The Blood of Caesar, page 19
part #2 of Pliny the Younger Series
I was in no mood to haggle, so I let Mercator have more than I probably should have. Then I entered on the contract the total amount of the dowry. “Demetrius will give you my share when we’re finished here,” I told Torquatus, a short, round man with hair everywhere but on top of his head.
“Thank you, my lord.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Thirteen, my lord. Fourteen in October.”
“Is she nubile?” While Roman girls marry young, I have told my clients I would never consent to the marriage of a girl who had not begun her monthlies.
“Oh, definitely, my lord. Just see for yourself.” He gathered up some of the girl’s gown and pulled it tight so that it outlined her breasts and her round hips. She blushed scarlet. “And she’s a virgin. You can check for yourself.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said quickly. “When will the betrothal party take place?”
“Two days before the ides of August, my lord,” Mercator said. “And the wedding will be ten days after that.”
I turned to the girl, who looked very young, in spite of all the paint and powder she was wearing. Her features were well-defined, almost sharp, presumably like her mother. For her soon-to-be husband’s sake, I hoped so. I could not imagine a worse fate for a man than to wake up some morning in bed next to a female version of Torquatus.
“Is this acceptable to you? Do you want to marry Mercator’s son?” The bride’s consent to a marriage is not required, but I think, if she’s to be handed over like so much property, someone should ask her how she feels about it. Women aren’t farm animals, after all, even if some men treat them like they are.
“Yes, my lord. I’m happy to be marrying him.” She looked at the young man with a glint of pleasure in her eye, which he returned.
“Very well, then.” I held out the document so Demetrius could drop some wax on it. Letting the wax cool for a moment, I pressed my seal into it. “I hope you will be happy and prosperous in this marriage.”
“And you, my lord?” Torquatus asked. “Will you be married any time soon? That would be a grand celebration for us all.”
I laughed. “There’s no immediate danger of my marrying, though I’m sure it will happen in good time.”
As I watched them leave, though, I wondered if I ever would take a wife. My uncle never married. He was one of those Roman men who found a mistress among his slaves, a woman named Monica. They were devoted to one another and lived together as though they were husband and wife for fifteen years, in spite of my mother’s constant, head-shaking disapproval. Monica died only two years before Vesuvius erupted, and my uncle remained alone after her death.
The only real reason Roman men have to marry is to beget legitimate children to whom they can leave their property. My uncle could fall back on me. I have inherited two estates—from my natural and adopted fathers—and have already begun to increase my holdings. But to whom would I leave my property if I died childless? Would Domitian, or someone like him, seize it? Is the desire to protect my property sufficient reason to marry, when Tacitus reminds me almost daily what a burden marriage can be?
* * * *
Having satisfied my obligations to my clients, I headed for the library with some misgivings. Dymas had told me he’d gathered a number of scrolls containing information about Agrippina and Nero. Since I could not tell him exactly what I wanted to know, he asked if I would be willing to look over the scrolls myself. History has never been my favorite type of reading, perhaps because my uncle tried so hard to make me like it. While Vesuvius was erupting, I sat in the garden of our house, copying passages from Livy which my uncle had assigned me. I haven’t picked up a scroll of the Paduan’s work, or any other historian’s, since. But I might see something in these scrolls which Dymas would not recognize as important.
One table had been cleared and there Dymas and Phineas had assembled the scrolls we were to look over this morning. Glaucon was out on another ‘errand,’ Dymas informed me. He seemed surprised that I didn’t ask the nature of it, but I merely wondered where Glaucon and his lover from Regulus’ house would go to couple during the day.
Dymas did the best he could to read the scrolls under the water glass. He had called on two young scribes to assist us, but they were inexperienced and I soon saw that Phineas and I would bear the brunt of the work. Relying on Phineas’ skill with Tironian notation, I did most of the reading, dictating anything useful that I found to Phineas, who could take down my words as fast as I spoke them.
By mid-morning I had sent the other two scribes back to copying my uncle’s 160 scrolls. They were actually slowing Phineas and me down. Toward midday Glaucon strolled in. He and I exchanged the sort of glances that people give one another when they share a secret neither can acknowledge.
“Is there anything I can help you with, my lord?” Glaucon asked.
Phineas and I were working so smoothly together I didn’t want Glaucon to intrude and disturb us. “See what your father is doing and assist him,” I said, looking down to dismiss him.
As Glaucon turned away I pulled out the sheet of papyrus on which Phineas had been keeping track, in regular Latin script, of important events in Agrippina’s life as far as we could deduce them from the scrolls assembled in front of us.
“This would be much easier,” I said, glancing from one piece of papyrus to a note on another piece, “if we had some reasonable way to determine exactly how many years ago something happened. We Romans build bridges, roads, and aqueducts that amaze the world and last for hundreds of years, but we can’t keep track of dates without using clumsy terms like ‘in the eighth year of Augustus’ or ‘in the tenth year of Tiberius.’ What is the connection between those dates?”
“We Jews,” Phineas said, “count from the beginning of the world, my lord. Don’t some of your historians date things ab urbe condita, ‘from the founding of the city’?”
“A few do, but it isn’t accurate, since we don’t know exactly when Rome was established. How do you Jews know how long ago the world began?”
“Our teachers—the rabbis—have knowledge of such things, my lord.”
“Knowledge not to be revealed to outsiders, I take it.”
“I would rather not, my lord.”
“Were you studying to be a ... rabbi?” I asked on a hunch, my tongue stumbling over the strange word.
He lowered his head and then looked back up at me. “My ability with languages and my love of our Law had been noted by the elders, my lord. I was eleven when Jerusalem fell. In another year I would have begun serious study.”
“Your skills have certainly proved useful to me.”
“Thank you, my lord. Shall we see what we know about Agrippina so far?”
His question re-established the proper relationship between us, something I was finding hard to do. Phineas was a likeable young man and my mother’s reminder of the similarities between my life and his had made me regard him in a different light. Under other circumstances, we probably would have been friends.
I shuffled a few pieces of papyrus. “The easiest date to establish is that she died twenty-four years ago, in the fifth year of Nero.”
“Yes, my lord, in March of that year.”
“But we found some disagreement about the date of her birth.”
“Yes, my lord. She seems to have been born about sixty-eight or sixty-nine years ago, just after Tiberius came to power.”
“And you think sixty-eight years ago is more likely,” I said, “even though my uncle’s account makes it sixty-nine?”
“With all due respect to your uncle, my lord, he was careless about numbers. Our other sources show greater precision in that regard.”
Phineas was displaying the insight into documents which Glaucon would never achieve. It came close to the sort of mystical vision that initiates into a religious cult claim to experience. Suddenly they understand things on a deeper level than ever before.
“All right, sixty-eight it is,” I said. “She married when she was thirteen, and Nero was born nine years later, or ...” I started calculating in my head.
“Forty-six years ago, my lord.”
“Exactly.” I put my finger on the next item on Phineas’ list. “When Nero was two, Agrippina was exiled, along with her sister, to the island of Pandateria, where she spent about two years. Her brother, Caligula, sent her there, and her uncle, Claudius, recalled her as soon as he came to power.”
Phineas put his pen down. “I hesitate to say anything, my lord, because I’ve heard you say you don’t believe in coincidences, but ... my mother and my uncle have some connection to Pandateria. I’ve heard her mention the place.”
I was as surprised as I was when he threatened me in the garden. “Bring her here at once. Don’t tell her what it’s about, just get her in here.”
Phineas ran from the library, sandals slapping the mosaic floor.
I couldn’t let myself get too excited. Whatever connection Naomi might have to Pandateria, she would have been an infant when Agrippina was there. She couldn’t know anything directly, only what others had told her.
“Dymas, how old is Naomi?”
“Let me check, my lord.” My chief scribe retrieved a scroll containing the names and origins of all my slaves, roughly in alphabetical order. Holding it under the water glass, he scanned it and counted on his fingers until he said, “She appears to be ... forty-three years old, my lord.”
“By the gods! She was born while Agrippina was on Pandateria.”
“So it would seem, my lord.”
Rubbing my hand over my eyes, I tried to absorb all the information flooding over me. If Naomi had some connection with Pandateria, that meant her older brother, Menachem, was also there. Could that be one more unlikely connection between Menachem the mason and Nero the princeps, or would Tacitus say I was grasping at straws? I wished fervently that Tacitus was here, to help me sort all of this out, but he was going to the imperial archives this morning to search through Nero’s letters for anything that mentioned Agrippina or Rubellius Plautus.
Phineas returned in a few moments with his mother, accompanied by my mother and Nelia. Aurora and two other female slaves trailed them, bearing trays of food and wine. Naomi hung back, almost hiding behind Nelia.
“Phineas said you wanted to talk to Naomi,” my mother said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing is the matter. I just want to ask Naomi about something. Why did all of you come with her?” I knew I was doing a poor job of concealing my irritation.
“We were about to eat,” Nelia said, “and we thought you needed something, too. Phineas said you’ve worked all morning without taking anything.”
Now that I’d stopped poring over the scrolls I did feel the need for something to eat and drink. “Put it down on that end of the table,” I said. “Be careful of the scrolls. Phineas, get some ink and fresh papyrus and take notes.”
When we were settled, with the women at the end of the table and Naomi sitting across from Phineas and me, I turned to her. “I need to ask you some things about your family.”
“My family, my lord?”
“What do you need to know about her family?” my mother asked.
“Mother, please let me talk to Naomi. This will take forever if you keep interfering. I am not angry at her. I just need some information.”
“Very well, dear.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I’ll be quiet.”
Somehow I doubted that. “Now, Naomi, Phineas says you have some connection to the island of Pandateria.”
She glanced at her son as if to ask why he hadn’t warned her that question was coming. He kept his head down, absorbed in his writing. “I was born there, my lord,” she said.
“What were your parents doing there?”
“They were freedmen in the service of Lucius Antistius Vetus. He was the emperor’s procurator on the island. He made sure people who were sent there in exile stayed there.”
“So he was their jailer,” Nelia muttered from the end of the table.
“I thought we agreed there would be no more of that kind of talk,” I said, glaring at her. She picked up a piece of cheese but would not lower her head or appear the least bit intimidated. I turned back to Naomi.
“How did your parents come to be enslaved?”
“They were taken captive, my lord, in an uprising led by Judas the Galilean.”
I realized then that her family’s fortunes had been reversed enough times to shake any Stoic’s confidence in fate. The parents went from being free people to slaves to freedmen, then the children and their grandchild fell from freedom back into slavery. Whether they would be freed again was now entirely up to me. “But you lived in Asia, didn’t you, when Phineas was born? How did you get there?”
“When Antistius left the island, my lord, he released my parents from any further obligation to him and gave them money to set themselves up. They didn’t want to go back to Judaea because there was so much trouble there, so they went to Ephesus, where they had relatives. My father was a stone mason and plasterer, and he taught my brother that craft, just as my mother trained me to be a midwife.”
I heard Dymas shuffling through scrolls. “Do you know anything about Antistius Vetus?” I asked over my shoulder.
“According to the Fasti, my lord, he was consul with Nero in Nero’s second year. Then he held some other posts and finally was proconsul of Asia. Your uncle used some of his writings as a source in the early volumes of his Natural History.”
So the man had a rather distinguished career. Sharing a consulship with the princeps was a privilege reserved for very few. “Were you still living in Asia when Antistius was governor?” I asked Naomi.
“Yes, my lord, but we didn’t have anything to do with him. My parents were both dead by then and he would not have known me or my brother.”
The scratching of Phineas’ pen was the only sound in the room as I pondered my next question.
“Back to Pandateria. Do you know who was exiled there when you were a child?”
Anxiety clouded Naomi’s face. “We were told never to talk about that, my lord.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “She’s been dead for twenty-five years. It was Nero’s mother, Agrippina, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“But everybody knows she and her sister were sent there.” I laid my hand on the scrolls in front of me. “It’s in these books we’ve been reading. Why were you told not to talk about her?”
“Not about her, my lord.” She glanced at my mother for reassurance. “About her baby.”
* * * *
Phineas’ pen stopped scratching and a heavy silence fell over the room.
By the gods! I thought. A sibling of Nero’s. Domitian was right to be afraid.
“Agrippina had a baby?” I was suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. “While she was on Pandateria?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“A boy or a girl?”
“A girl, my lord.”
That made things slightly easier. A girl could not challenge Domitian directly, but girls can have other babies. The line of Julius Caesar and Augustus could continue through her. I waved my hand over the scrolls Phineas and I had been reading. “Not one of these books says anything about Agrippina having a baby on Pandateria, or having any other child than Nero. Why are you the only one who knows this?”
“Nobody knew she was pregnant when she came there, my lord.”
Phineas pointed to a scroll of Aufidius Bassus’ history. “She was sent there, my lord, because she’d been having an affair with a man who tried to overthrow her brother, Caligula.”
I picked up the scroll and rolled it back to the passage we’d read. “Oh, yes. Lentulus Gaetulicus was her lover. And her sister’s.” My mother blushed; Nelia did not. “So I guess he would have been the father, assuming what your mother is saying is true.”
“It is the truth, my lord,” Naomi said, with a hint of pleading in her voice. “I swear it. Agrippina must have been about two months along when she came to the island.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nelia rest a hand on her belly.
“How do you know all this?” my mother asked before I could. “You were just an infant.”
“My mother was the midwife who delivered her, my lady.”
“And no one suspected Agrippina was pregnant?” I asked, glancing at Nelia.
“My mother said she stayed in a part of the house away from everyone else, my lord. My mother was the only servant who waited on her during the whole time.”
“What became of the child?” I asked.
“Agrippina left her with Antistius and his wife, my lord, to raise as theirs. Antistius’ wife wore something under her gown to make herself look pregnant and stayed to herself a great deal during those months.”
The implications of what I was hearing stunned me into silence. One of my slaves harbored a secret that could shake Rome’s government to its foundations and probably destroy me and my household. Now, thanks to my lack of foresight, a dozen other people knew it: my mother, Nelia, and all the scribes and serving women who had been listening to this conversation because I didn’t send them away before it started.
I stood and raised my voice.
“What you’ve all just heard must never be mentioned outside this room. Phineas, make a list of everyone who is here now.” The young scribe’s pen scratched rapidly. “If I ever hear that even a word of this has been whispered to anyone else, all of you will be punished more severely than you can possibly imagine.” I paused to let my words sink in. “Now I want everyone but Naomi and Phineas to leave.”
The slaves scurried out, as though they were escaping a punishment, but my mother and Nelia remained seated. “You cannot order us to leave, Gaius,” my mother said. “Surely you don’t believe we would ever reveal any of this.”
“Mother, you know any secret can be divulged by a slip of the tongue. I trust you, but there is too much at stake here. I know how women are.” I turned to Nelia. “Forgive me for being frank, but I’ve known you only three days, and there is so much about you that I don’t know. I must insist that you leave.”
