by Ken Parejko
But this of course was only the prelude to further comedy. The Senate then went on to debate my father’s virtues as emperor, which led them, based in part on Fimbria’s fraudulent testimony, to finally declare him a god. You are aware, of course, of the political subtleties embedded in that action. Daddy may be a god, but only the Senate can make him one... Will it ever stop, this interminable tug of war?
Can’t you just see him reclining up there on a cloud above the Esquiline, peering down at this sorry spectacle and having himself a good laugh? Laughing so hard he’ll probably pee. I should introduce a bill don't you think that rain be officially declared daddy’s divine pee.
Well then of course the next thing was for them to go right ahead and vote funds to erect a temple in his name then establish a new priesthood, the flamen Flavialis, and a priestly college, the sodales Flavialis, to care for the temple. I suppose we’ll see them popping up all over now, temples and statues in honor not of the good Emperor Vespasian, my father and your friend, but of the Divine Vespasian, emblem of the Senate’s power. It makes me want to puke.
Well, I can hear you saying, couldn’t I put an end to all that silliness? Well I suppose I could have tried -- though not likely with any success. But I am sure you will believe me when I say I have more important things to do. Serving alongside my father as emperor was nothing compared to being emperor myself , and little help I get from Domitian. More on that later.
So I let the Senate have their moment, and I remind you now that when you speak of, or even think of your dear friend my father you must from now on, by the authority of Roman law as duly enacted by the Senate, speak or think of him as Divus Vespasianus.”
I smiled. Vespasian surely would have enjoyed this solemn farce acted out by the most entertaining of all theatrical troupes, the Senate. Fortune save us from ourselves.
“On another front entirely, in the midst of all my work, dear old Berenice has shown up again. Now that I’m emperor it seems I’m the darling of every available female. They simply can’t wait to crawl into my bed. It’s far better than being named a god, I tell you! But Berenice, much as I once did care for her, it’s time for her to find someone else, to set her aim a little lower.
You know, I was surprised myself how those old feelings came up again when I saw her hanging around the Palace. Father and you were right, you know. She’s brilliant and lots of fun, but in the end it’s her own skin she’s looking out for. So, hard as it was, I sent her packing back to Judea. For the last time, I hope.
How go the plans for upgrading the fleet? I’m doing a status review of all the legions, auxiliaries, and the navy too. I’ll be sending it to the Senate with a request for funds. Send me your report as soon as possible.
We continue final work on the great amphitheater father started, and I look forward, hopefully in the coming year, to a spectacle there unlike any Rome has seen. You, of course, are invited, and I shall save a seat for you beside mine.”
I set the papyrus down. His letter brought no surprises. We knew the Senate would deify Vespasian, and of course I wasn't surprised to hear that Berenice had once again darkened Titus’ doorway. My report on the status of the navy was ready to send to him.
I unrolled the second letter. from Herculaneum, the house of Marcus Nonius Balbus, an old friend I’d seen at Vespasian’s funeral, recently retired from the proconsulship of Crete and Cyrenaica, the same position I'd held not that many years before.
“Gaius Plinius. We greet you from your dear friend Balbus’ estate. It is our regrettable duty to inform you that our father, Marcus Nonius Balbus and long your friend, died on the third of July, just after returning from the emperor’s funeral.
His death was quick and painless and seemed to have come from a failure of the heart. Our loss is great, as is all Rome’s. We will notify you as plans for the funeral are set.”
I laid the papyrus next to the one from Titus. One friend becomes a god, another a lifeless body.
Balbus. I’d just thought of him the other day.
And of visiting Herculaneum. I hadn’t seen Rectina, Bassus’ widow, for weeks. And there’s that book, too.
Lucius Calpurnius Piso, father of Julius Caesar’s wife Calpurnia, once had a villa at Herculaneum. The epicurean philosopher Philodemus was born in Gadara, a city I'd watched go up in flames in the Jewish War. Philodemus came to Italy about a hundred and fifty years ago and spent the rest of his life in Herculaneum. Piso was Philodemus’ patron, and since the philosopher’s death, Piso’s library was the most complete collection of his work. Piso himself died shortly after Julius Caesar, struggling to prevent the inevitable civil war. His villa and library remained in the hands of his family. I’d liked Philodemus’ On Piety, which saw religion not as divinely-inspired but developing from particular human needs and cultural origins. Philodemus’ theory of art was also interesting, and controversial. Hellenic and Roman art -- sculpture, painting, poetry or drama -- was mostly didactic, created for the moral edification of the audience. But like Philodemus I looked beneath the content of the art to the aesthetics of structure and form. I’d heard Philodemus had written, in his book On Music, that the real purpose of art was intellectual pleasure, and hoped to get to Herculaneum to read the original, in Piso’s villa.
I’d also recently learned of a rather obscure treatise by Philodemus, On Methods of Inference, which deals head-on with the very issue which was now most vexing me, epistemology. How do we know what we know? This was perhaps the most important question of all, for what we know is the basis of the decisions we make every day, and those decisions affect us and others. How can we act in a moral way if our decisions are not based on reliable information? Philosophy is of little interest to me for its own sake. I recalled Chryssipus, that if philosophy is an orchard, logic is the walls around the orchard, natural philosophy the trees, but ethics are the fruit of the orchard.
Logic, in other words, is necessary but not sufficient. The trees from which ethics grow are the most interesting to me. I’d become more and more an empiricist. We learn about the real world by studying it. Our observations, though limited by our own perceptual fields and experiences, broadened by the writings of others, if we dare trust them, are the raw materials of our understanding of the world. The stones of Vespasian's Temple of Peace or Colosseum do not move into place on their own. Neither do our observations build themselves. The best tool we have to raise the stones of experience into the architecture of knowledge, I’d come to believe, is inference. From our observations we draw inferences about the world, and from these inferences our future observations create, stone by stone, the world-view in which we move, conscious of it or not.
But it was not as simple as that. How well we understand the real world depends on how good these inferences are. Inferences, for example that the sun has risen in the east as long as mankind has noticed, and therefore it will rise in the east in the morning, are our guides which lead us from the known into the unknown. This is pretty straightforward when it comes to the sun -- not even one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand mornings has the sun risen in the west, and I would not trust the word of someone who says otherwise. Though tomorrow is an unknown, in which theoretically anything can happen, the prediction that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow is a strong one. All humans so far in all history have been mortal. Is it therefore safe to say that all humans are mortal? Is it not possible that somewhere lives a race of men who do not die? If one grew up and never traveled beyond the shores of Lake Larius, one might conclude that all humans are light-skinned. Strong as it might seem to some, that is a very weak inference, easily demonstrated by a trip to Africa or even Rome itself.
Inferences are troublesome from another angle. Are all things and events unique? If so, the empirical method quite simply fails, relying as it does on shared qualities between things and times. How reliable are the commonalities between things and events? Does nature operate within limits or are there no limits to what nature can do, or p
roduce? It is the sports of nature, the monsters, which demonstrate nature’s freedom to act outside the normal rules. Calves are sometimes born with two heads. I’d heard that some people – in Africa entire races -- are only three feet tall. And that there people live who have but one eye, in the middle of their foreheads, or heads placed backwards on their necks. It is in these monsters that nature plays games with the rules of empiricism.
If you pull a man’s hair out, it will grow back. If by accident you lose a fingernail, it will grow back. If you behead a man, he does not grow another head. We infer from this that it is not possible for a head to grow back onto a neck. But perhaps there is a race of men somewhere in which like hairs or nails, heads replace themselves. And this possibility, based on nature’s demonstrated ability to break her own laws, certainly sprinkles a condiment of doubt onto the meatiest empirical conclusion.
As I turned to empiricism more and more as the standard by which to understand the world, I’d given considerable thought to this problem, a problem Philodemus had written about, and I wanted to see what he had to say. Piso's library in Herculaneum had the nearest copy of both his On Inference and On Music. Eager to get both into my hands, I’d planned to travel over to Herculaneum in the coming weeks, and already sent a note up to the Piso family letting them know of this. While there I’d also meant to visit my old friend Balbus. But now there was no visiting him, except at his funeral. Unless, of course, nature meant to demonstrate her ability to break her own rules by bringing Balbus back from the dead. I sighed. I really ought to attend the funeral. Balbus was of a wealthy, powerful family, which had made its mark on the civic and financial life of Herculaneum and Pompeii. He’d been an avid supporter of Vespasian during the civil wars. He was a member of Herculaneum’s collegium of Augustales, the leading town officials who maintain the temples and cults of the deified emperors. In that role he'd have been the one to oversee translating the deification of Vespasian, which Titus had informed Pliny of, into stone. I first frowned, then smiled ironically when I realized that inscriptions on busts of my friend all over the empire would have to be amended from “To the emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus” to “To the divine Titus Flavius Vespasianus.”
Balbus had been a decent, effective businessman, an early supporter of the Flavian cause, a good friend. I could combine the funeral with a trip to Piso’s library. But another funeral, just now, so soon after Vespasian’s, it seemed too much. I would write them saying I was not able to attend and please would they accept my condolences.
I stared at the letters, one on top of the other, lying on the fine-grained table. Some are coming, I thought, some going. One by one my generation is going, and each loss is a kind of small death that sapped the strength of my own genius. I felt my horizons shortening.
That evening on a walk along the beach to collect plants I stopped to rest on a boulder which faced the promontory of the Misenum's cape. The harbor was quiet, all the many ships under my command properly moored in for the evening. The village of Misenum and the villas on the harbor and Cape were calm, too, as preparations for the evening meal were being made.
Evenings were always the longest hours for me. While I rested, the sun slipped behind the height of the Cape then reappeared for a few moments before sinking into the sea. My official work at the admiralty was done. It was too early to eat. There were very few local plants, anymore, that I didn’t already have, carefully pressed and filed away in my study. I was at a loss of what to do with myself not only in the present moment but for the remaining days of my life, however many or few they might be.
Quietly I watched the sun’s apotheosis, in its death blazing out with a glorious red. I watched as it touched the surface of the ocean and its color splash out from there across the horizon, then contract again as the crimson disk touched the sea. When I closed my eyes, in the darkness behind my eyelids I saw a palimpsest of the sun’s image. I opened them and watched with squinted lids until the brilliant circle was exactly bisected, just half remaining visible. How quickly it fell, Icarus-like, into the all-embracing sea. In a few moments the last, apical bit flared then sank. Rapidly now the thin clouds reflected back in different tones the light that had once come from the sea; first a salmon slip like a thin gossamer garment of light on the water’s thigh, which turned gradually pink, then paler and paler until only a suffused rose remained in a graying sky. I turned and looked away from the sunset. Now the light had left the trees and bushes along the beach, and on the slopes of the Cape above. Night was coming on. Ra’s eye had slipped shut. I quickly scanned the sky. No stars had yet appeared, and the moon had not risen from its bedchambers to the east.
I felt a tide of sadness wash over me, and loneliness, something which didn’t make sense when I thought about it. I still had my work. But somehow the challenge of my work was no longer a joy. I felt like a sea-captain who after traveling the world had been put away on a pension, standing at the shore watching others go out to sea. I was caught in an eddy-current of life, and seemed stuck there. My Flora of Campania, it was true, was still little more than a chaotic jumble of dried plants and notes in my journal, and needed my mind and the wide-ranging knowledge it possessed to organize it. That in itself was a life’s work. More. I sighed to myself. Already my eyes were going; more and more I needed the reading lens, and even with that it was a strain to read, to write, to study the plants. I was beginning to feel my age. That morning I’d seen an old man sitting in the sun by the sea who seemed ancient and decrepit, barely a shadow of a man. How terrible it would be to be like that. Yet I knew I was not so many years away from that. Plinia would be there to help me, and I in turn could help her. Caecilius. Yes, cultivating my adopted son's mind and career, that was something. I knew how much I meant to him, how much he admired me. He had a future, no doubt about that. Yes, that was something. Lucius, kind old Lucius was still there, too. But all together the job, the Flora, Plinia, Lucius, Caecilius, somehow I could not discover the equation by which they equaled, or replaced, Vespasian. And now Balbus. Much had been taken; what could possibly come to replace it?
I rose into the darkening night, the stars now beginning to offer me their company. Vespasian gone. It was hard to believe. I’d never thought about it, living without him. Would it have helped any if I had? Was there any preparing for this new emptiness I felt?
So I walked, utterly alone, up the beach toward my villa on the slopes of Capo Misenum, this evening of July sixth of the eight hundred and thirty-second year from the founding of Rome. Commander of a fleet of ships and twenty thousand men, from all outward appearances the same man who’d risen with the sun that morning to face the day, as I’d faced twenty thousand such days before, hopefully, efficiently, genially, gratefully. It would take a Plinia or a Lucius to find the subtle signature of my heart on the stanza my body presented to the world, a signature lightly written in the light gone out of my eyes, and in the new-found uncertainty of my gait.
Subtly my breath constricted to a gentle wheeze, through which I sighed. It was not far to the comfort of the villa and the evening meal, yet my steps seemed, paradoxically, not to be bringing me nearer. And though I knew the beach on which I walked, on which the sun-swallowing sea now gently lapped at my feet, knew its sand and rocks and shells as well as I knew the back of my own hands, I seemed less and less to belong. The beach was flat, a long way flat yet before I reached the rise of the Cape. But flat as I knew the beach to be, my feet fell tiredly one by one in front of me as though climbing a hill. Life, day by day, without Vespasian beside me, had become an uphill climb.
I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. I felt as though I’d walked a dozen miles or climbed to the top of the Cape, but when I turned and looked the rock on which I’d sat to watch the dying sun was not a hundred paces down the beach. How can it be, I asked myself? I forced my breath, to clear the dizziness from my head. Off to my left a dog barked. From the direction of the harbor I heard one of the men shouting. The man’s voice ran
g for an instant in my head, bell-like and bright. But the sounds carried no meaning. As they died away, I struggled to understand what the man had said, knowing it was not important, some order or another or a random obscenity. Then it was gone, and I knew there was no getting it back, and whatever it meant would be forever lost to me.
Now but for the gentle wheeze of my breathing there was only silence. I’d grown used to the sound of my breathing, though now and again it frightened me, as though lurking within the whistling wind made by my lungs I could hear, sometimes, the spitting of an angry cat. There was at this moment no sound in the world but the whistle of my lungs, until that is I noticed the sighing of the sea at my feet, a subtle suspiration in close rhythm with my breathing. This is interesting, I thought, perhaps the sea is beckoning me, as it had the sun, to some watery dissolution.
That thought passed through me, like the sound of the barking dog and the sailor’s cry, registering but not imprinting its meaning onto my consciousness. Well, I thought, if I don’t darken the doorway soon, they’ll wonder what’s happened. I started, again, worldweary on my way.
Dinner was waiting for me. Caecilius’ energy and enthusiasm always picked me up. During the meal I brought up the two letters I’d received.
“One was from Marcus Balbus’ house, “ I said, chewing a bite of cheese thoughtfully. “Balbus has died.”
“Oh?” Plinia asked. Though she’d only met him a few times, when he’d come over to visit the admiralty, she’d always liked him. A bit over-wound, perhaps, he swept into the house as though on a mission, then swept back out again. Still, he seemed to her a nice enough man, with a reputation for broad charity.
