Render Unto Caesar

by Gillian Bradshaw

  Hermogenes shook his head and turned to the Rubrius brothers, who had just finished removing the chest from the sedan chair. He took two sestertii from his purse and handed one to each man. The porters’ looks of surprise gave way to wide grins.

  “Thank you for your assistance,” Hermogenes told them. “You seem to know the city well. If I wish to hire you again, where should I look for you?”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Gaius Rubrius at once, still grinning. “You can send word to us at the Cattlemarket, at the foot of the Aemilian Bridge. We could come by here for you whenever you want, if we’re not on another job. We charge a denarius n’ a half the day, sir, if you want the chair for longer. Half a denarius after noon.”

  “I may send for you, then, once I know more about how I should conduct my business here in Rome. Good health to you both.”

  “Good health to you, sir!” chorused the Rubrii, and set off down the street, their empty chair dangling from one pole between them.

  Crispus tut-tutted. “You shouldn’t be so polite to rabble like that,” he informed his guest. “It makes them greedy—and you paid those fellows too much, too.”

  “I know,” said Hermogenes, turning back to his host. “In a strange city, I try to acquire every potential asset I meet.” Besides, he thought to himself, it was worth a bit extra, to have a pair of Roman citizens carrying my luggage.

  Crispus laughed. “Asset? A ragamuffin pair of sedan-chair bearers? If you need a chair, my friend, you are welcome to borrow mine. But come in, come in! Are these men yours?”

  “My slaves,” Hermogenes agreed. “Young Menestor here is my valet and secretary.” He snapped his fingers for them to pick up the luggage.

  “Dog!” snapped Crispus to the scarred doorkeeper. “Do I have to tell you everything? Help them!”

  The doorkeeper went silently to the traveling chest and took one end of it. Hermogenes realized that Crispus had called the man “dog” in Greek, even though the rest of the conversation was in Latin. “Does your doorkeeper speak Greek?” he asked in confusion. The man had not appeared to understand Menestor.

  Crispus giggled and shook his head. “Not a word of it. But I give all my slaves Greek names; it’s the fashion. His is Kyon.” He giggled again. “Good name for a doorkeeper, don’t you think?”

  Hermogenes tried to keep his feelings from his face. The idea of renaming slaves to fit a current fashion was repulsive, and the thought of obliging one to answer to Dog made him queasy. He didn’t like the idea of a fashion for giving slaves Greek names, either.

  His attempt at concealing his emotions obviously hadn’t succeeded, because Crispus cried, “Oh, dear! You’re offended. I assure you, this fashion for Greek names is only because we admire Greek culture so much, not because … obviously we don’t think of Greeks as naturally servile!”

  Hermogenes forced himself to smile understandingly. Inwardly he wondered if staying with Crispus was really such a good idea. It had seemed the obvious thing to do: Crispus was an old business associate of his father, after all, and had been a guest in Alexandria on several occasions. He had always declared himself eager to return the favor. It was very much the done thing to stay with guest-friends if you had any, much more respectable than a public inn … but now that he was here, he was remembering that he’d never actually liked Fiducius Crispus much.

  Too late to do anything about it now. Besides, he needed advice, and Crispus could give it to him. He followed his host into the house.

  The street door opened onto a wide entrance corridor decorated with a mosaic picture of a barking dog; the doorkeeper’s lodge was a tiny cell to the right of it. Through the entranceway was a vaulted atrium, with a pond in the center to catch the rainfall from the open circle of the impluvium in the ceiling. An archway beyond revealed a small courtyard with a garden.

  An anxious-looking man of about Hermogenes’ own age hurried in through the archway. He wore a tunic of plain bleached linen and a heavy leather belt through which was pushed a short leather whip. He bowed to Crispus and cast Hermogenes a worried look from mild blue eyes. “They’re getting the Nile rooms ready, master,” he informed Crispus in a hoarse whisper. His voice was so strained that Hermogenes wondered if there was something wrong with it. “And I’ve had wine sent to the dining room.”

  Crispus nodded. “That’s something, then.” He smiled at Hermogenes. “I told my slaves to get a room ready for you as soon as I received your letter—but, of course, the lazy things did nothing about it, and the place is perfectly squalid. Come and have something to drink while they do what should have been done days ago. Stentor, see my friend’s slaves and his luggage to his room.”

  Stentor, thought Hermogenes, looking at the hoarse-voiced man incredulously. Named after the brazen-voiced herald in Homer.

  Stentor gestured for Menestor and Phormion to pick up the trunk again; both at once looked to Hermogenes. Menestor’s expression held a touch of panic. Hermogenes couldn’t blame him: the prospect of being led off into a strange household by a man with a whip would frighten any slave, and the young man couldn’t even understand what that croaking voice said to him. Hermogenes touched his arm lightly. “They are getting my rooms ready,” he explained in Greek. “This man will show you where to put the luggage. I will ask if—”

  “Ah, yes!” exclaimed Crispus. “I should have said, shouldn’t I? Stentor here is my steward. If you want anything during your stay, ask him.”

  The worried blue eyes of the steward blinked. Hermogenes smiled at him in what he hoped was a reassuring fashion. “Stentor,” he said, “these are my valued attendants, Menestor and Phormion. They are tired and thirsty from our journey, and I would be grateful if you could ensure that they are looked after. Unfortunately, neither of them speaks Latin.”

  “I speak some Greek, sir,” the steward volunteered. There was something wrong with his voice. “And so do some of the others in the household. Our master is a man of culture—but I’m sure you know that.” He turned to Menestor and said in accented, hoarse, but acceptable Greek, “Put the things in your master’s room, and then I will give you to drink.”

  “Moderation,” Hermogenes reminded Phormion. The big bodyguard, who was fond of drink, rolled his eyes and nodded.

  The slaves followed Stentor through the archway and to the left. Hermogenes allowed Crispus to escort him through and to the right, into a large room facing into the courtyard. It was decorated with garish red panels, augmented by rondels depicting exotic animals—elephants, tigers, and giraffes. A girl and a boy were busy with cups and mixing bowls at the sideboard, but they turned and bowed as the two men entered. Crispus flopped onto the nearest of the three couches and put his feet up on the red leather upholstery. Hermogenes sat warily on the next one. He glanced at his sandals: they were dirty. The girl hurried over, unfastened the guest’s sandals, and wiped his feet with a damp towel. The boy followed with a pitcher and two red Arretine-ware cups, but Crispus stopped him with a gesture before he could pour.

  “What’s the wine?” he demanded.

  “The Sabine, master,” quavered the boy. “Mixed half and half with water, Stentor said.”

  “Ah!” Crispus nodded approvingly. “Good, good! One of our local Italian vintages, Hermogenes; I hope you like it. Go on, Hyakinthos, pour it for him!”

  “Please, I do not want it so strong,” Hermogenes said hurriedly. “I have just walked from the Ostian Gate, and I would like more of water.”

  The boy filled the guest’s cup halfway before turning to pour wine for his master. The girl hurried back to the sideboard, dropped the towel, and came over with a second pitcher, this one containing cold water. She topped up the guest’s cup.

  “Your health!” Hermogenes said, raising his cup, and Crispus returned the toast.

  The wine was a harsh, rather sour red, but deliciously wet after the hot carriage and the walk across the city. Hermogenes drained his cup, and the boy instantly refilled it. Hermogenes wondered how the lad
felt about being called Hyakinthos. The myth of the beautiful boy loved by the god Apollo was routinely invoked by pederastic poets, and it seemed very likely that other boys would greet the name with knowing sniggers. Then he remembered that Crispus liked boys: during one visit there’d been some trouble over one he’d picked up in the marketplace. Hyakinthos was probably well aware of the implications of his name.

  “You walked from the Ostian Gate?” Crispus asked genially. “You didn’t even use that sedan chair you paid so much for?”

  “That was for the luggage. In truth, I had not intended to walk, Crispus. I had intended to come all the way by carriage, but…” He shrugged, gave a deprecating smile. “I did not know that carriages are not allowed into Rome.”

  “Call me Titus,” offered Crispus. “That’s right, this is your first visit, isn’t it? I’m pleased that I can finally offer you some hospitality in exchange for all the kindness you and your father have shown to me.” There was a pause, and then he added solemnly, “I was very sorry to hear of your father’s fate. I pray the earth is light upon him.”

  Hermogenes bowed his head. The first time anyone had prayed that the earth was light on his father’s grave, he had shouted furiously, “How could it be? He drowned at sea!” The grief then had been raw, savage, and unwieldy. It had seemed impossible that the father who had shaped his own life so entirely, could so suddenly and absolutely vanish from it. Sometimes he had woken up convinced that it had been a mistake, that his father’s ship had not sunk but merely been driven off course, and his father would soon be home. It had been more than half a year now, though, and he knew that Philemon was never going to return from the deep salt water. He had learned to hide his pain, to wear a polite mask over his smoldering rage. He had even learned to accept condolences gracefully.

  “And you are his sole heir?” Crispus continued. “It must have been some comfort to him to know that he left his affairs in capable hands.”

  Hermogenes took another sip of wine and murmured that it was kind of Crispus to say so.

  “Oh, I don’t say it from kindness!” the Roman protested. “It would be a comfort to me, I promise you, if I had an able son instead of a worthless nephew to inherit all my hard work.” He took a swallow of wine and went on, “Of course, these days a man’s made to feel like a traitor to the state if he’s a bachelor. We’ve all been told that it’s our duty to marry and breed Romans. You’ve heard about the Julian laws?”

  Hermogenes had indeed heard of the new laws to encourage marriage and punish adultery. “You’re thinking of getting married because of them?” he asked, amused. He remembered, vividly, how Crispus had once told him that marriage was a trap to enslave men, and that any man of spirit should thank the gods if he escaped it. The speech had been intended to comfort him for the death in childbirth of his own wife, and it hadn’t seemed funny at the time.

  Crispus sighed deeply and gazed into his wine. “I think about it. Then I think again. How could I live without boys—or with the grief a wife would give me over keeping them? What about you? Have you remarried yet?”

  Hermogenes suppressed the grimace of disgust. He heard far more than he wanted on the subject of remarriage from all his father’s associates. At least Crispus didn’t have a daughter. “Not yet,” he said mildly.

  “You ought to. Get yourself a son and heir. Your first wife didn’t give you any children, did she?”

  “She gave me a daughter.”

  Crispus dismissed female offspring with a negligent wave, then straightened with a look of mock alarm. “Gods and goddesses, I’d forgotten that! Shouldn’t have mentioned that I was thinking of marriage myself, should I? Any man with a daughter is looking to buy her a rich husband.”

  Hermogenes thought of his daughter, who had informed him that she intended to be an acrobat when she grew up (“With a costume all made out of red leather with gold on!”), who was always in trouble at school for dirtying her clothes, whose luminous grin could persuade her respectable father to such feats as climbing the garden wall and sneaking into a neighbor’s shed to see a nest of young kittens. He looked at the fat man sweating on his red-upholstered couch and thought I’d see you dead first. He smiled, and said, “She is only ten years old, Cris—Titus. I am not looking yet. Besides, I am sure you can find yourself a wife here in Rome, if you decide you want one. How is business?”

  Crispus told him, at length, about his interest in a new shipping syndicate and some building work in Rome. Hermogenes listened attentively, occasionally making a mental note of something that might be useful. At last his host exhausted the subject and looked at his wine cup. It was empty, and he snapped his fingers to fetch the cupbearer.

  “What about you?” he asked, as Hyakinthos refilled it. “In your letter you said that you had some important business in Rome, but you didn’t say what it was.”

  Hermogenes refused a top-up of his own cup. Important business. He was uncomfortably aware that the powerful impulses which had driven him to leave his home and family and come to Rome had little to do with business. Oh, there was money at stake as well, but it wasn’t what mattered to him. He did not want to admit to Titus Fiducius that what he was really hoping to find in Rome was that elusive and impractical thing: justice. Any businessman would find that suspect and disturbing. Justice could well end up being far more expensive than even the worst-judged commercial transaction.

  “I am here like a bailiff, to collect a debt which is overdue,” he declared, smiling as though it didn’t matter to him. “I would welcome any advice you have to give me on how I should go about it.”

  Crispus laughed. “Whose furniture are you looking to seize?”

  “I will not ‘seize’ anything. The debtor is a wealthy and powerful man. What I want advice on is how to approach him tactfully.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Lucius Tarius Rufus.” In Alexandria he had once written that name out on a wax tablet, then scored it over with the stylus so deeply that he had taken all the wax off and gouged the wood beneath. He was pleased that he could utter it now with such casual calm.

  Crispus sat up straight and stared in amazement. “The general? Jupiter! He’s consul!”

  “Is he?” Hermogenes asked in surprise. “Surely, the consuls this year are”—he recalled the date on his most recent Roman business contract. It was agreed during the consulship of—“Domitius Ahenobarbus and Cornelius Scipio?”

  “Tarius Rufus replaced Scipio at the beginning of the month,” Crispus told him. “It happens a lot these days. The nobles expect the consulship by right of birth; the new men think they’ve earned it, and they end up having to share. Scipio’s blue blood undoubtedly boiled at having to step down for a farmboy from Picenum, but step down he did. Rufus is a friend of the emperor, and Augustus trusted him to command the army of the Danube. You don’t argue with a man like that.” He got to his feet, carried his cup to the sideboard, then turned around still clutching it. “I can see why you’re eager to be tactful. He owes you money? I never knew he had any business in Egypt.”

  Hermogenes swirled the wine round his half-empty cup. “He doesn’t, as far as I am aware. However, twelve years ago he was proconsul of Cyprus—an island which, as you know, has always had the closest ties with Egypt, since it used to belong to the kings. My father’s sister married a prominent businessman there, a man by the name of Nikomachos—he of the shipping syndicate, yes! Rufus borrowed half a million sestertii from him at five percent per annum.”

  “He signed a contract?”

  Hermogenes nodded. “Signed, sealed, and witnessed. In fact, during the first five years after he borrowed it he did make regular repayments—all the annual interest, and a hundred thousand of the principal. Then, however, the payments ceased. Rufus was in Illyria at the time, with the army of the Danube, and at first Nikomachos thought that he had simply failed to authorize his man of business in Rome to release the money. However, when he pursued the matter, he was unable to obtain anythi
ng more than another forty thousand of the interest. The default began to place a strain on his own affairs, and he pursued it more urgently, but received only threats from Rufus’s secretary and no reply at all from the man himself, even after he left the Danube and went back to Rome. Last autumn Nikomachos died, leaving his estate heavily in debt. The heir to the estate—and the debt—was my father.”

  Hermogenes took a sip of wine and swilled it round his mouth. “Nikomachos’s creditors were threatening to seize his house and turn his widow, my father’s sister, out into the street, so my father decided to go to Cyprus himself to set things right, even though it was late in the year.”

  He made himself have another swallow of wine, and was able to continue in a more-or-less normal voice, “He never arrived there. There was a storm, and his ship went down. In the spring I went to Cyprus myself, liquidated the estate, paid off the most pressing creditors, and persuaded my aunt to come back to Alexandria with me. Now I am, as you have mentioned, sole heir to my father’s estate, and that includes the debt he inherited from Nikomachos. Lucius Tarius Rufus owes me five hundred and twenty thousand sestertii.” And the lives of my father and my uncle. He met Crispus’s eyes. “I presume he does have the money.”

  Crispus shrugged. “I’m sure he does, my friend, I’m sure he does. As you said, he’s a very wealthy and powerful man. But he may well be a bit short of cash in hand. The consulship is an expensive proposition. You are not going to be a welcome visitor.”

  Hermogenes shrugged. “He borrowed the money.” He paused, considering, then went on, “It could be lucky for me that he is consul right now. He will not want the embarrassment of a summons for debt while he actually holds the supreme magistracy of Rome.”

  Crispus stared at him, aghast. “Oh, Jupiter!” He began to laugh. “You’re not going to tell him you’ll do that?”

  “I hope to settle the matter quietly. I do, however, hold a valid and binding contract—and, unlike Nikomachos, I am a citizen and entitled to use the Roman courts.”