“While I’ve been lying here, I’ve been thinking that perhaps it’s not all that clever to get one’s limbs broken for a moment of glory,” I admitted. “But what would you really like to do?”
“Rome already rules over the whole of the world,” said Lucius, “and is not seeking new conquests. The god Augustus sensibly limited the number of legions to twenty-five. Now the most important thing to do is to convert Rome’s crude habits to those of Greek civilization. Books, poetry, drama, music and dance are more important than the blood-drenched performances at the amphitheater.”
“Don’t take away the races,” I said. “At least one can see fine horses there.”
“Gambling, promiscuity and shameless orgies,” said Lucius gloomily. “If I try to get a symposium going to talk in Greek in the way the old philosophers did, it always ends up with dirty stories and a drunken orgy. In Rome it’s impossible to find a society interested in good music and song or which would appreciate classical drama more than adventure stories and dirty jokes. Most of all I’d like to go and study in Athens or Rhodes, but my father won’t let me. According to him Greek culture has only an effeminate effect on the manly virtues of
Roman youth. Just as if there were nothing left of the earlier Roman virtues except hollow pretense and pomp and ceremony.”
But I gained much from Lucius too, for he willingly told me about the administration and key offices of Rome. According to his innocent conception, the Senate could reverse a bill of the Emperor, while again the Emperor as a people’s tribune for life, could block a bill by the Senate with his right of veto. Most of the Roman provinces were ruled by the Senate through the Proconsuls, but some were more or less the Emperor’s private property, the administration of which was his own responsibility. The Emperor’s most important province was Egypt; also countries tied to Rome and several kingdoms, the regents of which had been brought up since childhood in the Palatine school and had learned Roman customs. I had not really realized before how basically clear and sensible this apparently involved form of government was.
I explained to Lucius that I myself wanted to be a cavalry officer more than anything else. Together we went through the possibilities available to me. I had no chance of gaining entry into Rome’s Praetorian Guard for the sons of senators took up all the vacancies for tribunes there. In the border country of Mauretania one could hunt lions. In Britain there was endless border fighting. The Germans were disputing with Rome over grazing lands.
“But you can hardly win battle honors even if you do take part in a bit of fighting here and there,” said Lucius. “Border scuffles are not even reported, for the legion’s most important task is to keep the peace along the borders. A legion commantler who is too enterprising and anxious for war loses his post before he can turn around. In fact an ambitious man has the best chance of promotion in the navy. An officer in the navy needn’t even be a knight by birth. There isn’t even a temple of Poseidon in Rome. You’d have a good income and a comfortable life. You could count on the command of a ship from the start. A good helmsman would of course look after the navigation side. Usually no one of noble birth ever goes into the navy.”
I was sufficiently Roman, I replied, that it did not seem much of a life for a man to be rowed from one place to another, especially now that one had heard no mention of pirates within living memory. I could do the most good in the East, for I could speak Aramaic like everyone else who had grown up in Antioch. But I was not attracted to building roads and living in garrison towns where the legionaries had permission to marry and settle and the centurions could become successful merchants. I did not want to go to the East.
“Why should you bury yourself at the other end of the world anyhow?” asked Lucius. “It would be incomparably better to stay here in Rome where sooner or later one is noticed. With the help of your riding skill, your fine figure and beautiful eyes, you could go further in a year here than in twenty years as a commantler of a cohort among the barbarians.”
Irritable from my long stay in bed and from sheer contrariness, I said, “Rome in the heat of the summer is a sweating stinking city full of filthy flies. Even in Antioch the air was fresher.”
Lucius looked searchingly at me in the belief that I had meant more with my words than I had.
“Undoubtedly Rome is full of flies,” he admitted. “Real carrion flies too. It would be better if I kept my mouth shut because I know perfectly well your father retrieved his rank of knighthood thanks only to the Emperor’s conceited freedman. I suppose you know that delegates from cities and kings bow and scrape to Narcissus and that he has amassed a fortune of a couple of hundred million sesterces by selling privileges and official positions. Valeria Messalina is even more avaricious. By having one of the oldest men in Rome murdered, she acquired the gardens of Lucullus on the Pincian hill. She has had her rooms in Palatine made into a brothel and not content with that, she spends many nights in disguise and under a false name in the bawdy houses in Subura, where she sleeps wdth anyone for a few coppers just for the fun of it.”
I clapped my hands over my ears and said that Narcissus was a Greek with fine manners and I could not believe the things that were said about the Emperor’s beautiful wife with her clear ringing laugh.
“Messalina is only seven years older than we are,” I said. “She also has two lovely children and at the festival performances she sits with the Vestal Virgins.”
“Emperor Claudius’ shame and ignominy in the marriage bed are well known as far away as in the enemy countries, in Parthia and in Germany,” Lucius said. “Gossip is gossip, but I personally know young knights who boast that they’ve slept with her on the Emperor’s orders. Claudius orders everyone to obey Messalina, whatever she demands of them.”
“Lucius,” I said, “what young men boast about you know only too well from your symposiums. The shyer one is in the company of women, the more one boasts and invents conquests when one has had a bit of wine to drink. That such gossip is known abroad too, seems to me to show that it is deliberately spread by someone. The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. Human beings have a natural tendency to believe what they are told. Just that kind of lie which tickles a depraved palate, people believe most easily.”
Lucius flushed.
“I have another explanation,” he whispered in an almost trembling voice. “Perhaps Valeria Messalina really was a virgin when she was married at fifteen to that fifty-year-old depraved drunkard Claudius, whom even his own family despised. It was Claudius who debauched Messalina, giving her myrrh to drink so that she became a nymphomaniac. Now Claudius is finished and it’s not impossible that he deliberately closes his eyes. In any case he certainly demands of Messalina that she constantly sends new slave-girls to his bed, the younger the better. What he does to them is another matter. All this Messalina herself has in tears confessed to a person whom I do not wish to name but whom I believe absolutely.”
“We are friends, Lucius,” I said, “but you are of very noble birth and son of a senator, so you’re not competent to speak on the subject. I know that the Senate brought in the republic when Emperor Gaius was murdered. Then the Praetorians accidentally found his uncle, Claudius, hiding behind a curtain when they plundered Palatine and proclaimed him Emperor because he was the only one who held that right by birth. It’s such an old story that no one even laughs at it anymore. But I’m not surprised that Claudius relies more on his freedmen and his children’s mother than on the Senate.”
“Would you choose a mentally deranged tyrant before freedom?” asked Lucius bitterly.