“Father,” I asked, “what exactly does Tullia want from you?”
“That I become a senator,” my father replied. “That is what that monstrous woman has got into her head. I own enough land in Italy and am of sufficiently noble birth to be able to become a member of the Senate. And Tullia, by special dispensation, has obtained the rights of a mother of three children, although she has never bothered to have any. In my youth I loved her. She followed me to Alexandria and never forgave me for choosing your mother, Myrina. Now she talks on at me as one talks to an oxen, abuses me for my lack of ambition and will soon turn me into an incurable drunkard if I don’t do what she wants and become a senator. But Minutus, my son, there is no wolf blood in me, even though in all truth, many a worse man has sat in red boots on an ivory stool. Forgive me, my son. You understand now why under these circumstances I could do nothing else but declare myself a Christian.”
As I looked at my father’s swollen face and restless roving eyes, I was seized with great compassion. I realized that he had to find something worthwhile in his life to be able to bear living in Tullia’s house. Yet even being in the Senate would be better for his spiritual health than taking part in the secret meetings of the Christians.
As if he had read my thoughts my father looked at me, fingering the worn wooden goblet, and said, “I must stop partaking in the love-feasts, for my presence simply does harm to the Christians, as it has to Paulina. Tullia has, in her mortification, sworn to have them all banished from Rome if I don’t leave them. All this because of a few innocent kisses which are customary after the holy meals.”
“Go to Britain,” he went on, handing me his beloved wooden goblet. “The time has come for you to take over the only inheritance you have from your mother, before Tullia burns it in her anger. Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews, once drank from it, almost eighteen years ago, after he had risen from his tomb and gone to Galilee with the scars from the nails on his hands and feet and the sores from the lashes on his back. Don’t ever lose it. Perhaps your mother will be a little closer to you when you drink from it. I have not been the kind of father I should have wished to be.”
I took the wooden goblet which my father’s freedmen in Antioch maintained was blessed by the Goddess of Fortune. I thought that it had not protected my father from Tullia, if one did not consider this fine house, all the comforts of life and perhaps the honor of being a senator the greatest possible earthly success. But I felt a secret respect as I took the wooden goblet in my hands.
“Do me one more service,” my father said gently, “On the slopes of Aventine, there lives a tentmaker… “
“… whose name is Aquila,” I said ironically. “Quite. I am taking a message to him from Paulina. I can tell him at the same time that you too are leaving them.”
But my bitterness dissolved and melted away when my father gave me his beloved goblet as a memento. I embraced him and pressed my face against his tunic to hide my tears. He clasped me tightly to him, and we parted without looking at each other again.
Tullia was waiting for me in the high-backed chair of the mistress of the house.
“Have a care in Britain, Minutus,” she said. “It will be important for your father to have a son serving the State and the common good. I don’t know much about army life, but I’m given to understand that a young officer is more quickly promoted by being generous with his wine and playing dice with his men than by going on unnecessary and dangerous expeditions. Don’t be mean with your money, but incur debts if necessary. Your father can afford it. Then you’ll be considered normal in every way.”
On the way home I went into the temple of Castor and Pollux to inform the Curator of the cavalry of my journey to Britain. At home my Aunt Laelia and Claudia had become firm friends and had chosen the best kind of woolen underclothes for me as a protection against the raw climate of Britain. They had gathered other things for me too, so much that I should have needed at least a wagon to take them all. But I was not even going to take my armor, except my sword, as I thought it best to equip myself on the spot in accordance with what the country and circumstances demantled. Barbus had told me how they used to laugh at the spoilt Roman youths who brought quantities of unnecessary things with them on active service.
In the moist warm autumn evening, beneath the uneasy red sky, I went to see the tentmaker, Aquila. He was obviously quite a wealthy man, for he owned a large weaving business. He met me suspiciously at the door and looked around as if afraid of spies. He was about forty and did not look at all Jewish. He had no beard and no tassels on his mantle, so I took him for one of Aquila’s freedmen. Claudia had come with me and she greeted Aquila like an old friend. When he heard my name and the greetings from my father, his fear left him, although the uneasiness in his eyes was the same as I had seen in my father’s. He had vertical lines on his forehead like a soothsayer.
He asked us kindly to come into his house, and his fussy wife Prisca at once began offering us fruit and diluted wine. Prisca was at least a Jewess by birth, judging by her nose, a managing, talkative woman who had probably been very beautiful in her youth. Both were upset when they heard that Paulina had been denounced and that my father considered it best to leave their secret society so as not to harm them.
“We have enemies and people who envy us,” they said. “The Jews persecute us, hound us out of the synagogues and beat us in the streets. An influential magician, Simon from Samaria, hates us bitterly. But we are protected by the spirit who puts words in our mouths and so we need fear no earthly power.”
“But you are not a Jew,” I said to Aquila.
He laughed.
“I am a Jew and am circumcised, born in Trapezus in Pontus, on the southeast shore of the Black Sea, but my mother was a Greek and my father was baptized when he was celebrating Pentecost in Jerusalem once. There was much quarreling in Pontus when some people wanted to make sacrifices to the Emperor outside the synagogue. I moved to Rome and live here on the poor side of Aventine, like many Jews who no longer believe that to follow the law of Moses absolves them from their sins.”
“The Jews on the other side of the river hate us most,” explained Prisca, “because heathens who have listened to them prefer to choose our way and think it is easier. I don’t know if our way is easier. But we have compassion and the secret knowledge.”
They were not unpleasant people and lacked the usual superciliousness of the Jews. Claudia admitted that she and her Aunt Paulina had listened to their teachings. According to her, they had nothing to hide. Anyone could come and listen to them and some were moved to a state of ecstasy. Only the love-feasts were closed to outsiders, but that was also true of Syrian and Egyptian mysteries which occurred in Rome.
They kept repeating that everyone, slave or free, rich or poor, wise or dull, was equal in the eyes of their God, and they regarded everyone as their brothers and sisters. I did not entirely believe this as they had been so depressed to hear that my father and Paulina Plautia had left them. Claudia had assured them of course that Paulina had not done so in her heart but only outwardly to protect her husband’s good name.
The following morning I was given a horse for the journey and a courier’s plaque to wear on my chest. Paulina gave me the letter to Aulus Plautius and Claudia wept. I rode along the military highways right through Italy and Gaul.
Book III
I arrived in Britain just as winter was setting in with its storms, mists and icy rain. As every visitor to Britain knows, the country can oppress any man. There are not even any towns in the sense that there are in northern Gaul. Whoever does not die of pneumonia in Britain gets rheumatism for life, if he has not already been captured by the Britons and had his throat slit in their ash groves; or been carried back to their priests, the Druids, who predict the future of their tribe from the intestines of Romans. My legionaries, who have thirty years’ service behind them, told me all this.