The Prefect of the Praetorians met them in the huge vestibule of the palace, a large and formidable man glaring suspiciously from under his helmet. He shone like a statue of bronze and brown marble under the great plate glass ceiling that topped the vestibule and admitted the sun, and his step was measured and heavy. Plotius lifted his right arm in salute and introduced Lucanus, who did not know how to greet this imposing man who scrutinized him curiously. “Greetings,” he said with briefness. So this was the Greek adopted son of Diodorus Cyrinus, a physician. “Greetings,” responded Lucanus with some stiffness, disliking the scrutiny. The Prefect smiled; he had sharp white canine teeth. “Caesar has summoned you,” he remarked, conveying by the tone of his voice that Caesar was an unpredictable person, and one given to the most extraordinary whims.
Lucanus flushed. He said, coldly, “That I understand. Did you think I should be here otherwise?”
Plotius hastily concealed a smile, for the Prefect was both astonished and displeased at Lucanus’ address. Yet, after a moment, he was impressed by the young physician’s proud manner and the rigorous set of his jaw and his obvious lack of obsequious fear. Like many brutal and military men, he had a secret passion for boys and young men. He decided that he liked the handsome Lucanus, and he put his hand on the young man’s unyielding shoulder.
He was more at ease in speaking the vulgate, but now he spoke in Greek to appease Lucanus, who was obviously not liking him. “You are greatly honored,” he said, and he noted with pleasure the young man’s broad shoulders and pillar-like neck and finely carved facial planes and large blue eyes.
Lucanus did not move. He suddenly remembered the slave trader, Linus, and a hot sickness came to him. Nevertheless, he did not move, quelling his sudden hatred. He said, in the vulgate, “Caesar is very kind.” He looked at Plotius, who was watching intently and frowning a little. He spoke to the young captain, disdaining to move from under the gripping brown hand on his shoulder.
“How shall I greet Caesar?”
Plotius had another struggle with a smile, because Lucanus had spoken to him in Greek, the language of the patricians and the educated. He said, gravely, “You enter his august presence, and when he notices you, which may not be immediately, and when he speaks, you drop upon your knees and touch your forehead to the floor.”
Lucanus said, “But that posture is to honor gods only. The Jews prostrate themselves to Jehovah, but not to any man.”
The Prefect pressed his fingers deeper into Lucanus’ shoulder, in a fatherly manner. “My dear boy,” he said, “have you not heard? Caesar is a god, and you give him the honors of a divinity.”
Lucanus saw that Plotius was shaking his head at him anxiously. So, he said nothing. The Prefect, smiling at him fondly, said, “I myself shall conduct you to the Divine Augustus.” He dismissed Plotius with a curt movement of his head, and Plotius, filled with misgivings, saluted and went away. Upon an affectionate gesture from the Prefect, Lucanus followed him.
The young physician had never seen a place like this, and had never even imagined such splendor and immensity. He even forgot the Prefect in his wonder and his attempt to see everything. They passed from huge hall to huge room and to endless other halls and other rooms, and the floors of each were of polychrome or snowy marble inlaid with shining red or blue stone or mosaics, each reflecting light as if from some inner radiance. Forests of fluted columns opened everywhere, of onyx, white marble, gilded metal, or alabaster. Statues of gods and goddesses stood in arches, and busts of Caesar and his predecessors rested on small columns. The walls glimmered with mosaics depicting victories and episodes in the lives of the gods, and so cunningly were they wrought that they appeared as the most delicate and heroic paintings. Divans and chairs lined the walls, of ivory, teak, and ebony, decorated with gold and upholstered in cushions of red and blue and white and yellow silks. Exquisite tables of marble and lemonwood were scattered near them holding gold and silver lamps not yet lighted, and little Alexandrian crystal vases filled with flowers, and silver and gold trays laden with brilliantly colored pomegranates and grapes and figs and white and black olives. Enormous ceilings seemed to float on the columns, either of glass or marble, but some were painted white and embossed in delicate designs in gold leaf. And everywhere, in every corner, stood tall vases filled with branching flowers, vases imported from Cathay, Persia, and Indi, and shining with many subtle hues. Perfumed fountains scented the air.
There was not a hall or a room which was not filled and bustling with slaves and couriers and Praetorians and high military officers, and senators seeking an audience, and patricians and Augustales here for the same purpose. Some of the latter were seated, engaged in jokes or banter or gossip, and negligently helping themselves to the dainties on the tables. When they saw the Prefect they smiled at him charmingly, knowing his power, and exchanged some words with him. But they looked wonderingly at the young man he conducted with so solicitous an air. Seeing his appearance, the gentlemen winked at each other, put their fingers alongside their noses, and whispered ribald comments.
The Prefect and his charge passed through open colonnades, then into another profusion of rooms, until Lucanus felt dizzy. Sometimes he glimpsed the gardens through a window or guarded doorway, and the green of trees and grass and strongly tinted flowers contrasted with the cool whiteness within. Sometimes he thought he was seeing vast pictures set in walls, so vivid and unexpected did the gardens appear to him on their broad terraces. His ears were assailed by voices and by distant music and laughter, and, from outside, the songs of birds and the rush of giant fountains. Occasionally a lady of the palace passed him and his escort, her beautiful face covered with cosmetics, her black or copper or yellow hair caught in jeweled and golden nets, her dress of white or fragile color flowing about her. Invariably every lady stared frankly at Lucanus and smiled at him. Jewels flashed on white necks and bosoms and arms and wrists and fingers.
They reached bronze doors of such lofty proportions that Lucanus was amazed. Praetorians guarded it. At a gesture four of them swung open the doors, and Lucanus saw before him a large but sparsely furnished library. Seated at a table, frowning and reading, was an unprepossessing man in a purple tunic and white toga, who slowly raised dark and resentful eyes.
“Hail, Divine Caesar,” said the Prefect, saluting. “I have brought — ”
“So I see,” interrupted Tiberius in an acid voice. “You may leave, my good Prefect, and take your Praetorians with you, and close the door, and wait without.”
This was incredible! Only the highest potentates had private audiences with Caesar, and then on only the rarest occasions. The Prefect stared. “Go,” said Tiberius, and now his tone was coldly vitriolic. The Prefect, confounded, saluted again, gestured to his Praetorians, went out, and the door was shut behind them.
Tiberius leaned back in his chair and gazed at Lucanus without speaking, and Lucanus gazed at him in return and with a candid curiosity. Here was Caesar, the very heart of the center of Roman might and power, and he was just an ordinary man, tall and lean, with a bald head, bitter features in a pallid face, and patches of eczema on his cheeks, which gleamed with an oily ointment.
Lucanus was not afraid of this most fearful man. He was only curious. Also, his physician’s mind automatically commented on the fact that this skin rash had been wrongly treated. Moreover, his mind continued, Tiberius evidently suffered from some obscure form of anemia for which liver had been highly recommended by the Egyptian priest-physicians.
Tiberius, in that long silence, became aware of Lucanus’ acute study, and he smiled. To Lucanus it was a disagreeable smile; if others had seen it they would have been astonished at its unusual benignity.
“Greetings, Lucanus, son of Diodorus Cyrinus,” said Caesar.
Lucanus hesitated, and now he remembered what Plotius had told him. But he could not kneel to any man! So, in his youthfully sonorous voice, he replied:
“Greetings, Caesar.”
Tiberius
’ smile widened in amusement; his lips were thin and taut, and showed small and yellowed teeth. He motioned to a chair near the table.
“Sit down, if you please,” he said. Those waiting to see him, and who had been waiting for hours, would have gasped with amazement, for no one sat in the presence of Caesar, except when dining. But Lucanus apparently did not know that, and so he simply bowed his head politely and seated himself, and waited.
“A pleasant day,” said Tiberius.
“Yes,” said Lucanus, and waited again.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lucanus could not know that he had been given a great honor in being permitted to see Caesar alone with no one present, not even a guard. He could not know that the astute Tiberius had seen at once that here was a young man who could be absolutely trusted. Lucanus himself was quickly judging Tiberius. A ruthless and resentful man: what was it he resented? His faithless wife, his friends, his burdens, Rome? Lucanus felt a quick compassion.
Somewhere in the gardens beyond the library peacocks screeched, and there was the distant sound of higher music. But in the library the two men, one the mighty Caesar and the other only a physician, looked at each other frankly. Lucanus sniffed; a faint but disagreeable odor from the unguents on Tiberius’ pimpled face came to him. He wished to speak, but he remembered that Caesar must always speak first. Tiberius, in his turn, saw that Lucanus did not fear him in the slightest. He wondered, for a moment, if the young man were a fool. Nevertheless, he was impressed by Lucanus’ appearance.
Tiberius said, watching Lucanus closely, “May I commiserate with you, my good Lucanus, over the death of your father? A just and simple and heroic man. The last of the great Romans.”
His voice, though grating and reluctant, carried sincerity with it. Lucanus smiled in gratitude. It was probably no secret to Tiberius that Diodorus had disdained his military qualities, yet Caesar could speak most kindly of him, and Lucanus, though his sorrow was renewed, thought that Tiberius was, himself, a just man. Tiberius leaned back in his chair and stared at the open window, which was ablaze with the sun.
“I have commanded that a statue of him be struck for the Senate portico,” he said. He idly scratched at an irritable spot on his face. Lucanus smiled at this irony. The senators would have the doubtful pleasure of always seeing the statue of the one who had denounced them on their very threshold, armed with his marble sword. “Sire, you are very subtle,” he said. Tiberius raised his black eyebrows. The young man was not a fool, then.
He said, “If I had ten thousand men like Diodorus Cyrinus in Rome then I should sleep well at night. But enough. I am concerned, Lucanus, with doing all in my power to alleviate the grief of the family, and to do honor to the memory of the tribune. I do not understand your letter. I have appointed you Chief Medical Officer in Rome, to the growling of the older physicians, and you have asked me to withdraw the appointment. I am curious to know why.”
Lucanus colored. He was not aware that it was not only incredible, but dangerous, to refuse what Caesar offered. It was as if a moth had defied an eagle. He said, gravely, “Rome does not need me. That is what I wrote you, Sire. But the poor and the enslaved have need of my services in the provinces.”
Tiberius was silent. His eyes narrowed and fixed themselves intently on the young man’s handsome face. He plunged into thought. He was confronting something he could not understand, and which seemed mad to him. He thought of the old philosophers who had commanded that man treat his fellows kindly. Too, the priests in the temples of Rome exhorted the people to be gentlehearted and, in the names of the gods, to be just, honest, and merciful. However, that was all mouthings. No man of sanity believed in it, considering the world as it was and had always been. Tiberius’ mouth quirked in a smile.
“You are a physician, a citizen of Rome, the adopted son of a great and honorable man, the possessor of wealth,” he said. “The doors of patricians and Augustales are open to you. What I have offered you is only the threshold. Yet you would give it all up for the purpose of ministering to the worthless poor and beggars and slaves!”
Did Lucanus belong to some strange obscure sect of Stoics, or was he dedicated to a peculiar and foreign god? Lucanus said, “Yes, for all else is as nothing to me.”
“Why?”
Lucanus colored again. “Because otherwise my life would have no meaning.”
Tiberius frowned. What meaning was there to life except power and wealth and position? He reflected on his own life, and his narrow features revealed an involuntary pain. What meaning was there to his own life? he asked himself in stark revelation. He had done what he could; he was a careful administrator; he had tried to arouse pride in the obdurate Senate and had wished to return its power to it. Tacitus disliked him, but agreed that he was a man of sound judgment. He, a soldier, wished for peace along all the borders and the frontiers. He had added no extra taxes, in spite of the voracious demands of the Roman rabble for new benefits. When courtiers complained of personal injustices he coldly advised them to take the matter to the courts and would not interfere himself.
He was trying, at this time, to save Rome, to restore some of the qualities which had made her great. But a depraved people would not accept their liberty and their former discipline and their character. He could feel a terrible premonition that their pollution would eventually pollute him, and that, in anger, he would strike back at those who insisted on corrupting him. He thought of his wife; he thought of those who hungered for his throne. He thought of his only son, Drusus, a young man of violent passions but limited mind, at present clumsily setting the Germanic tribes against each other in Illyricum, believing, in his simple way, that the gate of peace could be attained only through blood.
Tiberius could feel the inexorable forces about him, which would destroy him as a just man, which would degrade him to the level of a Roman dog, out of their greed, their cheap politics, their exigencies, their lusts, and their own urge to power. They had, he thought with awful clarity, made of his life a nothingness, all of them, his wife, his son, his generals, and the Senate. But more than all else, the contemptible mobs of Rome, the insatiable, polyglot mobs who looked on their Caesar as a deity equipped with a cornucopia of endless benefits to reward the lazy, the weak, the worthless, the irresponsible, the bottomless bellies who would feed at the expense of industrious neighbors. Soulless beasts! Suddenly Tiberius hated Rome.
He stared at Lucanus, who had spoken to him like a schoolboy of meaning to life! “Must life have a meaning?” he asked. “Even the gods have not given man a meaning for his existence.”
“Yes, Sire, that is true.” Lucanus’ face tightened. “But we can assign some meaning to our lives ourselves. The meaning I have given myself is to alleviate pain and suffering, to save the dying, to prevent the encroachment of death.”
“For what purpose?” asked Tiberius. “Death is the common lot. And pain, also, whether of the body or the mind. Too, of what worth are the poor and the slaves?”
“They are men,” said Lucanus. “It is true that pain and death are inevitable. But often pain can be avoided, death made more comfortable, or delayed. Who can look upon the world of men without pity, and without desire to comfort it?”
Tiberius thought of Rome, and smiled darkly. Here was certainly a schoolboy prattler, a fresh-bearded amateur philosopher. He knew all about Lucanus, who had lived such a sheltered life, had never been part of a military campaign, and who had spent his years in a virtuous and peaceful household and in schools. He pitied the young man. He spoke of the stinking rabble as ‘men’. He spoke of slaves as ‘men’.
No doubt he would even consider a venal senator a ‘man’! The nostrils of Tiberius contracted.
“Are you dedicated to some obscure god who has not as yet made his debut in Rome?” he asked Lucanus, with a faint and mocking smile.
He was surprised when Lucanus answered with extraordinary vehemence, “I am dedicated to no god!”
“You do not believe in the god
s?” asked Tiberius.
Lucanus sat in silence for a moment, looking down at the vast marble table before him. Then he said, “I believe in God. He is our Enemy. He afflicts us without reason. Even an executioner reads out to his victim the crimes of which he has been accused, and for which he must die. He has not told us why we must suffer. He sentences us to death for being what we are, He who made us what we are.”
“So you would console those who have been deprived of a consoler,” said Tiberius. He was much amused. He again thought that Lucanus was more than simple-minded. He said, “You have studied in Alexandria. No doubt you encountered Jewish teachers there. When I was in Jerusalem I heard the people talk of a Messias, that is, a Comforter, a Redeemer, one who will deliver the Jews from Rome and set them high on thrones to govern the world. Is it not a foolish thought? But you will see that all men are alike, wishing power.”
He unrolled Lucanus’ letter and scanned it musingly. Then he said, not looking at the young man, “When I was younger, and on one of my campaigns, we were astonished to see a great star in the sky one night. It was at the time of the Saturnalia. It moved eastwards and then disappeared. My astronomers tell me that the star was seen everywhere, and was a Nova, and the astrologers spoke of a great doom to come upon the world. But I have heard from the East that the star led to the birthplace of a god. That was fourteen or more years ago. If a god had been born then, surely we should have known it by this time. You will see how superstitious men are.”