“Higher ceilings?” said Hadrian. His face was ashen.
“Obviously. Any beginning student of architecture could see that these statues are too large for the interiors.”
“Too large?”
“What if the goddesses should wish to get up and leave? They’ll hit their heads on the ceiling.”
“But why would the goddesses-”
Apollodorus kept a straight face for a moment, then burst out laughing. No one joined him.
Despite the warmth that radiated from the heated floors and walls, it seemed to Marcus that the room was suddenly chilly. Hadrian’s face was as red as if he had just stepped from the hottest pool in the building. Apollodorus seemed oblivious of the scene he had just caused. He gestured to one of the slaves and asked for more wine.
Without a word, Hadrian left the room. Suetonius and Favonius and the rest followed after him, but Apollodorus stayed where he was. He sipped his wine and gazed at the model, shaking head.
“Father-in-law, what have you done?” said Marcus.
Apollodorus shrugged. “He asked me what I thought, and I told him. Better now than later. He may yet be able to salvage something from this folly.”
“Father-in-law, do you imagine you’re so important – do you think the emperor is so unfeeling-”
Apollodorus waved his hand dismissively. “If you have nothing intelligent to say, Pygmalion, go home and change my grandson’s diapers.”
Marcus hurried after the others. He hoped to find the emperor laughing and joking with his friends in the gallery, making light of Apollodorus’s comments. But as Marcus caught up with the retinue, he saw that Hadrian’s attention had been claimed by a most unseemly sight: two naked, middleaged men, one on each side of the gallery, were furiously rubbing their backs against protruding corners, just as the impoverished veteran had done earlier.
Apparently, word of the emperor’s kindness to the veteran had spread, and these two were hoping to elicit a similarly generous response. Hadrian angrily seized one of the men by the shoulders and pushed him towards the other, then called to his bodyguards.
“If these fellows need a backrub so badly, let them rub each other. Tie them together, back-to-back. Let them they stay that way for the rest of the day, as an example to anyone who presumes to make a fool of Caesar.”
Hadrian walked away at a fast clip. Marcus followed him for a while, then gradually slowed his pace and came to a stop, watching as the emperor and his retinue receded in the distance, listening to the echo of their footsteps down the long gallery.
AD 122
“Don’t stack those stones here,” said Marcus. “Can’t you see there’s more digging to be done? Stack them over there!”
The workmen charged with enlarging the basement of the Temple of Venus and Roma were probably the stupidest Marcus had ever dealt with, and he had dealt with some very stupid workers. These fellows did not have even the excuse of being slaves; they were all skilled stoneworkers. Hadrian had insisted that only artisans of a certain calibre be employed at each stage of the temple’s construction, including the enlargement of the basement.
How had it fallen to Marcus to oversee the project? It was a matter of attrition, he thought. He had done nothing to rise in the emperor’s favour; rather, those of greater experience and standing had lost the emperor’s favour, one by one, until Marcus had found himself called on to manage the work on the Temple of Venus and Roma while Hadrian was away from the city on his tour of the northern provinces. It was a great honour, but at this early stage there was nothing challenging about it and certainly nothing that called on his skills as an artist. Essentially, the temple was still just a hole in the ground, and at Hadrian’s decree that hole was being made larger.
“I spend my days with idiots in a hole in the ground,” Marcus muttered, shaking his head.
The slave who assisted him at the site each day – running errands, carrying messages, taking dictation – was a red-headed Macedonian named Amyntas. The youth scurried down the ladder and approached him.
“Master, your wife has come to visit you.”
“Did she bring my son with her again?”
“Yes, Master.”
Marcus sighed. How many times had he asked Apollodora not to visit him at the work site, and especially not to bring the baby? Even on the best of days, accidents happened – a cart stacked with stones might spill its load, or a carpenter with a sweaty hand might send a hammer flying through the air. But Apollodora was truly the daughter of her father; she would do as she pleased.
Marcus decided that the workmen could restack the stones without his supervision. He climbed up the ladder, secretly glad for a chance to get out of the hole and breathe some fresh air.
A little distance away, with the Flavian Amphitheatre and the Colossus for a backdrop, Apollodora sat on a pile of neatly stacked bricks. Nearby, one of her slaves was holding little Lucius in her arms, cooing to him. Apollodora did not look happy.
“Has something happened?” asked Marcus.
“Two letters arrived for you,” she said, producing the little scrolls. “Brought by separate messengers.”
“Did you read them?” said Marcus, frowning.
“Of course not! That’s why I’m here.”
He understood. She wanted to know what was in the letters.
She handed him the first letter. The seal was familiar. Marcus himself had carved the carnelian stone in Apollodorus’s ring; when pressed into the sealing wax, it left an image of Trajan’s Column.
“This is from your father,” he said. “You could have opened it, if you wished.”
Apollodora shook her head. “I was too nervous. You read it, husband, and tell me what he says.”
The letter had come from Damascus, where Apollodorus had been living for several months. Technically, Hadrian had not banished Apollodorus from Roma, but the imperial order that assigned him to an indefinite posting in his native city amounted to the same thing. Apollodorus had no desire to return to Damascus. Officially, Hadrian had claimed that he needed a builder with Apollodorus’s experience to oversee repairs to the Roman garrison, but the posting was clearly a punishment.
In the letter, Apollodorus made no complaints and said nothing that might be construed as criticism of the emperor. Perhaps, Marcus thought, his father-in-law’s exile had at last taught him to choose his words carefully. Marcus skipped over the formalities and found the gist of the letter, which he read aloud to Apollodora.
“‘You know that I am most eager to return to Roma, so that I can resume my work on the Luna statue and serve the emperor to my fullest capacity on any other projects that may please him. Towards that end, in my spare time – of which I sadly have too much here – I have composed a treatise on siege engines. This treatise I dedicated to the emperor. I sent him the first copy, with a note to express my hope that this small contribution to the science of war might meet with his approval. Though I sent this copy to him some months ago, I have not heard back from him. If you have any way to discover whether the emperor received this offering, and what he thought of it, I should be grateful if you could let me know, sonin-law…’”
Marcus scanned the rest of the letter. Apollodorus described a sandstorm that had swept through the city, made some wry comments about Damascene cuisine (“goat, goat, and more goat”), and noted that unrest among the Jews throughout the region seemed to be on the rise again. Attached to the letter was a scrap of parchment upon which Apollodorus had drawn his latest version of the Luna statue.