“A pity for our friend, then.”
“Another thing. I’m worried about the Purissima, sir. Why is she still there? What is she thinking of? I watch the house as often as I can. She never goes out. I was wondering if I could get in on some pretext.”
“No,” Parthenius replied. “Too risky—for her.” He spread his plump hands. “We must trust she knows what she’s doing. In fact, she may be safer there than anywhere else for the moment.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The Ides of Germanicus. Day nine of the Games.
The second hour of the day.
In the temple of Vesta, little Laelia, ten years old, roused herself from a doze and felt a moment of terror. On the bench by her side, her elder “sister” Fusca nodded, too. Fusca had lectured the little novice all night long, how if the sacred flame should ever be extinguished, mighty Rome would fall. Trembling, the two girls threw sticks on the guttering flame. They had been on duty since midnight, alone in the tiny, circular temple, it being their turn to tend Vesta’s hearth fire. Although tucked away in one corner of the Forum and dwarfed by loftier buildings, this spot was the sacred center of the Roman race. Their other “sisters” would be just now waking and stretching in their beds in the adjoining cloister that was their home and nearly the limit of their world.
And in this precinct, willing or not, the Vestals would draw out their days in an unceasing round of ritual duties, seldom seeing their families, never knowing the love of a man, on pain of death.
Vesta was not a goddess like Isis, who inspired ecstasy in her devotees. Vesta answered no prayers, offered no blessed afterlife. No myths were told of her. Her temple had no cult statue. But she was the living flame of the primeval kings’ hearth, the heart and soul of Rome. She was tended by six virgins, the king’s daughters once upon a time, who were potent with unspent fertility. Their service was not a joy but a solemn, unsought obligation.
Laelia remembered how almost a year ago the emperor, in his role of Pontifex Maximus, tall and terrifying, had come in great state to her home, spoken the ancient formula, ‘I take thee, Beloved,’ and pulled her roughly by the hand while her father, a Roman senator, stood by, puffed up with pride, and her mother wept.
And she remembered how she too had wept, in those first days, as though her heart would break. It was only the tenderness of her new “mother,” the Vestalis Maxima, that had eased her sorrow then. Perhaps it was because the Purissima herself seemed to wear an air of perpetual sorrow that made her so gentle a friend and so patient a teacher to the young ones.
But where was she now? When would she come back to them? She had told them she was ill and must leave the cloister for awhile. But that was so many days ago, and not a word from her since. But surely, Laelia thought, she would come back today, the day of Jupiter’s banquet. Hope fluttered in the little girl’s breast.
The “sisters” breakfasted together, and then their serving women helped them arrange their hair in the archaic fashion: coils of hair bound with fillets of red and white wool massed on top of the head and covered with a long veil that fell over their shoulders.
Outside, Laelia heard the shuffling of many feet and the lowing of cattle. It was beginning! It was only these few grand occasions that punctuated the tedium of her life. And this time the second-oldest Vestal, who was temporarily in charge of them, had given her permission to attend the ritual banquet. With two Vestals left behind to tend the flame, there would be only three of them going. But oh, if only the Purissima could be among them!
Groggy after a sleepless night, Pliny stood atop the Capitoline Hill with a very subdued Aurelius Fulvus and other officers of the City Battalions. His bronze corselet felt noticeably less snug than it had just nine short days ago when he wore it at the opening of the Games; worry had done this to him.
At that moment silver trumpets blared, the signal for the three massive doors of the temple to swing open. The feeding of the gods was the central rite of the Roman Games. The three-chambered temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva had been consecrated on this day six centuries ago, when Rome was only a collection of mean little cottages huddled on the slopes of seven low hills. Today, as on that first day, Jupiter’s face was painted a fiery red, symbolic of the blood of his slaughtered enemies, and he and his two female consorts were gorgeously dressed for dinner.
Public slaves carried the massive gold and ivory statues, freshly tinted and dressed for the occasion, down the temple steps and laid them lengthwise on banqueting couches built for giants. They placed tables before them and began to carry in steaming platters of food. Other couches had been arranged for the guests, senators and magistrates, who would share this sacred meal. Truly, at times like this, Pliny thought, the gods felt very real and very close. For a little while he could imagine himself among those shaggy ancestors, who in their simplicity believed that the divine images were nourished by the same food as they themselves ate. But what should he think of these deities now after what he had been through with Domitian, Lord and God, last night?
The emperor and empress dined with the gods at their table. Pliny, sitting not far away, stole cautious glances at them. Domitia Augusta sat as still as a statue herself; her face betrayed no emotion. Very different was her husband’s. His sullen, red-rimmed eyes seemed never at rest. He had gone through the long morning’s ritual of sacrifice and prayer like a sleep-walker. Now his lips were moving. Was he talking to his wife—or to Minerva, who had deserted him in his dreams? Was he, perhaps, begging Jupiter for his life? Was he insane?
Pliny turned back to his food without relish. At last, the emperor and his entourage stood up. Slaves ran up to drape him in his triumphal toga, purple stitched with golden stars, and placed a laurel wreath on his head. His lictors, bearing the ceremonial bundles of rods and axes on their shoulders, shouted for the crowd to clear the way.
The emperor would mount his golden chariot now and lead a procession of chariots representing the six racing teams, each liveried in its distinctive color, to the Circus Maximus—that immense oval, nearly half a mile long, ringed by tier upon tier of stands, capable of containing a full fourth of the city’s population. Today the races would begin and continue everyday until the end of the Games.
Pliny would join in the procession but then slip away as soon as possible. He regretted having missed most of the theatrical performances during the first week of the Games. He had no such regrets about missing the races. Almost unique among his countrymen, he found them inexpressibly tedious. How the Roman populace could rouse itself to a fever pitch of excitement over the Blues and the Greens, the Reds and Whites, the Golds and Purples, as if it made a particle of difference which team won, was quite beyond him.
But his musings were interrupted by a shocking occurrence. One of the Vestal Virgins, only a child, broke away from the others and streaked toward the emperor. What was she shouting? Something about her mother? The girl threw herself sobbing against Domitian’s legs, holding onto his toga. He raised his hand to slap her, and would have, only the empress pulled her away just in time and handed her to an older Vestal who had raced after her.
And then it struck Pliny—the thing that had bothered him at the sacrifice on the very first day of the Games. He hadn’t been able to put his finger on it then. Now there was no doubt. One of the six Vestals was missing.
He had no more time to ponder this now. To the blare of trumpets and thunder of drums, the charioteer cracked his whip and the four white horses of the imperial equipage started forward. As they turned into the avenue that led down to the Circus, an immense crowd surged forward, shouting the emperor’s name in rhythmic acclamations led by trained cheerleaders. Domitian, their Lord and God, raised his right arm in salute. But, at the same time, he steadied himself, gripping the chariot’s handhold with a white-knuckled fist. The rolling waves of sound made him visibly wince, so tightly-strung were his nerves. His features were frozen in a bloodless mask. He looked like a man face to face with death. If th
e soothsayers were right then this adoring crowd could not shelter him, the steel-clad ranks of Praetorian spearmen could not shield him. If those soothsayers were right, then in five more days, at the fifth hour of the day, his doom would find him.
The gilded chariot, flanked by twenty-four lictors passed on its way. Then followed, in turn, troops of noble youths on horseback, garlanded litters bearing statues of the gods on high, and the leaping priests of Mars, pirouetting to the music of flutes and lyres. Next, in a riot of color and noise, came the chariots of the competing teams, each charioteer pelted with flowers by women in the crowd who shouted their love. And after them the spectators formed one single mass, an immense stream of humanity surging toward the Great Circus.
Gaius Plinius, his mind sorely perplexed, signaled for his litter bearers.
Calpurnia had slept late that morning, drugged by Soranus’ potion. She awoke in a panic. Where was her husband? But Helen ran into assure her that all was well. Master was attending the ceremonies on the Capitolium and would be home for lunch. Helen helped her dress and comb her hair and then walked her out in to the garden to enjoy the fresh morning air. She saw Amatia sitting on the stone bench under the pear tree, facing away from her. She called “good morning,” but her friend did not seem to hear her. Calpurnia sat down beside her and touched her shoulder. Amatia turned to face her. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I miss my daughters,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-two
The sixth hour of the day.
Before Pliny, who was longing for a bath and a long nap, reached home, one of Valens’ men intercepted him in the street. “Something to do with a monkey, sir. Centurion says you should come at once.”
Minutes later, Pliny and his officer knelt on the floor in Verpa’s bedroom, peering at the small shape, hideously twisted in death, of Iarbas’ monkey. Lucius, who had followed them upstairs, watched silently from the doorway.
“I reckon he got himself locked in here the other day, after we were here,” Valens said. “A slave found him this morning. I haven’t let anyone touch him. You see how he’s clawed his throat.”
Pliny nodded. There were bloody tufts of fur under the animal’s nails.
“Now take a look at this, sir.”
Pliny bent closer. There, on the wrinkled palm of one small hand was a livid welt from which protruded a bit of cork. Grasping the cork warily between his thumb and forefinger, Pliny withdrew a tiny needle from the wound. Suddenly his exhaustion was forgotten. The thing must have been shaken out of the bedclothes when the bed was stripped and lay here on the floor for days until the monkey found it. Clearly whatever killed this animal killed Verpa too. But he would want Diaulus’ confirmation.
Wrapping the little corpse up in a towel and the needle separately in a napkin, and putting both in a shoulder bag, he rushed off to find the doctor. This proved to be not so easy. The embalming workshop in the temple precinct was locked and shuttered. Pliny accosted some minor priestling who was passing by and enquired after “Nectanebo.” To Pliny’s surprise the man dropped to his knees and begged for mercy. It was only then that Pliny, mildest of men, realized how he must look to this fellow. He was still corseleted, helmeted, and armed with his sword from the morning’s ceremony. An unaccustomed sense of power suddenly welled up in him. So this was how soldiers felt when they confronted cowering civilians. Just these bits and pieces of metal made all the difference. It was a heady feeling.
Nectanebo, it seemed, had been summarily fired by Alexandrinus. Word was that he was practicing medicine again in a storefront shop in the Subura.
Feeling invincible in his breastplate and swaggering like a real trooper, Pliny made his way down into that insalubrious quarter of noisy taverns and odorous alleys that buzzed with flies and cheap commerce. After a few inquiries, one ragged inhabitant was able to point out the doctor’s place of business.
He found the little man full of grievance and eager to talk. Indeed, the swelling on the monkey’s paw resembled the one on Verpa’s mentu—, er that is, membrum virile. What sort of poison produced it, he couldn’t say; he was an anatomist, not a pharmacist. But Diaulus had other information to impart, and no reason now to respect the secrets of his former employer, damn him. Twice in the past few nights, both before and after the reading of Verpa’s will, he had observed the Priest of Anubis together with a thin lady who walked with Scortilla’s unmistakable lurching gait.
Mehercule! thought Pliny as he shouldered his way back through the crowded street. Both his concubine and his son had a crack at the old man on the same night, only she, somehow, got to him first! Still, there were pieces to be filled in. He wanted to know what sort of poison this was and where she could have obtained it. And, most perplexing of all, how she administered it. For the first of these questions anyway, he knew precisely where to look. He collared an urchin in the street and gave him directions to Martial’s house with instructions to meet him without delay at the public library. It was a big job he was undertaking; he’d need the poet’s help. Still carrying the monkey and the needle, he turned his steps toward the Forum of Peace.
The Deified Vespasian had built his beautiful forum after the annihilation of Jerusalem and its inhabitants and had dedicated it, appropriately, to Peace. In one angle of it he built a library, Rome’s largest, where thousands of Greek and Latin manuscripts could be consulted by citizens of sufficient status. A librarian directed Pliny to the shelves which groaned under the enormous bulk of his uncle’s crowning scholarly achievement, an encyclopedia of natural history.
“As a favor to the emperor,” Pliny explained to Martial, who arrived soon afterwards, out of breath, “my uncle, who also became my adoptive father after my own father died, bequeathed his original manuscripts to the library. He was one of the most learned men of this or any other age.” Pliny began to hunt along the honeycombed walls from which the knobs of dusty scrolls protruded. Martial watched him dubiously. “You know, he thought any moment wasted which was not devoted to work. He rose before dawn and began work by lamplight. After his mid-day rest, he would work again until dinner time, only to rise from dinner while it was still light and return to his studies.”
The bookish young Pliny had grown up in the household of that extraordinary man. He began to pull out scrolls now, touching them lovingly, blowing the dust off them and heaping them on a long table while he talked over his shoulder to Martial. “Whether he was bathing, sunning himself, dining, or being carried through the streets in his litter, a secretary was always beside him, reciting from some book, while he himself jotted down excerpts. I remember how he chastised me once for wasting precious hours by walking. He was dictating notes on volcanic eruptions, you know, when Vesuvius engulfed him.”
The heap of scrolls on the table grew dangerously high. “And so, I can’t help smiling when people call me studious,” Pliny grunted as he carried another armload to the table, “when, compared to him, I am the laziest of men. At his death he left the world over fifty volumes of history, nearly a dozen on grammar and oratory, one hundred sixty miscellaneous notebooks for which I’ve been offered a small fortune, and of course, the Historia Naturalis, in thirty-seven volumes, comprising twenty thousand facts gathered from two thousand books by one hundred forty-six Roman and three hundred twenty-seven foreign authors!”
Martial looked on, bemused, and felt that he was, at last, beginning to understand this man. How might it crush a boy’s soul to have been raised in the shadow of that Titan of Tedium!
Pliny sat down and mopped the sweat from his forehead. When he recounted what Diaulus had told him, the poet’s eyebrows shot up and his eyes shone with wicked glee.
“And what would your uncle have thought of your marshalling all his scholarship just to save a gang of slaves from the executioner?”
“I’m sure he would have thought I’d lost my mind. I half agree with him.”
At that moment the mountain of volumes collapsed and scrolls in their cylindrical capsules rolled e
very-which-way across the floor.
It seemed the librarians had never gotten around to affixing labels to all the capsules. On hands and knees, the two men searched for the index volume, unwinding scroll after scroll. The poet glanced here and there among the yards of unwound papyrus that snaked across the polished floor.
…contact with a menstruating woman will drive a dog mad…a statue of a woman by Praxiteles was so lifelike that a man attempted to have intercourse with it…amber is formed from the urine of lynxes…a man with eyesight so keen he could see the tiniest details at a distance of a hundred and twenty-three miles…the entire Iliad inscribed upon a nutshell…the Arimaspi who have only one eye in the middle of their foreheads…the Megasthenes who, like serpents, have slits in place of nostrils…
“I’ve got the index,” called Pliny from a far corner of the hall. “Yes. Here we are. He treats of poisons in chapter forty-one of Book Eight, and again in Book Twenty-seven, chapter twenty-two.”
“Eight’s over here,” yelled Martial, catching his friend’s excitement.
“Good, I just had…Where was it? Here it is, Twenty-seven.”
Each of them rolled and unrolled a volume, running his finger down the columns of crabbed writing.
“This may be something,” said Martial. “Barbarians hunt panthers by means of meat smeared with a poison called aconitum. Goes on to say the beasts die from almost instantaneous strangulation!”
“Here I’ve found it too,” announced Pliny from his corner. “‘Aconitum, panther-strangler…quickest of all poisons if the genitals are merely touched by it…’ The genitals! That’s it! We’ve got it!”
The poet nodded excitedly. “Poison is a woman’s weapon. And remember, Scortilla’s the one who wanted the body wrapped up like a parcel. Why else but to hide that mark! Picture it. She enters his bedroom, rekindles the flame, arouses him, and as she delights and distracts him, she kills him! What an epigram this will make! Who but Scortilla could do something so shameless? She must have held the cork end between her teeth as she bent over him, like some fanged viper!
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