by Ben Pastor
“Instead, you have his watchdog.”
“How on earth—?” Her surprise was genuine, but no telling whether it concealed worry that he had found out. She fussed with the shaggy hair on her temples, sticky with the heat of day; all without looking at him directly, which was unusual for a prostitute. Aelius was not vain, but he wondered if she didn’t like him, or—vice versa felt unattractive to men at this time. Dressed as a youth, he wouldn’t have noticed her in a crowd. As a girl, even in the state she was in; she came close to arousing him; and he wasn’t about to let her suspect it.
He said, roughly, “I know, and that’s that. What about Soter? Did you notice him acting fearfully of late?”
“I can tell you that Soter was afraid, but that was nothing new.” She used a hem of the shawl to blot her neck, with her eyes closed. “Like all the rich, he feared folks would rob him or worse. At least two nights a week he’d spend here. He would have servants deliver him to my doorstep and usually come to get him during daytime. When he stayed late and had business early in the morning, the retinue looked like a holy procession, there were so many torches and tapers.”
“Did he say whether he feared anyone in particular?”
Her eyes were open again, and on him just the time to say the words. “If men were to tell whores what’s going on in their affairs, we’d all get killed sooner or later. I wouldn’t know, and frankly wouldn’t tell you if I knew.”
He wondered whether Anubina had those tired circles under her eyes while she carried her children; whether she, too, had continued to work until the growth of her belly displeased her clients. “You told me there’s a stew in Naples that the deified Hadrian patronized. I’m interested. What about it?”
“It has nothing to do with Soter’s death.”
“Is it as historical a place as you said?”
Her mood rallied a little. She spoke looking at an imprecise place on his shoulder, a bit amused, avoiding his face. “Why, in certain circles it’s legendary! The official version is that he met Antinous over in Asia Minor, but they tell you a different story in Naples. They say he was—Hadrian, that is—passing through the city on his way to some faraway land or other when he stopped for refreshment along the way. Antinous was a new arrival and had hardly had the time to get used to his little bed that he was snatched off. There’s a tablet in verses inside the stew that gives you the story and how Antinous made out afterward.”
“What about that?”
“Well, everyone knows: He fell into the Nile, was drowned, and they buried him. Nothing special, but the verses are pretty, and I liked them.”
“Does the tablet say where he was buried?”
“I don’t recall, exactly.” A droplet of sweat came down her forehead, and she wiped it with her ring finger. “I think it says he was buried where the Emperor later died—something of the sort.”
Her nails were bitten nearly to the quick. Aelius noticed it, and realized she’d caught his notice, by the way she put her hand under the shawl. He said, “You mean Baiae.”
“I guess so. No one cares nowadays.”
Far from it, he thought. This was a new one on him. He’d never heard of Antinous being at work in a Neapolitan bordello. “Are you literate?” he asked.
She stared at him this time, with some attention. “Whom do you take me for? Of course I’m literate. And I didn’t take the name Cleopatra Minor without knowing who the Great Cleopatra was.”
“What I mean is, did you read the tablet with your own eyes?”
“You must be used to cows in your army brothels! I write poetry myself. And, yes, I read the tablet and even wrote the verses down. I copy verses everywhere I go, but what does it have to do with Soter?”
“Do you have the text here?”
“Good God, yes.” Amusement played on her face, briefly. “I wouldn’t have guessed it, but I say you’re queer after all.”
“Don’t get your hopes up, I’m just curious.”
She was gone the time necessary—Aelius saw through the door—to take a rolled-up scroll from a shelf in her bedroom. “Here are the verses.” She walked back, handing it to him. “Enjoy.”
Written in Latin, and copied in a decent hand, the text of the tablet “set,” she said, “in the stew’s entrance hall,” read,
Born in the East, buried in the West,
died in the South. Now the Bithynian,
whom the imperial friend encountered here
to their mutual delight,
is naught but shadow and dust
close by, where Hadrian took his flight from mortality,
riding in Helios’s chariot.
In fact, the verses were insignificant, and the information they conveyed close to useless, except for the tidbit about Antinous’s permanence in a male brothel. Aelius could see why this detail would be omitted in the official story of the relationship, out of respect for the deified Hadrian. As for the emperor’s autobiography, he’d never actually said where he’d met the Boy. Only that the encounter had taken place in Antinous’s eleventh year, and Hadrian’s forty-fifth.
“Here it doesn’t say that the Boy was buried in Baiae,” he commented.
“But that’s where Hadrian died, isn’t it?”
History said that while his tomb in Rome was being finished, Hadrian had actually been cremated and buried in Puteoli, near the resort city of Baiae. The poem opened the possibility that Antinous had found his resting place there as well, but somehow Aelius doubted it. Hadrian’s heir Antoninus had not received the surname of Pious just out of filial piety: It was unlikely that he’d allowed a common grave to the emperor and to his commoner lover.
It all begged the question, also, of whether Antinous had been in the process of being groomed to look like a woman in addition to acting the part of one.
When he asked her, Cleopatra Minor said she didn’t know. “Who can tell? Of Trajan, they say he liked grown men, including some of his married officers.”
Aelius limited himself to muttering that things at court had been getting better since. Of Hadrian, well, he’d read that he liked married women, and young men. Did it mean that for Antinous he’d made a passionate exception, choosing him as a bedfellow when still a child, or did it imply something else? Could the Boy have been kept merely as a favorite page until late adolescence, when physical attraction would be acted upon? Was it even remotely possible that the relationship had never grown to be a carnal one? It would explain why historians who’d always heaped ignominy on imperial lovers were uncharacteristically silent about Antinous. Only the Christians seemed to have read into that constant companionship a licentious and possibly violent meaning. Well, a man who builds monuments for his hounds is not likely to lay his beloved lover (or friend) in a box somewhere, but what about the state papers supposed to be in the grave? Would Hadrian commit the imprudence of marking the tomb, when enemies of Rome (he could never be sure they had all been gotten rid of, whoever they were) could get into it and, while removing proof of their existence, desecrate the body? How sick, how mad, how mindless had Hadrian become before his death, that he wouldn’t make sure his orders to defeat the enemy had been carried out?
“Are you still there?” Cleopatra Minor spoke up. “You look like you’re off to Baiae yourself.”
He glanced at her. More likely than not, Anubina had turned so ripe, so weary during her pregnancy. How the next words came to him was odd, because he said them with the freedom that place and woman allowed him, but meant them as more than a compliment, as a way to console her. “And frankly you look as though you could make a fortune in this City even as a girl.”
“Thanks. You haven’t seen the competition, I can tell.”
“I have seen it, but not close up yet.”
Looking over, she smiled, either at the implicit flattery or her distrust of it. “Life is hard, soldier. I’m sure you know. Back to Antinous: at Fortunatus’s I learned he had his own house in Rome, but there’s no way to see it now.”<
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“Why, was it destroyed?”
“Buried. And unless you have the means to dig up the Antoninian Baths, there’s nothing doing. See? Historians think they know every thing, but the juicy tidbits about whores and male lovers are often disregarded by them. The boys at Fortunatus’s said Antinous’s house looked upon the Appian Way, and one got to it by a little side street near Drusus’s Arch, the one they call Arch of Remembrance. Was supposed to have Egyptian pictures in it. I was told it was actually covered over well before the baths were built, on the orders of Antoninus Pius,”
In the steam bath of midmorning, Aelius left the house at Septem Caesares by the back gate, where the old servant had directed him. “If you’re still in Rome after mid-October,” Cleopatra Minor had told him as he started down the stairs, “I will be back from Naples by then.” Crossing the well-tended little garden, he overheard barking from the guardian’s room and looked in. A large black dog snarled at him, pulling the long chain that granted it movement back and forth across the floor. It’s unfortunate animals can’t speak, he thought. Of course, she was the one who had retrieved it, but too late to save Soter. As things were, Aelius had no clues about the men Soter feared during his last days, and whether his nemesis had anything in common with those who had first frightened and then killed Serenus Dio. The same, likely, who had started the fire in Theo’s storeroom, and were forewarned that Caesar’s envoy had come to Rome. Fire, blood, water: Of such components was made the nameless threat, capable of striking across provinces as it seemed, and remains unseen. The “poachers” who had signaled his coming to Rome had never been identified, much less caught. For all Aelius knew, they could be watching him right now from across the street.
Bound for the State Library by the stranger’s roundabout way, Aelius had time to reason that perhaps the verses simply took poetic license with the facts. They could mean that Antinous’s soul abided by the Emperor after death, not that he’d been buried inside Hadrian’s temporary tomb at Puteoli. According to tradition, the tomb had originally belonged to Cicero’s family, and as far as Aelius knew it was still standing, empty after Antoninus Pius had removed his predecessor’s remains to Rome. He’d have to see for himself, unless he found a precise description of it somewhere.
State correspondence was kept at the deified Trajan’s Ulpian Library, and usually permission of the City Prefect’s office was needed to consult it. As the registers were about to be packed for removal to the library in His Divinity’s new Baths, Aelius impressed upon the staff the urgency to receive a reading pass. Scrutinizing the crates under the librarians’ annoyed control, he pored over originals and copies, and kept at bay the constant temptation to get lost after unrelated historical leads. History, larger than any part of it, beckoned and tried to make him forget the anguishing urgency of his task. He had no time, no time; so he limited himself to making a note of what private letter, what official brief he’d have to go back to when working on the lives of other princes.
At sunset, when closing time interrupted his readings, Aelius had just enough time to follow directions from the library to the address Philo’s brother had given him. There, in a religious school on the street that led from Vicus Pallacinae to the Iseum Campense, the banquet of Our Lord Anubis would begin shortly.
It was lucky that familiarity with Egypt had inured him to such sights, because the great shrine stood before him as a perfect delirium of statues and obelisks in a mixture of styles, ghostly in the half-light. Lions, sphinxes, baboons, dwarf gods, and dog-headed ones crowded around him as he sought the doorway—private, recessed, and unlit—of the House of Life.
Letter from Aelius Spartianus to Diocletian Caesar:
To Emperor Caesar Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletian Pius Felix Invictus Augustus, his Aelius Spartianus, greetings from the eternal head of the world, Rome.
There might be significance, Lord, to the fact that I began my survey of the deified Hadrian’s buildings on the recurrence of supplicia canum. Owing to your clemency, the day no longer implies annual crucifixion of innocent animals, but it is a reminder of the vigilance ever needed to maintain the security of the state. As I reported in my first, hurried note from the capital, the organizational needs of my historical research and investigative task have been met through excellent lodgings, and the astonishing availability of information in the many libraries and archives. It thrills me beyond belief to walk into the Ulpian Library in particular, with the wealth of its collection, and also the place where my mother’s ancestors were manumitted during the reign of the deified Hadrian and made free men.
Tonight I have attended a funerary banquet near the Iseum Campense. where I learned a few interesting details on the fortunes of the Egyptian community in Rome, and also on the man whose death prevented me from gathering information. It seems that in the days before the fire, Lucinus Soter told friends that he felt watched; Philo’s brother did not go as far as admitting that, but had mentioned to me how the police discounted his master’s unease, to the point of convincing him not to replace his watchdog after it disappeared. What I hoped to gain from Soter directly I now will have to reconstruct piecemeal, but I am not discouraged.
Indeed, while preparing to meet Aviola Paratus, I trust that every step I take in this blessed City will bring me closer not only to clarifying matters relating to the deified Hadrian, but also to resolving what more and more appears to be an intentional chain of events initiated by Serenus Dio’s discovery of the ancient brief As for the latter, it was deposited in a safe place secretly, and by my own hands.
Regarding the physical state of Rome, about which you desire details, I can report that the labor on your monumental baths continues apace, its surface to cover eventually just short of twenty-nine acres. The Sodality of Felicitous Fortune has been fully refunded for the razing of its premises to make room for the monumental swimming pool. Twenty-five hundred of the projected three thousand basins are in place. Official opening in less than two years’ time is expected. The repaving of the Great Forum is nearly completed, and that, eleven years after the disastrous fire that raged from the foot of the capital to the deified Hadrian’s monumental temple of Venus and Rome (still in need of repairs), all three of the major restoration works you ordered are completed now. As for the Senate House (Curia), rebuilt from the foundations, its bronze doors have just been installed and the marble floor is all but laid out. The Martian Aqueduct, less than ten years from the earthquake so damaging to its distribution castle, has been not only repaired (as you saw in your visit last November), but the water volume is in the process of being potentiated.
Still, many buildings await attention: Stadiums, amphitheaters and other public entertainment places carry the marks of careless patching-up during previous administrations; I hear that cracks open every other day, and that a heavy rain often results in the collapse of soffits and cornices, to the risk of Roman lives. Decius’s Baths on the Aventine are closed and structurally unsound. If the tepid pool hall’s ceiling gives way, I am told, the whole thing may come down. A curiosity: Mons Testaceus, made up of discarded wine and oil jugs by the river bank, has reached the height of a hundred feet, and is facetiously nicknamed Drunk Hill.
You also inquired, Lord, of the prosecution of Christians in the City. Coercion is applied according to the law, but the trials are not as visible as elsewhere in the empire, perhaps because here citified habits moderate religious extremism and the accused watch their steps. The cult places are closed, but their cemeteries (including the large underground ones and the ugly one grown like a barnacle on the side of Gaius’s horse track in the Vatican Field) have not been disturbed. Of some interest among the trials presently being carried out is that of the soldier Cyriacus, because it pertains to both your clemency and your monumental baths. In fact, this is the same man who—from the nearby house granted by you to his sect in the past—has been ministering to (and probably agitating) the Christians condemned to hard labor on the construction site. Incidenta
lly, the Christian head bishop (or “pope”), Marcellinus, has apparently abjured during his recent detention, an act which has earned him his fellow believers’ charge of traditor, but now is said to be retracting his abjuration.
On a separate sheet, Lord, I will send a list of selected prices of goods and services as observed in Rome. Meanwhile, I continue to seek everywhere the burial place of the boy Antinous, keeping in mind the dictum, Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice!
With thankfulness and greetings, written by Aelius Spartianus in Rome on Saturday, 5 August, Nones of August, in the twenty-first year of Our Lord Caesar Diocletian’s imperial acclamation, the seventh year of the consulship of Maximianus Augustus, and the eighth year of the consulship of Aurelius Valerius Maximianus Augustus, also the year 1057 since the foundation of the City.
E I G H T H C H A P T E R
6 August, Sunday (13 Mesore)
That night, Aelius swore to himself never to attend an Egyptian wake again. Not only had all the commonplaces about the people and their religion been confirmed but he’d felt out of place, estranged by the incomprehensible prayers, ritual drinks, and chants. It was the same cruel Egypt, he recognized it well, to which somehow he managed to return again and again. After finishing the letter to His Divinity he’d tried to sleep—without success. So he’d sat up and then paced the floor, and finally stood on the little balcony that looked upon the valley.
A waning moon like a tipped ladle poured a flushed light on things known and unknown. Below, the Antoninian Baths loomed on the Appian Way, rising out of their glossy piazza like a tall island; where the road split just ahead, a clot of deeper darkness indicated the arch Cleopatra Minor had spoken of—the Arch of Remembrance. There, under the farthest corner of the baths, had stood Antinous’s house, before earth filled it and millions of bricks were heaped upon it. Aelius could envision the blind rooms stuffed with earth, and puzzle over the possibility that Hadrian’s successor, having in his bigoted piety deleted this remembrance of the Boy, might have destroyed his tomb as well. Was it possible? Was it? Could he trust the possibility enough to relax, to let go of this anxious piece of his search at least, because in that case—whatever Hadrian’s letter said—neither he, Aelius, nor anyone else could lay his hands on a proof of conspiracy against Rome.
