As dark as the dense woods around him.
Moved by madness, he picked up a sharp stone.
He sliced off his manhood. He rose up transfigured:
A woman, the blood dripping from between her legs
Giving life to the dank, pungent earth.
Attis snatched up a drum and beat it, making music
To the Great Mother and her mysteries,
Singing rapturous falsetto to the servants of Cybele:
'Come galli, all together, to the groves on the mountain.
Sea salt stings the wound-turn away from the sea.
Turn away from Venus. Rid yourselves of manhood.
Leave that loathsome sort of love behind you,
Embrace the ecstasies of unsexed passion…' "
It was a long, strange poem. At times it became a chant, and the poet a dancer, moved to sway and stamp his feet by the poem that possessed him. The audience watched and listened, spellbound.
It was the story of Attis, and the madness of Attis, which moved him on a dark night, in a dense forest, far from home, to castrate himself and consecrate his existence to the Great Mother, Cybele. Still bleeding from his wound, he summoned the followers of the goddess and led them in a wild, ecstatic procession up the slopes of Mount Ida to her temple. They sang shrill chants, beat on drums, clanged cymbals, whirled about in frenzied, delirious dances with Attis leading them, until at last they fell exhausted into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When Attis woke, his madness had passed.
He saw what he had done.
He was horrified.
He ran to the seashore and gazed at the horizon,
sorry that he had ever left his homeland.
As a boy he had been a champion of the games,
a decorated athlete, a wrestler.
With his beard he became a man of the city,
known, respected, called upon.
What was he now?
A shipwrecked soul unable ever to return to his home,
neither man nor woman,
a fragment of his former self, sterile,
miserable, terribly alone.
His fanatic devotion had cut him off
from all that mattered to him, had cost him everything,
even his humanity.
Up on Mount Ida,
Cybele heard his wretched lament.
She looked down to see Attis weeping on the beach.
Did Cybele take mercy on Attis,
or was she only being practical
when she sent her lion down to the beach, not just to fetch Attis back, but to rend Attis's mind
and make him mad once and for all?
Attis in his sanity was too miserable for a life of worshiping Cybele, but in his unsexed state
what other life was he fit for?
So the roaring lion went crashing
down the mountainside and drove
Attis back into the forest, back into the
madness and raving ecstasy,
back into a life of loyal, unsexed
slavery to the Great Mother.
Catullus shivered, as if the poem were slowly releasing him from its grip. His voice began to fade, until the final lines were barely audible:
"Goddess, Great Mother Cybele,
guardian of Ida,
Madden other men-not me!
Give others your raving dream.
Avert your furies from my house.
Draw others into your scheme!"
Catullus was transformed. Mounting the stage, he had looked like a man stupefied by wine and self-pity, all soft and uncertain. Now his face was haggard and his eyes glowed, like a man emerging from a terrible ordeal, winnowed to his essential core. He stumbled a bit leaving the stage, not like a drunken man but like a man drained of all energy.
The garden was silent. Around me I saw raised eyebrows, uncertain frowns, thoughtful nods, grimaces of distaste. Sitting close by the stage Clodia stared unblinking at the spot Catullus had vacated. Her face was blank. Did she consider the poem a tribute to her, or the opposite, an insult? Or could she not see herself in a young man's poem about inescapable obsession, the obliteration of dignity and freedom by overwhelming passion, and the unequal, disastrous union of a mere mortal with an aloof, uncaring goddess?
Behind me I heard a stifled sob, like the sound of a woman weeping, so soft that except for the utter quiet I would never have noticed. I turned my head. Away from the other guests, on the steps leading down into the garden, a figure sat by the pedestal of the monstrous Venus, concealed in its shadow. He hugged his ankles as if to keep from shivering and hid his face against his knees, but by his dress I knew it was Trygonion.
Chapter Twenty Two
After Catullus's performance, the party never regained quite the same air of levity, despite the relentless parade of entertainments that followed. This included several other poets, better known than Catullus, who had been placed at the beginning of the evening as a sort of warm-up for those who followed. But no other poet who recited that evening left any lasting impression, at least not on my ears.
There were also dancers and jugglers and a concluding set of excruciatingly crude but very funny skits by the mime. During a break in all this entertainment our hostess found her way to our comer. She greeted Bethesda with outstretched arms and a kiss. "Did you receive the gift?"
"Yes, thank you. It arrived at the house while we were down at the Forum." Bethesda gave me a sidelong glance.
Clodia nodded. "Good. Now you're one of us. Yes, I saw you both at the trial. What do you think, Gordianus? How did it go for us today?"
"I suppose Bethesda said it best: 'Oratory is all very well when there are no facts to go on.' "
Clodia gave me a quizzical smile. "Was it Bethesda who said that? I thought it my ancestor Appius Claudius, the one who… well, never mind. May I talk to you privately? Senator, amuse this lady for a moment while I take her husband away on business."
She led me out of the garden, into a private chamber. The walls were painted a rich red, decorated with rustic scenes of satyrs and nymphs.
"You're looking much better today," I said.
"Am I? I thought I looked rather horrible when I saw myself in the mirror this morning. I considered calling off the party, but it would have been the first time I ever missed giving a party on the eve of the Great Mother festival. Even when Quintus and I were up in Cisalpine Gaul – "
"Did you have Chrysis tortured today?"
She looked at me blankly for a moment. Even by the lamplight reflected off the red walls her face looked pale. "Actually, I took you aside to talk about more important matters. But since you ask, Gordianus-yes, Chrysis was tortured today. Not by me, of course. By officials of the court. Surely you know that a slave can't give a statement in a trial without being tortured? Otherwise she might simply say whatever her mistress told her to say."
"So the logic goes."
"The bitch was about to poison me. I caught her in the act."
"Did she confess?"
"Yes."
"Did she implicate Caelius?"
"Of course. You can hear her statement read tomorrow, just before my own testimony."
"The statement which she gave under torture."
"You seem to have an unwholesome fixation on torture tonight, Gordianus. I should think you'd had enough of torture listening to that awful poem of Catullus's! Really, when he told me that he had an ideal poem for the Great Mother festival… " She gave a little shudder, then brightened. "But I won't have to use torture to get you to testify tomorrow, I hope."
"Me?"
"Of course. Who else could Herennius have meant when he said the man Cicero called 'the most honest man in Rome' would be testifying against Caelius? You need only tell what you witnessed with your own eyes at the Senian baths, and here in my house yesterday, when you saw what was done to me."
"What if I decline to testify?"
She seemed surprised. "No one can compel you. But I thought you wanted to see Caelius punished."
"I wanted to discover Dio's killer."
"It's the same thing, Gordianus. Everyone else in Rome has figured that out, so why haven't you? Oh, yes, I know, you're a man who demands proof. Well then, you should have come up with those slaves ofLucceius's, the ones involved in the poison plot. You were going to track them down and buy them for me, you said. Did anything ever come of that?"