“Britannicus was my best and only friend,” he said. “One day III give him a golden statue among the gods in the Capitoline. As soon as I’m well enough, I’ll go to my father in Britain. At that meal, I sat beside Britannicus. Nero did not permit us boys to lie at the table. It was a chilly evening and we had hot drinks. Britannicus’ cup- bearer deliberately offered him such a hot goblet that he himself burned his tongue when he tasted it. Britannicus asked for cold water in his goblet, drank and at once lost his power of speech and his sight. I snatched the goblet and took a sip from it. At once I felt dizzy and everything swam in front of my eyes. Fortunately I was only made violently ill. I have been sick ever since. Perhaps I would have died too, if I hadn’t vomited.”
“Then you think he really was poisoned and that you yourself drank some of the poison?” I asked, hardly able to believe my ears.
Titus looked at me seriously, boy that he was.
“I don’t think it,” he said. “I know it. Don’t ask me who the culprit is. It wasn’t Agrippina, anyhow, for she was appalled when it happened.”
“If that is true,” I said, “then I could believe that she poisoned Claudius, as rumor still persists she did.”
Titus stared pityingly at me with his almond-shaped eyes.
“Didn’t you even know that?” he said. “Even the dogs of Rome howled around Agrippina when she went down to the forum after the Praetorians had proclaimed Nero Emperor.”
“Then power is a more terrible thing than I had thought,” I said.
“Power is far too great to be borne by a single man, however skillful an adviser he may be,” said Titus. “None of Rome’s rulers has sustained it without being destroyed. I’ve had plenty of time to think about these things during my illness, and yet I still prefer to think well of people rather than evil. I think well of you too, for honorably coming here to ask me to tell you the truth. I know the Almighty creates actors, but I don’t think you are here to find out for Nero what I think about the death of my best friend. I know Nero too. He thinks now that he has bribed his friends to forget and he would prefer to forget it himself. But I had a knife ready, should you have come to injure me.”
He drew a dagger from under his pillow and threw it away, as if to show his complete confidence in me. But I did not think he trusted me absolutely. He spoke so deliberately and with such experience. We both jumped guiltily when a beautifully dressed young woman unexpectedly came into the room, followed by a slave-girl carrying a basket. The girl was as slim and broad-shouldered as Diana, her features fine but hard, and her hair was done in the Greek way in short curls. She looked inquiringly at me with her greenish eyes, and they seemed so familiar that I stared stupidly back.
“Don’t you know my cousin, Flavia Sabina?” asked Titus. “She visits me every day with the food the doctor prescribes and she herself supervises the cooking of it. Won’t you join me, as my friend?”
I realized that the girl was the daughter of the Prefect of Rome, Flavius Sabinus, the elder brother of Vespasian. Perhaps I had seen her at some large banquet or in a festive procession, as she looked so familiar. I greeted her respectfully, but my tongue dried up in my mouth and I stared at her broad face as if bewitched.
Without looking in any way disturbed, she laid out a Spartan meal with her own hands. There was not even a jar of wine in the basket. I ate out of courtesy, but the food stuck in my throat as I looked at her, and I thought that no other woman had ever made such an impression on me at first sight.
I could not understand the reason for this. She showed no interest in me whatsoever; on the contrary, she was cool and hard, withdrawn into herself, silent but conscious of her position as daughter of the City Prefect. During the meal I was more and more tormented with the feeling that it was all a dream, and though we drank nothing but water, I felt slightly intoxicated.
“Why aren’t you eating anything yourself?” I asked finally.
“I have prepared the food,” she said mockingly. “I’m not your cupbearer. And I’ve no cause to share my bread and salt with you, Minutus Manilianus. I know you.”
“How can you know me when I don’t know you?” I protested.
Flavia Sabina stretched out her slim forefinger without ceremony and felt my left eye.
“Oh well, then I didn’t do your eye any harm after all,” she said. “Had I been more experienced, I’d have put my thumb in it. I hope you got a black eye from my fist, anyhow.”
“Did you fight as children then?” asked Titus, who had been listening in amazement.
“No, I lived in Antioch when I was a child,” I answered absently.
Hut suddenly a memory glimmered which made me burn with shame. Sabina looked straight at me, enjoying my confusion.
“Aha, so you remember then,” she cried. “You were drunk and quite mad, together with a crowd of slaves and rogues. It was in the middle of the night and you were fooling about in the streets. We found out who you were and Father didn’t want to bring you to court for reasons you yourself. know only too well.”
I remembered only too well. Some time in the autumn, on one of Nero’s night escapades, I had tried to catch a girl coming toward me, but had received such a blow in my eye from her little fist that I had fallen over backwards. My eye had been black-and-blue for a week. Her companion had attacked us and Otho had received burns in the face from a lighted torch. I was so drunk at the time that I had not been able to remember much afterwards.
“I didn’t hurt you,” I said, trying to excuse myself. “I only clung to you when we collided in the dark. If I’d known who you were, naturally I’d have at once hurried to apologize to you the next day.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “And don’t try clinging to me again. It might be worse for you next time.”
“I’d* never dare,” I said, trying to make light of it all. “From now on I’ll take to my heels whenever I see you. You treated me roughly.”
Yet I did not take to my heels, but in fact accompanied Sabina back to the Prefect’s house. Her greenish eyes were full of laughter and her bare arm was as smooth as marble. A week later, my father and his following of two hundred clients and slaves were taken to Flavius Sabinus’ house to present my proposal.
Tullia and Aunt Laelia had other ideas in mind, but this betrothal was by no means a bad one. The Flavius family was poor, but my father’s fortune balanced this.
At Sabina’s request, we were married according to the longer form, although I had no intention of entering a College of any kind. But Sabina said she wanted to be married for life and did not want a divorce, and naturally I did as she wished. We had not been married all that long before I noticed that I let her have her own way in many more ways than that.
But our wedding feast was a fine one. At my father’s expense and in the name of the City Prefect, all the people were invited to a free meal, not only the Senate and the knights. Nero came to the feast himself and appeared in the wedding procession as well as singing an indecent wedding hymn he himself had composed to the music of a flute.
Finally he politely turned his torch upside down and left without fuss.
I took the scarlet veil from Sabina’s head and lifted the yellow mantle from her shoulders. But when I wanted to untie the two hard knots in her linen girdle, she sat down, her green eyes flashing, and cried, “I am a Sabine woman. Take me as the Sabine women were taken.”
But I did not even have a horse, nor was I good at the kind of plundering she wished for. I did not even understand what she wanted, for in my love for Claudia, I had become used to tenderness and mutual concessions.
Sabina was disappointed, but she closed her eyes and clenched her fists and let me do what I wanted and what the red veil obliged me to do. Finally she flung her strong arms around my neck, gave me a swift kiss and turned her back on me to go to sleep. I persuaded myself that we were both as happy as two wedding-tired people can be and fell asleep with a sigh of contentment.
Not until much later did I discover what Sabina had hoped for in physical love. The scars on my face had made her think I was quite different from what I am. Our first meeting in the street at night had made her dream that I could do to her what she wanted, but in that she was mistaken.
I bear her no grudge. She became even more disappointed in me than I in her. How and why she became what she did, I cannot explain. Venus is a capricious and often cruel goddess. Juno is more trustworthy from a family point of view, but in other matters of marriage, dull in the long run.
Book VII
