centurions could become successful merchants. I did not want to go to the East.
“Why should you bury yourself at the other end of the world anyhow?” asked Lucius. “It would be incomparably better to stay here in Rome where sooner or later one is noticed. With the help of your riding skill, your fine figure and beautiful eyes, you could go further in a year here than in twenty years as a commantler of a cohort among the barbarians.”
Irritable from my long stay in bed and from sheer contrariness, I said, “Rome in the heat of the summer is a sweating stinking city full of filthy flies. Even in Antioch the air was fresher.”
Lucius looked searchingly at me in the belief that I had meant more with my words than I had.
“Undoubtedly Rome is full of flies,” he admitted. “Real carrion flies too. It would be better if I kept my mouth shut because I know perfectly well your father retrieved his rank of knighthood thanks only to the Emperor’s conceited freedman. I suppose you know that delegates from cities and kings bow and scrape to Narcissus and that he has amassed a fortune of a couple of hundred million sesterces by selling privileges and official positions. Valeria Messalina is even more avaricious. By having one of the oldest men in Rome murdered, she acquired the gardens of Lucullus on the Pincian hill. She has had her rooms in Palatine made into a brothel and not content with that, she spends many nights in disguise and under a false name in the bawdy houses in Subura, where she sleeps wdth anyone for a few coppers just for the fun of it.”
I clapped my hands over my ears and said that Narcissus was a Greek with fine manners and I could not believe the things that were said about the Emperor’s beautiful wife with her clear ringing laugh.
“Messalina is only seven years older than we are,” I said. “She also has two lovely children and at the festival performances she sits with the Vestal Virgins.”
“Emperor Claudius’ shame and ignominy in the marriage bed are well known as far away as in the enemy countries, in Parthia and in Germany,” Lucius said. “Gossip is gossip, but I personally know young knights who boast that they’ve slept with her on the Emperor’s orders. Claudius orders everyone to obey Messalina, whatever she demands of them.”
“Lucius,” I said, “what young men boast about you know only too well from your symposiums. The shyer one is in the company of women, the more one boasts and invents conquests when one has had a bit of wine to drink. That such gossip is known abroad too, seems to me to show that it is deliberately spread by someone. The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. Human beings have a natural tendency to believe what they are told. Just that kind of lie which tickles a depraved palate, people believe most easily.”
Lucius flushed.
“I have another explanation,” he whispered in an almost trembling voice. “Perhaps Valeria Messalina really was a virgin when she was married at fifteen to that fifty-year-old depraved drunkard Claudius, whom even his own family despised. It was Claudius who debauched Messalina, giving her myrrh to drink so that she became a nymphomaniac. Now Claudius is finished and it’s not impossible that he deliberately closes his eyes. In any case he certainly demands of Messalina that she constantly sends new slave-girls to his bed, the younger the better. What he does to them is another matter. All this Messalina herself has in tears confessed to a person whom I do not wish to name but whom I believe absolutely.”
“We are friends, Lucius,” I said, “but you are of very noble birth and son of a senator, so you’re not competent to speak on the subject. I know that the Senate brought in the republic when Emperor Gaius was murdered. Then the Praetorians accidentally found his uncle, Claudius, hiding behind a curtain when they plundered Palatine and proclaimed him Emperor because he was the only one who held that right by birth. It’s such an old story that no one even laughs at it anymore. But I’m not surprised that Claudius relies more on his freedmen and his children’s mother than on the Senate.”
“Would you choose a mentally deranged tyrant before freedom?” asked Lucius bitterly.
“A republic under the Senate and the Consuls doesn’t mean democratic freedom, but is rule by aristocracy,” I said. “Plundering of the provinces and new civil wars, that much do I understand from the history I have read. Be content with reforming Rome from within with Greek culture and don’t talk nonsense.”
Lucius was forced to laugh.
“It’s strange that one has absorbed the ideals of republicanism with one’s mother’s milk,” he said. “It makes me hotheaded. But perhaps the republic is nothing but a relic of the past. I’m going back to my books. Then I can do no harm to anyone, not even to myself.”
“And Rome can remain full of carrion flies,” I conceded. “Neither you nor I can get rid of them.”
The most surprising honor which came my way as I lay tormented by my inactivity and my gloomy thoughts was a visit from the leader of the noble boys, the ten-year-old Lucius Domitius. He came with his mother, Agrippina, quite unpretentiously and without prior notice. They left their sedan and following outside the house and only came in for a brief moment to commiserate with me over my accident. Bar-bus, who during my illness was acting as doorkeeper to the household, was of course drunk and asleep. Domitius jokingly gave him a light punch on the forehead and shouted out an order, at which Barbus, dazed with sleep, sprang to attention, raised his hand in salute and barked, “Ave, Caesar imperator.”
Agrippina asked him why he greeted the boy as an Emperor. Barbus said that he had dreamt that a centurion had hit him on the head with his stave. When he had opened his eyes he had seen in front of him, in the midday sun, a huge celestial Juno and an Emperor in glittering armor inspecting their troops. Not until they had spoken to him had his sight cleared and he had recognized Domitius and guessed that Agrippina was his mother by her goddesslike beauty and stature.
“And I wasn’t far wrong,” he said flatteringly. “You are sister to Emperor Gaius and Emperor Claudius is your uncle. On the god Julius Caesar’s side you are descended from Venus and on Marcus Antonius’ side from Hercules. So it’s not all that strange that I greeted your son with the highest possible token of honor.”
Aunt Laelia was completely confused by such a grand visitation and ran around with her wig askew, straightening out my bedclothes and chattering reproachfully that Agrippina should have informed us beforehand of her arrival so that the household could have been prepared.
“You know very well, dear Laelia,” said Agrippina sadly, “that it’s safest for me to avoid official visits since the death of my sister. But my son had to come and see his hero Minutus Lausus. So we looked in to wish him a quick recovery.”
This lively, attractive and, despite his red hair, handsome boy hurried shyly up to give me a kiss and then drew back in admiration as he looked at my face.
“Oh, Minutus,” he cried. “You have indeed earned the name Magnus more than any other. If only you knew how I admired your amazing courage. None of the spectators had the slightest idea that you’d broken your leg when you remained in the saddle right to the end.”
Domitius took a scroll from his mother and handed it to me. Agrippina turned to Aunt Laelia apologetically.
“It’s a book on balance of mind,” she explained, “which my friend Seneca has written in Corsica. It’s a good book for a youngster who is suffering from the consequences of his own foolhardiness. If he at the same time should wonder why such a noble-minded man must spend his life buried alive in exile, then it is because of the present situation in Rome and not because of me.”
But Aunt Laelia did not have the patience to listen. She was much too taken up with offering some kind of refreshment. It would have been a matter of shame if such distinguished guests had left without partaking of anything.
Agrippina protested but finally said, “In your house, we should be glad to taste a little of that refreshing lemon drink which your brave invalid has in a jug by his bed. My son can share one of the buns.”
Aunt Laelia stared at her with wide-open eyes.
“Dearest Agrippina,” she said in horror, “have things already reached such lengths?”
Agrippina was then thirty-four years old. She was a statuesque woman, her features aristocratic if also expressionless, and her eyes were large and brilliant. To my horror, I saw those clear eyes fill with tears. She lowered her head and wept silently.
“You guess correctly, Laelia,” she said at last. “It is safest for me to fetch water from the pipe with my own hands for my son, and for me to choose from the market what I dare eat myself and let him eat. The people cheered him too openly at the festivities. Three days ago someone tried to kill him at his midday siesta. I no longer even trust the servants. It was strange that none of them was near and that a complete stranger with evil intentions could get into the house without any of them seeing him. So it occurred to me-but perhaps it’s best to
