An overheard discussion of the Thebaid one day made her realise her education’s deficiencies. Statius was not present, which was as well because he was so sensitive about reception of his work it was painful to watch. The discussion was about whether his poem, which might reflect on Domitian’s court, was either slathered with the grossest flattery or instead was deeply subversive and critical of the Emperor’s authoritarianism and the violence which underlay society. The concept that words could be so ambiguous was new to Lucilla. She was also straining to define phrases like ‘dactylic hexameters’, and to grasp whether she ought to regard these as thudding poetic metre or storytelling elegance.
Feeling disadvantaged, Lucilla might have gone off to some other clique, had she not come across the epigrams of Martial. His first book was recently published. These poems were easy: they were short, rude, witty and unpretentious — so readable that Lucilla could now see no reason to bother with any verse that was long-winded, overwrought and obscure. She began to discriminate between what she liked and what was fashionable. Such naive honesty would, of course, bar her from the intelligentsia.
Lucilla battled with epic. The success of Virgil’s Aeneid, with its undisguised grovelling to the Emperor Augustus, had encouraged writers of long heroic poems. Professionals like Statius blatantly hoped to win handouts whereas the upper classes, the amateurs, dreamed of retirement from public life, devoting themselves to ten-year labours over cherished epic manuscripts. Hence the Thebaid of Statius was now only one in a plethora of grandiose efforts: Valerius Flaccus, in his Argonautica, had begun the modern trend when he used Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece as a metaphor for the youthful Vespasian’s involvement in the invasion of Britain. It was Statius’ friend, the teacher Nemurus, who advised Lucilla against reading this; he told her the central hypothesis — that in capturing Britannia, Vespasian had opened up the seas in the same way as Jason — was so flimsy, the bluff old emperor himself must have guffawed. ‘All you get are tedious displays of erudition, exaggerated imagery, monotonous style and wilful dullness.’
This was when Lucilla first decided Nemurus was worth cultivating.
Epicry was like a plague. Rutilius Gallicus, the newly appointed Prefect of the City, was thought to be penning a little something. A career administrator from Northern Italy, he was such a plodder, nobody would even ask him about it. Silius Italicus, a lawyer with a suspect past (he had worked as an informer for Nero), kept his head down these days too, devoting himself to his Punica, which in a mammoth seventeen books related the conflict between Scipio and Hannibal. From what had leaked into public circulation (given a good shove off the slipway by the author, said Nemurus), his models were the historian Livy, Virgil naturally, and Lucan’s Pharsalia, written under Nero, which had retold the rivalry of Caesar and Pompey. Lucilla was disappointed to hear this was not glittering heroics. Caesar came across as unpleasant, Pompey as ineffectual. ‘However,’ (Nemurus again) ‘Pompey goes to his treacherous death with stoic poise.’
Lucilla, usually so diffident, lost her temper. ‘That’s insulting to our soldiers. I knew a Guard who was killed in Dacia. Nobody will ever even learn what happened to him, but he too was ambushed and I don’t imagine he went down with “stoic poise”. I see him covered in blood, fighting to exhaustion; I hear him saying “bloody well annoyed to be landed in this shit by idiots”… Why can’t poetry be real?’
The satirist Juvenal, happening to be present, fetched out a note tablet and scribbled words that he would work up later, excoriating Domitian and his advisory council by portraying them in a mock-debate about how to cook a monstrous turbot, when they ought to be applying themselves to Dacia.
Lucilla never cared for Juvenal, not socially. His targets were indiscriminate; he had even insulted Statius, saying he prostituted his art by pandering to the popular taste, so desperate that he had once sold ballet scripts to Paris. Juvenal could be extremely funny, but like Martial he was always depicting his life as a desperate struggle to obtain money from disinterested patrons, rushing about in the hope someone would invite him to dinner, or attaching himself to the gullible rich in order to screw legacies out of them. Martial was warmer, and at least said he never used real people in his epigrams. Juvenal did, and had a bad habit of brutal exaggeration. Once he knew who she worked for, he was always asking Lucilla about the Emperor’s relationship with Julia, trying to get her to say Julia had experienced a whole series of abortions, all supposedly forced on her as a result of sex with her imperial uncle. Telling Juvenal it was untrue never deterred him.
Lucilla had a distaste for men who chose not to work yet bewailed their poverty. So her preference was for the professional poets and other learned men who made up an income giving lessons. That said, even career teachers hung around hoping for imperial appointments, but as the Emperor and Empress continued to have no children, this was futile.
Good poets had opportunities. In the year of the Fuscus disaster at Tapae, Domitian’s chief project at home had been reinstituting the Capitoline Games, in honour of Jupiter, for which he built a new Odeum and Stadium, deemed two of the most beautiful buildings in Rome. Held from then on every four years, these games were modelled on the ancient Olympics and attracted international competitors, though Domitian extended the repertoire to include not only athletics but literature and music. Two years later, after Tettius Julianus won the second Battle at Tapae and reversed Roman fortunes in Dacia, the Emperor would hold the Secular Games in Rome, which were by tradition only held once in anyone’s lifetime. He then founded the Alban Games, held annually at his summer court in honour of his patron goddess Minerva. He liked to attend the Games in Greek dress, wearing a gold crown.
These years seemed to pass drably for Lucilla as her ache for Gaius Vinius slowly dulled. Finally, in the lull after the Alban Games, when those in her particular circle were upbeat and optimistic for their future because they were winning prizes, she decided to improve herself and first went to Nemurus to ask him to give her lessons. Although he felt instructing a female, a hairdresser, was demeaning for a man of his intellect, lack of a regular salary forced him to look receptive. Lucilla persisted; he agreed. He had been poor and had a one-time pauper’s terror of being poor again.
They got off on the wrong foot. Nemurus mistakenly assumed she was illiterate. He began showing her the alphabet on placards. Lucilla explained gravely that, even if most were not trained to the standards of a Greek secretary, slaves in upper-class homes, as her mother had been, were required to be basically literate and numerate. Lachne had sent Lucilla herself to a morning infant school.
‘So what are you asking?’
‘I want to learn to read a poem and understand it.’
Under encouragement from their mutual acquaintance, Statius, Nemurus caved in. The lessons had been Statius’ idea, in fact, because his own father was a teacher.
Lucilla’s critical education began and seemed successful. Nemurus could be an unsympathetic taskmaster, but she bore it. Reproof made her concentrate harder. For one thing, she was paying with her own money, and had no intention of wasting it, so strictness worked. She was determined to siphon off everything Nemurus had to give her intellectually. She fell upon reading and only needed to be given guidance.
For a time Nemurus was proud of her, or at least proud of his own achievement. They were on good terms — so good that Statius and his wife Claudia suggested that since both were single, they should get married. Though initially startled, Lucilla indicated that she would entertain the idea. Nemurus withdrew into himself, repeatedly begging advice from his male friends. But eventually he announced, as if the whole thing had been his idea, that this was what he wanted.