‘Shit! Is it because Caecilia is a widow?’ Fortunatus wheedled. ‘Are someone else’s nippers too much to take on?’
‘Now you’ve done it!’ muttered Felix.
Gaius stood up. His brothers assumed he was going off to order a new round of drinks, but he was leaving.
‘No,’ he announced. ‘It is because I am thirty-three years old, and I don’t need nursemaids. Next time I get shackled to some horrible mistake, I want to pick my own.’ Then he added, in a steady voice, considering: ‘But it won’t happen. Marriage is for procreating children and I cannot do it, lads. I’ve got Sailor’s Wilt, Soldier Boy’s Droop, Ex-Prisoner’s Prick. You just tell your next lovely widow that it wouldn’t be fair.’
For once both his brothers were reduced to silence. After Gaius had marched from the tavern, the horror- struck Fortunatus did fart again, but it was involuntary, caused by shock, and far from his usual heroic standard.
After a time Felix found his voice. ‘Be fair to the boy. It must have taken guts to tell us that.’
They continued to drink, without speaking, for a long time.
Gaius Vinius Clodianus lived at the Camp and got on with being what Flavia Lucilla had called him: a dumb soldier.
PART 5
Our Master and God
24
The quarrel between Gaius Vinius and Flavia Lucilla was hard and upsetting. It involved pointed, bitter silences aimed, from behind closed doors, across the corridor at Plum Street. They easily sustained the feud for a year.
Both became adept at avoiding each other. Sharing the same apartment could have been impossible, especially as Gaius now made a point of being there to irritate Lucilla with his ownership. They mastered a fine art of leaving a dish carefully positioned, to mark kitchen territory; Gaius would elaborate this by rewashing a supposedly cleaned saucepan of Lucilla’s to show how scouring was done by experts. Doors would open silently but click closed again, avoiding a face-to-face meeting. The watchdog became a constant battleground over petting rights, though Terror was in heaven, rightly thinking he now had two doting owners. Gaius brought him horrendous marrow bones, deliberately leaving them in the corridor, so as soon as the dog lost interest Lucilla would kick them out of doors furiously, with their comet-trail of flies. Gaius returned them. ‘Here, Terror — nice boney!’
Once, once only, Gaius came upon and ate two cold artichoke bottoms that were not his.
This was a dangerous moment. Lucilla spent a wrathful night, mentally planning vile torrents of recrimination, but she overslept and he hastily bought a whole netful next morning before he had to face her. She would have to prepare and marinade the new chokes, which caused plenty of bile, but Gaius kept out of her way for a month.
Once she did weaken. Coming home between visiting clients, she heard a troubled shout. From the open doorway of the sitting room, she saw Gaius had dozed off on the couch. He was frowning, his jaw clenched, one hand forming a fist. As dreams distressed him, he let out fitful gasps. Aware of his deep need for sleep, Lucilla slipped among the furniture, to close the heavy wooden shutters, muffling light and noise. After she finished lunch, she looked in again. Now Gaius slept peacefully. The watchdog had shoved in beside him. Although Baby was not allowed up on cushions, he had mastered sneaking up onto the four-foot-wide couch one paw at a time; Gaius must have woken enough to allow it and massage the loose skin under the dog’s collar, where his hand remained. She left them together.
In between were long periods when she and Gaius were in different places and so never had to meet. Lucilla was able to focus her antipathy on the distasteful work in which he was now involved, the results of which were well known at court and throughout society.
Rome had never been a liberal environment, but its atmosphere had decidedly altered. One man could not single-handedly wreak this change. Domitian relied on people’s indifference, their compliance, their complaisance. He also needed his soldiers, his undercover inquisitors, his brutal enforcers. He needed the Guards.
The Praetorians’ remit had always been threefold: imperial protection, suppression of public disturbances and discouraging plots. An emperor’s measures against plots could be as innocuous as Vespasian’s edict ordering food shops to sell only lentil and barley dishes, so boring that nobody would hang around talking politics. Or they could extend fear and betrayal like sinister tentacles into all areas of home and business life. That was Domitian’s way. Vinius Clodianus now had to work spreading the fear.
Strictly speaking, the wider supervision of law and order, including intelligence collection, came under the Urban Cohorts, governed by their Prefect, Rutilius Gallicus. He had a reputation for restraint and fairness, although trying to reconcile such an attitude to Domitian’s punishing regime could well have helped his mental health deteriorate. The Urbans supervised the triumvirs, a board of three who organised the ceremonious burning of seditious books — or books that Domitian called seditious — a bonfire in the Forum that was now lit with depressing regularity. They ran the political espionage team who investigated treason and social crimes. They carried out interrogations, often using torture, even though that was recognised as unreliable because some suspects were too tough to give in, while others collapsed at the first hint of menace and would say anything they thought the arresting officer wanted to hear.
As censor, chief magistrate and as Pontifex Maximus or chief priest, the Emperor himself judged many criminal proceedings. If Rome was a collective household, Domitian was its head. He presided over serious trials. Theoretically, he would never initiate charges himself, but when names were handed in by informers, the facts (or fantasies) had to be checked to gauge the likelihood of securing a conviction; where Domitian was the judge, his Praetorians liaised closely with the Urban Cohorts. Vinius Clodianus helped the Urbans evaluate cases and gave them ideas for following up evidence.
He was startled by what he saw. As censor, Domitian’s actions were meticulously correct, yet some seemed crazy and unjust; he ordered that when a juryman was convicted of taking bribes, all his colleagues on that jury should be punished too. He expelled someone from the Senate because he had acted in pantomimes. An ex- centurion was proved to be a slave after many years living as a free citizen; he was returned to slavery with his original master. Charges that the Emperor hounded married women for adultery were coloured with tales that he had often seduced the women himself first — though at Plum Street Clodianus once overheard one of Lucilla’s clients maintaining that if true, the women would not submit quietly but would come out and accuse him openly. What was there to lose? And why should Domitian get away with it? (Lucilla realised Vinius was in the apartment and shut the woman up fast.)
Sometimes accusations revived old injuries: Vespasian had once decided not to prosecute an opponent called Mettius Pompusianus, declaring that leniency would force him to be grateful and therefore loyal. Domitian first exiled Pompusianus to Corsica, then put him to death for having a map of the world painted on his bedroom walls, indicating supposed political ambitions. The man had also taken an interest in historical royalty. Studying bad rulers from the past was always seen as suspicious by bad rulers of the present; a philosopher died after an unwise speech criticised tyrants.
Domitian had no compunction about making an attack personal. Aelius Lamia perished; his only crime was to have been Domitia Longina’s first husband. Although at one point Domitian had made him consul, Lamia was never
