The Splendor Before the Dark

by Margaret George

* * *

  • • •

  But my dreams in the predawn were vague and murky, and when I opened my eyes midmorning I was no more enlightened. The day was well on and I needed to shoulder my duties, visiting the refuge stations farther down the river in the Gardens of Caesar and meeting with some of my former advisers from the Consilium—not all had returned to Rome, many having lost their homes, so they were staying in the their villas elsewhere. But enough were here for a quorum as we explored the massive undertaking of rebuilding the city.

  Do not think of the scale of it, just attend to each task lying before you; keep your eyes on that. Focus only on what you know, on what you can do, on what you can command.

  The day was fair and promised to be searingly hot. I chose my lightest toga—for although I normally hated wearing the uncomfortable garment, I knew the people needed to see me as emperor in one now—and knew it would be soaked with sweat and ruined by the end of the day. Even so, I felt embarrassed at having an intact garment when the people I would be consoling were in rags.

  The field with aid stations was past the old naumachia water theater of Augustus, just across from the warehouses of Rome proper. Those had been reduced to smoldering blackened piles, and now ships from Ostia were docking farther downstream to unload their food and take on the cleared debris from the fire. A sea of people swarmed in the field, knots gathered around flags indicating food stations, medical stations, clothing stations, legal stations with property advice, and secretarial stations where information about missing persons and announcements were posted.

  Flanked by my guards—for I had taken to heart the assassination warning—I made my way through the crowds. They seemed overwhelmingly joyous to see me; it was hard to believe they would wish me harm. But as Nymphidius had said, it took only one. And there were a lot of people here.

  “Caesar, Caesar!” they cried, surging toward me, yelling their petitions.

  “My house gone—”

  “My son is injured”—holding a child with bandaged legs aloft.

  “I have lost my livelihood—my hand crippled, I cannot work copper—”

  “See my agents at the appropriate stations,” I told them, pointing elsewhere. “They will help, in my name.”

  But they wanted me to help them directly, as if by magic I could heal their child, their hand. Their houses I could restore, but some things were gone forever. And lives lost were beyond help.

  I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten. Where had that come from? Something Poppaea had quoted once. Probably from those Hebrew writings she fancied. She had liked it, she said, because it promised that not only the grain would be restored but the very years wasted as well.

  “Only God can restore time itself,” she said.

  But which god? And would the Hebrew God want to undo what the Roman ones had visited on us?

  Time . . . the Roman gods had robbed us of that as well, for it would take months and years to rebuild what they had destroyed in nine days.

  I will restore to you the years . . .

  “Caesar, you are here!” Epaphroditus welcomed me to his headquarter station. He gestured to show me the tables set up, the files, the lists, the busy secretaries overseeing it all.

  “We are assessing the damages and filing the losses,” he said. “Many claims, of course.”

  “Can you restore time?” I asked. “Where is the station for that?”

  He looked at me quizzically. “Caesar?”

  “Names, property, food, all that can be addressed. But time—and life, of course,” I said. “Those losses are the ones that sting and wound.”

  “Caesar, we are not gods,” he said. “We cannot restore what only they have ultimate power over and what lives only once. A house has many lives, a man only one.”

  “True,” I said. “And we must admit the limit of our power, although the people here want to grant us more than we have.”

  “It is their wishes speaking, not their knowledge,” he said. “But we are doing what lies in our power to do, and we can rest our consciences with that. No one man can exceed his own limits.”

  “My, you sound like a philosopher,” I said. “And here I thought you were merely my head secretary and administrator.”

  “To be an able officer, one needs to be a bit of a philosopher as well.” He laughed.

  “Spoken like both,” I said. “Take me to see the other stations, if you will.”

  The nearest one was one of many distributing food. Several men and women were overseeing the distribution of grain that had been brought in from neighboring towns. The lines were long.

  “Many people have come in from the country to help in the aid stations,” said Epaphroditus. “They have been invaluable.”

  The medical station had several physicians attending to patients; tables of ointments, bandages, and instruments were set up, and there were several camp cots for people to lie on, as well as piles of crutches. The head physician told me, “We are seeing many burns, of course, but also broken limbs and wounds. The wounds are festering; we pour wine and oil into them, but about half do not heal, and the people either die or lose their limb to amputation. Then, some will die from the shock of the amputation.” He shook his head. “It is a tragic business. It goes on day after day, and still I see no end to this yet.”

  I thanked him and moved on from this sorrowful station.

  The clothing station was more reassuring. Cheerful workers handed out tunics, cloaks, hats, eagerly snatched by the threadbare suppliants.

  “Where did all these come from?” I asked.

  “Donations from the countryside,” the head worker said. “They have been very generous.”

  As we turned away, Epaphroditus said, “Speaking of generous, Seneca has offered an enormous donation to help. He seems to have pledged most of his considerable fortune.”

  “Seneca?” I was astounded, but I should not have been. He had retired, not died. He had busied himself writing in his country villa, but I only heard about him secondhand. My old tutor had cut ties with me, which had hurt, but I lived with it. I had made decisions he disliked, especially marrying Poppaea and daring to perform publicly as a musician, violating his standards of Roman propriety. And, like all teachers, he did not like seeing his pupil grow up and fail to follow his advice obediently. “He will have to come and discuss this with us,” I said. Secretly I was delighted that I would now have a chance to see him again.

  We approached the saddest station of all—the information center. A large board was filled with flyers and notes and lists, so thick that some were posted on top of one another. A woman stood by a table, helping people compose new notes and filing information.

  I walked over to the board and beheld the tablet of pain.

  Help find my daughter Paulina Fausta, last seen in Eagle tavern in Circus Maximus night of the Fire, twenty years old, blue eyes, blond hair, wearing green tunic. Report to information station.

  Missing husband of Marcia, Albinus Longinus, guard at grain storage warehouse, Regio XIII, forty-one years old, black hair, tall, scar on right shin. Last seen trying to put out the blaze at the warehouse.

  Have you seen my mother? She is Metella, thirty-two years old, brown hair, small, wearing white gown when last seen running with me from our house on the Via Lata—we were separated—please find her! Crispina Balba

  Our children, Gaius, age seven, and Vipsania, age five, lost in the crowd in the night of the Fire. We pray for your safety and hate ourselves forever that we were not able to keep holding your hands. Nonius Aetinus.

  “Show me no more of this,” I said. “I cannot bear it.” I turned and sought out another station, something to focus on. My eyes were filling with tears, knowing as I did there was nothing I could do to help these people and feeling only one thousandth of the pain they were enduring, and yet it was searing.


  “Let us turn then to the legal stand; the dry law dries all tears,” said Epaphroditus. Even he was touched, his voice husky with sadness.

  The legal station seemed the largest of all. A long table had at least five lawyers seated before it, and behind them were more tables with scribes and filing boxes, as well as legal scrolls. I inquired about their procedures and what they had processed so far, but I was almost deaf to the answers, as the plaintive words on the flyers were still echoing through the chambers of my mind.

  Looking over the head of one of the lawyers droning on (admittedly to my own question), I was thunderstruck to see, behind one of the back tables a face I thought never to see again. At the same time she saw me and looked not shocked but disconcerted. Or was my bad eyesight misleading me?

  “Acte,” I said.

  She rose. It was she.

  “Caesar.” She gave a little bow when she reached me.

  “Don’t call me that!” I barked. This woman I had loved, whom I had wanted to marry, to make my empress, now would only address me in my formal title?

  “What else should I call you? You are Caesar Augustus, that is the truth.”

  “Yes, but not to you.” I indicated that we should step away from these people. She had to obey. I was the emperor, she had spoken true. We walked a little way from the eager ears, the guards still trailing me.

  Now that we were alone—in the midst of strangers—I could not find words to speak to her. She stood patiently waiting. She had always been calm, a soothing presence for my soul. So was she still.

  “Shall I help you?” she said. “You wish to ask me why I am here. I am here to help; all the surrounding countryside is doing what it can, whether in grain or in presence. I still live in Velitrae. That is not so far.”

  “I know exactly how far it is,” I said. Twenty-two and a half miles in a straight line. I had traveled it many times in my mind but never allowed myself to do so in reality. “It seems to have treated you well.”

  She smiled. “Yes, it has.” She was lovely as ever, unchanged in the five years since we had parted. But I knew she could not say the same for me. If my looks reflected the changes in my being, I was not the same Nero. Instead, she asked, “And for you? How has the time treated you?”

  She would have known all the external things that had happened, and I could not relate the personal things. So I just said, “Well.”

  We stood awkwardly in the field as busy people flowed around us. There were a thousand things I could say and none of them I would say. I loved my wife, Poppaea, with a passion and a fidelity that was devout, but Acte had known me when I was very young and if not innocent, more innocent than the Nero standing before her now. The remnants of that Nero lived on in my music, my poetry, my art, that side that fought to stay alive and untarnished in spite of the pressing, inexorable grinding of life and of being emperor. To her I would always be that boy, that youth, and in losing her I had lost the one person who saw me that way, and only that way: new and uncompromised. But now the compromised, the mature Nero looked at her and said, “I am pleased to have seen you and know that you have fared so well. And I thank you for helping us in our hour of need.” Then I let her go, released her from the bondage of standing there, both of us brimming with the words we would never speak.

  IX

  ACTE

  No, you don’t sign there, you sign here.” My supervisor was standing over me, glaring at the paper I was processing. He stabbed his finger down on the spot.

  I took up my pen and started to write, then suddenly forgot my full name. Acte, I wrote.

  “This is a legal document,” he said sharply. “We need your full legal name as well.”

  My name . . . which one? The one I had as a child in Lycia, Glykera, before the Romans enslaved me? The one I had as a slave, a single name that denoted slavery, just Acte? The one I acquired when I became a freedwoman, through the imperial Claudian house, Claudia Acte? The private one Nero called me, my soul?

  But he had had different names, too, and I had known him first as Lucius—Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, before he changed into Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus at his adoption by the emperor Claudius. I often called him Lucius in affectionate banter between us.

  “Now you’ve blotched it!” A smear of ink soiled the page and obliterated my signature.

  I rose. “I am sorry. I don’t feel well.” Without waiting for his permission, I left the table and walked away, out into the field.

  Did not feel well . . . in fact I was shaking, unsteady. I had not expected to see him, except at a distance. I knew he would visit the relief stations at some point, had heard how he had exhausted himself with emergency measures for the city. But I had not prepared myself to speak directly with him.

  Words had deserted me just now, although so many times over the five years since we parted I had spoken to him in my mind. It was I who had left him, but only because he had changed, grown apart from me, kept secrets I could not share. And his dream of ever marrying me, a former slave, would never have come true. I, as the older one by six years, could see things he could not. I knew more of the world than he did, could see that even the power of an emperor had its limits and that he could never have all his wishes.

  Someone shoved me. “Look where you are going!” just before I tripped over a basket of grain. I was wandering like a madwoman in the heat, not seeing anything but just him, standing there in the field, saying, “I am pleased to have seen you and know that you have fared so well. And I thank you for helping us in our hour of need.”

  The formal, stiff phrases he would utter to anyone—a senator from Capua, an army officer, a lawyer from the provinces. Those words from the youth who had held me tightly on our bed of pine boughs in the cool mountains when we slipped away there for him to plan his retreat villa at Sublaqueum. His architects Severus and Celer—strange how I could remember their names today but not my own—had praised him as having the eye of an architect, but I had pleased him more by telling them no, he had the eye of an artist. And that night he had fervently begged me to marry him.

  It was always impossible. But oh! what happiness while the possibility still existed.

  If my heart had spoken instead of my closed lips, I would have answered him, not let him turn away. I would have said, “I am watching over you, and always will. If you call me, I will come. Always and ever.”

  Nothing could break or replace the bond formed from having once loved him with as strong a love as mine. I could not say the same for him. He had married her, Poppaea Sabina, the most beautiful woman in Rome, and the most vain and clever. And from all reports his madness for her had not faltered in the two years they had been married or through the loss of their baby girl.

  No, he was gone. But I never would be free of him.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had left Rome to make a new life in Velitrae and had prospered there. It was a pleasant place, the home city of the family of Augustus in the Alban Hills. I owned a pottery and tile factory in Sardinia that kept me affluent, as well as other businesses. I did not lack for suitors; now I could believe the myths about marriageable women setting impossible tasks for suitors. In my case the impossible task was that they equal Nero, but failure did not mean they would meet a deadly end, as happened in the stories. Instead their company brought me pleasure and amusement, but no more than that.

  I finally reached the end of the field and found a tree to sit under, beyond the milling crowds. I could still see him in his purple toga—how he hated them, I remembered—very visible in the crowd. As I sat quietly and breathed slowly, my heart stopped racing and I could think. I was glad to have seen him, for otherwise I would carry only an outdated memory of him in my mind. He looked different. His hair was singed by the fire, giving him a wild look, like a damaged sun god. He had put on weight—his face was fuller. Once he had seeme
d younger than his years, but now he looked older than twenty-six. He had borne heavy responsibilities and it was showing. And the task of rebuilding Rome would strain his resources to the limit—all his resources: personal, financial, organizational, and artistic. Now he had a challenge equal to any emperor before him.

  Protect him! I prayed to Ceres, my personal god, and then to all the other gods of Rome. Guide him in the decisions he must make, let them be wise and perfect for Rome. Let them make him immortal among emperors.

  I did not add, And let him return to me. That could never be. And adding it might cause them to reject the entire petition.

  X

  NERO

  I was exhausted and wished I had not summoned what remained of the Consilium to meet with me in the late afternoon. I did not have all the information I needed to lay before them, but more than that, I was so shaken by the suffering I had seen in the fields, and by encountering Acte again after all the years, that I could hardly think. They were mixed up together in my mind, both blisteringly real and dreamlike at the same time.

  I limped back into the palace, wilted and dragging. As I had predicted, the toga was ruined—soaked with sweat, covered with briars, and soiled at the hem. Off and out with it. Should I bother to dress in another toga for this meeting? Sighing, I admitted I had to. I needed to show my authority when I addressed them, and the visual always confirms authority.

  Acte . . . how was it she seemed unchanged, unaged? Was she truly just a work of art, as I had first seen her, the model for a mosaic in the imperial apartments? Art never ages, and that is what makes it so precious. It outlives us and our desires and griefs, serenely oblivious to the decay of its creator.

  But I had seen flickers of emotion in her face—or was that just my fancy? And why had I been unable to speak, except to utter banalities?

  Enough of this. Put it aside, put it away. Rome needs you. And the councilors will be arriving shortly. You have only a little while to go over the maps and think of what you are proposing.