I feel an oddly disconcerting and unfamiliar sensation that I suspect may be an outbreak of humility. I am a rich man’s son, I can trace my ancestry more or less legitimately back to kings of ancient Britain, I have had the benefits of a fine education, with high Cantabrigian honors in history and architecture. But what does any of that matter here? I’m in Italia now, the heartland of the imperishable Empire, and I am nothing but a brawny bumptious Celt from one of the outer edges of the civilized world. These people must think I wear leather kilts at home and rub the grease of pigs into my hair. I can see that I may be going to find myself out of my depth in this land. Which will be a new experience for me; but is that not why I have come here to Italia, to Roma Mater—to open myself to new experiences?
The shops of the Via Roma are closed when I go out for an afternoon stroll, and there is no one to be seen anywhere, except in the crowded cafés and restaurants. In the heat of this place, businesses of all sorts shut down at midday and reopen in the cooler hours of early evening. The windows display an amazing array of merchandise from every part of the Empire, Africa, India, Gallia, Hispania, Britannia, even Hither Asia and the mysterious places beyond it, Khitai and Cipangu, where the little strange-eyed people live: clothing of the latest fashions, antique jewelry, fine shoes, household furnishings, costly objects of all sorts. Here is the grand abundance of Imperium, indeed. With the war finally at an end, shipments of luxury goods must converge constantly on Italia from all its resubjugated provinces.
I walk on and on. Via Roma seems endless, extending infinitely ahead of me, onward to the vanishing point of the horizon. But of course it does have an end: the street’s own name announces its terminal point, Urbs Roma itself, the great capital city. It isn’t true, the thing they always say in Italia, that all roads lead to Roma, but this is one that actually does: I need only keep walking northward and this boulevard will bring me eventually to the city of the Seven Hills. There’s time for that, though. I must begin my conquest of Italia in easy stages: Neapolis and its picturesque environs first, then a gradual advance northward to meet the formidable challenge of the city of the Caesars.
People are emerging from the cafés now. Some of them turn and stare openly at me, the way I might stare at a giraffe or elephant parading in the streets of Londin. Have they never seen a Briton before? Is yellow hair so alien to them? Perhaps it is my height and the breadth of my shoulders that draws their scrutiny, or my golden earring and the heavy Celtic Revival armlet that I affect. They nudge each other, they whisper, they smile.
I return their smiles graciously as I pass by. Good afternoon, fellow Roman citizens, I am tempted to say. But they would probably snicker at my British-accented Latin or my attempts at their colloquial Roman tongue.
There is a message waiting for me at the hotel. My father, bless him, has posted letters of introduction ahead to certain members of the Neapolitan aristocracy whom he has asked to welcome me and ease my entry into Roman society. Before leaving the hotel for my walk I had sent a message announcing my arrival to the people I was meant to meet here, and already there has been a reply. I am invited in the most cordial terms to dine this very evening at the villa of Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus, who according to my father owns half the vineyards between Neapolis and Pompeii and whose brother Cassius was one of the great heroes of the recently concluded war. A carriage will pick me up at the Tiberius at the eighteenth hour.
I am suffused with a strange joy. They are willing to make the visiting barbarian feel welcome on his first night in the mother country. Of course Frontinus ships ten thousand cases of his sweet white wines to my father’s warehouses in Londin every year and that is a far from inconsiderable bit of business. Not that business matters will be mentioned this evening. For one thing I know very little of my father’s commercial dealings; but also, and this is much more to the point, we are patricians, Frontinus and I, and we must behave that way. He is of the ancient Senatorial class, descended from men who made and unmade Caesars a thousand years ago. And I carry the blood of British kings in my veins, or at least my father says I do and my own name—Cymbelin—proclaims it. Caratacus, Cassevelaunus, Tincommius, Togodumnus, Prasutagus: at one time or another I have heard my father claim descent from each of those grand old Celtic chieftains, and Queen Cartamandua of the Brigantes for good measure.
Well, and Cartamandua expediently signed a treaty with the Roman invaders of her country, and sent her fellow monarch Caratacus to Roma in chains. But all that was a long time ago, and we Britons have been pacified and repacified on many occasions since then, and everyone understands that the power and the glory will reside, now and always, in the great city that lies at the other end of the Via Roma from here. Frontinus will be polite to me, I know: if not for the sake of the heroic though unvictorious warriors who are my putative ancestors, then for the ten thousand cases of wine that he means to ship to Londin next year. I will dine well tonight, I will meet significant people, I will be offered easy entree to the great homes of Neapolis and, when I am ready to go there, the capital as well.
I bathe. I shave. I oil my ringlets, and not with the grease of pigs; and I select my clothing with great care, a silken Byzantine tunic and matching neckerchief, fine leggings of scarlet Aegyptian linen, sandals of the best Syrian workmanship. With, of course, my golden earring and my massive armlet to provide that interestingly barbaric touch for which they will value me more highly.
The carriage is waiting when I emerge from the hotel. A Nubian driver in crimson and turquoise; white Arabian horses; the carriage itself is of ebony inlaid with strips of ivory. Worthy, I would think, of an Emperor. But Frontinus is only a wealthy patrician, a mere southerner at that. What do the Caesars ride in, I wonder, if this is the kind of vehicle a Frontinus sends to pick up visiting young men from the backward provinces?
The road winds up into the hills. A cloud has drifted over the city and the early evening sunlight tumbles through it like golden rain. The surface of the bay is ablaze with light. Mysterious gray islands are visible in the distance.
The villa of Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus is set in a park so big it takes us fifteen minutes to reach the house once we are past the colossal iron gate. It is a light and graceful pavilion, the enormous size of which is carefully masked by the elegance of its design, set on the very edge of a lofty slope. There is a look of deceptive fragility about it, as though it would be sensitive to the slightest movements of the atmosphere. The view from its portico runs from Vesuvius in the east to some jutting cape far off down the other shore of the bay. All around it are marvelous shrubs and trees in bloom, and the fragrance they exhale is the fragrance of unthinkable wealth. I begin to wonder how much those ten thousand cases of wine can matter to this man.
Yet Frontinus himself is earthy and amiable, a stocky balding man with an easy grin and an immediately congenial style.
He is there to greet me as I step down from the carriage. “I am Marcello Domiziano,” he tells me, speaking Roman, grinning broadly as he puts out his hand. “Welcome to my house, dear friend Cymbelin!”
Marcello Domiziano. He uses the Roman, not the Latin, form of his name. In the provinces, of course, we pretentiously allow ourselves Latin names, mingling them to some degree with Britannic or Gallic or Teutonic localisms; but here in Italia the only people who have the privilege of going by names in the ancient Latin mode are members of the Senatorial and Imperial families and high military officers, and the rest must employ the modern Roman form. Frontinus rises above his own privilege of rank: I may call him Marcello, the way I would one of his field hands. And he will call me Cymbelin. Very swiftly we are dear friends, or so he wants me to feel, and I have barely arrived.