by Mike Ashley
‘I’ve been examining the site of the tragedy and I think I’ve discovered how Basso died.’
They stared at him in desperate expectation. He fumbled in the pouch at his belt and brought out a small object.
‘I found this lodged at the back of Basso’s throat.’
‘An apricot stone!’
‘After Basso left the triclinium he must have helped himself to some fruit, devouring it somewhat greedily, I would judge, two or three in his mouth at a time and spitting out the stones. This became lodged, cutting off air to the windpipe. He choked and fell into the euripus. There is a precedent of course. It’s exactly the way the son of Claudius died.’
‘So it wasn’t murder after all,’ Marcus dealt the Gaul a vindictive look. ‘You’ve been making fools of us. I’ve always known you had an amused contempt for anything Roman, particularly me. I asked you once what you thought when you stood in the arena and looked up at us, we who are masters of the world. You replied, I think only of my opponent’s next move.’
‘I probably meant it. I’m sorry if I gave some offence. That was not my intention.’
‘You did not own me, Gaul. I owned you.’
‘How could it have been otherwise?’ Hengist spread his hands in a self-deprecating manner.
‘I think that now we may safely leave this matter in the illustrious Senator’s hands,’ Piso interrupted, hastily.
‘And a word to the wise,’ Marcus’ look carried a patent threat. ‘Indiscretion is injurious to health.’
‘I like my life as it is,’ responded Hengist. ‘Why should I wish to complicate it? I thank you for a delightful evening. I apologize for the fact that I became so drunk I’ve forgotten most of its events.’
‘May I offer you a lift in my carruca,’ said Piso as they crossed the atrium. ‘We can tie your horse to the back.’
‘Are you sure there’s room in that bed on wheels for two?’
‘If I’m corpulent it’s your fine fare.’
Hengist dropped his voice. ‘You were ready enough to accept my explanation. You must have guessed it was a lie.’
‘I don’t want to know the truth. I’ve reached an understanding with Marcus. A cover-up in return for Julia’s life. He’ll divorce her and I’ll marry her myself. She’ll be so grateful.’ He chuckled, happily.
‘Brave man. And what will become of Basso’s body?’
‘Carried out to sea and dumped. If it washes up, well, he was drowned on his way to Baiae. The populace will howl for a bit, but the girls will soon be writing another name on the walls of the baths.’
Lucius Maro came into sight, mincing towards the peristyle. ‘I presume you won’t object if I take a stroll in the garden,’ he said, smugly.
‘Don’t touch the apricots,’ Hengist called after him.
Lucius threw a pale sneer over his shoulder and walked on.
‘Some people can’t be warned,’ mourned the ex-gladiator.
‘I know,’ agreed Piso, solemnly. ‘It’s the nature of the beast.’
THE GARDENS OF TANTALUS
Brian Stableford
Brian Stableford will be better known to most as a writer of science fiction and supernatural fantasy, with such books as The Empire of Fear (1988) and the David Lydyard trilogy The Werewolves of London (1999), The Angel of Pain (1991) and The Carnival of Destruction (1994). But his interests are far wider. He has a degree in biology, a doctorate in sociology, and has written books on subjects as far afield as futurology and the Wandering Jew. For the following story he turned his attention to the mysterious Apollonius of Tyana who became famed as a miracle-worker throughout the Mediterranean in the first century AD.
We live, it seems, in an Age of Miracles – or lived in one, at any rate, for the miracles about Which the young men always seem to be talking all took place in their grandfathers’ time, when Claudius, Nero or Vespasian was Emperor in Rome. Strange to relate, I – who am certainly a grandfather, born in the seventh year of Nero’s rule – heard little or no talk of miracles at the time, when the word on all men’s lips, in Corinth at least, was philosophy.
One rarely hears that word nowadays; it seems that men have a greater appetite for miracles.
My ignorance of the Age of Miracles through which I lived seems all the more remarkable when I recall (as clearly as if it were yesterday, although fifty years and more have passed) that I was present when one of the most widely rumoured miracles took place, and am named in all accounts as the one who benefited from that miracle.
Lest any Christian should read this – although that seems unlikely, given that a literate Christian is almost a contradiction in terms – let me hasten to say that it is not one of the miracles of their beloved Jesus to which I refer. His crucifixion must have taken place near thirty years before I was born. The miracle-worker I was privileged to meet was a very different man: Apollonius of Tyana, whose associate Damis of Nineveh produced the memoir of his life which proclaimed him a great magician. What Damis sought to prove by this I do not know, but I do know that Apollonius would have despised him for it, for Apollonius was a true philosopher, who had no truck with magic, omens or gods.
So far as I can tell, the principal effect of Damis’ fantasies has been to call forth hymns of hate from the followers of Jesus, whose instinct is to damn all miracle-workers save their own as black magicians and addicts of the sinister. Apollonius has already been attacked in this wise by one Moeragenes, who never knew him at all. But I am only a white-beard philosopher, in a world where age and wisdom count for nothing. For all I know, the lies which Damis tells might secure the memory of Apollonius until the end of time, so that in a thousand years men will know nothing of his life except that he once wrought miracles, and saved a fool named Menippus from the wiles of a lamia.
Perhaps he did; perhaps it is I, Menippus, who am deluded into thinking the world a humdrum place, which might be understood if only men would put aside their silly obsessions with the naming of imaginary gods and the everpresent threat of demons.
I will admit that there is much in the memoir of Damis with which I can pick no quarrel. It may be revealing, however, that most of what seems to me to be true relates to matters of which neither Damis nor I had any direct knowledge, merely repeating the account which Apollonius gave of his own history.
Apollonius was born during the long reign of Augustus, at Tyana in Cappadocia. He was well-schooled and showed great precocity in the art of rhetoric. He became a philosopher of the school of Pythagoras and soon became notorious for preaching, according to the creed of that school, that animal sacrifice was a useless evil. He refused to eat meat, never wore any sandals save those made of bark, and wore no clothing save for that made of linen. He renounced his patrimony, refused all use of money, and once took a five-year vow of silence while he travelled the world.
This vow of silence added greatly to his reputation for holiness, which was responsible in its turn for the fact that so many people sought him out as a healer – but he told me that the reason for the vow was to make of himself a distanced observer, that he might use his eyes and ears all the better as he travelled east through Persia to India, then south through Phoenicia and Palestine to Egypt.
‘I suppose it was a foolish notion,’ he said to me once, ‘but I was young then, and young men are always ready to think in absolutes. I would never have kept the vow had I gone to Egypt before I went to India and there encountered the Gymnosophists – the naked philosophers of the Thebaid. Contemplation of their state cured me of any further wish to take the business of living to its imaginable extremes.’
‘But you did not begin eating meat,’ I pointed out to him, ‘nor wearing animal relics upon your body.’
‘You could not think that an extreme,’ he chided me, ‘were you not a young man, and one who has never known poverty.’
As to the reputation which Apollonius had as a healer and an exorcist, I believe that he was as clever as any man of his time – which is to say that t
he advice he gave to all men who were sick in body was to avoid meat and medicines, and the advice he gave to all men who believed themselves possessed was to avoid meat and magicians. I have offered the same advice throughout my own long life, and by my reckoning it leads to the recovery of three suffers in every five, which is at least one more in five than regain their health after consulting doctors or wizards. Damis, of course, gives a different account – but doubtless he has his reasons.
Which brings us to my own sad case – which Damis calls bewitchment, although I remember it, at worst, as lovesickness.
Apollonius visited Corinth in his sixtieth year, or shortly thereafter. He was welcomed into the household of the Cynic philosopher Demetrius, an avid follower of his doctrines, among whose pupils I was to be counted. I was twenty-five years old, and even Damis concedes that I was handsome and athletic.
Damis misstates the case when he says that I was betrothed to a foreign woman who represented herself as a wealthy Phoenician. I was certainly enamoured of a foreign woman, but she was an Egyptian servant named Nauma, a minor adjunct of the household of a Phoenician widow called Galanthis.
Galanthis had been some months a guest in the house of a rich merchant named Aradus, who had known her for many years through her husband, with whom he had had commercial connections. Aradus was the father of Bassus, a man of my own age with whom I had grown up, although some strain had been placed on our friendship by virtue of the fact that he too was inclined to think of himself as a philosopher although he was an unrepentant hedonist. I used to think of our arguments as a kind of sport but Demetrius took a dimmer view of them and regarded Bassus as a malign influence who threatened his authority over all his pupils.
I must confess that I was by no means the best or most faithful pupil of Demetrius. I had found, while under his tutelage, that I had little heart for the ascetic life towards which Demetrius was continually urging me. Although I recognized that they were mostly excuses for conscienceless self-indulgence, I was not unattracted by the rival doctrines of Bassus. I was firmly committed to the ideals of philosophy, but I was at that time quite uncertain as to which set of ideals was to be preferred. Should it not be possible, I wondered, for a man of wisdom to enjoy life to the full? Should it not be permissible to eat good meat, drink good wine, wear good shoes and love women – marry, even – while still cultivating the art and authority of the mind? Demetrius said that it was not, but Bassus said otherwise.
Such was the antipathy which grew up between Demetrius and Bassus that Bassus became increasingly determined to steal me for his own fledgeling school. He might have succeeded in doing so before Apollonius arrived in Corinth, had it not been for the fact that when I visited the house of Aradus in the month before the fateful visit time spent with Bassus always seemed to be time that ought to have been spent with Nauma. Paradoxically, it was not until I was well away from the house that the words of Bassus began to exert their grip upon me – by which time Demetrius was usually on hand to refute the arguments in the strongest possible terms.
Quite without meaning to, I became the most significant prize that had ever been put at stake in the war of ideas waged between the two men – and Nauma became involved, in spite of the fact that she had not the slightest interest in philosophy. Her one and only vocation was dancing; Galanthis had acquired her on account of her skill in that art – and, I hasten to add, for her skill in that art alone. Even Damis of Nineveh does not dare to allege – as my master Demetrius sometimes did – that my beloved was no more than a common whore.
‘She may be a servant,’ I told my master, aggrievedly, ‘but Nauma is far too precious to be sold in that manner.’
Only because Galanthis intends to wed Aradus herself,’ Demetrius insisted. ‘She dangles her serving-maids before him as a cunning fisherman displays the lure, but you may be sure that he shall not touch them – yet.’
‘Bassus says that his father is perfectly content as a widower,’ I told Demetrius. ‘He has slave-girls of his own.’
‘If Bassus says that, it is hope speaking,’ Demetrius retorted. ‘He fears for his father’s fortune should the Phoenician ever get her greedy hands upon it, and he has extended his debts to the limit with every moneylender in Corinth. Aradus may be a prince of fools, too long retired from the marketplace, but even he knows better than to pay his son’s debts. You may not see what Bassus is, but Aradus does – he knows that an appetite such as that, once unleashed, is likely to devour wealth as a plague of locusts devours a field of green wheat.’
It was, indeed, hope rather than faith that determined Bassus’ opinion. On the same day that Demetrius was told to expect Apollonius in Corinth, Aradus announced that his betrothal to Galanthis would be marked by a sumptuous feast. This was the ‘wedding-feast’ to which Damis refers in his memoir; it was not mine, although I and my beloved were certainly there – and so was Apollonius.
Damis claims that Apollonius used magic to unmask my beloved and expose her as a lamia – a serpentine demon whose intention was to drink my blood and feed on my flesh. He also claims that Apollonius proved that all the gold and silver at the wedding-feast was mere illusion. He did neither of these things, and I am certain in my own mind that he never told Damis exactly what did happen, although Damis seems to have learned more about the matter than he perceived at the time. He did recognize a serpent which the other diners could not see, and he did unravel a strange web of illusion in order to assist in the awkward business of my education – but the ‘magic’ he used was no more than memory and philosophy.
My first meeting with Apollonius was not a happy one, for Demetrius was in a very sarcastic mood when he introduced me. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is Menippus. I do not know whether he will be a member of my school much longer, for he dwells in the gardens of Tantalus, fascinated by the luxury of his dear friend Bassus and mesmerized by the allure of an Egyptian temptress who dances – so I am told – like a snake bewitched by a charmer’s pipe.’
I remember that Damis of Nineveh laughed aloud at this. Perhaps that is why he records in his memoir that his master advised me there and then that I was ‘cherishing a serpent’. In fact, Apollonius said no such thing, and looked at me with a certain sympathy when he saw how hurt and embarrassed I was by my master’s unkind words.
‘It is good that a man should pass through the gardens of Tantalus,’ Apollonius said. ‘How else is he to learn that their promise is false, their reward an illusion? There will be time enough to judge Menippus when he has made his own judgement as to the worth of what is dangled before him.’
I had a speech of my own prepared. ‘I met the merchant Aradus yesterday,’ I told the great sage. ‘He asked me if the world-renowned Apollonius of Tyana were indeed expected to arrive in Corinth today. When I said that you were, he told me that his dearest wish was that the enmity between his son Bassus and the Cynic Demetrius might be set aside for the day of his betrothal. Aradus would be greatly honoured if you and Demetrius would come together to the feast and give your blessing to the union between himself and Galanthis. He knows that you will not eat meat and do not like finery but he says that there would be fruit and bread a-plenty, and that such finery as he intends to display is not intended as an insult to the poor, but merely as a celebration of his own good fortune. He would dearly like Bassus and Demetrius to be friends again, and he hopes that your benign influence might serve to ease the bitterness between them.’
Demetrius scowled, but he dared not make any response until the great man had spoken.
‘You may tell Aradus that I will come,’ Apollonius said, ‘but you must warn him that I cannot settle other people’s quarrels with honeyed words. I am a philosopher, not an envoy of Rome. The purpose of my arguments is to arrive at the truth, not to negotiate settlements.’
‘I will tell him that,’ I promised. ‘He will be very glad that your presence will dignify his betrothal feast.’
‘So he should be,’ said Damis of Nineveh – although
Apollonius frowned at his impoliteness.
‘There is no possibility of any reconciliation between the ideas of Bassus and those of better men,’ Demetrius said, pointedly. ‘His answer to the question of how men should live is that they should feed their appetites without restraint; the better answer is that men should become masters of their appetites. Luxury is the greatest barrier to the path of enlightenment.’
Demetrius looked to Apollonius for support, and I could see that he expected it; he saw the invitation to the feast of Aradus as one more phase in his battle with Bassus for the prize of my allegiance, and he trusted Apollonius to win the battle for him – but all Apollonius said in reply was: ‘There is more than one path to enlightenment – and there are many barriers that might blind a man to the truth.’
Damis of Nineveh was enthusiastic to lend his support to these words, but I am sure now that he never understood their meaning.
The day of the betrothal-feast was beautiful and clear; the most superstitious of men would have searched in vain for any omen of what was to come.
I had never seen such a repast as that which Aradus laid out for his guests, for he had gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that the day would not be forgotten. Although he was no longer the busy man he had been fifteen years before, he remembered with great fondness the days when he had built up his petty empire. His ships brought abundant cargoes from Antioch, Caesarea and Alexandria, and carried the best of Corinth’s produce to Ancona and to Rome. He had been a man of great influence in his time, and he was still an example to the younger men who followed in his footsteps.
The governor himself, Marcellus Cato, had come to sit at Aradus’ right hand. He had his doctor and his astrologer in close attendance, and a dozen men-at-arms under the immediate command of a centurion named Calidius. Arrayed below the governor’s party were the wealthiest men in Corinth, landowners and merchants alike. They were men whose names were known to everyone: the men who determined the commerce of Corinth. Almost without exception they were accompanied by the sons and nephews who would one day inherit their wealth and their concerns. They were so many that the position left to mere philosophers – even to philosophers as famous as Apollonius of Tyana – was a long way down the line, but Apollonius made no objection to his placing and Demetrius swallowed his pride.
