamed at them. That was, as they all all too vividly recalled, no mere metaphor. ‘Too many promises made. Too few fulfilled. Gentlemen, I keep my promises.’

‘What exactly do you mean, sir?’ a grave senior officer asked.

‘I think, with the help of my good friend Tigellinus here, I’m in the happy position of being able to compensate you for the Emperor’s deficiencies.’ He clapped his hands in the Oriental manner and the whole roast boars were wheeled on. Flitting through the green groves which were part of the estate, white naked bodies seemed to be seen and tinkling laughter to be heard. ‘I do not, of course, speak of bribery.’ Of course not, most dangerous word. His guests, being sharpset, fell to.

Somewhat later, Galba went to address the Senate. Followed by his foolish followers Titus Vinius, who had served him in Spain, Cornelius Laco, an arrogant idiot, and the freedman Icelus Marcianus, who was after Laco’s post, he made for the curule chair. He found it turned to the wall. He was furious as the attendants hurriedly put it into its right orientation. ‘Who did this?’ he called. ‘Who had the effrontery to arrange this act of ill omen?’ None spoke. Galba said: ‘I’m well aware, reverend senators, of your attitude to your Emperor. Inured to bribery, you are unused to justice. I hear murmurs of promises unkept, sums unpaid. You will hear from me this this this – that there are steps to authority, and they make for heavy climbing, but if the climbing is helped and eased by ready hands and arms, then such aid is rightly rewarded with soft words. But at the head of the stairway stands the plateau of power, and power lies in the very name of the office, its very history and mystical resonance. I will not buy the sustention of my office. Caesar is Caesar.’

The reverend senators recollected that they had heard similar words before, composed by Seneca, intoned by Nero, now presumably passed on to the new man by that damnable Tigellinus, who had been rendered immune to senatorial vindictiveness, or justice, by an imperial fiat. They looked with little confidence on the old toothless baldhead, in whom only sharp blue eyes burned with a promise of imperial vitality, pitying and despising the gouty hands that could not even unroll a parchment unaided, wondering how many more weeks he had to go.

Tigellinus said to Galba later in the gardens of the Palatine: ‘It’s as you surmised, Caesar. The Guards were ready for mutiny. They’re a bad lot. Venal.’

‘Like the whole city. What made them change their minds?’

‘A little talk from your humble servitor. A little bribery.’

‘Whose money?’

‘My own.’

‘That takes loyalty very far. What do you want?’

‘Caesar knows what I want.’

‘I don’t sell offices, Tigellinus. Not usually. We’ll see. You say ah the ah disaffection has been damped?’

‘Caesar may walk abroad in perfect safety.’

Caesar walked abroad towards the Temple of Saturn. Icelus Marcianus told him that Otho had seized the camp of the Guards. ‘The legionaries,’ Galba panted. ‘Where are the legionaries? Immediate orders that the legionaries rally to my standard.’ He saw with panic that his entourage was, singly and at various degrees of speed, running towards the Forum.

‘The cavalry, Caesar, see.’ An unnecessary notification. Armed horsemen were galloping in from the eastern end of the city. ‘Caesar, I humbly take my leave.’ Galba found himself facing, under a hot sun, a reined-in squadron that raised much dust. To his relief, he heard and then saw behind him a running platoon of German troops. Then there was no relief because they ran too slowly and the swords were out and bright.

‘What is all this? What do you want of me? I don’t like those looks. Come, aren’t we comrades? You belong to me, I belong to you.’ It sounded like a popular song that would have been despised for its banality by Galba’s predecessor. The leader of the troop made a rough vocal signal, then it was all hooves and blood. Struck down. He was left there by the ornamental pool named for Curtius. The German troops about turned and marched back. The cavalry galloped back east to the Guards barracks, where Otho was being proclaimed. The bleeding body was left to the phagocytes. A common soldier knew whose it was and had a vague notion that he might be paid for the head. He sawed it off without difficulty, the neck being thin, all strings, and then he cursed it because there was no hair to carry it by. He stuck his thumb in the toothless mouth and hooked it against the hard palate. Then he bore it aloft and swaying towards the headquarters of the Praetorian Guard. He heard cheers. Otho was being borne on stout shoulders. A new Caesar. How long would he last?

Aulus Vitellius, a long man in his fifties, on whom a disproportionately gross paunch seemed to have been plastered, received the news of Otho’s accession in his camp on the lower Rhine. He chewed fibrous gobbets of overboiled boarmeat with strong brown teeth as he read and reread the letter in which Otho asked for the hand of his daughter and invited him to share the rule of the Empire. Vitellius’s slow brain, inveterately clogged with the fat of gross feeding, pondered this and pondered also his present gubernatorial appointment, which had been made by Galba. Evidently these upstart Caesars feared him. One had wanted him out of the way; the other craved an alliance. It was as good as an invitation to take over. His aide Severus agreed. Picking delicately at the bone Vitellius had offered, he said: ‘The fact is that times have changed. The Praetorian Guard thinks it makes the emperor. The days of the power of the military in the capital are done. This province of Germany speaks for the future. The Empire is its provinces.’

‘How long since Otho seized power?’

‘A few weeks.’

‘Who helped him to it?’

‘You know Tigellinus?’

‘I know the bastard. A few weeks, eh? It seems hardly fair to allow him to get settled in.’

And so Vitellius disclosed to his troops an affability he had not previously shown, embracing odd common soldiers as far as his belly would permit, showering gold pieces on them, inviting even centurions to share his breakfast, a meal which tended to be prolonged until it could be fairly called dinner, and obtaining a cheering proclamation without much difficulty. How sordid all this is. When Otho got the news that the legions of Vitellius had already been sighted in northern Italy, he reluctantly marched at the head of the Thirteenth, ready to parley, and was suicidally depressed when he found he was committed to battle. He was not a fighting man. In his tent outside Brixellum he spoke harshly to Tigellinus, who had unexpectedly changed from uniform into the garb of a civilian traveller:

‘Did not expect it? What do you mean – you did not expect it?’

‘I did not,’ Tigellinus smoothly said, ‘expect such a state of unpreparedness. I gave you my support on a different understanding. Even under my first master Nero there was a sort of stability. Which, I must admit, Nero at length totally liquidated. After all, my loyalty is to Rome.’

‘Meaning whoever is capable of taking Rome?’

‘You can put it like that, yes. It’s no unpatriotic act to leave you now, Otho.’

‘I’m still called Caesar,’ Otho said, loudly though with little conviction.

‘So briefly. So terribly briefly. Still, you’re entitled to the honorific. Vale, Caesar.’ He gave the ancient European salute and left the tent. One of Otho’s senior officers came in and looked enquiringly at his master. Otho said:

‘No, I know what you’re going to suggest. Leave all that to Vitellius.’

‘Do we fight, Caesar?’

‘Well, we certainly don’t surrender. But I’ve no real taste for civil war. I think I’d better get my papers in order.’

This took a long time. To his secretary Britannus he gave certain simple signed instructions. No punishment of deserters. All manifests of Otho’s supporters to be burnt, along with all private letters which might incriminate his friends. No records, in other words. Though an exception could be made for Tigellinus. ‘I’ll retire now. I don’t want to be disturbed till dawn. I recommend that you go into retirement. Somewhere remote and safe. You know you’re provided for.’

‘I’m grateful, Caesar.’

Otho, like so many of the personages of my story, was completely bald, but he had always worn a well sculpted toupee that dissimulated his condition even to friends and concubines. Now he took this off. In a mood of total serenity he ate a light supper and then went to bed. By his bed a good sharp dagger was waiting. At dawn the army of Vitellius roared into the camp, pillaging in a fierce red light that was the shepherd’s warning. In the tent of Otho they found the body of Otho, neatly pierced, the face above the wound relaxing from the contortion of death into a deep peace. The hair above the face was very neatly disposed. It was what was known as a Roman end.

Vitellius ate his way into Rome, crunching the votive bunches of grapes that peasants numbly handed him, digging his blunt fingers into watermelons, calling for grilled meat from the stalls by the roadside. The first ceremonial banquet would be of three days’ duration.

Tigellinus was wallowing in a bath of bubbling mud in the establishment of a certain Laetus on the outskirts of Rome when he heard the news that his days were numbered, indeed his hours. One naked handmaiden was kneading hot red mud into his groin while another shaved him. He embraced the kneader with hungry fervour before politely saying to the shaver: ‘Give me that razor. Then leave me, both of you. A gentleman sometimes has to be alone. There are certain things a gentleman can only do for himself.’ The girls snatched up bathrobes and giggled their way out. Tigellinus grasped the razor by its white bone handle, mumbling to himself.

‘Well, little Nero, it was a good run. True to one’s nature. I was always true to mine. Well, until recently. A gentleman should never scheme to obtain power. Power comes to those who can use it – for whatever end. I was a bad man, Nero. Totally bad. That in itself ought to be pleasing to some god or other. But I don’t know his name. I rose out of the mud. And here I am. At the last.’ He scored both forearms very deeply and watched with a kind of admiration the rich red flow. ‘Sleepy, a little sleepy. Back to the mud, Tigellinus.’ He sank into it.

A man like Tigellinus could be regarded as a supererogatory element in the reign of an emperor like Vitellius, whose main distinctions were gluttony and cruelty and a willingness to indulge both at the same time. There was, for instance, the time when he sat alone at table, gorging brains, livers and pancreases seethed in cream and honey, having already taken a morning snack of the sacrificial meats offered to the gods and additional bevers of sturgeon, oysters, pies made of small wild birds and sickeningly sweet pastries, what time he gloated over the forthcoming dessert of the execution of a good citizen named Octavius. Octavius stood near the block, far enough away from the dining table to ensure that no blood would stain its napery, while the axeman waited to his left and his wife, Livia, wept and pleaded on his right. With courtesy Vitellius said:

‘You will forgive my dining at this solemn moment in your life, Octavius. I have a busy day. I must eat when I can. Have you anything to say before the carver ah carves?’

‘I die deservedly, Caesar,’ Octavius said. ‘There is no worse crime than being a fool. You should write a treatise called A Short Way with Creditors.’

‘Oh, Caesar,’ Livia sobbed, ‘he did only good to you, sir. He sold his mother’s house to get you the money you said you needed. Be merciful. He won’t do it again.’

Vitellius choked on that, spraying the air with fragments of stewed milt. Octavius said to his wife: ‘Go now, Livia. Remember me as I was.’ Vitellius said to her:

‘No, don’t go, Oliva or Lavia or whatever your name is. You can still remember him as he was for a second or so. A capitate husband, so to speak. You realise, of course, that your crime is rather greater than his. You pleaded for his life. You said in effect that the imperial verdict was unjust. Headsman, try out your blade on an easy neck – delicate, swanlike I think the poets would say.’

‘I congratulate you, Vitellius,’ Octavius said. ‘I thought Gaius and Nero were the ultimate monsters. You do better than both. And you’ll meet the same end. If you don’t burst first like a poisoned dog.’

The screaming Livia was carried to the block while Vitellius ate with relish. This was no exceptional day for him. The exceptional days were marked by consumption of the great Minerva pie, which was compounded, under a thick crust of flour and eggwhite, of the organs of pikes, carp, pheasants, quails, partridges, peacocks, flamingoes and lampreys and the execution not merely of creditors but of close friends who came to the banquet smiling. There was always plenty to eat for Vitellius.

What can one say of this Rome except that it was in great need of moral redemption and that it had missed its chance? And what can one say of the corruption of the present writer, who admits to a gross fascination in the recording of bloody misrule and a certain reluctance to return to the lives of small people who sweep, bake bread, make decent marital love, perform their humble duties to the community but raise yawns more than admiration when they become matter for a book? God, if he exists and does not recognise Petronius, may think differently, but you are not God.

Marcus Julius Tranquillus and his wife and daughter left Rome at an opportune time. Julius’s uncle, who was ageing and lonely, made them welcome in his villa in Pompeii, which lay not far from the fertile slopes of Mons Summanus, a mountain which had erupted recently and would not, so the astrologers decreed, erupt again for at least a century. Julius, a retired soldier, took to what many veterans did for health and pleasure in those days: he cultivated a garden. But he tended his uncle’s grounds, which had been neglected, for profit also. He added to the garden two acres of unused paddock: the soil was so rich here with the past effusions of the volcano that it cried aloud to be planted and harvested. So Julius grew salad greens, cucumbers, melons and marrows, plucked plums and cherries, and tended vines which produced wine so miraculous that it was called the tears of the gods; the few quiet Christians around (of whom Julius was no longer one) went further and called it the tears of Christ. When Julius’s uncle died, full of years and still dreaming of the return of the republic, the property went to the nephew. Julius prospered, employing two boys and his own son-in-law in the planting, tending and marketing. Ruth had married the son of a Greek bridging engineer named – like his father – Demetrios, who had migrated hither as a child with his family from western Cyprus. While the Roman Empire was setting to history the worst possible examples of morality and rule, it was also, distractedly as it were, proclaiming the virtues of intermarriage, which I have always held to be one of the hopes of a humanity which has tried to thrive too long on divisiveness.

Julius was growing old now, iron-grey but not bald, muscular and sunburnt but given to shooting pains in the back and thighs. Sara was less old, but she too was greying and her body, which had been slender as a sword, had rounded to an acceptable matronliness. She retained her old cynicism about the ways of God and empires. The day was enough and whatever the day brought – the kitchen tasks, the laying of the red dust, the feeding of the hens and pigeons, the evening gossip over the tears of the gods, the stroll with her married daughter through a town grown soft in its cultivation of pleasure, well planned however, full of ridiculous statues and refreshing fountains. It was a town of baths and brothels, fantastic fashions in dress and hair for the patrician women, lavish dinner parties for the rich, a general tolerance of Oriental faiths though not of Christianity, games and plays and singing contests, a balmy climate, Mons Summanus recovered from his sickness and puffing slackly and benignly.

One day Sara’s brother Caleb and his wife Hannah came unexpectedly, leading a grey donkey on which their household gods were bundled and corded. They were travelstained and weary but swiftly revived after a warm sluice and a cup of the divine lacrimation. They unloaded their beast and sent it to graze in the orchard among the plum windfalls.

‘How long are you staying?’ Sara asked.

‘Myself not at all. Hannah, until I get back. If I ever do.’ Hannah was thin with a grief she could not lose nor seemed to wish to. Caleb was hardy enough but looked older than Julius. His nose seemed more assertive than before, his cheeks had shrunken. They had had no further child; they had settled to an unphilosophical resentment of the death of their son.

‘There’s room for her.’

‘She’s a good hand with the needle. And her cooking isn’t bad.’

‘And you go where?’

‘Well, it’s a long story,’ Caleb said to Julius and Sara, as they sat over the cool jug. ‘I’m going back to Jerusalem. I take ship from Puteoli. I’ve waited how many years for this? And it comes when I’m too old, an old married man with no son to promise a future to.’

‘What future?’ Julius asked. ‘What’s going on?’

‘You get no news here?’

‘News of what?’

Caleb sighed heavily, sitting on his ornate little chair nursing his cup, his shoulders hunched. ‘The Romans always ran Palestine badly. Our people put up with a lot but there had to be a limit. The procurator Florus has forced this on the people. Robbing the Temple, God help us. What do the Jews do? Sit back and let him do it? They hit, at least the Zealots did. There’ve been some Roman deaths. Florus ordered a massacre and some woman there tried to stop it. Daughter of Caligula’s puppet – I forget her name.’

‘Bernice or Berenice,’ Julius said. ‘I saw her in Caesarea. A pretty little woman. No fool.’

‘Now she’s gone on to the Roman side,’ Caleb said. ‘Perhaps she can’t be blamed. The Jews burnt down her palace in Jerusalem. The Jews can sometimes be very ungrateful. But the Jews at the moment are mad, and who can blame them?’

‘Where did you learn all this?’ Sara asked.

‘It’s come through to Rome. There are prayers in the synagogues. It’s the war at last. The Romans brought this on themselves. I’ve got to get out there.’

‘To be killed,’ Hannah started to sob. ‘They won’t win, they can’t. It’s going to be butchery.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Caleb admitted. ‘They’ve got the legions coming in from Syria. And we, they, the Zealots, have stones and a few knives and no organisation. No unity, no control. The Sadducees want to keep out of it and the Pharisees aren’t sure. As for the Nazarenes—’ He looked straight at Julius. ‘It’s the end of the Nazarenes.’

‘I thought it would be, some day,’ Julius said. ‘God hasn’t been helpful to the Nazarenes. Or to the Jews. I lost faith. I see now it was Paul I had faith in.’

‘You’re no longer one of them?’

‘No longer. I attached my faith to something else. Something more in keeping with the needs of a retired centurion.’

‘He means,’ Sara said with some scorn, ‘he’s been washed in the blood of the white bull. Nonsense like the other thing. But more fanciful nonsense. Mithraism, they call it.’

‘In what way,’ Julius asked, ‘is it the end of the Nazarenes?’ He felt a lump like hard cake in his mouth.

‘How could the Nazarenes be trusted? They don’t believe in war. They turn the other cheek. They won’t die for the Temple.’

‘And quite right too,’ Sara said. ‘Why should anyone want to die for a chunk of stone?’

‘He’s ready to die for it,’ Hannah sobbed. ‘Men are fools.’

‘Suicidal idiots,’ Sara expanded. Caleb looked sheepish. Julius said:

‘What happened to the Nazarenes?’

‘Nothing much. They were given a warning. They were asked to show where their loyalties lay. And when their episcopos as they call him had the stones thrown—’ He gulped, remembering Stephen.

‘Who?’ Julius asked.

‘James. Head of the Nazarenes in Jerusalem. The last of those who saw Jesus Naggar. The Zealots said it wasn’t safe to have him around.’

‘I never met him,’ Julius said. ‘But I heard about him. He did well. He kept the balance. I thought the Jews loved him.’

‘Oh, they were ready enough to tolerate him before this Florus raided the Temple. Then he talked about forgiveness and the Temple not made by hands. So the high priest Ananus permitted the stoning. He knew what would happen if he didn’t. They killed the high priest Ananias. Cleaning up the Jewish camp before the great war. The pure clean blade of the sword of Israel.’ He began himself to sob like his wife but he soon gave over and then showed proud wet eyes to the company. ‘I know it’s hopeless, but what can I do? Could I live with myself? I take ship from Puteoli.’

‘The war will be over by the time you get to Caesarea,’ Julius said.

‘It will never be over,’ Caleb said. ‘It will take the Romans for ever and ever to kill all the Jews of the world. The Temple may be destroyed, but the Jews carried the Ark of the Covenant through the desert places and will carry it again.’

‘Go,’ his sister said, ‘to the desert places and wait for them. You’re following a bad dream.’

‘A good dream. I had it when I was a boy, you remember. I have to be true to my boyhood. It’s as simple as that.’

Caleb marched to the port on a rainy day, with the cone of the great mountain masked in grey moving mist. He kissed his wife and sister and niece and he wept. Julius shook his hand hopelessly and went to the weekly service at a temple less glorious than Solomon’s. The altar was a simple stone table, and on the wall behind it was a painting in Pompeian blues and russets of the god Mithras as a beautiful youth driving his sword into the neck of a white bull which was, for good measure, being devoured simultaneously by a scorpion, a crab and a dog. He found himself praying to the severed head of Paul for the safety of his brother-in-law, then he shook off the blasphemy. The masked priest stood near a tethered white bullock, knife in hand. Julius too was masked and, like so many of his fellow worshippers, he wore a military uniform worn, too small, somewhat mildewed. There were five young postulants, unmasked. The priest said:

‘Worshippers of Mithras, lovers of Mithras, god of the sun, lord of life, hearken well to his story. The god of light was conceived to be our saviour from the god of darkness Ahriman, prince of evil. The struggle continues until the death of time, and we participate in the struggle. Behold the solemnity of his mystery. The swift sword of light saves the force of generation from being devoured by the force of evil. The killing sword is also the sword of rebirth. For from the blood of the slain new life springs. For those postulates assembled today with the initiates, a most solemn moment is at hand. For they shall be bathed in the blood of the slain and be given new life.’ He raised the sacrificial knife and Julius closed his eyes. On the roof of the temple the rain beat. He remembered another bathing on the shore of the island of Melita. Sacrament meant soldier’s oath. Broken, broken. Cowardice. No, realism. Were they not all the same? Isis and Osiris, at whose ceremonies his daughter Ruth wept and rejoiced for the death and rebirth of the god of fertility, taking her new pregnancy to the priestess of Isis to be blessed. All the same under different names. He opened his eyes as the heavy bulk of the bleeding bullock fell to knees, to flank, bellowed in fear, died with blaring eyes. The postulants went forward to the altar to be smeared with the blood of the slain. For at his last supper the Lord spoke and said take ye and eat for this is my body. Take ye and drink for this is my blood. Julius was hearing the wrong words. The priest was saying: ‘Bring low the armies of Ahriman. Saviour, accept our love.’ Rain continued its rebuke, Julius beat his breast.

Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus, whom we will call simply Vespasian, hale in his fifties, once legatus legionis in Britain, hated by Nero but indispensable to him as an efficient, tireless and incorruptible general, sat with his son, who had the identical name but whom we will call simply Titus, in their military headquarters near the Syrian border. ‘The Tenth Fretensis,’ Titus said. ‘The Twelfth Fulminata. The Fifteenth Apollinaris. The Fifth Macedonian.’ Regimental orders were sealed and stacked for delivery. Vespasian said:

‘I leave it to you.’

‘But surely there’s no urgency. These Jews come first.’

‘Rome comes first.’ Vespasian read once more the dispatches. The Moesian and Pannonian legions had repudiated Vitellius. The legions in Syria and Judaea also. Their allegiance to Vespasian had not been sought and certainly not paid for. Vespasianus Caesar. Titus said:

‘If you leave it to me you leave to me also the fulfilling of the Antonian dream.’

‘Listen,’ his father said urgently, ‘things never happen twice. The Eastern Empire was an impossibility, and Antony would have seen that if he hadn’t been besotted.’

‘Bernice is no Cleopatra. Bernice accepts the pax Romana.’

‘Which is administered from Rome. Where, when I die, you will be Emperor. Another thing, Jerusalem is not Alexandria. I know what you have in mind, young as you are.’ Titus was in his middle twenties. ‘It’s a Neronian idea in the sense that it’s an artist’s dream. The fusion of Roman discipline and Oriental glamour. Well, there’s no glamour in the Jews. They don’t have the decadent softness of the Egyptians. I can understand your being bewitched by this Galilean princess of yours, but that’s just a young man succumbing to Asiatic languor. You’ll get over it.’

‘I propose marrying her.’

‘Ah, no. When your time comes the Romans will never accept a foreign empress. You won’t even have time now to use her as a mistress. You’re in total charge of the Palestinian campaign from now on. It won’t take long. Show no mercy. They deserve no mercy. Pound it to dust and sow salt in the ruins. Spare nobody. Spare nothing. Not even their damned temple.’

‘There are certain things not even a conqueror ought to do.’

‘Oh, I know – fine architecture, sacred to an ancient people. But batter it, desecrate it, don’t be seduced by the tears of your Galilean mistress. There’s no room for strange gods in the Empire. Cover the body of the Jewish faith with quicklime.’

‘And the Christian faith?’

‘That’s already finished.’

I have not much to say about this Jewish campaign: the story has been exhaustively, if sometimes inaccurately, told by a man named Joseph ben Mattias, who turned his coat and, in devotion to the dynasty initiated by Vespasian, renamed himself Josephus Flavius. It was after the massacre at Jotapata in Galilee that he, a rare survivor and a competent captain of infantry, sought Titus in his tent. ‘He comes under a truce flag,’ the centurion Liberalis told his general. ‘He wants to come over to our side, he says. He has valuable information, he says.’

‘I don’t like defectors. Why didn’t he die with the rest of the—What’s this place called?’

‘Jottapatata or something. Shall I let him in?’

Titus tiredly nodded. A young man in armour, heavily bearded, came in, his brown eyes sharp as though feverish. He gave his present name and what he trusted might be his future name. ‘The Jewish cause was always hopeless,’ he said. ‘Why have you crucified some and not others?’

‘We ran out of wood.’

Josephus sighed. ‘I fought but saw that fighting was a mode of self slaughter. I wish to join the Roman cause.’

‘And what do you hope to gain from the Roman cause?’

‘For myself, nothing. Except my life. Rome I know. I pleaded the cause of the Jews there once. The Empress Poppea Sabina was generous enough to say that she was impressed. She proposed joining the Godfearers. No, irrelevant. I’m a writer of histories. As such, I know that no man can fight against history. It is a strong tide and a man must float with it. History lies, for the next few hundred years or so, indubitably and ineluctably with the Roman Empire.’

‘And how many of your fellow countrymen feel the same?’

‘Not many. We Jews are a stubborn people. When I come to the writing of the history of this war I shall not deny either the stubbornness or the courage or the faith. The way things are going, all that will be left of the Jewish people is what will be in my book. But that must be so with all peoples, even the ones who establish their empires for eternity.’

‘I’m a patient man,’ Titus said. ‘I’ve listened. But I’m not greatly interested. Why do you tell me all this?’

‘I tell it you because, without realising it yet, you are desperately interested. Every victorious general needs the palms of the poet or the historian. Otherwise he becomes only a garbled tale for children. But I do not come primarily to tell you this. I come to tell you of the rifts in the fortifications of the holy city.’

Titus showed brief revulsion. ‘You come here to betray your own people?’

‘Hardly. I do not wish Jerusalem to suffer a great siege. Let Jerusalem be taken with the minimum of bloodshed. I will show you the surest way to the citadel. I think you may find me useful in other ways. Your Aramaic hardly exists. Aramaic is my mother tongue.’

‘What prevents my treating you as a captive and as a slave?’

‘Your good sense. Your victorious generosity. The fact that I am what I am. A man who has the right view of history. As for captivity and slavery – these, of course, I will not accept. I can always fly at your throat with my teeth and then be struck down. All death is captivity. Living, we have a choice.’

‘Highly philosophical. You’d better tell me about the rifts in the Jerusalem fortifications.’

It was not intelligence of any great utility. The battering rams found their own weak places in the city walls. The catapults hurled rocks at the battlements. When Titus’s forces entered they found a wailing population white with dust, arms raised to heaven, women howling over the dead children they still carried tightly in their arms, Jew fighting with Jew. Odd troops of Zealots armed with the slingshot David had found efficacious against Goliath, sworded and daggered too, opened fierce mouths at the invading Romans and rushed on them to no great effect. Those who were caught were nailed in cruciform postures to the city walls. The weak and old had already found refuge in the Temple, which had its protective garrison of young warriors. The Tower of Antonia was in Jewish hands. Arrows and stones rained on the vanguard that Titus himself led to the Temple gates. Titus, marching through the inner courts, saw with interest a notice in the three languages of the province, promising death to the Gentile intruder. That in itself was a challenge. He ordered the rams to be dragged to the massy doors, marvelling at their gold and ivory, fighting a sickness that was a mere transitory disease of his impressionable youth.

‘Steady, there. Watch that offside wheel. Come on, move.’

Wails came through the clouds of white dust. The Romans completed their forcing of the doors, finding it no easy task. Within the Temple they found howling women raising babies like weapons or shields. The old were on their knees, though not to the Romans. A noisy lot, the centurion Liberalis thought. There was now battle in the Temple. Young men with beards fought for the Holy of Holies. Priests cried prayers to their all highest. Sweating Roman troops, awed distractedly at the magnificence of gold and onyx and carbuncle and amethyst, stuck their spears in and seemed to hear the blood gush in cries about the horror of the ultimate desecration.

In the morning glory of birdsong, Titus surveyed the multiple crucified bodies that were crammed on the skyline. There were no trees left in the environs for further crucifixions. He walked with Josephus through smoke, dust and broken stone, stumbling over corpses. One corpse came alive and spoke:

‘Yusef ben Mattias. Traitor.’

‘Josephus Flavius. Roman citizen.’

The corpse, briskly speared, rejoined its fellows.

‘One thing I would not wish to be recorded in my history,’ Josephus said calmly. ‘The desecration of the Temple through pillage and demolition. Posterity will never forget that.’

‘Even though it’s been used as a military fort?’

‘Necessity, necessity. The citadel of the faith and the faith means the city. I will tell you the true reason why I accept the Roman mastership of the lands of the Mediterranean. The future can never lie with theocracy.’

‘Explain that big word to a simple soldier.’

‘The Christians are right when they render unto Caesar and unto God but keep the two tributes apart. All rule must be secular. When God enters politics he turns into his opposite. Always has. Always will.’ Titus did not well understand.

The troops stumbled over the bodies of men, women and children in the forecourts. ‘Heathen muck,’ Liberalis said, as the pillaging began. The veil of the Temple was rent. The great menorah was taken away. One young soldier shook his head sadly. ‘A bit doubtful, are you, lad? No direct orders, is that what you’re thinking? Haven’t you ever heard the word discretion? No general officer likes to order this kind of thing. But he knows it has to be done.’

The destruction of the ransacked Temple called for all the engineering skill the invading legions possessed. Huge metal balls swung from chains on derricks: the outer walls were stubborn, but they yielded at last in torments of dust and smoke. The pillars cracked, there was a scramble for safety as the great ornate ceilings began to bow. There were few Jews left to wail. After two or three weeks of steady destructive energy there was only a great heap of rubble, sending up dust to an invisible sun.

When Caleb landed at Caesarea he looked like a Roman growing old in the service of ships’ cooking galleys. To any who asked he gave his pseudonym Metellus. He felt a stranger in this port where there was hardly a Jew to be seen or heard. Roman patrols clanked through the streets; a homegoing legion paraded on the dockside. Caleb saw an old blind man sitting on a bollard, clanking a cup, crying for alms. He put a coin in the cup.

‘Todah, ach, achot.’

‘What news from Jerusalem, av?’

‘You don’t want to know the news from Jerusalem, ben. Jerusalem is no more, ben. Get you to Masada.’

‘Why Masada?’

‘All that will be left of Israel will be the young men of Masada. Until the Romans get there. They will come and starve you out. But the faith will prevail, ben.’

‘But tell me of Jerusalem, av.’

‘Thank the great Lord of Creation I never saw Jerusalem. And even had I the sight I would not see it. For Jerusalem will be no more. The trees cut for crucifying by the forestload. And the grass of the pasture outside the city burnt and the soil of the richness of the land sown with salt that no more life shall henceforth spring. Get you to Masada, tsair.’

Caleb trembled and sought the road. He met with a ragged column of Zealots who were seeking to join up with the forces of Eleazar.

Vitellius felt great fear when he heard the news, and the fear promoted massive appetite. He gnawed meat, trembling. He stuffed pie into his mouth, trembling, with two hands. Fight. Start recruiting campaign immediate discharge bounty regular pension after victory. Troops assembled in Palatine. Never wanted to be Emperor, never asked for it, forced against will. Give us the money now and we’ll stand by you. Call on Flavius Sabinus, brother of invading Vespasian: won’t have you put to death for disloyalty, instead offer five hundred thousand no a whole million gold pieces if hold off brother. Peace, I want peace. Tell Senate send envoys for armistice, Vestal Virgins in front cooing peeeeeeace.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, eating.

‘Explorator, Caesar. First detachments of Vespasian’s legions close at hand. Recommend immediate evacuation of palace.’

He called for a closed litter for himself and one for his chief cook and Arab expert in flaky pastry. Mouth stuffed, chicken drumstick in fist, he stuffed himself in. Quick, my father’s house on the Aventine. Soldiers outside the palace, relaxed, cooing of peeeeace, no need to worry, Vespasian is still busy in Judaea. But the palace was empty. Vitellius took from a cupboard a belt with pockets already stuffed with gold pieces and strapped it on. Not starve, limp away anonymous, unnoticed, cloak and hood. Then he heard noise. He ran, clinking, chewing, to the quarters of the janitor. The janitor’s dog, chained outside, snarled bitterly. Vitellius fed it a piece of meat and went in, jamming the bed with its mattress against the door. The vanguard could be heard tramping, smashing, looting. They broke in.

‘Who are you?’

‘Only one left. Look after palace. What have you done to my poor dog?’ The centurion and his troops eyed Vitellius’s paunch and nodded. ‘Important message for Vespasian. Demand safe custody till he arrives.’ They tied his hands behind him, tightened a noose about his neck, dragged him out of the palace whimpering, desperate for food, tore his clothes off him, sliced off his leather moneybag and threw the gold to the mob. Then they kicked him along the Via Sacra towards the Forum. He tried to bury his wineflushed face in his chest, but they stuck a sword under his chin and made him squint in the sun. The mob cried fatbellied old bastard. The troops played the game of the little cuts with him, a swordjab here, a daggerthrust there, then, on the Stairs of Mourning, they stuck into his belly and watched the guts flood out. Then they threw his body into the Tiber. He floated some time before he glugged to the bottom.

When Vespasian entered the palace he found it fully staffed and a banquet prepared for himself and his entourage. He looked at the loaded table with loathing.

‘Take this filth away.’

‘Filth, Caesar? It was specially prepared—’

‘Remember my name. It is Vespasianus Caesar and not Vitellius Pseudocaesar. Vespasianus Caesar would appreciate an imperial luncheon of bread, goat’s cheese and raw onions. And, to drink, some cervisia.’

‘Cccccervisia, Caesar?’

‘Yes. It is not wine. It is a fermented beverage made from malted barley. It foams. It is bitter and invigorating. Rome needs its salutary acerbity and an infusion of its salubrious vigour. Things are going to change around here.’

So, with the whole of Israel subdued except for the fortress of Masada, the final task of the Romans was to break the resistance of Eleazar, leader of those most zealous of the Zealots called the sicarii, who had gathered his forces and led them toiling up the steepness of the rock on which Masada stood. There were two ways up, both precipitous, one to the east above the lake Asphaltitis, the other a serpentine pass to the west. Herod had built a kind of palace at the summit, with a wall about it all of white stone, thirty-eight watchtowers set upon it, equidistant on the circumference. The new procurator, Flavius Silva, marched from broken Jerusalem with siege engines, setting them up on the so-called white promontory three hundred cubits beneath the highest part of the fortress. Forgive me, I am not well able to set down the details of siege engineering, lacking the knowledge, being also in pain and somewhat drunk, but it is sufficient to say that Eleazar was able to look down on the smoke of a vast camp of ready Romans in the knowledge that the supplies of the fortress had run out, except for the water in the natural wells, that the enemy was confident none of the Jews could escape, and tomorrow or the next day a stream of Roman armour would file up by the two passes, breach the walls and commence the work of systematic, God help us, slaughter.

‘I know what some of you are thinking,’ he said to the men of the garrison (there were wives and children there too, also to be systematically slaughtered). ‘Best to be taken prisoner and fed. But they won’t take prisoners.’

The man they called old Caleb muttered something about the leeks and onions the Israelites had eaten in Egypt, that captivity was no burden.

‘You don’t seem to understand, Caleb. The Romans are not going to behave like the Egyptians. Nor like the Babylonians. This is the modern age. History is in the hands of the Romans and the new pattern of history is based not on the humanity of enslavement but on the ferocity of liquidation.’ Eleazar, though he called himself primarily a fighting man, loved to hear himself speak. He spoke now at great length about the beauty of death, how it was no more than a sleep, and was not sleep to be considered a great benison after the long day of work and thirst and heat and aching muscles? No, they were not to be killed by the Romans; the Romans would make their laborious ascent in vain; they would find the fortress filled with the corpses of brave men (and not so brave women and children who, in terms of the morality of a holy war, were neither one thing nor the other). Cheated of their prey. One man was chewing something; Caleb squinted at it: it looked like the corpse of a rat. Forbidden, of course. Mass suicide also was presumably forbidden. To manifest the glory of the law you had to break the law. ‘You men who have wives and children moaning in the quarters of the mothers,’ Eleazar said, ‘ought not to apprise them of what you propose to do. Do not afford them the time of protest, but do what has to be done without a word, though, and this is fitting, on a valedictory kiss.’

‘You mean,’ said a slow-witted man named Yigael, ‘we have to stick the knife in our nearest and dearest?’

‘Crudely put, but that is precisely what I mean. Look at the Romans down there, eating the meat of our country by their campfires, polishing their swords and slavering over the prospect of mass slaughter. I know what the law of Moses says about murder, but what I propose and indeed command does not come into the category of homicide in anger or in lust or greed. In killing each other we still fight a just war. You, old Caleb, I see shaking your head. You have been too much softened by a sybaritic Roman life and, I don’t doubt, by the watery creed of conduct of the Nazarenes. Be a Jew, be brave, set the younger ones an example.’

Cold-blooded slaughter is never easy, even in a good cause. It was found better to dispose of the children first, and this was mostly done by hurling them down the rocks so that their skulls might be fractured on the flinty prongs or solid surfaces. The Romans looked up from eating, laundering or polishing to see white things failing through the rare air of the height: tokens of surrender or what? The slaughtering of the mothers was more difficult, though some threw themselves weeping or cursing after their children. Two male friends had usually to hold down a yelling wife while the trembling husband thrust a dagger under her breast. These widowers were among the first to be willing to stand bravely against the wall, throat bared to the dagger, murmuring Israel as the blood spurted.

Caleb confronted Yigael, standing over the corpses. Eleazar, still orating about the beauty of death, had said that he would see his friends bedded down for the long night before taking the knife to himself. Yigael said to Caleb: ‘Who first? Yacob there will do in which one of us two is left.’ Caleb thought of his own Yacob, dead and buried in Rome, and felt the acid of a great despair rise to his gullet. Without voicing an answer, he walked round Yigael, who stared out to the hills of Israel, and struck him in the bone of his back with his borrowed dagger. Then he struck in the flesh and saw blood well. Yigael said: ‘Not so bad as you’d think after all.’

‘Loss of blood,’ Eleazar said, ‘induces a desire for sleep. And sleep is a benison and to be sought for.’

‘Ah, be quiet,’ Yigael said, tottering. Yacob, a brawny man in early middle age with few facial expressions, suddenly grabbed Caleb by the collar of his filthy tunic and, with a wide arm arc, let the dagger’s point fly to his throat. So that was it. What was life all about? What were we sent for? Caleb saw and heard the red tide gallop all down his tunic front, Hannah would be annoyed, have to wash it, always wash out blood in cold water, then, which was not pleasant, began to choke in it. Blow to the heart best, centre of the scarlet city, not the outlying streets. Israel, he heard someone say and remembered, choking, that the name meant a struggle with God.

Struggle with God, indeed. I am drunk enough to proclaim to the whole world, meaning these trees and that prospect of Alps beyond the lake, these nesting thrushes and the quietly though busily growing grass, that, despite all the depositions of the sceptics, God exists. There has to be an explanation for man’s unwilled misery. Yet God is above human morality and, in the arena of morals, knows not what he does. He is no more than a gamester. Was not this all a game? He played the game of bringing a fleshly son into the world, whose task it was to cry the salvation of Israel. He ensured that Israel should either shut its ears to the cry or puzzle over it as if it were in a foreign tongue, and then reject it. To ensure that Jerusalem should not be the centre of the creed of its own redemption, he smashed the church in Jerusalem and sent its father to Rome, there, before his ludicrous death, to establish the spiritual lineage of its insubstantial paternity. What worse centre for a doctrine of love could well be imagined? Oh, a great game of unquestionably divine provenance, and the game goes on. That it makes men suffer does not come into the sphere of God’s supposed omniscience: the flesh is a curious substance he does not well understand, not himself possessing it, and, since he does not possess it, it must be deemed to be of a negative quiddity. I am drunk on sour wine, so forgive me. He does not see my pain and is certainly incapable of feeling it. He does not see the deep wound in the body of Israel, the ruined Temple, the streets where dogs bark and whine in the ruins, the fields where crows caw, pecking at the eyes of the countless crucified. Trumpets shrill in Rome as the menorah is borne in the victorious procession of Titus. The woman called Israel weeps under the willows. Let me out of it, I have had enough.

In Pompeii the Israelite widow Hannah wept and Sara gave little comfort. Sardonically she recited:

‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I remember not Jerusalem above my chief joy.’

‘You’re – heartless. He was your brother.’

‘I don’t think I approve of martyrs. Life’s hard, and we have to get through it somehow. We don’t have to make it harder by inventing gods and causes and holy cities. Cities are only stones and bricks and thatch. Easily burnt. Rome was burnt, Jerusalem was burnt. What does it matter? Living is what matters, such as it is, keeping alive in spite of all of them – the hard faces, the men full of their own authority, the big causes, God, Deus, Zeus, Jehovah—’

‘It’s a comfort,’ Hannah sniffed, ‘to know he died for what he believed in.’

‘Nonsense. You are what he should have believed in. But you’ll find somebody else to believe in you. A man who gets on with earning his daily bread and doesn’t make his eyes big with dreams of big causes.’

‘You’re heartless, you just have no heart. I don’t want another husband. I just want to die.’

‘Yes, you say that now. In a few weeks’ time you’ll wake in the night, alone and cold, and want the comfort of somebody or something. Forgive the truism, but life has to go on.’

‘You keep saying that. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘It isn’t meant to mean anything. I’m going to make you some chicken soup. Eat, girl. Keep going. Live, if you can call it living.’

She ate, and she kept going, and she lived, if you could call it living, and she accepted the courtly advances of the widower Isidorus who, despite his name, was no cynic. And Sara’s daughter Ruth, who gave birth to a daughter named Miriam in the year of the death of Nero, was happy enough in the little house at the end of the Street of the Smiths, and Julius grew old in his work, ruddy and healthy in the air, though his back creaked. This is not the stuff out of which history is made. History pretends to be a straight road with a mapped destination at the unseen end, whereas ordinary life is a circle. Miriam grew, slender as a wand, proud of her black hair with a curl in it, and she became friendly at thirteen with a lad of sixteen named Ferrex. Ferrex, as the name will tell you, was a Briton. His father had come as a captive with Caractacus and, because of his fighting skill, had lived to be a freedman gladiator at Neapolis, dying in the arena at Pompeii when visiting Galba had given the thumbs down. Young Ferrex was in training in the same trade when he first met Miriam.

I leap ahead in my narration to these two because I have to find hope somewhere, and only in these young can I find it. They were living under a reasonable Emperor whose elder son would carry on his reasonable father’s business; of the other son, the Emperor who sends the taxman to me, I will say nothing as yet. Life and the world lay before them. The Empire was at its old distracted business of mingling bloods. Ferrex loved Miriam. They sat on the lower slopes of benignly puffing Vesuvius and talked. Ferrex’s red poll became gold in the sun. Miriam’s grandmother’s brother had not yet been wholly forgotten. Ferrex believed that he had done a stupid thing, going to a foreign country to let himself be killed.

‘But he believed.’

‘Well, I believe. And you believe too, don’t you? In the god Osiris. But I wouldn’t die for my belief.’

‘Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with the god Osiris. Nobody would die for him. He’s only a kind of poem about the winter and spring.’

‘You’d better not let the priests hear you say that.’

‘He didn’t make heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them.’

‘Now you’re talking like a Jew.’

‘I am a Jew.’

‘That’s something else you’d better not talk about too loud. The Jews are supposed to go into slavery or feed the beasts at the games.’

‘Only the Jews who fought the Romans in Judaea. Why did you say what you said?’

‘What did I say?’

‘“Now you’re talking like a Jew.” As though there was something wrong with being a Jew.’

‘There’s nothing wrong, except – well, you take everything so seriously. About the God who made everything. And he looks down on you all the time, growling if we kiss or – well—’

‘Yes?’

‘We ought to get married.’

‘You’re starting again. Round and round and round. Like the god Osiris. And I say we’re too young.’

‘We’re not. We’re not too young to—Well, if you knew how I felt about you—’

‘Oh, I know how you feel. Perhaps we ought to stop seeing each other. Perhaps you ought to go out with that Greek girl who rolls her eyes at you when she’s not pretending to pray to the divine Osiris. What’s her name? Daphne or something. You wouldn’t have to marry her.’

‘That’s not a very pleasant thing to say. I’m not – well, like some men, boys. I believe in love.’

‘Amor, eros, agape, ahavah. Look at the mountain. Fire. It’s gone now.’

‘It’s your God getting angry.’

‘That’s stupid and – you know—’

‘Blasphemous. Would it help if I became a Jew? Would you marry me then?’

‘That’s stupid too. You can’t become one. You just are.’

‘A Christian, then. That’s serious too. With a God who made everything and even had a son of flesh and blood that people eat every Sunday.’

‘They don’t now. It’s not allowed. It’s death to be a Christian.’

‘Is that why your mother’s father gave it up? Because he was scared of being thrown to the beasts? If you’re frightened of that I suppose it’s right to give it up. But it’s not very brave.’

‘He was very brave.’

‘Yes, when he had the Roman army behind him and in front of him. Not so brave now. Going to worship this god who killed the white bull. With the rest of the old soldiers, making him feel as if he’s a fighting man again.’

‘Ferrex, if you say another word against my grandfather I’ll get up and leave. Do you hear me?’

‘I hear you. Vesuvius hears you too. And he’s sticking out his big red tongue at you. Now it’s gone in again. I love you, Miriam.’

‘I love you too, Ferrex.’

And they kissed with closed mouths, arms entwined. The great mountain, unseen of them, vomited a little spit trail of lava.

Charming, are they not? Young love. Oh, I know the bubbling of the juices of the glands comes into it, but I think if there were a God who understood love he would put down his paper games for a moment and bless. His son knew all about it, but Paul was not too sure. And the rest of the disciples? It would not have been possible at this time, seventy-nine years after the birth of their master, to ask any of them, for they were all gone under. Barbarous deaths for most in outlandish places. But stay.

One afternoon while Julius was deploring the depredations of the birds in his orchard, an old man, older than Julius, came timidly to the gate. He said: ‘Is it Julius? Is that your name?’

‘At your service. What can I sell you – a fine melon, some cherries, some squashes, a cucumber?’

‘May I come in? May we talk?’

‘Yes.’ A very old man, infirm, ragged, with a knotty stick to help him hobble. ‘Let’s sit under this beech tree here. Would you like some of this wine and water? How did you know my name? Did someone send you to me?’ They sat on the rough wooden bench Julius had knocked together. The wine and water had been married in a leather skin. The old man drank shakily but with gratitude. He said, wiping his mouth on his ragged grey sleeve:

‘Yes and no. I’d better give you my name. It’s not fair to have the advantage of you. Matthias. From Jerusalem. I was called the new twelfth apostle of the Christ. Does this make any sense to you?’

‘But,’ Julius said, ‘you’re Sara’s uncle.’

‘Sara,’ Matthias said. ‘Is she alive?’

‘Very much so. She’s in the house now. Let’s go to her. She’ll be amazed.’

‘But perhaps not happy. She held things against me – well, one thing. It was in the old days of Pontius Pilatus. Her brother, my nephew, condemned. There was a possibility of bribery. But the new Nazarenes didn’t believe a man should do what he wished with his own money. Besides, I mean no offence, women talk. This is a very secret visit.’

‘You’re a Jew,’ Julius said, ‘and a Christian. Those are both deadly things to be – with the way things are. I take it you fled from Rome.’

‘I fled from Rome. I came to Pompeii because I was told there was more tolerance here – tolerance, indeed, for too many things – strange faiths from the Euphrates, brothels as a major industry, drunkenness, adultery. And is my nephew Caleb alive?’

‘He went to the Judaean war. He never came back.’

‘Yes. That was to be expected. Fought for the Temple. And Stephen and James died because they thought nothing of the Temple. Mostly dead I believe, my colleagues, companions. I grow near to death. According to a man’s just expectations, I’m well past it. But, as you see, I’m hale though stringy. My voice still carries. I have work to do in this city.’

‘No,’ Julius shook his old head with vigour. ‘There’s no work for you here.’

‘Yes. There’s a grove near the foot of that mountain. Fit for meeting. Fit for the breaking of the bread. But you must tell me where the Christians are.’

‘This I don’t know and don’t wish to know. I think you’re under some misapprehension. I was a Christian, baptised by the apostle Paul himself, but I repudiate the faith. I follow the cult of Mithras.’

‘A very inadequate substitute, if I may say so. You worship a myth instead of a flesh and blood reality. God walks into human history and you turn your back.’

‘I must warn you,’ Julius said harshly, ‘to keep out of our way. Sara must know nothing of your coming here. A man has a certain responsibility to his family.’

‘I understand. Clearly. That’s why I come to you here under the trees, not to your house. Is that your house – where the chimney is smoking?’ It was a good mile off from these converted paddocks. Julius nodded. ‘It’s easier for a single man to follow the path of martyrdom. But you can help me in another way. Give me work. I can gather fruit, sweep, tug out weeds. Old but hale, as I say. And I have to earn my bread.’

‘My son-in-law works here. Today he’s at the games. The Pompeians pride themselves on their amphitheatre – big as the one Vespasian’s building in Rome. Work? Well, you’re welcome to your bread. As for shelter—’

‘Oh, I see your problem. Some day I’m arrested and you’re arrested for harbouring a criminal. Surely you have a shed, stable – where I can creep in at night and you can disclaim all knowledge of my being there. Or am I proposing to make life too difficult for you?’

‘I give under the pretence of your taking. I leave food and you take it. But soon you’ll find Christian friends with deep cellars.’

‘It grieves me that you yourself are not a Christian friend. But I regard your – apostasy as a temporary lapse. You’ll be back.’

‘I think not.’

‘Julius,’ Matthias said, grinning with few teeth, ‘you’re better known that you think. You knew a man called Luke, a Greek physician with a talent for writing? He turned up briefly in Rome again when I was there, looking for Paul, and then disappeared – God knows where to. Perhaps to Athens, where they have a bishop named Dionysius and the Romans leave Christianity alone. They seem to regard the faith there as a harmless form of Platonism, if that’s the right term.’

‘I knew Luke, yes. He and I and Paul were – close. We suffered shipwreck together. In what way better known than I think?’

‘Luke kept the record of the bright days for the dark future. His writing is copied and read. The name Julius is there. A humane and helpful Roman centurion.’

‘And how did you know I was here?’

‘A very old couple in Rome told me about you and your wife Sara. A tentmaker, very old. He’s survived and his wife too. I think you will survive. You have the look of a survivor.’

‘One who has survived. What does it matter now? I have to worry about other survivals.’

‘I can say that also of myself, I suppose. But I don’t matter, nor really do the others. The great battles are remembered, but who recalls the names of the soldiers who fought in them?’

In Rome things went well for the Romans who did due, if cynical, reverence to the Roman gods. But a return to the bad times was in preparation. Titus Flavius Domitianus, second son of the Emperor, whom I shall call simply Domitian, was, though in his late twenties, not inclined to follow paths of virtue and wisdom. He drank, gambled, whored, paraded the streets with a flock of bad-mouthed cronies and a bloodthirsty wolfhound from Neapolis called, with no onomastic originality, Lupus. He had no skill as a soldier nor even as a sportsman, though he showed a certain aptitude for archery. When, one day, a slave came out of the imperial apartments to the walled garden on the Palatine where Domitian and his friends were pelting each other with fallen fruit, Lupus emptily barking the while, he would not allow the man to deliver his message without making him submit first to a sportive torture. The slave had to stand against a white-painted board set against the wall, his right arm extended laterally and the fingers spread. Then Domitian took his arrows and his bow and, from a distance of many yards, aimed at the fingergaps. He hit no flesh and was duly if wearily applauded by his friends. The slave said:

‘My lord Domitian—’

‘I know, I know. My imperial father awaits. Come, Lupus, let the two beasts march together to the sacred presence. Why does he want us?’

‘You, my lord, not the dog. He gave strict instructions which were passed on to me to pass on to you. He doesn’t want to see your dog. You alone, sir. Why, I don’t know.’

‘Stand there. Don’t move.’

Domitian shot a final arrow which parted the slave’s hair.

‘Some day,’ he said, ‘I’ll shoot lower. Much lower. You know where. You talk too much.’

When he had gone, one friend said to another: ‘Exeunt the beasts.’

‘You’re not being fair to his wolfhound.’

Vespasian was taking his frugal luncheon alone in the small dining room of the very limited, but, he said, entirely sufficient, imperial apartments. Bread, cheese, garlic, ale imported from Alexandria. He could hear the dog whining outside, tied to a post, so he lifted his head in the expectation of seeing his second son. Domitian, sleek, stocky, insolent, came in with a mock salute, crying: ‘Hail, Caesar.’ Then he took a wedge of cheese for himself and chewed it noisily.

‘I don’t like your manners, son. If you behave like this with me, the gods alone know how you behave with your slaves. You may sit down.’ Domitian sat chewing, grinning, showing what he chewed. ‘You don’t have much knowledge of imperial history, do you? Indeed, you don’t have much knowledge of anything except dice and whoring.’

‘Fair shot with the bow.’

‘You don’t know how I, with the help of your brother, have brought this Empire back on the road to sanity after decades of total disaster. Titus follows me. You follow Titus.’

‘If I live. If Titus lives.’

‘We assume you both will. Only I wouldn’t blame any slave who strangled you in your sleep. Or any whore who secreted a razor—never mind, I say no more. I know it wearies you to be reminded of your future responsibilities. I propose granting you a provincial quaestorship. I want you out of Rome. You do the Flavian reputation no good.’

‘But I don’t want to be a provincial quaestor. I want to stay here and help you, father. As I’ve done already. Help with the collecting of the taxes.’

‘The tax on the Jews is useful, I never doubted it. Any tax is useful. But listen to me—’

‘A tax is useful when it doesn’t involve loss of imperial dignity, I would say, father. People going to the public urinals have started to call them vespasians. That impairs your dignity.’

‘I don’t mind. It’s a wholesome tax. Money doesn’t smell. But at least men going to a urinal uncover their private parts privately. You, I’m told, make men prove that they’re not Jews by doing that publicly. It’s unseemly.’

‘But the Jews are the enemy. They’re lucky not to get worse.’

‘The Jews are the conquered enemy, which is slightly different. The only salt we rub in their wounds is the salt of exorbitant taxation. The Christians are a different matter. The Christians defy our gods and spit on the new temples I’ve built. And you can’t uncover a Christian by uncovering his genitalia. You have my permission to persecute whatever Christians you can find out. But not in Rome. We can take care of the Christians without your help. I’m sending you to Pompeii.’

‘But I want to stay in Rome. My friends are in Rome.’

‘You’ll make new friends in Pompeii. Decent retired centurions and Greek businessmen. And you’ll find a decent city council that will keep you in your place. On my orders. I’m asking for monthly reports. If you do more than usually badly I’ll send you off somewhere savage and remote. Britain, for instance. Now, get ready.’

Domitian rose, took a crumb of cheese, mocksaluted and gave his father vale. Then he left. Vespasian could hear the dog barking now, not whining. Then the noise receded in the direction of whatever mischief Domitian had arranged for the afternoon.

He spent the afternoon, like most, including his last one in Rome before assuming his commission, in a low gambling den, playing dice with a one-eyed man named Scrupulus, while Lupus sat panting at his feet (‘Bring your master luck, boy’) and whores sat around drinking wine fortified with grape syrup, ingesting at the same time the lead of the bowl, which was conceivably a factor contributing to Roman madness. Scrupulus said:

‘Got you there, your lordship. I make it three hundred sesterces.’

‘Roll you for double. No, wait – double and double and double.’

‘Six hundred and sixty-six, the holy number. Good, my lord.’

Domitian lost and said: ‘Loaded.’

‘You wouldn’t have said that if you’d won, your lordship. Six six six sesterces.’

‘Don’t spit at me. On to him, Lupus. Bite him.’ The dog obligingly snarled and made for Scrupulus, who retired to a dark corner where the dripping fangs held him. Domitian chalked the sum on the wall: DCLXVI, saying: ‘Very well, that’s what I owe. I’ll pay you when I get back from Pompeii. But I still say those dice are loaded. Come, Lupus.’ And he left. This number has ever since been the mark of the beast, expanded in the secret writings of the Christians to an abbreviation of Domitianus Caesar Legatos Xsti Violenter Interfacit, meaning that the Emperor Domitian is violently killing the legates or representatives of Christ. The collocation of office and act was still to come and is proceeding as I write, but Domitian, as I shall show, was brisk enough in persecution while still merely a prince.

He rode to the assumption of his office in Pompeii with the dog Lupus in a saddle basket, followed by his personal slaves and the dour Greek Amilon, a very starchlike man, whom Domitian called his secretary. He was fed and wined amply by the town officials, installed in the rarely used imperial lodging on the Street of the Flowers, and he spent his first few days and nights in pursuing the ample pleasures of the town. He whored, gambled, drank, attended the games in the imperial box, became well known as a roaring boy on whom a dangerous authority had been plastered. One day he pursued a young man named Keravnos, so called for his loud voice, with a party of lictors: he wanted the young man to raise his robe and show the end of his penis, but Keravnos, who thought this to be merely a heavy joke in bad taste, ran away very quickly, Lupus lolloping after him, and entered the house of Marcus Julius Tranquillus, whose door was ever open. He slammed and bolted this door, hearing the scratching and whining of the dog and then the thunder of the lictors’ fasces on the wood, demanding admittance. The widow Hannah was sitting there with a new suitor named Achilles. This had been their conversation:

‘I mean, I know.’

‘You know?’

‘About loneliness, I mean. When my second wife died – well, I drank you know. Drank. It doesn’t do a man any good.’

‘Drink, no.’

‘Loneliness. Or a woman either. I got over the drink. My business suffered. But I’ve never got over the other thing. So I ask you to think.’

‘Oh, I think all the time.’

‘Think. We’re all entitled to our little comforts.’

‘Spoken like a Greek.’

‘I am a Greek.’

‘Well, that’s why you speak like one. Now I’m being – what’s the word? – pert. I’m being pert. I apologise. I’m grateful you should ask.’

‘Well, I haven’t asked yet, to be truthful. But, with your permission, I will ask. There’s no need to give an answer now. Tomorrow, say.’

‘Or the day after.’

It was at this moment that Keravnos ran in and bolted the door. ‘The lictors,’ he panted, ‘asking for something ridiculous. And the new man, Dom something—’

‘Domitian,’ Achilles said, going pale. ‘That’s the Emperor’s son.’ There seemed to be an attempt to tear the door from its hinges while a kind of wolfhowl, representing authority derived from Romulus and Remus, combined with loud male shouts to open up. ‘We’d better—’ Then Sara came in from the kitchen. She went straight to the door, frowning, and unbarred it. Domitian and his dog tumbled in. She looked at Keravnos, still frowning, asking:

‘Is this a friend of yours?’

‘Never saw him before in my life.’ The lictors, who knew no harm of this family, stayed outside, somewhat embarrassed, unhappy under orders. Domitian and his dog strode about the room, Domitian saying:

‘Domitian, son of the Emperor, performing an imperial duty. Is this a Jewish household? Are you,’ to Achilles, ‘a Jew?’

‘I’m a Greek. I’m also a mere visitor here.’

‘We’ll consider the taxing of Greeks later. At the moment we’re not concerned with the uncircumcised brethren. Is one of these women your mother?’ he asked Keravnos. He shook his head. Sara said:

‘The head of this household is away on business. He is a Roman citizen and a retired centurion of the imperial forces. I think that should be enough for you, whoever you are.’

‘I’ve told you who I am, woman.’

‘We have only your word for it. Whoever you are, remember that Roman citizens have certain rights. One of these rights is privacy. Kindly stop your dog or wolf or whatever it is lifting its leg against my furniture. And now, leave. Whoever you are.’

‘Whoever I am. You’ll see. Good day to you.’

He left, Lupus dribbling on the floor in valediction. Achilles said: ‘Unwise. Very.’

Sara said a foul word in Aramaic and went looking for a mop.

Matthias, whose native Aramaic had given way to Greek, which he spoke with elongated vowels and rasping chis, was at this moment talking to a number of Pompeian Christians in a grove near the foot of Vesuvius, which was today quiescent, merely sighing out odd wisps of vapour. ‘Marriage,’ he said, ‘that is to say holy matrimony, is a sacrament or holy oath of allegiance that one breaks at one’s peril. With us Christians, it is an act of grace which binds us to God and his blessed son. When a man and a woman enter into the holy state of matrimony, they place themselves before the throne of God, binding themselves to eternal fidelity. They beget children and thus help to people heaven with new souls—’

Ferrex and Miriam, hand in hand, were wandering near the grove. Miriam was surprised to find her grandfather sitting alone on a long-congealed lump of lava. Julius knew Ferrex. He grinned at them both and said: ‘Keeping watch. A secret meeting.’

‘What kind of a meeting?’ Miriam asked.

‘If you want to see a man who actually knew Jesus Christ, he’s in that grove talking to some Christians. I think you can both be trusted, can’t you? I’m here to come out with a wolfhowl if anybody suspicious starts hovering. You know what happens to Christians?’

The nodded. They knew. They wandered, hand in hand still, into the grove and saw a very old man talking to fifteen or so citizens of Pompeii. The old man was saying:

‘The ceremony is a very holy one. It is not a matter of making a civil contract. It is a heavenly contract, and over it presides one of God’s deacons or bishops. I must consider myself the bishop of Pompeii and empowered by the Lord himself to preside and tie the holy knot. Jesus Christ said certain words I would ask you to remember: “What God has joined together let no man put asunder.” An eternal contract between the man, the woman and God himself. Unbreakable by the laws of the state or the will of man—’

‘You saw Jesus?’ a woman asked.

‘I am the only man now living who did. I had just been elected to the discipleship. There were two candidates for the office – myself and poor dead Barnabas, and it was decided on the throwing of dice. The Lord appeared to us, wounds in his hands and feet, but truly raised from the dead, and bade us preach the word. But I stray from the point—’

A wolfhowl came from further down the slope. The party disbanded. Matthias smiled briefly on the two children, one Jewish, one Celtic, as he hobbled away. Ferrex said to Miriam:

‘Well, there you are – marriage.’

‘Christian marriage.’

‘They take it seriously, anyway.’ And then Ferrex said: ‘They say I’m ready. They say I can appear in one of the minor bouts at the next games. They say I can call myself a gladiator. My probation’s over. I can move into the main barracks. I asked about married quarters.’

‘Oh no.’

‘That’s what they said – I mean, they laughed and said gladiators don’t marry, they have a different woman every night, and the women fight for the privilege, ladies too, some of them, very high born.’

‘But that’s terrible.’

‘That’s what I said. I said I loved somebody, and not all of them laughed. One of them said there’s no harm in loving somebody so long as it doesn’t interfere with your training, but he said being married is a different thing altogether.’

‘What did he mean?’

‘And one of the gladiators made sort of sucking noises at me. I didn’t understand that either.’

Domitian did not understand the signs which one of the lictors charcoaled for him on the white wall outside the civic offices. ‘A cross,’ Domitian said, ‘I thought they had a cross.’

‘You mean a Greek chi? No, that’s a beggar’s touch sign. They mark the houses where they hand something out. Food or money. It’s the first letter of cheire, meaning a hand. They hand something out, see? No, what you used to see, more in Neapolis than here, was a drawing of a shepherd, not easy to do, or an anchor, or else a fish.’

‘Why a fish?’

‘Because the Greek for fish is ichthus, and that gives the initials of IesousChristos Theou Uios Soter. See, sir? I first saw that outside the ichthic market, which the ignorant call the ichthic fish market. In Neapolis, I mean. Here there aren’t many left. You won’t find those signs much about.’

‘I saw that fish thing today.’

‘Where, sir?’

‘We’re going to dig them out.’

Sara was looking for her husband Julius. There was a shed near the ramshackle gate of the orchard where the donkey, Hannah’s and Caleb’s, young then, growing old now, was lodged. Sometimes Julius sat there whittling stakes for his plants. She found the donkey chewing straw and, sitting in straw, a very old man trying to bind two lengths of rough wood together to make a cross. They looked at each other, he smiling uncertainly.

‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’

‘You don’t know me, Sara?’ She frowned, puzzled. ‘I know you. I knew you as soon as I saw you in the market the other day. But I didn’t say anything.’

‘Uncle Matthias? But it’s not possible. Uncle Matthias joined the Nazarenes. He’s dead, they’re all dead.’

‘I should be dead. I’ve been lucky, I suppose. But I’m still in the faith. That’s why it’s better for you not to know me, Sara. An old man doing odd scraps of work, sleeping in this stable. I don’t want to cause trouble. But I wondered how long it would be—’

‘Good God,’ Sara said, with force and decision, ‘must we spend all our lives being frightened, being cautious when we’re not hunted? Is there no place in this world where people can be free to think and do what they want without men with laws and swords and axes and crosses interfering? You come to the house, Uncle Matthias. No flesh and blood of mine has to sleep in a dirty manger.’

‘No, leave me here. Don’t put yourself or Julius in more danger than you may be in already.’

‘Julius? How do you know Julius? Did Julius tell you to stay here? In what way is Julius in danger?’

‘He keeps guard when we Christians have our meetings. It’s good and brave of him.’

‘Julius,’ she smiled sourly, ‘washed in the blood of the white bull. You’ve dragged him back among the Nazarenes?’

‘No. He’s not with us. It just happens that he’s on the side of the hunted, that’s all. I used no persuasion.’

‘Come to the house at once.’

‘Let me think about it. I have a meeting arranged here. A young couple. They want to get married. I have to tell them that they can’t have Christian matrimony without the Christian faith. And I feel like using persuasion there. Negative. I don’t want them to be baptised. They’re too young to be martyrs.’

It was not until the next day that Matthias took courage, really a vicarious courage, and went to the house of his niece. He admired the signs of very modest property, the swept and scoured very Jewish cleanliness. He found in the house not only Sara and Julius but the widow of his nephew Caleb and his great-niece Ruth with her husband Demetrios, a ruddy young man with soil under his nails. The table was laid with platters, winecups, sliced bread, a Pompeian jug with the contorted body of a young athlete as its handle, vegetable soup steaming in its tureen. ‘Sit,’ Julius said. ‘You, Uncle Matthias as I ought to call you, at the head.’ They sat. Matthias said:

‘So I, a Christian, sit in a house of very mixed beliefs. Hannah and Sara, who believe little—’

‘Nothing,’ Sara said. ‘Except in what’s so simple and what we can’t have. To go our own way.’

‘Will this company be offended,’ Matthias said, ‘if I offer this bread and wine in the way I was taught?’

There was a silence of some embarrassment. Sara said: ‘If it pleases you, Uncle Matthias. It can do the rest of us no harm.’

‘So, then. The night before he died, the Lord took bread and broke it, saying: “This is my body, eat in remembrance of me.”’ He passed the bread round. Sara would not eat it. Hannah nibbled. Ruth said:

‘The broken body of Osiris. I take it.’

Julius could not eat. When the wine came Sara said:

‘I take this as wine. Wine is wine.’

‘The shed blood of Osiris.’

Julius muttered: ‘My Lord and my God.’

There was a fierce barking outside. The door crashed open. This time the lictors entered, preceded by Domitian in princely raiment. Domitian said: ‘This is imperial Rome, my children. Searching for Jews who evade the payment of taxes. You, old man. I’ve had my eye on you. Do you know anything about fish?’ Julius, standing, said:

‘This is a Roman household, my lord. We give shelter briefly to an old man workless, breadless, homeless. We break no law.’

‘What’s your name, old man?’

‘Matthias.’

‘Not a very Roman name. Take him. And you, whatever your name is—’

‘Marcus Julius Tranquillus, former centurion, citizen of Rome.’

‘You have some explaining to do. The rest I can deal with later. Come, let’s go.’ Matthias, batted to the door by the fasces, forbore to bless the company. Sara spat. Domitian ignored her.

Domitian ignored Matthias and Julius until the following day, which was also the day of Ferrex’s first appearance at the games. Ferrex vomited in the morning but recovered at noon. Matthias and Julius starved in a cell until they were summoned to an interrogation room in the quaestorial offices. Domitian sat languidly with his short bow and his quiver of short arrows. The prefect Rusticanus was ready to follow the regular interrogatorial procedure; he waited for Domitian to tell him to—

‘Proceed.’

‘Your name?’

‘Matthias bar Yacob.’

‘Born where?’

‘Jerusalem in the province of Judaea.’

‘You admit you are a Jew?’

‘I was born a Jew. But I do not practise the Jewish faith.’

‘What sort of life do you lead?’

‘Hurry,’ Domitian said. ‘I have to attend the games.’

‘What sort of life?’ Matthias said. ‘Blameless, I think. And without condemnation in the eyes of anyone I know.’

‘You say you were born a Jew but are no longer a Jew. What are you then?’

‘A Christian.’

‘My lord,’ Rusticanus said, ‘the situation has changed. The interrogation now is not in respect of this man’s being a Jew.’

‘He stands doubly condemned, doesn’t he?’ Domitian said. ‘We proceed in respect of his holding a faith condemned by the Roman state. But hurry.’

‘What are the doctrines that you practise?’

‘I’ve tried to become acquainted with all doctrines that men hold. But I’ve committed myself to the true doctrines of the Christians, even though these may not please those who hold false beliefs.’

‘Are there other Christians in this city of Pompeii?’

‘There are.’

‘You meet with them?’

‘I do.’

‘Where do you meet with them?’

‘In various places.’

The sharp ears of Domitian caught the noise of citizens proceeding to the amphitheatre. ‘Hurry, man. The games are beginning.’

‘What is that thing in your hand?’

‘A wooden cross. The symbol of my belief. My master died on the cross.’

‘What is that writing on it?’

‘Pater Noster. Our Father. Meaning my God.’

‘You believe that when you die you will rise again?’

‘I do.’

‘And if you are scourged and beheaded do you believe that you will ascend into a place called heaven?’

‘I know this. That for those who lead a just life here below the divine gift of eternal life is waiting.’

‘So you think that you’ll ascend into heaven?’

‘I don’t think it. I know it.’

‘Will you sacrifice to the gods of Rome in accordance with the laws of Rome?’

‘I cannot. Those gods were made by human hands. I cannot worship gods of stone and wood and metal. There is only one true God.’

‘Those who refuse to sacrifice to the gods are to be scourged and executed in accordance with the laws. You stand condemned.’

‘So be it.’

Domitian stood. He said: ‘Matthias, which is your lucky hand?’

‘Lucky? I don’t understand you.’

‘I see that you hold that cross thing in your left hand. Is that the hand you use for holding things?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Are you a sporting man?’

‘Again, I don’t understand.’

‘Do you have luck with the dice?’

Matthias smiled briefly at that before replying. ‘Many years ago I had luck with the dice.’

‘Good. I will give you a chance, Matthias. Take these dice and roll them.’ From his beltpurse he took the carved white bones with black dots on them. He threw them on to the table. ‘If the number you roll is higher than five you shall take the chance of my marksmanship with these arrows. If the number is lower than five then you die at once – with a point straight to your old cor cordium.’

‘A man doesn’t play games with his – well, call it destiny.’

‘Take them. Roll.’

Matthias saw Peter and the others watching, Barnabas watching most of all. He took the dice. There was a perceptible trembling below their feet and a faint smell of brimstone came in through the unshuttered window. ‘Nothing, sir,’ Rusticanus said. ‘We sometimes get these tremors. It will pass.’

‘Roll.’ Matthias rolled. Six. ‘Spread your hand against the wall there. Your lucky hand.’

‘This,’ Matthias said, ‘is madness.’ But he obeyed. Standing his good three yards back Domitian let his arrows fly. Two of them refused to impale the wall but all missed flesh.

‘Your luck, Matthias – amazing. But sometimes luck isn’t enough.’ And he shot an arrow straight at the old man’s heart. It went deep: crimson welled on to Matthias’s old grey robe. As he fell Julius ran to him. ‘You – Roman centurion – are you too a Christian?’

‘I am.’

‘So. We’ll leave your interrogation till after the games. Shove him in a cell somewhere.’ The floor trembled again; brimstone fumes sailed in. Domitian went out into the courtyard. Vesuvius belched golden fire and dribbled red lava. The dog Lupus, tethered to a post, howled bitterly and retracted his tail. ‘Take your chance,’ Domitian said, patting him as he unleashed him. The dog ran with limbs ill coordinated, whimpering. Domitian strode to the stables, where ostlers were wide-eyed with fear and stood as if paralysed. It’s coming. The horses stamped, their manes atoss, their eyes blaring, snorting and sweating. ‘Quick, the piebald.’ Domitian galloped alone eastwards. He had to live to become Emperor; there were many hearts to be transfixed before he died.

Smoke, fire and lava. Lungs filled, choked. A black pall began to be pulled over the day’s serenity. In the amphitheatre ten thousand Pompeians felt the ground heave, heard the thunder, saw the black pall drawn over. They screamed, yelled, crushed each other. Ferrex dropped his sword and ran. The mountain vomited endlessly. Air thick, defiled, a pale sun sometimes trying to shove through. The road of scorching lava down the mountainside spread to the streets and divided.

I please myself, in as much as I am capable of being pleased, with an image through the smoke of Ferrex and Miriam together, scrambling through fallen bricks that raised high dust. A donkey has raced from its stable and missed being brained by a crumbling wall. Ferrex and Miriam find the donkey, Miriam mounts, perhaps Miriam and Ferrex have anticipated their knot and she is already with child. For good measure let them also find the wooden cross of Matthias, with Pater Noster upon it. Then they race off away from the disaster, carrying hope. I do not think this happened. One hopes in a sense without hope. If only that mountain could be my body, flooding out its life. But I have to wait.

They have all gone. Accius and Acerronius Proculus and Achilles choked and crushed by a fallen roof. Gaius Acilius and Aviola Acilius and Glabrio Acilius trampled upon. Paulus Aemilius meeting Aeneas dragging Laertes from tumbling ruins. Afranius and Agrippa and Titus Ampius running, their arms held up, outlined in fire. The Aequiculi falling into hot lava. Annona and Antistius in bed together, brained by falling timbers. Aponius and Antillus and Anicetus caught in their cups, toasting each other, forced to drink fire. Epicadus Asinius straddling the body of Asillius, his back broken by the fall of a pediment. A priest calling on Osiris, another on Mithras, a deacon on the Lord Jesus. Dying Julius saying My Lord and my. Hannah and Sara choked on the floating poisons of the air. Balbillus and Bibulus and Blossus not able to get the name of the Bona Dea out of mouths silting up fast. Caesonius Priscus trampled by Cassius Longinus. Cornelius Fuscus and Corvinus and Cremutius and Clodius and Salvito and Licinius and Marcus Curtius caught naked in the baths seeing with surprise a smoking solid river lurch into the water and contrive a temperature they have not before known. Drusilla about to deliver with Domitia helping, the child ready to emerge into hell. Ennia Naeva suffocating in black and golden air. Flavia Domitilla – no, she is in Rome, safe daughter of Vespasian. Furius Maximus with his leg broken, crawling in pain to a safer place that is unsafer. Fonteius and Gabinius reading poetry while Vesuvius bellows its own and thuds with its feet to mark the rhythm. Gallius, Quintus or Marcus, stumbling with a torch through an underground tunnel to see bricks collapse at both ends, the poison meanwhile seeping in. Halotus and Hasdrubal and Hecuba and the Helvetian visitors swimming a burning tide, one last breaststroke into final fire. Hortensius and Hermogenes safe in a deep cell except for the thud of stone blocking the way out from which, to their delight, the door had fallen from its hinges. Isidorus perpetrating his final cynicism. Janus Quirinus not knowing which way to turn. Julius Marathus and Julius Saturninus and Julius Vestinus Atticus and Julius Vindex and Junia Calvina scalped by hot raking fingers, burning claws snatching out mouthfuls of teeth. Laberius and Labienus and Lactus and Livius and Lollia and Lollius and Lucceius eating on the leaf in a pleasance of poplars hearing the rattle of pebbles and then seeing the pebbles as rocks, and the rocks burning and crushing. Macro and Marcia Furnilla running to child and nurse left at home, finding the home dust, then dust themselves. Mummia and Mucia passing straight into death during an afternoon nap. Nonius and Norbanus and Novius Niger and the elder Nymphidius eating hot lava, seeing the red blast of volcanic triumph through the darkness suddenly swept off by the hot wind, not seeing the outer darkness any more. The Oculata sisters resigned, stiff in each other’s arms as the blundering flood comes. Odysseus and Oedipus and Oenone turned to fire in the sky, enormous, burnt on to clouds shroudlike in their stiffness, crying for wife, wifemother, Paris. Orestes pursued. Paconius and Pacuvius and Paetus and Palfurius and Pallas hearing loud flutes of Pan in the innermost chambers of the brain as they gasp in the last air of pitch and sulphur. Pedius pleasuring both Phoebe and Phyllis sodomised by the huge splinter of a wooden pillar in a downtown brothel. Pitholaus hearing the voice of Plato saying only ideas are reality. Try this pain, Plato, and then no pain. Plautius and Pollux and Pompeius and the Psylli with their charmed snakes writhing in blasts of a wind pumped from the terrene viscera. Priapus dephallified. Proserpina cool in hell. Ptolemy recalling a prophecy of an end by fire but only for Alexandria. Pyrrhus the victim, Romulus screaming as he sucks at a firedug, Rubria a red body before the final charring. Rustius and Rutilius embalmed screaming, their quarrel cut off. Salus praying in his last nightmare to Saturn, god of health in old age procured by liberal use of seasalt, while he raped Sabines to the approval of the Salli, singing priests. Salvidienus tearing the skin of his own face off. Scipio eaten by an igneous Africa heaving with scorpions. Selene failing to drag Semiramis moonwards. Spiculus stoned by Stephanus, both stoned by ultimate firestones. Statilius set upon by a bull as big as an island. Sulpicius on a gallows of molten marble. Theogenes seeing no heavens, all burnt, the stars flying sparks, for his scrying. To say nothing of the Thessalians, Trioptolemus, the Vinii, the visiting Vonones. The lights out, time’s ruination, our mother our killer, an uncaring deity, so everything ends, a figure of the finality and nothing done. And Sadoc the son of Azor in great agony among the cropping goats, many-breasted, with nothing to pray to, a great idea having burgeoned, having flowered, having died, the sun over the circumcised alps and the Helvetian thrushes opening their throats, waiting for another end.