homely daughter. The morning salutatio was one of the duties pertaining to rank, and Pliny was a man who took his rank and his duty seriously. And every so often, he reminded himself, there came along some promising young man from his native district, just setting his foot on the path to advancement, who deserved the counsel, wealth, and connections that an up-and-coming senator like Pliny could offer.
Though he ached to stand up and massage his neck, Pliny stifled a yawn and kept his stately pose, fondly conscious of the eyes that admired him from behind the door curtain-the dear girl, so curious, so shy. He squared his shoulders and looked magisterial.
At last, the clock slave called the second hour of the day and the crowd began to shuffle out. He watched their backs retreating through the vestibule and out into the street. Fewer clients nowadays, he reflected, sought their patron’s advice or his blessing on their endeavors as they once had done in the old republican days. Now they came mostly for the handout, the money that was just enough to keep food in their bellies for another day. They would all be back again tomorrow, and the whole tedious degrading routine gone through again. At least, with the Senate and courts in recess, he would not need to be accompanied by a horde of them throughout his day. What a relief!
As the door closed behind the last of them, a plump young girl emerged from the side chamber where she had been hiding. She looked up at him with a grave and gentle gaze, full of love and admiration. With her own hands she unwound his sweat-soaked toga and draped a light linen cloak over his shoulders. Pliny held her round chin between his fingers and gave her a tender, almost fatherly, kiss on the forehead.
But this fond moment was interrupted by a female slave bursting into the atrium, baskets of vegetables spilling from her arms. “It’s all over the market, Master,” the woman gasped. “Senator Verpa’s been murdered! Hacked to bloody pieces, they say. Troopers from the City Battalions are there already and have the slaves under guard. Thanks to the son, they say, not a single one got away…” She stopped to catch her breath.
There followed a moment of stunned silence while Pliny’s slaves stood stock still and exchanged fleeting looks. The girl turned wide eyes on Pliny. “Husband, what does it mean? Are we…?”
He checked her with a stern look. “Now Calpurnia, you’re not to think about it at all. There’s simply nothing to be afraid of. Do you hear me, my dear? That’s better. Helen, take your mistress into the garden and fetch her kitten or her sparrow or something, you know what to do. Go along, my darling, and put this completely out of your mind, completely out of your mind. You know you mustn’t excite yourself, not now.”
“Gaius, I’m your wife, I’ve a right…”
But he leveled his gaze at her, and the girl reluctantly allowed herself to be led away by her nurse. Calpurnia Fabata was fourteen years old, less than half her husband’s age. And she was pregnant with their first child. Pliny watched her with anxious concern. A pregnancy could be difficult in one so young. Her morning sickness had now stretched into the sixth month, and her doctor insisted that excitement and mental stress must be avoided. In an age when Romans of his class had to be bribed by the government to procreate, Pliny longed for children.
Swift-footed rumor raced through the city. By mid-morning there was no one in Rome who hadn’t heard of Verpa’s murder. And, as always happens, exaggeration flourished. The isolated murder of one master, and a notoriously cruel one at that-he was once said to have thrown a miscreant slave into a pool of carnivorous eels-had now swelled to the first act in a bloody slave insurrection. Romans, reminding each other that fully one-third of the city’s population was of servile origin, felt stirrings of panic.
By midafternoon the wilder reports had begun to subside. Nonetheless, the killing of even one master by his slaves chilled Roman hearts. Living in a sea of slaves-slaves to dress them, feed them, bathe them, brush their teeth, wake them, put them to bed, carry them, read to them, teach them, amuse them, sleep with them, even remember their friends’ names for them-Romans had a queasy fear of them. A man had no secrets from his slaves. They were everywhere in the house, silent shadows, seeing, hearing things that might interest a tyrannical emperor and cost their master his life.
And whenever a slave, driven beyond endurance, turned on his master, Romans responded with hysterical savagery, for this was every slave owner’s nightmare. The Law was explicit. All the slaves in the house must be punished alike. Could one slave alone plot his master’s death without letting a word slip to the others? Could he procure the weapon, creep unnoticed past the night-guard, open the door to the chamber, carry in a light, do the deed, and make off all in total silence and secrecy? Impossible. Every slave in the house, it must be assumed, knew what was afoot and could have reported it. To put it simply, no slave was innocent of his master’s death, and the whole familia without distinction must be executed. “Are not some punished unjustly?” asked a few. “What of it? Unless we keep them in constant fear, we are at their mercy.”
Even the mild Pliny, who had never raised his hand or spoken a harsh word to a slave in all his decorous life, could not suppress a shudder.
Chapter Three
The day before the Nones of Germanicus.
The ninth hour of the day.
The bronze gates of the palace swung shut behind them with a clash of metal. A moment later the figure of Parthenius, the imperial chamberlain, preceded by a cloud of scent, strode toward them with arms outspread. Vast sheets of colored silk draped his whale’s body, rings glittered on his fingers and thumbs, the crisp curls of his hair appeared to be sculpted in silver. He performed, as well as his belly permitted, a low bow.
“What a pleasure to welcome all of you, my lords and ladies,” the chamberlain panted. “A rare evening is in store for you. If you will follow me, please.”
The guests made the minimal reply that etiquette demanded. Roman senators despised these imperial freedmen. Spawned in the gutters of Antioch and Alexandria and sold as children into the emperor’s service, they wielded more real power than any senator did. Parthenius, for example, oversaw the emperor’s domestic arrangements, woke him in the morning, and all but tucked him in at night. At dinner, in the bath, even in the latrine, some said, he never left the emperor’s side. A good word from Parthenius was worth much gold.
Preceded by this great man, the dinner guests filed into the Hall of Audience. The heat of the streets never penetrated here. Pliny shivered in the marbled chill and felt goose bumps on his arms. The hall was empty now that the day’s business was done, but visitors were always taken this way for a good reason: the vast space was designed to awe. In this stupendous vaulted cavern a man was no more than an insect. Pliny had not been here for some months, and so it was with surprise that he noted a new feature. Disks of moonstone as big around as shields and polished like mirrors had been attached with brackets to the walls and columns wherever one looked. For what purpose, he could not imagine.
From the great hall, their way lay through a splendid formal garden in whose center a sunken fountain shot jets of water high above their heads. Peacocks strutted past them on the path.
“Chamberlain, have you forgotten where the emperor’s banquet hall is?” Several of the guests had stopped where the path divided and regarded Parthenius with amused contempt.
“Our Lord and God,” he answered, breathing heavily, “prefers a more intimate room tonight, as we are so small a party. Come this way, please.”
Obediently they went through a door and down a succession of sloping corridors that turned and twisted until they had lost all sense of direction. And it seemed as if at every turn the corridor grew dimmer, dustier, quieter. Conversation died until there was only the shuffle of sandals and the wheezing and puffing of their guide to relieve the silence.
“And just down these steps, my lords and ladies…” A flight of worn stone steps descended into a well of darkness. No, this was all wrong. There was no dining room in the bowels of the palace. The guests bunched together, turned round and found their retreat blocked by a dozen Praetorians who had come up silently behind them. Women turned to their husbands with wild, questioning looks. Pliny caught the city prefect’s eye, but his superior’s face, controlled through years of practice, told him nothing.
“Before you, honored friends, gapes the Portal of Hades, the bourn from whence no man returns. Your Lord and God commands you to join him tonight in the realm of Pluto, his brother god.” Parthenius delivered this speech with the voice and gestures of an actor on the stage. Pliny breathed a silent prayer of thanks that he had not brought Calpurnia, though she had begged and pouted.
