Some adventurers took an interest because they had assessed her success and were after her money. One even told her so; his honesty had a passing allure but she still refused him.
To find a loyal companion from among these potential disasters began to appear impossible. Lucilla could certainly have a string of sexual partners, if she could endure brief conjunctions, one-sided action, men who nervously checked the time of day to find excuses to leave, raw panic on their part if she ever seemed to grow needy. Occasionally she went to bed with someone, but she failed to find permanence or real pleasure.
She needed a man who would neither resent her talent nor try to take her over. He must have either a business or professional career, but not one where he needed a wife’s unpaid assistance; Lucilla wanted to continue her own work. It would be best if he was connected with the court, Lucilla’s world. He should have the same mobility as she did, for the same reasons.
However, the way Lucilla moved on a whim between Alba and Rome was in itself off-putting to many men. She looked flighty. Her freedom to wander hinted she might lead a double life: if she was not doing so now, she could do it in future, betraying any poor mongrel who kennelled with her permanently. Each knew about two-timing because they, men, did it all the time. They made duplicate assignations; flitted to new partners; lied and got away with it. Alba had many a careerist who for years kept a wife and children, dumped in some small town, on a farm, in a back-street of the capital, but who, in the separate world of the villa, lived it up with a dancer or singer or an imperial servant — a dresser, an embroiderer, a jewel-casket-minder, a hairdresser. Some moved around skeins of these ladies in an ever-changing country dance. Inevitably on retirement they would slink back to the small town or farm.
A problem was the subtly unreal atmosphere. Much as Lucilla loved the vast villa complex, she recognised its falsehoods. Alba lay twenty miles from Rome, which was just near enough to make the journey down the Via Appia in one day with the best transport. It seemed accessible; yet was remote. It seemed cosmopolitan, yet was intimate. Everything suggested simple country life, though a life suffused with luxury. Attendants padded everywhere in their resplendent white uniforms with gold decoration; white roses were brought in enormous quantities from Egypt to adorn and perfume the marble halls. Reality died at the entrance gates.
Domitian aimed to prove that ‘Rome’ was the Emperor. Power no longer resided in the Senate, which was physically tied to the Curia in the city Forum; power now centred on him. He had not retreated to Alba in the same way as Tiberius, the emperor he most studied, a grim figure who had exiled himself in Capri in order to lead a life of morose perversion, set apart from Roman society. Instead, Domitian made Alba the heart of things that mattered.
His villa was regarded as a gloomy citadel, full of suspicion and menace. Its beauty and amenities belied that. His architect, Rabirius, who was now creating a staggering new palace in Rome too, had devised at Alba a building with sophisticated use of space and materials. Domitian’s personal pleasures were cultural. He surrounded himself with music and poetry, plays and readings in his theatre, athletics and gladiating in his arena. He also loved hunting. Despite spindly legs and a pot belly, he had become a notably good archer, capable of shooting two arrows into the skull of a deer so they looked like horns. Once he made a slave hold up his fingers, and shot arrows through them, causing no wounds. And he spent many hours walking in his magnificent gardens.
In addition to outdoor activities he gave dinners, dinners which were almost a chore to him because he preferred to eat his main meal at lunchtime in private. In the evening he merely watched others, blighting their enjoyment as he stared and munched an apple glumly. His social reticence stood for his austere moral authority. Even so, for those privileged to share his life at Alba, he kept a famously elegant table, though he tended to terminate banquets early then retreat to his private quarters.
Once Domitian was out of sight anything went. Each evening came a sense of restraint being lifted. Lucilla felt temptation, though usually she shied from the decadence. Yet sometimes her loneliness became too much to bear.
It was late summer, the days already shortening though they were very hot and their evenings sultry. The Emperor was gathering an army for Moesia. Domitian was heading there in person, soon. His advisers, his freedmen, his Praetorians would accompany him. The Guards’ Commander, Cornelius Fuscus, had been given overall command.
They were all keyed up. The court’s impending shift had imposed an end-of-term atmosphere that unsettled both those who must go and those who would remain in Rome.
Lucilla became unbearably restless. Last time, when the Emperor went to Germany, her sister had still been alive and in order to spend time with Lara she had accepted that the removal of the court simply meant the sisters would for a time exist more quietly in Rome. Now a greater sense of loss hung over her. Not only was her domestic life solitary, but with the big masculine exodus she lost all chance to make connections. In over a year she had made no connections that she valued. She had no lover. She could not envisage ever acquiring one. Looking around at the men she encountered, she was as half-hearted about them as they were towards her. Her faith in herself diminished. She was not only frustrated, but intensely lonely.
On one particular evening, any man who deployed a scruple of charm could have had her. A few shared jokes would have done it. A gift of half a bowl of cherries, some tame philosophical theory, caressing the arch of her foot as she sat on a flight of steps, all would have been sufficient. Perhaps luckily for her, this wild mood that laid her open to seduction was too scary for most of them.
On the main terrace the Emperor was attending a concert in his miniature theatre. It was a perfect gem, marble-decorated, intimate and exclusive. Twenty or so tiers of stone seats formed a tight semi-circle, so close that friends on one side could converse across the centre with others opposite, while from his marble throne midway, Domitian could preside and feel himself the centre of a sophisticated gathering.
Tonight’s elegant music was too refined for many hangers-on, who had stayed outside, too rowdy, too impatient and shallow to appreciate measured cadences of lyre and flute. People had clustered in small groups on a terrace with an enormous fountain bowl, waiting for Domitian to emerge with his immediate coterie. They were quiet but louche. Flagons were being passed around, strong perfumes filled the air, lewd jokes flickered through every verbal exchange and it was blatantly assumed everyone present had world-weary hopes of copulation.
Lucilla drifted among them, in a set centred on Earinus, Domitian’s eunuch. He was an exquisite youth, selected in Pergamum to be sent to Rome for the Emperor, then too beautiful to be sent back after the Emperor took a new moral stance. Domitian had decided to shame his brother Titus, who had once kept eunuchs, by banning male castration as an unnatural outrage; even so, he ignored his own strictures by favouring this smooth, scented boy in his bracelets and necklaces. Earinus tasted the Emperor’s wine, then passed him his rare fluorspar cups like Ganymede attending Jupiter, an analogy Domitian adored since it made him godlike.
As ever, prurient talk dwelt on just how much the cup-bearer had lost in his castration, and what sexual acts Earinus could still perform. People harped on his painful snip obscenely. Unabashed, he lapped up attention. According to him, he was much in demand among senators’ wives, especially as there was no risk of pregnancy. Despite any diminution of his sexual drive, he slept with anyone. He even offered himself to Lucilla, not entirely joking.