Flavia Domitilla looked suddenly older. Despite her pampered prior existence, during the journey to Puteoli her face had acquired the lines of an elderly woman; even her hair, simply wound by Lucilla in an old-fashioned style today, seemed to have greyed, thinned and faded. Though widowed and torn from her children, she was still the granddaughter of the Divine Vespasian; she walked unaided up a narrow gangplank to be received by a naval captain who looked shamefaced. She spoke to him graciously. She never looked back.
Lucilla waited with Stephanus on the quay until the ship had sailed out to sea so far they could no longer see it. Even when travellers are expected to return, the slow dwindling of a vessel into the far distance is a mournful sight. Lucilla knew she would never see Flavia Domitilla again.
On their journey together back to Rome she and Stephanus spoke little. They were both raging at the injustice, but under Domitian no one openly showed such feelings if they wanted to survive. By the time they reached Rome, nonetheless, they had a shared understanding.
Hurrying to Plum Street, even though it was late, Lucilla could tell Gaius was at home. They normally slept in her bed, but she found him in his old room, with the dog on his feet, forcing him to curl up. She crept into bed behind him. Gaius greeted her only with a bad-tempered grunt and did not turn around.
Pressing her face between his shoulder-blades, Lucilla murmured pleas against his unresponsive back. ‘I am sorry. Please don’t be angry. I was her freedwoman. I discovered that it meant something.’
Gaius, a free citizen from birth, had spent the best part of a week depressed. He knew freed slaves had an obligation, but until now its importance to Lucilla had escaped him. He was jealous, he knew it. Lucilla heard his misery: ‘I thought you had left me.’
‘Don’t; please don’t upset yourself. I am here. I would have gone as her companion,’ Lucilla admitted. ‘But she knew you had a claim on me. I am so glad she said no. I wanted to come home to you.’
Gaius pushed the dog off the bed with the flats of his feet so he could stretch out and turn round. He hauled Lucilla into his embrace. ‘Oh gods, am I glad to have you back…!’ He was warm-bodied and warm-hearted; despite the scare she had given him, he remained deeply affectionate.
‘It’s over. She is gone, Gaius. I know she will die there. She will never be allowed home. He means her to die. They will neglect her, and probably starve her, and because she has no hope she will surrender to her fate. That is how he wants it. So he does not have to see what happens, and can shed all responsibility.’
Gaius wrapped himself around her until she felt like a kernel, safe in its nut. ‘There; let it out. You need to cry.’
Lucilla took his comfort but she said, ‘I have not shed one tear since I watched her sail away. I am too angry.’
Gaius was silent. He recognised that she had changed. He saw that he could indeed lose her — though of all the wild doubts he had ever harboured, losing Lucilla would not be in any way he had dreamed. No other man would lure her, nor would she tire of him. Even her long exposure to poets, teachers and philosophers had not achieved this. Flavia Lucilla had joined the opposition to Domitian.
‘It has to end.’ Lucilla’s voice was quiet, her tone stripped, her mood fatalistic. ‘People must do something. Whatever it takes, he will have to be stopped.’
33
Over a year passed, after Flavius Clemens died and his widow was banished. Nothing significant happened. It could be argued that this was because the conspirators took their time and planned things properly. Excuses, said Lucilla.
Organisation did occur, however. A slow current of hatred had begun its drag. In the Senate, men confined themselves to muttering complaints, while Domitian knew they did so, and loathed them more as a result. At the Praetorian Camp, officers and soldiers took another New Year Oath, pledging loyalty to their emperor with set faces. Their Prefects waited, each with his motives. The army loved Domitian; legionary commanders and their provincial governors, with power in their hands, were his loyal appointees. He chose them personally, and they had seen what happened to anyone who challenged him. The public neither loved nor hated, grateful for gifts and favours, yet finding him a cold, distant ruler. The benefit of efficient government with many costly state occasions was that there were no riots — nor would there be, if their ruler was to fall to a well-constructed palace revolution, with the promise that life for the public would continue undisturbed. Juvenal’s famous slur was right; given bread and circuses, people would tolerate anything.
A group of dedicated people worked secretly to identify who was sympathetic, indifferent, suspect or hostile. They rarely met formally. When they did, they chose the summer, so absences looked like normal holidays. Some of these people were senior officials, who were used to running the Empire. They knew how to hobnob. Because they were careful, their meetings often took place far from both Rome and Domitian’s fortress at Alba. So, in the middle of summer, Gaius Vinius and Flavia Lucilla travelled together down the Via Valeria, setting off like cheerful holidaymakers with light luggage, an obvious picnic basket, and their dog.
There was a villa in the hills which by reputation was the farm given from his rich supporter Maecenas to the poet Horace. A will produced in a hurry when the poet died in delirium had bequeathed his entire estate to the Emperor Augustus. Horace had enjoyed imperial patronage and he was a childless bachelor, so no suggestion of sharp practice should be inferred.
The poet’s beloved Sabine farm was swallowed up into the gigantic imperial portfolio, from which imperial freedmen were sometimes rewarded with spectacular presents. Some of the best properties in Italy passed from an emperor to a servant who worked hard, or who knew where the bodies were buried. When the state budget was tight, those who had made a packet from bribes could buy auctioned property at wincingly favourable rates, though sometimes there was a quid pro quo.
Nearly a hundred years after Horace died, the small farm at the head of the wooded valley was in new ownership. Approached by its own informal road, it was encircled by low, scrubby hills with a crown of trees. The dark soil was thin, but supported modest agriculture; Horace had had his own flocks and was able to seal demijohns of his own wine. A small spring provided fresh water. A brook chattered.
The living quarters remained modest, at least by contrast with the gross spreads flaunted by tycoons along the Bay of Naples. Even so, a luxurious redesign and make-over in the reign of Vespasian had improved both facilities and decor, with plenty of white and grey marble, all worked to a high standard. The most important rooms on the ground floor had impressive geometric mosaic floors in black and white, announcing that this was a high- status home. Pleasant suites occupied two storeys; some rooms opened onto internal courtyard gardens. The master dining room had a splendid view across a peristyle down the main axis towards a particularly striking hill in the distance. A short flight of steps led to a gently sloping garden, surrounded by shady colonnades, that included the usual topiary and urns, a large pool and scallop shell grotto. Natural woodland complemented the formal plantings.
Only a staggeringly outsized bath house showed that although this delightful and very secluded house was in single private ownership, it was occasionally used by travelling rulers and their large, demanding retinues. Freedmen lived here. An emperor could enjoy the attractive dining and sleeping rooms, in the suave company of a host he knew and trusted, while his swarming backup team was foisted onto local villages or bivouacked in the grounds. This rural villa made an ideal stopping point on the way to Nero’s spectacular country palace in the hills at Sublacium, too far from Rome to be reached in one day, which had continued in use by the Flavians. Alternatively, with only a slight detour, this could serve as a way-station en route to Vespasian’s birthplace at Reate and other Flavian family compounds. Though close to the Via Valeria, the house lay down a minor road which lent privacy and made it very secure.
A daytrip from Rome, Horace’s Villa had seemed in the past a superb place to plot. An equally long way from Alba, it still was.
The current owner was Domitian’s great chamberlain, Parthenius. He took on the villa after other wealthy and influential freedmen and women, as he explained on the first evening while his group of visitors relaxed with nightcaps after their hot and bumping journey from Rome.
‘I find it entertaining — ’ Perhaps because he had worked for so long for an emperor with a macabre sense of humour, Parthenius was amused by situations that made other people feel faint — ‘that one of my predecessors
