The Splendor Before the Dark

by Margaret George

  I had done it, I had done it.

  “I must tell you that this sometimes happens for no apparent reason. No injury, no warning. Just a sudden onset. And the Augusta has had problems in childbearing. So she may have been predisposed to this.”

  Yes, but I set it in motion.

  “The child is lost, too,” said Andromachus, pointing to a bundle, wrapped in another linen. “It was still too small to survive.”

  I did not want to break down in front of them, but I could not help it. I waved them away, out of the room, and wept.

  They were gone. Everyone was gone except Poppaea, who lay serenely on the cot, her slender, pale hands clasped. In death she was beautiful in a way she had not been before—in absolute stillness and perfection. A beauty that could not change. A beauty that was immortal.

  * * *

  • • •

  When it was full day, Epaphroditus appeared at the door. Wordlessly, he came in and stood looking down at the figure on the cot. He turned to me, protocol forgotten, and touched my shoulder. His silent gesture caused me to weep again.

  “Caesar, we must . . . make preparations,” he said. “For the Augusta . . .”

  “Preparations?” I did not understand.

  “The funeral.”

  The funeral. Yes, there had to be a funeral.

  “Shall I arrange to have the cremation site readied?”

  “No!”

  “We will carry her with the utmost respect and care.”

  Onto a funeral pyre. Laid on a pyre, set aflame. Crackling and melting and turning black.

  “No! No cremation! I won’t have her destroyed!”

  “But, Caesar, it is a necessary rite. The customary Roman rite.”

  “Not for my daughter and not for the Augusta. She will be embalmed.”

  I had not yet allowed myself to step beyond the now, the overwhelming now, and enter the world of next, the world of practicalities and what shall we do with the body of the Augusta? But instantly I knew she must be embalmed, preserved, not obliterated.

  “Embalmed?” He sighed. “But the spices necessary for an adult, the quantity, so different than for an infant.”

  “Am I not the emperor?” I cried. “Is not procuring a mountain of spices within my power? Get them, get them, send for all the merchants who deal with Arabia, but get them!”

  Shocked, he retreated, bowing and hurrying away, leaving me alone with Poppaea again.

  I knelt by her side. “I won’t let them harm you. You wished that your beauty would never fade, and I promise you it will not.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Eventually I was persuaded to leave the room, to return to the lower palace, and attendants took Poppaea away in a closed litter to the place where she would be prepared for eternity.

  Once in the palace, I felt marooned and lost. How could all this be unchanged? How could the couches still be as they were, the round tables be oblivious to the loss? They were inanimate, and I hated them for it—hated their immunity to our mortality. Things rusted, they rotted, they disintegrated and eventually fell into dust, but they weren’t aware of it and were not mourned by their fellow pieces of furniture. I kicked the little table that usually held a pitcher of juice, smashing it. Then I turned to the neighboring table and said, “You don’t care, do you? You won’t miss it!” I wanted revenge on the furniture for their protection against all loss and care. I wanted revenge on everything that was not wounded by the loss of Poppaea.

  Then the rage was replaced by a dullness, a softness that the armor of anger had kept at bay. Pain and sorrow crept in, little fingers that clasped and then grasped, squeezing the breath out of me. I flung myself down on my bed and lay motionless all day, feeling dead myself. Perhaps I was.

  Finally my closest attendants tiptoed in. “Caesar,” one said. “We have food for you. You must eat.”

  The light was fading. It was almost dark. The first full night without Poppaea was about to begin. The first full day without her had passed.

  I can’t live without you. I can’t survive without you. I had said that. But now I would have to. And I did not know how I could.

  * * *

  • • •

  When the embalmers had finished their task and laid Poppaea in her coffin, I was called in. I gazed down at her. She looked as if she still lived, which was painful. Why is this possible? It is more of a torture than if the embalmers had failed. Then I would see that you are no longer here. Instead I think you should stir, arise. I wait for you to do so, and you do not.

  I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for your skill.”

  Once again I was alone with her, and all that remained was to close the lid and say farewell upon this earth. I took one last lingering look, then did it. And resisted the temptation to raise it again for just one more glance.

  * * *

  • • •

  She was to have a state funeral, with the bier resting on the Rostra, where I would address the people in the Forum. It was a cloudy day, blowing misty rain. I was flanked by members of the four orders of state priests, as well as a cordon of magistrates, Praetorians and leading members of the Senate. They blocked my view of Poppaea, now resting where everyone could see her—everyone but me. I had said my farewell.

  I looked out at the crowd, dressed in muted mourning colors, their heads covered. Waiting. Waiting to see what the emperor would say. How many times had I experienced that? But today, I hardly knew what to say. The emperor was at a loss for words. But there had to be words.

  I motioned to the priests’ acolytes to light the incense, heaped in high stands on both sides of the Rostra. Clouds of smoke rose, sending the voluptuous scent of myrrh and cassia to surround us and waft out into the Forum.

  “Today there are no official mourners but one. Your emperor. My loss and my mourning are so vast that an army of official mourners could not equal it. I have lost the Augusta, my beloved wife. She was a woman of incomparable beauty, of goodness, of intelligence. Of wit and compassion. And she was the mother of the Diva Claudia Augusta, who is on the couch of the immortals. She now takes her place on that couch beside her as a goddess in her own right, Diva Poppaea Augusta.”

  People began to wail and keen, as customary in funerals. The sound grew and grew, resounding off the buildings in the Forum.

  “She will be entombed, intact, in the tumulus of the Julian family, where our daughter now lies. She, too, will have a shrine dedicated to her divinity, as does Diva Claudia. I will lead the procession.”

  Through the dreary drizzle I walked, with Poppaea’s closed coffin on a royal litter borne before me, with swaying priests and chanting mourners behind me, a long line of mourners snaking through the Forum and out to the Campus Martius. The tumulus, an imposing, high mound where the ashes of Julius Caesar himself rested, had two bronze doors, now open and waiting. I stood as Poppaea was taken inside, to the place where I could not follow.

  XLVI

  Life must go on, they say. But in what way? For days afterward I kept to my chamber, but she was still there. All the things she had gazed upon, touched, remained, mocking me. I felt her presence, but when I turned to see her, she was gone. Silent servants came and went, bringing food, taking it away untouched.

  Stoic philosophers would argue that my folly was in forming an attachment to an earthly thing. One had gone so far as to say that when he held his wife he was always aware of her skeleton and that she was just a piece of flesh that would decay. If we can stay aloof from all that perishes, then we do not ache when they leave us.

  But that is not to live at all. I could find no consolation in philosophy or in clever ways of restating facts to try to alter them. The poets knew more than all the philosophers put together and offered me the only solace I could find, and even that was meager. Homer said,

  The life
of man is like a summer’s leaf.

  And Archilochos said,

  Now, I have no desire for poetry or joy,

  yet I will make nothing worse by crying,

  Nor worse by seeking good foods and pleasure

  And he was right. But Sappho was the only one who truly understood:

  The moon and Pleiades

  are set. Midnight,

  And time spins away.

  I lie in bed, alone.

  And so the days and the nights passed.

  Since, as the poet said, I felt no better or no worse regardless of what I did, eventually I returned to my duties, signing papers, meeting with the Consilium, consulting with my true advisers—Tigellinus, Nymphidius, Epaphroditus, Phaon. To them and them alone could I speak freely, not guarding my every word.

  In addition to these official duties, there was the melancholy one of dispersing Poppaea’s household, her servants, her slaves, her possessions. There was even the question of what to do with her stable of donkeys that she kept for their milk to bathe in. I visited her apartments and surveyed the objects—the luxurious bed, the ivory-adorned couches and tables, the array of costly perfumes and ointments in their slender-necked alabaster vials and delicate glass. And the jewelry. I took the necklace I had commissioned for her, the gold collar with the nine celestial stones, that she had worn on the last day before the night that everything changed, when Rome caught on fire. I would keep it, remembering her joy at wearing it. For the rest, it should be sold and the money deposited in the imperial treasury.

  We had no child to save these things for, and keeping them would be a continual stinging reminder of that.

  The slaves and servants would be absorbed into other households, but I wanted to keep her musicians and Sporus. His uncanny resemblance to Poppaea meant that sending him away would, in some way, be losing her again. The first time I saw him again, it was both a pain and a comfort. Long ago I had said, Now I know where to find another Poppaea if I need one, and she had answered, I hope that never happens, that you would need another Poppaea. Easy to laugh and joke about it then. I freed him as a gift to Poppaea’s memory, but he chose to remain in the palace, as near to her as he could be in this life.

  It was a long time before I was able to return to the Golden House, once my joy and treasure, its majestic beauty now tarnished with the sorrow of that night. I stood in the Hector room, seeing that the mosaic floor had been retiled, presumably because the stains of her blood had permanently damaged the original. The painting of Protesilaus and Laodamia, reenacting their tragedy for eternity, leered at me. I ordered it painted over but changed my mind, realizing it was the last thing she had seen, and she had specially commissioned it, and to destroy it was to deny her wishes. But I never wanted to see it again. Let later generations admire it. I would never stand in that chamber again and ordered it closed.

  But would there be later generations to see it? What of the dreadful prophecy in my dream? Not one stone shall remain standing upon another, nor anything that you hold dear.

  Was there any use, then, in striving against the Fates, against oblivion?

  * * *

  • • •

  Tigellinus came to me one day with a further taunt to my loss.

  “Another malicious rumor,” he said, laying a paper before me. I looked at it, listlessly.

  “Just tell me,” I said. What now?

  He was truly reluctant to speak. But he was charged with finding out all the dangers and secrets harbored in Rome. “Some say that you caused the death of the empress.”

  I above anyone accused myself of that. But only I and the physician and the midwives knew what really happened; even Tigellinus didn’t. “What do they say?”

  “That she scolded you for coming home late from the races, and in a fit of anger you kicked her even though she was pregnant.”

  I sighed. What evil imagination. “There were no races, I didn’t return late from any, and I don’t hit or kick people.” I had never struck anyone in my life. But it wasn’t Tigellinus I needed to convince.

  “I know that, Caesar,” he said. “But how to refute it?”

  I had learned my lesson after the Fire. It was almost impossible to snuff out a rumor that was determined to burn. “We can’t,” I said. “Only Poppaea could refute it.” I didn’t care anymore. I was weary of the unfair rumors and accusations. Let them flame, let them smolder. But the unfairness of them made me sick at heart.

  XLVII

  ACTE

  Like everyone else, I heard about the death of Poppaea and Nero’s responsibility for it. Yes, even in Velitrae—or perhaps especially in Velitrae, for the farther a place is from the origin of a story, the more it changes—the tale circulated. She had nagged him for coming home late, and he had kicked her, the story went.

  I could well believe that she could scold him. She was imperious and demanding, as I knew firsthand from her summoning of me and her cutting words. But I could not believe he would harm her or anyone else by striking them. He was capable of striking people, but only from a distance with arrest warrants, and only for his enemies who tried to strike him first. And that he loved her, I had no doubt, loved her to madness.

  I grieved for him—what would he do now, without her? She and Tigellinus had been his closest companions and advisers. Now there was just Tigellinus. All the political personas who had crowded the stage when he and I were first together were gone, swept away—Agrippina, Seneca, Burrus, Octavia, Britannicus, now Poppaea.

  Only he and I survived. Odd thought. May we endure and live.

  * * *

  • • •

  I attended the state funeral, standing in the crowd before the Rostra. Why did I go? It is hard to answer that, even to myself. I can only ask myself questions. Is it because I still want to share, even at the margins, his life? Is it because I feel protective of him, more so now than ever? Or did I simply want to see him again, even at a distance? How strange not to know oneself better.

  The day was cold, drizzly, windy. Poets would say the skies wept. Common people would say they should have remembered to bring a hat. An enormous crowd had gathered in the Forum, a testament to his popularity among the people.

  The Rostra was filled with officials, standing behind the bier with Poppaea’s form stretched out upon it. She lay pale and slender, surrounded by myrtle boughs, her amber hair waving around her shoulders. Two enormous incense burners flanked the bier, and when they were lit, heady smoke poured out, almost enveloping the Rostra.

  Then he appeared, wearing a mourning toga of dark color, and started speaking. At first his voice was so low I could barely hear him, but it gained strength as he went on. He spoke of her in the highest terms, but even as he enumerated all her qualities and his vow to build a shrine to her, and declared that she was divine, I knew—I could sense—that he wished just to cry out and scream to the heavens rather than deliver this measured, calm speech.

  He looked ravaged, far older than his twenty-seven years. Where was the boy I had known?

  The speeches over, it was time to transfer the bier to the cremation spot. Reverently they closed the coffin and descended from the Rostra. Nero followed, and then all the officials and last the rest of the people fell in behind him.

  He passed by me but did not see me; his eyes were focused on the swaying coffin ahead of him. I waited and then followed at a distance. We snaked through the Forum and then toward the Campus Martius. But we did not stop in the open field, the traditional spot for cremations. We kept walking, and around me people were murmuring, wondering, and then someone said, “He won’t cremate her. He had her embalmed. She’s going directly into the tumulus of the Julians.”

  “No cremation? That’s un-Roman!” a man next to me cried.

  “Foreign—like the Egyptians!” muttered a woman.

  “He likes foreign things. What about th
ose Greek games?” the man said.

  “But embalming!” a boy said in alarm, as if it were perverse.

  “It must have cost a fortune. All those imported spices. And the incense at the Rostra—a year’s worth!” said an old man, hobbling along with his walking stick.

  But I remembered, if they did not, that he had done likewise with his daughter, Claudia. Perhaps he simply could not bear to think of them burned. Or perhaps he merely wanted to believe they slumbered rather than ceased to exist.

  The tumulus rose before us, a great mound that had been heaped over Caesar’s only daughter in her sarcophagus, then over Caesar himself, and held the embalmed body of Drusus, the first Germanicus. Nero was not the first in Rome to have someone embalmed.

  There were brief prayers before the yawning doors of the dark interior, and Nero touched her coffin, then nodded for it to be conveyed inside.

  He turned away, unseeing, although I was close by. But then, even without grief, he had bad eyesight. Once he had given me an emerald he used to improve his eyesight at the races. I still had it; it rested on a table in my workroom, a poignant reminder of how vulnerable even an emperor can be.

  XLVIII

  NERO

  I had to select a site for Poppaea’s shrine. The Senate had voted formally on her deification, but it was up to me to find the proper place for her temple. A task that would, for a little while, keep her with me.

  Would it be in Rome? She was empress here, and here she rested. But her cry Oh, it is so good to be home! when we returned to the area of Naples meant that her heart was there, and there she would want her shrine. And Naples was a spiritual home to me, too, in that its temperament was Greek, not Roman.