wrote Archilochos seven hundred years ago. Well, I would endure. I had no choice.
I love and yet do not love.
I am mad yet not quite mad
wrote Anakreon a hundred years later, capturing the playful side of human existence.
Our powerful destiny comes from the gods,
And whichever way the scale of Justice
Dips, we shall fulfill
Our determined fate
wrote Bakchylides a hundred years after that.
I found great solace in reading and translating these works, remnants of events long forgotten, preserved only in the poets’ words. It inspired me to write my own words. I brought out my neglected manuscript about the Trojan War epic, my Troia. Before, I had focused on Paris and his love for Helen, but now other aspects of the story called to me. Paris’s abandonment by his original family and his later reunion with them. The attempt to forestall the prophecy about his destroying Troy, only to have it fulfilled regardless. We shall fulfill our determined fate . . .
After I had written enough to feel comfortable again as a poet, I reconvened my old literary coterie, adding some new names. We would meet for dinners, then stay on for a working literary gathering—a version of the Greek symposium but with the twist that we would be composing and criticizing one another’s works.
The new sunken garden’s pavilion proved to be the perfect setting. The twelve columns served as sturdy supports for us to lean against, drape ourselves around, declaim from, once the food and tables were removed. The whisper of the long fountain nearby provided our applause.
Petronius came—I had not seen him in a long time. As he was Otho’s friend I had hesitated to seek him out, but he seemed perfectly at ease with the change in marriage arrangements. Lucan came, and Piso, and Spiculus, a gladiator who wrote poetry, or was he a poet who fought as a gladiator? In addition, there were several young men who had shown a passion for writing, sons of senators and librarians. As appropriate to the Muses, we put on wreaths of ivy to keep our heads cool even with the wine. And I had provided choices of wine to suit all tastes: dry or sweet Albanum, aged fifteen years; Calenum, lighter than Falernian; sweet golden Spolentinum.
“Spolentinum,” Petronius asked the serving slave, “but only if it is cooled with melted snow from the Alps.”
“Sir, we have only snow from the Penniculus mountain,” the slave said.
“Oh!” Petronius looked as if he had just spotted a large rat on the floor. “In that case, I will have the Calenum.” He turned to me. “You need a better supply of snow. There’s a slight tang—a funny taste—to the Apennine snow, haven’t you noticed?”
No, I hadn’t. And the differing taste of various melted snows was not important to me now. I shrugged. “If you say so, my arbiter of taste.” Just to make a point, I ordered the Spolentinum with the local snow.
Just then the musicians arrived—an aulos player and a barbiton player, to provide soft music to blend in with the murmur of the fountain. I was most intrigued by the barbiton, which was a bass cithara. I would like to learn to play it.
For this first meeting, I asked everyone to tell us what he was writing, and where he hoped for criticism or comments, and suggested that we could work together on troublesome lines.
“I am still working on my civil war epic,” said Lucan. “I will not finish it for a long time. I have three books of it done, up until Caesar’s siege of Massilia.” He lolled on the floor on cushions laid down over the marble.
Piso sank down beside him. “Nothing so weighty for me,” he said. “I like light verses, satires.”
Spiculus was still standing, not leaning against a column. “I like composing love poetry,” he said. How at odds with his looks. His bulging muscles would not have been out of place on a bull.
“How did you come to writing poetry at all?” I asked.
“Like many people who live by their bodies, my imagination longs for another avenue,” he said. “My training takes so much time but leaves my mind starving. So I feed it with poetry as I feed my body with meat for strength.”
The others volunteered that they liked epic, lyric, song, and satire.
“And you, Petronius?” I asked.
“I am writing a novel,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Well, a novel is . . . something novel. It’s a story, like The Odyssey, but it isn’t in verse. It’s just in prose, everyday language. And it isn’t elevated. The hero of my story is trying to escape the wrath of a god, like any good epic hero. But not Neptune, Jupiter, or Juno. No, the god he is trying to appease is—Priapus, the Lord of the Phallus.”
Everyone hooted.
“So you can imagine what Priapus puts him through.”
“Read some of it! Read some of it!” they all cried.
“Very well,” he said, pulling out his manuscript.
The torches were flaring and the wine flowing as the company sat entranced by the scurrilous adventures of the hero. Their faces grew flushed in spite of the protective ivy wreaths. Finally Petronius rolled it up and said, “I have stopped here. Suggestions as to where the hero should go next?”
“A brothel?” one of the young men asked.
“Too predictable,” said Petronius. “After all, where do you expect Priapus to lurk?”
“What about a ship?” asked Lucan. “With a debauched captain?”
“Not bad,” said Petronius. “I shall think on it and next time we meet continue the story.”
Now they all looked at me. “I am composing an epic about the Trojan War,” I said. It sounded unimaginative, coming in the wake of Petronius’s mock epic. “Especially the theme of fate.” I fetched my manuscript. “But there are some lines here that perhaps need revision.” I unrolled it. “Yes, as I set the scene, what do you think of this?”
The Tigris first drawn down by earth in covered depths is plunged
And holds a secret course; then born again
Flows on unhindered to the Persian sea.
“Too wordy,” said Lucan promptly.
Lucan should talk. His writing was florid beyond measure. But I wouldn’t point that out.
“But he has the meter right. It’s difficult,” said Spiculus.
“What do you think of this simpler line: You might think it thundered ’neath the earth?” I asked.
“Better,” said Lucan.
• • •
The evening went on until it began to grow light in the east.
“Ah, dawn’s car is approaching,” said Petronius. “I shall stay poetic till the end! But really, it is time for bed. Time for my bed, as I prefer to sleep during the day!”
After they had stumblingly taken their leave, I leaned on the table holding the wine—or what was left of it. I had not felt sad during those hours; they, and poetry, had banished the black mantle of grief, if only for that brief time.
LXXIV
Determined to reclaim the side of myself that had run like a lifeline through my earlier years, and given me definition, I turned back to my music and athletics. Once again I pursued the lead plates and the diet and the practice; once again Appius came to teach me. My voice had deepened since the Juvenalia, even though it had not been exercised much, and my vocal range increased.
“That is what is known as happy chance,” said Appius. “Usually people do not improve when they do not practice.” He refrained from scowling, but he didn’t need to; I could see the invisible lines on his forehead. He stood rigidly beside the bronze table that held my cithara.
“I have had little opportunity to perform,” I said. “Practice with no hope of performance is a dull exercise.”
“But necessary,” he said. “Necessary! All art is anchored in discipline.”
“As you say,” I said. I needed to embrace something that would consume my being, t
o keep the darkness at bay. “I want to perform before an audience!” I suddenly said. “A real audience, not a handpicked, private one.” That would be the real test; that would be the true nerve-shattering artistic debut.
He frowned. “Where in Rome could this be?”
“Not in Rome!” I remembered hearing about a music festival in Naples. Yes, Naples, that Greek-inclining city, which was amenable to the finer arts. “Naples. There’s a theater there—they have a music event in the spring—I could train for that and be ready—find out about it!” My words tumbled out.
“You will have to work hard to be ready in only six months,” he said. “You are a long way from flawless.”
Good. That would call forth the utmost effort from me, an effort that would blank out other things, leaving only the sweetness of pure concentration on a high goal.
• • •
As for my athletic reclamation, I sought out Apollonius, whom I had not seen since the Neronia. We met in my gymnasium training yard in the Campus Martius.
“Much has happened to you since I last saw you,” he said. “I give you my best wishes for your marriage, and my condolences for the loss of your daughter.”
I winced. But it was necessary for him to mention it, I knew that.
“I am ready to go back to what once brought me such gratification,” I said. “I need your advice and teaching.” All around us men were exercising and shouting, making a din, wearing almost nothing. I had stripped, too. No one but Apollonius glanced at me; such was the license of the exercise yard.
He looked me over. “When I first knew you, you were a boy, a sapling. Now you are a man, an oak.”
“What you mean is, I have grown stocky.” I laughed to let him know his words had not displeased me. Obviously Poppaea’s observation about the weight gain was shared by others.
“An athlete cannot choose his event until his body chooses it for him. Yours has chosen wrestling. You are well suited for that. But you will have to leave racing behind, I fear.”
I knew as much. “So, I will train again for wrestling. And I wish to go back to chariot driving. And eventually racing them. I was quite good at one point.”
“That is not my expertise. I think your prefect Tigellinus is the man to help you there.”
Yes, Tigellinus. I would see him about that. But for now—“I am ready to begin today!” I said. “Give me some exercises.” My slave stood by with the olive oil for my body, used by all athletes in training.
“Always eager—too eager. You jump ahead of yourself. Build slowly and the foundation will be firm.”
I nodded, but I did not concur. How could I tell him I had a sense of time pressing, of my race ending too soon? Like Claudia’s.
• • •
The ninth anniversary of my accession; the occasion was an invitation to brood on my dynasty and its future. My first (earlier) wild surmise that it was cursed had abated but not disappeared. In the past, I had rarely visited the ancestor room in the palace, in my eagerness to put the past behind me and build my own future, but now I found myself drawn to it, as though the solemn busts of my predecessors had wisdom to impart to me. To be an emperor was the sublime good fortune so many sought and only four before me had attained, but every one of those four had been dogged by disasters.
I eyed the bust of Augustus on its pedestal. He was wearing a crown of flowers and looked divinely serene. “But appearances are deceiving, eh, Great-great-grandfather?” I challenged him. “By the reckoning of history you were superlatively successful in establishing the empire, and you lived an astonishing seventy-six years to cement it. But not so lucky in your family, eh? No sons, and forced to rely on nephews and grandsons to inherit, and they all died and left you. What an extraordinary roll call! All of Julia’s sons, and Octavia’s son! All four! Just bad luck? I don’t think so.” I left his snow-white marble bust and found Tiberius’s, one of black basalt. The gloomy man stared at me as if he would have said something nasty if his mouth was real instead of stone. But he was condemned to remain still while I scrutinized him.
“Miserable man,” I said to him. He kept silent. “Cheated of the wife you loved and forced to marry Augustus’s daughter. Your son poisoned by his wife, the mistress of your betrayer. Forced to adopt your nephew Germanicus, who was more popular than you. He was conveniently poisoned and removed from the scene by an unknown, but you were blamed for it. Great-great-uncle, can you argue that you were not blighted in everything you held dear? And you didn’t even get to be emperor until you were in your fifties. Just bad luck? Again, I don’t think so.”
And next was Caligula. His big ears stuck out from his triangular face on the alabaster bust. His eyes looked dead, but then, they were only empty stone sockets. He was harmless now, the man who had tried to drown me but had killed so many others. “You were young but went mad early. Madness is sent from the gods. Just bad luck, again, Uncle? No.”
Then there was Claudius, reduced to a genial bust. “From the beginning the gods inflicted humiliation on you, with your impediments and defects. But, being truly cruel, they did not leave it at that. No, they gave you two wives who betrayed you, one of them my mother, who murdered you. And an adopted son who became the enemy of your natural son and put an end to him. And now that adopted son, also your great-nephew, stands here and asks, what can the gods have in store for me, when they have dealt so harshly with those of my blood?” If I expected Claudius to reply, I was disappointed. I had, rather, expected the gods to hear me and give an answer.
But they were silent, speaking only through the stories and legends they had left us. Of the House of Atreus and its curse through five generations. Was theirs any worse than ours? The only crime missing from the Julio-Claudian House was the Atreus House cannibalism. Until now none of us had baked children in stews, but wives had murdered husbands, brothers had murdered brothers, untimely natural deaths had stolen the hopes of parents. And I was part of this parade—the deadly fifth generation.
My child had been taken away, as I thought, because she was too pure for this family. But I must have an heir, to redeem the dynasty and change its fortunes. Surely there was a way to reverse the curse. But Poppaea had not conceived again, as if in mockery of the first time, which had happened so swiftly and effortlessly. Was I to be the last of the line? Was it to be snuffed out?
There was only me to carry on. Recently the last remaining descendants of Augustus, Decimus and Lucius Silanus Torquatus, had been found guilty of imperial ambitions against my throne (it ran in the family) and Decimus had committed suicide. I faced the Augustus bust squarely and said, “I would have pardoned him. He never gave me the chance, just killed himself before I could respond. This one was not my fault!” As for Lucius, he had fought against his executioners and died like a warrior.
• • •
The Naples festival I aimed at was the Greek Anthesteria, celebrating the early spring. Like my Neronia, it also featured drama, dance, and poetry, but I was concerned only with the music contests, which honored Dionysus. Some of the other contests awarded monetary prizes, but the music recital awarded a sacred wreath, and that was what I wanted.
Poetry had sustained me through the dark days of grappling with my heritage, searching for an answer. Finally the lines of Kallimachos on his dead friend pointed the way out.
Dear Halikarnassian friend
you lie elsewhere now
and are mere ashes;
yet your songs—your nightingales—will live,
and never will the underworld,
destroying everything,
touch them with its deadly hand.
Paul of Tarsus was wrong. It is the wreath of art that is imperishable. If I sought it and won it, I would never die. It is the wreath of the Caesars that fades; only through art could I transcend the curse of the family.
• • •
I
stood on the stage of the theater in Naples, dressed in the loose robes of a citharoede, my hair long and falling down my neck. As an enrolled member of the guild of professional citharoedes I was entitled to enter the main music contest. The moment was here, the moment I had spent hours and hours preparing for. (Is any preparation ever enough?) This contest was in the form of a recital and I had one song of my own composition as well as several in the common repertoire.
The nervousness had not seized me yet and I calmly looked out at the audience. There were eight thousand seats, all filled, and crowds were standing in the back. I had brought my Augustiani clappers and they were in one section, recognizable by their bushy hair, their elegant clothing, and their left hands devoid of rings. Anyone who wanted to come was admitted and the crowd was a mix of the general public, Romans who had traveled all this way to attend, and local Greek aristocrats. My competitors were lined up beside me. I did not dare to look at them; they must not exist for me. Still, as the first one was called to perform, I could not help but admire—and hate—his artistry. No, no, I told myself. Do not compare. You are not a judge. You cannot judge. Listen only to yourself and hear only your own music. And then the next came out, and he sang in a clear, supple voice that could lure serpents from their dens. And the next, a virtuoso on his cithara, his fingers moving swiftly but almost invisibly as the fluid notes filled the air. There were more, each seemingly better than the last.
Suddenly I was alone out on the stage, the last one called. Now agitation seized me, the old familiar spasm of fear, wondering why I was there—how could I escape? I gripped the cithara, tuning it to buy myself time. I cleared my throat a few times, panicked that I had not had a chance to sing earlier and loosen my vocal cords. I was afraid only a squeak would come out.
The judges were stirring impatiently. I had to start. I did, boldly, and after the first few notes all fell into place; I had entered the groves I had traveled before and my voice and fingers knew the way unerringly. And I soared, leaving the stage and all those faces below, seeking out Apollo himself.