by Ken Parejko
Chapter 14
Rome, the Iseum on the Campus Martius
June 16, 71 C.E.
Roma Resurgens
What a wonder it is to me that the human mind can reach beyond its own comprehension, most especially in memory and the world of dreams. It is often remarked that my own memory is prodigious. Perhaps it is, but not when I compare myself to Mithridates who ruled twenty-two countries and could speak to all his subjects in their various tongues, or to the Greek Charmidas who when asked if he’d read a particular book could immediately repeat it line by line as though he had it in front of him.
But it is the world of dreams which most astounds me. We do not nor perhaps can we ever understand how it is our minds re-interpret our lives, fears, and wishes into a drama which seems sometimes bizarre, sometimes tender, other times instructive. Democritus claims that possession of the left shoulder of a chameleon allows one to construct dreams by will, and even transfer them to another person of our choice. It is said two people have, in the same night, shared the same dream. Whether dreams can foretell the future is a question of some interest, and dispute.
Though Lucretius and Cicero wrote skeptically of the importance of dreams, the worship of Isis and Serapis having overspread the empire has brought to us the ancient rituals of dream incubation once known only on the banks of the Nile. These oriental mysteries seem of most interest to our women, and perhaps it was Berenice’s influence over Titus that brought him and his father into an annex of the Rome's Iseum the night before their triumph.
This is how it happened, as Vespasian told me later.
As they stepped out of the bath the attendant handed first him then Titus a delicate white robe. He slipped into the robe which lay on Vespasian’s skin lightly as the touch of a breeze. He’d never felt so clean, pure or light, as though he’d washed away his past and the soft white silk spun from the silkworm’s larval threads would be his own chrysalis, in which he would incubate into a new life.
They followed her into the abaton. There they found two couches with purple coverlets trimmed in gold, separated by a shallow pool of Nile water. She settled them into place with the softest of hands, light and knowing. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, then opened them again, part-way, and now noticed a small altar in the center of the pool with a golden uraeus, a coiled serpent crowned with the shimmering Eye of God. On either side of the altar from tall golden candlesticks flickered tongue-like flames.
His lids closed. He listened closely. He could hear his own slow breathing and beneath it the tidal wash of his blood coursing through his veins. After the great war, this was a greater peace. She touched harp-strings so gently the sound was there before he heard it start. The notes fell from the silence like tiny drops plashing one by one into a calm pool of light.
His eyelids opened themselves. The candle-light caressed the golden sheen of the uraeus and lit flickering flames in its turquoise eye. It seemed the notes she played were in perfect rhythm with the flickering of the candle-light and as he listened and watched it seemed too that somehow the music moved the flames.
His mind became water and light, and sunsets over the sea: from Caesarea’s palace he'd watched the sun sink, become liquid light, a flame which flared from the abodes of Isis and of Juno Lucina. It was beyond comprehension, the play of light and water, water and light.
A gentle incense, sweet as ripe fruit, slipped into and caressed his nose.
A little boy, among the apple-trees on grandma’s estate, apple-blossom-sweet. He ran, laughing, straight into his mother’s embrace.
He could not tell how long she’d touched the harp. Time now was water-wet, ebbed and flowed with the blood and the heart and flame and harp. Worlds came and went, according to their own ways. The harp’s last note, pulled from its lowest string, washed across him and wavered on, and on, refusing to die. He listened and watched the conversation it had with the candles.
She set the instrument down and moved, her robe rustling quietly, to Titus’ side. As she went she muttered sounds archaic and low. He knew little of their language. At first he’d thought it a coarse, barbaric tongue. But in Alexandria when he heard it praying he heard a different sound, the quiet clatter of reeds bowing in the wind, whispering promises ancient but still-fresh.
This was her language too, Cleopatra’s. She who the whispering reeds, or so she thought, had named Isis.
Now he heard the reeds whispering low into her ear, eager to hear:
You are Isis. Antony is Anubis. Isis, they whispered. Anubis, and Isis.
He broke from the spell.
But how easy it would be to believe. Their priests, steeped in the ancient lore of the gods, named me Source of the Nile, and my heart they called the Eye of Ra. My heart, the sun. The river, they told me, the holy river rises in your blood, and the source of your life is the source of our lives. How easy it would be, to believe.
So much of him wanted to believe, there was little left, only a tiny flame of truth struggling against the rising waters and the winds which gave tongue to the reeds.
Her bare feet padded on the marble floor, her robe rustled. The sound in his ear was the sound of the cataracts of his blood, bringing life to Ra’s Eye.
A drop of Nile-water fell onto his forehead. Another, and slid slowly down his temple, onto his neck where it lay, cool and heavy.
Her finger, slicked with scented oil, touched his eyelid. Through her finger he felt what he had never felt, the roundness of his eye, a globe, a god’s eye in which he held the earth and the sun and the wheeling heavens. Her finger settled on the other, like an ibis settling onto the river in the evening’s last light.
“Sleep,” she whispered, her tongue clattering reeds. He did not know the words, but he understood. “When the Eye of Ra is reborn from the womb of the sky-goddess you will awake and know your future.”
She padded lightly away, more spirit than body, and the door to the abaton clicked shut. Father and son were alone together.
The oil lay cool on his eyelids. He pictured the quiet pool of water separating him and Titus, felt his body relax.
Titus breathed as though asleep. Outside the temple a dog stirred and barked, quieted.
The Nile’s waters carried him gently towards sleep.
A figure from a past he’d never known entered the abaton, thin but strong, came toward him with the light grace of the gods: world-conquering Sesostris, world-builder, leader, light of his people. Carefully he was lifted and lain into Sesostris’ acacia-wood baris. The rope which bound them to the shore fell free. They sailed away, together.
He stands alone on a warm sandy beach.
Above him the sky stretches to infinite, tranquil depths. Two streams of light pour out of the sky: one deep blue and the other shining white. Separately they fall into a clear, still pool, where light and water merge: water-light. At the pool’s edge a tall lotus-tree. A movement on its trunk. A serpent of fire slowly climbs the tree.
The air is fragrant, and sweet. Tongues of flame flicker from the tips of the lotus’ branches, or tiny red blossoms which perfume the air. Or the flowers are fruit, red, ripe, ready to fall. Or they are crimson droplets of blood.
The tree is bleeding, one by one the droplets fall into the pool below, and disappear.
He watches closely two droplets slowly form at the tip of a branch. Each droplet is a microcosm, holds in its globe an entire city, all its apartments and sprawling houses, glinting marble fora, high temples, libraries and museums, a busy city in which a happy prosperous people go about their lives, rich with music, poetry and theater. Two worlds hang from the tip of a branch. The worlds fade. Two faces form, scions of the same tree facing each other. A flash of recognition. First one droplet slips off the leaf, then the other. Now the faces fall separately, drifting towards the water. For an instant each stirs the surface, purling waves, then they are gone, leaving behind only a dim shimmering light-shadow, as when the sun plays its final notes on the sea, the sea from whic
h he wakes, a dolphin leaping from the waves beside Sesostris’ baris.
She helped him with the dream. She asked if it came soon, or late. False dreams come early, she said. He said it came as he woke. The dream is good, she said. Sesostris carried you to the pool by the tree of life. The lights from the sky are the Nile, the Blue and the White. The prosperous city you saw is the future, which you and Titus will bring to Rome.
And the faces? he asked.
That’s not so easy, she admitted. Did you know them?
Faces, just two faces.
Perhaps, she said, Wadjet and Nekbhet, the twin gods of the Upper and Lower Nile. They come often. It means you will rule not just half but all the world. But it might be other. Geb, and Nuit. Or even Isis and Osiris. You perhaps are one of the faces. The other, who knows. Titus, or Domitian.
Or Sabinus, my brother, the one who fell first.
Perhaps, she said.
Titus did not dream, or could not remember it. She told him it sometimes happens. His father’s dream was rich enough for both, she said, and it was good.
Only now they had no time left for dreams. There was a triumph to attend, and a world to build.
Raucous crowds lined the streets and filled the alleys. They’d come to celebrate him, Rome’s latest hero, who'd stepped forward to rescue them from civil war then brought them victory in Judea. And to celebrate Titus too, beside him, the son who would carry his dream beyond his life.
The triumph, like their careers, would move from east to west. His chariot was painted with gaudy red and gilded gold, beneath it a big wooden mentula, the phallus of power. A favorite of his from the British wars, a centurion who’d come to his rescue in the midst of battle, held the reins to four white horses covered with trappings of red and gold. As he stepped into his chariot a roar rose and echoed to the far edges of the city. Titus entered his chariot, and the roar doubled. The flanks of the horses winced, their tails fanned the air.
Domitian rode between them, like his father and brother in full armor over an imperial purple tunic. His wedding to the daughter of Corbulo, martyred by Nero, was barely over when he’d hurried first up to Gaul to put down a revolt, then back to the capitol to face Vitellius’s troops. While his uncle Sabinus was being murdered he hid out in the caretaker’s hut of the Iseum, whose priests saved his life. When only a few hours later the Flavian troops reached the city Mucianus handed command over to him, and he led the army to victory over Vitellius. In his own mind he’d saved the city for his father, then held it til he and Titus arrived from the East. But this was not to be his triumph, and though he was between them, he did not feel among them. His father had made it clear that Rome, longing for an emperor worthy of the name, would have two. Titus would share his father’s power and responsibilities. There was little they would argue about. Titus was a younger Vespasian, straightforward, hard-working, honest. The two men, the older and wiser, and the younger and stronger, would give the empire the continuity it needed after what had become known as the year of four emperors. Titus was given a consulship, tribunician power and a shared Imperium, named praefect of the Praetorian Guards and commander of all equestrians. As Vespasian set Titus up to replace him Rome sighed with relief.
Domitian, not completely forgotten, was given Sabinus’ old command of the urban cohorts and a consulship. As Vespasian’s second son his future was uncertain but hopeful. Only at least for now he would have to stand patiently in line behind Titus.
Vespasian raised his arm, motioning the parade ahead of him to move out. Far ahead dozens of scaffolds which rose forty feet into the air like great masts from out of the sea of humanity bent and moved, their tapestries waving and fluttering, woven with images of the Jewish War.
Behind the scaffolds Simon ben Giora led a thousand prisoners of war, around his neck the hangman’s noose which at the Forum would be the instrument of his own death. Many Jewish generals would die beside him, their deaths displaying to the gathered crowds the potency of the Roman state. Common prisoners would live hours or days longer only to die more painfully in the city’s amphitheaters and circuses.
Behind the prisoners the spoils of the Temple surged forward in a flood of gold, silver and ivory -- the Holy Torah taken from the Temple, the Golden Table, the Menora, the Veil of Purple, the Holy of Holies, the Censers, Silver Trumpets, Ephod and Thummim and other holy vestments. Behind these sacred treasures came the secular riches, stripped from the wealthiest houses in the ancient Jewish city: costly tapestries richly embroidered by Babylonian workmen, gems and precious stones of every kind, paintings, sculpture, furniture and clothing. Next came big rare animals from the mountains and deserts of the East: lions, camels, rhinos and hippos, carefully led up the street, their roars mingling promiscuously with the roars of the crowd. Then came a dozen images of Victory, sculpted in precious ivory and gold, held high on litters carried by Nubian slaves. When the Victories at last got under way Vespasian, Titus and Domitian and all those behind could finally follow.
If still alive Vespasian’s brother Sabinus would have had a place of honor in the triumph. Sabinus’ son, recently suffect consul, rode proudly in his place, the admiring crowds cheering him for his father’s heroism. Then came nephews, cousins and uncles on the Flavian and on Vespasian’s mother’s side. I rode alongside Josephus, in front of me Licinius Mucianus and Tiberius Julius Alexander. Annius Vinicianus, Domitian’s brother-in-law, L. Caesennius Paetus, husband of Vespasian’s niece, M. Arrecina Clemens, T. Plautus Aelianus, Junius Arulenus Rusticus, Eprius Marcellus, Petillius Cerialis, and a half-hundred others followed on horseback, natty in their parade uniforms, some hoping for, some already granted governor-, praefect-, or proconsul-ships.
Following us came the Senate, always ready to ride the wave of a patriot’s glory. Some hadn’t fully embraced the Flavian cause -- after all, the Flavians were not patrician, did not have the auctoritas that came with the decades or centuries of civil service underlying many Senators’ families. Helvidius Priscus, who’d continued his opposition even after the Senate declared Vespasian emperor, was not to be seen. Priscus' price for opposing Titus' tribunalship, which essentially declared him next in line to the principate, was life-time exile.
We moved past Augustus’ mausoleum, which swarmed with spectators like ants on an anthill, the noisy crowds continuing to press in on the procession. From ahead a wild cheer marked Vespasian and Titus’ entrance through the city gates, just as I passed under the horologium of Augustus’ solar clock.
The long lines paused at the moment, far ahead, Simon bar Giora when was dragged out of the procession and flung into the dungeon of the Mamertine prison to be strangled with the rope hung around his neck. When a crier announced that the leader of the enemy was no more, I heard the city roar its approval. We moved again, and Vespasian and Titus dismounted at the foot of the Capitol, and with Domitian climbed the stairs into the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to hold a private sacrifice of thanksgiving.
As I waited I dismounted too and stood holding Lightning’s reins.
“So the oracles were right,” Julius Alexander remarked from atop his speckled mare. “The Flavians have come, saviors from the East.”
Just at that moment we saw Vespasian and his sons reappear in the portico of Jupiter’s Temple, their arms held high to the crowd.
“It wasn’t the oracles that brought us to this. It was hard work, planning and sacrifice on the battlefield.” I suggested. “All of which, by the way, you did your part in.”We remounted and followed the parade into the Forum. The official triumph was over, but not the celebrations. The day would be filled with banquets, music, bonfires and spectacles at the city’s many theaters and amphitheaters. An epidemic of hangovers would plague the city the next morning; but that was of no consequence, for the next day and the two after had been declared official holidays. Rome, a city in love with holidays, was enjoying one of its greatest.
Though Vespasian’s wife Flavia Domitilla had stayed beside him thro
ugh the good and the bad Fate did not grant her the good fortune of sharing his triumph. She was already ill when he rode out of Reate for Syria and died while he was wrestling with the Jewish armies. He was ashamed he wasn’t able to attend her funeral. He always spoke highly of her and respected her strong presence in the household and her political instincts which had helped him through hard times.
That is not to say he'd given her the entirety of his heart. He had an open relationship with Antonia Caenis, a freedwoman who years ago served as secretary to Drusus’ wife Antonia. Caenis was brilliant, well-read and witty in a way Flavia Domitilla was not. Vespasian had fallen in love with her shortly after meeting her in Claudius’ court, even before he was married. It was a relationship he’d never completely broken. After Domitilla died he welcomed Caenis into his life openly. She was at his side when he and Titus, with Berenice on his arm, celebrated the lavish dinners which followed the triumph. Vespasian and Caenis retired early and left the celebrating to others. But by the second hour of the next morning he’d dragged both his sons out of their beds and after offering sacrifices of thanks at the altar of the family lares, in a meeting with a dozen or so of us got down to the work of forming a new administration.
I was let in to the Flavian residence on the Quirinal and announced by the doorman. Vespasian came to take my hand. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Now, my friend, any regrets at coming with me to Judea?”
“None,” I smiled.
Vespasian, standing beside a portrait of his father, said he felt his father’s presence, and his grandmother beside him too, who he loved more than anyone, and their joy in his success was his joy.
