“To Gaius Plinius Secundus, greetings from Aurelius Fulvus. Your presence is commanded at the palace at the ninth hour for dinner. Wives are particularly invited.” Pliny raised an eyebrow at this; as a rule, the emperor had little use for senatorial wives. “We will meet on the steps and go in together. Be prompt. Farewell.”
Curt and faintly unpleasant, as usual. Pliny disliked his superior. Some months ago he had been plucked from his civil law practice and asked to assist the Prefecture in clearing away a great backlog of criminal cases. Not long afterward, one of the deputy prefects, a man tortured by ulcers, committed suicide, inconveniencing everyone, and Pliny was moved into his position. Only for a few days, he was assured, but days had stretched into weeks with no end in sight. It was another feather in his cap, no doubt, but the job was irksome.
The sun was still high and the heat oppressive as his litter-bearers had snaked along the teeming streets, holding him high above the filth. The narrow streets of Rome were clogged with thousands of visitors streaming into the city to enjoy the revels that would occupy the next fifteen days: tomorrow the Ludi Romani, the Roman Games, began.
The palace sprawled over half the Palatine Hill, rising up “like seven mountains piled one atop the other, reaching to the sky,” said a flattering poet. It was divided into a public and a domestic wing. In the former, the Domus Flavia, toiled a thousand imperial slaves and freedmen-the clerks, scribes, and accountants whose drudgery made the vast Roman Empire run, while in the latter, the Domus Augustana, other slaves, sleek and perfumed, performed more intimate services for their “Lord and God.”
The building was entirely Domitian’s creation; he had supervised the design of it down to the smallest detail. His father and elder brother in their lifetimes had both been content with far more modest quarters.
When they had arrived that evening at the breathtaking sweep of steps that led up to the monumental gates, Pliny had been astonished to see among the company several known critics of the regime. Could reconciliation be in the wind? He had heard no such rumors, but the thought gave him pleasure.
Catching sight of his chief, Pliny had made his way toward him. The city prefect, a sallow, long-jawed man, gripped his forearm with false bonhomie and intentional pain. Aurelius Fulvus had been a stalwart of the regime for years. Raised to senatorial rank by Vespasian as a reward for his family’s loyalty in the civil war, he now held this powerful and lucrative office which was far beyond his modest intellect and sluggish nature. By his side was Atilius Regulus-senator, lawyer, informer-a man Pliny despised. Was he on the prefect’s payroll too? Regulus threw a friendly arm around Pliny and brushed his cheek with his lips.
“I regret that the Lady Calpurnia…” Pliny had begun.
“Yes, yes, never mind,” said Fulvus, “We didn’t bring ours either.” He drew the two of them close and whispered over the hubbub. “We are not here tonight to enjoy ourselves. Our instructions are to look sharp and listen well. Those were Our Lord and God’s precise words.” Lord and God. How easily the phrase rolled off Fulvus’ tongue.
“And for what precisely are we listening?” Pliny had asked, but at that moment, the tall gates of gilded bronze had swung open and the elegant mob swarmed up the steps between a double line of Praetorian Guardsmen in their white tunics and scarlet cloaks.
…Yes, he would resign his post. This embarrassing charade was the last straw. He was a Roman senator, not a common spy.
“You are all looking well, my friends. Hale and strong. No need for any of you to fear Hades!” Domitianus Caesar, Conqueror of Germany, Conqueror of Dacia, Pontifex Maximus, Consul, Lord and God, regarded them all with a tight smile. Like his father Vespasian before him, the emperor was thick-bodied, big-shouldered, and bull-necked. He had managed to enter the hall ahead of them through some secret passageway, no doubt, and was already reclining beside his wife on the imperial couch, raised upon its dais. An exuberant laurel wreath failed to conceal his thinning hair. When some of the guests began laboriously to kneel, Parthenius assured them that the emperor did not wish to stand on ceremony tonight and the prostration could be omitted. “My only thought,” Domitian continued, “was to honor Pluto on the night before we honor his more genial brother, Jupiter.” Vigorous nods of approval. Fixed smiles. “Cocceius Nerva, I believe, is hungry? Am I right, Nerva, it was you, wasn’t it, who said so?” “I am perishing of hunger, Caesar.” In fact, Nerva was a martyr to indigestion and seldom took anything but porridge.
“Perishing! Well, we shouldn’t allow that. Best eat your fill tonight, my friend, for who knows what tomorrow may bring, as some poet has no doubt said.”
The air crackled with malice.
Trying his best not to overhear any of the conversation around him, Pliny’s eyes strayed to the imperial couple. Domitian was a man of forty-five who had once been thought handsome. Now baldness and a paunch had ruined his looks. Beneath dense black brows, quick, mistrustful eyes peered out.
Behind him, as always, stood his cup-bearer and bed-mate, Earinus, a young boy of exceptional beauty except that his head was grotesquely small. As the boy leaned over to refill his master’s goblet, Domitian reached under his red tunic-the youth always wore red-and ran his hand up the inside of his smooth leg. Earinus smiled. The empress, however, did not. Domitia Longina Augusta, stared stonily ahead of her, putting not a morsel of food to her lips. A man of breeding does not fondle his pet boy in his wife’s presence.
She was a proud woman, the daughter of Nero’s best general. She had inherited her father’s strength of character, but, sad to say, his looks as well. She was as tall as a man, with a square jaw and prominent nose. Her face was thickly coated with powder of white lead-some said, to hide the bruises made by her husband’s fists.
It was not only with boys that he humiliated her. If one believed the palace “smoke,” Domitian had committed incest with Julia, his niece, a pale and delicate girl, and then forced her to have a near fatal abortion.
At a signal from Parthenius, waiters-Ethiopians, Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, all of them beautiful young boys-came round with the appetizer course on trays of solid gold. On offer were baked dormice rolled in honey and poppy seed, Lucrine oysters, pickled eggs, and snails fattened on milk.
Course succeeded course without pause: sow’s womb stuffed with herbs and surrounded by the teats boiled in milk, lamprey eels from the straits of Messina, roast boar, mullet, hams ingeniously carved in the shape of pigeons, an enormous lobster garnished with asparagus, goose livers with truffles, and sea urchins. For drink there was Falernian wine, strained through snow. The beautiful boys refilled the crystal goblets as fast as they were emptied. Other slaves hovered about the guests, ready with silver ewers of rosewater to pour on greasy fingers and to offer their long hair with which to dry them.
Pliny was offended in his philosopher’s soul by these grotesque displays. He took just a little of each dish and drank abstemiously, as ever. He doubted whether anyone had much of an appetite left after what they’d been through. Still, his table fellows outdid each other in praising the fare, heaped up their plates, and belched enthusiastically.
Meanwhile, to entertain them, dwarfs dressed in miniature suits of Greek armor fought bare-breasted Amazons. The guests did their best to look entertained but their laughter was too gay, their smiles tense and wary. The only safe topic for dinner table conversation was tomorrow’s great sacrifice to be followed by days of theater and chariot racing.
As the dessert course of imported fruit and honeyed wine came round, the emperor rapped for silence. “Papinius Statius,” he called out, gesturing to the couch alongside him, “one of the few living poets worth hearing, is with us tonight. Though he is weighed down by years, he has obliged me by coming up to Rome to attend the Games and immortalize them in verse. I have asked him to recite to us from a work in progress.”