“And their lovers?”
“Because they freely confessed, Domitian was lenient. Instead of being hung on crosses and being beaten to death with rods, they were stripped of their property and citizenship and sent into exile – a punishment no more severe than those Domitian hands out to slanderers and adulterers. But, Lucius, what of you? When you heard about the arrests, you must have been terrified.”
“My suffering was nothing compared to yours, Cornelia.”
“Even so-”
“It isn’t worth speaking of.”
In fact, the days and nights immediately after he learned of the accusations against the Vestals had been the longest of his life. At every moment he had expected a knock at his door. The punishment for a despoiler of a Vestal haunted his nightmares; sleep became impossible. He considered fleeing to one of his country estates, or even taking an outbound ship from Ostia, heading for the Euxine Sea and land of the Dacians to join Dio, but the futility of such an enterprise stopped him; if Domitian wanted to arrest him, there would be no escape, and sudden flight would be as good as a confession. Nor could he abandon Cornelia. If he should be arrested, he would refuse to testify, even if he was tortured – so he told himself – and if he was executed, he would die with the knowledge that he had not betrayed Cornelia.
He talked to no one about the arrests and upcoming trial, not even Epaphroditus. If he was being watched and followed, anyone with whom he had contact might fall under suspicion.
The date for the trial of the Vestals arrived, and still Lucius was a free man. All that day, he expected soldiers to come and arrest him. As he did every day, he dispatched his freedman Hilarion to go down to the Forum to deliver messages and bring back the day’s news. Late that afternoon, Hilarion finally returned. He quoted the latest price for grain from Alexandria. He also mentioned that another play had been added to the censor’s list, though he could not remember the title.
“Oh, and what else?” said Hilarion, scratching his head. “Oh yes, the Pontifex Maximus has rendered his judgement of the accused Vestals.”
“Yes?” Lucius tried to control the quaver in his voice.
“All were pronounced guilty – except one.”
“Is that right?” Lucius could hardly breathe. “Which Vestal was that?”
Hilarion thought for a moment. “Cornelia Cossa is her name. She was acquitted.”
Lucius could hardly believe his ears. He was as stunned by the news as if Cornelia had been found guilty. He felt faint. Hilarion asked if he was alright.
“I could use a bit of wine. Would you fetch it yourself, Hilarion?”
As soon as Hilarion left the room, Lucius had burst into tears.
He had longed to contact her, but did not dare to. Then one day a message arrived, written on a scrap of parchment and carried by a street urchin. “Meet me tomorrow” was all it said, but Lucius knew who had sent it and what it meant. And so they were together again at last, after so many months apart.
Lucius shook his head. “If Catullus was responsible for your arrest, he won’t give up. He’ll be watching and waiting for another chance to ruin you. He may be watching even now. He may have seen you come here. It was madness for us to meet again.”
“I had to see you, Lucius.”
“And I had to see you, Cornelia.”
He touched her face. He kissed her.
Both of them had arrived expecting their tryst to be chaste, a meeting to talk and share their suffering, to acknowledge the terrible danger they had escaped and to say a final farewell; but the strain of their ordeal culminated in a physical desire beyond anything they had experienced before. Their union was more than a simple coupling of bodies; it was an affirmation that they were still alive. Lucius was shaken to the core of his being. He experienced a blissful release such as he had never imagined. He knew this would not be the last time they met.
Much later, as he was walking home alone and the haze of lust began to lift and he could think clearly again, the irony of the situation struck him so forcefully that he laughed out loud. Domitian’s relentless campaign for public morals had driven him back into the arms of a Vestal virgin.
AD 88
It was the fifth day before the Ides of Junius, the twentieth anniversary of the death of Titus Pinarius.
As he did every year on this date, Lucius conducted a simple ritual of remembrance before the wax effigy of his father that occupied a niche in the vestibule of his house on the Palatine. He was attended only by the freedman Hilarion, who had been his father’s favourite and who cherished the memory of his old master. In the years since he had been manumitted, Hilarion had married and started his own family, and in many ways was a more devout Roman than Lucius, observing all the holidays and the customary rituals for the benefit of his children. Lucius, since he had little interest in religion and had created no family of his own, observed few ceremonies throughout the year, but he never neglected to note the day of his father’s death.
As happened every year, he felt a little guilty as he honoured the memory of his father. At the age of forty, Lucius had not produced an heir; after he died, who would continue to honor the memory of his father and all his other ancestors? Two of Lucius’s three sisters had children, but they were not Pinarii.
It was also the twentieth anniversary of the death of Nero.
That anniversary was not especially significant for Lucius, except as it related to his own father’s death, but it meant a great deal to Epaphroditus.
To observe the occasion, he had asked Lucius to join him at the tomb of Nero on the Hill of Gardens.
It was a mild, clear day. Lucius decided to walk rather than be carried in a sedan. He told Hilarion to spend the rest of the day with his family if he wished, and set out alone.
Leaving his house, Lucius gazed up at the massive new wings that had recently been added to the imperial palace. Domitian had so enlarged the complex that it now occupied not just the whole southern portion of the Palatine but much of the rest of the hill. He had also given the complex a name; as Nero had called his palace the Golden House, so Domitian called his palace the House of the Flavians. The public rooms were said to be enormous, with soaring vaulted ceilings, while the rooms and gardens where the emperor actually resided were said to be surprisingly small and to lie deep within the palace, accessible only by secret doorways and hidden passages.
Lucius descended the Stairs of Cacus and crossed the marketplace and the Forum. He walked along the huge, cordoned-off area where a saddle of land connecting the Quirinal Hill to the Capitoline was being excavated to make room for a grand new forum that would facilitate passage from the centre of the city to the Field of Mars. The amount of earth being removed was staggering; the buildings that would fill such a space would have to be constructed on a truly monumental scale. This new forum was without doubt the most ambitious of the emperor’s building projects, but it was only one of many. Structures could be seen going up all over the city, and a great many older buildings, still damaged from the fires under Nero and Titus, were at last being restored. Everywhere he went in Roma, Lucius saw cranes and scaffolding and heard foremen shouting orders to their work gangs. The incessant banging of hammers echoed from all directions.
Everywhere, too, he saw the image of the emperor. Monumental statues of Domitian had been placed at every important intersection and in every public square. The statues were of bronze, decorated with gold and silver, and invariably portrayed the emperor in the ornate armour of a triumphing general. Walking across the city, a man was never out of sight of a statue of the emperor; from certain spots, one could see two or even three of them in the distance. There was no place in Roma where a citizen could escape the stern gaze of Domitian.
Along with his statues, Domitian erected commemorative arches all over the city, little replicas of the vast Arch of Titus in the Forum ornamented in the same excessively decorated style. On many of these arches, some brave, seditious wit had scrawled a graffito that consisted of a single word, ARCI – which, when said aloud, could be taken either as the Latin word for “arches” or the Greek word, arkei, meaning “enough!”