“Or unless you’re Nero!”
Titus headed back to the stands. The sky had grown darker. The stars were coming out. Torches had been placed here and there to light the grounds. As he neared the stands, a pair of Praetorians abruptly blocked his way.
“What’s that?” said one of them. The man was big and brutish but had perfect teeth, which glinted in the torchlight. He pointed at the fascinum at Titus’s breast. “Isn’t that a cross, like some of those Christians wear?”
“What I wear around my neck is none of your business,” said Titus curtly. He tried to step past the two men, but they barred his way.
“You’ll come with us,” said the Praetorian with perfect teeth.
“I most certainly will not. Can you not see that I wear a senator’s toga? I’m returning to the imperial box.”
“Sure you are! A Christian, in the emperor’s box!”
Each of them grabbed an arm and together they led him, despite his efforts to resist, to a small room under the newly built wooden stands. A third Praetorian, apparently their superior, sat at a table piled high with scrolls.
“Problem?” he asked.
“An escaped Christian, sir,” said the Praetorian with perfect teeth.
“This is ridiculous!” snapped Titus.
“What’s your name, Christian?” said the officer
“My name is Pinarius. Senator Titus Pinarius.”
The officer consulted a list. “Ah, yes, we do indeed have a Pinarius among those scheduled to be punished in the circus today. A male citizen, age forty-seven. This must be him.”
Titus clenched his jaw. All day he had avoided thinking about his brother, telling himself he had no brother. “That would be Kaeso Pinarius, not Titus-”
“ Now I recognize you!” said the officer. “You were one of the first arsonists we arrested. You certainly look different now! How did you manage to clean yourself up like that, and escape from the cell? And where in Hades did you get that toga? I’ll bet you murdered a senator to get your hands on that!”
“This is absurd,” said Titus. “I am a senator, an augur, and a friend of the emperor.”
The Praetorians laughed.
Titus felt a sinking sensation. The situation was getting out of hand. He told himself to remain calm.
“Let me explain something,” he said, speaking though gritted teeth. “I have a brother… a twin brother… who is a Christian-”
The Praetorians only laughed harder.
“An identical twin?” shouted the Praetorian with perfect teeth. “That’s rich!”
“With your imagination, you should be writing comedies for the stage, not setting fires,” said the officer, who abruptly ceased laughing and looked grim. “Such a preposterous story only confirms what I suspected. What do you fellows think? How do we treat a lying, murdering Christian?”
The Praetorians roughly shoved Titus back and forth between them, yanked at his toga until they pulled it off him, then ripped his undertunic until it hung in tatters and he was left wearing nothing but his loincloth. When one of them reached for the fascinum Titus tried to fight back, but he felt like a child flailing at giants. The Praetorian with perfect teeth struck him hard across the face, jarring his teeth and leaving him dazed and unsteady and with the taste of blood in his mouth.
They grabbed him by the arms, pulled him out of the little room, and began taking him somewhere else. In the open space behind the stands, they passed two men in senatorial togas. Titus tried to raise his arms, but the Praetorians restrained him.
“Help me!” he shouted.
The senators glanced at him. One of them muttered, “Filthy arsonist!”
The Praetorians struck Titus across the face to silence him and shoved him to a gate. The gate opened and Titus was forced into a dimly lit enclosure. Above him he could hear the murmur of the crowd. All around him echoed the creaking of the wooden stands as people moved about overhead. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that the cell was quite large and full of people, most of them in rags or wearing little more than he was. They were filthy and unkempt and stank of urine and sweat. He passed among them, staring at their faces. Some were trembling with fear and muttering prayers with their eyes tightly shut. Others were oddly calm, speaking to their companions in low, reassuring voices.
“In such a wicked world, death is a release to be longed for,” said a man with a long white beard. Titus had seen him once in Kaeso’s rooms. “Even a death under circumstances as horrible as this is better than life in such a world. Death will deliver us to a better place.”
A harried stage manager scurried by, followed by a group of Praetorians. “I am trying to maintain order here; I am trying to keep to the emperor’s schedule of events!” the man shouted. “Now, I need you fellows to divide the prisoners into groups-”
Titus ran toward the man. “Listen to me!” he said. “A mistake has been made. I shouldn’t be here-”
The man started back, as if a wild dog had jumped at him. Before Titus could say another word, one of the Praetorians raised a shield and used it to shove him back. By a flicker of torchlight Titus caught a glimpse of his reflection in the highly polished metal. He was shocked at what he saw.
Staring back at him was a nearly naked man with a crazed look in his eyes, his face bruised, his lips bleeding. How quickly his dignified, untouchable identity as a Roman senator had been stripped from him!
Titus looked this way and that, desperate to find someone to whom he could explain his situation.
Suddenly he was face-to-face with Kaeso.
He had never before seen his brother look so wretched. Like Titus, Kaeso wore only a loincloth. The body Titus saw before him was familiar but distorted, like a mockery of his own, covered with bruises and wounds and bloody patches. Kaeso had been beaten and tortured. From his gaunt appearance, he had been starved as well. There was nothing aloof about his manner, as was the case with some of the Christians; Kaeso looked utterly broken and unnerved. Titus saw a pitiful, frightened man.
As the arrest and interrogation of the Christians had proceeded and the day of their punishment approached, Titus had forced himself not to think about his brother. He had told himself so many times that he had no brother that he almost believed it. Now Kaeso stood before him, a shadow of the man he once had been, but still undeniably the son of Lucius Pinarius, Titus’s twin brother. Titus felt an unbearable sadness, remembering their boyhood together in Alexandria and the years before they became strangers to each other. How had they grown so far apart? How had Kaeso ended up among these mad death-worshippers?
“It’s alright, brother,” whispered Kaeso. “I forgive you.”
Titus’s sadness faded. He felt a quiver of anger. What had he done to require forgiveness? Why did Kaeso always have to be so smug and self-righteous?
He tried to think of something to say, but there was no time. Suddenly a line of Praetorians was between them, forcing Kaeso into one group and Titus into another. With the Praetorians barking orders at them, the people in Kaeso’s group were forced to put on tunics soaked in pitch, then their arms were tied behind them.
A door opened. From the arena came the roar of the crowd. The stage manager screamed at the prisoners to hurry into the arena. “Quickly, quickly, quickly!” Guards with spears herded them through the opening.
Titus suddenly realized that his meeting with Kaeso had not been accidental. The gods had given him a last chance to save himself. He stepped away from his group and tried to get the attention of the stage manager. “We’re twins! That’s my twin brother! Look at us! Do you see? There are two of us, but it’s my twin brother who’s the Christian, not I! I’m not supposed to be here!”
The stage manager gave him an exasperated look and rolled his eyes. One of the guards used the butt of his spear to knock Titus to the ground.