Render Unto Caesar

by Gillian Bradshaw

  He set off on the errand. Hermogenes picked up the jar of wine he’d bought for his host, then set it down again, troubled by the boy’s unhappiness. He wondered if his own slaves ever found their servitude that bitter.

  Menestor was smiling as he arranged things on the desk, relaxed and contented after an enjoyable day. Or was that an illusion? Did the young man ever lie awake, longing for a freedom he had never known?

  Hermogenes thought of Menestor’s parents and the rest of the household in Alexandria, then found himself blinking at an unexpected wave of homesickness. He imagined his daughter receiving the letter he had written that morning, running an ink-stained finger along the words that he had penned for her, smiling, sitting down to produce some badly spelled reply. He wished he could pick her up and hold her, feeling her thin strong arms around his neck and smelling the sweet scent of her hair.

  His wife’s hair had always smelled sweet, too.

  He sighed: Myrrhine and Alexandria were over a thousand miles away, and his wife further, much further still. He had business in Rome. He picked up the jar of wine again and went off to find the dinner party.

  It was a big dinner. Crispus had invited seven of his friends to meet his Alexandrian guest, and had provided a meal of three courses, each consisting of six separate dishes. There were eggs in fennel, olives stuffed with cheese, shellfish in dill sauce, sausages, Parthian-style chicken, ham boiled with figs, pepper-stuffed dates, and so on and on over several hours. The quantities of wine consumed were even greater than the quantities of food. Hyakinthos and his girl partner were kept hard at work filling the cups. Kept busy in other ways, too: by the end of the night Crispus was openly fondling the boy, though he rebuked a guest who let his own hand wander in that direction. The girl was pawed freely without comment from the master of the house. She tolerated it with a glittering false smile, but Hyakinthos had a rictus grin under glazed eyes.

  All the other guests were also in business or shipping, and the conversation circled around from interest rates to the dealings of shipping syndicates to the likely harvest in Egypt to the price of land in Italy and then back to interest rates again. About halfway through the evening Hermogenes found himself looking around at the drink-flushed faces and despising them, and he reprimanded himself severely. He had no cause to be self-righteous. These men were in the same trade as himself—though, from all he could tell, mostly not as good at it.

  The guests had been told the reason for his visit to Rome, and the discussion of land prices provided some information about the consul Tarius Rufus.

  “Rufus has bought up half Picenum, from what I hear,” declared a fox-faced banker. “A hundred million sestertii worth of it, anyway.”

  The head of a shipping syndicate guffawed. “I would’ve thought that for a hundred million you could buy all of Picenum!”

  “Good farmland,” retorted an investor judiciously. “Not cheap. Where did he get the hundred million?”

  The banker rolled his eyes and sketched a crown around his own head with a significant forefinger.

  A financier shook his head gloomily. “He won’t get a good return on his money. Everyone always says land is safe, but one bad harvest and where are you? And if you take farming seriously, you have to invest. Wine presses, olive presses, oxen, plows, wells, irrigation—a farm can ruin you as fast as a ship, if you don’t manage your investments right. He should have put some of those millions out into buildings. That’s where the wise money is these days.”

  “Rufus is from some little hole in Picenum, though, isn’t he?” said the banker. “He didn’t buy land there because he wanted a good return; he bought it because he wanted to go back there as the biggest man in Picenum.”

  “Biggest cocksucker in Picenum,” murmured the head of the shipping syndicate, and laughed.

  “How much was it you said he owed you?” asked the banker.

  Everyone looked at Hermogenes, who smiled, shrugged dismissively, and replied, “Half a million, including the interest.” The banker whistled.

  “Well, good luck getting it out of him!” said the head of the shipping syndicate. “I hope you want a farm in Picenum.”

  About an hour after the late June nightfall, the party ended, and the other guests were collected by their slaves and escorted stumbling off toward their own houses. Crispus said good night and set off for his own bed, towing Hyakinthos.

  Hermogenes went back to his rooms, tired, unhappy, and more than a little drunk. Menestor was already lying on his pallet in the dayroom, but he stirred when the door opened. “Sir?” he said sleepily.

  “Nothing,” said Hermogenes. “The party’s over, that’s all. Go back to sleep.”

  He went into his cubicle and took off his cloak, belt, and sandals. He suddenly saw again Hyakinthos’s face as he cried “I hate it!” and his glazed expression as his master towed him off to bed.

  He sat down on the bed, remembering his own first love. She had been a slave, too; most men did seem to begin that way. Thaïs had belonged to a neighbor, though, not to his father. He had seen her fetching water from the public fountain and followed her home, and she had stopped in her doorway, looked back at him, and smiled. That had been enough: he’d hung about that house for days, on and off, hoping to see her again, and when he finally did he had hurried to talk to her. She’d laughed at him, called him “young lord,” and asked him what he wanted with a mischievous look that said she knew very well. He had been sixteen; she, a year older. There had been snatched meetings and stolen kisses; he had ignored work his father had set him, stayed out from home at odd hours, skipped school all day once, to meet her for ten minutes. His father had finally confronted him over his derelictions, and he had confessed all. His father had sighed in exasperation, gone off to talk to Thaïs’s master, and come back with the girl, a new and expensive present. “I sell her if you don’t keep your mind on your work!” his father had warned him.

  Thaïs had stayed in the house for four years. Then his father had decided that it was time for his son and heir to marry a respectable girl of his own class. He’d given Thaïs her freedom and found her work making perfume, and they had wept in each other’s arms as they said good-bye. They still saw each other sometimes in the marketplace, and smiled and waved, but she seemed to have married—at least, she generally had a child with her—so they did not speak.

  He believed, still, that she had loved him—but she had never had any choice about sleeping with him, once his father had paid over the sum her owner demanded. Of course you must obey your master, Menestor had said. Hermogenes had always believed that, too. If a master wanted to sleep with a slave, and if he wasn’t married and offending his wife by it, and if he didn’t mistreat the slave, then he wasn’t doing anything wrong. It might cause problems to have a favorite in the household, but those could be sorted out. He had never slept with any slave in his own household since Thaïs, but that had been because he loved his wife, and, after her death, because he hadn’t wanted to upset his daughter. He had always accepted other men’s right to indulge themselves—but now Hyakinthos’s expression of hopeless desperation would not leave his mind.

  He went back to the door of the dayroom and said, “Menestor?”

  “Sir?” said the young man’s voice out of the darkness, thick with sleep.

  Hermogenes hesitated. Menestor had never, so far as he knew, slept with anyone—and if the boy had somehow managed to lose his virginity without his master’s knowledge, it had been by his own choice. Perhaps he wasn’t a good person to consult. He was awake now, though, so he asked “Will Hyakinthos be all right?”

  There was a silence, as though the question was a surprise. “He should do well,” Menestor replied at last. “His master dotes on him. He’s getting a good education out of it and all sorts of privileges. He should even be able to get his freedom. He’s lucky with his looks, and he ought to do very well.”

  “But he hates his master’s bed.”

  “Now,” said
Menestor dismissively. “But it’s not as though Titus Fiducius is hurting him. He will get used to it, sir. Sir, please do as he asked you, and don’t mention what he said. You’d upset his master and it could ruin his chances completely.”

  “‘His chances,’” said Hermogenes flatly. “Menestor, would you sleep with a man like Crispus for your freedom?”

  There was another silence. “Titus Fiducius isn’t my master, sir,” Menestor said in an uncertain tone. “You are.”

  “I don’t want to sleep with you!” Hermogenes told him in exasperation. He hesitated again, wondering what he wanted to hear, why he was bothering a slave who only wanted to get back to sleep. “Do you hate being a slave so much?” he asked at last.

  “No,” Menestor replied slowly. “But I’d like it if … if … if you … if you freed me. Sir.” His voice was full of longing. “Not that I don’t like working for you, sir, it’s just that … well, anybody’d rather be free than slave.”

  “Very true,” Hermogenes said quietly. “Very true.”

  He thought of all the slaves in his house—people he’d grown up among, people familiar and loved. Did they all want so badly to be free? He hoped they didn’t: he couldn’t free all of them. There was a tax on manumissions of slaves; there were laws limiting how many could be manumitted in a will. Free people needed wages to buy food, too, and money to pay rent: unless they were paid well, they’d be worse off than slaves, who had food and accommodation free. He thought of his uncle’s debt—that ulcer which was eating its way steadily into his own affairs, for all his efforts to block and baffle it. He tapped the doorframe. “I will free you one day, Menestor,” he promised. He could make no promises for the others.

  “I … thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”

  “Thank me when I do it.” He went back to bed.

  He woke next morning with a sore head and a queasy stomach to find Menestor opening the shutters. He groaned.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said the slave soothingly, “but there’s a letter for you from the consul, and I thought you’d want to see it at once.”

  He groaned again, but got up and stumbled into the dayroom. The letter lay on the table, a neat scroll of papyrus, inscribed in bold black lettering with the address: Hermogenes of Alexandria, at the house of T. Fiducius Crispus. He felt a stab of irritation that the writer had treated his name as purely Greek while giving Crispus his full Latin nomenclature. He grimaced at the letter, and went to the water pitcher to get himself a drink of water and splash his face before he sat down to open it.

  L. TARIUS RUFUS, CONSUL, TO HERMOGENES OF ALEXANDRIA: GREETINGS.

  You may visit my house on the Esquiline today at the fifth hour.

  That was all, but Hermogenes felt his heart speed up. Today.

  He set the letter down carefully and glanced round at Menestor, who was waiting in the door to the sleeping cubicle.

  “Today,” he informed the young man, “at the fifth hour. What time is it now?”

  “The beginning of the third hour, sir.”

  “Again? Never mind. I need a clean tunic and a shave. Zeus! The Esquiline, he says. I’ll have to find out where that is.”

  Fiducius Crispus was still in bed. Stentor informed him that the Esquiline was one of the seven hills of Rome, and that it was less than a mile to the north of the house. Hermogenes considered that, then decided that he did, nonetheless, want to travel by sedan chair. Given that either the consul or his secretary had ignored his status as a Roman citizen, it seemed desirable to do as much as he could to show that he was a man of substance.

  “May I ask you to send someone to fetch me a sedan chair?” he asked Stentor. “I would send one of my own slaves, but they do not have the Latin. I would prefer Gaius and Quintus Rubrius, who said they might be summoned by an inquiry in the Cattlemarket, at the foot of the Aemilian Bridge, but if they are not available, then a chair with other bearers.”

  “The master said you could use his chair,” the steward whispered hoarsely.

  “I do not want to impose on him. I do not know how long I will be, and he might want it himself.”

  Stentor seemed pleased at this consideration. “I’ll send someone at once, sir.”

  “Also, can you tell me where is the nearest barber?”

  The steward smiled. “In front of you, sir. That was my work in the household for many years, until the master made me steward. I still shave him myself.”

  “Oh! Then could you—”

  “My pleasure, sir.”

  Stentor did send someone for the chair at once, but even so it was nearly an hour before the Rubrius brothers arrived at the house. Hermogenes was waiting in the atrium by that time, walking up and down, stopping occasionally to check his reflection in the pond of the impluvium. The pond always showed him the same thing: a short, muscular, dark-haired man, impeccably dressed in a long cloak of linen dyed an expensive shade of dark red-gold, neatly draped, worn over a fresh white tunic pinned on the right shoulder with a gold fibula—the picture of confident wealth, if it hadn’t been for the expression of worry. Menestor and Phormion sat quietly on the atrium bench, both in their best clothes, Menestor holding the copies of the debt documents in a leather satchel.

  At last the chair arrived, and Kyon the doorkeeper announced it. Hermogenes strangled his impulse to bolt out into the street: he thanked the doorkeeper, proceeded out onto the Via Tusculana in a stately fashion, and smiled at the sedan-chair bearers.

  The Rubrii grinned back and set the chair down for him. “I wish to go to the house of the consul Tarius Rufus, on the Esquiline,” he told them, and was pleased at his own matter-of-fact tone.

  “Right, sir!” agreed Gaius Rubrius. “Should be easy to find. Climb in.”

  He climbed in and held the shafts tightly to keep his balance as the bearers picked it up and set it on their shoulders. He glanced round to check that Menestor and Phormion were ready, then tried to sit back and relax as the party set off.

  Gaius Rubrius talked quite a bit at first: “You’re seein’ the consul, sir? On business? He gave some good games to celebrate his consulship. You like the games, sir?” Hermogenes answered pleasantly but noncommittally: yes, it was on business; no, he did not like gladiatorial games—had never cared for bloodshed. Then they reached the slopes of the Esquiline, and Gaius stopped talking and used all his breath for climbing.

  The towering insulae had climbed in a gray tide from the Via Tusculana and up the Esquiline’s southern slope, but when the sedan chair neared the top of the hill, it came into a region of luxurious villas, set back from the road behind high walls. The one belonging to Rufus was, indeed, easy to find: the first person Gaius Rubrius asked for directions—a slave woman off with a shopping basket—gave them at once. No one who could afford a villa on the Esquiline was obscure.

  Rufus’s villa was enclosed, like its neighbors, and access was through a gatehouse. The gate was kept not by a single slave but by four armed guards. It was a shock to see them there—tall, fair-haired men in mail shirts and red-crested helmets, out of place in a city which forbade the carrying of arms. They eyed the sedan chair suspiciously. Hermogenes gave his name to their leader and produced the letter making the appointment. The guardsman merely glanced at the Greek writing, but studied the seal carefully. He gave the visitor a long, cold stare. “What time is your appointment?” he demanded. His Latin had a strong accent which Hermogenes could not recognize—German, perhaps, or that of some other tribe of northern barbarian.

  “The fifth hour,” Hermogenes informed him.

  Another hard stare. “You’re early. The fourth hour is only half finished.”

  “I am a stranger to the city, and I did not wish to insult the consul by being late,” Hermogenes replied.

  At this the guard grunted and jerked his head for his fellows to open the gate. “Go round the back of the house,” he ordered.

  The sedan chair proceeded through into a formal garden, enclosed between the wings of a tiled
two-story house. There were cypress trees, and small hedges of box and rosemary clipped in complicated forms. The morning sun glittered on a fountain, and shone on the paths of immaculate white sand.

  “Never been in a place like this b’fore,” said Gaius Rubrius in a subdued voice. “Pretty.”

  They went round the back of the house, as they had been ordered. There was a stable there, with a number of horses inside it, another thing Hermogenes had not expected to find in a city outside a palace. A groom ordered them to wait in the stableyard while he fetched another slave from the house. The second slave, a middle-aged man, looked at the seal on the letter in a supercilious fashion, then instructed the bearers to take their chair into the stable and wait there. With a disapproving air he gestured Hermogenes himself toward the house.

  Menestor and Phormion followed, but the house slave stopped them. “You wait there,” he ordered, gesturing toward the stable and speaking in the loud, simple Latin used to address foreigners.

  The two looked anxiously at Hermogenes. They understood the slave’s meaning, but knew that a gentleman shouldn’t go to a meeting with no attendants at all.

  “The young man is my secretary,” Hermogenes told Rufus’s man calmly. “He is carrying documents relating to the business I have come here to discuss.”

  The man grimaced. “Very well. He can come with you. The other fellow stays. The master doesn’t like his house cluttered with people who have no business there.”

  “Phormion, wait with the chair,” Hermogenes ordered. The big bodyguard hesitated, then went obediently back to join the Rubrii. Menestor followed Hermogenes into the house.

  The house of Tarius Rufus was even finer than his gardens. Everywhere there were mosaic floors, painted ceilings, luxurious hangings of red and green, frescoed walls. The slave showed them to a bench in a marble atrium, told them, “You’re early. You’ll have to wait,” and departed.

  They waited. Hermogenes passed the time by trying to estimate the value of the house and that part of its contents he’d seen. Houses in Rome were very expensive, he knew—that topic, too, had surfaced at the previous night’s dinner—and a place like this, right in the middle of the city, must have cost well over a million even without the furnishings.