The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  Another seven years they continue to live and toil for the poor, until they are murdered in their beds, like Julian's parents, by a band of passing thieves.

  It is not entirely clear why the story of St. Julian the Hospitaller was so immensely popular in the Middle Ages. It certainly incorporates a great many themes of everyday medieval life religion, the Crusades, pestilence, the dangers of travel, arbitrary violence, the casual cruelty of noblemen, redemption through suffering. I have a suspicion, however, that its popularity lay in the subconscious journey - personal and cultural - that it describes, one that told the people of the Middle Ages both where they had come from and where they saw themselves going.

  If we think of Julian as a nation, we can see him starting out on his life's journey as a brutal pagan Frank, Saxon, Visigoth, or Lombard. He is cruel, wantonly destructive, and faithless, but through a series of trials, tests, punishments, and humiliations, he is gradually transformed into the very model of a humble, abject Christian. Certainly, it is hard to picture a hardened Frankish warrior willingly drinking disease from a leper's lips or offering him his naked wife. We tend to imagine the Middle Ages as a place of darkness, fear, ignorance, and superstition, but I doubt that people of those times saw their situation quite so starkly. They had, after all, emerged from an era far darker, more mysterious, and dangerous than theirs, and even among the illiterate there must have been some vague awareness of the deep fog in which their forebears had been enshrouded. Julian was their story, the Frank who became French, the Anglo-Saxon who became English, the Visigoth who became Spanish, the pagan who embraced the true Church.

  They could have made him the patron saint of anything: crusaders, ferrymen, lepers, or pimps. Instead, they made him the patron saint of hospitality because his transformation and redemption made possible the reawakening of a forgotten but cherished tradition that had lain dormant for many centuries. Scenes of domesticity, cooking, the life of the peasantry, romance, and the pageantry of noble hospitality had all but disappeared from art and literature under the Germanic hegemony of the Dark Ages. Now, under the divine protection of a new patron, the appurtenances of domestic hospitality were resurgent everywhere, from religious iconography to the emerging vernacular poetry. Hospitality was back in business, just in time for capitalism, colonialism, gunpowder warfare, and the Renaissance.

  CHAPTER VII

  GAIUS, TITUS, LUCIUS

  Must not those who live in kitchens always stink?

  Petronius, Satyricon

  In the history of hospitality, there are those who are invited to the party and those who are not. Those who are not invited participate just as fully in this history as those who are because it is their very absence that defines the opposing camp, since you cannot include someone without excluding someone else. Like ancestral spirits at a shamanistic ritual, those who cannot be seen often make up the majority of those who are present.

  You would imagine that those who are invited would be smug, while those who are not would be bitter and insecure. And yet, it is an interesting truth about human nature that this situation tends to arouse bitterness and insecurity on both sides of the fence. Of course, the uninvited may initially experience envy, but pride will usually transmute their bile into jeering contempt and haughtiness, as anyone who has ever watched the Oscars on television will attest. We all know how easy it is to ascribe hubris to others - tragic theater could hardly exist without it.

  The bitterness of the invited, however, is a little more complex. You may start out feeling pretty good about yourself, but that won't last unless you're a fool. Instead, you often begin to question the value of inclusion. Am I worthy of being included? Is this company beneath me? Any initial sense of self-satisfaction at being included becomes adulterated with an unstable admixture of guilt, self-doubt, and disdain for one's fellow participants. That, in turn, will probably give rise to self-loathing, resentment of those you rightly suspect of sneering at your participation, and, ultimately, reactionary exclusionism.

  I knew these feelings intimately as a child growing up in England. As an American and a Jew, middle-class and intellectual, there was no natural place for me among the confident, athletic, and cosmopolitan children of British, French, Belgian, Persian, and Lebanese aristocrats who peopled my school. I looked down upon their thoughtlessness, their booklessness, their casual obliviousness to self-doubt, while I wanted only to be just like them in everyway. Mine was a home of chaos, illness, anxiety, and nonconformity; theirs were places of decorum, serenity, and secure social standing. This made me turn against myself even more scathingly and hate the people I longed for. I was certain that I was smarter than them but that they knew something I could never know. How could they be so calm and sure of themselves otherwise?

  I was anything but a misfit. I strove tirelessly, if vainly, to attain a sense of belonging. I cultivated a gift for making friends and never lacked for invitations to country weekends, but I was always lonely in company because I was forever on my guard against being denounced. No one ever outed me, of course, because the harsh searchlight of paranoia makes people (including oneself) appear flatter, more one-dimensional, than they really are. With hindsight, it is clear to me that most of my friends were perfectly decent people who had never scorned me as an insecure wanna-be, but to this very day it is difficult for me to believe that anyone likes me as much as he claims or feigns.

  Maybe that's why I keep inviting them over for dinner.

  In the year 60, the Roman proconsul to Bithynia was recalled to the capital to serve in the court of the emperor Nero. Not much is known about the life of Titus Petronius Niger - who has also been identified as Gaius Petronius - other than that he was of an extremely wealthy and illustrious family, but what is certain is that he immediately fell into intimate companionship with the emperor, who was in awe of his ability to ally the most refined sophistication to the appearance of unaffected simplicity. Within a year of his arrival, he was distinguished by the extraordinary and unprecedented title of arbiter elegantiae - the arbiter of elegance, or master of good taste - giving him the first and final say in all of Nero's aesthetic choices and diversions. 'The emperor," says Tacitus, "thought nothing charming or elegant in luxury unless Petronius had expressed to him his approval of it." During his brief ascendancy, Petronius was in full control of coordinating the emperor's banquets, orgies, musical entertainments, games, and guest lists.

  But, as men more powerful and ruthless than Petronius were to discover, being close to Nero could be as dangerous as being in his disfavor. The appointment of Ofonius Tigellinus as commander of the Imperial Guard in 62, less than two years after Petronius' return to Rome, marked the beginning of his downfall. Petronius played to Nero's artistic pretensions, Tigellinus to his cruelty; predictably, cruelty won. By 64, Tigellinus was known to be organizing the emperor's banquets and the arbiter's position was becoming increasingly precarious. In 66, Tigellinus implicated Petronius, along with many of Rome's most eminent politicians and intellectuals, including Seneca and Lucan, in the failed plot of Gaius Calpurnius Piso to overthrow Nero. Rather than await the inevitable, Petronius slew himself at Cumae.

  Like Seneca and Lucan, Petronius left something for the world to remember him by. Some time between being named Nero's favorite and killing himself, he wrote a masterpiece of prose, a nasty bit of documentary satire that, in its surviving fragments, has come down to us as the ultimate record of decadence at the Roman banquet table. Less obviously, but perhaps more durably as an object lesson, it offers a very revealing insight into the conflicted heart of the real insider, of one who both reviles and is helplessly drawn to the glamor of inclusion, and who suspects that he may have lost himself at the host's elbow. Most critics tend to see Petronius' work as an indictment of Neronian vulgarity and depravity, or at best as an amoral portrait of the nouveau riche. I see it, however, as documenting the efforts of a man to come to terms with his own ambivalence about always being at the top of the A-list. The Satyric
on is best read not by those who despise the elite and scorn excess, but by those who are secretly attracted to them despite themselves.

  Like Americans, Romans of the early empire had a tendency to romanticize their flinty pastoral origins and lost moral rectitude, while viewing their current prosperity as a mixed blessing. Wallowing in ornate decadence, many a Roman poet made an excellent living harking back to the ancestral farmstead with its olive groves, beehives, and virtuous, hardworking, simple-living Quir-ites, who often had to make do with a mere handful of slaves. Almost every patrician had his villa in the Alban hills, Etruria, or Campania where he played the humble homesteader, raising his own vintages, eating homegrown bread and cheese. Every soldier recalled the glorious triumphs of bygone days, when real Romans were the army's backbone and you came home after a hard-fought campaign to hear Latin being spoken on the streets of the capital, instead of this bastardized babble of Greek, Gaulish, Syrian, German, and Hebrew. Like Americans, Roman orators at the pinnacle of Rome's power enjoyed nothing quite so much as to lean on the crutch of patriotism while predicting the imminent swamping of the patria in debauchery, corruption, sloth, and indulgence. When the poet Horace, in the very opening years of the empire, bemoaned the glory days when "private estates were small, and great was the common weal," he was only reiterating in sublime Latin what was being said in coarse vernacular on every street corner and from the speakers' stump in every forum.

  Nero's villa, the Domus Aurea, or Golden House, was the epitome of all that ordinary Romans had come to despise in their degenerate rulers. It replaced the Domus Transitoria, partially destroyed in the great fire of 64, which was said to have been started and fanned by the henchmen of Tigellinus in order to clear the central city for Nero's monumental dream house. Whether or not the fire was set intentionally, the Golden House and its grounds were built precisely atop the three neighborhoods that had been entirely leveled. The estate covered some two hundred acres on the Palatine and Oppian hills and spanned the entire valley to the Esquiline. The grounds centered on a vast artificial lake and boasted temples, vineyards, pastures, orchards, and herds of wild beasts - a veritable rus in urbe. The estate kept growing, eating away at the city; a popular song, claiming that "Rome is becoming one house," advised Romans to flee to Veii, "if that house does not soon seize upon Veii as well." The palace itself, an oversized Mediterranean peristyle villa, had a triple colonnade running along its entire length (which Suetonius asserts to have spanned a mile) and in the vestibule a statue of Nero more than one hundred feet tall (the colossus after which the Colosseum was named). Pliny claims that the entire facade was gilded. The house had two bathing pools, one of salt water, the other of sulfur, and an enormous ramp of running water to cool the air in the dining room. Nero plundered all of Greece to furnish its 150 rooms. The walls were encrusted with marble, gold, gems, mother-of-pearl; the mosaics on the vaulted ceilings played out epic scenes from Greek mythology. "There were dining-rooms with fretted ceilings of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens." The Domus Aurea was not quite complete at Nero's death in 68, but he was able to live and entertain there for several years, at its dedication saying merely that "he was at last beginning to be housed like a human being."

  No one was quite able to pinpoint the moment at which old-fashioned Roman virtue had succumbed, but historians, moralists, and poets spoke with one voice in naming the perfidious Orient as its killer. The Greeks had been infected by the arts of luxury from conquered Persia and had passed on the disease to Rome, where it incubated and spread throughout the second and first centuries B.C. Pliny could not say it plainly enough: "The conquest of Asia . . . introduced luxury here." He despised such Asiatic luxury, as did Horace, Martial, Strabo, Livy, and anyone else who sought to score an easy hit with the disaffected. Crankiness aside, they weren't entirely wrong. The Romans were indeed irrepressible assimilators; they copied or adapted Hellenic styles of poetry, history, writing, architecture, worship, and mythology. One did not necessarily have to be a reactionary to consider the secondary consequences of colonialism upon Roman society and morals to be less than salutary. No sooner had they conquered the Greek colonies in southern Italy and Sicily than liquamen - the Roman version of the salty fish condiment garos - became ubiquitous in their cooking. The modern addiction to expensive wine, Phrygian marble, Persian nard, Indian mushrooms, Cyrenaican silphium, Egyptian cotton, slave labor, sodomy, gold, and, ultimately, autocrats was simply a nasty virus the Romans had contracted in their travels. Seneca tells with puritan dismay of how Apicius (one of several Apicii to whom the famous cookbook is ascribed), having squandered one hundred million sesterces on banquets, and with only ten million left, killed himself rather than risk starving to death. Real Romans killed themselves for honor, not dinner.

  When it came to setting precedents for depravity, the Romans were awfully diligent and inventive, but too much has been written about Roman excess - especially in food and sex - to make it worth retelling here at any great length. Still, it's hard to resist, especially when writing about hospitality, and even more especially when the excesses of the early emperors make today's ill-omened headlines read like excerpts from a provincial crime blotter.

  The Romans' appetite for self-indulgence was whetted under the empire, and grew progressively sharper under the first five emperors, the so-called Julio-Claudian dynasty. Rome had had dictators before, under the republic, but these were appointed by the Senate during military emergencies for fixed terms of six months (the fighting season) and were generally, with a few notable exceptions, in no position to abuse their limited power. In principle, even the imperator was nothing more than a high-ranking magistrate subordinate to the Senate, but that was a mere technicality. No senator was going to keep Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, or Nero from his Asiatic luxuries.

  Julius Caesar was the founder of the line but is not included because he never assumed the title imperator. This is just as well for any study of imperial depravity, for his worst crime against hospitality seems to have been to have put his baker in irons for serving one kind of bread to Caesar and another kind to Caesar's guests. Marcus Cato summed it up well when he called Caesar "the only man who undertook to overthrow the state when sober."

  His adopted son Octavian, later Augustus, the first Roman emperor, was almost as restrained. Although he loved to gamble and enjoyed hosting banquets, he could be very choosy about his guests and was known to be a frugal eater and drinker. Indeed, he often ate before his guests arrived, showed up late at table, and then withdrew early - tendencies that, while not criminal, were not necessarily those of an attentive host. Later in life, however, he began to exhibit tentative signs of the behavorial patterns that would be so successfully developed and refined by his successors. Scandalously effeminate in his youth, he became a notorious adulterer in maturity, going so far, while dining at the home of one senator, to seduce the man's wife in his presence, "bringing her back to the table with her hair in disorder and her ears glowing." In the midst of a dire famine, he once held the notorious "supper of the twelve Gods" at which he blasphemously assumed the role of Apollo. These incidents, while only modestly reprehensible by the standards soon to be set, were specifically cited as precedents for much worse in the years to come. He was the only Julio-Claudian emperor whose death was not openly celebrated by the people of Rome.

  His stepson and successor, Tiberius, continued the gradual downward trend. Early in his career, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he undertook a voluntary eight-year exile in Rhodes, where he lived a life of extraordinary privacy and where, perhaps, he picked up many of the habits that he took with him when he later retired from active statecraft. He was a humble, if laconic, ruler, prone to depression, more austere than authoritative - "mud kneaded with blood," his own tutor called him. He built no public monuments
and held few games. Despite having exerted every effort (including murder) to secure the title, he was always more comfortable in a private setting than in a public one. In the spirit of his dynasty, he despised and tormented the members of his immediate family, driving his own daughter-in-law Agrippina to starve herself to death.

  In the year 26, about halfway through his reign, he left Rome, never to return, and fell back on Capri, where one Titus Caesonius Priscus reigned as Master of the Imperial Pleasures - a sort of beta version of Arbiter Elegantiae. On Capri, Tiberius was able to give free rein to his vices, the least of which was an inordinate thirst. His villa was a veritable museum of pornography, while teams of male and female prostitutes roamed the woods and groves of his estate, ready to solicit or perform with each other at his pleasure. He trained young boys, his "little fishes," to dart around him as he swam, nibbling and licking his imperial parts. He was particularly fond of fellatio, not only demanding it of high-born female guests but also coaxing it out of unweaned babies.

  His cruelty and cold-bloodedness thrived and blossomed in the balmy island climate. He found the very loveliest spot on the island, commanding spectacular views of the exquisite Bay of Naples, from which he delighted in watching his torture victims flung to their death. One of his favorite pranks was to ply his male guests with copious draughts of wine, then have them seized and their penises tightly bound with cord.

  He was succeeded by his great-nephew Gaius, more commonly known as Caligula. Caligula reigned for a mere four years, but in that time did much to advance the Julio-Claudian marriage of hospitality and cruelty. It was under Caligula that accepting the emperor's hospitality became a game of Russian roulette in earnest. Forcing senators to wait on him, "napkin in hand at either end of his couch," he would laugh loudly at the thought that he could have their throats cut at any moment. He was an eager poisoner and, like Tiberius, enjoyed watching torture, most especially at mealtime. He perpetuated the Augustan tradition of seducing his senators' wives and enjoyed incestuous relations with all his sisters, whom he elevated above his own wife at the banquet table. He once forced a man to attend his own son's execution, then threw him a banquet to cheer him up. He sincerely believed in his own divinity, was an occasional cross-dresser, and liked to walk barefoot on carpets of gold coins. He was finally struck down by members of his own bodyguard and succeeded by his uncle Claudius.