“Were these paintings new or had they been there for a while?”
She thought about it. “Now that you mention it they looked rather fresh. I could still smell the paint, and the ceiling wasn’t smudged with lamp soot. But then the whole house looked new, as well as the plantings in the garden.”
“Very good. What next?”
“On one wall she had a bookcase. It was in the honeycomb style, but much larger than usual because it held star charts instead of ordinary scrolls. She asked us the birth dates of those whose horoscopes we wanted cast, and she went to the case and drew out several of the charts and took them to a broad table. She unrolled some of them and weighted their corners with little linen sandbags.”
I started to say something but she hurried on. “And before you ask, the charts gave every appearance of being quite ancient. They weren’t made of papyrus or parchment, and they were in a style that was not Greek or Roman or Egyptian. In fact, they resembled no style of art I have ever seen. And the writing was utterly incomprehensible, just tiny squiggles attached to long, straight lines. Yet the constellations were perfectly recognizable, once you understood the stylization of the art.”
“Who went first?”
“Atia. She gave Ashthuva young Octavius’s birth date and time and Ashthuva went over a sheet that seemed to be some sort of conversion table. I could make out a column that listed the Roman consuls of the past fifty or so years, and next to it a list in Greek of the Olympiads and the successive archons of Athens and next to that a column of writing in that odd language from the charts. It was pretty clear that this was her way of translating Roman and Greek dates into her own system. It was not ancient like the charts and it was written on very fine parchment.”
“Quite clear,” I commended. “There was no nonsense with braziers and arcane things burning? No purification ritual or mysterious libations?”
“None of that, and what if there were? We have plenty of those things in our own religion.”
“Yes, but it seems to make more sense when we do it.”
“Anyway, astrology is not a religion. How could it be? It makes no provision for the will of the gods, nor of their mutability. It involves no sacrifices or appeals to higher powers. It simply deals with human destiny as it is determined by the positions of the stars and planets at the moment of birth and their relations and juxtapositions as they change throughout life.”
“You sound very taken with this business,” I noted with more than a bit of alarm.
“I find something very satisfying in it. It is as rigorous as the study of Sosigenes, it merely applies these things to human life, while the astronomers simply study celestial phenomena without regard to the doings of humanity, as if the stars were above such things.”
“I suppose so. Still, it seems unnatural. No taking of omens, no sacrifices, no prayers. Why are these stars telling us about our destiny when we’re doing nothing for them?”
She rolled her eyes upward in a long-suffering gesture. “Why do I bother?” She took a deep breath. “To continue, and please try not to interrupt unless you have a truly pertinent question.”
“I promise.”
“Ashthuva told us that what she would do that night constituted only a preliminary casting, that each horoscope would require much longer study and detailed analysis.”
And cost more, I thought without saying it.
“She explained how the sign of Octavius’s birth was affected by the planets of that moment, which was ascendant, which was actually within the sign, how the phase of the moon affected all these things. It was quite fascinating.”
I hoped the woman foretold an early death for the brat, but I was disappointed.
“She said that Octavius had a most remarkable congregation of signs at his birth, that he would rise unprecedentedly high in the world and would be served by the best and most loyal people.” She caught my expression. “All right, go ahead.”
“How can she go wrong predicting a bright future for a highborn woman’s only son? It’s what any fortune-teller would have done.”
“You are such a Cynic. She told Atia she would have a much more detailed horoscope prepared for her in a few days. Then she did yours.”
I felt a slight shiver. I always hated this sort of thing. I have always been content to meet my bad fortune as it comes, without having to anticipate it. What good fortune I have enjoyed has always come as an agreeable surprise. “Go on.”
“Well, first of all, she predicted no future greatness for you.”
“It would be a stretch, at my age. If I were going to achieve greatness I’d have done it long before now.”
“But she did say that you would live a very long life, full of incident and adventure. She said you would die very old and very sad.”
“If I achieve great age I suppose I can anticipate great sadness at the end of it, though I think relief would be more in order. Anything else?”
“She asked Callista, but Callista said she was just there to observe, and that inquiring about the future would violate her philosophical principles.”
“How did that sit with Ashthuva?”
“She seemed to accept it with great serenity. In fact, if I had to choose a word to describe her other than ‘exotic’ it would be ‘serene.’”
“Servilia asked nothing?”
“No. It was clear that she had been consulting with Ashthuva for some time. We will be going back to have our own horoscopes cast in a few days.”
The barber patted my face dry and I got up. “Well, my dear, your expedition has been extremely informative and helpful. Keep close to these women and let me know what you learn. I’m off to the Tiber Island. I need to check out some information I picked up last night.”
“Picked up where?” she wanted to know.
“Oh, well, you know how it is. I had to interrogate one of Rome’s shadier characters so I had to go to a low place to find him.”
“Public service is so demanding,” she said sweetly. This boded ill.
If only it were public service, I wanted to say. It was Caesar’s personal service. I’ve never liked being someone’s flunky, though I’ve had to play the role often enough in my life.
I rounded up Hermes and we made our way to the island. There was no Senate meeting that morning, for a welcome change. Caesar was overseeing the layout of the huge new Forum he was planning. It was to be an expansion of our ancient Forum. He planned to condemn and level an area of several blocks of land adjacent to the Forum and build an ambitious new facility with a vast open space surrounded by multistoried terraces to be used for business, government, religion, and even entertainment. It would be roomy and orderly and rational, unlike our cramped, irregular, monument-studded, old Forum.
I suspected that it would prove to be just as unpopular as his new calendar, with its impeccable rationality. We Romans like some things to be chaotic and disorderly. As a people we have always been martial and disciplined in war and government and sternly observant in religion. So it pleases us to leave some things in their naturally irregular state, especially if we are used to them that way.
At the Tiber Island I asked for the high priest and he arrived with his usual show of impatience. “Yes, Senator?”
“I won’t take up much of your time. Do you employ a clerk here named Postumius?”
He looked puzzled. “We did, but I have not seen him in several days. I assumed he had sought more congenial employment elsewhere. Is it important?”
“I believe so. Where did he work?”
“In the accounting department, where we catalogue donations to the temple. The overseer is Telemachus.”
“I’ll trouble you no further. Where may I find Telemachus?”
The accounting department turned out to be a cavernous room at the north end of the island, stuffed with dedications and donations of every imaginable sort, from fine sculpture to good old-fashioned sacks of money. Several clerks worked there under the watchful eye of an old man who had spent his life at the temple, first as a slave, now as a freedman.