pleasure.
Gallienus watched him sleep. The physiognomists were wrong. In bed, Demetrius might enjoy playing the role of a girl, but there was nothing effeminate about him. His eyes were not weak. Walking, neither did he mince nor did his knees knock like a woman’s. Gallienus had never seen him tilt his head to the right or adjust his hair with one finger. No palms-up, open-handed gestures. In the act of love, he did not ‘snort’.
The physiognomists might be wrong but Gallienus wondered what made a fine youth such as Demetrius find his pleasures like a woman and run the risk of every man’s contempt. Astrologers would put it down to the conjunction of the stars at birth; if Taurus was rising, rear end first among the Pleiades – that sort of thing. Magicians might claim to have caused it. Scratch a drawing of a castrated man gazing at his own genitals on a piece of obsidian, put it in a gold box with the stone of a cinaedus -fish, trick the victim into carrying it – or, much more efficacious, into eating it – and a soul was deformed.
Any number of men, charlatans or otherwise, might have any number of theories. How did you trick someone into eating a stone, in a gilded box or not? Gallienus suspended his judgement. He suspected that Demetrius’s predilection was innate. Whether it was or not, for years, the boy had had no choice about the physical aspect. Demetrius said he had been born into slavery. Although very vague about his early life, once he had become an intimate of the imperial bedchamber he had spoken about the succession of brutal masters through whose hands he had passed. Gallienus had been moved to tears. The youth’s degradation ended when he was purchased to be secretary to Ballista.
Ballista had treated Demetrius well. In the end, he had granted him his freedom and, although Demetrius did not realize that Gallienus knew, he had given the boy a share of the loot from the camp of the Persian King of Kings. Ballista had never taken the youth to his bed. In a Greek or a Roman, that would argue for strict self-control, but in a northern barbarian probably it was something else altogether.
Gallienus gazed at Demetrius. The emperor had never shunned Aphrodite. The gifts of the goddess of love should be honoured. There was nothing of the priggish and boorish virgin Hippolytus about Gallienus. Rather, he knew, there was a gadfly in his eyes. No sooner had it alighted on a beauty – boy or girl – than it wanted to fly again. His pleasure in Demetrius would not last. Beside anything else, the youth was shaving, using depilatories. Demetrius was getting too old.
Slowly, Gallienus pulled back the cover. Demetrius stirred, but did not wake. The boy was still beautiful. The well-formed back, the delicate moulding of the buttocks; neither too thin nor too fleshy. The straight thighs. The ringlets of dark, hyacinth hair.
Ballista had been a fool, misguided by his barbarian upbringing. The northerner was quite wrong: there was nothing unmanly about loving a boy. Gallienus had little time for the specious and hypocritical posturings of Platonic love. The noble duty of a philosophic spirit is to worship but not to touch: what nonsense. Nothing but a regime for frustration or guilt, or an unhealthy combination of the two.
No, there was nothing to be frowned at in physical pleasure for the erastes with his eromenos, as long as the older lover did not continue when the beloved became a man, bearded and tough. The very briefness of the time, from the first down to the full beard, added poignancy.
Hercules, Gallienus’s particular divine companion, had not been less manly for loving Hylas. Hercules had also loved many, many women. Indeed, it had been a woman, Omphale, who had for a time enslaved him; love of a woman that had briefly unmanned him.
Demetrius woke, opened dark eyes. His cheeks shone like amber or Sidonian crystal. The boy smiled. ‘You remember your promise?’ he murmured.
Gallienus kissed his lips. ‘I remember.’ For a moment he felt a pang of jealousy. Then it was overcome by affection. The boy was nothing if not loyal. Gallienus would keep the promise Demetrius had requested. Gallienus would not execute Ballista. Something must be done, but not that.
XI
Ballista knew Hippothous had not been happy at leaving Miletus – not happy at all.
Why, the Greek had complained, why had Ballista decided to do such a thing? The gods knew, said Hippothous, he was no coward but, largely by their own efforts, the northerner and his familia had saved Miletus. So, why – just two days after the Goths had been repulsed – why leave the relative safety of its walls and ride to Didyma: a place that meant nothing to them, which may well be indefensible, and to which the Goths could easily follow them? It was completely irrational; it was barbaric.
Maximus, who knew, had looked dubious, but said nothing.
Ballista, who had spent the hours before leaving closeted with Macarius, the asiarch of Miletus, had not felt like explaining.
For the journey, Ballista, Maximus and Hippothous had been accompanied by ten mounted soldiers and three able-bodied slaves: one Ballista’s, the others belonging to the soldiers. Yet even so, it had not been without its tensions. Having left Miletus through the Sacred Gate in the southern wall, they had not long passed the tomb of Neileus, the founder of the city, when they had seen the Goths. There were small groups of the raiders scattered here and there, looting and defiling the suburban villas and temples. The Goths had not attacked, but ceased from their pleasures to stand and watch the cavalcade.
Far from slipping out unnoticed, Ballista had openly courted attention. He had had a white draco hurriedly made. His personal standard, its roughly hammered metal jaws snarling, had hissed and snapped as they rode. The trooper carrying it had flourished it proudly. Ballista had wondered if the man, an auxiliary called Patavinus, would have been quite so happy if he had known what had happened to most of his predecessors. Romulus, Antigonus: they had been good men, but it had not saved them. So many violent deaths. Ballista had not chosen his trade; he often thought he would have been happier in a quieter, more sedentary life.
They had ridden easily, keeping the horses in hand. There had been no danger of losing their path. The Sacred Way ran, broad and paved, up into the hills. Punctuated with milestones and rest places, it crossed the scrubby high country of laurel, box and stunted evergreen oak. Sheep and goats, abandoned by their shepherds, had looked up from their rough grazing. Once, in the distance, a pack of wild dogs loped away.
After some nine miles, the Sacred Way had dipped down to the sea at Panormos. There was no settlement there. But, in better times, boats would have been tied up to the jetties, disembarking pilgrims bound for the oracle at Didyma. There would have been a bustle of guides and hucksters vying for their money. Panormos had been deserted.
Ballista and the others had sat their horses, high on a bluff. The wind had tugged at their clothes, the smell of the sea in their nostrils. They had gazed out into the Aegean. Sure enough, across the shimmering surface, hazy, but at no great distance to the north, had been the distinctive double-prowed shapes. The Gothic longboats were no more than an hour behind.
They had ridden the last two and a bit miles south-east flanked by seated gods and priests in marble, by great crouching lions. The weathered faces of the statues, man-like and bestial, expressed the complete indifference of antiquity.
At Didyma, there was an arch with a gate across the Sacred Way. But there were no walls. The holy site was delineated merely by boundary stones. The god had not protected it from Persians or Gauls: Ballista doubted he would make a better fist of it with the Goths.
A strange deputation was waiting under the arch; a mix of robed priests and locals with makeshift weapons.
‘Health and great joy.’ The leader wore a wreath of bay leaves bound with white cloth. He carried a wand.
‘Health and great joy.’ Ballista dismounted, handed the reins to his slave. ‘I am Marcus Clodius Ballista, and I have come with my amici and these soldiers to help you against the Goths.’
The priest beamed – an unusual reaction for a civilian encountering soldiers, a certain sign of the terrible fear abroad. ‘Welcome, Marcus Clodius Ballista. Welcome indeed.’ Perhaps he was partly reassured by Ballista’s equestrian gold ring and his excellent Attic Greek, or it could be simply that a small party of Roman soldiers was indeed welcome in the face of a large horde of barbarian warriors.
