Octavian's great-uncle was no god, no matter what accolades the senate may have heaped upon him. Julius Caesar invaded our home to filch advantage from a counterfeit friendship, looked down upon his benefactor as if my master's generosity were an amusing imperfection in character, and most heinous of all, Caesar sought to cement his own political advantage through my mistress by assaulting her and using the rape as political blackmail. I would wipe the horror of that night from my mind, but it will not go. It remains as fresh and vile as the stink of Melyaket's goat fat.
Years ago, letters from Rome described the political ascendancy of Gaius Julius Caesar. I still have them. At the time, I told myself an ailing empire had finally fitted to its neck a cunning, ruthless head to match its foul and corrupt body. I cannot deny that my gratification was palpable when word reached us here on our tiny island refuge, almost a decade after Crassus had sailed from Brundisium to meet his own fate, that with a frenzy of daggers, the gods had granted Caesar's wish for an “unexpected death. ”
Calmly, Alexandros, calmly; you are too brittle to allow yourself to be cracked by immoderate indignation. At whom would you direct it, and to what effect? You must husband your strength if you are to have any hope of achieving your own modest purpose. Righteous choler is such a taxing emotion. Indeed, at my age, it takes some bit of wind to rise or sit, hence I am resolved to stay where I am put. No, hatred is a coin best spent by vigorous, ambitious youth.
Harken to me now; I am composed.
PART I — Home
Chapter I
56 BCE Summer, Rome
Year of the consulship of Cn. Cornelius Lentulus Marcellinus and L. Marcius Philippus
It was a bad day for Livia’s homecoming. We had just returned to Rome from Luca; nerves were frayed and twisted like an unkempt braid. Though Crassus had been assured of a five-year term as governor of Syria, he was sullen and the mood of the familia was more funereal than festive. Normally, I would have helped him through his discontent with dialogue and philosophical diversions, but not today. I occupied myself instead by making a distracted attempt to teach my new assistant to balance the monthly grain accounts; my distraction was total-I was as breathless and as jumpy as a fish in a net. That evening I discovered the man had done a superlative job without any help from me. I was soon to learn why Crassus had foisted this freedman upon me. There were two reasons, one more disturbing than the next. But we shall come to that.
Pacing back and forth through the atrium, then out past the guards to scour the street for any sign of her, I thought about one of the last times Livia and I had been together, almost six years earlier. Another unhappy day.
The true and lasting punishment from being whipped comes not with the stinging agony of your flesh being stripped from your back. Though you think it never will, that pain fades. Not so the humiliation you are meant to carry with you ever after. These Romans have had centuries to refine the art of encouraging submission. The true penance of a good scourging is writ with a dye more indelible than the knots of twisted rope that crawl beneath your tunic. Those scars that tug and itch with every bend or stretch are proof that you have been separated forever and always to live amongst that class of creature which welcomes those rebellious individuals of their breeds — horses, oxen, dogs and other unmanageable examples that are not fully domesticated. In my case, I was moronically proud to claim that I was not a very good example of Roman subjugation, for both Crassus and I knew, even as he cracked the lorum into my flesh, that faced with the same circumstance, I would repeat the “offense.” Did this make me a bad slave? Or Crassus a lenient owner? Neither one of us paid heed to the strict rules of Roman society-as a slave, I should never have laid hands on Julius Caesar, praetor and pontifex maximus, and because I did, Crassus should have had me crucified, and yet he spared me.
But you see, this whipping had very little to do with punishment, and almost everything to do with love. No, I have not lost what little remains of my senses. When Caesar assaulted Livia, meaning to defile her, it was either love or madness that spurred me to break his hold, punch him in the face and knock him to the ground. (Truthfully, he fell back onto a couch, but the affront was the same; I might as well have thrust a knife into him.) In the crystal sanity of that moment I was certain beyond any doubt that my love for Livia was genuine and pure. How? Because I knew the next day I would be dead. I was surprised and proud, with only a smidgeon of regret to discover I could count myself among the very few who could say they were willing to die for love. And prove it. At least my 8,791 days as a slave would finally come to an end.
Crassus had no choice but to set an example. A slave assaulting a noble must be dealt with swiftly and brutally. The consequences must be a merciless warning to others, severe and shocking, so that news of the horror of it travels far and wide. Even more so in our case, since we were summering at Baiae, over 100 miles from Rome. That is how I am certain that Marcus Licinius Crassus, the same general Crassus who revived the dormant, lethal discipline of decimation and subjected an entire cohort to it for fleeing the field of battle in the war against Spartacus, the heart of that same hard man bore some kind of love for me. Here is how he demonstrated it: he threw Caesar from his home and chose the whip for me rather than the cross. Granted, it was a peculiar display of affection, but affection nonetheless. Did I love him for it in return? No, but Pan’s hoof, he knew me too well. In truth, I did not want to die, and I had no choice but to be grateful to my master that the kiss of the lorum was all that I suffered. That tickled him, no doubt. I took solace in the knowledge that though he would never treat me as an equal, he often treated me as a man. For a Roman slave, that was something.
By the way, if your predilection for lurid details has not been satisfied by this abbreviated version of these gruesome goings on, and you slaver for the original and more explicit accounting, the Serapeum will have copies of the first set of scrolls of this sad chronicle. Providing that ancient temple and repository of knowledge still stands.
Just before my sentence was carried out, Livia ran up to me and kissed me briefly on the mouth, her eyes shimmering. She also called me stupid, which stirred as much hope in my breast as her caress. Unfortunately, there shortly came proof that doused that anemic, yet emboldened flame: before I had risen from my sick bed after my ordeal, I discovered she was gone, and without a word of parting! Dominus had allowed her, at the last moment, to accompany Baltus, the pompous but competent medicus who had treated my wounds, along with a dozen men and several women from our own fledgling clinic and medical school to travel to the House of Life in Memphis to learn all they could of that ancient civilization’s healing art. Livia, it seemed, had been granted permission to set aside her duties as seamstress to follow in the footsteps of her disgraced mother. She intended to become a healer. The excruciating irony of this tale is that with Crassus’ blessing and funding, it was I who had established our school of medicine, of which there were almost none in plague-ridden Rome, ravaged as it was by the rose-spotted fever and again every summer by the rage of the Dog Star. (Editor’s note: typhoid fever and malaria.)