by Ken Parejko
Their lives as man and wife had become a contest of who could hurt the other more. The winner of one battle was likely to be the loser at the next, and the only way to survive became, in the end, to not feel the hurt, and eventually to simply not feel.
They came over time to distrust each other deeply, and hate each other intimately. Most of the time they simply despised each other in a quiet, familiar sort of way, with no great feeling behind it at all. It was a kind of adjustment they’d made, and they managed a semblance of married life with it quite well. It was, I knew, only too common.
Hosidius ignored his wife’s sighs and occasional moans as the pain of the gout flared up. He pretended to care by offering her a drink of water, then handed her the jar of goat’s dung mixed in bear-grease she kept on hand, to rub onto her arms and legs. But she knew this solicitude of his was bogus, and that actually he was enjoying her pain.
“So my friend, are we riding to Narcissus’ triumph, or his downfall?” Hosidius asked.
“We’ll soon find out,” I offered.
“That we will. I'm betting on the downfall,” the old man replied, then dropped the curtain on his sedan. I hurried to catch Lucius, who’d gotten well ahead of me. I wasn’t done yet with dictating: Vibius’ gout had reminded me of the many medicinal uses of animal-dung.
As we came down toward the lake we could see the hillsides swarming with people: shopkeepers and farmers, shepherds, carpenters, masons and bakers, old, young, women and children. Villages for miles around had emptied themselves for the day. To see a spectacle and catch a glimpse of the emperor was a chance of a lifetime. We watched them as they milled around, shouted at one another, sat and ate or just whiled away the time in impatient little groups, chattering in a half-dozen local dialects which neither of us could make any sense of as we rode past. We had entered a small sea of humanity, its surface stirred with the winds of rumor: the spectacle had been canceled because the empress was ill, or because Claudius was angry, or because Narcissus was drunk and in prison, or already separated from his head.
Rounding a corner suddenly there was the lake itself. This was Latium at its most beautiful, its vine-clad hillsides falling down into a sparkling lake, decorated with pretty farms and villas. Today the lake was further decorated with a small flotilla of ships, each flaunting colorfully-painted sails with flags flapping in the breezes.
The emperor’s reviewing stand, set up part-way round the lake, was empty save for some workmen making last minute preparations. The breezes furled the stand’s large blue and white awning, moved on to stir the many flags planted around the stand, then skated across the shining surface of the lake and made lovely complex wave-patterns.
Lucius slowed his horse a moment and exchanged a coin for a loaf of bread. He tore off a piece, offered me the loaf.
Claudius, who had a close relationship with the equites, had made sure a large plot was reserved for us near the imperial stand. We walked our horses into the enclosure, already milling with knights. Nearby was an area for senators, patrons and members of the imperial family. There wealth was flaunted, and to there Hosidius’ litter was slowly making its way. These hierarchies of powers and principalities flowed away on each side of the imperial stand. Beyond the powerful, farther from the imperial stand, were the fields full of commoners.
Lucius led our horses uphill to a paddock where they would be fed and watered. Meanwhile I found an unused piece of ground which I declared ours for the day, and found myself busy fighting off the hawkers of food and wine who suddenly swarmed me. We’d provisioned ourselves and wanted nothing, though it was becoming clearer that an awning against the sun would have been smart. I accepted a vase of cool spring water from Lucius.
Just as I set the jug down a cheer rose from the crowds. Claudius, Agrippina, her son who would soon be the emperor Nero, Pallas, and their closest friends and aides were making their way onto the reviewing stand. This was not the first time I’d been in Claudius’ presence. I’d been in Rome for his coronation and the grand celebrations which followed, and saw him once in Ostia. Agrippina I’d seen at Ara only two years before. Claudius, not fond of crowds and these public displays, sat down. Agrippina remained standing. She wore today a dress woven entirely of fine threads of gold, which flashed magnificently in the morning light.
She rested a hand on Nero’s shoulder, who stood beside her. At fourteen, a handsome boy who shared his mother’s thirst for public adulation, Nero had just taken his toga virilis. He waved to the crowd. Today he wore a soldier’s uniform, as though preparing himself for the career he saw ahead of him. Claudius’ son Britannicus was nowhere to be seen: after a brief private scene, Agrippina had convinced Claudius to leave his son by Messalina in Rome. This was to be Nero’s first public appearance after the toga virilis ceremony, and she would stand for no one competing against him for attention.
Claudius was already sixty-two. He was, unknown to himself and all perhaps but the closest to him on the reviewing stand, very near the end of his life. Behind Claudius’ timid vulnerability I caught a glimpse, now and then, of the strength and self-will of the emperor’s father, the Drusus who’d come to my dream.
On the reviewing stand behind the imperial family and alongside Agrippina’s favorite Pallas were a handsome middle-eastern couple. I asked a nearby equite who they were. I learned that the man was Pallas’ brother Antonius Felix, the newly-appointed procurator of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. Beside him was Felix’s recent wife Drusilla, daughter of the Herodian king Agrippa I, and great-granddaughter of the King Herod who’d been so close to Augustus.
Augustus had once said he’d rather be Herod’s pigs than his sons. Politics were Herod’s favorite game, and he used his family as pieces in that game. He had incurable paranoia, which drove him to execute two of his sons, one them this Drusilla’s grandfather. Drusilla’s grandmother Berenice had been a close friend of my dream-friend Drusus’ wife and also of Agrippina’s grandmother Antonia. And Drusilla’s father Julius Agrippa had been close to Claudius’ older brother Germanicus, who’d died in Antioch. So though not connected by blood, Agrippina and this Drusilla shared a common history. At the moment Drusilla had gotten her brother-in-law Pallas’ ear and was whispering to him, pointing to something out on the lake.
I followed her gesture out to the twenty-some ships on the lake, which included two big quadriremes while the rest were triremes and biremes moving slowly among one another, sorting themselves into opposing fleets. The half meant to represent the Sicilian navy bore sails and flags splashed with bright orange and red flames, the colors of the flames rising out of Etna. Their opponents were the Rhodians, also a nautical culture, whose sails and shields were decorated in bright yellow, with an image of the god Helios in his chariot pulled by four horses. In one hand Helios held the reins of the horses, in the other a brilliant red rose, symbol of Rhodes. Aboard the ships were more than a thousand prisoners and slaves, who after digging the canal which would drain the lake had now been armed to fight to the death in this the grandest naumachia ever.
Though Augustus had given up on draining Lake Fucino, in the intervening decades engineering had advanced and the state treasury filled enough that Claudius decided to give it a try. For years the farmers who planted along the lake complained that when the lake flooded in the spring the rich fields along the shoreline remained too wet to plant. Draining the lake would expose the rich sediments of the entire bottom of the lake to cultivation. And, hopefully, the important road to the east, the via Valeria, would no longer be subject to seasonal flooding. Claudius knew the recipe for keeping the people happy: bread and spectacle. By draining the lake, he could provide them both. Work on the project had begun a decade ago.
As the water drained it would pass through a canal dug out of the lake’s east end, til now closed up by floodgates. The canal ran straight to Monte Salviano, where half the thirty thousand men working on the project were employed digging a two-mile tunnel through the mountain. The tunnel was so
deep and long it was necessary to punch shafts up from it to the top of the mountain, to provide the workers with air. If the surveyors had calculated right, on opening the flood-gates the lake’s water would drain out the canal, through the tunnel, and down the east side of Mount Salviano. Though the slaves doing the work weren't paid, they did need food and clothing and serviceable tools. Halfway through the project it seemed to Claudius, and even more-so to Agrippina, that the project would drain the imperial treasury before it drained the lake.
A decade is a long time. Narcissus’ political future -- and perhaps his very life -- depended on the success of the Fucino project. The people, the Senate, and lately even Claudius had grown impatient. Claudius was a middle-aged man when he approved the project, now he was old. What good would this great accomplishment be to him if he was dead? The past two years he could barely stand the sight of Narcissus, who meanwhile regretted ever taking it on. But it was too late to back out; too much money had already been poured into what Claudius called “that piss hole of yours.”
A month ago the canals, dams, and sluices were declared completed. A great naval spectacle would start the festivities, then the sluices would be opened and the water start flowing, and at last all the sweat, blood, money and years of effort would be repaid.
The loud blare of fifty golden trumpets marked the start of the celebrations. Three horses appeared from behind the reviewing stand, led by their trainer out to the lake where they goose-stepped their way up to their bellies. On command they reared back and pawed the air. Now they moved out further and collapsed into the water where they lay like hidden sea-monsters, their heads and flaring nostrils as though floating calmly on the lake while a circle of oil was poured around them and lit. The horses’ faces looked out from a halo of licking flames, but they did not move.
With a clap of their trainer’s hands the horse-faces disappeared, and the animals dove under the ring of fire. They swam their way into a single line, and paddled a perfect circle around the fire which as it faded sent dark clouds of smoke into the clear morning air. Another clap and the horses made their way towards shore into shallower water where they erupted into a gallop straight toward the trainer, as though to run him over. But at the last moment they veered, each passing him on one side or the other, then galloped around him, splashing in and out of the water. While the crowd roared they broke the circle and trotted out of sight.
As though by magic thirty women appeared on the shore. I recognized this next performance, based on the Tarquin's attack on the capitol centuries ago, when they dragged a hundred of the city’s women hostage just across the Tiber. From inside the city our army could see the enemy and their hostages, but being out-numbered and out-armed, there was little they could do. It was up to the hostages to save themselves. One, a beautiful woman named Cloelia, planned an escape. She asked the Tarquins if the women could bathe in the river. The Tarquins agreed and gathered around to watch the women undress and bathe. The Roman women dropped their clothes on the river-bank, walked demurely into the water, turned to wave to their captors, and swam straight to the other shore and their freedom.
Today’s Cloelia was played by a pretty woman dressed in a diaphanous pink gown. Her companions wore gowns of white. But as they reached the water they scattered the gowns behind them on the beach like spent chrysalids, swam out into the lake, then stopped and tread water and sang a flirtatious song, popular in taverns, in Claudius’ direction. They split into two groups, a smaller circle inside a larger one, swimming in opposite directions. Their arms rose gracefully out of the sea and fell again, their long hair streaming back over their naked bodies, the curves of their thighs rising from out of the water. The circles broke, and they formed themselves into the shape of a ship. Two lifted Cloelia high out of the water at the ship’s bow, her hair trailing down over her back and her young breasts lifted in the direction the ship was headed, toward the middle of the lake. From the sides of the ship swimmers moved their arms like oars dipping and rising out of the water while from the middle others raised their arms to sway and flutter like a sail. A man rose among them from under the water, costumed as Triton. He blew his sea-conch and joined them as they swam past the Sicilian and Rhodian ships.
Claudius, Agrippina and the others on the stand stood to cheer and clap. As the swimmers climbed out on the opposite shore, naked and dripping, they turned and acknowledged the applause.
Now the water at the very center of the lake stirred, and from it rose, slowly and magnificently, a huge mechanical Triton, a merman with the hindquarters of a fish holding a conch and trident. Lead pipes lain on the lake-bottom connected the big silver conch in the Triton’s hand to a bellows worked by a half-dozen slaves hidden on the lake shore. As the slaves worked the bellows the conch blared, at first feebly then with a loud roar. The crowd roared back.
The bugling of the Triton signaled the ships, at opposite sides of the lake, to stand ready. A moment later a loud cheer arose from the ships: “Hail Caesar! We who are about to die salute you!”
Claudius, too clever for his own good, shouted back to them. “Or not, as the case may be!”
From the ships came a sudden silence, where the men now stood unmoving. The crowd grew restless. Claudius was seen conferring with his aides. A small rowboat hurried across the lake. Two centurions splashed out and trudged up the beach. The crowd watched with great interest as the centurions conferred with Claudius and his aides. His response, they told him, had confused the men on the ships, who were expected to entertain the crowds with their own blood and deaths. Claudius’ “Or not, as the case may be,” they interpreted as a kind of last-minute equivocation whether they would actually have to fight to the death or not, which they further interpreted as a last-minute reprieve.
After some time Claudius climbed down from the imperial stand, walked across the beach and into a rowboat. Long minutes passed while he was rowed to the farther shore.
We could see him board the Sicilian flagship. Though we couldn’t hear, standing on its deck he made two things absolutely clear. The first was that if the spectacle went well, he would double the promised pay of the survivors. The second was, if they did not get on with the show, he would return to the imperial stand and command the gathered archers, to whom he pointed, to kill them all. That would be a fine spectacle, he said. He asked if they understood him. Their answer was a reluctant affirmative. By the time he’d returned to Agrippina’s side the navies were maneuvering for battle.
As hundreds bent to their oars Triton again sounded his conch, boatswains started their chant, and the fleets moved, barely at first, then sluggishly, and at last glided gracefully toward one another. We watched in silence as the sound of the oars and the boatswains’ cries flew across the lake.
Many of the ships were old cast-offs from the fleet at Ravenna. Some of the smaller ones had been built right on the lake. The flagship of each fleet was a cast-off quadrireme, in which two hundred oarsmen pulled as hard as they could on four banks of oars. Below deck the ship was hot, and the air stale. There the harder the men pulled, the more they suffered.
The two fleets rowed toward, then through one another. The gathered infantry on board each ship took ineffectual swings at their opponents and seemed set on doing as little damage to one another as they could. This went on until Claudius signaled his best archers to let loose a volley of arrows, which rose high into the sky then pelted down on the ships, making his point.
The flagships turned slowly, then headed again directly towards one another, the rest of the fleets following. The two quadriremes glanced off each other. As they passed by, grappling hooks flew from one deck to another and knit the ships together. Launched by catapults other grappling hooks flew through the air from the other ships. Some missed their targets and splashed ineffectively into the lake. Two of the triremes had been fitted with the boarding plank called the corvus, a thirty-foot-long heavy plank which stood on end at the ship’s bow. As these ships neared an opposing ship t
he plank was let loose to fall forward. A heavy iron spike, curved like that of a crow’s bill, drove itself into the enemy’s deck and men flowed onto the plank to fight to the death.
Now that the battle was underway there was no turning back. It was kill or be killed. The cries of men being hacked apart, falling off the boarding planks and decks and splashing into the water, the creak and groan of the ships as they tried to free themselves from one another, the buglers on board inciting their men to fight, in the middle of the lake the mechanical Triton’s loud conch like the bugling of an elephant at battle, even the twang and swish of archers firing their arrows from ship to ship were brought across the lake by a light northerly breeze, which cooled us but not the men in the heat of battle. Bets were still being taken on the fleets. The Sicilians were considered favorites. I glanced toward the imperial stand where Claudius now looked twenty years younger, pointing and gesturing this way and that.
One of the Sicilian biremes, rammed hard by a Rhodian trireme, leaned far over, paused a moment as though trying to right itself, then continued in a slow-motion capsize. I could only imagine the mayhem inside the ship as scores of men struggled to save themselves from drowning. Some who’d fallen overboard clung to the capsized hull which was slowly slipping into the water. As it disappeared dragging its human cargo with it, the crowd cheered.
The outcome of the battle was still undecided. Hundreds of men floated, tread water or swam among the ships, dyeing the lake scarlet with their blood. Four Rhodian biremes and two of their triremes had been captured while only two Sicilian ships had given way to the Rhodians. But the savage battles on the flagships continued, with dozens of men falling like ants off a lifted log from each of the high decks. As the tide of battle swung one way or another the crowds surrounding us cheered their favorites.
