by Ken Parejko
Yet here I was administrator of some of the largest mines in the empire. I could no longer bear to see the damage they caused. It had been weeks since I'd actually visited a mine, choosing instead to stay in Tarraco and there like a good bureaucrat tally the tonnage and reckon the profits accrued.
Then this sickness came, and now I would have to face the long journey back to Rome. I sighed. Should I wait til I was well? My headache returned, a throbbing drumming pain which shouldered aside all rational thought and decision.
Lucius came in on me and found me shivering with fever, my head wrapped but dripping with sweat, eyelids narrowed against the light, and I saw how he was brought up short. We had over the years become more than friends. He picked up a towel and patted my face. I smiled through the sweat. Lucius pulled the blanket up to my neck and I lay back on the pillow, my wheezing breaths like the sound of steam escaping from underground fumaroles. "We’re going to Rome," I whispered.
"To Rome? But you’re in no condition to travel."
"We must go," I insisted. "Cilo has died. Plinia and Caecilius need me. We will go."
The ship slipped through the night. All was quiet but for the gentle slap of waves against the hull. I’d caught passage on the first ship to Ostia, an ore-boat called the Isis of Alexandria. Though slow and cumbersome, the ship’s sheer weight provided the stability I longed for. The crew was Egyptian, and though unsure about having a highly-placed official on board, after a few words in their own language they warmed to me.
We weren’t the only passengers. While manning the sails the crew had to step over a half-dozen others scattered asleep on the deck. I tossed and turned, Lucius beside me. The fever had lessened but not disappeared. Now and then I'd wake and stare up at the sky. As the night went on the great wheel of the heavens turned above, the familiar stars of the Plowman and the Eagle sliding down behind the ship, new ones rising from the east. Like our lives, I thought: we rise, wheel a time, then are gone.
At first sight my life had been successful beyond even my parents’ dreams. I’d already published four books -- the javelin handbook, the biography of Pomponius, the History of the German Wars, and my recent completion of Aufidius Bassus’ History of Rome. In my journals and stacks of notes I had the beginnings of an encyclopedic Natural History. I’d served my country well in the military and civil services, had traveled extensively and developed a close friendship with the most influential men of the time. I was a personal friend of the emperor and his son. A man of few material needs, my job and the profit from my books provided me a more than comfortable living. Yet under the surface I could feel a kind of emotional tumult. How could I continue as fiscal administrator when most of our revenues came from destroying the earth? More and more I felt I wouldn’t return to Spain. What the future might bring I didn't know, or hardly care.
For a while I thought, perhaps it is only delirium, but it seemed my soul was as sick as my body. My mind felt as though it were defenseless, an open border through which all kinds of travelers passed. And I realized that was as true when I was healthy as now. I felt that most of my thoughts were not really my own, but part of a much larger order, passing through me as it were, as a ship passes through the night. Now as I tried to sleep, tossing and turning on the heaving deck, I had another image, of my mind as a cauldron of water, atop the fire of my life: my thoughts and ideas were like bubbles on the surface of the water, insubstantial, fleeting. My thoughts appeared from out of the water, burst, then were gone.
But where did the water in the cauldron come from? Stoicism, I answered, the politics of the equites, a splash of Flavian optimism. This troubled me, this sense that my very thoughts and feelings were not my own, but part of a larger thought-system. This was what I was then, not only on the outside, but on the inside, through and through a Stoic equite of the Flavian variety. Had I ever had a single thought, or feeling, or belief not deeply rooted in that well? Could I ever in my life draw a thought up from a well which was my very own? I felt dizzy thinking about it, and was disgusted that my very soul was no more than an illusion my mind had created to fool itself.
To quiet the dizziness I opened my eyes and found the sky again, the old familiar stars, and partway up the sky a new visitor, an ivory half-moon whose light dimly lit the deck around me. The sky, the moon, the sun, yes, I thought, these are subject to their own laws, to natural law. Human law, thoughts or emotions, no matter how strong or assured, could not affect them. Gaius Caligula was a man, like me, rooted in his own history and time, yet he believed he could talk the moon out of the sky and into his bed. But that was not the way, I realized, to step outside the cauldron I grew up in and become truly oneself. There must be another way.
Again I closed my eyes, felt the fever draining. Clearly there was order to the universe, outside of man's realm, which moved of its own. Some saw a divinity or divinities behind it, from Plato’s Ideas to the silly superstitions of Jupiter, Ceres, Isis. Instead, I felt, to the point of knowing, that the universal order was its own divinity. The world itself was sacred, eternal, boundless. There was no need to invent deities, when The Deity is all around us. As my fever lessened, my mind set out on a path of its own, leaving me feeling giddy, expanding, mentally accelerating outward to the stars. I am not God; I am not the universe. I am part of all that is, tethered to the rest, to the all, by my mind and my senses.
My mind played a joke on me. It asked me: Who wrote Plato's Republic? I smiled, and answered. Why, Plato. He lived in Athens, long ago. How do you know? And I answered: I know because other men have saved his writings, across the years. It's true, I cannot prove that Plato ever existed, or even that the entire universe does not come into existence at the very moment I perceive it. But to hold that is as silly as to hold, with Zeno, that all motion is impossible. Existence does not depend on logical proof. The ship slides through the night, every moment distancing itself from Tarraco. In the morning I will step onto Ostia's harbor. Elegant as his argument might be, Zeno was wrong. And some day, like Cilo I will die, and the world will go on without me.
I opened my eyes once more and saw that the stars had slipped slightly westward, and felt them chuckling with me at poor old Zeno. I’d found a boulder in the stream of thought on which I could rest, and watch as other unanswered questions came tumbling down the current of my mind. Are living beings such as I also subject to natural law, or did being alive somehow release one from its shackles? Life has its own natural laws, I replied to myself, to which all living things are bound. The laws of plants, Castor had taught me, are different from but no less interesting than the laws of animals. From the confusion and inactivity of the past week, like gems in an underground lode, my mind found and clung to one inference after another.
The Pythagoreans had worshiped numbers, but their universe fell apart when they discovered the irrational numbers. So they said, okay, rational numbers are part of the rational world, definite, with explainable causes and irrational numbers belong to the other world, the indefinite, which cannot be analyzed. Aristotle in his Physics describes monsters, unexplained phenomena such as two-headed calves, comets, and races of men with only one leg, as evidence for the irrational. There are things which cannot be explained, he says. This is true, I thought. Like the sail flackering in gusts above me, my mind billowed and carried me forward with an image of Aulus in his boat, this time falling like a leaf onto the slick surface of the lake.
Are we humans no different from the rest of creation and therefore subject to natural laws? If so, where is our free will? Are we free, or are we not? If we are, then what is the difference between what is possible and what is right? Is it possible Caligula and Nero were not mad, but prophets?
I lay back, remembering giddy discussions with Pomponius and other friends, when as a young man I’d first bitten deeply into philosophy. Are the gods subject to natural law? But why even admit the existence of the gods? It’s fair to assume there are no gods but only nature herself. The official pantheon and the
silly rural water-sprites and demons feared and worshiped by the common folk all over the world are all creations of mankind, who depend on us, not us on them. Only nature does not depend on us. Nature is another name for God; and in the perception and understanding of nature we can read the face of that god. What wonderful gifts we’ve been given, in our eyes and ears and minds, our umbilicals to God. Though the fever was leaving my body, it had ignited a fire in my mind. I knew now what I had to do, and all that remained was to work out the details. I would spend the rest of my life, if it took that long, drawing the face of God. I was no artist. I remembered Plinia’s lovely little sketches of people and flowers, thrown off so quickly yet so adroitly, as graceful as mine were clumsy. No, I would describe God as a naturalist would; for the face of God is reflected in the natural world. So at last I'd found my footing, in my nascent Natural History, in which I would describe Divinity not by theological speculation, dry philosophical logic, or the wild imaginings of a superstitious mind, but by recording the world and all its wonders.
I felt better by the moment, gained energy and clarity. My natural impatience returned. I wanted to write all this down, right then, so I wouldn’t forget any of it. But it was dark, everyone else was soundly asleep, and no lamp would stay lit on the deck. It would have to wait til morning. I would remember. I smiled, felt at home again in the world, a dim little star sailing on the boat of time toward my own destiny. I fell into a deep sleep from which I woke, cured of the fever, just as the ship slipped into Ostia’s harbor, where an official carriage was waiting to take us to Rome.
I felt at home again. The bustling traffic and activity along the road to Rome resonated with my new-found resolve to get on with my life. I drank it all in in great gulps. I could tell Lucius was pleased to see me back to my usual expansive and enthusiastic self.
I met Plinia, who’d come down from Comum, at Marcus Quintilianus’ house, who we hoped would take Caecilius on as a student. Plinia was subdued and still grieving. I searched for appropriate words to console her. She thanked me for coming.
Caecilius had done well under the guiding hand of his tutor, she explained. He especially excelled at rhetoric. Perhaps, I mused, he will be the lawyer I could never be.
When he first faced me across the marble floor of the reception room, he stood unsure what to do. But when I smiled and in my wheezing but reassuring voice merely pronounced his name, he ran into my arms.
“Your father was taken from you,” I said, “but you will not be fatherless.”
I held the boy out at arm-length, looked into his eyes.
“You’ve grown, towards the sky,” I said, “while I fill out like a ripe pear.” Caecilius smiled. “And what good things I hear about your rhetoric!”
I put my arm around the boy’s shoulder and turned to my sister. “Now, with your permission, I’d like to take him out of his lessons for the rest of the day. I have someone I’d like him to meet.”
I’d scheduled an audience with Vespasian and meant to take the boy along. The joy reflected in Caecilius’ eyes and flushed face more than doubled the pleasure of seeing my old friend again.
Vespasian, just over his afternoon nap, was relaxed and energetic. We talked about the empire, at home and abroad. Caecilius drank it all in, a ten-year-old boy plopped down at the very epicenter of global politics. Vespasian described the progress being made on the building projects they’d planned. Another year, maybe two, and the Temple of Peace would be complete. The amphitheater, well, that would take longer.
The boy was delighted when Vespasian himself led us on a walk to the amphitheater. Like every other boy in the city, Caecilius had kept close track of the huge project’s progress. After Nero’s gardens and lake were demolished, the gigantic foundation was excavated with room for underground galleries beneath the arena. The downward work was finished and already the first courses of stone were laid, and workers like tiny ants crawled over the massive outlines of the building. Vespasian was in his cups and took Caecilius’ hand as we climbed precariously onto a big block of stone. Vespasian insisted on knowing all the architectural and engineering details of this the largest building ever constructed. He pointed out to Caecilius and myself the tufa which sandwiched travertine piers, around which concrete faced with bricks would later be added to support the high rows of seats.
“You’re invited to the dedication, young man,” Vespasian said, as he helped Caecilius down. “And bring your uncle,” he added, his arm now around my shoulder. “Who by then, like me, will be an old greybeard.”
Next we spent almost an hour inspecting progress on Vespasian’s new forum. At last Vespasian had to go. “The dreary business of being emperor,” he apologized, only half in jest. “So, how long is the City blessed with your presence?” he asked me.
“I don’t know yet, I’m just getting over a nasty fever.” The time would come, though this was not exactly it, to bring up my doubts about returning to Spain.
There was another thing I needed to do, and I meant to take Caecilius with me. Twenty years had gone past since my last visit to Castor’s garden. I’d kept up an irregular correspondence with the old man until the Jewish Wars, when it became impossible. I was saddened but not surprised when I learned of his death. The quiet life among his plants and the healing herbs he’d found there had served him well; not many lived to a hundred and five. Had I been in Rome I would not have missed his funeral. Instead today I would take a kind of pilgrimage to the beloved gardens, and share my admiration for the plants and their departed husband with the boy. It was a fine clear June morning, blessed with a fresh breeze, when we started out in a sedan-chair.
As we passed through the city I enjoyed telling my nephew, about to be adopted son, details of who’d been the architects of the buildings we passed, and what important events had happened in the empire’s history in this temple, or that office or basilica.
“Uncle,” he said, “is there anything you don’t know? It seems there isn’t a thing you see, building, bird or tree, that you can’t go on and on about.”
I smiled, glad that such things mattered to him. For his part, he realized that no one of his time had a mind like his uncle’s. The journey to Castor’s seemed to take only a few minutes.
Our sedan was set down in front of Castor’s house. Caecilius stepped out and held a hand out to help me. Yes, I’d really put on too much weight. I glanced up and down the street. The neighborhood had become more upscale, with sprawling villas replacing the tenements among which Castor had hidden his garden. I raised and dropped the brass door-knocker, which resounded loudly off the heavy oak door. The door creaked slowly open. I introduced myself, and asked if we could see Castor’s garden.
“Garden? Ah. Come in.” The purple band on my toga which marked me as an equite gained me entrance through doors which would otherwise remain shut. Caecilius followed us into the atrium, which looked much the same as it had twenty years before but for one important difference -- it was now devoid of the profusion of living, green plants it once held.
“I’m Quintus Varius, Antonius’ nephew.” The man who’d let us in bowed, and in his quiet and gentle manner I caught a glimpse of my old friend.
“I spent many hours out back with your uncle Antonius,” I said. “Many happy hours, perhaps the happiest of my life.”
“We’re all grateful to him,” Quintus said. “It’s surprising how many of you, great and little, he must have shared the garden with.”
This surprised me. Somehow I’d always thought of my and Castor’s relationship as something special, unique. “And the gardens?”
Castor’s nephew looked away, a note of embarrassment in his voice. “I tried to keep them up, for a while, but it was too much for me. I couldn’t afford the slaves. Men came, after he died, wanting his plants for their gardens. Rome is in a construction boom, you know.”
“Yes, I’ve seen.”
“So I sold them off, one by one.” Castor’s nephew shrugged. “When the plants wer
e gone, I had no use for all that land. So I sold it, too, and someone's put up a big house.”
“They’re gone, the gardens?”
Quintus nodded.
I sighed. “Nothing left for us to see?”
Quintus shook his head. “Nothing.”
I felt destroyed. I looked around as though lost in a place and time I did not know. “Well then,” I said at last. “I guess, we may as well go.” I took Caecilius’ hand.
“I’m sorry,” our host said. As we turned to exit he asked “What did you say your name was?”
“Gaius Plinius Secundus,” I responded, stepping outside into the brilliant morning.
“Plinius? Wait a moment,” Antonius’ nephew offered, deep in thought. “Now I remember. Yes, wait Plinius, Uncle had spoken of you.”
“He had?” I stopped outside the door, turned.
Quintus took my hand. “Yes. He said that of all his visitors, the two of you were most alike. Wait here,” he said. We waited in the street. A gang of boys had gathered around the sedan, begging for handouts. I shooed them away. On the far side of the street in the shade of a wall the carriers were all resting, at the moment being pestered by a big mangy dog. One of the Ethiopians petted the dog, found a piece of bread in his pocket and slipped it to the poor animal. But when the dog wolfed down the bread and began nosing around for more, a quick kick sent him yelping up the street.
Quintus reappeared at the door. “Here,” he said, handing me a small wooden box. The dark oiled citrus-wood box, which fit nicely in my outstretched hand, was finely made. A thin string was wrapped around it and a scrap of papyrus. On the paper, in an ancient hand, elegant but shaky, I saw my name: For Gaius Plinius Secundus.
“This he left for you. It’s been sitting in his study, and I’d almost forgotten about it.”
