The Chiron Confession

IV

The dreams were different, but the girl was always the same. Young, maybe 17, long black hair, dark eyes, and tears of blood trickling down her tragic face. Sometimes she was the harlot Rahab in ancient Jericho, and he was the enemy spy sent to bring down the walls. Other times she was a beauty named Aphrodite in a future Greece under the rule of Germania. This night she had no name, but he knew it was present day. She was in a cave somewhere, calling out to him in the darkness. She possessed the secret of the ages, a mystery he had to unravel, or his mission would fail and the world would be doomed. In the haze of dream, he stumbled down an endless cave, his hands feeling the walls as they narrowed, his feet tripping over jagged rocks. “I’ll find you! I’ll find you!” he cried out, and then slipped, tumbling over and over into space.

Athanasius of Athens awoke from his nightmare, gasping for breath, the sound of trumpets outside piercing the air. He sat up and let his eyes adjust. Shafts of sunlight streamed through the drapes and marble columns onto a vast mosaic floor. He looked over at Helena’s empty side of the bed and put his hand on it. It was cool to the touch.

What time was it?

He put on a robe and walked onto the balcony of his hillside villa, taking in the spectacular view of the city below. To the west were dazzling white terraces and marble columns cascading down the cypress-covered hills to the Circus Maximus and the winding Tiber beyond. To the east was the intersection of Rome’s two great boulevards, the Via Appia and the Via Sacra, and, in the middle, Rome’s great coliseum known as the Flavian Amphitheater. The roar of a crowd wafted up on the wings of the breeze. The lunchtime executions must have begun.

He frowned. It must be noon already.

On his better days the playwright Athanasius religiously followed a strict regimen. He would wake before dawn, leave Helena in their warm bed and put in a good hour or two writing his next play. Then he would leave their villa on Caelian Hill and head over to the Circus Maximus to run laps and maybe shoot some arrows — he was a marksman archer — before the heat of the day set in. He found his best ideas flowed while he ran, and it kept alive his fantasy that at age 25 he could still run the marathons he once did as a boy outside Corinth back in Greece. After lunch he would enjoy the baths, a relaxing massage, and perhaps take in an afternoon rest with Helena before answering letters, supervising rehearsals at the Theater of Pompey, or attending to the problems of everyday life, which he limited each day to the single turn of an hour-glass. Then he and Helena would enjoy dinner with friends in the city or stroll along the Tiber and watch the imperial barges delivering the world’s luxuries to Rome. They would cap off the evening by attending various parties and then retiring to bed with each other.

It was, in short, the perfect Epicurean life he had always imagined as a boy, filled with friends, food, freedom and sex. Lots of sex.

Those were the good days.

On his bad days, he slept until noon, hung over from a late party or a nightmare induced by his creativity-enhancing leaves. Having missed his peak writing time, and not feeling up to laps at the Circus Maximus, he’d still have lunch with friends, go to the baths, enjoy a massage and a nap, albeit alone because the ever-practical Helena would be upset with him for his lethargy. All the same, they’d go out to dinner and perhaps see one of his own productions, just so he could validate that he existed. Then on to the can’t-miss parties where the wine would loosen his lips and he’d talk about his writing and productions and delight the great of Rome with his humor and wit, praying to the Muses that he’d remember what he had said the next morning so he could write it down. He rarely did, of course, and too often the first time it all came back was while attending a rival’s production when he heard the actors utter his stolen lines.

This was one of the bad days. He could feel it.

It was noon already, after all.

Helena was in the courtyard, where she emerged dripping from a bathing pool. Behind her was a gigantic, half-finished sculpture of herself in the guise of the goddess of love. The sculptor Colonius had been taking his sweet time with the hammer and chisel, Athanasius thought, and was months behind. He could hardly blame him.

Helena caught sight of him and wrapped a clingy gown around her supple, golden body. Then she turned to face him with her two round breasts and a smile.

“The toast of Rome has awakened!” she announced.

A true Amazon in height, she stood almost a head taller than him in her bare feet, and he was by no means average. She was a sight to behold with her hair of gold, flawless features and eyes of sapphire blue that betrayed an intelligence her beauty often masked to mad distraction. He had fallen for her instantly. The miracle was that of all the senators, noblemen and charioteers to choose from, Helena, the glory of Rome herself, had chosen him.

“My Aphrodite,” he said.

“This year’s model.” She kissed him on the lips. “But I’ll always be your Helena.”

“You let me sleep in. Half the day is gone.”

“And half your delirium. You know how you get before an opening. I spared us both.”

She was right about that. Tonight was the premiere of Opus Gloria, his greatest and most controversial work yet, and he was a wreck. He needed it to be well-received, to secure his marriage to Helena. Her well-connected Roman family was quite wealthy at one time but had lost much of their fortune. If not for the modeling that her beauty brought her, and she had earned quite a bit from it, she would have been penniless by now, or married to a man she did not love. All the money in the world would never quench her fear of poverty, Athanasius knew, but they had agreed that the success of Opus Gloria would go a long way and be enough for them to marry. Next month would mark a full year living together, when Roman law regarded them as married. But she had planned a huge, multi-day wedding celebration, and he had planned to take her to Greece afterward to meet his mother and cousins, where there would be another wedding party.

So in truth the affections of Helena could not be bought, but they still had to be paid for. Thus the significance of Opus Gloria and his success in this Roman world, which would mean little to him without Helena by his side.

“I suppose you are right,” he told her and kissed her back.

She smiled. “Repeat that line over and over in your head tonight, and all will be well.”

He laughed. If only his father were still alive to meet Helena and see his success as a playwright. His father always told him to take pride in his heritage and “show the Romans what the Greeks are still made of.” His memory made Athanasius suddenly reconsider the staging of tonight’s performance.

Helena saw it in an instant. “Now what?”

“I still don’t know why we should have to go to the Palace of the Flavians tonight to see my own play,” he said. “Caesar and the rest should be coming to the Pompey to see it. That’s the proper venue. The stage has already lost its place to the Games of the Flavian Amphitheater. Soon it will drop behind the races of the Circus Maximus when its latest incarnation is completed. If it falls another notch, I might fall off with it.”

“Oh, Athanasius. Only you would find a way to diminish your achievement. You are bigger than the stage. What playwright wouldn’t give his right hand to enjoy a venue at the palace? Besides, you heard what Maximus said about the Pompey. It has too many sinister associations for Domitian. Why would he want to celebrate your opus at the very place where Julius Caesar was assassinated backstage? It might give people ideas.”

“Yes, well, we can’t have any of those running around on the loose.”

He thought of his father again, and then of dear old Senator Maximus, who had become something of a surrogate father to him. The senator was a Hellenophile and early fan of his plays, navigating them through the government censors and political traps of Roman high society. Even so, the roar of the mob in the wind was a grim reminder to Athanasius that the fading art of his scripted comedies was no match for the so-called “reality” of the Games. They were as bad as religion. Indeed, they were the new religion of Rome. But he dare not speak it aloud, for who knew who was listening? But he thought it. And Rome had not invented a way to read minds yet. There was still free thought, if not expression.

“You hear that?” he asked Helena, lifting a finger to the breeze as another cheer rang out in the distance. “You know what that is?”

She shrugged. “The last of Flavius Clemens, I suppose.”

“That’s right,” he lectured her. “First it was the Jews. Now it’s the Christians. Who’s next?”

Helena smiled brightly. “You?”

“Laugh all you want, Helena. You haven’t heard Juvenal’s jokes about Greeks in Rome.”

“He flatters you by imitation, Athanasius, and everybody knows he is not half the wit you are.” Helena ran her soft finger down his cheek and gazed at him lovingly.

“There is no pleasing you when you are in a mood, Athanasius, is there?”

“No.”

“Then relax yourself before tonight. Join your friends at Homer’s for lunch. Go to your favorite bath. Take a massage. Then enjoy the premiere of your greatest play ever.”

“And then?”

“Let your work do its work. Let your rival Ludlumus burn in jealousy at what you can do with words that he cannot do with a thousand Bengal tigers. Let Latinus and the rest of your actors take the credit. Let the world and even Caesar himself forget September 18th and the sword of Damocles that hangs over Rome. This is your night to be worshipped, to join the pantheon of the gods of art.”

“And then?”

“And then you get to go to bed tonight with the goddess of love and wake up tomorrow on top of the world.”

She was heaven for him, it was true. “Well, you do have that effect on a man.”

“A performance not to be missed,” she told him, and kissed him on the lips again, warm and wet, full of promise.

Helena looked on with great affection as Athanasius walked away, but she felt a dark cloud of fear forming over her head and frowned. This bothered her even more because she knew frowning was not good for her. She may be the face of Aphrodite, but she didn’t wake up that way. It took eight girls — now waiting for her in the bathhouse — to fix her hair, paint her lips and buff her nails for her to reach perfection for this evening. And this wasn’t ancient Greece. It was modern Rome. Sculptors like Colonius were no idealists. The first tiny crease around her eyes would become a giant crack in marble and spell the end of her reign and the start of another’s.

Not that Athanasius would care. He was the kind who, once smitten, would love her forever.

And that was the problem.

Athanasius seemed to think they had all the time in the world. Money and power meant nothing to him. Life was all about his works and the world’s recognition of his merit as a playwright. The fortunes that came his way passed through his hands like water from the aqueducts passed through the bathhouses and homes of Rome into the central sewer to the Tiber. And yet he’d be happy scribbling away on his plays from a cave, eating wild mushrooms and smoking his leaves for inspiration.

She, however, would not.

Her beloved was a proud man who so desperately wanted to win the acceptance and respect of a Rome that spurned him. But he never would, even with his marriage to her. She knew that the only thing that made him acceptable to Rome was the popularity of his comedies — and the money they brought the state in ticket sales and merchandising. It was the same with her beauty. But Athanasius simply could not accept the reality that the mobs who flocked to the Games of the Flavian by day were the same who filled the seats of his Pompey at night.

“Ludlumus and I are not in the same business,” he had once declared to her. “I am playing a different game, and those who see my plays are the better for it.”

All of which led him to push the bounds of acceptability in his plays, to point out Rome’s tragic flaws and weaknesses in hopes of strengthening society. This, in turn, only raised the ire of the pontiffs, augurs and astrologers he mocked along with the gods. For all its violence and lust, Rome was actually a conservative and religious society. It could only wink at its wits like Athanasius for so long before it lost its patience. It was time for him to pick a different theme for his productions.

Having waited until the servants confirmed to her that Athanasius had left and her attendants were waiting in the bathhouse, she turned in the opposite direction and walked past the great marble image of herself as goddess and under the peristyle into the villa.

Helena entered the library, which intimidated her with all its shelves of books and scrolls. Athanasius had one of the largest personal collections in Rome. It was a secret part of him she could never get her arms around.

She found a silver tray with a cup and pipe on her beloved’s desk. She picked them up, one at a time, and lifted each to her nose with a frown. He had been drinking kykeon and smoking blue lotus leaves again, no doubt to lift his senses and enhance his creative spirits while he wrote.

“Oh, Athanasius.”

Those creative spirits were going to ruin them. It was a miracle that Opus Gloria had even passed the censors, let alone get this kind of launch tonight at the palace. That scene of Zeus taking the form of a swan to rape Leda, or rather the other way around in this new telling was… so disturbing, to say the least, and certainly sacrilegious, worse even than the ridicule and death the gods had endured in his previous works. Only the intervention of his lead actor, Latinus, who reminded his friend Domitian that Athanasius took care to mock only the Greek gods, not their Roman successors, and the magistrate Pliny the Younger, who promised that the women of Rome would buy the uniquely shaped figurines of Zeus-the-Swan in droves, saved the production.

Helena felt the old confusion rise up inside her. She adored Athanasius. He was talented, athletic and compassionate. He was also incredibly handsome and a god in bed. Yet the very qualities she loved — like his dangerous curiosity and insatiable quest for truth — were what she most feared. Even his beloved mentor Maximus had once confided to her: “You just have to control him. Sexually, psychologically, financially. For his own sake. And you’ll get by.”

She glanced at the titles of his stacks of books and scrolls. There was Aristotle’s Poetics, along with the complete works of Euripedes. There were also the classic Greek comedies of Hermippus and Eupolis, and Athanasius’s favorites from Aristophanes, The Clouds and Lysistrata. There were others too: books about the arts, history. One was about the ancient Israelite invasion of what was now Judea, and another about Rome’s campaign in Germania.

So many old books and crazy ideas that filled his head.

The pile of scrolls collapsed from her touch to reveal a scroll hidden behind them all. This one was in common Aramaic, which she understood enough to read the title: The Revelation of Jesus Christ.

She went cold. Officially banned by the empire, this was the book about the end of the world written by that crazy old “last apostle” John imprisoned on the island of Patmos. No wonder poor Athanasius had been having nightmares. What was he thinking? She knew that, to the love of her life, pure and undefiled religion was attending the Olympics in his native Greece and smoking psychedelics. All other religion he pilloried in his plays. To him this was a harmless curiosity, of course, a chance to “break the code” that rumors suggested was bound in the sinister symbolism of this evil tract. Wasn’t the antichrist supposed to be Domitian, after all?

Everybody knew that Athanasius was a closet atheist who did not believe in the gods. Not all atheists were Christians, and certainly not Athanasius. But all Christians were atheists by Rome’s standards, because they rejected religion altogether in favor of a superstition that required neither sacrifices nor idols of any kind. These were the very things that greased the wheels of commerce — and made life for her and Athanasius possible. Yet all a disgruntled servant or paid informant had to do was tip the Praetorians, and they were finished. At the very least, their new hillside villa, one of only 2,000 single residences in a city of squalid apartment blocks, would be confiscated.

“You live in a fantasy world, my love,” she murmured to herself.

She produced her divination dice, which she used for every decision of her life. Each side had a sign of the zodiac. She would throw them to decide what to do with the scroll. Burn it now? Or ignore it and confront Athanasius tomorrow? Whatever the outcome, she knew she would have to avoid any row with him before the party tonight.

She pushed up her python lucky charm bracelets on each arm — double the charm to keep evil away — and rolled the dice in her hands. She looked up to heaven to utter a silent prayer and then said, “Fortuna!” as she cast them onto the desk.

A six.

She smiled with relief. She would burn the scroll, place the ashes with his lotus leaves on the silver tray, and let the servants carry them out. Perhaps Athanasius would never even notice. Perhaps a new idea would grab his attention, and these visions of the end of the world would disappear from his memory along with his nightmares.

A young voice from behind said, “Mistress Helena, your dress for the evening has arrived, and the girls wish me to tell you that they are ready for you now.”

She stiffened. It was the servant boy Cornelius. He was a holdover from Athanasius’s previous household staff and always seemed to regard her as an interloper. The boy fancied himself a protector of the great playwright’s papers. How long had he been standing there?

“I am not ready for them,” she said imperiously. She then rolled up the Book of Revelation, laid it aside on the desk and slowly turned. “I’m just tidying up for Athanasius. You know how he hates it if I throw papers out. Please take his tray back. Tell the girls I’ll be with them in a moment.”

“Yes, mistress.”

She watched him take the silver tray and walk away. Then she took the scroll and buried it in the pile behind the poetics. She would have to burn it tomorrow. Or not, she realized with pleasant relief. After tonight it wouldn’t matter.