They complained endlessly about their poor houses, their wretched tools and their oxens’ illnesses.
Occasionally my father grew angry and spoke harshly, in contrast to his usual attitude, but then they hurriedly produced a meal for him and offered him chilled white wine. The children tied a wreath around his head and played ring games around him until he was appeased and made new concessions to his tenants and freedmen. In fact, in Caere my father drank so much wine that he hardly saw a sober day there.
In the city of Caere we met several potbellied priests. and merchants who had folds in their eyelids and whose family trees went back a thousand years. They helped my father draw up his own family tree, right back to the year when Lycurgus destroyed the fleet and harbor of Caere. My father also bought a burial place on the holy road in Caere.
Finally a message came from Rome that everything was in order. The Censor had confirmed my father’s request to have his rank of knighthood returned to him. The matter would be put before Emperor
Claudius any day now, so we had to return to Rome. There we waited at home for several days, since we could be summoned to Palatine at any time. Claudius’ secretary, Narcissus, had promised to pick a favorable moment for the case.
The winter was severe; the stone floors in Rome were icy cold and every day people died in the tenements from fumes from ill-cared-for braziers. In the daytime the sun shone and predicted spring, but even the senators unblushingly had braziers put under their ivory stools during the meetings at the Curia. Aunt Laelia complained that the old virtues of Rome had gone. In the time of Augustus, many an old senator would have preferred pneumonia or a lifetime of rheumatism to such unmanly coddling of his body.
Aunt Laelia naturally wanted to see the feast of Lupercalia and the procession, too. She assured us that the Emperor himself was the high priest and we should scarcely be summoned to Palatine on that day. Early on the morning of Idus in February, I accompanied her to as near the ancient fig tree as it was possible to get. Inside the cave the Luper-calias sacrificed a goat in honor of Faunus Lupercus. The priest drew a sign on the foreheads of all the Lupercalias with his bloodstained knife and they all wiped it off again at once with a piece of holy linen which had been steeped in milk. Then they all burst into the ritual communal laughter. The sacred laughter which came from the cave was so loud and terrifying that the crowd stiffened with piety and several distracted women ran ahead down the route the guards were keeping open for the procession with their holy bundles of sticks. In the cave the priests cut the hide of the goat into long strips with their sacrificial knives and then danced their sacred dance down the route. They were all completely naked, laughing the sacred laughter and, with the strips of goatskin, whipping the women who had pushed forward onto the route so that they received bloodstains on their clothes. Dancing in this way, they circled the whole of Palatine Hill.
Aunt Laelia was pleased and said that she had not heard the ritual laughter sound so solemn for many years. A woman who is touched by the Lupercalias’ bloodstained strips of hide becomes pregnant within a year, she explained. It was an infallible remedy for infertility. She regretted that noble women did not want children, for it had been for the most part the wives of ordinary citizens who had come to be scourged by the Lupercalias, and she had not seen a single senator’s wife along the whole route. Some people in the tight-packed crowd of spectators said that they had seen Emperor Claudius in person leaping about and howling as he urged the Lupercalias on to the scourging, but we did not see him. When the procession had circled the hill and turned back to the cave to sacrifice a pregnant bitch, we went home and ate the customary meal of boiled goat meat and wheaten bread baked in the shape of human sexual organs. Aunt Laelia drank wine and expressed pleasure that the wonderful Roman spring was at last on its way after the miserable winter. Just as my father was urging her to take her midday siesta before she began to talk about things which were not suitable for my ears, a messenger slave from Narcissus, the Emperor’s secretary, came running breathlessly in to say that we must go to Palatine at once without delay. We went on foot with only Barbus accompanying us, which surprised the slave considerably. Fortunately we were both suitably clad for the occasion because of the feast.
The slave, who was dressed in white and gold, told us that all the signs were favorable and that the festival rituals had been faultlessly carried out, so Emperor Claudius was in a very good mood. He was still entertaining the Lupercalias in his own rooms, dressed in the robes of the high priest. At the entrance to the palace we were thoroughly searched and Barbus had to stay outside because he was wearing his sword. My father was surprised that even I was searched, although I was a minor.
Narcissus, the Emperor’s freedman and private secretary, was a Greek, emaciated from worries and his prodigious burden of work. He received us with unexpected friendliness, although my father had not sent him a gift. Quite openly he said that at a time which foreboded many changes, it was to the advantage of the State to honor reliable men who knew and remembered whom they had to thank for their position. To confirm this he rustled in the papers concerning my father and extracted a crumpled note which he handed to him.
“It would be best if you yourself took care of this,” he said. “It’s a secret note from Tiberius’ day on your character and habits. They are forgotten matters which are of no importance today.”
My father read the paper, flushed, and hastily thrust it into his clothes. Narcissus went on as if nothing had happened.
“The Emperor is proud of his knowledge and wisdom,” he said, “but he is inclined to fasten on to details and sometimes persists with some old matter for a whole day just to demonstrate his good memory, while forgetting the main point.”
“Who in his youth has not occasionally kept vigil in the groves of Baiae?” my father said in some confusion. “As far as I am concerned all that is in the past. In any case, I don’t know how to thank you. I have been told how strickly Emperor Claudius, and especially Valeria Messalina, watch over the moral conduct of the knights.”
“Perhaps one day I’ll let it be known how you can thank me,” said Narcissus with a bleak smile. “I am said to be a greedy man, but you must not make the mistake of offering me money, Marcus Manilianus. I am the Emperor’s freedman. Thus my property is the Emperor’s property and everything I do as far as I am able is for the best for the Emperor and for the State. But we must hurry, for the most favorable moment is soon after a sacrificial meal when the Emperor is preparing for his siesta.”
He took us to the south reception room, the walls of which were decorated with paintings of the Trojan war. With his own hand, he let down the sun-blind so that the sun should not glare too strongly into the room. Emperor Claudius arrived, supported on each side by his personal slaves who, at a sign from Narcissus, sat him down on the Imperial throne. He was humming the Faunus hymn to himself and he peered at us shortsightedly. When he was seated, he looked more dignified than when standing, although his head kept nodding in different directions. He was easily recognizable from his statues and the replicas of his head on the coins, though now he had spilled wine and sauce on himself during the meal. He was obviously cheered by the wine for the moment and was ready and eager to tackle matters of State before he began to feel sleepy.
Narcissus introduced us and said swiftly, “The matter is quite clear. Here is the family tree, the certificate of income and the Censor’s recommendation. Marcus Mezentius Manilianus has been a prominent member of the city council in Antioch and is deserving of full compensation for the injustice that has been done to him. He himself is not an ambitious man but his son can grow up and serve the State.”
While Emperor Claudius mumbled about his youthful memories of the astronomer Manilius, he unrolled the papers and read here and there in them. My mother’s ancestry captivated him and he ruminated for a while.
“Myrina,” he said. “That was the Queen of the Amazons who fought against the Gorgons, but then it was a Trachian, Mopsus, whom Lycurgus had exiled, who killed her in the end. Myrina was really her divine name. Her earthly name was Batieia. It would have been more suitable if your wife had used this earthly name. Narcissus, make a note of that and put it right in the papers.”
My father reverently thanked the Emperor for this correction and promised to see to it at once that the statue the city of Myrina had erected in memory of my mother would bear the name of Batieia. The Emperor received the impression that my mother had been a famous woman in Myrina as the city had raised a statue of her.
“Your Greek ancestors are very noble, boy,” he said, looking at me benignly with his bloodshot eyes. “Our culture is of Greece but the art of building cities is of Rome. You are pure and handsome like one of my gold coins on which I have had a Latin text imprinted on one side and a Greek on the other. How can such a beautiful and upright boy be called Minutus? That is exaggerated modesty.”
My father hurriedly explained that he had postponed my day of manhood until my name could be placed in the rolls of knights in the temple of Castor and Pollux at the same time. It would be the greatest honor if Emperor Claudius would himself give me a suitable second name.
“I have property in Caere,” he said. “My family goes back to the days when Syracuse destroyed the sea
