Could a good man serve a bad emperor and keep his own hands clean? Pliny was on the horns of a dilemma. He was a good man. But he was also an ambitious one, and he could not put out of his mind the emperor’s words to him: a chance to emulate his uncle, that paragon of learning, virtue, and dedication.
He tossed and turned, but sleep would not come. He counted the hours until dawn, when he must rise and present himself for the opening ceremony of the Roman Games, a festival that occupied two weeks in the middle of September-not September-“Germanicus,” he must remember to say! For many senators and lawyers, with the cessation of public business, the Games, which only the priests were strictly required to attend, meant a fifteen-day vacation from the sweltering cesspit of Rome to their estates in the hills. But no such respite for him this year. And all because this wretched Verpa had got himself killed.
Pliny had known the man only by sight and reputation. The world of senatorial society was large enough that he could avoid meeting people he found disagreeable, and Verpa had never shown any interest in meeting him, the gods be thanked! The man had been a notorious informer all the way back to Nero’s reign.
Informers were a cancer on the Roman Senate. Every emperor began his reign by denouncing the evil, but sooner or later succumbed to the temptation of listening to the vicious innuendo spread by the informer against his fellow senators and their families. Condemnation was certain, and the informer divided the victim’s property with the emperor.
Verpa had begun by denouncing a woman of senatorial family for treason because a slave saw her undressing before the emperor’s image, and, on another occasion, he condemned a man for carrying a coin with Domitian’s portrait into a privy. But he had outdone himself when he denounced Clemens, the emperor’s own cousin, and his wife, Domitilla, on a charge of atheism and performing Jewish practices. Verpa had brought this charge openly in the Senate. Pliny had been there to hear him. It was indeed a shocking revelation, but Verpa had incontrovertible evidence to back it up, and the emperor went nearly insane with anger. Clemens was swiftly strangled and his wife banished for life to an island. Sextus Ingentius Verpa was riding high; that is, until someone butchered him in the night. Tomorrow Pliny must poke a stick into this anthill and turn it over. The thought of it revolted him.
When at last he drifted off to sleep, naked black children invaded his dreams, hanging on his arms and legs, dragging him somewhere he did not want to go.
Pliny was not the only one whose night was filled with terrors. Domitianus Caesar, Lord and God, emperor and high priest of Rome, sat alone in his bed chamber-his refuge, his inner sanctum, where few ever penetrated. Because he feared the dark, tiers of lamps made the room almost as bright as day. A bluebottle struggled between his thumb and forefinger, waving its small legs. He raised a needle-sharp stylus and ran it through. More flies buzzed inside a baited jar, waiting execution.
When he was a boy, ignored, despised by everyone, Domitian would while away whole days brooding over hurts and resentments. Lately he had begun to do it again. The Helmsman of the World had sunk into a misery of fear.
Parthenius scratched at the door and eased it open-the nightly ritual of bringing the emperor his wine and a few choice tidbits left over from dinner on a silver tray.
“Master, I congratulate you on tonight’s performance. Who but your divinity could have conceived such a stratagem?”
“I!” Domitian swept his arm across the tray, sending flask and dishes clattering to the floor. The boy with the small head, Earinus, who had been asleep in the corner, sat up and blinked.
“My plan? You fat turd, this was your plan! Frighten the senators into betraying themselves, you said, with all that childish mumbo-jumbo. Well, you see how well we succeeded. One word from Nerva quelled it in an instant, and we learned nothing. Instead of exposing them, these philosophers and republicans and atheists, we only drive them deeper underground. You know what happened to Epaphroditus, your predecessor. He gave me bad advice. He was younger and smarter than you are, Parthenius. I loved him.” Domitian smiled; his teeth caught the candle light and glittered like knives.
Parthenius, his several chins quivering, stooped to gather the dishes. He had raised self-abasement to an art. “Cocceius Nerva could be removed, Master. It only takes a word.” “And seven more will spring up in his place. I’m fighting a hydra. They all hate me.” “No matter, you saw their fear, Lord of the World. Recall the words of Caligula, ‘Let them hate, as long as they fear.’” “Yes, and look what happened to him, you donkey!” The Lord of the World squinched his tired eyes, then opened them again. Parthenius’ smile never faltered, though the pain in his belly was excruciating.
“Don’t stand there, grinning like an ape, pour me more wine, and put a drop of laudanum in it. You know I don’t-don’t sleep well lately.”
“Of course, Master.” Parthenius extended a pudgy hand with the goblet. “Will you require anything else tonight?”
“Ah, what would I do without you, my friend. Who else can I trust? Come here, kiss me.”
The chamberlain bent awkwardly to comply, and Domitian struck him across the mouth with his open hand. “Get away, you disgust me, you’re too fat.”
Parthenius, his face a frozen mask, bowed himself out the door and sagged against the corridor wall. With a perfumed handkerchief from his sleeve he dabbed at the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. He remembered that Epaphroditus had been summoned one night to Domitian’s bedroom. The emperor had made love with him, had dined with him, sent him away with every sign of affection, and the next day signed an order for the man’s crucifixion. Parthenius sighed as the spasm of pain passed off. He smoothed his gown, took a deep breath, and went unsteadily down the hall.
Ever since Augustus Caesar had made himself Rome’s first emperor a century ago, it was the freedmen of the imperial household who made the wheels of government turn. Senators and magistrates, for all their wealth and pretensions, were really no more than the ornamental detritus of the vanished Republic, honored in inverse proportion to their relevance, or terrorized, depending on the emperor’s whim.
But the imperial freedmen, too, lived lives of constant dread. Without family, without inherited wealth or status, they were all caught in the hollow of the emperor’s hand. One misstep and it was back to the gutter, if they were lucky. Parthenius had a wife and a small son, born without the taint of slavery, who might make him proud one day if the chamberlain could stay alive long enough. And, if Fortune favored him, he hadn’t long to wait until there would be an end to fear and humiliation, to the stomach aches and the bile rising in his throat. He shook himself and straightened his shoulders. After tonight’s events he and the others needed to talk. ???
“It wasn’t you, was it, Stephanus?” the empress said. “With your dagger?”
They sat on delicate-legged chairs around a rosewood table inlaid with ivory. Each had come stealthily along a different corridor to Parthenius’ office in the working wing of the palace. It had taken time to arrange. It would be dawn soon. Entellus was there. He was the freedman who received petitions to the emperor; his favor was worth a fortune. Titus Petronius, the commandant of the Praetorian Guard, recently appointed and already insecure in his post. Stephanus, still with his left arm in the sling. He was fiercely loyal to Domitilla and her family and ready for anything. And finally the empress, herself, who hated Domitian perhaps more than any of them. They all deferred to her.
Stephanus was a lean, olive-dark man of about forty, with greasy black hair. He shrugged noncommittally. “You wouldn’t expect me to admit to murdering a Roman senator, a low-born fellow like me?”
“Well, if it wasn’t you who stabbed him, then who in the name of thundering Jove was it?” This was Petronius, the Guard commandant, blustering as usual.
“And does his death solve our problem or compound it?” asked Entellus in his quiet, precise way. The man of letters. “We must assume that Domitilla’s letter and her husband’s imperial horoscope are still in Verpa’s house somewhere. What if someone else finds them? Someone more loyal to the emperor than Verpa was-this fellow Pliny for instance? He’ll have the run of the place.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him,” Parthenius said. “A pettifogging lawyer drafted into a police job that he clearly has no relish for.
“You should’ve seen his face when Fulvus proposed him. Still I’m concerned for the Purissima. We’ve had no news of her yesterday or today through the usual channel. What is she thinking of? I was against this in the first place…”
The empress raised a finger and Parthenius instantly shut his mouth. “That woman will decide for herself what’s best to do. She always does. We will leave it to her.”
“Of course, empress, as you say.”
