begin and continue everyday until the end of the Games.
Pliny would join in the procession but then slip away as soon as possible. He regretted having missed most of the theatrical performances during the first week of the Games. He had no such regrets about missing the races. Almost unique among his countrymen, he found them inexpressibly tedious. How the Roman populace could rouse itself to a fever pitch of excitement over the Blues and the Greens, the Reds and Whites, the Golds and Purples, as if it made a particle of difference which team won, was quite beyond him.
But his musings were interrupted by a shocking occurrence. One of the Vestal Virgins, only a child, broke away from the others and streaked toward the emperor. What was she shouting? Something about her mother? The girl threw herself sobbing against Domitian’s legs, holding onto his toga. He raised his hand to slap her, and would have, only the empress pulled her away just in time and handed her to an older Vestal who had raced after her.
And then it struck Pliny-the thing that had bothered him at the sacrifice on the very first day of the Games. He hadn’t been able to put his finger on it then. Now there was no doubt. One of the six Vestals was missing.
He had no more time to ponder this now. To the blare of trumpets and thunder of drums, the charioteer cracked his whip and the four white horses of the imperial equipage started forward. As they turned into the avenue that led down to the Circus, an immense crowd surged forward, shouting the emperor’s name in rhythmic acclamations led by trained cheerleaders. Domitian, their Lord and God, raised his right arm in salute. But, at the same time, he steadied himself, gripping the chariot’s handhold with a white-knuckled fist. The rolling waves of sound made him visibly wince, so tightly-strung were his nerves. His features were frozen in a bloodless mask. He looked like a man face to face with death. If the soothsayers were right then this adoring crowd could not shelter him, the steel-clad ranks of Praetorian spearmen could not shield him. If those soothsayers were right, then in five more days, at the fifth hour of the day, his doom would find him.
The gilded chariot, flanked by twenty-four lictors passed on its way. Then followed, in turn, troops of noble youths on horseback, garlanded litters bearing statues of the gods on high, and the leaping priests of Mars, pirouetting to the music of flutes and lyres. Next, in a riot of color and noise, came the chariots of the competing teams, each charioteer pelted with flowers by women in the crowd who shouted their love. And after them the spectators formed one single mass, an immense stream of humanity surging toward the Great Circus.
Gaius Plinius, his mind sorely perplexed, signaled for his litter bearers.
Calpurnia had slept late that morning, drugged by Soranus’ potion. She awoke in a panic. Where was her husband? But Helen ran into assure her that all was well. Master was attending the ceremonies on the Capitolium and would be home for lunch. Helen helped her dress and comb her hair and then walked her out in to the garden to enjoy the fresh morning air. She saw Amatia sitting on the stone bench under the pear tree, facing away from her. She called “good morning,” but her friend did not seem to hear her. Calpurnia sat down beside her and touched her shoulder. Amatia turned to face her. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I miss my daughters,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-two
The sixth hour of the day.
Before Pliny, who was longing for a bath and a long nap, reached home, one of Valens’ men intercepted him in the street. “Something to do with a monkey, sir. Centurion says you should come at once.”
Minutes later, Pliny and his officer knelt on the floor in Verpa’s bedroom, peering at the small shape, hideously twisted in death, of Iarbas’ monkey. Lucius, who had followed them upstairs, watched silently from the doorway.
“I reckon he got himself locked in here the other day, after we were here,” Valens said. “A slave found him this morning. I haven’t let anyone touch him. You see how he’s clawed his throat.”
Pliny nodded. There were bloody tufts of fur under the animal’s nails.
“Now take a look at this, sir.”
Pliny bent closer. There, on the wrinkled palm of one small hand was a livid welt from which protruded a bit of cork. Grasping the cork warily between his thumb and forefinger, Pliny withdrew a tiny needle from the wound. Suddenly his exhaustion was forgotten. The thing must have been shaken out of the bedclothes when the bed was stripped and lay here on the floor for days until the monkey found it. Clearly whatever killed this animal killed Verpa too. But he would want Diaulus’ confirmation.
Wrapping the little corpse up in a towel and the needle separately in a napkin, and putting both in a shoulder bag, he rushed off to find the doctor. This proved to be not so easy. The embalming workshop in the temple precinct was locked and shuttered. Pliny accosted some minor priestling who was passing by and enquired after “Nectanebo.” To Pliny’s surprise the man dropped to his knees and begged for mercy. It was only then that Pliny, mildest of men, realized how he must look to this fellow. He was still corseleted, helmeted, and armed with his sword from the morning’s ceremony. An unaccustomed sense of power suddenly welled up in him. So this was how soldiers felt when they confronted cowering civilians. Just these bits and pieces of metal made all the difference. It was a heady feeling.
Nectanebo, it seemed, had been summarily fired by Alexandrinus. Word was that he was practicing medicine again in a storefront shop in the Subura.
Feeling invincible in his breastplate and swaggering like a real trooper, Pliny made his way down into that insalubrious quarter of noisy taverns and odorous alleys that buzzed with flies and cheap commerce. After a few inquiries, one ragged inhabitant was able to point out the doctor’s place of business.
He found the little man full of grievance and eager to talk. Indeed, the swelling on the monkey’s paw resembled the one on Verpa’s mentu-, er that is, membrum virile. What sort of poison produced it, he couldn’t say; he was an anatomist, not a pharmacist. But Diaulus had other information to impart, and no reason now to respect the secrets of his former employer, damn him. Twice in the past few nights, both before and after the reading of Verpa’s will, he had observed the Priest of Anubis together with a thin lady who walked with Scortilla’s unmistakable lurching gait.
Mehercule! thought Pliny as he shouldered his way back through the crowded street. Both his concubine and his son had a crack at the old man on the same night, only she, somehow, got to him first! Still, there were pieces to be filled in. He wanted to know what sort of poison this was and where she could have obtained it. And, most perplexing of all, how she administered it. For the first of these questions anyway, he knew precisely where to look. He collared an urchin in the street and gave him directions to Martial’s house with instructions to meet him without delay at the public library. It was a big job he was undertaking; he’d need the poet’s help. Still carrying the monkey and the needle, he turned his steps toward the Forum of Peace.
The Deified Vespasian had built his beautiful forum after the annihilation of Jerusalem and its inhabitants and had dedicated it, appropriately, to Peace. In one angle of it he built a library, Rome’s largest, where thousands of Greek and Latin manuscripts could be consulted by citizens of sufficient status. A librarian directed Pliny to the shelves which groaned under the enormous bulk of his uncle’s crowning scholarly achievement, an encyclopedia of natural history.
“As a favor to the emperor,” Pliny explained to Martial, who arrived soon afterwards, out of breath, “my uncle, who also became my adoptive father after my own father died, bequeathed his original manuscripts to the library. He was one of the most learned men of this or any other age.” Pliny began to hunt along the honeycombed walls from which the knobs of dusty scrolls protruded. Martial watched him dubiously. “You know, he thought any moment wasted which was not devoted to work. He rose before dawn and began work by lamplight. After his mid- day rest, he would work again until dinner time, only to rise from dinner while it was still light and return to his studies.”
The bookish young Pliny had grown up in the household of that extraordinary man. He began to pull out scrolls now, touching them lovingly, blowing the dust off them and heaping them on a long table while he talked over his shoulder to Martial. “Whether he was bathing, sunning himself, dining, or being carried through the streets in his litter, a secretary was always beside him, reciting from some book, while he himself jotted down excerpts. I remember how he chastised me once for wasting precious hours by walking. He was dictating notes on volcanic eruptions, you know, when Vesuvius engulfed him.”
The heap of scrolls on the table grew dangerously high. “And so, I can’t help smiling when people call me
