I recognise him: the feeling is faint at first but quickly grows to certainty. It has been several months, and he is no longer wearing the armour of a legionary, but rather only a simple tunic of light blue, but his scar gives him away: the horizontal line an inch below his left eye; the cut I gave him on the road from Ostia, the day I first saw Red.
Neither of us moves; we stare, each gradually recognising the other.
Time slows. I’m walking in mud.
The man works for Montanus. That much is plain. Which means I helped kill two of Montanus’s men.
Run. All I can think is run.
‘You –’ the man with the scar starts to say just before I grab his tunic and run as hard as I can forward. We both burst through the curtain and fall to the ground. I roll over the top of him, get to my feet, and run towards the exit, leaving cries of surprise behind me. I’m just about to reach the door when my feet are out from under me and I’m crashing to the cold, brick floor. As I’m falling, out of the corner of my eye, I see it was the little rash-covered whore who stuck out her leg and tripped me.
I hit the stone floor and the air flies from my lungs. Before I can move, fists and feet rain down on me, pummelling me into submission. Then I’m dragged back to Montanus.
Chaotic chatter soaks the canteen. Fabius and another man are stamping on blackened curtains; grey smoke twists up from the deadened flames. The private room is no longer a room.
Two men hold my arms. Then a hand grips my hair and my scalp burns as my face is twisted upwards, towards Montanus’s face. He looms over me, like Jupiter. Now that he is standing, I remember how huge the man is. He says, ‘Are you mad?’
The man with the scar finally stands up, unwinding himself from the curtains I left him in. He pulls Montanus aside and explains in whispers. Fabius leans towards the exchange, eavesdropping. He looks at me and shakes his head. There won’t be anything he can do.
XXV
Letters from a Stoic
A.D. 73
MARCUS
1 September, morning
The school of Musonius Rufus, the island of Rhodes
‘Raising a child, shaping the boy into the man . . .’
Musonius paces the portico. One hand is tucked into his armpit. The other is pressed into the depths of his white, curly beard, cupping his chin. The old man’s mouth is gorged with his huge, yellowing teeth, like he’s chewing chunks of piss-stained marble. When he speaks, it sounds like he’s mid-meal, too rude to swallow before making his point.
‘. . . it’s every man’s obligation, his duty.’
In the garden, under the canopy of an elm, a young girl walks by.
‘What you teach a boy is far, far more important than leaving him a fortune . . .’
I crane my neck to watch her; a few classmates do as well. Her little breasts poke out of her pale green chiton, her back curves like a snake, and her –
‘Marcus!’
Musonius glares at me. Every boy – cross-legged on the floor – stares in my direction. Beside me, someone lets out a deep breath, thankful our tutor didn’t just scream his name.
‘Come here, Marcus.’
A beating from a stoic is the worst kind of beating – worse than those I’d receive from Master Creon. A stoic doesn’t hit out of anger, but duty. It often lasts longer and is more exact. Worse yet, Musonius has a specific slave for the task: a muscled and very dumb Thracian. Aside from the Thracian, the other problem is my prick, which, thanks to the girl walking through the garden, is as hard as a gangplank. Sitting cross-legged, it is lost in shadowy folds of my tunic. Standing, however – standing is a different matter. Last month, Gaius stood up with his cock hard and the class pointed and laughed. Ever since, Peleus and his friends call him Happy Prick.
‘Marcus,’ Musonius says again. ‘Come here. Now.’
The Thracian stands, sensing he will be needed soon.
Silence. Then, from the back of the classroom, a man’s voice says: ‘Musonius, I have a question.’
In unison, the class turns to see who spoke. I don’t need to look. I know the voice. My cheeks, already smouldering, burn with embarrassment. Where did he come from? Why does he insist on interfering?
Musonius sighs. ‘Ulpius, I must insist you stop sneaking into these lessons. It does the children a disservice to have my lesson constantly questioned.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Nero says. ‘A dialogue has no place in philosophy.’
Musonius frowns. ‘What is your question?’
‘You said that it’s more important to instruct a child, rather than to leave them wealth. You said that what a child learns is more important than the wealth he or she inherits.’
‘Yes, I would have hoped this would be obvious to a man of your age. Knowledge is more important than wealth.’
Nero chuckles. I keep staring straight ahead, not wanting to look. If I don’t look at him, then I’m not with him.
‘Very well put, Musonius, very well put. I wonder, though, if given the choice, would you choose knowledge over the wealth? You have been kind enough to invite me to your home. I have experienced its splendour. I have been waited on by your army of slaves. I have dined at your dinner table. If put to the test, if only one were possible, would you really choose philosophy over that house of yours? And all those slaves?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘Splendid! A true philosopher.’
Musonius keeps frowning. He knows more is coming.
‘I wonder, though . . . is such a response universal? If we were to go to a beggar in the street and offered him knowledge or, I don’t know, a million sesterces, what do you think he would choose?’
I finally look over my shoulder. Across the colonnade, in the frame of the door, Nero is leaning on his cane. He looks like the beggar he described. How can someone who looks so old and broken – how can his voice sound like that? Like a drum.
‘Yes,’ Musonius says, ‘if the man were acting in his best interests, he would choose wisdom.’
Nero smiles; he is enjoying himself. ‘You are a true study of human nature. I wonder though, could we use your wealth to test the point? Could you donate one million sesterces to our beggar?’
Musonius hesitates. He says, ‘We cannot hand wisdom to a beggar to make the exchange. It would be a pointless endeavour.’
‘Much like the lesson itself, I’d say – though, admittedly, I am quite ignorant on this subject, as ignorant as the beggar we keep talking of. You see, I would have thought part of the problem would be your reluctance to part with one million sesterces. But tell me, I have one more question. Have you ever raised a child, Musonius? Are you a father?’
‘I have dedicated my life to philosophy. To teaching and shaping the Empire’s youth.’
‘But you’ve never had a child yourself. Yet your views on education and rearing children are formed, and they are uncompromising?’
Musonius grimaces. ‘Yes.’
‘What luxury! You claim expertise on a subject you have no practical experience in. What amazing luxury you philosophers have. Truly! The tradesman is bristling with jealousy. Can you imagine the painter attending his patron’s home? “I will paint you a grand mural,” he says, and the patron asks, “What experience do you have?” to which the painter replies, “None, but I have thought a lot about painting. I feel quite strongly on how it should be done.”’
We finally reach the point where Musonius screams at Nero, telling him to leave. The class is silent; we can hear Nero’s cane tap-tap-tapping along the portico as he leaves. Musonius waits until the noise is finished before continuing his lesson. He is too flustered to remember he owes me a beating.
*
When school is over, Nero is waiting for me on the street. We walk back together. Nero takes my arm and I lead the way along the rocky path. Curls of turquoise, topped with white bubbles, lap against the rocky shore. I want to walk ahead and leave him behind, but I can’t. He needs my help.
‘You’re quiet this afternoon,’ Nero says.
I don’t say anything.
‘Well, point proven, I suppose.’
I spin around. Nero stumbles but doesn’t fall.
‘You embarrass me,’ I say.
‘Do I?’
‘Everyone knew you interfered to save me from a beating, as though I couldn’t take it.’
Nero still thinks I’m the quiet child who was afraid of everything.
‘What of it?’ he says. ‘My tutors beat me regularly at your age. It did no good, only bad. Why not stop it if I can?’
‘It embarrasses me. I look weak, like a child.’
‘Are you no longer a child? You continue to speak like one, talking to your elder with such insolence. In fact, maybe you are getting younger? The boy I met had more respect.’
A pulse of fury shoots through my limbs like a shiver and I push Nero, not hard, but hard enough to knock him over. He lands arse first in the brown dirt, beside a green shrub.
He looks stunned. He doesn’t try to get up.
‘My point is proven,’ he says, ‘again.’ He dusts his hands against each other. ‘By aggregate, the argument is mine, I’d say.’
I storm off, leaving Nero sitting in the dirt.
*
Two hundred paces on, I see Spiculus walking out from the forest. Two rabbits are slung over his shoulder.
‘Marcus!’ he calls.
I keep walking and he calls my name again.
After an angry grunt, I halt.
Spiculus holds the rabbits up for me to admire. ‘What do you think? I am tired of fish.’
‘They’re fine,’ I say.
Spiculus frowns, disappointed with my reaction. He looks around. ‘Where is your uncle?’
‘He is not my uncle.’
Spiculus’s back straightens; he scrutinises me with his good eye. I am breaking the rules. I am not supposed to break the fiction.
In a softer voice, Spiculus says, ‘Where is he?’
I point back the way I came.
‘You go back to the house.’ He pats me on the shoulder and smiles. ‘I’ll see to him. Yes?’
‘Fine.’
I stomp back to the house, alone.
NERO
1 September, afternoon
The shore, the island of Rhodes
Spiculus helps me out of the dirt. I rub my tailbone.
‘He would have left me to die,’ I complain, bitterly. ‘What happened to him? To my Marcus?’
Spiculus ignores the comment. He knows I could have made it home on my own, but hurt feelings made me sit in protest.
‘He is a child who wants to be a man,’ he says. ‘It is a difficult period of one’s life. Adolescence.’
‘Is it? I wasn’t much older than he is now when I was named Emperor. I managed.’
‘Did you?’
Spiculus was not in Rome when I first rose to the purple, but he has heard stories, a boy fighting his mother for control – not just for himself, but for the machinery of Empire.
‘All we ask of him is to attend class,’ I say. ‘To learn.’
‘You are both too hard on the other. And you are both too stubborn.’ He mulls this over. ‘The problem is you are too alike.’
Spiculus’s comment is meant to flatter, but I react like a barbarian. I poke him once, twice, somewhere in the midriff. ‘Marcus is different.’
I will not admit this – not to the boy, not to Spiculus, not to anyone – but my fear is this: I will raise Marcus to be another Nero. Not the Nero of the tales currently in vogue, the stories told by those seeking Vespasian’s favour, the tales of a bloodthirsty hedonist who murdered and screwed half the Empire. But after all these years divorced from my station, bereft of the unlimited power I once wielded, blind and physically helpless, I have come to a realisation: there is truth there, beneath the sanctimony, beneath the hypocrisy. I was spoilt, unfair, vengeful, lazy. I was profligate. I murdered and raped. (Can one consent if the man asking is a god?) I was selfish, mean, close-minded, cynical. I was a tyrant, a young sexed-up despot. Marcus will not be another Nero. I will not let that happen.
Spiculus, the gentleman warrior, immediately seeks reconciliation. ‘Yes, Marcus is different.’ He pats my shoulder. ‘He is a good boy, struggling through a difficult time. Come. You can’t see, but I have magnificent hares for dinner.’
*
I was in Greece before, while still the emperor, during my grand tour, and I remember the country’s beauty. I can still feel it, though it is now only a dull sensation, a mere aftertaste of what I felt then. In truth, I’ve found this difficult, not being able to see it once more. I tell myself there are many things a man will never see once, let alone a second time. At least I saw Greece the one time . . . But it is, without question, worse being here, living on the island, breathing its air, rather than thinking of it abstractly, as some distant memory. It’s like having your lover in the next room after a long separation. She calls to you, whispers to you through the cracks in the stone, her soft flesh just out of reach. You think of her big, swishing lashes, and your body aches. I try to focus on the senses I still have: smell, touch, sound. All day I suck in the briny Aegean air and I sit on the portico, listening to the waves lap the shore, while the breeze runs along my arms and the back of my neck.
And I’ve found other ways to stave off bitterness, to fill the days as we wait for Halotus. Musonius is one. Marcus thinks I harass his tutor only to embarrass him or to save him from a beating. He doesn’t realise I’ve despised the man for years. When I was emperor, he was a constant headache, using philosophy to undermine the principate. He persisted, year after year, until I banished him from Rome and he ran here, to Rhodes, and opened this school. My revenge (and daily entertainment) is banter, one question after the next. It’s the screw I turn, day after day, as he tries to give his lessons.
Stoicism, like all philosophy, has value (that’s why I send Marcus). But Musonius, like most philosophers, is worthless. His ideas have value, but the man is, without question, full of shit. This is one of the lessons I try to teach Marcus, the bird’s eye view of the world, while his tutors teach him narrow, inflexible ideologies.
But Marcus no longer listens to me. The sweet boy who sat and listened with rapt attention to every word I said is gone, consumed by adolescence. In his place is a taller beast with only a vague resemblance to my sweet Marcus, but with a light dusting of hair above his lip (in my mind’s eye anyway), an acidic smell that could fell a legion, and wandering eyes that rarely focus on anything other than a pair of tits (or so I’m told); a boy that disappears for hours at a time and gives inadequate explanations when he returns. And there is an anger now, beneath the surface; an anger that is often directed toward me, despite the fact he owes everything to me – his position, his education, the tunic on his back.
Is this normal? Is this how sons treat their father once they reach a certain age? I don’t know. My father died when I was quite young. And the men my mother married afterwards did not meet the definition of ‘father’.
Part of the problem is the slave woman, Elsie. Marcus’s surrogate parent before he met me. He wanted us to purchase her, free her and bring her to Rhodes. But I wrote to Creon, his old master, and he’d sold the woman a year ago, and the man who bought her sold her a month later. I’ve sent letters across the Empire, tying to follow the chain of sale, but the trail has gone cold.
Spiculus thinks Marcus is having trouble because he is a slave masquerading as a senator’s son. Doryphorus agrees. They think I’ve upset the natural order: one cannot eradicate the past, they say; and, if one tries, there are consequences. They don’t understand. They haven’t been through everything I have. They don’t realise that it’s all a trick – a play you’ve invited the world to attend. Being made a slave is arbitrary – as arbitrary as being named emperor. Once one is physically out of his chains, all that matters is what the world thinks. There’s nothing more too it. So why not de
cide what Marcus is, rather than let the world decide for him.
We came here to wait for Halotus, but now I also wait for my sweet Marcus to return to me. But waiting is nothing. I was once the master of the known world; now I am the master of time. I will wait as long as I have to.
*
Doryphorus has returned from Ephesus a week early. He is waiting in the peristyle when Spiculus and I return.
‘Any luck?’ I ask as a slave helps me take a seat.
‘Yes,’ Doryphorus says. ‘Some.’ He sounds worn out from the road. I picture him dishevelled, streaked with dirt, possibly still in his eastern costume.
Spiculus is impatient. He says, ‘Out with it, man.’
‘We should wait for Marcus,’ I say. ‘Where is he?’
A slave answers. ‘He has gone with Orestes, master.’
‘He spites us openly now,’ Doryphorus says. ‘He should be punished.’
Orestes is the son of a farmer down the road, dirt poor, unconnected, and not someone with whom Marcus should be spending his time. After I told Marcus this, he began to spend even more time with the boy. A typical response of a thirteen-year-old, but frustrating all the same.
‘Never mind,’ I say. ‘What happened in Ephesus?’
Doryphorus says. ‘It took nearly two weeks, but I seduced a man on Marcellus’s staff.’
Spiculus asks, ‘Your disguise worked?’
‘Yes, very well. Exceptionally well. I enjoyed playing the exotic.’
‘Your Parthian accent was believable then?’ I ask.
Doryphorus’s voice is mock sadness. ‘You wrong me, sir. I am an actor! There is no role I cannot achieve, no accent I cannot master.’
‘In any event,’ I say, ‘it was a necessary precaution to ensure you were not recognised. Go on. Who did you seduce? What did you learn?’
‘I found the canteen Marcellus’s staff frequent. It was there that I struck up a conversation with the assistant secretary. We made love that very night.’
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