by Ken Parejko
“Only he's always late delivering, and then only if we threaten him.”
Quintilius shrugged. “True.”
I sighed. “Well, lets give him one more chance. If he doesn't deliver on time I’ll go over myself and rattle his cage. What else?”
“There’s a small outbreak of dysentery in one of the barracks. Nothing to worry about, yet.”
“Well, what’s being done?”“
The doctors prescribed powdered grape-stones.”
“Yes, that’s good. Keep them away from figs. See they get panic-seeds, boiled in goat’s milk,” I ticked off almost mechanically. In my Natural History I’d enumerated a thousand uses for a hundred different herbs and so I'm seen as something of an authority. Because I'm not afraid to correct their prescriptions the fleet’s doctors, and even those in town, have come to resent me. “Keep me updated, especially if it’s spreading.”
Lucius entered the room. “The staff has arrived,” he announced.
“Anything else?” I asked Quintilius.
“Nothing important.” Quintilius closed his wax-tablet.
“Then let them in,” I told Lucius. “You’re staying for the staff meeting?” I asked Quintilius.
“Of course.”
“Oh, Lucius, see to it we get some wine, and a little of that new cheese Plinia’s been bragging up.”
Lucius showed the subpraefect Junius Rusticus and two navarchs Diogenes Aurelius and Claudius Salonus in. They saluted me as they entered, a silly gesture I'd never gotten used to.
The day after Vespasian’s funeral Titus had requested a complete account of the fleet’s status. I’d worked hard on that report, and after forwarding it to Titus was surprised to hear back in two days. Titus thanked me for the detailed accounting of ships, men, equipment, and the state of the fleet, and agreed there were too many old and clumsy quadriremes. He said he could find some money for updating the fleet and asked how long it would take and how much it would cost to build ten new triremes and ten Liburnian galleys.
Thus this morning’s meeting.
The men were seated and sipping their wine. “We’ve done well,” I began quietly, “these past years. Vespasian – you’ll note that while according to the Senate, we are now required to refer to him as a god, you’ll not hear me call my good, departed friend the Divine Vespasian.” They all smiled. “Vespasian understood the importance of the fleet. And so does Titus. He’s asked us to plan for the building of some twenty new ships, triremes and Liburnians. I need your input.”
I didn't keep men on staff who weren't reliable or dedicated. For their efforts I treat them fairly and honorably. Since their own careers depend so much on the success of the fleet, they know full well how fortunate they are that I'm on such close personal terms with the emperor. A modernized fleet would be to everyone’s good.
Rusiticus, who kept the fleet’s books, spoke first. “It’s a big project. We can't take on a project like that without new money.”
I nodded. “Titus is young but not inexperienced. I'm sure he’ll offer us new money. He’s in a kind of honeymoon with the Senate. I don’t see them turning him down for something like this.”
“That's all fine and good,” Aurelius spoke up, “but if I may say so, it’s not just a matter of money. We could have all the gold in the treasury, but still couldn’t move the Alps to Baia.”
“Not quite true, Aurelius,” Sadonus said. “If the admiral will allow me an hour, I'll ride up to Baia and bring back a goblet of Alpine snow.”
“A goblet of snow is not a mountain,” Aurelius argued.
“Might I ask,” I interjected, “what this deeply philosophical, and if I may say so not especially enlightening argument has to do with our fleet?”
We turned to Aurelius.
“Let me put it this way. Where will we buy rope for the new ships?” he asked.
Nola, Pompeii, Tarraco were mentioned.
“Good,” Aurelius commented. “And sails?” Several sources were suggested. “All right. The iron then for the oarlocks, anchors, pulleys?”
“There’s a half-dozen cities awaiting our orders. We could have them filled in a month, less,” Sadonus objected.
“Fine. Now then, where will we find the wood for all these ships?”
Silence followed.
“I see your point,” I offered. “And now, thanks to you, I can also see the Alps. Indeed, gentlemen, where do we find timbers for the masts, the keels and planking?”
The best fir masts came from Corsica, but the forests there had already been stripped. Likewise for the oak, pine, cedar and cypress for the hulls. Good lumber was hard to find.
“Lusitania?” Sadonus suggested.
“Deckwood, maybe. But no keels or masts,” I observed.
“Dacia?” Someone offered.
“Same story.”
“Have we stripped the earth of every usable tree?” Rusticus asked, frustrated.
“No,” I observed. “Only those we could reach. First was Corsica. I'm told that a century ago one big oak there would build a quadrireme's keel. I’ve seen trees in Spain that would serve us well, but they were so high on the mountainside they were impossible to bring down. The same for Egypt's firs, which used to provide our finest masts, hardly any left.”
“While what you say is true, may I point out,” Aurelius suggested, “that we have an ancient forest with far more than enough timber to rebuild our fleet, right in our own backyard.”
“Which is?” Rusiticus asked.
“Which is the sacred groves of the sibyls, of Bauli and Cumae, barely a stone’s throw away, with the biggest standing timber south of the Alps. We'd need only the smallest part of them for Titus’ new fleet.”
This was true, but it was a hard truth which brought us all to silence.
“So, Aurelius,” Sadonus at last remarked, “how do you suggest we get these trees? Sneak into the woods in the dead of night and cut them down?”
Unfortunately the groves of the sibyls, which lay like a green carpet over the hills to the north, were inviolable. The boom in construction up and down the Bay had stripped every other available forest of its lumber. Hillsides lay bare and open to the winter’s rain and for anyone who cared to notice were eroding away at startling rates. Over much of Italy's countryside where once stood ancient forests now only remained scrubby goat pastures.
Here in Campania only the woods owned by the sibyls were untouched. The sibyls were prophesying from many of the caves dotting the Campanian countryside even before the Greeks had arrived here, a thousand years ago. Odysseus and Aeneas had consulted them. They and their lands were sacrosanct.
It was an odd kind of silliness this throwing of vague prognostications scribbled on little clay tablets, randomly chosen, read aloud and interpreted by the oracles. Witchcraft, black and white magic, auguries, a thousand odd rustic rituals, were a plague across the empire. Cicero in his De Divinatione had appealed to logic and hard evidence to demolish divinations, and though we Stoics constantly railed against this nonsense yet there seemed no containing it.
So the oracles of Bauli and Cumae had kept their sacred groves, said to be protected by the wily wood-spirit Faunus, who though never seen could sometimes be heard crying out from the woods in a thin, ethereal voice. Anyone who violated the groves, believer or unbeliever, would suffer the wrath of the great masses of the public. So the forests remained untouched.
“Is there any chance at all,” Aurelius offered, “that we could buy some of the lumber from those woods? The trees grow old and die and rot.”
I thought a moment. “Well?”
Rusticus spoke up. “I think it’s worth a try. I suggest we send someone up to talk with them. Stay away from the priests or the oracles themselves, they’re fanatics. But their administrators, who manage the properties and finances, might listen to reason.”
“Didn’t Augustus,” I added, “when he first moved the fleet down here from Lucrino and needed wood for the barracks and ships,
didn’t he try just that, to no avail?”
“He did. But that was seventy years ago,” Rusticus said.
A moment of ineffectual silence followed.
“So say we do find the wood. What would Titus have us build?” Sadonus asked.
“He’s expressed an interest in triremes and Liburnians, but in the end that’s up to us,” I explained. “Correct me if I’m wrong. The fleet consists of twenty-two triremes, seventeen quadriremes, a single quinquireme, and eight Liburnians. They're all useful in their own way. But where does the future lie? What do we want the fleet to look like thirty, forty years from now?”
Rusticus had thoughts of his own on that. “With boarding tools like the harpax, which will throw a grappling hook a long ways, I’d say the future lies with the quick and maneuverable and not the large and ponderous. We need to be able to change, and change rapidly.”
Rusticus said this looking directly at me. We'd had had our disagreements of late, Rusticus and I. I'd often thought he was after my job. It sounded to me as though Rusticus' comments weren't only about the fleet, but about my corpulence and what he saw as my reluctance to change. It was true, it was harder for me to adapt to change than it used to be.
“Are you suggesting, Rusticus, that we build nothing but new galleys?” Aurelius asked.
I chimed in. “I think we should all of us think this through, what our own vision for the fleet would be, meet again and after reaching some consensus forward our recommendations to Titus. Any other questions?” I asked. “All right then,” I said, standing, stretching my aching legs. “We’ll meet again in a week. I want all of you to come back with your own ideas about the future of the fleet. Talk to our master shipwright. Let’s be bold. Is there a ship design we don’t already have, one we can’t even picture, that might best meet our needs?”
Though I was still good at it, somehow my heart wasn’t in it any more. The admiral’s job was big and demanding, needed constant attention to minute details while at the same time maintaining a broader strategic vision. It just didn’t feel the same with Vespasian gone. Forty years from now? How could I imagine what the fleet would be like forty years from now? Thankfully I had a staff who could do that. I sighed. In their faces I could see they saw me as an old man, especially since Vespasian’s death.
“As for the trees, I’m the one to go up to the sibyls,” I volunteered. “If they won’t negotiate with me we can assume they won’t negotiate period. If that’s the case, we’ll have to look someplace else for the trees. Well then that’s it. We’ve got enough to do.”
After I’d released the men I sat down, exhausted. Plinia brought a cool glass of water and a slice of melon. I was glad Titus cared enough to modernize the fleet. But it was a big project, and I felt something I’d never felt before, wanting to hand it on to the younger officers, to another generation. If it was to be done it should be done properly, and I wasn't sure I had it in me. As for wood from the sibyls' groves, I had few illusions about succeeding there.
I drank the cool water, stared out the doorway of the reception room, through the atrium, out the front door clear across the harbor, the village and the Punta Sarparella to the hills behind which nestled the Piscina Mirabilis and Bauli. Just a few generations ago these hillsides were covered with forests but today held only a few scattered trees, with sheep and goats, shepherds and goatsherds moving across them like a plague of locusts. To my own amazement, at the back of my mind a seed of rebellion sprouted. There was little of the ancient forest left in this humanized landscape of villas, farms and villages. The remaining block of forests held by the sibyls was somehow comforting. The destruction of the local flora and ecosystems was an affront to my new-found love of the natural landscape, gained through long hours spent in it. Could I in good conscience play a part in broadening that destruction? Not only did I not have as much energy as I used to – as a young man I'd have run full-tilt alongside the engine of progress -- now I actually had my doubts about the virtue of that progress. It would do no good to inform Titus of these misgivings. Titus was emperor, and his proper concern was the social, political and military integrity of the empire, not the integrity of its natural landscapes. I would have to keep my doubts to myself. I did hold the upper hand here, though. I could put off going up to see the sibyls or in some way sabotage the negotiations and save the forests, even if only for a while.
I'd discovered that being sensitive to nature and caring about natural systems had a cost. So long as you don’t know anything about or aren’t in any way emotionally attached to the plants, wild animals, streams and forests, you can do whatever you want to them without qualms. But the minute you entered their world, stepped into the complex web of life which each animal, tree or plant was a doorway into the rules changed, and you had no choice but to care about them. That made life harder.
I had seen something like it before, at highest levels. The easiest thing was to care only about yourself. That was Nero, or Caligula, and too many others to even count. It gave them a freedom that caring about others took away.
But I never had that as an option. I knew too much to not care. And because of that I found myself in another role, admiral of the landscape. Praefectus naturum, I thought. Apollonius of Tyana complained to us that we put someone to watch over our bridges, roads and temples but not over our women and children. He was right. So, why not someone looking after the earth?
Meanwhile I had my own household to look after. The time had come to replace the floor tiles in the dining room, a garish black and white mosaic worked in patterns to resemble waves at sea. The artist had been so successful it made me seasick sometimes just to walk across the room. Some of the tiles were cracked, others badly worn.
A mosaicist had been recommended to me out of Naples who'd done some really nice work in Pompeii. He'd come over a few weeks ago to go over the design. I'd retrieved from my study a sketch I’d made of the silphium plant. He wasn't so sure. It’s such a plain plant, he said. It barely has a flower. I can do some nice acanthus or roses or lilies, something more elegant. But I insisted.
And the walls of the peristyle needed repainting, where the panels between the marble veneers were a simple pink wash. I wanted the panels to continue a botanical theme, highlighting my favorite Campanian flora: arbutus, caper, oleander. The painters had already sketched the plants onto the panels and were scheduled to come back and start painting any day. At last my house, like Castor's so many years before, would be a naturalist’s house, not just an admiral’s.
But first it was lunch-time. My aversion to the elaborately-prepared delicacies so popular these days was empirical. Simple foods, simply prepared, left me feeling better. While this may have been true twenty years ago it was even truer today. Plinia brought me a small lettuce, three snails served with oil and garlic, a poached egg, and a small barley cake. Every day after lunch Lucius followed me to a small corner bedroom, the coolest room of the house, for a half-hour's dictation. He scribbled as fast as he could to keep up. Today I went on and on about how little of the region’s native flora remained.
It wasn't a pleasant thought to take into a nap; my nap wasn’t as restful as it might have been. But I woke, on my own, in the usual half hour.
I felt like a bath. But the admiralty baths, like my dining room floor and peristyle, were undergoing renovation. And Misenum’s public baths, which I’d been forced to use for more than a week now, held no appeal to me: I was tired of the whispering and pointing I faced when I went over to the village. Because the town of Misenum was a one-industry town, as admiral of the fleet I was the most important man around. But I’d earned a reputation as an eccentric. Whether I was in full admiral's dress or more informally walking the streets in my toga I attracted just the kind of attention I abhorred. I'd been spending hours out in the countryside, wandering the hillsides in search of plants and animals, behavior that fueled their sarcasm.
“I saw him the other day,” I heard a shopkeeper comment as I passed by. “
He was hauling himself up a big rock halfway round the Cape. They say he looks for plants, in all the oddest places.”
“Plants? I saw him last week on the beach, down on his knees, praying to the shellfish.”
Spado!” They would sometimes say, pointing at me as I walked by. “Eh, Spado!”
They called me a eunuch because to them I was the opposite of the great Roman ideal of virile manhood; a delicate scholar, fat, whose asthmatic voice sometimes broke and slipped into a eunuch’s squeak.
“He’s an odd one, that Spado,” was a common remark.
No, there would be no bath this afternoon. Plinia found me in the peristyle where I was watching the painter fill out the leaves of an acanthus. She handed me two letters which had just arrived and a cool glass of mulsum, my favorite wine mixed with honey. I went into the reception room and reclined beside my favorite citrus-wood table. Citrus-wood was rare and very popular. Properly cut it showed off a fine complex swirling grain. Mine, which displayed three hands of the nicest grain called pantherinae, was built by a local craftsman. Larger citrus tables, four feet or more across, sold for a million or more sesterces.
I set my mulsum on the table and broke the imperial seal of the first letter. It had come from Titus by official courier.
“I trust this letter finds you, my dear Plinius, in good health and spirits. I have of course been very busy but hope to find time to come down to Campania later this summer, and will look forward to visiting the fleet and seeing you then.
Perhaps you’ve already heard of my father’s deification by the Senate. How it happened I am sure you will find amusing. A few days ago, in a shameless effort to toady favor with Domitian and myself, Flavius Fimbria -- you remember him, I think, a tight-assed little jerk -- declared that at father’s funeral he’d seen father’s soul rising to heaven from out of the funeral pyre. It must have been a glorious sight, dear old daddy making his nuptial flight. Atilius Barbarus chimed in to verify Fimbria’s report. Someone pointed out that Fimbria & Atilius had been present at the cremation, not of my father’s actual body, but his waxen effigy. So now, my dear Pliny, if it has come to that, when even waxen effigies have souls, surely the genius of Rome is mired deeply in shite.
