The Nero Prediction

by Humphry Knipe

  “Yes sir,” I said. “I wasn’t running away. I was running back to the Museum.”

  There was a sly light in the freedman’s small green eyes. He seemed to find me amusing. “Although headed in the wrong direction.”

  The jailer handed the freedman Phocion’s money bag. “He had this on him. Exactly a hundred silver tetradrachmas in there. Count them yourself. Must have stolen them.”

  “Thank you,” said the freedman, weighing the bag and giving me a sideways smile as if we were somehow in collaboration.

  “Want me to leash him?” asked one of his attendants who had the battered face and broken fists of a pugilist.

  “No, he doesn’t look like a fool. Untie his hands. But watch him anyway.”

  The streets were already bustling with early risers. My escort was alert, eerily silent.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked the freedman. He ignored me. A few minutes later we passed out of the city through the Canopic Gate.

  The freedman broke his silence. He told the pugilist, “Run ahead. Tell the master we have him.” The man took off at a brisk trot. The Sun was already high in the east when we reached a horse farm near the hippodrome.

  The pugilist, his face still running with sweat, waited at the door of a modest villa. “He says bring him straight in.”

  Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus was standing at the window of his study, hands clasped behind his back, watching the early Sun burnish the hippodrome perhaps a quarter of a mile away. The walls of the room were decorated with paintings of horses, some of them so life-like you could hear them snort.

  I had the distinct impression that he took a deep, quiet breath as he turned. His shoulders were broad, his waist tapered, his clean-shaven face elegantly chiseled, his velvet blue eyes large and compelling. There was an iron ring on his finger that told me he was a Roman citizen. He examined me from head to foot as if I were a statue he was appraising. I certainly stood as still as one, my eyes riveted to his, like a cornered mouse stares in fascination at the cobra that has trapped him in a corner.

  “He’s not quite what I expected,” he said in a calm pleasant voice.

  The freedman flashed his strange smile. “He’s had an uncomfortable night.”

  “Lovely,” the citizen said. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

  “Dominus?” I squeaked because I was unsure whether he was calling me lovely, because that is what Epaphroditus means in Greek, or just calling me by my name.

  “They tell me you tried to run away. Why did you do it?” he asked, very cordially.

  I couldn’t lie to this man, no more than the paralyzed mouse can flee from the snake. “I was told I was going to be killed.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “An astrologer, dominus.”

  “Really! What was his name?”

  I swallowed hard but it wouldn’t stay down. “Phocion.”

  “Phocion.” Tigellinus seemed to relish the word as if it were a particularly savory oyster. “Why did Phocion think you were going to be killed?”

  “Because the Romans were looking for someone with my birthday, sir.”

  “You told him your birth date?”

  “No sir, I don’t know when I was born. But Phocion said he knew the very hour.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Since I was a child, sir. He was a friend of my mother’s when she was alive. She died at my birth.”

  “Amazing! He knew you all those years and he didn’t tell you your own birthday. Why?”

  “He said … he said something about forbidden knowledge.”

  Tigellinus sat on an Egyptian chair that was carved with gilded hieroglyphics. His voice remained calm, faintly bored even, but it had an undercurrent that frightened me. “What else did he tell you about your horoscope?”

  “Sir, he said it foretold astonishing things.”

  The Roman raised both eyebrows, glanced at his freedman who stood behind me. “Astonishing things, fancy that! A sixteen-year-old pen pushing slave is destined for astonishing things!” He took Phocion’s well-worn money bag out of his pocket, I recognized it instantly from the large X that had been embossed on it, bounced it in his hand so it jingled. There seemed to be shards of ice in his dark blue eyes when he looked back at me.

  “A hundred silver tetradrachmas. A lot of money. Where did you get it?”

  “Phocion, sir. He gave it to me so I could buy passage on a ship.”

  The Roman looked up at the ceiling painted with joyful scenes of the Egyptian afterlife, papyrus marshes teeming with wildfowl, fat cows, years of plenty without end. “Would you have any idea why Phocion hanged himself from the rafters of his room?”

  Grief gripped me by the throat. If it were not for the dispassionate way Tigellinus was looking at me, as if he were waiting for me to break down, I think I would have. “No sir I don’t,” I managed to get out.

  “Are you sure you didn’t get this from the Copy Master?”

  “No sir, Phocion gave it to me.”

  “We questioned the Copy Master, you know. Eventually he told us that he was giving you money for forging famous documents that he then sold as originals. Forgery, you should lose your hand for that.”

  “The Copy Master forced me to do it, dominus. He used his whip. He only gave me a few coppers.”

  Tigellinus tapped his fingers on his thigh as if he were keeping track of the seconds. “The Copy Master knew Phocion.”

  It wasn’t a question but I answered it anyway. “Yes sir. Phocion used to work in the Records Office.”

  Tigellinus’s tapping on his knee stopped abruptly. For a moment I thought my time had run out. “Come. Let me show you something,” he said evenly, rising to his feet and walking to a wall hung with a large painting of a chariot race in Rome's Circus Maximus - I recognized it from cheap sketches they sold to tourists in the marketplace. For a long moment he gazed at the picture with its the electrum-coated obelisk that Augustus had taken from Heliopolis and set up in the middle of the central divider. He spoke without turning around.

  "There it is, the microcosm of the universe. See, the course is oval because the universe is an egg. The track is the earth and the moat between the track and the seats is the sea. The Circus is the circular year, its twelve doors are the twelve months and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Each race consists of seven laps just as the astrological week has seven days and the universe has seven planets. Twenty-four races are held each day to correspond to the twenty-four hours its takes the Sun to circle the earth. Did you know that, Epaphroditus?"

  "No sir,” I said, as astonished as I was relieved by this sudden digression. “Although it all makes sense to me now."

  "It's why being banished from Rome is like being banished from the world itself.” He faced me and again I felt the numbing power of his velvet eyes. “You do know who I am, don't you?"

  "Yes, yes of course," I said because I had heard of Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus, things said both loudly and in whispers. He was famous for his chariot teams and was making a fortune in the hippodrome. He wasn’t in Alexandria by choice, the emperor Claudius had banished him from Rome when he discovered that he was having an affair with his niece, Agrippina, Caligula’s sister.

  "Did you know that I was close to Caligula?” Tigellinus went on, reading my thoughts. “Fortunately for me, as it turned out, it wasn’t a political relationship at all, our mutual passion was horses, I supervised his personal stables. You must have heard the joke that he was going to make his favorite horse a Consul? It was a horse I trained for him. That’s how I got to know his sister Agrippina, when we were both quite young. A remarkable woman, Agrippina, born to be empress some day. Would have been emperor by now if she’d been a man. I performed little services for her, when she needed them, nothing more. Unfortunately friends of someone I had to … take care of for her, convinced Claudius otherwise. That’s why I remain confined to the eastern provinces, breeding horses for the Circus Maximus but not allowed t
o watch them race there."

  Tigellinus's head tilted in a listening posture as if he could somehow hear the distant roar of that mighty Roman crowd, a quarter of a million voices, through the shriek of the Egyptian cicadas. "The day before yesterday I received a letter from her, from Agrippina. She said she’d had a dream that I would find someone with the birth time she was interested in here in Alexandria. Certain matters are coming to a head in Rome. Agrippina needs help immediately. She needs it from you, she needs it from me also. I need eyes and ears in the imperial palace. Your eyes, your ears. As long as I have them I will say nothing about what you and the Copy Master were up to and all the interesting possibilities that raises. You will be treated like a visiting prince in Rome. Betray me …” His tone became almost loving. “But I don’t think you will betray me, will you?”

  I was gaping with astonishment, giddy, my life had been turned on its head so quickly. I stumbled over my words. “No sir … never … I will never -”

  Tigellinus gestured briskly to the freedman who’d been standing just inside the door. “You leave immediately. Euodus will travel with you. He will keep in touch with you daily. Obey him without question because his instructions will have come for me."

  Although I knew that this man had just sunk a hook into me, I blurted out my thanks.

  Tigellinus smiled for the first time, showing his perfect white teeth. It was a warm smile, reassuring, winning. “Here,” he said, handing me a wooden box made of lacquered wood. The lid was decorated with a dreadful lion headed man with four wings and a serpent wrapped around its naked torso. Its hands were crossed over its chest. Both held large keys. It stood on a globe that was crossed with an X like the one on Phocion’s moneybag. “This is for you. A parting gift. Do you recognize the figure?”

  We have several lion headed gods and goddesses in Egypt but I didn’t recognize this one. “No sir.”

  “His Egyptian name in Kar-Knum which the Greeks translated as Kronos. He’s lord of the four winds. See the keys in his hands? Those are the keys to the future because Kronos, of course, is also Lord of Time. Well, what are you waiting for? Open it!”

  I opened the box. Inside was a hand, neatly severed at the wrist. Its fat fingers were covered with rings.

  The First Murder

  September 23 – October 16, 48 A.D.

  Euodus and I left Tigellinus’s farm after lunch, escorted by the same bodyguards who had walked with us from the Castellum. We walked to the harbor in silence which gave free play to my swarming thoughts.

  Was Phocion really dead? The thought tore my heart but I was sure he was. He must have known that the Copy Master had seen him try to get into the Records Office, must have realized that the fat man would guess that he had come for my certificate, that I was the one the Romans were looking for. When he heard the Copy Master was being interrogated, he knew it was his turn next. That’s why he’d hanged himself, to save himself from torture. He might also have wanted to protect others, too, names he would have been forced to reveal. Mark perhaps? What did Mark mean by ‘You have been chosen’? Chosen for what? A gull cried mournfully. We’d reached the harbor.

  A fast, single banked passenger galley was waiting for us. It cast off immediately and was soon speeding through the glassy water. The Pharos lighthouse, wonder of the world, towered four hundred and forty feet above us as we passed out of the mouth of the harbor into the open sea. High above it, tiny smudges in the sky, vultures circled. I saw that Euodus was watching them too.

  It was calm, at first, nothing more than gently undulating blue-green slopes as we glided over them, the drum keeping time for the rowers beating like the ship’s heart. Three hours later, when it was already dark, the beam of the lighthouse began to settle into the sea like a bright star twinkling with a myriad colors. It reminded me of the star Phocion had taken me to watch rising just two months before, the ceremony he had taken me to ever since I could remember. As always, an hour before dawn we joined the silent congregation which crowded a long narrow aisle, in the great temple of Isis in the center of the city – her temples were everywhere but this one, on the sea side of the old Ptolemaic palace, was the most revered. The aisle, closed to the sky except for a round oculus in the eastern wall, was bordered by massive stone columns carved in the shape of palm trees that supported the lofty roof. All eyes were fixed on where the beautiful statue of the goddess Isis loomed in the darkness against the western wall. I had seen miniature copies of the statue, of course. They were sold by the thousand by street vendors in the market places because she was by far Egypt’s most popular goddess whose worship was spreading around the world. On her head was her crown, still invisible, a disk that was set between cow’s horns, the sign for the royal throne. In her arms was her son, the infant Horus, the falcon god whose eyes were the Sun and the Moon.

  Faintly, at first, as light from the dawn sky streamed through the oculus, the disk in the goddess’s crown began to glow eerily in the darkness – it must have been made of highly polished silver. A sigh of ecstasy escaped from hundreds of throats as the glow was transformed into a holy fire that danced with all the colors of the rainbow. On either side the statue, great drums began to beat. A priest with a loud voice intoned: “Behold, the soul of Isis has returned from the Land of the Dead! She commands the Nile to rise! Thanks be to you, great goddess, for bringing us a New Year!” As suddenly as the fire on the crown of Isis had come, it was gone. The silver disk reflected nothing more than the familiar ruddy glow of the dawning sky.

  Phocion hurried me outside onto a vast balcony that faced east. Like the vaulted room we had left behind, it was crowded with devotees, all staring east where a single star, just above the horizon, was dissolving into the morning sky. “There she is,” he said. “the Messiah’s heavenly mother. On the day he returns she will return also.”

  As the last rays of the Pharos lighthouse sank into the bosom of the sea I said my final farewell to Phocion because I needed a clear mind to prepare myself for a perilous world in which I was simultaneously bound to serve a secret master and a royal mistress. Tigellinus needed a spy at the center of imperial power, supposedly so he could defend Agrippina. But why did Agrippina need someone with my stars so urgently that she had gone to such extraordinary lengths to find me? Why didn’t she just find herself a sixteen-year-old in Rome - there must have been dozens of sixteen-year-olds in that great city of two million people who was born at the same time as I was? Why did I have to be from Alexandria? “Time is of the essence,” Tigellinus had said when he had seen us off. Whatever Agrippina believed I was fated to do for her, it was clear that Tigellinus was convinced she needed me to do it very soon.

  Shrieking like an eagle the storm blew out of the north at midnight. Within minutes foaming waves snapped at the oars like rabid dogs. I heard one break with a sharp crack.

  “This storm will founder us! We have to turn back!” the captain was yelling at Euodus.

  “Take your choice. Perish at sea or perish at the hands of my master!” Euodus yelled back. “I swear to you the sea will be more merciful!” On we went, hour after hour, thrusting ourselves into the teeth of the gale. Alone in the passenger cabin, I had to cling to a strut holding up the ripping canvas canopy to prevent myself from being thrown across the deck. Seasickness overwhelmed me. Soon I was dry retching bile. I was afraid I was going to die until my misery became so severe that I was afraid I wasn’t. Exhausted I dropped my head onto my satchel and closed my eyes. I dreamt that something cold and wet was crawling up my chest. I looked and saw it was the Copy Master’s hand, encased in a shell of rings. With a sudden leap it fixed itself around my throat, throttling me. I woke screaming. There was no hand around my neck, but there was a sound from somewhere inside my satchel, a scratching sound. With shaking hands I opened the bag. The sound was coming from the box that held the Copy Master’s hand. A blind, mindless terror took possession of me. I grabbed the box and crawled out onto the pitching deck. Fearful tridents of lightning
illuminated Euodus clinging to the mast as he screeched Sicilian curses at the rowers. I pulled myself to my feet and flung the box as far away from the boat as I could. Shortly before it disappeared into the glassy wall of a wave I could have sworn it opened and something birdlike flew out and was swept by the wind homewards to Egypt.

  The effect was instantaneous. The wind gusted a few more times, the last gasps of a dying beast, and then it was gone just as quickly as it had come. The sky cleared and the sea calmed. The captain had the rowers fed while he examined the stars. Within half an hour we were back on course.

  "Why must I be in Rome before the Ides?" I asked Euodus the next morning while he splashed himself with a bucket of seawater.

  "We'd better for your sake."

  "But the storm wasn’t my fault!"

  Euodus turned his naked back on me as he stooped to pick up a bottle of olive oil. It was striped with the scars, straight and thick as white fingers, that scored his skin from the waist to the base of his neck. I'd seen whip marks before, the Copy Master had been liberal with them, but never anything as brutal as this. What had Euodus done to merit such a lashing that must have come very close to killing him?

  The freedman oiled himself, taking his time. I was certain he wanted me to see the scars. "Agrippina will regard it as a test like the one that the emperor Tiberius put to Thrasyllus. Do you know the story?"

  "No."

  "But you do know that Tiberius lived on Rhodes for several years?"

  I was eager to show off my knowledge of Roman history. "Yes. It was during his self-imposed exile when Augustus's health was declining. He thought it wise to lie low until the succession was decided."

  Euodus chuckled at this, an irritating sound that was more like a cock’s crow. "Decided! You make it sound so civilized. In fact it was simply a matter of who would die first, Augustus or Tiberius. With either death or mastery of the world in store for Tiberius, you can imagine how much he itched to know the future. His problem was how to find a real astrologer in a profession overrun by charlatans. His solution was brilliant. He put out the word that a wealthy Roman was seeking astrological advice. Of course quacks flocked to him from all over the east. Tiberius interviewed them in person at his villa that was perched on a cliff towering hundreds of feet above the rocks of the sea. He had one of his most trusted slaves, a tongueless giant, lead them up to the villa one at a time up a goat path cut into the cliff. Tiberius gave them all exactly the same instruction: 'Cast your own horoscope'. When they'd finished all the varied and wonderful tales they told of their prospects, he sent them down the goat path again without even showing them his stars. They didn't get far. The giant hurled them down the cliff to where an old fisherman waited to stuff their bodies into Tiberius's lobster traps. That's how his table got the reputation for having the tastiest lobsters in Rhodes."