Overwhelmed by emotion and unable to speak, Epaphroditus could only nod.
More Praetorians came rushing into the little room, their swords drawn. Before they could reach him, Titus pulled out his dagger and plunged it into his chest.
PART III
LUCIUS
The Seeker
AD 69
Lucius Pinarius sighed. “If only Otho were still alive, and mperor. You were able to twist Otho around your little finger.”
Sporus, wearing an elegant silk robe, made only a grunt for an answer. She – for Lucius always thought of Sporus as “she,” and Sporus preferred to be addressed as a woman – stretched with feline grace on the couch next to Lucius. Side by side, the two friends gazed up at the elaborate scene painted on the ceiling, its vivid colours softened by the slanting winter sunlight. The scene depicted the abduction of Ganymede by Jupiter; the naked, beautiful youth was clutching a toy hoop in one hand and a cockerel, Jupiter’s courtship gift, in the other, while the king of the gods stood with muscular arms spread, ready to make himself into an eagle to carry the object of his desire to Olympus.
“Is there a prettier room in all the Golden House?” said Sporus. “I love these apartments, don’t you?”
“I’d love them more if I were only a visitor, and Epaphroditus would agree to let me to return to my own house and family,” said Lucius.
“He’s only doing what he thinks is best for you. He made a promise to your father to look after you; I witnessed the vow. If Epaphroditus says you’re safer living here, then you should be glad he still has these apartments, despite all the changes, and gladder still that he has space for you.
Besides, if you were no longer here, I should grow awfully lonely without you, Lucius.”
Lucius smiled. “A year and a half ago, we hardly knew each other.”
“A year and a half ago, many things were different. Nero still lived. Imagine that – a world grand enough to contain Nero in it! Nero was too big for this world. Galba was too little.”
“Galba might still be emperor, if he had paid the Praetorians what he owed them.”
“Galba was a bore!” declared Sporus. “A miser and a bore. His reign was seven months of misery for everyone, including himself. The soldiers were right to kill the old fool. And right to make Otho emperor in his place. It was almost as if Nero had come back to us.” Sporus sighed. “Once upon a time, back in the golden days, Otho and Nero were best friends, you know. Their parties and drinking bouts were legendary. Nero told me Otho was like an older brother to him – though he flattered himself if he thought there was any physical resemblance. Otho was so good looking. And what a body he had! It was Poppaea who came between them. Otho was married to her; Nero had to have her. Poor Otho was forced to divorce Poppaea and head off to Spain.”
“And when the soldiers got rid of Galba, Otho was their choice to succeed him.”
“Because the people were already nostalgic for Nero, and Otho was the closest thing to Nero they could find. He was only thirty-seven; he could have ruled for a long, long time. He took Nero’s name. He restored the statues of Nero that had been pulled down. He announced his intention to complete the parts of the Golden House still under construction, on an even grander scale than Nero intended.”
“The bricklayers and artisans in Roma loved hearing that!” said Lucius.
“In every way, Otho seemed ready to rule just as Nero had done.”
“And ready to love as Nero had loved.”
Sporus sighed and nodded. “Yes. Dear Otho! Because I looked like her, of course. I remember the first time he saw me. It was in these apartments. He came to see Epaphroditus with some question about the household staff. Otho saw me across the room. He looked as if he’d been struck, as if he might fall. I could see his knees trembling.”
“His tunic was short enough to show his knees?”
“Otho loved to show off his legs, and with good reason. He had the legs of a mountaineer, as smooth and firm as if they’d been carved from marble. Thighs like tree trunks. Calves like-”
“Please, Sporus, that’s enough about Otho’s legs!” Lucius laughed.
Sporus smiled. “It didn’t take us long to get acquainted.”
“You dragged him straight to your bed, you mean!”
“It was his bed we slept in, though I don’t recall sleeping. It was like the night the Divine Julius met Queen Cleopatra in Alexandria – love at first sight.”
“Or lust!”
“Perhaps. Sometimes lust comes first, and love later. In private he called me Sabina, just as Nero did.” Sporus frowned. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t looked so much like her. What a strange destiny the gods laid out for me. Ah, well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.”
A wistful expression crossed the eunuch’s face. Lucius had seen it before, and Epaphroditus had once explained it to him: “That is the look Sporus gets when she thinks about her long-lost testes.”
Otho had reigned for only ninety-five days. Many of those days had been spent away from Roma, mustering troops and preparing for the invasion of Aulus Vitellius, the governor of Lower Germania, who had been proclaimed emperor by his own troops. Otho took to the field against Vitellius in northern Italy, but before the campaign could begin in earnest, Otho killed himself.
Why? Everyone in Roma had asked that question. Otho had every chance of winning against Vitellius, but instead chose to die in his tent on the eve of battle. His friends said that Otho killed himself to save Roma from civil war. Lucius could hardly imagine such an act of self-sacrifice, especially from a man who had been hailed as a second Nero. But the story was repeated so often and so fervently that Otho’s suicide for the sake of Roma had already become the stuff of legend.
Otho might have hoped to give the city a respite from bloodshed and upheaval, but his death and the unopposed succession of Vitellius accomplished just the opposite. The new emperor arrived in Roma at the head of a licentious and bloodthirsty army, and the city became the scene of riot and massacre, gladiator shows and extravagant feasting. To reward his victorious legionaries, Vitellius disbanded the existing Praetorian Guard and installed his own men. Under Galba and Otho, a few brave voices in the Senate had spoken up for a return to Republican government; Vitellius’s reign of terror silenced all opposition.
Physically, the new emperor was the opposite of the statuesque Otho. He was grotesquely obese. Apparently he had not always been unattractive; rumour had it that the young Vitellius had been one of Tiberius’s spintriae at Capri, where his services to the debauched emperor had advanced his father’s career. Titus found it hard to imagine Vitellius as a pleasingly plump boy when gazing at the man in his late fifties.
The death of Otho had left Sporus without a role in the imperial household. As she had done in the confusion after Nero’s death and under Galba, Sporus again looked to Epaphroditus for protection. That was how Lucius and Sporus had been thrown together. Lucius was already residing with Epaphroditus, seldom stirring beyond his suite of rooms, trying to draw as little attention as possible to himself or to the personal fortune he had inherited from his father. There was plenty of space in Epaphroditus’s apartments to accommodate both Lucius and Sporus, but the two wards inevitably found themselves spending time together. They were about the same age: Lucius was twenty-two and Sporus a bit younger. Otherwise they had little in common, yet they never quarreled and often talked for hours, sharing gossip, laughing at each other’s jokes, and reminiscing about the dead – not only Lucius’s father and Otho, but all the others who had passed into oblivion in the tumult that had begun with Nero’s death.
So far, Lucius had remained beneath the new emperor’s notice, and so had Sporus. Epaphroditus told them that this was a good thing, but inevitably they grew restless shut up in Epaphroditus’s apartments.