by Ben Pastor
Taking an opportunity to go off on my own, I gladly retraced my steps on the Via Triumphalis (the imperial ladies’ gardens are aged, but traces of topiary elegance survives). At the crossroads with the Cornelia, which runs in front of Hadrian’s mausoleum, I passed again the marble pyramid that impressed me upon arriving in the City. By this time I have seen other large ones (including Cestius’s one clear across town), while miniature ones crop up here and there, and though the peasants refer to all of them as metae, they scarcely resemble the conical turning posts of a stadium.
By this time Onofrius joined me, and began telling me tales of Christian trials where all kinds of miracles took place, from thunderbolts striking the judge to rings of fire protecting the virtue of women defendants. He even told me that whipping left no trace on the martyrs’ skin, that lions in the arena refused to bite, etc. When I asked how is it then that none of them survived the executioner’s blade, he fell entirely silent. By which I understood that he was either without an answer, or afraid I might think him still a Christian. Leaving his nonsense and the overheated City for a few days will be a pleasure.
20 August, Sunday (27 Mesore)
Carminia Repentina had been called Minula by her late husband Tuscus, elected to the consulship with that Annius Anullinus—now proconsul of Africa—who had his hands full with Christian trials. Aelius, having survived two endless dinners in the company of the superintendent’s daughters at Tibur, came to her estate on a day when the wind seemed to have tucked itself under the rug of the world.
Slaves were splashing the porches’ floors with pails of water, causing steam to rise in the garden. Through this mist, like a middleaged nymph, Repentina came forward to meet him and at once asked what was new in Rome. Expecting the question, Aelius had caught up with city gossip as best he could; he dropped a few names in the appropriate slots, and made up for the rest by presenting his hostess with a new edition of poems.
“Imagine,” she uttered, “Sammonicus Junior! How did you know I liked philosophical poetry?”
“I didn’t, but it was the latest edition available, and I thought you might not have acquired it yet.”
There was no way of coming to business before agreeing to view the family tree, Tuscus’s death mask, a dozen portrait busts of ancestors, and the many honorific diplomas hanging from tablets in the hallways. Placidly Aelius accepted indoctrination, with an eye to the promised library, but also with real interest for the views of an old school noblewoman.
“The great families have all but disappeared.” Repentina spoke in a well-bred aristocratic whisper over her quickly flapping fan. “Soon there will be none of us left, and then Rome will realize what an irreparable loss it suffered. Why, there have never been so many blue eyes in public office! When I was a girl, you could go to a party and not see one set of blue eyes.”
“It’s a fact worth pondering,” Aelius said, repressing a smirk. “I wonder what the eye color situation was in the days of the deified Hadrian.”
“Well, you know, I do not mean to brag, but the late consul’s family was well acquainted with imperial matters even then. On his mother’s side—they are Anicii, as old as the hills and glorious for centuries—the ancestor in question is that Marcius Turbo who put down the uprising in Mauretania and was made prefect of the guard after his role in Dacia and Pannonia. It’s his correspondence you want to see. Marcius’s son Lucius traveled with the emperor.” Once inside the summer dining room, crisscrossed by strategically opened windows, she sat in a wicker armchair and bade Aelius do the same. “He was a great mountain climber (all the men in the late consul’s family have beautiful and sturdy legs), and accompanied Hadrian to the top of Mount Etna and up Mount Casius, where they were nearly struck by lightning while making a sacrifice. The priest was killed—he, too, was a relative, but by marriage, and I won’t belabor the point—and Lucius had his hair singed by the thunderbolt.” A grizzled pile of curls, outmoded not to say antique, gave Repentina the odd look of a stage mask, although sternness of features—unrelieved by carefully retouched beauty marks—revealed the formidable guardian of ancestral virtues. Minula was an impossibly charming nickname for her, and Aelius had the impression that no man ever, much less the late consul, had succeeded in changing her mind. With the flip of her forefinger she summoned a servant and told him to open up the library. “You see I prepared myself in view of your visit.”
“I am most thankful.” Aelius had villa-grown fruit forced on him, and was compelled to sample all of it even though he’d much rather start viewing the shelves. “Did Lucius also travel with the emperor to Egypt?” he managed to ask.
Repentina studied him, perhaps evaluating whether she’d do him the favor of answering. “Yes,” she said then in her raspy whisper. “He was one of those golden boys, spoiled and curly, and it reportedly took his father the rod and three costly Greek girls to straighten him out afterward. You know Hadrian’s boys always had curls. Well, Lucius went along, and made friends with the rest.”
“The rest?”
“Yes, the others, Antinous’s contemporaries. There were scads of them, and they did things boys do hunting, riding, partying, along with some serious studying, because Hadrian liked his companions reasonably educated. At any one time there were eight or nine of them around, so the family story went. The nine idols, they called them—Pancrates called them so, actually, because he was a gossip, and it’s a miracle he didn’t get his head lopped, charlatan and poetaster that he was, as many did at that time for much less.”
Aelius thought it prudent not to look overanxious and reached for a plum. “I have never read this in Pancrates.”
“I’m surprised you read Pancrates at all. Hardly anyone does these days. Anyhow, it’s not in his poetry, but in the letters of the imperial secretary, Suetonius. Suetonius maintained a correspondence with Marcius Turbo, who worried about his son Lucius frequenting the imperial crowd. The plums, I look after myself—I trust you can tell the difference.”
“There’s no comparison with market-bought, madam. Was Antinous one of the nine?”
“If Suetonius is to be believed, he was the tenth idol, and the most important. Just think, the saplings of these plum trees were brought from Sicily by the late consul. A veritable Cincinnatus—historians ought to rush to write his biography. Of course, I would prefer if a Roman did it.”
Aelius caught the hint, and said something to the effect of knowing at least two City-born colleagues who would welcome the challenge. “Are any of Suetonius’s letters to Marcius Turbo extant, by chance?”
“The late consul had several of them copied, and yes, they are right here, but you won’t get to see them unless you stay until the end of the week.”
“Madam, I am obliged.”
“But do you accept?”
It meant four days out of his schedule. “I accept gladly,” Aelius hastened to say. Private correspondence of this sort was hard to come by, and besides—plums and portrait gallery notwithstanding—he appreciated how a widow’s summer in the country had to grow boring after a while. “Could you give me the sense of Pancrates’s gossip?”
Repentina left her armchair and said, “Come,” inviting him to follow with a curt wave of her hand. “It seems that by the time the imperial party left Arabia and headed for Egypt, there had been a heated argument between Hadrian and Antinous. It might have had to do with the fact that Hadrian took Lucius along on the mountain climb (Could he help it, I say, if he was a good mountaineer?), or the fact that Antinous had cut his hair short and was growing a beard. Both of them are presented in Marcius’s letters as possibilities. The library is this way, mind your step. Oh, it’s incredible what went on during those trips, apparently. Fussing and slamming of doors and spiteful hissy fits, worse than at the hairdresser’s before a wedding. The boys started taking sides, too, at least those who were in the imperial retinue during this leg of the journey.”
“How many were there?”
“I don’t recall, yo
u’ll have to see for yourself whether the information is spelled out in the letters. I know that Lucius and young Modestus and Alcibiades and of course Antinous were there. There might have been more.” The library—also a reading room—was well-lit and impeccably dusted. From a low shelf, Repentina took a bound index and put it in Aelius’s expecting hands. “The situation grew so intolerable that the empress asked to be put ashore with her girl friends and ladies-in-waiting. Even Hadrian had enough of it at the end and took the occasion of the lion hunt to get away from the barge.”
Keeping from throwing the index open taxed his eagerness, but Aelius checked himself politely. “I thought the emperor took Antinous with him.”
“Not according to Marcius Turbo. He says Lucius was supposed to go along, but that he, as his father, prevailed on him to stay on the pretext of a sore shoulder.” With a critical forefinger, the lady ran the edge of the closest shelf. “Hadrian might have wanted to be alone (he loved to hunt, you know), because he didn’t insist on anyone substituting Lucius.”
“What about Antinous, then?”
“He followed of his own accord. It’s a grotesque little episode Phlegon, Suetonius, and other contemporary chroniclers ignore, but it is fairly well described in one of the letters.” Repentina bowed her head slightly, and left him alone.
The crossreferenced index, bright with rubrics, facilitated Aelius’s search. Greek and Latin correspondence were listed separately, by writer and subject: Aemilius Papus, Attianus, Avidius Cassius—names ran under his eyes that he’d only read of in history books. Dusty names, forgotten glories: How likely was he to discover clues to a conspiracy? Through the open window, a dance of pollen from the garden sparkled around him when he lifted a midbook page to the sunlight, and knew even before viewing the document that he’d found what he was looking for.
It was in a letter from Marcius Turbo to Suetonius Tranquillus, formerly director of imperial correspondence. That the great historian had been dismissed from court for a supposed indiscretion, Aelius knew, but only the writing’s date, days after Hadrian’s death, justified the boldness of the exchange.
Do you remember, Tranquillus, what Cicero writes, that courage is a habit of the soul? The Boy took it into his head that he was not going to be left behind, and as soon as he could, he secured a guide, pack animals, and followed the emperor. Foolish youth! Had he not listened to the accounts made to the imperial party about the lion terrorizing the countryside? Or did he believe himself a match for the beast or the imperial marksman? Although it was then said (and the low-born Phlegon described the episode in his usual pompous tone) that Hadrian and Antinous went hunting together, such was not the case. Hadrian did not even know the Boy was in the neighborhood. He assumed him, and he told me so himself afterward, to be on the barge still, or at one of the many places where they stopped during the voyage.
The mischievous youth had been doing the same in Sicily and Syria—not wanting to be left behind, he’d gotten himself lost in the mountains the first time (there is a shrine still, halfway up the volcano, recalling the fortunate event of his being found by a search party long after the emperor had come down after seeing the rainbow of dawn), and the second time he’d risked being struck by lightning even as his master was with my Lucius on top of the mountain. This time Antinous advanced incautiously into the territory where the lion, unbeknown to him, lay in wait. His guide was thrown off the horse by the beast, and devoured under his eyes; pack animals and servants in the caravan scattered to the four winds, and the Boy was left by himself to confront the lion with a javelin more apt to chase deer than for serious hunting.
It was a miracle that Hadrian, having drawn with his own party close to the lion’s den, and believing the racing animals and escaped servants strangers running away from the beast, decided to follow through. Imagine his surprise when he found Antinous, whose horse had been clawed and lay dying, before the lion already crouching for the fatal attack. It took that prince an instant to send an unerring dart into the lion’s heart, but I leave it to your judgment what might have happened had he delayed, or—which would have been more likely—been altogether elsewhere at that time. My Lucius, safe with me on the barge, was not only spared that risky scene, but also what show of gross recrimination is likely to have followed between the lovers.
Again you ask me whether I have sure information about Antinous’s death, but I told you in person all I know. You say that he was approached by obscure conspirators while in Egypt, who—taking advantage of his present despondency—tried to draw him to their side. I ignore who your sources are, for I never heard these rumors. Have you asked Caesernius Quinctianus? What I do know is that the emperor set up a memorial obelisk for Antinous in his villa at Tibur, intending to move it with the mummified body to Rome, but did not live long enough to do it.
Standing in the sunlight, Aelius stared at the sparkling motes around him. This was the first oblique confirmation that a conspiracy did exist in Hadrian’s day, and had penetrated as far as the imperial entourage during the Egyptian tour. By whom, for what reason, mattered less now than knowing he could postulate it. Did Suetonius ever follow the advice to interrogate Caesernius, to whom Hadrian’s lost orders had been addressed?
Regarding Antinous’s burial, the letter’s closing sentence was ambiguous. It could either mean that the body had been moved to Rome without the obelisk, or that neither of them had made it to the City. One thing was established, though: Mummification had taken place, as Theo and his cohorts maintained. Should Onofrius be able to read a location (precise spot, district, city—anything would help) on the Varian Gardens’ obelisk, the second-to-last step in finding the grave might be at hand.
To the lady Repentina, when he was collected by a servant for dinner, Aelius only said that he found the correspondence of great value and ample proof of the family’s worth. In truth, the collection contained mostly accessory court gossip, and its one hundred or so letters would only take one more full day of reading. He was well content to play the conversationalist in exchange for the breakthrough. The names of Julius Capitolinus and the Right Honorable Vulcacius Gallicanus were dutifully made as possible authors of Tuscus’s biography, and details furnished on the Court at Nicomedia, the Rebellion, and Egyptian fruit production.
“Close-up,” she told him over a plate of villa-grown pheasant, and he thought she’d never shut up, “you rather resemble a youthful portrait of Agrippa, a bit frowning, but pleasant. The gray hair gives you a distinguished look, though your blue eyes, well, you can’t help those. It’s a good thing you like to chat, because—well, you may say, you have urbem in rure, and it’s true that city comforts are not wanting here, thanks to the late consul. Still, in a rustic location, a visit is a treat not to be renounced. Indeed, I have a mind not to let you go off the grounds while you’re here, because I can’t see why you’re determined to tramp to the old imperial properties at Sublaqueum and Praeneste, which are half-empty and the serfs have been stealing from them for centuries. There are no libraries left in either place. Perhaps it is good that Caesar’s envoy be seen once in a while on the premises. As a military man, you’ll be able to use the right terms, and curtail the abuses by nearby residents, such as running pipes from the imperial villas to their property—freedmen and parvenus do that, always did and always will, unless one watches them like hawks—cutting timber from state groves and copses and fruit orchards. I have seen it myself and I screamed, you may believe it, so that the culprits stopped in their tracks and ran, though it was only a woman shouting from her sedan chair. Likewise, they’ve been lifting benches from the palace parks to reuse them in their paltry yards, and the like. The late consul was convinced that bad example set by princes who shall go unmentioned (you know who they are, dear Spartianus) and who consorted with serfs and freedmen, giving them the run of all these places, have brought us to this state of things. Blue eyes everywhere, it’s an invasion in our public offices! I realize I’m bending your ear a little, but if
it does take a little ear bending for you to remember to inform our Lord Diocletian, well, so be it. Repetita juvant, I say.” Repentina kept encouraging the servants to fill Aelius’s plate, and talked all the while. To his question, she stopped only enough to let the few words through the barrage of her own, and then lifted her eyebrows. “Do I think Antinous’s burial is in Rome? Of course it is. Marcius. Turbo used to stroll with his son in front of it, to remind him of what it means to be a favorite. Where in Rome? I have no idea, but I can tell you how to get to the Marcii’s monument.”
It took all of Aelius’s tact to keep his promise to stay after receiving a note from Paratus on Thursday. It informed him that he had succeeded, through his old acquaintances in the ranks of the night patrol and fire police, in obtaining permission to “dig up, dean, and repair” the broken obelisk in the Varian Gardens. Replacement on its pedestal at his own cost was also a possibility, if it could be worked out, et cetera. Aelius chafed at the bit in the estate until Saturday. Then—taking advantage of the first of the three days of Mundus Patet celebrations, in memory of the dead—he left for the City against the promise to Repentina that he’d secure a Roman historian for the late consul’s biography.
24 August, Thursday
(1st of 6 Egyptian intercalary days, epagomenai)
A pale green midafternoon sky stretched waiting for stars when Aelius arrived at the Special Agent Barracks. He’d seen fine linen dyed this color, hung across Egyptian doorways and gathered in lazy draperies; the severe army building, echoing with footsteps and shouted voices, gained from the lightness and gentle hue of that back, drop. If, he thought, now and for two more days the dead wander the earth from the opening of the sacred well they call mundus, they must so much enjoy the beauty of this live sky.
