by Ben Pastor
16 August, Friday (23 Mesore)
Notes by Aelius Spartianus, continued:
I am becoming convinced that-this enormous villa is not just a pleasure palace. If it survives spoliations and the ravages of time, historians and other experts, centuries from now, will be troubled by the same question I have been mulling ever since stepping through its gates. What does its convoluted plan mean? Why, even as I pursue (and am pursued by) an elusive adversary, does it matter to my knowledge of the deified Hadrian that I see the link between his mind and this villa, between this villa and his grief? Does mourning become stone in order to last? What does a conspiracy turn into in order to do the same?
The old servant recommended to me is in his nineties. He’s lost all his teeth, and his gums have hardened like a turtle’s beak, so that despite the loss, he can speak clearly enough. His hair by contrast is thick, cropped short, yellow-white in color. Although doubled over by age, he appears hale and lucid. After a long existence as a servus villicus, he’s been put out to pasture in a decent little house at the edge of this immense villa, on the highland behind the observatory tower. Not bad for a rural slave. Like many elders, he claims not to recall what he had for dinner the night before, but to bear perfectly in mind episodes that took place sixty, seventy, and eighty years ago. If anyone knows about Antinous’s burial, it is he.
According to him, the damage to the Canopus happened during a visit to the villa by Helagabalus the summer before the monster was gotten rid of in March, eighty-two years ago. The slave, whose name is Opilianus, was then about twelve years of age, and a gardener’s helper. As such, he had the task of repotting flowers that had overgrown their vases, and of sweeping the paths on the southwest side of the villa, where Canopus was and is.
Apparently this was the same imperial visit during which Helagabalus mocked the slaves by commanding them to gather one thousand pounds of spider webs. “Several of us crippled themselves on that day,” Opilianus said to me, scowling, “and one broke his neck and died, falling from a ladder as he tried to wipe a spider web from the ceiling of the throne room.”
I will not waste time repeating what other absurdities that madman thought up during his idle reign, all the more since I hear that my Nicomedia army lawyer friend, Aelius Lampridius, is working at a biography of his. I do not envy him, and thank my good star that it isn’t my task to report on that beast.
Anyhow, Opilianus says that Helagabalus showed up with hundreds in his retinue, most of them mimes and buffoons, and that for two days and two nights the entire villa was prey to their license. I understood from hints (unless I am so blinded by my antipathy for that tyrant) that Opilianus’s young age made him a target of unspeakable attentions by the charioteer Gordius; only because his mother intervened saying that the boy had the scrofula in his privates, was he spared, and even given wide berth.
“They were a colorful lot for all that,” Opilianus continued, “so I was curious. Everything they did, ate, what they spoke of was for me a great wonder. Your Excellency understands that by then the villa had been practically empty since the days of Antoninus Caracalla, more than ten years, and in all my young life I hadn’t seen visitors of rank show up at the gate.”
Here is the truly intriguing part, that made the slave’s gossip into valuable narrative (I must recommend him to Lampridius before he kicks off, as he’s a goldmine of detailed reports just from that visit). When asked whether he’d heard the reason for Helagabalus’s coming, he replied without batting an eye, “He wanted to see the burial place of the deified Hadrian’s favorite.”
Suddenly, my inspiration to come to Tibur seemed to have paid off in a big way. Before I explain how it then turned out to be a piece of information rather less direct—shall we say—than I hoped for, I will report verbatim what conversation ensued between us.
aelius: Do you mean that the blessed Antinous is buried on the villa’s grounds?
opilianus: What else? Everyone knows that in Tibur.
a.: Can you point out to me the exact spot?
o: Well, it depends—it depends on which burial Your Excellency refers to.
a: Is there more than one?
o: Why, yes. The first was right here. (Note: We were standing with-our faces to the pavilion, and at the foot of the pool; he indicated a spot on the right, where one remaining basket-bearing maiden, copied from those in Athens, holds up the remains of an arched-and-flat entablature. As I mentioned, originally other such statues, with those resembling Bes, formed a porticoed front on the west side of the pool). There used to be a needle (Opilianus meant an obelisk) behind the statues, you can still see the base of it. It pointed out where the Boy was buried.
I rushed to the place indicated by the old man. Surely enough, here was a porphyry base bearing the marks of having had a square shaft cemented to it and held by an iron. Out of forethought or sheer military punctilio for details, I had noted the grain of the obelisk in the Varian Gardens, and was thrilled to discover that its description matches perfectly the base at Tibur. Still, for the sake of historical precision, I asked Opilianus whether the obelisk had been removed by Helagabalus.
“Removed? And how! It was in the course of a dinner party when they ran around and swam in the pool, threw off their clothes and sent their slippers sailing like toy boats in the drain around the pavilion’s dining table. The emperor was dressed like a girl (here I omit the obscene details of his outfit; Lampridius can pick them up in his biography if he wishes). He was jumping around saying that he was Isis and was looking for the phallus (not the word Opilianus used) of her dead husband Osiris. My mother was Egyptian—God keep her memory—so I knew even then what it meant. I also knew that the blessed Antinous had become Osiris by drowning in the Nile, so I figured that he wanted to dig up the Boy’s burial place to do God knows what. By this time you can be sure the superintendent (in those days it was Ingenuus Regalianus, put there by Clodius Albinus Caesar, after Commodus’s death) was pulling his hair by the handful. You know that Commodus, too, was at one time looking for Antinous’s body, and didn’t find it in the Egyptian grave.”
The last detail I had learned from Theo in Egypt. I answered that I knew, yes, without adding that, having failed at the same search, I could confirm that the Boy’s corpse wasn’t there.
Opilianus was on a roll now. He seemed to be reporting on scenes that he’d only witnessed hours earlier, with such precision of details that I have no doubt he has absolute recollection of that day so long ago.
It appears that the drunken Helagabalus ordered the slaves to fetch him the gardener and his helpers. When these promptly showed up, he bade them start digging around the obelisk, which he said always indicates the burial of an important man or god. He also told Gordius that—should he die—he promised him a similar monument on his grave. Gordius didn’t seem to appreciate the idea. Meanwhile, Opilianus dug with the others, meeting soon with the difficulty of removing paving stones set in a star pattern around the base of the obelisk. By the time they had labored enough in Helagabalus’s disappointed eyes, it was clear that no burial was in that ground. Then they were ordered to secure ropes and to pull down the obelisk, since it was likely that the “casket with Antinous’s ashes” (Opilianus’s own words, I don’t know whether Helagabalus actually said them) was encased at the foot of the obelisk itself.
“So we pulled and pulled, with all those damn dwarves and stinky acrobats around us, until finally the shaft came down and broke in two—here, just about here—knocking down the sileni. No cavity at the base of the needle, and no casket. Helagabalus grew furious—not at the damage, but for not seeing Osiris’s phallus and shouted to tie ropes to the remaining statues and drag them into the pool, to punish them for ‘lying to Caesar,’ as he put it. It was a shame to ruin that beautiful pool garden, where I’d learned to tend flowers and had my favorite bushes, but we had our orders. Down came several other statues, on one side and then the other, with cheers going up each time one fell on its nose int
o the water with a huge splash. By now Helagabalus had had enough of the entertainment, and he retired with a chum deep into the pavilion, where I couldn’t have guessed what they were doing; except that his cries and laughter gave us all an idea. My master put his hands on my ears at one point and led me away.”
I’d been taking furious notes all along, and was about to scrap one more possible repository for the Boy’s remains. Then I recalled how Opilianus had spoken of more than one grave site within the villa’s confines, and asked him.
“Of course,” he shot back, “it’s the round memorial, up the hill by Hades’ Grotto, by the laurel thicket. It was built over a burial chamber from the days of the first villa.” By that, I took him to mean the estate of Hadrian’s in-laws, which predates the great villa and constitutes one of its cores. “But I should tell Your Excellency that after the craziness of the imperial visit, the garden crew had its work cut out for it. We were forbidden to right up the statues, but the needle was gone, and the flowerbeds needed fixing and replanting. It seemed a fine idea to arrange periwinkle around the empty porphyry base—there where you’re standing now. You see we put the star pattern together again, and a good job we did of it.” Here, although we were perfectly alone, the old man lowered his voice. “Then master’s spade scraped something white, a square slab about a foot per side. He kept at it, until we realized there were six of them, never cemented, but forming once a kind of loose box. Inside, not even a pin, but we figured that’s where the Boy’s ashes had been put by the deified Hadrian at some point. Only because Helagabalus had gotten bored, had the box not been discovered, but when it was emptied or who emptied it, no one knows.”
Having until now felt assured that Antinous had been mummified, Opilianus’s revelation comes to me as a double blow. First, it seems clear that the Canopus was a burial place, but no longer is; second, I might be looking for a casket small enough to fit in a square foot box rather than a man-sized coffin. The old man being fatigued, I let him go. Onofrius showed up meanwhile, ready to give me an interpretive tour of the inscriptions on Egyptian statues and the larger objects still in place. I intend to start (and deposit in the State Archives) a list of the statues and reliefs that still populate the villa: They are a crowd and had better be censed before anything else happens.
In the afternoon came more unwelcome news. Onofrius reported that the Egyptian inscriptions scattered through the villa predated Hadrian by centuries, which made them useless to the present search. Already in a cross mood, Aelius lost his patience when he discovered evidence of badly repaired damage elsewhere in the Canopus area.
Opilianus, who was supposed to meet him by the round memorial, sat in the shade of the laurel thicket and philosophically shook his head. “No, the damage you speak of has got nothing to do with Helagabalus. That happened, much later, some thirty years ago. It was the prisoner queen who did it when no one was watching, owing that Aurelian Caesar was busy fighting the barbarians.”
“You mean Zenobia.”
“The same. A fine piece of woman, too, but women should not be rulers. A regular harpy, commanding us around like we belonged to her or something. And me already an old man, with my own little house to look after. I am telling Your Excellency, it was a shameful thing, leaving her here to gallivant around and do as if it were her own house. We had to sweat it out, to make sure she didn’t break things.”
From where Aelius stood, only the scruffy eastern rim of the Canopus valley was visible, and he looked away from it. “Break things? Why would she do that?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Opilianus scratched his badly shaven chin. “Well, I guess I didn’t. What remained of the marble trellis of the needle was knocked down by her. She was looking for the same thing the Boy’s grave. I know Your Excellency is not a blue blood, being a soldier, so I can say it: The nobility, they’re crazy, the lot of them. Too much getting married in the family. The queen had taken to digging at night if we didn’t keep an eye on her. I can show you the places where she grubbed by herself, if we kept her from paying laborers to do it.”
“It doesn’t make any sense. Why would a foreign queen care where the Boy was buried?”
“Beats me, Your Excellency. My son was head gardener in those days—the last one, by the way, since the position was not renewed after Aurelian’s death, and all went downhill from there. My son, called Opilianus like me, had been taken into her confidence, and she told him she’d buy his freedom if he helped her find the Boy’s grave.”
“Well?”
“Well, number one: My son was happy with his lot, and not in a hurry to be a free beggar in those days when jobs were scarce—not that they are plentiful now. Number two: He was not likely to uproot imperial property flowerbeds and dig up monuments for anyone, much less a woman. He said no, that he was under imperial orders, and so on. So she did her own digging at night, especially toward the end of her life. It’d become a joke with all of us.”
Aelius recalled ben Matthias mentioning Zenobia, how she’d been kept for years a prisoner at Tibur and he ought to visit “the old girl’s grave.” Never mind the visit. Why would an oriental queen, and an enemy of Rome, be interested in Antinous’s burial? Jews, Parthians, Zenobia’s Persian allies: There was possibly a dim sense in all this. “Did she find something?” he urged.
“She found nothing. We watched her, and made sure she didn’t do too much damage. This memorial right here, she managed to get into, but we caught her at it, and nailed the door shut. The day she died, we all breathed freely. Her sons never came to visit again, and I believe they still live, if they weren’t done in meanwhile. My own son died a year ago, and to the last he worried that someone would come digging in the gardens.”
17 August, Thursday (24 Mesore)
Notes by Aelius Spartianus, continued:
They call it here heroon, in the Greek fashion. It is a marble building shaped like a round basket, with columns running about it, twenty-two in all. Such, some believe, was the age attained by Antinous at the time of his death and twice the years he spent with his friend and master. The door, the key to which is long lost, did not open—and wouldn’t anyway, given the silt that has accumulated all around. The entire monument appears, in fact, to have sunken somewhat through the years. The nails placed by Opilianus Jr. to impede entrance are rusted, and I was able to pull them out without much trouble today, the feast of Portunus, god of keys and openings. By looking through one of the nine slit windows, I discerned a sarcophagus inside. From this, I gather that Antinous’s body was at least for some time kept here, unless of course the monument is a cenotaph, like the one in Egypt.
Since no effort would avail me to force the door open, I engaged the help of Opilianus’s great-grandchild, a boy of eight, who could slip through one of the openings and report to me what he saw. I held little confidence that he could open the door from inside and let me in, but the alert lad was able to accomplish it, as the lock could be easily worked. It is a marvel, if one considers the frost and rain and rust of those many years.
I couldn’t help but consider how long since the light of day shone inside the burial chamber. Rats’ nests and dry leaves surrounded a perfectly plain porphyry sarcophagus, which—resolved in my duty and notwithstanding Opilianus’s grudge—I instructed the servants to open. Not a mean feat given the size of the lid and the cramped conditions of the interior. Inside (I cannot say if I expected it or not) we found one of those alabaster vases called in Egypt “canopic jars.” I recalled Theo saying how, after the drowning, Hadrian traveled south to Ptolemais and Thebes with the Boy’s heart in a “jar, bearing as a cover the human head of Imseti, which is under the protection of Isis.” This jar has in fact a human head. Whether it was supposed to be the sole contents of the grave, or the body itself ashes, mummy—had been there once, I was left wondering.
Inside this sealed, translucent container, I thought, was the once beating heart of one so loved! Onofrius, trembling in his superstition, told me that the anc
ient characters on the jar read, if it is to be believed, “Antinous the Justified.” On the back of the jar, [Mu], three wavy lines; [khebs], a sun disk followed by a human leg and what seems to be a plough. Onofrius says it is to be read as “water stealing,” or “water thief,” which reminded me of Dio’s dream of the Boy taking water from the Nile with a ladle, and of the priest telling me in Egypt that praying to Antinous protects one from water thieves. Does it help me in the investigation? Not at all. The only consolation for me was that the jar measured just under one foot in height, hence might have been destined to be the contents of the marble box under the Canopus obelisk. Is there a mummy, then? Was there ever one? With a heavy heart, I had the unopened jar dutifully replaced in its sarcophagus.
Having finished this task, although there were no clouds in front of the sun, daylight began to fail, Before I could realize that an eclipse was in progress, the servants scattered like the superstitious lot they are, and no explanations or threats availed. I was left alone by the heroon, and remained there to prove the foolishness of superstition until the sun disk was obliterated altogether, and the stars flickered again in the livid grayness of the sky. The coincidence struck me all the same, so that in the unnatural chill of the phenomenon I had to wonder what it may mean, if not portend.
T E N T H C H A P T E R
19 August, Saturday (26 Mesore)
Draft by Aelius Spartianus for a letter to His Divinity:
The wanderings with Onofrius brought us today to the gardens of Nero’s mother out in the Vatican Field, and to the neighboring Domitia’s Gardens. We’d already scoured half the City for obscure Egyptian monuments, and now in the water theater called naumachia Hadriani my noxious guide—endless purveyor of trivia—insisted that here the Christian patriarch named Cephas, which is Hebrew for “stone” (hence Peter, as he is known among them), was executed under Nero. This is at variance, I observed, with the tradition that wants him buried at a short distance from the place, teste Tacito, in the horse track built by Gaius Caligula just as Tacitus writes. Peter’s modest burial, by the way, is in plain sight, a witness to the evenminded policy of all Caesars since the events that followed the Great Fire.
