While we waited on the dock for my trunk to be carried off the ship and then loaded onto the imperial barge, I waved goodbye to Periander, still on deck. He scowled, made a rude gesture with one hand, and turned his back on me for good. I hoped my imperial escort hadn’t noticed that exchange.
As a guest of the emperor, I was spared the usual necessity of an inventory of my belongings by the customs officers waiting to collect import fees from passengers who disembarked dockside. Trunk stowed at last, with the smell of the sea in my nostrils still, I felt both frightened and exhilarated by whatever new experiences might now lie in wait ahead, a reality I could not even begin to conceive, and my gaze turned inland once my escort and I stepped into the river craft that carried us on an anabasis via the Tiber into the waiting arms of that mistress of the world, Rome herself, eternal city.
AIR
II. AIR
ROME LOOMED LARGER than I had imagined. Its circus and amphitheatre, white marble temples, palaces, libraries, and the public edifices around the forum rose above the throngs of people (many of them poor, hungry, and desperate) who crowd the city’s streets all day and cause an unending cacophony in its thoroughfares.
Except for those wealthy few whose mansions and villas, wreathed about with pleasure gardens, recline upon the surrounding hills, most of the city’s inhabitants dwell in apartment complexes rising like hives full of honeycomb, and likewise buzzing with activity all of the time. Shoddy construction and cheap materials cause frequent conflagrations, since whenever one apartment catches fire, those surrounding it go up as well, and often take adjacent buildings with them, taxing the city’s firemen to the limits of their strength and available resources. At first it seemed surprising how often smoke soiled the air, or blazes lit the nighttime skyline, illuminating the tangle of carts forbidden to traverse the streets on business by daylight, but no one else ever seemed panicked by these incidents, and soon I also learned to ignore them.
We new arrivals at the imperial paedagogium had been given a few days to be introduced at the palace, settle into our own quarters, and acquaint ourselves at the school before we were allowed to go off on our own to explore the great city sprawled like a wanton across the seven hills, and proclaimed eternal by Emperor Hadrian himself.
Senses engorged by new sights, sounds, smells and tastes, I meandered along her streets, visited the various quarters of the metropolis and sampled the wares of merchants whose offerings represented all the riches of the far-flung empire right there in its pulsating heart. Everything is available in Rome, if only you agree to the price: Queen Money, to quote Horace, rules all.
The hawking of street vendors competed with curses flung by pedestrians, braying mules, hammers on anvils, mourners hired to wail after funeral processions, cymbals and drums punctuating religious celebrations, barking dogs, tavern patrons, crying babies and screaming children, robbery victims shouting at pickpockets, fullers singing at their work, and detachments of army recruits on parade through the middle of the street, the hobnails of their boots clanging against the paving stones. And beneath those stones, under the feet of the multitudes, the Cloaca Maxima, a vast sewer main that flows beneath the city like the dark twin of the Tiber.
On game days the spectators at the Flavian amphitheatre, almost seventy thousand strong, take in the sights of gladiators at battle, of exotic animals such as lions, tigers, giraffes, elephants, ostriches, and rhinos exhibited and slaughtered by the droves, and of various horse and chariot races. I was told the shouting of the crowds on such days could be heard far off in the countryside, sounding almost as if they were calling the hogs that root for acorns in the woods beyond the rustic farmlands. The chariot races and other events at the Circus Maximus drew even larger mobs, for the circus can hold almost four hundred thousand souls.
At the site where Caesar was assassinated, I noticed a large number of cats always lounging about, as if in hopes of communication with the great man’s spirit. Befriended by a few of these strays, I gave ten sestertii to the priest at a nearby shrine of Isis, for he had taken it upon himself to be sure these local denizens, sacred to the goddess, always had food and water.
Each time I passed the temple of Vesta with its eternal flame, and the house of her consecrated virgins, I recalled the story of a Vestal virgin who consorted with a man, breaking her vow to the goddess. Upon being discovered, she was buried alive, upside down—a punishment deemed appropriate for her sacrilege. Her consort was merely whipped to death.
In the multi-storied market halls of Trajan’s Forum, people of every nationality appeared, and during each visit I saw clothing, jewelry, and hairstyles such as I never dreamed of back home. Some of the more extravagant merchants displayed custom-made mosaics of the items they purveyed. Captivated by these tile images, I decided to seek out the particular artist whose designs I found most colorful. From him, I commissioned a mosaic featuring a ship to send to Deucalion, in thanks for his many kindnesses while he hosted me in Nikomedia.
The variety of goods available at market every day, and the quality of the selections for those able to afford such purchases, astonished me: cheeses, olives, olive oil, thyme-scented honey gold in its comb, fruits, nuts, herbs, spices, wine, smoked fish, dried fish, silvery stringers of fresh-caught, fish sauce, eels, sausages, poultry, meats, game, and bread baked fresh each day from flour provided by the ocean of grain pouring in from Egypt, about eight thousand tons each week.
One might find furniture handmade by the best wood carvers and iron wrights in Italy; silks and brocade from China; linen, papyrus, cosmetics and perfume from Egypt; wools and finely tooled leather from Gaul; carved ebony and ivory from Africa, along with terra cotta and carved wooden figurines for making offerings or shrines. Slaves, horses, oxen and other domestic creatures were purchased in the livestock markets nearby. Even human hair, lustrous blue-back skeins sheared from the heads of Indians, might be bought and made up into wigs, for those whose own locks failed them.
The price of goods shocked me at first. A loaf of bread, a cup of wine, each cost a quarter of a sestertius, while a bath cost one sesterius—four times what men paid back home. A cheap prostitute, as I later learned, might charge half that. Soldiers earned up to twelve hundred sestertii a year, common workers maybe two or three sestertii per day—just enough to stay fed and bathed.
My favorite snack soon became a bowl of soup made from day-old bread stewed with grain, peas or beans, topped with olive oil and a palmful of rosemary, “queen of the garden,” as the vendor proclaimed each time he added it. Most Roman citizens ate such soup or bread as their daily ration. I, however, ate so many strange new treats that my stomach began to strain against my imperial tunic and forced me to curb my appetite.
On an impulse one afternoon I used almost half a week’s allowance from home to buy a length of silk in the fabric stalls for ten sestertii. Blue as the Argus-eyed peacock and shot through with fine gold thread, the color reminded me of my mother. I had a seamstress cut it up and then hem the little squares to create a set of hand cloths for my personal use. From then on, I always kept one tucked somewhere in the folds of my outer garment.
I soon grew fond of visiting the spice quarter upstairs at the market, whose merchants traveled difficult land routes to and from the East to bring back frankincense, myrrh, ginger, turmeric, cloves, camphor, sandalwood, cardamom, sesame, cinnamon, and nutmeg, with a brown musty fragrance I particularly enjoyed. The exotic aromas offered a respite from the streets, which reeked of animal manure, fuller’s urine, fish, rotted vegetables, the flung-out contents of chamber pots, and bodies and clothing too long unwashed. The three pepper sellers, Italians from the southern coast who sang at their work, always laughed to see me coming. Every time I drew near a display of their wares, I began to sneeze. At least I always had a cloth handy.
THE IMPERIAL PAEDAGOGIUM offered a curriculum intended to educate and finish young men as imperial pages and civil servants, but in truth we were a pack of beautiful boys,
a seraglio of youths discovered and brought in from all over the empire.
The school itself was perched in Caput Africanae, a street hugging the Caelian Hill, and its facilities included classrooms, a library, living quarters both private and common, a gymnasium and training fields.
Our head master was a bald, thin-lipped freedman who took his duties seriously. He set a schedule that had us up by dawn, even though we might be required to stay out late into the night whenever royal banquets required our presence.
Mornings were spent studying philosophy, rhetoric, literature, mathematics, and geography, with music lessons twice a week before lunch. In the afternoons, we exercised, wrestled, trained with weapons, or competed in various athletic events. I noticed, in particular, one handsome older boy who excelled at archery. He was called Korias.
Those of us who served as grooms soon spent our early mornings and evenings before supper helping the stable master feed, exercise, bathe and brush the imperial horses. A pack of hunting dogs followed at our ankles and amused us with their antics while we made our rounds of the stables at the edge of the palace grounds.
The stable master, Momius, a grizzled old freedman with sun-squinted eyes, the rinds of his heels caked as often as not with manure, acted gruff toward new hands, impatient at any sign of laziness or carelessness with the animals. Yet his curses soon enough sounded like prayers to me, his way of calling down blessings around the horses and dogs and grooms left in his charge.
Momius knew the measure of every horse in Rome, knew which horse had won every race held for the last twenty years and from which bloodlines it descended. It was he who told me about the October Horse of Rome, a custom retained from the earliest days of the city.
“Every October,” he said, “a race is held in the Forum during the festival of Jupiter Capitolinus. The winning horse is the sacrifice. Its head is cut off and displayed in a place of honor along the Sacred Way. The October horse protects the people of Rome for a year, until the next race, when its skull will be replaced by the head of its successor.”
I spent many of my happiest hours out at the stables, engrossed in riding and caring for those creatures and watching while the hunt master worked the horses and the dogs, training them so their nerve could be counted upon to hold steady during the hunt. I hoped someday to be one of those grooms allowed to accompany the emperor and his friends when they rode out after stag or boar, or even bear or lion.
AT SCHOOL, ISSUES arising out of class and wealth differences sometimes caused conflicts within our ranks. Certain personalities also clashed on occasion. But many friendships and romances grew up there as well. In some cases, boys cemented bonds of fraternity with one another likely to endure for their lifetimes. Older boys often looked out for favorite younger ones, and helped with their acclimation to court life.
Early on, some of the other boys gave me a hard time for being Greek, a circumstance which no doubt I helped provoke with a youthful arrogance regarding my ancestral culture’s superiority, despite the low social standing of my own family in comparison with many of theirs.
“If the Greeks were so advanced,” one boy, a Roman patrician named Gracchus Lucius Marcus, asked me one day while several of us sat around talking together in the library, “why did they condemn Socrates to death? And if he was so superior intellectually, why did he not write anything down?”
After a few such interrogations by Marcus and some others, I learned perhaps the most important lesson of all for surviving both in school and later at the court: Though the mind remains open, keep the mouth shut.
We new boys, shy at first, soon joined the others in discussions during our lessons and spent what free time we had in the school’s new library, reading or studying between classes. We also spent time in the common dining area, where we took our meals on those evenings when no official banquets were held—that is, most evenings, since the emperor traveled for much of the year.
In the atrium, I studied the images of Rome’s early heroes and heroines, and soon learned their stories. There were the founding twins, Romulus and Remus, suckled by a she-wolf, who reigned together until Romulus killed his brother and took over, as forecast by augurs. There was Lucretia, a virtuous woman spied upon and then raped by the son of Tarquin. Afterward, she killed herself in shame, spurring her Roman countrymen to defeat their Etruscan overlords and establish the Republic. (When I first met Empress Plotina, Hadrian’s adoptive mother and the widow of his predecessor, Trajan, I felt struck by the similarity of her features and demeanor to that image of the noble woman who represented Roman honor.)
I also learned of Cincinnatus, a citizen appointed dictator in a time of war during the era of the Republic, who upon achieving the Roman victory renounced his title at once and retired to his farm outside the city. I found myself as moved by his story as when I first heard of Pheidippides’ run from the plain of Marathon to relay the news of Athens’ victory to its citizens. Just as men today still hark back to the ideals of Greek democracy, so too, I believe, will future generations of Romans continue to look back to the old Republic, and perhaps even to the current empire, though not to the reigns of those emperors corrupted by absolute power.
In the school’s new library, some wag already had scratched bits of doggerel in one corner of the back wall, which I deciphered one morning for another new boy who couldn’t yet read Latin: “Virgil is still the frog boy,” “Pandora’s jar was sealed up tight—Epimetheus pried. . .” and so forth, no doubt the handiwork of older students since none of us new boys would have dared leave our mark on the empire that way.
In the housing annex, we bunked in a wing with a dozen rooms. My room was far larger and much fancier than any back home, painted in shades of red, yellow, blue and black. It was carpeted with thick wool rugs, and furnished with cupboards, shelves, my own chest, and a table beside the bed, which was spread with embroidered linens and a heavy wool coverlet. Incense kept the air fragrant, and the lamps, braziers, and candles offered a wealth of light.
Back home, by habit I rose with the sun and went to bed soon after it set, so the early mornings didn’t bother me at first. But there in the private quarters, one could stay up late into the night and read beneath those plentiful lights. So on many nights I chose books over sleep, until exhaustion caught up and I nodded off. The housemaid must have been the one who eased the book from my grasp, pulled the coverlet over me, and put out the light, for that was how I always woke. She also gave me a shy smile whenever we met in the hall.
A cook in the school’s kitchen also took me under her care after I wandered into her corner of the place one day, looking for something to eat. She offered me pears, told me to feel welcome any time. Whenever I dropped by after that, she petted me and gave me choice morsels, and sometimes even fed me tales recalled from her own childhood, which I soon enough recognized as corrupted versions of Aesop’s fables. I tried to show my gratitude in turn, bringing her flowers or spices from the market or collecting herbs for her from the imperial garden, but when she caught me washing out my own dirty cup and plate one afternoon after a snack during a free period, she looked bemused. No doubt she feared someone might see and think she’d set me to this menial task. She chided me, pretending an offense she perhaps did not feel.
“No, lad—I mean, sir,” she said. “This is work for servants and women. You are a page of the imperial court now. You mustn’t sully your hands with such tasks. Unless, of course, you go out hunting, or off to war.”
She ruffled my hair, a gesture of affection my boyishness still allowed her back then, and sent me off to more appropriate diversions.
I still think of her and that maid with fondness, although I understand now what I did not as a child—their need, for their own dignity’s sake, to observe the formalities proper to our separate stations in life. At home, servants always seemed part of the family to me. Circumstances were different at court.
EMPEROR HADRIAN HAD selected the palace built by Domitian, a complex o
f enormous rooms and mirrored galleries which occupied the Palatine hill, to use as his personal residence whenever he held court in Rome. At this palace, one of my first assignments as a new imperial page called for pouring the watered wine during feasts held for the emperor and his guests.
The opulence of the imperial banquet hall impressed me on first viewing, with its mosaics and enormous carpets, wall paintings with scenes of gods and goddesses at the hunt or at play, elegant tablecloths, silk-cushioned divans, silver, gold and cut-glass table service gleaming in the lamplight, but soon enough I became accustomed to it, as one does with any surroundings after a while, however humble or luxuriant. My focus turned instead to the performance of my official duties.
A senior page, the handsome archer named Demetrius Korias, volunteered to teach me the correct technique for the pouring of the wine and water. This involved grasping the handle of the flagon in a particular manner, and arching the wrist and forearm to minimize splashing.
“You’ll notice,” Korias said, “that by holding it this way, the curve of one’s arm echoes the curve of the handle—a configuration considered graceful and pleasing to the eye, at least by the banquet steward.” He grinned at me, his eyes full of mirth.
I felt quite nervous the first evening I served, but the various guests seemed kind, and several smiled as if for encouragement, or in recognition of my desire to please, and to execute my task without flaw. Not a drop fell awry, and I collapsed into bed later that night exhausted but happy to have acquitted myself well in the service of the emperor, even though, on that first night, I was not permitted to serve at Hadrian’s own table. I noticed that Lucius Commodus, a young noble deemed worthy of consideration as the emperor’s successor, was present at the emperor’s table that evening, seated near Plotina, Hadrian’s adoptive mother and the widow of Emperor Trajan. Later I learned that Commodus also was rumored to be the emperor’s favorite among the court’s young men.
EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian Page 3
