A Mist of Prophecies

by Saylor, Steven

  There was a noise at the door. Both of us looked up to see Bethesda. She looked pale and delicate, but in her eyes I saw a steady flame that signalled hope. The journey to Egypt had come to mean everything to her.

  ‘Are you done packing, Husband?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. We leave at dawn. Diana, if you’ve finished helping your father, come help me sort my things.’

  ‘Of course.’ Diana rose and followed her mother. In the doorway she paused and looked back. Her eyes glittered with tears. ‘Can it really be tomorrow that you’re leaving, Papa? I suddenly feel like Hieronymus; I envy you! You shall see the Nile, and the pyramids, and the giant Sphinx . . .’

  ‘And the great library,’ I said, ‘and the famous lighthouse at Pharos . . .’

  ‘And perhaps you shall even meet . . .’

  We laughed, knowing we shared the same thought without speaking.

  ‘Cleopatra!’ I said, finishing her sentence.

  ‘Cleopatra!’ she echoed, as if that odd, foreign-sounding name were a code for all that was understood between us, spoken or unspoken.

  After she left the room, I rose from the bed and stepped to the trunk. I reached down and picked up the bronze urn. I held it for a long time, feeling the metal’s cold rigidity, sensing the heaviness of its contents. Finally I returned the urn to the trunk and slowly, gently closed the lid.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  After two novels recounting political manoeuverings and military operations at the outset of the Roman Civil War – Rubicon and Last Seen in Massilia – it was my wish to return to the city of Rome and to see what its beleaguered citizens, especially its women, were up to.

  While Caesar and Pompey conducted an overt war in northern Greece, who can doubt that covert operations continued at an equally furious pace back in Rome? We can easily imagine that espionage, bribery, betrayals, profiteering, and all sorts of other skullduggery were rife, but when it comes to eyewitness or even secondhand accounts, our sources for this particular time and place – Rome in the year 48 BC – are scattered and obscure.

  The challenge to the status quo posed by Marcus Caelius, and its outcome, are recounted in several ancient sources, including Velleius Paterculus, Livy, Cassius Dio, and Caesar’s The Civil War. Unfortunately, these authors offer contradictory and fragmentary details and do little to establish even an approximate timetable. But the same chronological uncertainty and paucity of detail that constrain the historian offer a certain elasticity to the novelist, of which I have taken considerable advantage.

  In trying to make sense of the political milieu and the mood of Rome in 48 B.C., I found myself returning again and again to a book by Jack Lindsay, Marc Antony: His World and His Contemporaries (London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1936). Lindsay offers a far more complex ideological interpretation of the aims of Marcus Caelius than do most historians, who tend to dismiss Caelius as a mere opportunist. For details of the conflict between Pompey and Caesar, T. Rice Holmes’s closely argued, exhaustively annotated The Roman Republic and the Founder of the Empire (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923) provides a vivid reconstruction. The letters of Cicero also yield much information on the chain of events; I have spent many hours appreciating the labours of Evelyn S. Shuckburgh of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who not only translated but arranged and indexed the entire correspondence in chronological order in The Letters of Cicero (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909).

  What of Titus Annius Milo and his fate? Did even his old champion Cicero mourn him? Perhaps not. Consider that Titus Annius may have added the ‘Milo’ to his name because he wished to equate himself with the legendary Olympic athlete Milo of Crotona; consider that Cicero probably felt guilty to the end of his days for botching Milo’s defence at his trial for murdering Clodius; consider that, in the dying Republic, Milo must have become the epitome of the has-been who wouldn’t stay gone; and then read the following rather catty passage by Cicero in his treatise ‘On Old Age,’ written in 44 BC, four years after Milo’s death. This is Michael Grant’s translation, from Cicero’s Selected Works (Penguin Books, 1960):

  A man should use what he has, and in all doings accommodate himself to his strength. There is a story about Milo of Crotona, in his later years, watching the athletes train on the race-course. With tears in his eyes he looked at his own muscles, and said a pitiable thing: ‘And these are now dead.’ But you are the one who is now dead, not they, you stupid fellow, because your fame never came from yourself, it came from brute physical force . . . Milo is said to have walked from end to end of the race-course at Olympia with an ox on his back; well, which would you prefer to be given, Milo’s physical vigour, or the intellectual might of [Milo’s friend] Pythagoras? In short, enjoy the blessing of strength while you have it, and have no regrets when it has gone . . . nature has one path only, and you cannot travel along it more than once.

  Was this Cicero’s way of declaring to the world that his Milo had no one to blame but himself?

  What of the women of Rome who populate these pages? Terentia, Tullia, Fabia, Fulvia, Sempronia, Antonia, Cytheris, Fausta, Clodia, and Calpurnia all existed. Gordianus has encountered some of them previously in the Roma Sub Rosa series – Clodia in The Venus Throw and A Murder on the Appian Way; Fulvia, Sempronia, and Fausta in A Murder on the Appian Way; and Fabia in the eponymous short story in The House of the Vestals.

  Terentia’s marriage to Cicero ended when he divorced her and married a much younger woman, probably late in 46 BC At about the same time, Tullia and Dolabella also divorced. Tullia’s death the next year caused her father much grief, but according to Pliny, Terentia went on to reach the remarkable age of 103.

  Probably Fulvia made the greatest impact on history, especially after her marriage to Marc Antony in 47 BC, following Antony’s divorce from Antonia; Antony even gave up Cytheris for her. But neither Fulvia nor any of these other women speaks to us across the ages in her own voice. We have letters written by Pompey and Antony and Caelius, we have whole books by Caesar and Cicero, but for these women we have only secondhand sources, and mostly hostile sources at that. (Unable to account for Fulvia’s ruthlessness and ambition, Velleius Paterculus called her ‘a woman only on account of her gender.’)

  As remarkable as these women must have been, no ancient historian saw fit to leave us a biography of any of them; to write the life story of a woman was beyond Plutarch’s imagination. The reader who wishes to know more about them will find only scattered crumbs, not the rich banquet afforded to anyone with an appetite for Pompey, Caesar, or any number of other men of antiquity. For the modern historian working from such sources, the task of bringing these women to life is problematic to the point of being insurmountable; so it seems fitting that they should find a prominent place in the Roma Sub Rosa, a secret history of Rome, or a history of Rome’s secrets, as seen through the eyes of Gordianus.

  Thanks are due to my editor at St. Martin’s Press, Keith Kahla, for his attentiveness and patience; to my agent, Alan Nevins, for keeping me too busy to get into any trouble; to Penni Kimmel and Rick Solomon for their comments on the first draft; and to my good neighbours at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, whose splendid production in the spring of 2001 of the complete Oresteia by Aeschylus inspired the creation of Gordianus’ Cassandra.