He fell to one knee as I entered. “O most exalted Caesar, I prostrate myself before you,” he cried, flinging himself flat on the floor.
I stood looking down at him for several long moments, letting him taste the full measure of his abjection. Then I said, “Arise.”
He picked himself up and slowly stood upright. His hair had mussed itself and stood out from his head in asymmetrical tufts. He looked terrified.
“You have returned to Rome, after having grossly humiliated your country, your army, and your emperor,” I said. “Rome’s Eagles, captured by the enemy! Your wounded, left to fend for themselves, against all decency in a commander. Agreeing to abandon territory to the enemy.”
His mouth was quivering so badly he could hardly form words. “I—I—they—it—it is all true, Caesar.” He then bowed his head as if he expected a sword to strike it off.
“What punishment could be worthy of this?” I asked.
He kept his head bowed. “What—whatever Caesar decrees,” he said.
I let him wait. Then I said, “I pardon you.” His head jerked up, his eyes wide in shock. “I am telling you this first thing, since you are of such a weak and anxious disposition any long wait to hear your sentence might prove too much for your delicate nervous system.” I hoped he heard the slap in my explanation.
“I—I—”
“You are dismissed, General,” I said. “There is nothing more to be said.”
He backed out of the room, his knees still shaking, bowing all the way. Once outside he took to his heels.
Now I would call the Consilium and get down to the real business—what to do about Armenia. I had let Caesennius Paetus go to make my point to them—that their military policy had failed and would continue to fail, not through the fault of any one general but because it was untenable. It was time to try my policy—diplomacy.
• • •
It took several weeks, but after an initial meeting of the Consilium and messages to our remaining general in the field, Corbulo, an agreement was reached between me and Vologases. Vologases’s half brother Tiridates would be king of Armenia, recognized and supported by both of us. In recognition and submission to this, Tiridates laid his diadem at the foot of my official statue, where it was received by General Corbulo and sent to me. Tiridates would travel to Rome, where I would restore the surrendered diadem and crown him publicly before the entire city.
At last, in May, I received and held Tiridates’ bejeweled strip of majesty and turned it over and over in my hands. What it cost him in pride to surrender it I could only guess. But the cost of the surrendered dreams of conquest by my generals and war supporters had been higher, harder to part with. Tiridates would get his diadem back. We would have magnificent ceremonies to welcome him and mark the occasion, but none could be great enough to truly salute this momentous agreement—peace with Parthia after over a hundred years of war.
Parthia had been Rome’s enemy far back into the Republic. It was to conquer Parthia that Julius Caesar was leaving Rome when he was assassinated. It was considered a campaign that only someone of his genius and skill could win. Now I had won it, not with swords but with words and ambassadors.
• • •
When I returned to Antium, spring was already past and early summer whispered in the gardens. This time I alighted at the sea entrance, where the waves lapped near the buildings on the shore. I was delighted to find Poppaea in the cool pavilion overlooking the sea, shading her eyes as I walked up the pavement. She sprang up with excitement and we embraced; I lifted her up off her feet and swung her around until we were both dizzy.
“I heard! I heard!” she said. “Your achievement! Rome’s success!”
I put her down. “Now you rob me of the joy of telling you. But gossip flies faster than ships sail.”
“You can still explain about it all. I heard only the barest facts—that Armenia is settled and war will end.”
We sat under the vine-covered arbor and I related everything that had happened, all the arguments and the letters and negotiations between the two sides.
“How long have we waited for this?” she asked. “A hundred years? More?”
“Crassus was murdered there more than a hundred years ago,” I said. “Yes, it has been a long time. And they supported Brutus and Cassius. But that is over now, buried at last.”
“I hope you will get your due as the emperor who ended this.”
“I will get my due,” I reassured her. “And we will get an event the equal of a Triumph when I welcome Tiridates to Rome and crown him. Rome has not had a Triumph in a long time—not since Claudius’s, which I saw when I was a child.”
“Now your child will see your Triumph—or what is similar to one. Oh, you haven’t seen her in weeks!” She motioned to a slave to bring Claudia down to us.
In a few moments the baby was placed in my arms. She was heavier than the last time I held her, and much more alert. “Oh, I have missed you,” I said, stroking her cheek. Inexplicable how I could miss someone who did not recognize me or talk, but I had. She was bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, as no one else was.
For a moment I wondered if Mother had felt the same about me. I had not understood her professions of our unity, thinking they were just another of her ploys, but now I did. Perhaps it is always the parent who feels it and the child who fails to recognize it.
• • •
That night Poppaea and I lay in the bed in the large room with the windows open and listened to the sea. The rhythm of the waves below, coming in regular intervals, held us in a drowsy web. We had made love after the long absence, all the more precious because of the separation. I floated on a sea of lulled content, safe at last. Then the sound faded and I slept.
I awoke to a scream. Poppaea was not beside me. It was just before dawn: light was blue and diffuse in the room. In one corner I could see a dim figure, arms outstretched, holding something inert. Her hair was long and streaming, like a madwoman’s. Still I couldn’t see, and another scream tore through the air. The figure tottered over to the bed and laid something on it. Something that did not move.
“She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!” It was Poppaea beside me, Poppaea screaming.
A cloth was over the bundle. I pulled it away to see Claudia’s face, blue like the light in the room. I touched her cheek, as I had only hours before. It was cold.
An actual shock went through me, as if I had been struck by a bolt. I trembled; I turned cold. Poppaea collapsed on the bed, facedown, sobbing. I touched her, but my hand, cold and clumsy, could offer no comfort.
I touched Claudia again, as if this time it would be different. Her blue eyes were open and staring, seeing nothing. Horrible. I closed them, pushing the eyelids down. Her perfect row of dark lashes lay against her cheek.
I pulled Poppaea to me and let her sob against my chest. I could offer nothing besides holding her close. No words could help; no words heal; no words soften. We would never know if she would have grown up to be contemplative.
LXXI
There were questions; there were no answers. Waking early, Poppaea had gone into the nursery and found the slaves sleeping peacefully by Claudia’s cradle. Claudia, too, was peaceful; there was nothing to have wakened her attendants. It was thus that she found her, dead sometime during the night. Hysterical, Poppaea had taken her into our room.
My physician Andromachus gave Poppaea a potion to calm her and ordered her to lie down. He took the lifeless bundle that was Claudia and examined her.
“I see no reason she would have stopped breathing,” he said, carefully refolding the covering. “Everything is well formed, and she bears no marks of injury. But how was she lying when Poppaea found her?”
Groggily Poppaea roused herself and said, “She was lying on her stomach.”
“Ah.” Andromachus thought for several long moments. “I
have heard of this in other instances. The child stops breathing for reasons we do not know, and it happens more often if she is lying facedown. It does not happen once a child reaches a certain age, around one year.” He touched my shoulder. “I know it is difficult, Caesar—”
“Difficult?” I cried in anger. “Difficult?”
“I do not belittle your loss,” he said. “But what can be done to alleviate it? Nothing, I fear. We do not know the cause.”
But I did. My family was cursed, targeted by the gods for destruction. And this child, who was to be a new beginning, cleansed of all the taints of the past, had been snatched by them, as too pure and good for this earth. They had taken her to be with them on Mount Olympus. There she would take her place with Hercules and Psyche, mortals welcomed by the immortals and given the cup of ambrosia. But she would never take her place by my side, by mine and Poppaea’s.
• • •
They say my grief was immoderate, just as my joy had been. Great joys, when stolen, call forth great grief. I had no choice in the matter; I did not choose to be laid low by sorrow so heavy it felt like an enveloping fog, overlying everything, darkening everything. For days I shut myself up in a room far on the other side of the villa, curtains drawn to keep the summer daylight out, reliving over and over again what had happened, castigating myself for the time I had spent away from her in Rome. Had I known those precious days were already numbered, I would not have parted from her, no matter what the cause. The desire to hold her in my arms again was so acute they ached.
Even when, days later, I left the chamber, that fog still hung over everything. The bronze lamps, the meadows in their dancing summer flowers, the drip of the water clock—everything was altered, not right. Her absence tinged the world.
As I emerged back into that world (now distorted and smudged), I had to endure the pitying looks and tiptoeing, the false, stiff expressions of sympathy, as if for anyone else to smile was to betray me. Fools. They had not lost anything and to pretend otherwise was a lie. And I despised pity. It was a loathsome position to be in—the pitied. And the irony of it: to pity the emperor!
The Senate returned to Antium to pay their respects. I received them wearing the dark toga of mourning. They likewise had put on mourning togas. I accepted their condolences and thanked them for coming. Then I announced to them that Claudia was a goddess and would henceforth be known as Diva Claudia. They showed no sign of surprise and even told me her image had been voted a place on the gods’ ceremonial banquet couch—the pulvinar—that was honored in the Circus Maximus. I proclaimed that she would have her own shrine with her own priest in Rome.
I then informed them that she had been embalmed, rather than cremated. I could not bear to consign her to the flames. She would be interred not in the Mausoleum of Augustus but in the tumulus of the Julian family, where Caesar’s daughter had been buried a hundred years before, where his own ashes lay, and where the embalmed body of my great-grandfather Drusus Germanicus lay. I myself would see to the honors when I returned to Rome by and by.
• • •
The first raw transports of grief wore away like chalk marks on a sidewalk, rinsed by rain. Made blurred and faded, but still legible. Now it was something I wore, something that was branded on my soul, like the brands forced on runaway slaves. As summer waned, I put off the mourning toga and made ready to return to Rome.
The city I beheld seemed duller of hue, louder, and meaner, or perhaps I was drained of life force and therefore saw only its unpleasant properties. The climb up the Palatine Hill took me away from the congestion and heat of the streets, and once in the palace I felt more at home. The new adjoining building was almost complete, I was pleased to see. I descended the marble steps to the sunken garden and stepped on the pavement Poppaea and I had designed. It was still shiny and untrod. I poked my head into one of the adjoining rooms. A painter was busy at work, his brush tracing delicate red twining borders ending in stems and flowers, framing the white that would serve as background for the paintings. He worked methodically, intently, his hand steady, his eyes focused only on his task.
He would create the paintings within the white space waiting for them. While he was doing it, he would be in that world, not in the one where he wore heavy, paint-stained sandals and sloshed his brushes in grimy water. Art. It was the only antidote to the grief of life, the only solace and escape, for him and for me.
Poppaea came up behind me. “You were right about the red and white,” she said.
Only at the sound of her voice did the painter stop and notice us. When he realized who we were, he immediately put down his brush.
“Don’t stop,” I said. “Continue your work. I was just admiring it.” I quickly moved away and back out into the garden.
“Is the tunnel finished?” Poppaea asked. A dark arching way stretched before us.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Let us see.” We stepped into the space. It was not entirely dark because of small slit windows cut along the way, and the white plaster made it light. “You were right about the white in here, too,” said Poppaea. “The paintings here aren’t finished. They will need scaffolding to do the ceiling.”
“The ceiling will have gold, glass, and lapis worked into the frescoes,” I said. “I may have been right about the colors, but you were right to suggest the entire project. What shall we call it?”
“The Domus Transitoria,” she said quickly. “The House of Passages, of Transition. In many ways that is what it is—what it will be for us.”
Together, holding hands, we walked the distance through the tunnel and emerged in the Gardens of Maecenas. The sunlight hit us as we came out, dancing motes of light. The gardens, quite extensive, were set on a series of terraces marching up the hill. Ornamental fruit trees filled one terrace; in another, winding paths snaked between arbors and shaded stone benches; a third was open to the sky, with only low-growing flowers like irises, roses, and peonies in geometrical beds. Butterflies flitted and swooped among them. At the very top terrace was an elaborate marble and mosaic fountain, spewing water in four directions and filling a round basin, to overflow in gentle waterfalls to the terrace just below. Tall umbrella pines shaded it with dappled light.
“Now we have true privacy,” Poppaea said. “We can visit our gardens without traversing the crowds in the Forum.”
I stood silent, not wanting to share the somber thoughts I had. For the first time, the future was not bright and beckoning to me. It looked shadowy and murky and I did not know where it was leading. The House of Transition—where was it taking us?
LXXII
ACTE
I was saddened to hear of the death of his little daughter, and even more saddened when I saw how crushed he was by it. I do not wish him any pain; I always felt that was what Poppaea would bring in her wake, but I did not wish it.
The funeral ceremony took place later, and, drawn to witness it, I made my way back to Rome. There I stood unrecognized in the crowd gathered before the Julian family tumulus to watch him place her there. He looked careworn and forlorn, but he spoke his words with dignity and then turned away, swallowed up by his attendants, and he was lost to me once more.
LXXIII
NERO
My absence from Rome had done no harm as the empire basked in a quiet period. I had replaced Paulinus as governor of Britain with a more conciliatory official, and the island was recovering from the recent grisly disruption of war. My ambassadors had set out again to Armenia, this time to arrange for the official journey of Tiridates to Rome, and Vologases was keeping his vow to uphold the settlement. General Corbulo now retreated back to Syria and there were no skirmishes.
The Praetorians had finally returned from their trip down the Nile, bringing back priceless information about that region. The Nile, they said, split into two branches south of Meroe. They’d followed the inland branch because it looked wider, but then ran into the impene
trable swamp and were lucky to find their way out. They reported that there were no ebony trees, one of the things I sought, in the area. There were trees that had ebony-like wood but the trees were crooked and thin, not useful for much except perhaps small carvings. They handed me samples and I had to agree. As for gold, they hadn’t found any. There was, of course, gold in Nubia but nothing south of that.
As emperor there were innumerable—or seemingly innumerable—formal events I had to attend or preside over. The Ludi Victoriae Caesaris, ten days in July celebrating the military victories of Caesar. Feriae Augusti, the entire month of August dedicated to the triumph of Augustus over Antony and Cleopatra, with horse races and a respite for all beasts of burden, the donkeys, mules, and camels. The Consualia in August, dedicated to the god of granaries and featuring horse, mule, and donkey races in the Circus Maximus. The Volcanalia, honoring the god of destructive fire. And on and on all year, so to miss some, as I did this summer, does not lighten the burden. How dreary, how plodding, to lead these ceremonies year in and year out, like the donkeys they celebrated. Few people can grasp just how many tedious tasks an emperor is required to perform, all the while acting as if he relishes them.
At night, the robes laid aside, the glittering gold removed from my arms, I took refuge in my poetry. Before, it had been a pleasure and a diversion, a means of personal expression. Now it was my salvation and sanctuary. A still place, eternal and unchanging. There was Sappho, of course, who knew all the stabbings of human emotion, and many other poets, mainly Greek. They dwelt on death and loss but could also turn to the joys of the moment, reminding themselves—and me—that that was all we had to balance sorrow.
Yet against this incurable misery the gods
Give us the harsh medicine of endurance