“Pray do not stop,” I said.
“I have come to a stopping place,” she said.
Now I was close enough to speak in a lower level of voice. “What are you practicing?” I asked.
“A pantomime,” she said. “Daphne and Apollo.”
“Where are your leaves?” I asked.
“We will have them for the performance. They will be cleverly stuck onto my fingers. In the meantime, I am trying to capture the moment she becomes rooted in the ground and realizes she cannot move, and then sees her arms turning into branches. It must have been terrifying.”
“I wonder if at that moment she suddenly wished she had just submitted to Apollo.”
“It was too late then,” she said. “The bark was already creeping up her legs.”
“Now, if you were in her place, would you think it a worthy exchange—to be a tree with rough bark, forever, instead of a living woman?”
“It would depend on how I felt about Apollo,” she said. She smiled. “Clearly Daphne had an aversion to him, but she is the only woman to have had that reaction to the sun god.”
“Is Otho playing Apollo?”
“Yes,” she said. “But you would be more suited to the role. Perhaps you can practice a few steps with me?”
“Where do you want me to stand?” I quickly asked.
“Here, just behind me,” she said. “As if you are pursuing me and are just catching me.”
An arm’s length behind her, I felt myself drowning in the sense of her nearness. I reached out and touched her shoulder, grasping it like I imagined Apollo would have.
She shivered and writhed, throwing her arms up and twisting them. With her silent mouth she screamed—there is no voice in pantomime. I could almost feel her skin turning to bark, so well did she simulate the terror.
I stepped back. “Excellent,” I said.
“Thank you for your help,” she said. “It is difficult to practice alone.”
“Why do you say I would be more suited to the role?” I had to ask.
She cocked her head. “Your hair, of course. It is golden like Apollo’s. You ought to grow it out and wear it long. Then others could see what I see.” She reached out and touched it. I was shocked at the familiarity with an emperor.
I touched my own hair, made sacred now by her touch. “Perhaps I will.”
“You have other connections with Apollo,” she said. “After all, when you were born, the sun anointed you with his rays before you ever touched the ground.”
How did she know that? She must have studied about me. She had made it her business to know personal things about me. “So my mother told me,” was all I would say.
“And is not Apollo the god of music? I have heard that your skill on the cithara approaches that of Apollo himself.”
I laughed. “Hardly,” I said. “But he does inspire me.”
“You should not hide your gift.”
There is no respect for hidden music. She understood. Or did she? Was this all just a clever ploy, a wife ingratiating herself with the emperor to help her husband?
So suspicious and wary had I become that the thought pierced the golden glow of the afternoon. But I banished it, choosing instead to bask in her beauty and aura.
“I do not intend to,” I assured her.
LIV
The theater was prepared, draped with garlands. Each chair was fitted with cushions; servers were on hand to pass out goblets of drink. The invited audience filled the seats, dressed in their best, excited to have received a private invitation to the emperor’s gardens. I sat in the very front, on an ivory chair, with Acte beside me. Seneca, Gallio, and Burrus flanked my other side. As each group performed, they would leave their seats and go onstage. So the audience would be at once performer and spectator, on a rotating basis.
I rose and faced the people. “Welcome, welcome, all! We celebrate today a happy milestone in the life of your emperor, crossing a threshold.” They would think it meant the shaving of my beard, but by tonight they would know the true threshold I was crossing. “May all enjoy what we have prepared for one another.”
After I sat down, Acte leaned over and whispered, “If they only knew. Are you sure you want to do this?”
I was sure. It had to be, and it had to be now. I nodded, slowly, keeping my eyes straight ahead so I would not see hers.
The first act, a silent, solemn ballet, performed by the older and more timid people, was rather dull. People tepidly applauded. The next, a chorus wailing about the fall of Troy, was an improvement and stirred the audience. In the meantime, the ballet dancers had filed back to their seats. A dance followed with the young daughters of senators, their gowns floating out behind them as they sought to depict the winds of early spring.
“The one on the left is about to trip over her gown,” said Acte.
I was disappointed in her comment. She was not entering into the performance but focusing on the literal aspects of it. “I think the dance is graceful and moving,” I said. “That is what I see.”
“I see frightened girls,” she said. “Terrified of performing.”
Did she not understand? “That is what all true performers feel.”
“I am not one of them, then, and never will be,” she said. “I should count myself lucky to be spared such anguish.”
Lucky or impoverished? Those who did not have the calling could never experience the ecstasy that followed the anguish. “You must content yourself with being the critic, then,” I said. The critic: safe behind his wall, judging others. But without critics, there is no art. For art must be judged to be proved true.
I dug into a pouch I carried and fished out a rough-cut emerald, which I handed to her.
“Take this,” I said. “It will help you to see better.” In many ways, I hoped. Being shortsighted myself, I often put it up to my right eye to sharpen my vision.
She turned it over, puzzled. Then she laughed. “So this will make me see the way you do?”
“Perhaps.”
She playfully held it up to her eye.
The next set of performances were the tragic dramas, and a number of actors left the audience and trooped up to the stage. One very aged senator acted the part of Tithonus, the man loved by Eos, the goddess of dawn, who asked Zeus to grant him eternal life but neglected to ask for eternal youth as well, so he withered away and was shut up in a room to chirp with his weak voice. The man’s faded voice mimicked the enfeebled bleats of the very old, and their panic and fear at no longer being heard. He got a thundering applause.
The next was Piso, who strode onto the stage like a conqueror. But that was fitting, as he was Agamemnon. He declaimed the speech I had heard him practicing, and more beyond. For an instant I truly believed he was the doomed king, about to be led into a bath and butchered like a ram. His natural stiltedness worked in the role, for Agamemnon was pompous and rigid.
Acte was shaking her head. It distracted me, took me from the moment. “He wears a false face,” she said.
“He isn’t wearing a mask,” I said. “No masks in these performances.”
“I meant his real face,” she said.
“Most women find it charming,” I said. Men, too. He was universally popular. “The emerald isn’t improving your vision! But keep it anyway.”
More dramas followed; Oedipus, Hector, Hercules, all took their turns onstage.
Then the pantomimes—Odysseus and Nausicaa, the wanderings of Leto, Atalanta the lightning-fast runner, and then Daphne and Apollo.
Poppaea, wearing a bark-colored gown, fairly floated out onto the stage. Her movements were so fluid and graceful I felt prickles on the back of my neck. She enacted the happy life of the river nymph, bending over the stream where her father the river god lived. Then Apollo—Otho—appeared. He was wearing a short—too short for his spindly legs and knobby knees—tunic an
d a sun-rayed crown of divinity, which kept slipping over his wig, pulling it to one side.
The audience laughed. I felt embarrassed pain for Poppaea. But she gamely went through the rest of the performance. They got to the part I had enacted with her, and I watched as Otho’s clumsy hand fell like a piece of overcooked mutton on her shoulder, at the very place where I had touched her.
She turned and, as she had with me, twisted and moved her arms upward, and just as she had promised, the leaves affixed to her fingertips gleamed green in the failing light.
The act received wild applause, but not the right kind.
As they were leaving the stage, Acte said, “Perhaps this will puncture her vanity a bit.”
“What exactly do you mean?”
“She’s very vain,” she said. “So proud of her beauty. It’s said she keeps a stable of five hundred donkeys to supply milk for her to bathe in.”
“I haven’t heard that.”
“I had several months while you were away to hear what people in the street were saying. Everyone knows about the donkeys. And it’s also said she shoes them all in silver.”
“Five hundred asses,” I said. “I know where the stable is. The Senate. There are certainly five hundred asses in the Senate.”
Acte giggled, but Seneca harrumped.
I hardly saw the rest of the acts. For mine was coming closer. The moment was at hand.
As the last troupe of pantomimes were finishing their performance, I quietly rose and made my way back behind the stage. Gallio followed.
Behind the curtain, my cithara was waiting, along with my performance tunic. It was long and flowing like Apollo’s. I removed my toga and short tunic, my heart beating so fast my fingers could hardly work.
A tempting pitcher of wine stood on a table to one side. I wanted to down a cup, to calm the trembling that was affecting my limbs, but knew I could not stifle my performance that way. Afterward, afterward, there would be wine aplenty. But not now, oh, not now.
Robed and holding my cithara, my hands still unsteady, I was asked by Gallio if I was ready. He touched my arm gently.
I answered for him then. “I am ready,” I said, lying, horrified at how small my voice sounded. I clutched the cithara with sweaty hands.
Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? I wanted to run away, to run into the rapidly falling night. What had possessed me to want to do this?
I took a deep breath, stilled my racing heart. An answer came. Apollo himself had possessed me; he had drawn me to him and commanded me to prove myself a worthy son by daring to do this. And he would protect me, empower me. I had to trust him.
“Let us go,” I said to Gallio, holding out my hand.
Together we went out onto the stage.
There was a loud, collective gasp. In the dim light I could almost see the widening of eyes, their whites gleaming.
“My dear audience,” said Gallio, doling his words out precisely—he was a skilled speaker, as his brother was—“I present to you tonight the pinnacle of the festival, a special performance just for you, here in private, a rare gift reserved for this company alone—your emperor, a citharoede of great but hitherto hidden talent, will sing and play for you.” He stepped back. I stepped forward.
My heart was racing again. I commanded it, in the name of Apollo, to quiet itself. My mouth was dry, paralyzed. My hands were hot and wet and my fingers stiff. I held the cithara gingerly, afraid of it.
I recited the traditional plea of the performer to his audience. “My lords, of your kindness give me ear.” For one awful moment there was silence, but then the trained soldiers clapped and the audience followed suit. “I will sing a poem of my own composition, ‘The Bacchantes,’” I said.
I held the cithara as I had hundreds of times before, but this time, oh! so different. But then training took over, and the words of the song I had so labored over sprang forth, eager to be born, to be heard—there is no respect for hidden music—and my voice soared, my fingers magically mastered the strings, and the audience before me both vanished and at the same time throbbed through me, enflaming me with the creative fire of Apollo himself. The song rose clear and pure, my offering to him and to them and to myself.
Then it was over, the mystical wind that had sung through me passed on, and I stood on the stage hearing the audience crying out, “Glorious Caesar! Our Apollo, our Augustus, another Pythian! By thyself we swear, O Caesar, none surpasses you!” amid the trained and rhythmic clapping of the Augustiani.
I had done it. I had walked out where I feared to walk, shown what I had feared—yet longed—to show, and crossed the threshold. Now I was a true artist, having survived the initiation rite all artists must pass through. For there is no respect for hidden music. And only the fearsome initiation rite could uncover that music, reveal it. There is no other way.
• • •
Afterward I wandered in a strange altered state of mind. I saw the people around me, even (so I am told) conversed with them; I saw the bright torches being lit to illuminate the gardens and thought what a tender color a flame is; and somehow found myself (but I must have followed others, or been transported there) in the Grove of the Caesars, surrounded by milling people. They were speaking, but I did not register what they were actually saying. The trees were murmuring overhead, the booths with food and drink were closing, and two pleasure boats on the artificial lake of Augustus were waiting to waft us away. This was the private party, restricted to the emperor’s close friends. I had looked forward to it as a relaxing reward for the tension of the day, but now, floating in exaltation, I hardly noticed what was happening around me. I welcomed them (I assume). I looked about and saw my friends and companions (although I cannot now tell you who was there). Of course wine flowed, and I availed myself of it, as I had promised myself I would when the performance was safely past.
Now the world spun more than ever, excitement and wine alike carrying me away. There was music, some sort of music . . . horns? Cymbals? It was loud enough to make conversation impossible. I found myself lying on the cushions spread out on the deck, next to rows of people likewise lolling. Laughter and poking. Bodies pressing up against me on both sides. Warmth. Complete happiness. The stars overhead wheeling. Part of me was numb, another part quiveringly awake. I felt a soft hand on my thigh, gentle, the brushing of a bird’s wing. It inched up and down, sliding along the silk of my tunic. Someone spread a cover over the row of bodies, making a tent—a tent to veil activities beneath it. The person who was touching me—who was it? I shut my eyes. I did not want to know. It was better, more of a trespass, that way. The person—it was a woman—boldly made her wishes known by where she touched me and how she moved her hands and then, her entire body. A luscious and perfect body. Still I did not look, or speak. This was a gift directly from the gods (and perhaps was not even a real person), who would be insulted if I refused it. So I yielded to her. And never had I tasted a sweeter gift, never savored an act of love more.
The music was still blaring and bleating its high-pitched wails as I fell back to earth at last, slowly, deliciously. The world became real again, the wrinkles of the cushions under my back, the creaking of the wooden deck, the bumping of the side of the boat as it entered the narrow canal to the Tiber. And then, a familiar voice from the other side of me.
“Is she not supreme among women?”
Otho! I sat up with a jerk. He was lying beside me, smiling, his head propped up on his elbow, looking amused. “I knew you were curious about her, and told her to satisfy your curiosity. There is only one way to end temptation, and that is to give in to it. At least, that is my method.”
I could hardly bring myself to turn my head and look on my other side. I knew what I would see, knew already, and I did not wish to confirm it. But I had to.
Poppaea was lying facedown, and all I saw was her unmistakable amber hair. I could not have borne
it if she had spoken.
I could not speak to Otho, could not speak to either of them. I stood up and threw off the covering, then wished I hadn’t: I had uncovered a row of other lustily coupling people. I flicked it back down again and walked off to the rail.
We were passing through the canal; we were almost back in the city.
My extraordinary day had come to an end, and I was stunned. I could not think, but without actual words I wondered how Otho could have done this. And how could Poppaea have complied? Or . . . whose idea was it, really?
That was the true temptation. To think Poppaea was the instigator, rather than her husband being a procurer. To imagine that she had wanted me first.
LV
You have had your amusement,” said Seneca three days later. Outside, the debris from the Juvenalia had been swept away, the wilted garlands collected, the wooden stages collapsed and stored away. Inside, my crumpled citharoede robe was hanging on a peg behind my door, stained with wine, sweat, and scented balm.
If only you knew, I thought, and that lent a smile to my face as I looked at his stern one. Oh, if only you knew.
Poppaea had haunted my mind, my dreams, waking and sleeping, yet I could not even convince myself it had happened. The whole Juvenalia floated like a mirage in my memory, something precious and elusive, that might not even be real.
“Yes,” I said. “And now it is time to work.”
He looked surprised. Clearly he had never expected me to insist on that, or even to suggest it.
“I called you and Burrus here first, but the rest of the ministers will be joining us shortly, as well as some members of the Consilium.”
Seneca looked at me expectantly. He was used to telling me what the agenda was and this turnabout puzzled him. Before I could speak, Burrus entered the room, spotted us, and strode over to the bench and took his place beside Seneca.
“Ah,” he said, sinking down. “And what am I summoned for? Does the emperor, perhaps, have a new tune he wishes to preview with his faithful ministers?” He twitched his toga up to settle more comfortably on the bench.