by C C Taylor
And having seen it for myself, I could now imagine what that so impressed the rich Roman; Skip up there in Athens on the big skene, this time in his gaudy coloured robes, the comedian’s garb, he’ll have finished with a final flourish, milked the audience reaction, the theatre shaking to the appreciative stamping of feet…and not for the first time, rather unfortunately, right after his final salutes, a Roman Guard will have swooped down and grabbed him by his robes before hauling him away and pressing him into their service…
And yet, as you will see, this particular performance, even when judged by unfortunate immediately posterior circumstantial events, rather than artistic merit, was not – by a Roman country mile – Skip Delirio’s worst ever gig.
No. But we’re getting there.
Chapter Four
Sharks
After the impromptu late-night performance was over, Stumpy tried to kick us out of the tavern but we bargained with him to let us stay there, as there was no point going home at that hour…so we lay on the floor or on tables and tried to sleep.
It was then, among the snores of his companions, and with oaths of secrecy that Skip gave me the details of his African adventure. He’d deserted, then possibly worked as a spy (he still wasn’t sure) for some pan-mundial, anti-Roman network, so the less said about that part of his life, the better.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he whispers at me, “those Africans are civilised. They tell us they’re Barbarians…”
“They say the same of the Gauls…but they’re right, though, aren’t they? Did the Gauls have roads and aqueducts?”
“If you heard their music and poetry,” he says. “You might think us Romans had done nothing so fine. What we’re good at is smashing things; cities, cultures…and grinding them into the dust.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” I say. “But I heard from some of the old guys whose dads were soldiers back when our army was besieging Carthage, that the locals had had their chance to surrender to the Roman army, but they said no. Which was stupid enough, but then what did they do? They hauled all the Roman prisoners they had out of their jails, put out their eyes and hung them over the walls. And there, in full sight of the enemy, they flayed the writhing half-dead carcasses to death then threw the bodies to the Romans.”
Skip thinks this over for a while.
“That is a provocation, admittedly,” he says. “But, it’s not like we don’t do the same. Caesar’s men liked to decorate their parapets with enemy heads.”
“That’s as may be,” I say. “But when you hear things, Skip, just ask yourself who’s telling them. We lawyers get to hear two sides to every story. And we have to know our history to cite precedence. But history very often only has one side to it. Even when we tell it to our advantage, it gets twisted. The name Hannibal still makes blood run cold in the Northern territories, and we all know he brought his army of elephants over the mountains to fight us. You know how many elephants made it over?”
“I don’t know…fifty? Thirty?”
“One. So, you see, it’s often the shadows of things we fear rather than the things themselves.”
“Hannibal had the Senate shitting bricks for nearly seven years. He had Rome’s balls in his grip.”
“Indeed. But what he didn’t have was what everybody thought he had; an army of elephants. The truth is usually somewhere between the two.”
“So, as you seem to be well up on world politics and that… What’s really waiting for us in Hispania?”
“Well that’s a good case in point. Back here, we’re told that all’s going well. But it’s been ‘going well’ for an awful long time now. His lordliness has spent two or three years flitting back and forth between here and there…he popped back just last year to let the senate have the chance to declare the Republic again, but they all looked down and shuffled their feet, and watched while he ended up arming the Praetorian guards and getting a new name out of it…as for what’s happening in reality, I hear that the more remotely stationed troops are still getting picked off by marauders from the Northern hills.”
“At least where I’m going, it’s all Roman territory.”
“If you don’t count the odd raid by the Cantabrians and the Astures, yes…”
“The Cantabrians…never heard of them.”
“If you make it down the coast, you’re clear, but before then you have to cross the very edges of the Pirenaian Mountains. That’s where the Cantabrians attack the untamed part, north of the river Ibero. They come down from the hills and pick off our stragglers. Augustus sent three columns into the Cantabrian Mountains…they got the standard nicked! And they were even getting battered from Gauls who’d arrived by boat from Aquitaine… Not that the Hispanics needed any help. After all, these are same Cantabrians that came over the Alps with Hannibal…and broke the siege at Numantia; those Cantabrians. The ones who will drink poison made from the yew tree rather than be taken captive or, if such ill luck befalls them, laugh and sing together as they are being crucified; those Cantabrians.”
“So it’s not as rosy as they said out towards the sunset then.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll be all right. All his favourite legions are over there… The V Legio Alaudae, Legio X Gemina…I don’t know if that’s good news or bad… Oh, by the way that lot you went off to fight with, your chums on the boat over to Numidia…they call themselves ‘The Elephants’ now. See? So there’s another good example of what I’m telling you. From what you say, all they did was turn up and the great beasts trampled their own armies. Hardly worth boasting about, I would have said…but now they make out they destroyed an army of thundering beasts all by themselves.”
“And what about the Big Man? He’s ill, isn’t he?”
“His Godliness? He’s always ill just before important battles…but don’t put that in your gig, for the love of Aphrodite, and when he isn’t feeling poorly at battle time, he tours the army camps doling out punishments like a right cunt…he makes them hold turf in their outstretched arms for hours on end, cuts their belts off so the tunic hangs down and they look like women…”
“Oh, Hades,” Skip said at last.
Of course, I realised as he said this, it wasn’t a good idea to paint such a bleak picture before our dear short-term guest.
“Of course, he has many fine qualities as well,” I stammered… But I’d put the frights up Skip already.
“What if the Great Caesar sees the show and decides to…? Maybe I should…tell me some more stuff about him. I could change the show and do something more flattering. What’s he been up to? Phil and Harry love him…monuments and poetry and all that… I could focus on that side of him.”
“Tell the story about how he’s the last man ever to see Alexander the Great.”
“Oh, good. I like that…when he was in Alexandria…and Ptolemy had the sarcophagus brought out…it’ll be a good thing to say.”
“I was joking.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t you hear?”
“No?”
“As he bent down to kiss the corpse, he knocked the nose off it.”
“No!”
“Yes…I thought everyone had heard that?”
After a second Skip rolls over and lets out a loud:
“Ha ha ha ha ha!”
Not enough to wake the drunks, but enough to rouse some fishwife to proffer some choice words in our direction from and upper window, before throwing a bucket of slops out into the street.
“A ha ha ha,” Skip collects himself…and when he has done so, I say,
“Tell me more of your story. Fifteen years is a long time in any man’s life.”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “If you come with us to the staging post, we’ll have more time.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Skip…I have to…”
“Tell them you’re ill. You will be, won’t you? After all that wine?”
“You’re not even going to say salute to Metella?”
“Why?”
he asked. “I have a wife in Athens. And two children.” Then he thought awhile. “Maybe on the way back,” he said. “I can stay longer. And I’ll be rich. She can see me then.”
“Two kids, eh? Well, Octavian would like that. He had all us bachelors in the forum the other day, haranguing us for not fucking enough. Telling us to go home and get our wives pregnant.”
“Ha ha ha,” Skip laughed gently. “Rome is getting soft.”
Then we drifted off and managed to catch a few hours’ sleep in the creeping white light of dawn, before Stumpy’s slave came pushing the tables to one side to clean up the wine and vomit from the previous night’s revels.
For breakfast, the four of us went out to look for bread and onions, and found some on the south side of the forum where we sat to eat.
Now everything I have told you so far is what your great, great etcetera told me in the course of that one, albeit long, drinking bout. And you will forgive me, I hope, as there must now be a certain change of style. Why? Well, because the description of the events that happened after they left Rome, I only had from the mouths of Phil and Harry, who, it turns out, were big fans…at least the first time I met them.
“How much we’ve learned,” they said, “gesture, pauses…tone…” they opined. Well I never knew your great, great whatever was such an artistic genius. Just goes to show.
Having crossed the forum to where the early food stalls set themselves out, we chose one and sat down to eat as the sun stumbled over the rooftops now, hurting my eyes…I was sitting on a low wall and at one point a pigeon came too near me looking for crumbs. So I kicked it away. In the head. Skip looked at me as if there was something troubling him.
“What?” I asked him.
“Do you think animals feel pain?” He asked.
“How do you mean?”
“Are they like us in that?” he sprang at me out of the blue. “Do they remember things?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean…in Athens I met some of their famous philosophers. They come to congratulate us along with the Big Fish…some of them are famous. I say ‘What do you do for a living’ and they say ‘we think’. That’s what they do over there, you know…think. They have these academies and they have students who come and pay money to argue with them.”
“Of course. Where did Plato and Aristotle come from? The desert?”
“So why in Rome do we not talk of such things?”
“About what?”
“About things like that. What is thinking? If an elephant can remember a man after thirty years’ absence…and Hanno swears that this is true…then they must be able to have thoughts…”
“I hadn’t thought about it, Skip,” I confessed, “I mean ‘What is thinking?’ Isn’t it obvious?”
“Where do we come from?”
“What?”
“That’s another good question.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Where do we come from?”
“Some say we are an attempt by the gods to make imitations of them.”
“Do they? What do the others say?”
“Well…the other philosophers say, we are the product of atoms that hit each other by chance and form things. And in the beginning, there are all kinds of monsters, like just heads with arms sticking out, or bodies with no legs…and these just pass away, obviously. They have no way of breathing, or moving…horrific freakish creatures that live a very short time, then die. But every so often, the atoms by chance combine into something useful and in this way the successful accidents survive. And that’s where we come from. And all animals. We could have had a long nose and thick skin…or wings…”
“How can anybody think that?”
“Bear in mind the numbers of atoms are very great as the atoms are so small, they are invisible. And also, remember that the universe has no limits, it goes on forever and has always been and always will be…so how is it not possible that everything has been tried before?”
“The night stars are other worlds like ours,” Phil chips in, rousing himself, yawning and spitting into the sand, before munching on a piece of bread.
“Yes,” Skip continues, “and they go on forever. So if they go on forever and we have always been, then everything must have been attempted. Those that worked, survived and those that didn’t, perished. And at the end of many experiments, this is the result.”
“So we…men…are the best example of all? The one most like Zeus? The one most fitted to survive?”
“Yes. Us. And all of nature. Everything that has survived. Elephants. Eagles. Owls… And all the animals that live on earth or in the waters. The ones that were no good, perished.”
“And this is what the philosophers say?”
“Not all of them. Cicero didn’t believe it.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s donkey shit.”
And not only that, Marcus, but it seems the doctors over there were miracle workers too…Harry had had some problem and a doctor cut him open, and took something out and now he was fine again. Well, I’ve heard some stories… It must have been obvious that I was incredulous of their tales as Skip insisted:
“They can do that. I’ve seen them cut open live animals to show you…”
“They cut out parts of the brains of animals to see what effect it has.”
“No!”
“Yes,” says Harry. “For many, many years, now our doctors have studied to know which part of the brain controls which action or which feeling…”
“Even my story about buying up owl brains didn’t seem so ridiculous over there…a curious bunch, they are.”
“Well,” I say. “It does seem that the Greeks are fond of their myths.”
“It’s true,” Harry says. “I can tell you what you look like inside. I saw a doctor perform an operation in the medical school. In fact, when you see what humans are made of, we’re just bags of fluid held in place with skin. Your internal parts all have functions…”
“Indeed, it is amazing what they’re doing these days,” says Phil. “They discover new things in medicine every year. One of them had his slaves drink only water with no food, just to see what would happen. The spirit of curiosity is alive in our land.”
“And what happened?”
“Oh, they died.”
Make what you will of this way of talking, Marcus, but it was all Greek to me.
Unfortunately, Greek was the tongue in which the last chapter of your father’s sad life was related to me, so I only ever half understood the ending, though I grasped the important parts. I know I’m supposed to know it for my job, but one thing is hobnobbing with Romans who speak it equally badly and another is talking to a pair of over-excited real-live Greeks. But that was the way it turned out.
You see, what happened was, that the three of them set off rather grudgingly for their meeting point, where they were to be picked up by Roman guards…they even had all the tolls paid in advance for a four horse carpentum. With suspension! What’s suspension? Oh, something to make the ride less bumpy. I doubt you’ll ever have the pleasure, young one. Only for the very rich. But who knows? If you go into the law like your fathers before you and happen to do very well and lick enough arses…
At any rate, I’d decided to pull a sickie that morning as Skip had suggested and accompany them to the staging post at the north end of the city, which was where they were to present themselves for transport all the way overland to Hispania. They even felt flush enough to hire a lectica, carried by four Negro slaves. And it was during this journey, I learned more of the adventures in Greece of which I have spoken, though obviously he could not compress fifteen years into a couple of hours, but there I got the full story of the kidnapping, the battle and the elephants, and how he ended up running bangue from Africa to Athens.
Before midday, we were alighting at the staging post where I – who, following Skip’s intended destiny – h
ad never been out of Rome, stood for a while marvelling at the clipping machines they had there for checking the real silver content of coins…and the wheeled carriages had new mechanisms, where a gear turned a hopper in such a way that a small pebble falls in on every revolution, so that at the end you counted the pebbles to know what distance to charge for. Quite amazing. Though, now that they are becoming commonplace in the city, I’m sure they’ll soon find ways to cheat you out of your money with them.
The scene made an impression on me. It was a valediction, but I was expecting to see my old cousin at least once again as he passed through Rome in the other direction, laden with gold and then, who knows, maybe get him to see out his last days here with his untold wealth?
“I’ll try to sneak another visit in en route home,” Skip said. ‘If the gig goes well, I should be able to do pretty much as I please…so expect me back. I should be away some four months or less, I imagine’, were the last words he spoke to me, apart from the usual platitudes.
And as I watched the motley company of soldiers and merchants trundle northwards out of Rome towards the mountains I was thinking to myself, For all his philosophy classes, Skip still thinks the real world corresponds more or less to the way he wishes it to be. When will he learn that it is not so?
Well the optimistically short four months passed, and I began to wonder if – when I saw the old fucker again – I couldn’t persuade him to stay here in Rome right away instead of heading back out east. It would be good to have him back. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t spent such a good night since the last time Skip had been around…drinking and clowning, as ever. That’s how he got through life. He was fun when he was broke, and the prospect of spending time with your great, great uncle and some money… Yes, I certainly mulled the possibility over. Surely, we could do something about the birthmark…let him wear a turban or something, like the old Parthians…
