what the cook has come up with this morning to help you stop missing Menenia?'
Our bellies were warmed by freshly baked bread sprinkled with sesame seeds, a porridge of oats and honey, and a warmed compote of spiced apples. Davus joined us. Though the simple act of walking and sitting seemed to cause him considerable agony (manifested by grunts and grimaces), this did nothing to impair his appetite. He consumed as much as Eco and I combined.
I intended to take our horses and head out again on the Appian Way, but when the foreman discovered our destination he suggested that we walk instead. It seemed there was an ancient footpath that ran along the ridge that would take us directly to Clodius's villa. 'It's considerably shorter,' he explained, 'and of course more discreet than being on the open road. Besides, it's much warmer today, thanks to all this sunshine, and the walk is quite beautiful. It will take you through the grove.'
'The grove?'
'The sacred grove dedicated to Jupiter… or what's left of it.'
'Yes, I think I should like to see that. Come, Eco. Well, Davus, it looks as if you're to be spared the agony of mounting a horse again, at least for the moment.'
His smile of gratitude turned into a wince as he rose to his feet.
As Pompey's foreman had promised, the walk offered splendid views, especially on a day when the sky was cloudless and the visibility unlimited. The mountain peak brooded above us and the plain shimmered below, both equally remote. The hidden lake showed nothing of itself, only a perfect reflection of the sky. The sea was too distant to be heard, even as a whisper. The taciturn woods, as we passed into their shadow, blocked off all sight of the rest of the world except for fleeting sunlit glimpses.
I found myself bemused by the shade-dappled boulders strewn along the path, by the rustle of last autumn's leaves beneath our feet, by the canopy of gnarled branches above. I have always delighted in the beauty of the countryside, even though my one attempt at living there, on my farm in Etruria, had failed so utterly. That chapter of my life, like so many of those who participated in it, belonged now to the dead past.
As the path continued to descend, we came to a cleared place and the foundation of.a house. The outline of the various rooms could be seen amid the scattered debris of stone and old wood. There was little of any decorative value remaining, except for a few fragments of mosaic floors that had been damaged in removal and left where they were. There was also a marble statue of a female form, its head missing, that lay broken in pieces on the ground. I was reminded with a shiver of the fallen bronze Minerva in my own house. This goddess, I suspected, had been knocked over by careless workmen rather than angry looters, though the man to whom workers and looters alike had owed their allegiance was almost certainly the same. Living and dead, Clodius had left destruction in his wake.
I took time to wander through the ruins for a while, tracing the demarcations of halls and cubicles where my presence would never have been allowed when the house stood, trying to imagine the sounds, smells and shadows of the place. The Virgo Maxima had mourned for its rustic charm, gone now forever. I felt her presence in that place, her brittle humour and forthright bitterness, far more than I felt the presence of the goddess, who no doubt had abandoned the desecrated place as surely as the missing head of her broken statue.
Farther up the hill, through the trees, I could see the white columns and round roof of the circular Temple of Vesta-her original temple, as the Virgo Maxima had sternly reminded me. Even in daylight and at such a distance, the flame that burned eternally within could be seen by the lurid glow it cast on the smooth inner curves of the surrounding columns. The temple was unharmed and the land around it untouched. Even Clodius had not been impious enough to disturb the sacred flame.
We returned to the path and moved on.
The character of the woods began to change in some subde way. Even my irreligious son sensed it, and mentioned it before I did. It may be as Eco suggested, that the trees outside a sacred grove, having been felled and allowed to grow back many times over many generations, establish a character somehow different from the trees within the sacred precinct, which have never been brought down by any mortal, and have never been scarred by any flame except fire sent from heaven by Jupiter himself. Such sacred woods are different in many small ways — the distance between the trees and the quality of the light that enters between them, their relative ages, the kind and amount of foliage at their feet. However it may be, after a time it was clear to us all, even to city-bound Davus, that we had entered a place that was special to the god.
All the more shocking, then, was the sudden devastation we encountered in the very heart of those woods. We rounded a bend in the path, ducked beneath a low branch, and found ourselves in a clearing where only stumps remained. It was not a small clearing, but a whole hillside that had been denuded, as if some rapacious devourer of trees had gorged itself at this place.
'This must be what the priest Felix was talking about,' I said.
' 'They cut them down by tens and twenties,' he said. But it looks even worse than that to me.' Eco shook his head. 'What sort of woodsmen would inflict such a scar on a sacred grove?'
'What sort of workers would carelessly knock over a statue of Vesta and leave the broken pieces where they lay? Clodius was known to recruit many of his free labourers from among the hungry rabble in Rome. Not a very skilled bunch, I imagine, but loyal.'
'And not very pious, from the way they desecrated these holy places.'
'Ah, but these places weren't holy once Clodius was through with them. I'm sure he attended to all the legal formalities to see that the House of the Vestals and this section of the grove were duly desanctified before he plundered them.'
'Surely a place either is holy or it isn't, Papa.'
I had to smile at my son's sudden passion for things sacred. 'Eco, you know better than that. A place is sacred or not depending on the judgment of the proper authorities. Some of those authorities no doubt are very sensitive to the mysterious signs of the gods, and as pious as men come. Others are not quite so pious, and more likely to see auspices in the glitter of a coin than in a flash of lightning. It is the Roman way, Eco, or at least it has been in my lifetime, and one of the reasons, I suppose, that so many men of your generation tend to have so little religious sentiment.' We kept walking steadily as we spoke, for I felt no desire to stop and contemplate the devastation.
We came at last to the end of the clearing. The path took us into a dense stand of trees, where for a brief moment the sacred nature of the grove seemed to reassert itself amid the hushed shadows. But we had reached the farthest edge of the woods, and after only a few more steps we found ourselves again in bright sunlight. The band of woods we had just passed through had merely been left as a screen to hide the devastated hillside. We had arrived at Clodius's Alban villa, the destination of the lumber from all those felled trees.
Like his house in the city, Clodius's villa still had an unfinished look-the decorative stonework in some places was only partly done, scaffolding clung to sections of the facade, and the landscaping was interrupted here and there by piles of crushed stone and stacks of brick and lumber. But the villa was built on such a massive scale that even in its rough-hewn state it was impressive. The grove of Jupiter awed a man in one way; a building such as this was awesome in its own right.
The hillside on which it was situated was so steep that I would have thought it unsuitable for building. Clodius had given the architect Cyrus a difficult site on which to do his work, and Cyrus had responded with a building of daring innovation. No doubt the structure was fixed into.the earth by some sort of stilts, but any such supports were concealed behind solid walls. Viewed from the side, the villa appeared to perch precariously on the hillside. On the downhill side, a long covered gallery ran the entire length of the topmost floor. Its seaward views must have rivalled those of Pompey's villa. It was surely no coincidence that there were no windows or other means of ingress on the lower floors, which made the building practically impregnable to anyone approaching from below. The long gallery would not only afford spectacular views, but could be used to defend against attackers, like the parapet of a fortress.
The entrance to the villa was located on the opposite side of the topmost floor, which was the only part of the building visible from the eastern, uphill side of the building. A great mass of earth had been removed from the hillside to make a level courtyard in front of the entrance. Materials for constructing a wall were stacked around the courtyard's perimeter, but the wall had not yet been erected. Clodius and his architect must have realized the vulnerable nature of the villa's entrance, and had intended to do something about it. Neither of them would finish the job now.
We came to the entrance, a double door made of solid oak, ornately carved and darkened by age. I wondered
