To the Consiliarius with silver eyes who sat with a basket of anemones as red as blood at his elbow I said I had been made emperor of Rome a fine morning in Pannonia. By noon we were crossing the Ister, where I was advised to flee toward Singidunum with a contingent of Praetoriani. At sunset they abandoned me.
Surely I was not the first emperor to pee the purple? I remember banked rack over the Carpathians, a band of Gypsies, a brown child riding a goat. I gave the Gypsies the damp toga and six denarii in exchange for an ass on which I made my way into a terrible wood. I soon heard hooves and saw the knives in the half light. Never should man kill anything at all.
If the name Balbinus does not go into your ear like Caligula or Augustus it is because history is a slut. She will accept pomp everytime over worth. Did not Augustus say with the last of his breath that instead of a funeral oration he wanted a round of applause?
It is because the historians would find little beyond my name to record that the Consiliarii were patient with me. They seemed not to want to obtrude, and kept a polite distance when they appeared. Of one I could make out a blue eye only. The rest was shadow. The second was clearer, the folds of his toga fell through a rose bush, a very pretty pattern.
Another time they came through an ilex with a rabbit in each hand. A sacrifice, I assumed. One that I had perhaps omitted on the outside, the inside, whichever I’m on now. I can’t get it straight. Pensum is verbum in this layer of the world, between the tissue of light and its stay on the bought and hollow of things. They are of our realm, I understood them to mean. We may talk with eyes here, I don’t know. And the pensum inside the word folds out here. I was beholden to these staring bucks. Even they come through the membrane, the one said to the other, meaning me.
I began to see the significance of having come across with the bee. It brought me, I think.
I found a Consiliarius in a stand of thistle by a milestone, turning himself leisurely inside out and back again, like candle-smoke in a still room.
— Jupiter! I said, remembering that I had not thought to ask after the gods.
He closed his hand and opened it.
— Jupiter, he said.
— Juno?
He joined his hands.
I gave it up. I knew that he would make a fist for Mars and a finger for Venus, would knit his knuckles for Minarva and smooth his hand along the air for Mercurius.
— Themselves! I cried. I am not a schoolboy.
He went into the milestone like water into sand.
ROMA, ROMA. Pain makes us all equal here, in Rome it is the differentiator. We have had to learn not to laugh at the bloody stump, the epileptic jerking along, the milky eye, the legless. Such amusements belong to the city, where a lady, her face a glory of powder, Sidonian lips, a tower of hair woven with pearls, earrings like stars, can shake her litter with a fit of laughter at the sight of a humpback swinging along on crutches, where mothers, barristers, doctors gasp with pleasure as two dwarves hack themselves to a butchered ruin in the Circus.
Of the crucifixions, that peculiarly Roman entertainment, a Greek said to me one day in tears, have you no Goddess of mercy? None, I said. He had seen a crucifixion against his will, and had been held by the horror of it longer than he could stand, were he sane at the time, as he said, for he lost his mind when he realized that the spectators were laughing.
And yet he had not seen, as I have, a thief almost apologetic for having such a terrible time with his pain as the nails were driven into his wrists and feet. He bellowed like a bull, driven wild by the pain, and when they pulled the crux up to go into its socket his scream pierced to the quick of your bones, but you could scarcely hear it over the laughter of the audience.
Here we do not laugh at pain, our lot in common. We have only averted eyes or a word of courage to serve for compassion, having learned something of what the Greeks mean by sympathy. Or is it shame?
The Procurator comes down in a litter to the channel, a Garamantian trotting beside him with an umbraculum. A wart tarantulous and inauspicious sprouted from the flange of the old custus’s nose and a goiter the size of a piglet wrenched his chin around to his shoulder. He kept shouting that he must not be brought near any lepers.
The SPQR rides high before, carried by a wheezing corporal whose leather cinctures squeak and whose face shines with sweat.
The Procurator wiggles his ringed fingers at a scribe. The Machinator leans to listen. The litter out among the ravaged earth which we are hacking and loading into buckets looks like nothing so much as a beribboned and curtained cradle that has been spirited from a censorial nursery
