Jail Bait

I

No one could say for certain quite how it started. Some blamed that pot-bellied quarrymaster, home from Numidia. Others suggested it was the legacy of two Lebanese flautists passing through on their way to Iberia. Who could say? But like the first blue wisp of a heath fire, it passed virtually unnoticed, for the citizens of Rome had more pressing things on their minds.

The first two weeks of May had been treacherously hot. A vicious reminder of why so few festivals were scheduled in a month set aside not for rejoicing, but for restraint. For purification rites rather than revelry. Some years the problem was cold, scorching the vines and wizening the buds. Other years rain, inducing the blight and the mildew and worms in the cattle. In fact, so grim were May’s auspices, marriages were rarely contracted and, as crops in the countryside shrivelled, cityfolk discovered that, virtually overnight, Rome was transformed from a glamorous metropolis into a stinking, fly-riddled furnace.

What use were great soaring arches, triumphal basilicas, if your children had no air to breathe? When the meat for your dinner turned rancid, fruit rotted and the poison from the quills of the wryneck bird could not hold back the rats? No longer confined to the slums, vermin scampered openly over the Forum and left droppings on tables and plates and on pillows. Sleep was impossible. And when people arose, crotchety and drained, their tunics would cling to their flesh regardless how often they bathed. Purple hollows formed under their eyes and even Old Man Tiber began showing his age. Dark brown and sluggish, his treacly current stank worse than the sewers, and although aqueducts fetched treasured water down from the hills, the channels were covered and this generated heat of its own.

Thus, as a million souls gulped tepid water and prayed to Jupiter for mercy’s sake, for all our sakes, please send a change in the weather, so the little blue wisp gathered strength.

At first it was just the wife of a carpenter. A slight hoarseness. A fever. A few livid spots on her chest. Crushed by the heat and mistrustful of doctors, she dosed herself with fenugreek and took to her bed, smug at the money she’d saved.

Then two small boys, the sons of a wheelwright, succumbed and their mother had no such qualms about medics. They had expelled her husband’s bladder stones, cured her sister’s colic and eased her father’s pain with henbane when he lay dying. But by the time the physician arrived at her home, four more cases had been reported on the Quirinal Hill.

And the little blue wisp that was Plague prepared to lay to waste its territory.