Empire

AD 59

On the day in late March that news reached Roma of the death of the young emperor’s mother, Titus Pinarius lit candles in the vestibule of his house and whispered a prayer before each of the wax masks of his ancestors, thanking them for his good fortune.

Long ago, his late cousin Claudius had scolded him for knowing so little of his family’s past. “A man must honour his ancestors,” Claudius had said. “Who else made us, and how else did we come to exist?” Since that time, Titus had devoted himself to studying his ancestors, discovering all he could about them, learning from their examples, and paying homage to them like a dutiful Roman, trying to make his own life something of which his forebears would be proud.

At the age of forty-one, Titus was more prosperous and well regarded than ever – and glad to still be alive. It had not been easy in the six years since Claudius had died, navigating the treacherous politics of an imperial court split between a ruthless mother and a young son struggling to break free of her.

But now Agrippina was dead. In some ways, her death was a more profound event than the death of Claudius, for Claudius seemed to fade gradually away, while Agrippina still had her wits about her and might yet have regained control of Nero and the court. What a woman she was, and how little she allowed her womanhood to limit her ambitions! Titus recalled the incident when Armenian envoys had pleaded their cause before Nero, and Agrippina emerged from behind the screen where she customarily remained hidden and actually seemed about to mount the emperor’s tribunal and preside along with him; while the whole court was paralysed with alarm, Seneca hissed at Nero to intercept his mother, and so a scandalous scene was averted.

Agrippina! The world would not be the same without her. A new age would begin.

So deeply did Titus feel the impact of the news that he found himself unable to contemplate the activities of a normal day. Only some unplanned and irregular activity would be suitable to such a strange day. Following this impulse, he decided to discharge an onerous duty that had long been weighing on him. On this day, he would visit his brother.

Once every year or two he forced himself to see Kaeso, to offer his brother yet another chance to return to a normal, respectable way of life. Titus felt he owed that duty to the shade of their father, if not to Kaeso, who always refused him.

He left his house with a small retinue, as befitted a senator of his standing. There was a scribe with a wax tablet to take down memoranda. There was another slave who was versed in all the streets and byways of the city, so that Titus need never wonder where the closest tavern or silver shop or eatery might be. There was another slave who knew the names not just of every senator and magistrate in the city but of every person Titus was likely to meet, no matter how important or inconsequential, so that Titus need never search his memory in vain for a name or a title. And of course there were a number of brawny bodyguards, well-behaved fellows whose sheer size was so intimidating that they seldom had to use force to defend their master or to clear a way for him through a crowd.

The day was typical of late March, bright and spring-like one moment, blustery and overcast the next. Titus found the changeable weather invigorating and walked with a spring in his step. Agrippina was dead! The news had not taken Titus completely by surprise. Recently, Nero had summoned Titus to consult him about omens regarding his mother’s and his own immediate future; the young emperor said nothing of what he had in mind, but he was clearly desperate to finally rid himself of Agrippina. Thank the gods it was Nero who trusted and consulted Titus at that precarious stage of the power struggle, and not Agrippina! Like many in the court, Titus had walked a tightrope between mother and son for years, afraid to offend either party or to irrevocably throw his lot with one or the other.

The story of Agrippina’s demise had played out like a comedy of errors. According to rumours, Nero had tried on more than one occasion to poison her, but each time Agrippina had either been forewarned or had taken an antidote to save herself. Then the ceiling had fallen in above her bed – surely not by accident – and Agrippina escaped being crushed only because she happened to have been lying next to the headboard.

Then, saying that he wanted to patch things up with her, Nero invited Agrippina to his seaside villa at Baiae to celebrate the feast of Minerva. There he presented her with a splendid pleasure barge and persuaded her to take a cruise on the bay despite the blustery weather. But this was not an ordinary ship: one of Nero’s engineers had devised it to collapse on itself and sink without a trace, a circumstance that could be blamed on the choppy waves or a sudden squall but surely not on the young emperor. The ship duly collapsed and sank, but Agrippina – who had once supported herself by diving for sponges – was such a strong swimmer that she made her way to shore. Nero decided that his desperate mother, like a wounded tigress, needed to be disposed of straightaway. In the beach house where the bedraggled Agrippina took refuge, assassins arrived and did away with her once and for all.

An astrologer had once told Agrippina that her son would become emperor, but that she would have to pay for his greatness with her own life. Agrippina had flippantly replied, “Let him kill his mother, then, so long as he is emperor.” So it had come to pass.

Walking along the riverfront and through the Forum, Titus let himself be distracted by the sights and sounds of the city. Despite the constant tension and turmoil within the imperial household, for Roma and the empire the last few years had been a golden age. Seneca had taken charge of the actual running of the empire and had done a splendid job. Taxes had been reduced even as the services of the state had been improved. Nero’s love of music and poetry, his youthful enthusiasm, his theatrical personality, and his love of spectacle pervaded the culture. He had devised extraordinary entertainments for the populace, made all the more extraordinary by the fact that they were bloodless; though gladiator games were still a part of many holidays and festivals, Nero had decreed that no one should be put to death in the arena, not even criminals.

Roma thrived. It seemed to Titus that the world had never known a better moment. And now that the discord in the imperial house had come to an end with Agrippina’s death, who could say to what glorious heights Nero might ascend?

Titus left behind the gleaming marble and travertine monuments of the Forum and entered the Subura with its narrow, filthy streets. He was glad to have his retinue around him, especially his bodyguards. As a younger man he had dared to walk through the Subura at all hours alone and unarmed, but those days were long past. Yet even here, he thought, conditions had improved since Nero had taken power, thanks to the general prosperity of the empire and Seneca’s efficient city administration.

It occurred to Titus that the general well-being of the world made his brother’s hateful attitude towards existence all the more perverse and inexplicable. How could Kaeso detest the world so much when there was such joy and beauty in it? And of all places on earth, surely Roma was the most beautiful – though as he stood before the tenement where Kaeso lived, Titus had to admit that this was a gloomy-looking place, even worse than his brother’s last residence. If Titus had been reduced to living in such squalour and, like Kaeso, had to make his living as a common labourer – back-breaking work for a man of forty-one! – perhaps he would hate the world, too.

Titus left his retinue in the street, gave the bodyguards permission to play dice, and ascended the stairs to the highest floor. Why did Kaeso always live up so many flights of stairs? The stairway itself was littered with debris and filth – a discarded shoe, broken bits of pottery, a child’s wooden doll with its limbs missing, and at one landing not one but two rats, whom Titus interrupted in the act of copulation. How could Kaeso stand to live in such a place?

Titus knocked on the door. He heard movement within; in such places, the walls were so thin that one could hear everything. Kaeso opened the door. He smiled broadly. “Greetings, brother!”

Kaeso was as ill-groomed as ever – a bird’s nest could have been concealed inside his bushy beard – but in high spirits. Titus took this for a good sign. Perhaps their meeting would go well. He noticed that Kaeso was wearing the fascinum on a bit of twine around his neck.

“Greetings, brother,” he said.

“Come inside.”

Artemisia briefly looked in from the other room and perfunctorily greeted him, then disappeared. How plump and plain she looked, without make-up and with her hair unwashed. Chrysanthe was holding up much better, despite having given birth to their son and three daughters. Poor Artemisia had not even become a mother because her husband saw no point in bringing new life into the world.

“You seem happy, Kaeso.”

“l am.”

“May I ask why?”

“You won’t like the answer.”

“Probably not. But try me.”

“I am happy because the end of the world is very close now. Very close! Perhaps it will happen within the year.”

Titus groaned. “And this idea makes you happy?”

“Of course. It’s what we long for, to shed the trapping of this foul place and be reunited with Christ, to see the naked face of God revealed in all his glory.”

Titus sighed. “And how will the world end, Kaeso? How could such a thing even happen? What fire could be big enough, what earthquake terrible enough, what tidal wave high enough to wipe out all of creation? Will the stars come crashing down? Will the sun burn out, and the moon explode like a dandelion? The very idea of the world ending is nonsense!”

“The one God is omnipotent. He made all of creation in six days, and he can destroy it all in the blink of an eye.”

“If this god is omnipotent – and if there are no other gods to stand in his way – why does he not simply fix this world to his liking, likewise in the blink of an eye, and put an end to the evil and suffering you say is all around us? What sort of god is this you worship, who plays a cruel waiting game with his worshippers?”

“You simply don’t understand, Titus. It’s my fault; I lack the power to explain it to you. If you would come to one of our gatherings, there are men far wiser than I-”

“No, Kaeso, Senator Titus Pinarius will not be seen at a gathering of Christians!” The idea was so ludicrous, Titus laughed out loud.

“You mock me, brother, but of what are you so proud? Of your special status in the world, your friendship with the emperor? You were friends with the last emperor, too. Yet you did nothing, said nothing, when cousin Claudius was murdered.”

Titus felt the blood drain from his face. “You don’t know that Claudius was murdered.”

“Of course I do. Everyone knows. Ask your senator friends. Or ask my neighbours. The niece he took in his incestuous marriage – violating even Roman standards of decency – put poison in his mushrooms, and when that failed to act quickly enough, Agrippina called for a physician to treat him, and the physician put a feather down Claudius’s throat to make him vomit. But the feather was dabbed with an even more potent poison, and that was the end of poor Claudius. Did you even mourn for him, brother?”

Titus was taken aback. That the common people had some vague notion of how Claudius had met his end did not surprise him, but Kaeso knew the actual details, and if Kaeso knew, then everyone in the city must know.

Perhaps, Titus thought, that was not such a bad thing. If people believed that Agrippina was a poisoner, that would make her violent death more acceptable, once they learned of it.

“No one knows for certain if that feather had poison on it or not,” said Titus. “It may be true that Agrippina, as a devoted mother, took extreme measures to promote her son-”

“Her son, who turned his hand to murder with just as much enthusiasm. Or will you claim that young Britannicus met a natural end? He was poisoned as well, wasn’t he, only a few months after Nero’s ascension? The poor boy! And did you, as Claudius’s friend and cousin, lift a finger to protect Claudius’s orphaned son?”

The jab was well aimed. Far from protecting Britannicus, Titus, at Agrippina’s bidding, had done his share to promote the notion that the boy was a changeling, so as to discredit any claim he might have to rule.

“I had nothing to do with either the death of Claudius or the death of Britannicus,” said Titus.

“But you know who murdered them.”

“ I f they were murdered.”

“Titus, my poor, deluded brother! You move among these people as an Egyptian snake handler moves among serpents. They may not have bitten you yet, but their venom has poisoned you nonetheless. Nero’s venom has seeped into you, polluted you-”

“You dare to call Nero a snake? In five years, that remarkable young man has done more for this city than any emperor since Augustus. If you ever left this hovel and took a walk through the decent neighbourhoods of Roma, where decent people live, you’d see how happy those people are. Those are the people who don’t want the world to end, because Nero has made this world a better place.”

“And what do all Nero’s earthly achievements count for, when you consider that he murdered his own mother?”

Titus was stunned. He himself had only just been informed of Agrippina’s death by a messenger who came directly from Baiae.

“How can you know about Agrippina? Living in this hole, a nobody among nobodies?” A dark suspicion struck him. “Is there some network of spies among the Christian slaves? Does that network reach even to the imperial house hold?”

Kaeso laughed. “You think all Christians are Jews, slaves, outcasts, or beggars. If you only knew the truth, Titus! There are people of every rank among us, even fine, upstanding Roman ladies. Not all can aspire to Jesus’s example of poverty, but all can look forward to the day when we shall be redeemed and united in the afterlife-”

“Then there is a network of Christian spies, even in the imperial household?” Titus recalled something Nero had once said, that the Christians might be seditious. Titus had long ago decided that his brother’s obsessions were maddening but harmless, but could it be that the Christian cult was more sinister than he had thought?

“Tell me something, Kaeso. Every so often I come across some bit of information about your cult, whether I want to or not. Someone recently drew my attention to a purported holy text which contained a quotation from Christ himself. When I read it, I found it so alarming I memorized it: ‘If any man comes to me, and hates not his father, and his mother, and his wife, and his children, and his brother and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.’ Did your god actually say such a terrible thing?”

Kaeso nodded. “A follower of Christ must be ready to reject all the attachments of the material world in favour of spiritual rebirth-”

“You don’t have to explain the words to me. I understand them well enough,” said Titus in disgust.

A bit of light happened to reflect off the fascinum, drawing Titus’s attention to it. “You dare to wear the fascinum of our ancestors – you, who do nothing to honour our ancestors, who profess to despise all they accomplished and handed down to us! You, who would profess to hate our father and to hate me, merely to please your god?”

Kaeso smiled and touched the fascinum. “This amulet is not what you think it is, Titus. It is a symbol of Christ’s suffering and a promise of his future resurrection, of the resurrection of all who believe-”

“No, Kaeso, it’s a link to the past, a talisman handed down to us from a time before Roma was founded. You would pervert it into something else entirely, with your hatred of the gods and your hatred of Roma!”

“The gods you worship are not gods, Titus. If anything, they’re demons, though I tend to believe that in fact they do not exist at all, that they never did exist-”

“Fool! Atheist! The gods have always been and always will be. They are of the world and in the world. They made the world. They are the world. If mortals fail to comprehend them, it is because we are so small and they are so vast. What a tiny world you imagine, the plaything of a single god who wants his worshippers to be as poor and stunted and miserable as he is! Can you not see the beauty, the majesty, the mystery of the gods all around you? Yes, they baffle and confound us, and their will is difficult to discern. But I do what I can. I practise the rituals of our ancestors, who were here before us and encountered the gods before we did. I revere their wisdom. You spurn it! You never visit my house. You never come to pay respect to the wax effigies of the Pinarii. You turn your back on our ancestors. You are disrespectful, impious, unworthy to be called a Roman!”

“But I don’t call myself a Roman, Titus. I call myself a Christian, and what you call the wisdom of our ancestors means nothing to me. I have no use for the sins and follies of the past. I look ahead to the bright, perfect future.”

“A future in which you will be utterly forgotten, because you have created no descendants. All memory of you will vanish, Kaeso, because you have broken the link passed down from one generation to the next. The only immortality a man can achieve is to be remembered, to have those who come after him recall his accomplishments and speak his name with honour.”

“Just as you imagine men of some future age will speak of Nero? The fratricide, the matricide? And if you’re lucky, they’ll mention that Senator Titus Pinarius was Nero’s friend – the friend of a mother-killer! Is that your idea of immortality, brother?”

Titus stared at the fascinum. He could barely resist ripping it from his brother’s neck.

“I came here today out of respect to our father. I feel a duty to his shade, to do what I can to look after you. But this is the final stroke, Kaeso. I won’t come to see you again.”