The Blood of Caesar, page 8
part #2 of Pliny the Younger Series
“These letters are badly formed, my lord. Do you know why someone wrote them on the back?”
“The letters don’t matter right now. The age of the papyrus is the only question.”
I felt better when he put the document down in front of me again. “What do you think, boy?” he asked Peleus. If he called someone older than I am ‘boy,’ I wondered what he thought of me.
Peleus bent over and peered closely at it. “This torn corner is recent.”
“Very recent, in fact,” I said.
“That’s one indication that it’s not a fresh piece of papyrus, my lord,” Dymas said. “I would estimate it’s older than yourself.”
“I’m twenty-one,” I snapped. “Do you mean it’s twenty-five years old, or a hundred?”
“Much closer to twenty-five, my lord,” Dymas said. “It has some moisture left in it. Is that helpful?”
“Yes, it is.” I rolled the letter up and put it back in its pouch. The fact that the papyrus was about the right age didn’t prove Agrippina had written this letter, but if the papyrus had been only a few years old ...
“May I ask a question, my lord?” Dymas said.
I hesitated and hated myself for it. In the four years since my uncle died the most difficult thing I’ve had to learn about dealing with the slaves I inherited from him is to assert my authority over the older ones. It feels too much like giving orders to one’s grandparents.
“Yes, Dymas, go ahead.”
“How, my lord, do you come to have a document bearing the seal of the lady Agrippina, mother of Nero?” He was asking a question he knew he had no right to ask, but elderly slaves often lose their fear of punishment and become impertinent.
“Is that what this is? How can you be sure?”
“I recognize the seal, my lord. I was a younger man in your uncle’s service when Agrippina and Nero came to power. Your uncle commanded a cavalry squadron on the Rhine. Communications that our legion received from Rome carried this seal as often as Nero’s own.”
“But this seal has been broken and part is missing. How can you tell what it looked like?”
“Will you look at it under the glass while I describe it, my lord?”
“All right.” I removed the letter from the pouch again, placed it under the glass, and concentrated on the remaining fragment of the seal. It showed the upper part of a woman’s body and some sort of structure behind her.
“Agrippina’s seal,” Dymas said, “showed a woman—her mother—standing in front of a bridge. Isn’t that what you see, my lord?”
Was that what I was seeing? Or was he planting the idea in my mind? “I suppose it is. It’s difficult to say, the way it’s broken. Why would she have chosen that image for her seal?”
“She regarded that as an auspicious moment in her own life, my lord. Germanicus’ troops—he was her father—were in revolt and threatening to tear down a bridge across the Rhine. Germanicus and some of his loyal troops were on the German side of the river. If the bridge had been destroyed, he would have been trapped there and slaughtered by the barbarians. The elder Agrippina stood on the bridge, the story goes, and shamed the troops into backing down. At the time she was pregnant with her daughter, the younger Agrippina. The daughter liked to claim it was her mother’s pregnancy—thus her unborn self—that brought the soldiers to their senses.”
“You know a great deal about her life then? The younger Agrippina’s, I mean.”
“Only as it relates to events in Germany, my lord. Your uncle dictated his history of the German Wars to me. My memory soaks things up, the way papyrus absorbs ink.”
“I wonder what other information about Agrippina has been soaked up in here.” I glanced around at the shelves heavy with papyrus rolls, like lumps of dough on the shelves of a baker’s shop early in the morning.
Peleus answered. “I’m sure there’s much to be learned about her in here, my lord. Is there something in particular you’re interested in?”
I could hardly tell him the princeps had asked me to find an unexpurgated copy of Agrippina’s memoirs. How was I going to find something when I couldn’t admit I was looking for it? And wasn’t even sure it existed.
“No, nothing in particular.” I tried my best to sound indifferent. “She and Nero were discussed at a dinner I attended recently. That conversation piqued my interest.”
Dymas glanced at the pouch containing Agrippina’s letter. I knew he wanted to ask what connection it had with my conversation. I felt my motives were as obvious as the letters magnified under our glass. I wanted to escape his scrutiny. The best way to do that was to put him to work.
“I’d like for you to assemble whatever information you can find about Agrippina and Nero. A sketch of their lives, if you will, especially hers.”
Dymas and Peleus both bowed their heads. Dymas spoke. “It would be easier for us to find whatever you’re interested in, my lord, if you could tell us what we’re looking for.”
His simple statement was as close to a challenge as a slave dared come. I looked at him more intently than I ever had. He and Glaucon have always been here, like pieces of furniture. They’ve lived in ‘my’ house longer than I have. No one, except my steward, knows more about my affairs than Dymas and Glaucon. They are privy to all my correspondence and come and go as they please, as Glaucon had this morning ... For all I knew, he could have gone to report to Regulus.
“I probably won’t know until I see it.” I used to hate it when my uncle said anything like that to me. It’s dismaying how quickly we become our elders. “Just find me as much information on Agrippina as you can by tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, my lord,” Dymas said. “Your uncle wrote a lot about her. In fact, it seems to me that he recorded some odd characteristic of hers in his Natural History. Something to do with her face or her mouth.”
“An odd wart perhaps? A third nostril?” My uncle, as erudite as he was, did become overly interested in people’s quirks and physical deformities.
“I can’t recall the passage at the moment, my lord. I will check on it.”jk
“If it’s nothing more significant than that, don’t bother me with it.”
* * * *
As I left the library I decided to hide Agrippina’s letter in my bedroom, which is in the back of the house, off the peristyle garden. It’s unusual for me to venture into that part of the house during the day. Once I’m up and about my business, the garden and the rooms around it become the women’s part of the house, my mother’s realm. There she supervises preparation of our meals and insists on working wool with the slave women, in the manner of noble women of the Republic, a hundred years ago and more. Every tunic or toga I wear is made by her own hands, right down to the equestrian stripe. Tacitus adores her antiquated virtue.
Turning into the passageway leading to the back of the house, I heard the laughter of two little girls, the daughters of my steward, Demetrius, and his Egyptian wife, Siwa. Demetrius gave the girls perfectly good Greek names, but their mother calls them Hashep and Dakla, after her mother and sister, and that’s how they’re known in the household. She converses with them in Egyptian, but they use Greek with their father and the rest of us. I suppose it’s time they learn Latin. They are seven and five. Their company never fails to delight me, like listening to the chattering of birds.
A light, warm rain was still falling when I emerged into the garden. The slave women were working under the cover of the portico that runs around it. The first one who spotted me greeted me more loudly than she needed to.
“Good morning, my lord.” That alerted the rest of them.
Demetrius’ daughters were standing on the edge of our fishpond. At least, a fishpond was what the builder of the house had intended it to be. My uncle found it more trouble to raise fish than to send a servant to the market to buy them. I played in this pool with the children of our servants when I was a boy, as long ago as that now seemed. My uncle’s death propelled me, at seventeen, into adulthood, like a rock being pushed down a slope. Spending time with the children of my servants allows me to escape my responsibilities and sneak back into my youth now and then.
The girls were nude, just as Aurora and I used to be when we played here at that age. Hashep, the older one, looked at me in surprise—like Artemis must have looked at Actaeon when he stumbled upon her bathing. I think she was about to cover herself with her hands, when Dakla said, “Uncle Gaius! Watch!” She pushed Hashep into the water and jumped in after her.
They surfaced, spluttering and wiping water off their faces. Hashep stayed crouched down, with only her neck and head above the water. Apparently she had grown modest during my year in Syria. Dakla had no such inhibitions. The water was deep enough that she could swim a few strokes toward the end of the pool where I was standing.
“Would you get your lyre and play a song for us?” she asked.
“One of the ones you made up,” Hashep said from her end of the pool.
I have never admitted to anyone outside my household that I play the lyre. A Roman man of my class who plays any musical instrument is considered foppish, but I find plucking the strings very soothing. One of our servants taught me when I was a boy. I’ve even found that I have a certain facility for devising new melodies.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll play you something, but I am out of practice. I didn’t take my lyre with me to Syria, you know.” I had left it behind because I knew a military tribune playing his lyre would not be well received in a legionary camp.
“Will you teach us how to play a song?” Dakla asked. She boosted herself up and sat on the edge of the pool.
“You said you would,” Hashep reminded me.
“I can’t sit out there in the rain and play,” I said. “Why don’t you get out of the water and put on your tunics while I get the lyre? Then we’ll sit under the portico ...”
“Girls! Don’t bother master,” their mother said in her halting Greek as she emerged from one of the workrooms off the garden. She’s only a year older than I am, and now carrying another child. Niobe’s midwifing skills would soon be needed. One look at Siwa revealed the source of her daughters’ sleek black hair and lustrous dark eyes. Their lighter skin was their father’s main contribution.
“It’s not a bother, Siwa,” I said. “And I did promise them.”
Siwa shooed the girls out of the fishpond as I hurried to my bedroom. I keep a strongbox under the bed and hide the key in a location that only Demetrius and I know. But I did not want to risk even Demetrius seeing Agrippina’s letter, so I resorted to a trick from my childhood. Lying face-down on my bed, I reached behind and under it and slipped the pouch containing the letter into the webbing of rope that supported the mattress.
I was just pushing myself up off the bed when I heard Hashep’s voice behind me.
“What’s taking you so long, Uncle Gaius?” She was standing in my door. Her light, bleached tunic made her hair and eyes seem even darker. How long had she been standing there? Had she seen what I was doing?
“I just needed to put something away. Now, let’s play some music.”
Hashep stepped into my room and took the lyre from the peg in the wall over my bed where I hang it. The wall is decorated with a fresco of Orpheus playing his lyre to soothe the monsters of the Underworld. I’ve placed the peg so that my lyre covers the one in the picture. “I’ll carry it for you,” Hashep said.
****
Sitting in the far corner of the garden, the girls and I played and sang until their mother called them to help her at some task. Hashep sang with confidence and an ability to follow—even anticipate—the nuances of a melody that surprised me in a girl of her age. She learned quickly the two or three strokes on the lyre that I was able to teach her in spite of her younger sister’s jealous interference. I decided she should be given more training in music. Having such a skill could help her rise above the status of a kitchen drudge, her most likely fate. As soon as she had mastered a song or two, I would have her sing at a small dinner.
When the girls were gone, with my assurances that we would sing again soon, I picked up the lyre. After a year away from it, I hadn’t been sure I would be able to resume playing with any fluency. The tips of my fingers had softened. They would be sore for several days, but before I put the instrument away I strummed a few more chords and picked out one of my favorite melodies. I had almost forgotten how soothing this could be.
And I needed to be soothed. Finding myself the guest of honor at the princeps’ house, being forced to examine a corpse in his library, then having Domitian himself show up at my door this morning with a demand that would probably be impossible to meet—any of that could unnerve even the stoutest heart. All of it together was enough to leave my heart near panic.
VI
I HAD JUST FINISHED a song and was about to put away my lyre when my mother came into the garden, accompanied by Niobe, whom she seemed to be comforting. Peleus, Niobe’s son, walked on the other side of his mother. They were among the slaves awarded to my uncle for his service in Titus’ campaign against Jerusalem. Their Greek names had been given them to replace their unpronounceable Hebrew ones. Like her mythical namesake, Niobe had obviously been crying, although she showed no sign of turning to stone.
My mother, with tears in her own eyes, spotted me. “Oh, Gaius, Niobe and Peleus need to ask you something. Something important.”
“Are you their advocate, Mother? Can’t they speak for themselves?”
My mother put her arm around Niobe. “I’m sure they can, but Niobe came to me when she heard the news, and I just thought I would— ”
“News? What news?” Why were slaves hearing news before the master of the house?
Niobe started to speak, but the tears erupted again. Mother looked at Peleus, who stepped forward.
“It’s my uncle, my lord. My mother’s brother. He’s been killed.”
“I’m sorry. When did this happen?” Even as fast as news travels across Rome’s far-flung empire, the man could have been dead for weeks.
“Two days ago, my lord.”
“Then he lived close by?”
“Here in Rome, my lord. He was brought here, as we were, after Jerusalem was destroyed.” He didn’t add the words ‘by you Roman dogs,’ but the sentiment lurked in his tone.
“What happened to him?”
“He was killed while he was working, my lord. Hit by a falling brick, or so we’re told.”
By the gods! Could there be two? Trying not to show my surprise, I straightened up and stood directly in front of Peleus. “What is ... was your uncle’s name?”
Niobe cried out something that sounded like a violent sneeze.
“His name was Menachem,” my mother said, squeezing Niobe’s shoulder. The slave buried her face in my mother’s stola and sobbed. “She’s very upset because it’s their tradition that the ... person who has died not be left alone between death and burial and that he be buried as quickly as possible.” Her own eyes were teary, recalling the deaths of her own brother and her husband, no doubt.
“And none of this was done?” I asked Peleus. He at least seemed to have his emotions under control.
“No, my lord. We just learned of his death an hour ago.”
“He lived in Rome, you say. Did you see him often?”
He nodded. “He was a freedman, my lord, emancipated a few years ago after his work on the Amphitheater. He continued in Caesar’s household, though. He was a mason. His Roman name was Maxentius.”
Unable to suppress a gasp, I motioned for Peleus to follow me across the garden. When I was sure we were out of the women’s hearing, I said, “This is an amazing coincidence. I saw your uncle’s body yesterday, a few hours after he died.” I didn’t tell him the entire story, just that the man had been killed by a brick falling from a great height and hitting him on the head.
“Forgive me, my lord, for doubting you, but that’s what I find so hard to believe.”
“Why is that?” His refusal to believe me didn’t really come as a surprise. I’d always found him obstinate, one of those young men who refuses to accept his status as a slave and, because of that attitude, probably fated always to be a slave.
“My uncle had great skill at plastering walls, my lord. He told us just a few days ago that he was working on the cryptoporticus of Domitian’s new house. It would take him several more days to finish it, he said.”
“What difference does it make where he was working?”
“The cryptoporticus, my lord.”
Of course. The underground walkway. It was completely covered. Nothing could have fallen on Maxentius from any height, great or otherwise.
* * * *
No amount of lyre playing could settle my nerves after my mother left, arm-in-arm with two of my slaves, to attend the funeral of a freedman, a Jew, a man she’d never known, a man she never would have known, no matter how long he might have lived. I couldn’t stop her. To avoid having my authority in the house undermined even further, I had to send a small troop of slaves to escort her, as though I approved of the whole business.
While awaiting their return, I tried to work on my accounts in the tablinum. Although Demetrius had kept good records while I was away, I couldn’t concentrate on the documents he was showing me. Too much had happened since Tacitus and I started up the steps of the Palatine yesterday. It seemed his wife’s fortune-teller had proved to be prescient—my life would never be the same.
I finally gave up and sent Demetrius to do something more useful with his time. Then I sent a slave to tell Josephus that I was on my way to see him. I needed to know more about where and how he found Agrippina’s letter.
As my litter-bearers worked their way through the crowded streets I tried to make sense of a rapid, bewildering series of events. What disturbed me most was that Domitian had lied to me, not just once but twice. First in the archives, where he staged what was supposed to look like an accident, then right there in my own house. If Maxentius’ death was an accident, it didn’t happen the way Domitian told me. Based on what Peleus told me, I had to assume that Maxentius had been murdered.
