Tears would fill the large blue eyes of ten-year-old Lucanus. The Unknown God. The libation was not only an ancient custom of the Greeks, to Lucanus. It was a mystic salutation, a universal rite. Lucanus would watch the falling ruby drops and his heart would clench with an almost unbearable emotion, as if he were witnessing the spilling of divine blood, the offering of an inscrutable Sacrifice.
Who was the nameless and Unknown God? Aeneas would answer his son: It was a custom of the Greeks to perform this ritual to Him, and it was necessary to maintain civilized Grecian custom when one lived among Roman barbarians, even barbarians who ruled the world. His scarred hands would fold themselves in an unconscious gesture of homage, and his narrow face, so insignificant and ordinary, acquired distinction and gravity. It was then that Lucanus was sure he loved his father.
Lucanus had been carefully tutored by his father about the gods, for whom he used Grecian names, and not the gross names given them by the Romans. Even so, with their poetic and lovely names, they were, for Lucanus, merely man grown gigantic and immortal, possessing all man’s cruelty, rapacity, and lust and hatred and malice. But the Unknown God appeared not to possess the attributes of man, neither his vices nor his small virtues. “The philosophers have taught that He is not to be comprehended by man,” Aeneas had once told his son. “But He is mighty, omniscient and omnipresent, circumambient yet in every particle that has being, whether tree or stone or mankind. So say the deathless thinkers of our people.”
“The boy is too serious for his age,” Aeneas once said to his wife, Iris. “However, one should remember that his grandfather, my father, was a poet, and so I must not be too censorious.”
Iris knew that the poet grandfather was one of her husband’s more pathetic fictions, but she nodded in agreement. “Yes, our son has the soul of a poet. Yet I see and hear him playing with great liveliness with the little Rubria; they chase the sheep together and hide from each other among the olive trees, and sometimes their childish laughter is boisterous and loud.”
She watched her husband gently as he lifted his long head with importance and attempted to frown. In his poor heart he was flattered, for all his contempt for the Romans. “I trust he does not neglect his lessons,” he said. “With all respect to my employer, it is hard to forget that he is a Roman barbarian, and that his daughter cannot offer my son any intellectual diversion.” He added, quickly, “However, one must remember that he is but ten years old, and the little Rubria is still younger. You say, my dear one, that they play constantly together? I have not noticed it, but then I am busy from dawn to sunset in the tribune’s house.”
“Lucanus assists Rubria with her own lessons.” Iris shook a golden lock from her forehead. “How unfortunate it is that the noble tribune, Diodorus Cyrinus, does not employ you to teach her.”
Aeneas sighed, and touched his wife’s white forehead with his grateful lips. “But who then would manage these Roman affairs in Antioch, and keep the records and supervise the overseers of the slaves? Ah, these greedy, sucking Romans! Rome is an abyss into which all the wealth and the labor of the world sinks without a sound, an abyss from which no music rises or has risen.”
Iris considerately forbore to remind her husband of Virgil. Aeneas usually compared him disdainfully with Homer.
It offended Aeneas that his employer was only a rude tribune, and not an Augustale. True, many of the Roman tribunes were Augustales, but not Diodorus, who loathed patricians and whose hero was Cincinnatus. Diodorus had considerable education and much intellect, and was the son of a sound and virtuous family of many soldiers, but he pretended to the soldier’s scorn for men who preferred the things of the mind. He hugged his old-fashioned virtues to his breast and affected ignorance of the things he knew, and spoke in the harsh and simple accents of a soldier to whom books were contemptible. In his way he possessed as many affectations as Aeneas. They were both frauds, Iris would tell herself sadly, but they were also piteous frauds. Let Aeneas condescend to the soldier whose father had freed him, and let Diodorus deliberately use bad grammar and display bad manners: it did not matter.
The father of Diodorus Cyrinus, a moral man of noble qualities, had bought the young Aeneas from an acquaintance who had been noted for his extreme cruelty to his slaves, a cruelty which had become infamous even among a callous and cynical people. It was told that there was none of this man’s slaves who did not bear scars, from the workers in his fields and vineyards and olive groves to the youngest females in his house. Nor, in spite of the laws, did he desist from the wanton killing, at will, of any slave who displeased him, and he had devised manners of torture and murder which gave him immense pleasure. An Augustale of proud if decadent family, and of immense wealth and power, he was also a senator, and it was said that even Caesar feared him.
There was only one man in Rome who dared to scorn him publicly, the virtuous tribune, Priscus, father of Diodorus, who was loved by the Roman mobs, who, themselves debased and vicious as their masters, yet paid him honor for his integrity and his soldierly qualities. The mobs even admired him for his kindness and his justice to his slaves, and this was paradoxical among a people to whom a slave was less than a four-legged beast.
Aeneas, the Greek slave, had been one of the workers on the senator’s land, and no one was quite certain how Priscus had acquired him, except Aeneas, and he never spoke of it. But Priscus had brought the wounded and broken youth to his house, had called his physician to treat him, had assigned him a place in his household, and had required only obedience from him. “We are all subject to obedience,” Priscus had told his new slave, sternly. “I obey the gods and the laws of my fathers, and there is pride in such subjection, for it is voluntary, and demanded of all honorable men. The man without discipline is a man without a soul.”
Aeneas was illiterate, but he was quick and respectful and had a shrewd and orderly mind. Priscus, who believed every man, even a slave, should be developed to his full capacity, had permitted Aeneas to sit in a corner of a room where his young son was being tutored. Within an amazingly short time Aeneas had caught up with Diodorus; his memory was astounding. It was not long until Aeneas, at the command of Priscus, was sitting at the foot of the table where Diodorus sat with his tutor. “Have we a Greek scholar here?” Priscus asked the tutor ironically. But the tutor replied with sagacity that Aeneas was no true scholar, but only a young man of clever mind.
By the time Aeneas was twenty-five he was managing the Roman estates of his master, Priscus, while Diodorus had taken up his proper profession as a soldier and was assisting the procurator in Jerusalem. He had also fallen in love with another slave, the young Iris, handmaiden to the wife of Priscus, a beautiful Greek girl, the pet of the household, educated personally by Antonia, who regarded her with the affection of a mother. Priscus and Antonia had presided over the wedding of the young people, and had given them many gifts, including the priceless one of their freedom.
Diodorus Cyrinus, returning home after the death of his parents, had been pleased with the freedman, Aeneas, for the Roman estates were in fine order. He remembered his old fellow student as being a ‘commonplace fellow’ of no particular brilliance, but he recognized his qualities and honesty, though he was annoyed at the petulances and small arrogances he displayed against the slaves under his command. But, as Diodorus was extremely intelligent, and secretly merciful, he understood that in this way Aeneas was compensating for the years of his own slavery.
The lonely young Roman, who was now twenty-seven, five years younger than Aeneas, soon married a young woman of a sturdy Roman family, who had his own robust qualities but not his intelligence. Shortly after this, Diodorus was assigned to govern Antioch, in Syria, and he took Aeneas and Iris with him. Here Aeneas found wider scope for his talents of meticulousness and management and bookkeeping and precision, and for the first time he had a home of his own on the estate in the suburbs of Antioch. In the evenings he dreamt his dreams of the glorious men of old Greece, and identified himsel
f with them, and read the poems of Homer, and declaimed them aloud to his wife and son. His learning, intellectually, remained small and meager. He prated of Socrates, but the dialogues were beyond his real comprehension. He knew very little of the lesser giants of Greece, and almost nothing of the statesmen of his nation. He served his gods as dutifully as he served Diodorus. Perhaps they meant Greece to him; perhaps, in their loveliness and delicacy and splendor, they reminded him that their Roman counterparts were gross and lascivious and brutish, beyond all subtlety and grace, merely enlarged shadows of the Romans themselves. In his gods Aeneas found refuge from his memories of bitter slavery; in them he found pride for himself, for even Romans honored them and built temples to them, and began to draw distinctions between them and their own deities.
Aeneas had preferred Rome to Antioch, for though he disdained the Roman rabble he had liked the bustle in the crowded streets and the excitements of the city and the air of power. Antioch, to him, was too ‘foreign’, for it was constantly being invaded by rough seamen from hundreds of nameless and doubtful barbarous places. He had a conspicuous aversion for them, and would shudder at them fastidiously. But he had a small and pleasant house of his own, with cool stone floors and bright woolen curtains and arches and gardens, and it was far enough away from the larger house of Diodorus to give him the illusion that he was a master of land in his own right. Much of this pleasure, however, was spoiled frequently for him when he came into contact with Diodorus and was forced to listen in silence to the Roman’s soldierly expletives and coarse language.
Diodorus was even lonelier in Syria than he had been in Rome. His wife, Aurelia, was a buxom young woman who devoted herself to her household and its slaves and her husband and her young daughter. She was pious and virtuous in the manner of an old Roman matron. But she was unlearned and only shrewd, and as naturally unpolished as her husband was naturally if secretly polished. She chattered about the slaves, her daughter, the newest fashions from Rome, suspected depredations in the kitchen, the climate, the health of her family, and the dishes she herself concocted under the eyes of the cooks. There was no doubt that she was an estimable woman, and there was no doubt that though she was a trifle too fat she had much prettiness of round pink face and large brown eyes and luxurious black hair. Diodorus would listen to her fondly, and then would retire to his library, there to bring books out of assiduous hiding and read until midnight, long after all in the household had retired. He especially delighted in poetry and history and philosophy. He would whisper a whole poem to himself, with a kind of wanton abandonment to phrases and cantos.
It never occurred to him, as an anachronistically moral Roman, to seek some sexual diversion in the teeming brothels of Antioch, nor did he consider it proper to gather together with some fellow Romans in the city for gaming or cockfighting or even simple companionship. A man’s place, after his work, was in his home, according to Diodorus, no matter how trivial his wife’s conversation. He drank very little at the table, and believed drunkenness to be one of the major sins, so he had no escape except in his work.
Aurelia had women friends among the Roman families in Antioch, but they were as virtuous and ordinary as she herself. She and they would gossip about the more emancipated women of their acquaintanceship, and would deplore them with shivers. They were all completely and innocently unaware of the depravity of their nation, its corruption and its moral viciousness, its licentious manners and mores, and they criticized other women for conduct which was common in Rome, and accepted. Their lares and penates were the most important things in their lives, and their gossip was as exciting as a bowl of stewed beans. But they were happy; they had husbands and children and gardens, and they were industrious and devoted.
It was among the simpler soldiers in Antioch that Diodorus Cyrinus found some respite, and he talked with them easily of military matters, to the smothered vexation of his junior officers. The officers themselves considered that they were exiles in this country, and they longed for the delights and gaiety and vices of Rome, and they thought of their superior officer with wonder and secret derision. They never doubted his morality, but this did not inspire their respect; rather, they believed him a fool. Even his stern justice, which was never overcast by a moment’s pettiness or caprice, was, to them, something inhuman. He would punish an officer as quickly as a common foot soldier, no matter his family or his standing in Rome. Aeneas sympathized with them, and when they would wink at him over some rigid order of Diodorus’ he would pompously pretend to hide a smirk.
Matters had been particularly perplexing and obnoxious today. Diodorus, surrounded by his officers, had watched the fruits of Syria, honey, olives and olive oil, wool, and many other things, being loaded by slaves on a Roman ship. Though it was December, and the feast of the Saturnalia was approaching, the sun had been unseasonably hot, the air wet with humidity, the greasy waters glittering as if covered by lighted fat. The shouts of the overseers had been exceptionally irritable, and the cracking of whips had snapped unceasingly against the wall of damp air. But the slaves, sweating profusely, were sluggish. Suddenly, with an impatient curse, Diodorus had left the table on the docks where Aeneas was meticulously recording the bales and the barrels, and had himself seized a particularly large box on his shoulder as easily as if it had been a small lamb. He had strode up the plank of the ship and hurled the box with swift precision on the other boxes. Then he had stood there, smiling happily.
The officers gaped; Aeneas looked delicately aside; the soldiers stared, the overseers and the slaves were petrified. But Diodorus had flexed his muscles and breathed deeply, and had said: “Eh! But that is good for a man’s soul!”
Aeneas, the Greek, shared with all Greeks a contempt and detestation of manual labor, and he was shocked to the heart. He and the others were even more shocked when Diodorus shouted to the slaves, “Are you men or sickly worms? This must all be loaded before sunset or you will work by torches in the dark. Come then, let us move like men with a purpose and have done with it!” Again he had bent and seized a barrel and rolled it up the plank, and his muscles strained in his shoulders and legs and arms. It was obvious that he was enjoying himself. The slaves, spurred by whips, hurried back to work and, inspired by Diodorus, quickened their movements. He began to sing hoarsely in a rollicking rhythm, and the slaves laughed and sang with him. Long before sunset the ship was loaded. Not a single officer had assisted, and not even a foot soldier, for Diodorus had indicated, with a contemptuous glare, that he repudiated their assistance.
Then Diodorus stood among his officers and wiped himself with a kerchief one of them offered him, and he grinned at the ship. The captain approached him with awed respect, and Diodorus shouted, “Tell the effete lady-men in Rome that Diodorus Cyrinus, son of Priscus, himself helped to load this ship! Tell them, as they perfume themselves with nard and attar of roses and listen to the lutes and dip nightingale tongues in honey, that today you have seen a Roman work as Romans once worked, and as they must work again if Rome is to survive and not die forever among vases and flowers and singing-girls and wine and elegance.”
Then he had turned to his officers — who were blushing in shame for him — and had cursed loudly and had shouted again, “Where are your scars and your calluses, your muscles, and your brown shoulders, you exquisites? Do you know what war is, and labor, and the strength of bodies which live sparely and with fortitude? To Hades with you all! By Mercury, you are less men than these poor slaves!”
This was unpardonable. The slaves snickered among themselves, and the faces of the Roman officers had darkened ominously. But they dared not reply. Diodorus was quite capable of slapping an impudent face openly; he had done it often enough, even before foot soldiers and slaves.
Diodorus, unfortunately, was not done. He wrathfully surveyed his men, and continued, “Cincinnatus left his plow to save Rome, and he did not halt even to wash his stained hands or put his sandals on his soil-dusted feet. But not one of you would leave the arms
of a Syrian whore to save the life of a man, or to uphold, in your jurisdiction, a law of Rome.”
He had swung away from them then, and had pounded back on the docks to his horse, and had galloped off home to the suburbs. He left his chariot behind to be brought by an officer to his stables, and Aeneas rode in it with the officer. Once at home, Aeneas had related the whole horrifying episode to Iris, who had listened in silence. He expected her to be appalled, as he was appalled, but she had said mildly, with her lovely smile, “The noble tribune was once my playmate in the house of Priscus. He was always a strenuous boy; he would sometimes carry me on his back and pretend that he was Jupiter in the guise of a bull and I Europa.”
She had watched the aghast expression on Aeneas’ face for a moment, and had added gently, “Ah, but we were only children then, dear one.”
There were times when Aeneas could not understand Iris, and he said pompously, “I see that you do not grasp the larger implications of this incredible episode of today. Diodorus is constantly talking of discipline, yet he publicly derided his officers before their men and the slaves. Does that enhance their authority?”