“How many people live here?” I found myself asking.
“A million, perhaps more,” my father replied. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”
It was magnificent – but it terrified me. It was too big. I felt as if I were drowning.
Carriages were not allowed into the city until nightfall, so when we stopped at a mansio to rest, my father left the luggage in the carriage with a slave, and hired some bearers to carry us onwards in litters.
“The Emperor is expecting us,” he said. I had never seen him so nervous.
As we went deeper into the city, the noise grew and grew. Six-storey tower blocks – called insulae because, like islands, they reared up from the sea of people around them – blocked daylight from the streets. People leaned from their windows to chat with their neighbours, and more than once we had to scoot to avoid a chamber pot being emptied. Arguments and love songs, politicians thundering away, all mingled with the shouts of people selling everything from vegetables to perfume, fish sauce to fine scarves.
“Caput mundi!” my father said, as proudly as if he had built Rome himself. “Head of the world, the greatest city there is.”
Just as he said that, our bearers stopped. An old man’s even older donkey had died in the middle of the road, spilling its baskets of onions everywhere. Helpful Romans, annoyed Romans, pick-pocketing Romans and just plain curious Romans had gathered around. The road was completely blocked.
“Now I see why they demanded an hourly rate,” my mother said dryly, peeking through the curtains of the litter. “It will take us a day to reach the palace.”
In the end my father hired some more people to clear the way in front of us, and we went slowly onwards. I stared out of the litter, amazed at everything. Everywhere I looked there were more roads, more streets of hammering smiths or busy vegetable markets, more glittering temples heaving out smoke from sacrifices, more steaming bathhouses, more jingling dancers and priests winding their way through the crowds. And the words! So many babbling barbarian voices, so many shrill Roman dialect curses being shrieked, so many arguments and jokes and fights! Even the walls shouted, for wherever I looked there was more rude graffiti than I had ever seen before. All these things were in Leptis Magna too, but there was so much more of them all in Rome. If Leptis was a busy fish pond, Rome was the ocean.
My father was beaming, but my mother sat up as straight and taut as if she were a prisoner. I was terrified, but excited too. Soon we had left the ordinary streets and entered the heart of Rome, where the most important buildings were. Now things were different. There were more soldiers around, and more people in togas, fewer in tunics. Marble glared back the sunlight from arches built to honour great men. The straight lines of the inscriptions made me think of sword cuts, slicing down, then slashing up. Columns towered above the bustling, toga-clad officials. Upon each one, like an eagle watching for prey, perched a statue. Gods and emperors seemed to follow us with their painted eyes, their gilded crowns flashing golden in the sun. And there, among them—
“A girl on a horse!” I exclaimed. I pointed. There was a statue with a girl like me, wearing girls’ clothes, astride a horse.
“That’s Cloelia,” my mother said shortly.
“So girls do ride! Can’t I have a horse?”
My mother tutted and my father laughed.
“Cloelia was captured by Rome’s enemies in the ancient days of Lars Porsena. She escaped from her captors by stealing a horse and swimming a river, and she took the other captives with her. She was brave, but that was wartime. Horses are for men in Rome, and not just any men – knights and senators.”
I was silent. I watched the statue until it was out of sight. The stone girl, voiceless, unnoticed, looked out over the heads of everyone bustling in Rome. Then, as if a river swept me away from her, she was gone.
My father kept up a commentary, pointing out the temples to different gods, the forums built by Julius Caesar and the Senate House.
“Why are there so many soldiers?” I exclaimed, as yet another cohort in jingling armour and scarlet cloaks strode past. “There were fewer in Leptis Magna and we had the Garamantes on our doorstep.”
My father and mother exchanged a glance.
“The Emperor is a military man,” my father said. “He likes the army.”
This still seemed odd to me, but a moment later, I had forgotten about it. For we had reached the enormous entrance to the Palatine Hill, the palace where the emperors of Rome lived. Looking back, I saw the busy forum with dignified senators crossing it, deep in conversation with each other. But when I looked ahead, I saw only soldiers with stony faces and eyes that were about as kind as those of the statues; less, in fact, for the painted eyes of the gods often seemed to smile at me.
Our litter bearers stopped. Soldiers milled around. One centurion flicked open the curtain of our litter with his truncheon and examined us without a smile. I heard questions, orders and instructions. The spears in the hands of the soldiers were like the thorns on a cactus, glinting. I’d once grasped a cactus fruit by mistake and I remembered the pain. I kept my eyes on the spears.
But people were expecting us. The gates opened and we were carried in; then they shut with a crash behind us.
“You were inside the palace? The real, emperor’s palace?” Your eyes are wide. “How big was it?”
I think hard. What can you possibly compare it to? I realise for the first time, perhaps, how different your world is to mine. The biggest things you’ve ever seen are the sky and the sea. The biggest things built by man
