A Pillar of Iron: A Novel of Ancient Rome

by Taylor Caldwell

  Marcus listened intently. Then he said, “Noë ben Joel speaks of the Messias of the Jews, Who will change men’s hearts.”

  Archias made a superb gesture. “These Jews! And where is this famous Messias? Why does He wait so long? If He comes, which I doubt, He will understand men. But I doubt He will be able to change them.”

  Marcus had had many disturbances of his emotions this night and now his head began to ache. He became inattentive, and in impatience Archias dismissed him. Marcus went to his cubiculum but could not sleep.

  He lay uneasily and listened to the huge and sleepless roar of the mighty city about him. He thought of her vast subject territories which embraced the world, and her countless millions of subject people of multiple races and tongues. He thought of her power, growing more tremendous every day. Yet, as she now struggled with her own people in her own land the subject lands and nations stirred restively, hoping that the eagle’s wings would be torn, her head severed, and that then they would be free of the short sword and the iron claw that held it. Roman banners on endless walls and on distant fortresses were eyed with speculation; lips were wetted. The fasces were secretly cursed. The Roman legions which marched everywhere were gazed on with hating and hostile eyes. If Rome were weakened and divided, then the jackals would move upon her wounded members.

  It was true that Rome had established her alien law in conquered lands and introduced her alien customs and her alien gods. But the law was still fairly just though the taxes were growing more onerous. The proconsuls were as honest as could be expected, considering the local pressures which were exerted upon, them and the mighty bribes which were offered by princes and chieftains and tax-gatherers. To a world simmering with constant war Rome had brought a peace, a precarious one, but still it was a peace. The short sword was hated, but it kept the law, and it enforced order. Rome had been wise enough not to impose her gods upon conquered nations. She had been shrewd enough even to accord alien deities a measure of honor and to introduce many into her own pantheon.

  In all of history, then, there had been no ruler so comparatively benign before. The Roman passion for jurisprudence had relieved populaces from a constant siege. But if subject nations showed signs of rebellion they felt the crushing weight of the Roman fist. Romans considered this only reasonable. They also considered that national pride and natural patriotism in conquered lands to be reprehensible, for did they not threaten the peace of Rome? The world was Roman; let it beware of dreaming of its own hegemony again, its own independence. What had independence wrought in the past? Wars, competitive ambitions, destruction, disorder.

  Marcus, lying on his hard bed, considered these things. He considered the Pax Romana, enforced with cold and efficient ruthlessness. It was against nature! Nations could not be welded together like bits of iron! They were composed of men, of different races, tongues, customs, gods. They had a right to their land, and only they had a right. Rome strove to destroy individuality and variety, in the name of peace and in the name of Rome. But men persisted in being born with features of their own and souls forever alien from the Pax Romana. It was a mad and unnatural dream—that all men should have one government and look to that sole government for law, and pay their taxes to that government. Dead empires had had that dream before, including Greece, and it had destroyed them, for man’s spirit will not be mocked. What was it Noë ben Joel had quoted to him, Marcus, from the writings of the Jews? That God had set the boundaries of the nations and had created the various races, and no man should intrude upon them.

  “Of one thing you can be certain,” Archias once had said. “Men learn nothing from the past. They tread the same old paths to death and are blind to the warnings.”

  And today, as Rome struggled with her brothers on Italianate land, conquered nations hoped and prayed that she would fall, and that they would be free of her onerous peace and her taxes and her law once again—for these were alien to their spirits.

  Marcus’ thoughts became more and more uneasy. He wondered if he were being disloyal to his country. He rose and lighted his lamp by the one in the corridor and then looked at it aimlessly, and with inner disquiet. He was proud of his country. But other men had a right to be proud of their own countries, too, and to maintain their own laws.

  Marcus’ head buzzed with many thoughts and ached more fiercely. Archias had a low opinion of mankind, he mused, thinking of Archias’ words tonight. To Archias man was amusingly evil, and completely evil; he was at his worst when he pretended to virtue. Yet, truly, Marcus said to himself, there is some virtue in man. He had magnanimous impulses as well as cruel ones. He built hospitals for the poor and the slaves, as in Rome. He protected slaves with various laws. (Romans did not consider slaves mere “things,” as the Greeks had considered them.) He had an ineradicable honor for truth and justice, even when he was a liar and unjust, himself. He respected virtue, though often lacking virtue.

  Marcus found himself in the cold atrium, and wondered vaguely how he had come to be there. No slave slept in the hall any longer. The youth opened the strong oaken door and the chill February wind struck through his woolen shift. But he looked down upon the city. Romans went to bed early, but many were still abroad on their feasting and their revels. The dull mutter of hurrying chariots came to Marcus in a metallic thunder of wheels. The city looked as if on fire in the murk, for the torches affixed to stone walls fluttered for miles like a flaming and restless sea. Lanterns still bobbed everywhere. And the winter sky, lowering in clouds over the city, reflected the torchlight. Near and distant shouts, laughter and heavy voices were borne on the hovering fog. Marcus closed the door.

  He had reached the curtain of his cubiculum again when he heard a hoarse groaning. He halted, straining to hear. The groan was repeated, then a faint and strangled cry. Marcus’ first thought was of his father, and he was suddenly sick with dread. But when he reached his father’s cubiculum he heard no sound from within except a restless turning. The groaning was suddenly loud again, full of distress, and Marcus ran down the cold and narrow hall to his grandfather’s cubiculum.

  “Grandfather?” he asked in a low voice.

  The old man cried out again, and Marcus threw aside the curtain and entered the cubiculum. It was as black as a hole within. Marcus hurried to his own cubiculum and brought his lamp. He held it high over his grandfather.

  He had never seen the face of death before, or its shadow. But the old man was sitting up in bed, clutching his throat, and his eyes rolled wildly and dimly in the faint light. They fell upon Marcus. He swallowed convulsively, and his gray beard rippled. His hands dropped.

  “I am dying,” he said in the faintest of voices.

  “No,” said Marcus, in terror. He raised up his own voice and shouted for Phelon, the physician, who slept nearby. Phelon came into the hall naked and drowsy, and blinked at the lamp.

  “Help!” said Marcus.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The cypress of mourning stood at the door of the house of the Ciceroni.

  “You are sixteen, Marcus,” said Helvia, whose plump face was serious and pale. “You will not assume the manly robe for seven weeks. Nevertheless, you are now the man of the family. There is none else.”

  To a young man whose life had been serene, only once or twice lit by passion or anger, who had led a most bucolic existence in the heart of a peaceful family, whose days had been quiet and full of affection and without true responsibility, the situation seemed formidable. Not for him had been the uneasy and turbulent days of those engaged in war or who had warriors in the family; not for him the days of anxiety which attended those whose income was uncertain. As he was no patrician, he had been subjected to no arrogances, no insistences on protocol, no heartburning honors, no strivings, no tremendous ambitions, no struggling for political power, no schemes or plots, no mingling with Senators or Consuls or tribunes, no terrors, no suspicions, no grandeur. “In all ways,” he wrote many years later, “my early life was the golden mean of the Greeks,
without excess. But, alas, I do not admire it. Experience makes the man, and if it be fiery, then is the metal tempered. The quiet river moves through peaceful country, but it makes no living estuaries, it does not thunder in green fresh violence over stones. If it has no turbulence, neither has it life. It is stagnant.”

  Marcus could not weep for his grandfather, for he was too stunned, too incredulous that one so colorful and so majestic would be heard no more, would offer no hand to assist youth, would have no words of explicit advice. Marcus felt some bitterness against his father, Tullius, who wept like a child now, and hid his head under coverlets and cried that the family had been cast into ruin. When Marcus visited him in his cubiculum, the father would extend a trembling thin hand to him for help, for reassurance. It was some time before the distraught youth could bring himself to touch that hand of a child. “If only I had died, and not my father!” Tullius would cry, and in his misery and confusion Marcus once or twice echoed the thought in his mind.

  Young Quintus gazed at his older brother with the respect due to the head of the family. The slaves deferred to him. Archias held his mocking tongue for some time. Helvia eyed him sternly, and waited. And he did not know what to do first. His own grief was overpowering; he was not permitted to indulge it, for the family waited on him.

  His grandfather had died in his arms, and it was only then that Marcus had realized how much he had loved the old man, who had stood in the family like a great oak among saplings. His branches had sheltered them from violent winds; his leaves had preserved them from scorching suns; his trunk had been their refuge. Now, in one instant the oak had been felled, and the saplings were exposed. For many mornings, when he awoke, Marcus would cry aloud, “It is not possible!”

  The terrible panoply of death had to be observed, sacrifices made, the temples visited, prayers said for the repose of the grandfather’s severe and virtuous soul, money to be distributed to the poor in his honor, priests to be recompensed, offerings made for the prayers of the Vestal Virgins, candles to be lighted in the grandfather’s name at sundown—lighted by Marcus—exhortations, and money, given to the slaves for their prayers and the remembrance of their duties, visitors to be greeted, condolences to be endured, the grandfather’s will to be listened to as it was intoned gravely by lawyers, and above all, the disposition of his gnarled and stately body. A man does not die simply, and disappear.

  Helvia prudently did not advise her son or even help him. He was now a man, and must assume a man’s responsibilities. Helvia was an “old” Roman. The sooner a youth became a man the better. She merely laid her books before him, explained their significance, and then referred Marcus to the lawyers and the bankers. Marcus on more than one occasion wished to turn to her, but her calm set face warned him that he was no longer a child, and all this was his duty.

  He felt soft, weak, and vulnerable, but, as Helvia waited for him to assume his burden his wings hardened and grew strong, as the young wet wings of a butterfly must do when it emerges from its chrysalis. Otherwise, it will never fly, and would be at once the prey of any bird, helpless and pulpy. There was no time for weeping, no time to pity one’s self. The days crowded on Marcus like encroaching walls or advancing armies. He must deal with them. He could deal well enough with large problems, for there were lawyers and bankers. The small problems tormented and infuriated him. He found himself losing his temper even with the meekest of slaves. His books were dry as powder. He, who had rarely made a decision, must now make all decisions. “I have the most helpless family!” he exclaimed once to his mother. Helvia merely smiled faintly. “Did you wish always to be a child?” she asked.

  The grandfather’s will was simple enough, at first glance. The income of his investments was left to Tullius, but Marcus was the residuary beneficiary as the older son. The house was affectionately bequeathed to Helvia. Quintus, as became a future soldier, was left the old man’s mementoes of wars, his cherished short sword, his shield, his armor, his bust of Mars, his citations for gallantry in the field, his medals. The grandfather had made Marcus his executor; he had also left to him the paternal island at Arpinum.

  For the first time Helvia offered advice. Who knew what had happened to the ancestral home on the island? The family, she pointed out, needed money because of the failure of many investments. When would the family be able to return to the island? Who knew how long the war would last? In the meantime, the property was heavily taxed, due to the war, and the taxes were increasing. Marcus should sell the island.

  “No,” said Marcus.

  Helvia compressed her lips.

  “We shall return,” said Marcus. “Even wars must end sometime.”

  Helvia noticed, for the first time, that Marcus had very prominent brows and for a moment she was startled, for it was as if the grandfather were looking upon her with his own eyes, though their color and shape were hers.

  “I will take his ashes to the island and bury them there, in the spot he loved,” said Marcus. “In the meantime we must live as sparely as possible, to meet our taxes. Strange, is it not?” he asked with bitterness, “but the powerful seem unaffected by taxes, and they flourish even during wars.”

  “They have Senators as friends,” said Helvia. “The corrupt and the influential are never burdened as are the responsible and the just. It is the price we pay to venal government, which protects its favorites and punishes those who despise it.”

  “It was not always so,” said Marcus. “Our history teaches us that when a government is honest and just and virtuous taxes are light. But when a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant, and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself.”*

  He talked of this to Archias, who shrugged.

  He smiled wryly at Marcus. “Now you must become interested in politics, for he who refrains with lofty words has no patriotism and no honor. It was Pericles who said, ‘We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics minds his own business. We say that he has no business in the world at all.’”

  Marcus discovered that the father of Noë ben Joel, Joel ben Solomon, had been the grandfather’s investment counselor and advisor. So Marcus visited Joel ben Solomon, for whom he had a filial affection, having dined at his sumptuous table on many occasions. The elderly man, the father of many daughters—whom he had finally succeeded in marrying off—and one incomprehensible son, received him kindly in his offices in the Forum. His gray beard reminded Marcus of his grandfather, and the shrewd bright eyes also. Marcus looked at him and for the first time since his grandfather’s death his eyes filled with tears. Joel ben Solomon appeared to understand. He sat patiently at his ebony table and regarded Marcus paternally. Finally he spoke.

  “I have you to thank, Marcus, that my son now takes interest in religious matters. I had despaired of him.”

  Joel ben Solomon smiled benignly. “I have hopes also that he will enter this counting house,” he said.

  Marcus returned home to inform his mother that modest though the household was in all its ways more stringent methods must be put into practice. She inclined her head seriously. “Tell me,” she said. “Was I ever profligate? Do I possess a slave whose sole duty it is to anoint me after the bath and arrange my hair? Do I have three cooks in my kitchen? I am the cook, my son. Is my dress extravagant, my shoes jeweled? Do gems lie upon my throat or against my ears? What few slaves we still possess are necessary; moreover they are old and have been in my service, and my mother’s, for many years. Shall we sell these miserable and ancient creatures? Who would buy them? Shall we give them their freedom, and so loose them to starve on the streets? Their manes would curse us! You must tell me what we must do.”

  Marcus hesitated sadly. “There is the stipend of Archias,” he said. “We cannot afford it.”

  “Socrates has said that a man to be of value to the world must have education,” said Helvia.

  “Qui
ntus is no scholar,” said his brother. “He detests books. His tuition at the school of Pilo is half Archias’ stipend.” Helvia sat with her books and waited while Marcus, shrinking inwardly, went to Archias’ quarters to impart his decision. The Greek listened in silence.

  Then he said, “Your father has paid me generously all these years, and I am a man of few wants, except for an excellent wine, which I buy, myself. Moreover, my Eunice is invaluable to the Lady Helvia. I have saved my money; knowing the ways of men, I have invested it in certain ventures. Therefore, permit me to remain with you, my dear Marcus, without a stipend at all. I have no other home.” He hesitated. “If my poor funds will assist you in this crisis, you may call upon them.”

  For the second time that day, and the second since the death of his grandfather, tears filled Marcus’ eyes. He fell upon Archias’ neck and embraced him. “Do not depart from me, my dear teacher,” he said.

  “Tut,” said Archias. His brow wrinkled. “Withdraw Quintus, that amiable dunce, from the school of Pilo. I will teach him for not a penny at all, though I confess that I wince at the thought. But he has a cheerful nature, and that is not to be disdained. He will be in the army in a few years, for which I offer up my pious gratitude.”

  “And I begin, in a few weeks, to study law,” said Marcus. “It is no longer necessary for me to go to the school of Pilo. He has taught me all he knows.”

  “Which is of no great magnitude,” said Archias.