That’s still two months away. “I hadn’t really given it much thought. I suppose I will.”
“Then you’ll see how cold it can get. I usually go to someplace like Sicilia or Aegyptus for the winter months, but this year I’m going to stay in Roma.” She snuggles cozily against me. “When the rains come we’ll keep each other warm. Won’t that be nice, Cymbelin?”
“Lovely. On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind seeing Aegyptus, you know. We could take the trip together at the end of the year. The Pyramids, the great temples at Menfe—”
“I have to stay in Italia this winter. In or at least near Roma.”
“You do? Why is that?”
“A family thing,” she says. “It involves my uncle. But I mustn’t talk about it.”
I take the meaning of her words immediately.
“He’s going to be named Consul again, isn’t he? Isn’t he?”
She stiffens and pulls her breath in quickly, and I know that I’ve hit on the truth.
“I mustn’t say,” she replies, after a moment.
“That’s it, though. It has to be. The new year’s Consuls take office on the first of Januarius, and so of course you’ll want to be there for the ceremony. What will this be, the fourth time for him? The fifth, maybe.”
“Please, Cymbelin.”
“Promise me this, at least. We’ll stay around in Roma until he’s sworn in, and then we’ll go to Aegyptus. The middle of January, all right? I can see us now, heading up the Nilus from Alexandria in a barge for two—”
“That’s such a long time from now. I can’t promise anything so far in advance.” She puts her hand gently on my wrist and lets it linger there. “But we’ll have as much fun as we can, won’t we, even if it’s cold and rainy, love?”
I see that there’s no point pressing the issue. Maybe her Januarius is already arranged, and her plans don’t include me: a trip to Africa with one of her Imperial friends, perhaps, young Flavius Caesar or some other member of the royal family. Irrational jealousy momentarily curdles my soul; and then I put all thought of January out of my mind. This is October, and the gloriously beautiful Lucilla Junia Scaevola will share my bed tonight and tomorrow night and so on and on at least until the Saturnalia, if I wish it, and I certainly do, and that should be all that matters to me right now.
We are passing the great hotels of the Via Roma. Their resplendent façades shine in the morning sun. And then we begin to climb up out of town again, into the suburban heights, a string of minor villas and here and there an isolated hill with some venerable estate of the Imperial family sprawling around its summit. After a time we go down the far side of the hills and enter the flat open country beyond, heading through the fertile plains of Campania Felix toward the capital city in the distant north.
We spend our first night in Capua, where Lucilla wants me to see the frescoes in the Mithraeum. I attempt to draw on my letter of credit to pay the hotel bill, but I discover that there will be no charge for our suite: the magic name of Scaevola has opened the way for us. The frescoes are very fine, the god slaying a white bull with a serpent under its feet, and there is a huge amphitheater here, too—the one where Spartacus spurred the revolt of the gladiators—but Lucilla tells me, as I gawk in provincial awe, that the one in Roma is far more impressive. Dinner is brought to us in our room, breast of pheasant and some thick, musky wine, and afterward we soak in the bath a long while and then indulge in the nightly scramble of the passions. I can easily endure this sort of life well through the end of the year and some distance beyond.
Then in the morning it is onward, northward and westward along the Via Roma, which now has become the Via Appia, the ancient military highway along which the Romans marched when they came to conquer their neighbors in southern Italia. This is sleepy agricultural country, broken here and there by the dark cyclopean ruins of dead cities that go back to pre-Roman times, and by hilltop towns of more recent date, though themselves a thousand years old or more. I feel the tremendous weight of history here.
Lucilla chatters away the slow drowsy hours of our drive with talk of her innumerable patrician friends in the capital, Claudio and Traiano and Alessandro and Marco Aureliano and Valeriano and a few dozen more, nearly all of them male, but there are a few female names among them, too, Domitilla, Severina, Giulia, Paolina, Tranquillina. High lords and ladies, I suppose. Sprinkled through the gossip are lighthearted references to members of the Imperial family who seem to be well known to her, close companions, in fact—not just the young Emperor, but his four brothers and three sisters, and assorted Imperial cousins and more distant kin.
I see more clearly than I have ever realized before how vast an establishment the family of our Caesars is, how many idle princes and princesses, each one with a great array of palaces, servitors, lovers and hangers-on. Nor is it only a single family, the cluster of royals who sit atop our world. For of course we have had innumerable dynasties occupying the throne during the nineteen centuries of the Empire, most of them long since extinct but many of the past five hundred years still surviving at least in some collateral line, completely unrelated to each other but all of them nevertheless carrying the great name of Caesar and all staking their claim to the public treasury. A dynasty can be overthrown but somehow the great-great-great-grandnephews, or whatever, of someone whose brother was Emperor long ago can still manage, so it seems, to claim pensions from the public purse down through all the succeeding epochs of time.
It’s clear from the way she talks that Lucilla has been the mistress of Flavius Caesar and very likely also of his older brother, Camillus Caesar, who holds the title of Prince of Constantinopolis, though he lives in Roma; she speaks highly also of a certain Roman count who bears the grand name of Nero Romulus Claudius Palladius, and there is a special tone in her voice when she tells me of him that I know comes into women’s voices when they are speaking of a man with whom they have made love.
Jealousy of men I have never even met surges within me. How can she have done so much already, she who is only twenty-one? I try to control my feelings. This is Roma; there is no morality here as I understand the word; I must strive to do as the Romans do, indeed.
Despite myself I try to ask her about this Nero Romulus Claudius Palladius, but already she has moved along to a sister of the Emperor whom she’s sure I’ll adore. Severina Floriana is her name. “We went to school together. Next to Adriana, she’s my best friend in the world. She’s absolutely beautiful—dark, sultry, almost Oriental-looking. You’d think she was an Arab. And you’d be right, because her grandmother on her mother’s side came from Syria. A dancing-girl, once upon a time, so the story goes—”
And on and on. I wonder if I am to be offered to Severina Floriana also.
It is the third day of our journey now. As the Via Appia nears the capital we begin to encounter the Imperial tombs, lining the road on both sides. Lucilla seems to know them all and calls them off for me.
“There’s the tomb of Flavius Romulus, the big one on the left—and that one is Claudius IX—and Gaius Martius, there—that’s Cecilia Metella, she lived in the time of Augustus Caesar—Titus Gallius—Constantinus V—Lucius and Arcadius Agrippa, both of them—Heraclius III—Gaius Paulus—Marcus Anastasius—”
The weight of antiquity presses ever more heavily on me.
“What about the earliest ones?” I ask. “Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius—”
“You’ll see the Tomb of Augustus in the city. Tiberius? Nobody seems to remember where he was buried. There are a lot of them in Hadrianus’s tomb overlooking the river, maybe ten of them, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, a whole crowd of dead Emperors in there. And Julius Caesar himself—there’s a great tomb for him right in the middle of the Forum, but the archaeologists say it isn’t really his, it was built six hundred years later—oh, look, Cymbelin—do you see, there? The walls of the city right ahead of us! Roma! Roma!”