by Ken Parejko
I looked out to see how far we’d come. We were making good progress, skirting the base of the Punta Epitaffio, the high hill on which Julius Caesar had built his villa, still shining opulently from high above.
“Hold it!” I shouted. “Stop!”
Our little private parade halted below Drusus' villa, built near Caesar's to keep his wife Antonia happy while he was off fighting the wars he loved, and which finally brought him down, impaled on that gigantic oak in Germany’s forests. In her villa's pool Antonia had kept a school of eels which she doted on, setting golden earrings into their gills. Even now “spoiled as Antonia’s eels” was used to describe pampered pets or children. After Drusus’ death the villa was used by first Tiberius, then Claudius. Now the Flavians, not the Julio-Claudians, stayed here when vacationing on the Bay. Vespasian had replaced the pampered eels with fish which could be served at his table, and which now and then he'd had sent down to me at the admiralty, sweet and luscious and seasoned with all this history.
At the moment I was more concerned with our country’s future than its past. As I peered up the side of the bluff towards Drusus’ villa I’d caught a glimpse of a plant which, like a mule gazing out of a paddock full of horses, did not belong. I pointed it out to Caecilius, who scrambled up the side of the hill. Plinia watched anxiously as he made his way up the bluff, sending little showers of rocks down towards us. People we’d passed along the way slowed and, curious, watched Caecilius climb.
At last he came scuttling down the hill, sliding on his backside then breaking into a run on the pathway. He brought the plant to me.
“It’s skirret,” I said, the plant Drusus held for a moment in my dream before he’d dropped it into the stream of destiny. “Wild parsley. Tiberius first discovered it on the Rhine. It was a favorite of his, the root boiled with honey and wine. So he brought some with him, and had them grown in the imperial gardens, and on Capri too, and here at his mother’s villa. Like captives cast into a wall-less prison they’ve escaped and now threaten to overrun our native landscape. In some places it grows so thick it doesn't leave anything else room to grow. That’s it, that's the pax romana!” I said, bitterly, and dropped the plant to lie and wither in the hot Campanian sun.
“Lucius,” I said, “make a note to send some men up here before it goes to seed, to pull them up. Every one! Understand?”
As I’d come to know the plant world better I’d learned that some plants were not native to our soils. I’d first recognized alien weeds in Rome itself, like a foreign army creeping their way up the slopes of the Capitoline and Palatine hills. Every time I saw them I felt a pang of sadness. I had the sense that it would only take a few generations for much of the Italian countryside and its lovely native flora to lie victim to this quiet, unnoticed invasion. Our heroes who’d died fighting invading armies had busts at every street-corner but there would be no monuments to these victims, and entire kinds of plants would be gone before I could even catalog them.
As the carriers lifted the litter and we began once again making our way up the Via Herculano my mind turned away from worry over the state of the Misenian fleet to that of the flora of Campania. Thanks to my friendship with Antonius Castor and the inspiration he gave me, in my Natural History I’d discussed many of our plants, as Theophrastus had those of Greece. More recently I’d turned to studying in detail and collecting the plants of Campania, which sprouted all around me. But it seemed almost a funereal effort, a brief eulogy to species as they succumbed to the onslaught brought on by luxury and wealth. How could one help but be full of gratitude for the spectacle of nature and its wonders, yet the more I learned of mankind’s treatment of nature, the more I despised my countrymens' ignorance.
As we started off again the natural enthusiasm of the morning was gone, replaced by a quiet regret. Virgil, who'd lived in and loved this Campanian countryside, had written in his Ecologue that “Love conquers all. Let us yield to love.” It sounded good, and there were times when it rang true in my heart. But now even Virgil couldn't dispel my doubts about the future of the landscape he’d come so much to love. Love: what an interesting word. What should we love, then, to conquer all? Ourselves? Someone or something other? What is, or what might be? Or perhaps we should love change itself, which seemed the only constant in life. I found myself in recent years having become a lonely champion of preservation, who wanted nothing more than to slow or stop the sometimes terrifying, seemingly ineluctable flood of change overtaking the land and its people. Now even the lovely Bay on which the winds played gentle games, and the hills coming down to the Bay, this Campanian land blessed by the gods with so much natural beauty, even all this could not clear the clouds which had gathered over my head. I rolled up the fleet’s status-report, leaned back and let the quiet rocking of the sedan-chair nudge me into a short nap.
When I opened my eyes again we were passing Lucrino and the lake which was once the Portus Julius, the harbor Julius Caesar built for his fleet. But the breakwater which protected the harbor from the open Bay didn't allow natural flushing, and in a few years the harbor had silted in. So Augustus moved the fleet to Misenum, where the breakwater was engineered with tunnels allowing the tides to flush the harbor. We passed now the magnificent pleasure palaces of Baia, the villas of Rome’s rich and famous. Here my men came for pleasure, where on the higher slopes Nero had built a many-roomed compound for women who made their living off the sailors of Misenum.
We exited the Via Herculano and followed the walkway uphill toward the amphitheater. Crowds were already gathering, and knots of workmen busily making final preparations for the day’s spectacles. Food of all kinds was being hauled in by vendors whose prices bellowed a paean to the new god of profit. There were great amphorae of water, cooled with ice brought all the way from the Alps, and amphorae too of wines of different kinds. High on the upper tiers of the amphitheater the velarium, the huge red, yellow and gray linen which would keep the hot sun off the audience was being unrolled and fastened down by a hundred sailors brought up from the fleet. As we passed a group of them busily rolling up ropes, the officer in command saluted me.
“Those ropes look dirty,” I barked. I’d learned from Vespasian, whose brilliance with artillery had brought him so many victories, that ropes soiled with dirt or sand quickly wore out. “Wipe them clean and re-roll them,” I demanded.
Vespasian, Titus and Domitian hadn't yet arrived. I dismounted from my chair and spoke to an officer who'd come up to greet us. I’d acceded to Caecilius’ request for a tour of the new amphitheater’s basement. A pair of guards were assigned to accompany us. While waiting we stood in the shade of a big plane tree, watching the bustle of workers, crowds and officials and refreshing ourselves with cool water and fruit we’d brought along. From deep in the cellars of the amphitheater came the loud roar of a lion. I turned to Plinia and asked her one last time. “Are you sure you want to do this?” She nodded apprehensively in the affirmative.
At last the guards arrived. Thracians, I guessed. Great fighters, but it was troubling how fewer and fewer soldiers, cavalry or sailors were Roman. Auxiliaries and mercenaries were fine, but the empire had been built on the backs of Rome’s native heroes. How long would the empire survive without them?
We four – myself, Lucius, Caecilius and Plinia – followed the two guards, who unlocked a set of heavy iron doors and stepped into a nondescript side-entrance of the amphitheater, which led straight into a long, narrow flight of steps leading down into the basement. As we started into the cool, cavernous darkness the sounds and smells of the animals rose to meet us; the growling of lions and tigers, and the anxious snorting of Spanish bulls thrown into terror by the proximity of the big cats. Up close the lion’s roar was an entirely different sound than from a distance, a deep, primitive terrifying roar which wrapped around us and raised the hair on the backs of our necks.
When the big cats went quiet the silence made room again for the feel of the cool air and the animal smell. First in line b
ehind the guards, I stopped and turned back to Plinia, who was breathing deeply as though she’d just been pulled from deep, roiling waters. Caecilius, beside his mother, had his hand on the sword at his side. Plinia smiled weakly. I urged the guards forward. At the cellar's first level we left the staircase to wander down a long, dark corridor. Ahead of us was a jumble of cranes used to lift the scenery and the caged animals up into the arena above. As we passed under the slit through which the scenery would pass a column of light poured down onto us, blinding us for an instant. Here we moved as in a wonderland made of fake shrubbery and trees and plaster rocks which raised to the surface would become a forest in which the staged hunt -- the venatione -- would take place. All this machinery was worked by huge wooden gears, ropes and pulleys. I would’ve liked to take time to study them, but the guard moved ahead. Caecilius’ foot caught in a rope coiled on the floor. He stumbled into the arms of one of the guards. Plinia whispered for him to be more careful.
While half an army of men worked above in the bright sunlight on last-minute preparations here the other half worked, near-naked, in near-darkness: carpenters, painters, animal keepers and trainers all busy at each their assigned job. Many of them lived here below, their food brought down to them by a crew of slaves, their wastes carried up and dumped into the Bay. They seldom saw anyone from the higher world, and kept a close eye on us interlopers. They were slaves mostly, prisoners of war and criminals who did not live in this dark and dangerous world by choice. Some had been below for weeks. A kind of subterranean society had grown here mimicking the one above, with its own workers, thieves, priests, doctors, police and prostitutes. Twice a day, day after day their boss came down, a hard, brutal centurion. He drove them hard to keep them on schedule for today's deadline. Yesterday the scenery had been hauled up in a practice run, without problem. The animals were healthy and hungry. If anything went wrong today it was his head would pay, so to save his own flesh he sacrificed theirs, bullying his way through them. He came among them with a half-dozen guards, swords in hand, and when he came yelled irrationally, randomly picking on one of them, spitting in his face and whipping him with a stick or the flat of his sword. He threatened them with death and worse. The clank of the iron doors above had come to mean an instant of fear, like the throes of a recurrent fever.
Other than the prostitutes who came down the long dark stairway Plinia was the first woman to visit here. Why she’d come was to them a sharp and difficult mystery. The armed guards who accompanied the group, and Caecilius’ sword now drawn, were the only guarantee of her safety.
My eyes adjusted to the dark. The flickering light of the torches threw dancing shadows on the walls of the galleries. We turned down a wooden stairway to the sub-basement, the keep for animals. At the bottom of the stairs we made a quick turn to our right. After a few steps and as if by magic we were suddenly confronted by a pair of glaring green eyes which angrily threw the torchlight back at us. We fell back. A guard held his torch out.
Up close the male lion was massive, its imperial face framed by a long, graying mane. The only thing between it and us was the iron rods in the front of its cage, a cave scarcely larger than the lion, dug back into the bedrock. The animal circled its cave restlessly, around and around. It stopped for a moment to stare blankly out at us with a stare full of hatred so intense it caught our collected hearts and drew us all up again for a moment. But even the cat itself could not bear that hatred for long, and it broke the stare to resume its regular circling. As it paced, paced its cage its muscles rippled, and the brute strength of those muscles threatened, against all logic, to somehow break through the hard stone walls and iron bars which contained them. The lithe, rippling muscles spoke their own awesome truth, but trumped by the even more terrible truth of of how useless they now were, whether to catch prey, mount a mate, or escape. That was the fascination of the caged lion: mankind flexing our muscles, which were our brain and its limbs, our technology. I lived in a culture in love with technology; but in my writings I tried too to point out its dark side.
Our hearts and minds were stirred by the animal’s grace and beauty. Its muscles rippled with every step, its huge paws padding quietly on the stone floor of its tiny niche. It seemed to be watching us with a kind of noble aloofness which neither sword nor iron bars could touch. One of the guards poked at it with his sword. The animal raised a paw to defend itself, and bared its long teeth. The guard laughed.
Recently I'd achieved a view of nature’s creatures quite different from that held by my countrymen. Like a musician at a concert or a poet at a poetry recital, the lion called forth to me levels of meaning not available to them. My survey of the Campanian flora took me on quiet walks into the countryside, where I would pause to bend over or sit respectfully beside the commonest of plants which most of my countrymen didn’t even notice. I admired each kind for its own worth, and was struggling to understand why one plant grew where it did and not another. My notebooks had proliferated far beyond my reckoning; each observation led to a question, and each question to another and another. All this was working itself in the background of my mind, slowly germinating, and as I stood in the cool, dark, smelly caverns beneath this most recent of our monuments to violence and bloodshed, the seed of all that study burst forth into the light of my consciousness. Standing so near the terrible lion I could almost touch it, I had a sudden and profound realization. The animal held in the cage of my eyes, I realized, as terrible as it was, was but the shadow of a lion.
To me, the lion was a kind of pacing flower in a stone vase. For an instant an image of a lion’s head as a flower, with its mane like petals billowing around it, the mouth and eyes at the center of the blossom, flashed briefly in my mind. Lovely as a flower might be, in the beauty of its form and color, a flower is much more to a naturalist. The flower, in fact, tells you very little about the plant that produced it. What is a lion, then? I asked myself. If a flower is the soil out of which it grows, and the sunlight and water which drives its fragile life, then the lion is more than the flesh, bones, teeth and eyes awesomely pacing the cage before us. The lion is the very plains from which it has been stolen. It is the thundering hooves of its prey, the comical zebra and the swift-footed sleek impala, whose bursts of speed and sharp, slicing hooves the great cat must overcome to live. It is the cry of the secretary-bird and the glint of a setting-sun off the watering hole to which it has come, with its pride, to quench its thirst. It is its pride; the squalling cubs, the strong and savvy lionesses, and the other males, cooperating in the hunt but ever on edge for a chance to rise in status. It is the smell of dust slathered with rhino manure, suddenly splattered with a hot afternoon shower. The lion-flower is but a node of a web-work nature had woven. Beautiful as the lion might be, to stand back and see the web-work was to see a deeper level of beauty.
Like the flower set in the vase the lion before us was an organ removed from the larger body; a kidney or spleen, or perhaps a beating heart, which of course could not survive outside the body from which it had been torn. The marvelous cat pacing so restlessly inside its cage, I knew, was but a shade of its true self, which I now and then caught glimpses of in the glowering eyes and the animal's graceful stride. Polybius had changed my view of the inexorable march of history. I’d come to see the men and the great events lauded on our steles, inscriptions, and in our many festivals as part of a greater societal web from which that hero or event had sprung. In the same way every flower, bird or animal was not self-sufficient; could not be torn from its social fabric; was, in fact, but a facet in the larger gem of life. Awesome as it was, the lion before us was but a vestige of its true self. It belonged where it had come from. I was ashamed.
We had all, for our own reasons, seen enough. Plinia asked the guards to take us away. As we made our way up the stairs and back again into the hot air and glaring light of day, where the crowds were making their way in streams into the amphitheater and the workmen busily shouting to one another we returned to the same worl
d we’d left half an hour before. The world had not changed, but my perception of the world had broken free, like a traveler struggling up a mountain-path who turns a corner to suddenly confront a grand, wide vista. I would never see the world quite the same again. A different man came up out of the darkness than had entered it. To construct my Natural History I’d recorded my own and many others' experiences and scoured the literature of the known world -- as I sometimes bragged, searching two thousand books by two hundred authors to put together twenty thousand facts. To some this harvesting of minutae seemed a petty thing at best. But perhaps there had been an underlying logic to it, which even I was not aware of: the pieces had been lain into my book, and now at last the mosaic had come together to form its pattern. In the dark and smelly bowels of the Puteolana amphitheater, perched on the bright slopes falling down into the Bay of Naples I’d rubbed up against the great interconnectedness of things. In so doing I’d brushed up against the face of God. I had entered the darkness, and found light.
Though I couldn’t quite articulate my new-found aesthetic, it suffused and colored my day. I put it aside, momentarily, when I met up with Vespasian and Titus on their way to the imperial box. Then it came back to me: these were lions in their own right, and while the crowd cheered them enthusiastically I could see past the emperor and his son in their colorful finery into the soil from which they’d come.
The spectacle below seemed brutally venal and superficial. The sun was hot, and I had trouble breathing. I sipped cool water to moisten my lips and throat. I closed my eyes, drifted in and out of sleep. Beside me Vespasian and Titus stood up to thundering cheers, sat down, stood again. A line of trumpets and drums moved across the arena. Like magic a forest rose from the sandy floor, then deer and gazelles. Hunters appeared, the venationes began, one after another the animals screaming, falling, bleeding. Sick of heart I slept, awoke to chat aimlessly with Vespasian.
