The Princess and the Pirates

6

It was late afternoon when we got back to Paphos. Ariston came up to me just as we pulled into the naval harbor.

“They’ll strike very soon now,” he said. “They may be hitting someplace this very hour. When word of what we saw on that island spreads, you can expect little cooperation even from the people you are trying to help.”

“Where?” I asked him.

“Anywhere they want to go,” he assured me. I could have tried swearing everyone to silence, but I knew the futility of that. Several hundred men cannot keep a secret, even if they are all Romans and honor the same gods. Here I had the sweepings of the whole sea, not to mention Cleopatra’s Egyptians and her gaggle of servants. Even to try such a thing would start rumors far worse than the truth.

A small crowd of citizens, sailors, and dockside idlers had come to view our return; but the little throng quickly dispersed when it was clear we were coming back without pirate heads, freed captives, and heaps of loot. It was a little early for that. An elaborate litter remained on the wharf as I stepped off the gangplank, its liveried bearers squatting patiently by its poles. A delicate, multiply ringed hand drew its curtain aside.

“Senator! Did you have a pleasant voyage?” It was Flavia. She wore an expensive but relatively modest gown, and the elaborately dressed blond wig was back in place. She looked every inch the noble Roman lady, and it was hard to believe that I had seen so many more inches just two nights previously.

“It was a tolerable outing, no more than a shakedown cruise really.” “Did you see any pirates?”

“No, but we saw where they’d been. It was instructive.” She slid over to one side of the litter. “Please join me, Senator. I am sure that your labors have given you an appetite. An early dinner at my home will do you a world of good.” She caught my raised eyebrow and smiled. “My husband would like very much to talk with you.”

“Then if you will allow me to make a few arrangements here, I will be most honored.”

“Go right ahead. I like to watch sailors at their work.”

I told Hermes to haul our gear back to our quarters at the house of Silvanus and wait for me there. He didn’t like it but knew better than to argue. I left orders with my captains to be with their ships and crews at dawn, ready to sail at my orders. Out in the harbor, I could see Cleopatra’s gilded barge carrying her to the commercial wharf. I left word with Harmodias where I would be for the next few hours should I be needed.

Then I crawled into the litter beside Flavia, and she dropped the curtain. Immediately I was enveloped in a cloud of her perfume. I was not unaffected. Of course a man of my station should properly be repelled by a noble woman who wallows with the lowest dregs of society, but then I have never been very proper. And there is something undeniably exciting about such a concentration of raw, animal appetites and energies.

But, to my credit, I retained my distance. Bitter experience had taught me that many of my personal catastrophes had been brought about through my weakness for very bad women. And I had known some of the worst. Clodia, for instance. And then there was that German princess, Freda. She wasn’t really evil, just a savage like all her race, but fearsome for all that. I had encountered the younger Fulvia and a score of less famous but equally shameless women, and I had been involved with some of them and attracted by all. A bronze founder had once explained to me that glowing metal was beautiful, mysterious, and exciting; but one should never touch it with bare hands. It was sound advice.

She laid a warm hand on my arm. “Everyone says that you are a man of the world, Decius Caecilius. You are a friend of Caesar, and the old bores like Cato consider you degenerate.”

“I have been so complimented,” I admitted.

“Wonderful. The moralists are so tedious. I would appreciate it though if you would not bring up the subject of my nocturnal escapades when you speak with my husband.”

“Flavia, your pleasures are your own business and I will seek to advise neither you nor your husband, but he must be more than a bit obtuse if he does not know already.”

“Oh, he knows perfectly well how I amuse myself. It is something we have simply agreed not to discuss in the company of our peers. He has his own pastimes, and I do not interfere with them. It is a comfortable arrangement, don’t you think?”

“The world would be a happier place if other couples were so understanding,” I assured her. In truth, such liberal marital arrangements were not uncommon in Rome. Flavia was just more extreme than most in pursuit of gratification.

The house of Sergius Nobilior was only slightly less grand than that of Silvanus. Roman equites of that day, which is to say the wealthiest plebeian families, dominated banking, finance, and other businesses. Though most of them were perfectly happy to make money and stay out of the Senate, with its endless duties and burdensome military obligations, they formed a very influential power group and they dominated the Popular Assemblies. This was the class to which Sergius Nobilior belonged.

The man himself greeted me in his atrium.

“Senator! You do my house great honor. When we heard your ships had been sighted my wife swore that she would bring you back, and she usually catches her man.” He said this without seeming irony. “Please join us for some dinner. Living on ship’s food is tedious.”

“It wasn’t much of a voyage,” I told him, “but I gladly accept.” We went into the beautifully decorated triclinium and confined our talk to inconsequential things while we ate. There were no other guests, an uncommon thing in a wealthy man’s household, so I assumed he had some sort of business he wished to discuss privately. I therefore drank cautiously. So, I noted, did the two of them.

“Was your voyage productive?” he asked, as the fruit was brought out. So I told them about the island we had visited with its devastated village and its few stunned survivors.

“How terrible!” Nobilior said. “What inhuman beasts they must be to do such a thing. I cannot believe this report that their leader is a Roman.” Flavia, on the other hand, sipped sweet Egyptian wine and did not seem unduly shocked by such goings-on.

“Well, if we Romans are nothing else, we are versatile. Personally, it seems to me that no one but a Roman could cause so much trouble with so few ships and men.”

He chuckled. “You are certainly right about that. Sometimes I think that the rest of the world makes it too easy for us. Have you heard how Ptolemy got his throne back?”

“I was in Gaul much of that time, but I heard rumors concerning the passing of heroic bribes.”

“More godlike than heroic,” he said. “It seems that his subjects thought him remiss in allowing us to annex Cyprus. When his brother committed suicide, the subjects drove Auletes from his throne. After all, he had taken the surname Philadelphus: ‘he who loves his brother.’ The Egyptians thought that a bitter irony. But they must have some sort of Ptolemy so they put his daughter Berenice on the throne. According to Ptolemaic custom, a queen cannot rule by herself, so she cast about for a royal husband and eventually chose Archelaus of Pontus.

“Auletes immediately fled to Rome, where he petitioned the Senate to restore him to his throne. Do you know by what right he made this petition?”

I thought back. “He’d been voted the status of ‘friend and ally’ a few years earlier, hadn’t he? I think it was during the consulship of Caesar and Bibulus.”

“He had. He paid handsomely to get that title, too. Pompey and Caesar guaranteed him the title, but they told him it would be expensive-no less than six thousand talents.”

“Six thousand!” Even by the standards of the time that was an enormous bribe.

He nodded. “Six thousand. That represents, roughly, half a year’s income for Egypt. But Auletes is a beggar and everyone knows it, so where do you suppose he came up with the sum?”

This was his story and I’d just eaten his dinner so I played along. “Where?”

“He borrowed it from Rabirius Postumus. Do you know him?” “I met him once, several years ago, at a party at the Egyptian embassy. He’d just been appointed Ptolemy’s financial advisor. Surely even Rabirius wasn’t rich enough to lend six thousand. Crassus couldn’t have come up with that much in one lump sum.”

“Rabirius is an old friend of mine,” Nobilior said complacently. “He took a number of us on as partners in this enterprise. Of course, that was just to have the title so that the Senate would have to back his claims. Getting Rome to provide him with the military force he needed was going to cost a further ten thousand. Mind you, at this time he still owed for part of the original six.”

“I think I see where this is going,” I said. “He agreed to pay, but first we had to restore his throne so he could start looting his own country to pay it off.”

Nobilior smiled. “Exactly. Caesar isn’t the only one who knows how to use indebtedness to his own advantage. Now, by this time, Caesar himself was busy in Gaul, and Pompey had affairs of his own to manage, but there was our friend Aulus Gabinius, waging war in Syria with a perfectly good army at his disposal. He couldn’t break off his war against the Parthians and go to Egypt with his whole force, but Caesar sent him a strong force of auxilia, Gabinius recruited others locally, and off he went, accompanied by Rabirius to keep an eye on everyone’s money.”

“I wonder,” I said, “how the voters would feel if they knew that so many of our wars are just business arrangements? A lot of them still think that things like the glory and honor of the Republic are involved.”

He shrugged. “Nobody objects to the heaps of loot and the cheap slaves our victorious generals bring back. That’s what they really care about. That and keeping the barbarians as far away as possible. There are plenty of voters now alive who remember the Cimbri and Teutones camped a few day’s march from Rome, before Marius crushed them. Remember, kings all over the world bankrupt their kingdoms through foolish wars even when they don’t suffer conquest themselves. Should the Roman people complain because our own wars are so profitable?”

“You have a point.” I wondered what other point he had but suspected that he would get around to it sooner or later.

“A versatile man, our Gabinius,” Flavia observed. She may have had multiple meanings here, but I had too little information to sort them out.

“A Roman statesman has to be versatile,” I pointed out. “Do you remember how Pompey got his extraordinary command against the pirates?” Nobilior asked.

I thought about it. “That was when Piso and Glabrio were consuls, wasn’t it? It was four years before my quaestorship. My family had me in Campania that whole year, administering a training camp for recruits to be sent to Crete for Metellus Creticus’s army there. I was out of touch with Roman politics that year and most of the next.”

“Pompey’s imperium was to last three years,” Nobilior said, “and it encompassed the entire sea and fifty miles inland, overriding the imperium of every provincial governor. And it was conferred by a lex Gabinia.”

“Gabinius was the tribune who got that law passed?” I had forgotten that.

“After a good deal of fighting, yes. The tribune Trebillius interposed his veto and was supported by Otho. There were weeks of brawling.”

“I’m sorry I missed it.”

“They were lively times. In the end the Senate had to bring in a whole rural voting bloc to break the deadlock. The country people were great supporters of Pompey, of course, so the law got passed.”

“Are you telling me that Gabinius is Pompey’s man?”

“I am telling you that war, politics, and business are very complicated in this part of the world. As to his current affiliation”-he made an eloquent gesture with his hands-“these things change. The lex Gabinia was many years ago, and Pompey’s sun is in eclipse.”

“Here in the East,” Flavia added, “the people have a different view of Rome. The current politics of the Forum mean little to them. In the West, Caesar is the man of the hour. Here he is all but unknown. The great names in the East are still Pompey, Gabinius, even Lucullus. Their paid-off veterans and mercenaries are settled all over the islands and seaboard, many of them active in the various armies of the region.”

“In Egypt,” Nobilior said, “a sizable contingent of the king’s forces bear the name ‘Gabinians.’ Some are Romans, but most are those auxilia sent by Caesar-Gauls and Germans, many of them.”

Here, it seemed, he was coming to the crux of the matter. “And not only those,” Flavia added. “He picked up recruits from a lot of settlements in Cilicia and Illyria.”

“Including,” I asked, “those settlements founded by Pompey to separate the erstwhile pirates from the sea?”

“That I could not say,” Nobilior asserted. “It would have been in violation of the surrender terms after all. These men were not to take up arms again. Still, few laws lack flexibility where power and ambition are concerned.”

“All too true. Well, then, it may be that this man Spurius is one of those paid-off veterans now set up in business for himself.”

“Quite likely.” Nobilior nodded. “Would you care for some of this excellent Lesbian?”

I left his house no more than pleasantly tipsy. Flavia saw me to the door personally.

“You must visit us again soon, Senator,” she said.

“I would not forego the pleasure,” I assured her. Her parting kiss was far more ardent than commonly sanctioned by the rules of etiquette, but at least she kept her clothes on.

As I walked away I reminded myself to steer a wide course around that woman. Julia would, after all, be here soon, Flavia was a deterrent to clear thinking, but I managed to draw my thoughts upward from my nether regions sufficiently to ponder what I had just heard.

Nobilior implied that these pirates were Gabinius’s men. But, if so, where did that leave me? Gabinius had no imperium, was no more than an exile like many others, awaiting his chance to go back to Rome and resume his Senate seat. If some of his veterans turned outlaw, that did not mean he had put them up to it, although the implication could not have been clearer.

When I reached my quarters at the governor’s mansion I sent Hermes to fetch Ariston.

“How do the accommodations here suit you?” I asked him when he arrived.

“Fine so far. The serving girls here have taken a shine to me. When you consider the quality of the men they usually have to put up with, that’s not too surprising. The food and wine and the room are all better than I can afford at most times.” He stretched his powerful arms. “It would get boring as a steady diet, but for now I like it just fine.”

“Good. Ariston, when you were in Spurius’s little fleet, did many of the men speak of serving with Gabinius on his Egyptian expedition?”

He nodded. “Several of them did, as I recall. They said his recruiters had come to the villages where they were settled and offered them the chance to do something more congenial than trudge along behind an ox, and they’d jumped at it.”

“Did these recruiters say why their oath not to take up arms again had been suspended?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t there. But Rome is always raising auxilia from defeated people, right? And that oath specified that we never take up arms against Rome. If a Roman general wanted them to fight an enemy of Rome, what could be wrong with that? Anyway, Pompey was mainly concerned that we keep away from the sea.”

“Quite so. But did any of these men perhaps hint that he still served Gabinius in some fashion?”

Ariston’s gaze sharpened. “You mean you think he may be behind this?”

“It is one of many possibilities I am exploring.”

“Nobody said so. Anyway, if a man that highly placed wanted to do such a thing, he would treat with only one person, and that would be Spurius. Even then, he might not see the man personally. He’d probably use an emissary.”

“Yes, I know how it’s done.” I remembered innumerable dealings between prominent candidates and officeholders in Rome and the street-gang leaders whose support they needed. Some freedman always acted as go-between. “Go on back to your quarters. Mention to nobody what we’ve spoken about.”

“Come, Hermes,” I said, when he was gone, “let’s call upon Princess Cleopatra.”

We found her in a beautiful little nook of the formal garden, well illuminated by torches and braziers, accompanied by her scholars and listening to Alpheus, who stood before them declaiming a lengthy poem concerning the birth of Venus, which, according to the myth, had occurred not far from the spot we occupied. Upon coming ashore in her scallop shell, she founded her first temple right there in Paphos, where the ancient, rather modest structure remained the center of her cult.

Of course, the Greeks call her Aphrodite, “the foam-born.” Among the Greeks she is a gentle goddess, lacking the more alarming qualities of the Roman Venus. This does not keep us from identifying the two goddesses though. Among other advantages, it allows us to steal Greek statues of Aphrodite and set them up in our Temples of Venus without impropriety.

I am told that, in the old days before we came under Greek influence, our gods had no form, and we didn’t even know what they looked like. It is difficult now to think of Jupiter without picturing Zeus, or Mars lacking the image of Ares, but once this was so.

I waited in the shadows of the fruit trees until Alpheus had finished his song, and while I waited I noticed the man seated next to Cleopatra. He looked decidedly familiar-a pudgy, round-faced man with a bald head, wearing a great many Egyptian rings on his fat fingers. The Egyptian jewelry jogged my memory. It was Photinus, First Eunuch to the court of King Ptolemy. When I had seen him years before in Alexandria, he had worn the Egyptian dress, complete with wig and cosmetics, favored by that court’s functionaries. Despite that he was a Greek like the rest of them, and here he was dressing the part.

“Good evening, Princess,” I said, as the applause died down and Alpheus took his bows.

“Ah, Senator, there you are,” she said, smiling. “We tried to find you earlier.”

“I have been enjoying the hospitality of Sergius Nobilior,” I told her. “You remember Photinus, I am sure,” said Cleopatra. “It is so good to see you again, Senator Metellus,” he said heartily. Our previous relations had been of a decidedly hostile nature, but the present moment is all that counts to courtiers and diplomats.

“An unexpected pleasure,” I assured him. “What brings you to Cyprus?”

“Some trivial matters concerning the transfer of authority to Rome. A great many Egyptian noblemen have extensive landholdings on Cyprus, and their anxieties must be set at rest.”

“We wouldn’t want them worrying,” I said. “I’m sure all will work out to your satisfaction. We Romans are punctilious about property rights, especially in regard to land and slaves.”

“You mean,” Cleopatra said, “that having stolen the whole island, you will respect all the deeds and titles?”

“Exactly,” I affirmed. “It’s the way the world works, if you hadn’t noticed, Princess. After all, you Ptolemys stole the island from someone else, didn’t you? And I’ll wager you simply deposed the previous possessors, too-killed them or sent them packing without a drachma. Our way is better. Everyone agrees that our taxes are far lighter than the ones their old native rulers levied on them. It doesn’t take long for people to get used to it.”

“Rome’s lordship is the admiration of the whole world,” Photinus said.

“Come, sit with us, Senator,” Cleopatra said. “You have missed a marvelous presentation.”

“I caught the final verses,” I told her. A moment later Alpheus joined us. Cleopatra presented him with an olive wreath, as if he had won in the Olympics.

“You flatter my modest verses,” said the poet.

“Is this a new poem of yours?” I asked. “I have been working on it for some time,” he said, accepting a cup from one of the servers. “It was commissioned by the Temple of Aphrodite here in Paphos for the great festival. It will begin on the next full moon, ten days from now. Have you visited the Temple of Aphrodite, Senator?”

“I intend to, but I’m not on a sight-seeing expedition so it will have to wait until I have leisure.”

“Do we sail out again tomorrow?” Cleopatra asked.

“If we have word of another raid.”

“Then we will just get there too late again,” she pointed out. “The next raid or two should establish a pattern,” I told her. “Once I have a pattern nailed down, I may be able to anticipate where they will strike next. In the meantime the men are far from perfectly drilled, and these outings will improve their performance.”

“But what if there is no pattern?” she asked. “What if they attack on whim or just cruise about at random until they spot some likely, undefended place?”

“If these were ordinary sea robbers that would be a consideration,” I admitted. “But their leader seems to be a Roman of military experience, and I think his mind will work in a more orderly fashion. He knows the business procedures of the islands and coastal ports, and I believe his raiding will be conducted with an eye toward maximizing his profits. With enough information about his activities, I should be able to anticipate his actions.”

“You are depending heavily on these stories of the man’s Roman origins,” she said. “Suppose they prove to be wrong? It is easy enough to take a Roman name and allow others to make up stories about you.”

“Even so,” I said, “he is no brainless criminal following the pirate’s trade for lack of a better. If he is not a Roman, I’ll wager he has served with the Roman forces in the East. I understand Gabinius enrolled quite a large number of foreigners into the army he took to Egypt to set your father back on his throne.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “it contained only a core of Roman soldiers. The rest were every sort of Greek and Syrian. Then there were Cappadocians, Judeans, Lycians, Dardanians, and so forth. It was like the roll of the ships at Troy. There were even some Gauls and Germans. Those were the first Germans I ever saw.”

“Why didn’t you ask them if they sang?”

She smiled. “My father would never let me go near those soldiers. He considers only the Macedonian household guard fit to stand near a princess.”

“Many of these soldiers stayed behind in Egypt, did they not?” I inquired.

“Many of them did,” she said. “People grumbled about a Roman occupation, but they were just mercenaries. They took their oath to my father and are no longer part of any Roman army.”

“Are there Romans among them though?”

“A few. But they are time-served veterans, not deserters or part of a Roman force. Their services are theirs to sell. Why are you so curious?”

“I am just trying to gain a clear idea of the military situation in these parts. In the West it is simple. There are the Roman legions and not much else except for our enemies. Here it is complicated. I am told that among these mercenaries are a number of the pirates resettled inland by Pompey.”

Cleopatra shrugged. “If so, I am sure that it was all done quite legally. After all, it was a Roman general who arranged matters.”

“So it was.”

“Senator,” Alpheus put in, “if you have no alarms to distract you in the morning, would you allow me to show you the Temple of Aphrodite? It is well worth the visit, and I have a feeling that, once your pursuit of Spurius begins in earnest, you will have very little time to devote to the finer things.”

“That sounds like a splendid idea,” I said. “Ion insists that those lazy sailors need some rest. If duty doesn’t call, I will be more than happy to accept.” The truth was, I felt the need of some rest myself. The wine was working on me, making the urgency of pirate-chasing seem more and more remote as the evening wore on. I looked around. “Where is our host? Off carousing with Gabinius again?”

“He is conferring with a delegation from Alexandria,” Cleopatra said. “They arrived today with Photinus.”

“Would General Achillas be among them?” I asked. I had been at swords’ points with that martial gentleman during my stay in Alexandria. The thought of meeting with him on Roman territory was not without a certain charm.

“Oh, no!” Photinus said. “If it were an Egyptian delegation, I would be with them right now. No, these are Roman citizens resident in Alexandria who have anxieties concerning their property in Egypt and here on Cyprus.”

“The duties of a Roman governor are tedious,” I said, gazing about the beautiful garden, “but they have their compensations.”

“Our host has done well for himself, I suppose.” Photinus sniffed. He and Cleopatra lived amidst luxury that made the mansion of Silvanus seem little more than a hovel.

The next morning Alpheus accompanied me to the naval docks, where I learned that there was no word of new depredations. I ordered my skippers to keep the men in or near the barracks, ready to board and sail instantly. In the arsenal I checked on the progress made on the catapults and ballistas, which were coming along nicely. Then I went with Alpheus to visit the Temple of Aphrodite.

“The temple,” Alpheus explained, as we drew near the complex of sacred buildings, “is one of the most ancient in the Greek-speaking parts of the world. Even if the tale of the goddess’s arrival here and personal founding of the temple is untrue, it is far older than any Temple of Aphrodite on the mainland. It was built by people who still respected human scale.”

Human scale was something of an exaggeration. It looked more like a temple built for Pygmies, no larger than a common farmhouse, constructed of large, ragged blocks of local stone and roofed with the inevitable red tile. The pillars of its portico were clearly stone replacements for wooden ones hewn from single logs.

Oddly, I found this pleasing. I have always preferred the very ancient, small Italian temples to the grandiose structures we have built in recent generations. The proportions of this temple were exquisite, and its setting was as charming as one could ask: a garden of ancient and lovingly tended trees in which bees hummed and birds sang as they had for who could tell how many centuries. Smoke from the morning sacrifice rose from the altar, and the scent of pure frankincense perfumed the air.

“The Ptolemies and the other successors of Alexander,” I noted, “were in the habit of building colossal temples and enlarging the ones already in their domains. Have you ever been to Sicily?”

“I confess I’ve never been that far west,” he said, “although I have heard of its temples.”

“They built temples for giants. In fact there is one that has caryatids in the form of Atlas-like Titans. The Temple of Ephesian Diana is immense and, of course, the Serapeum in Alexandria is tremendous. The kings of Cyprus have never been poor. Why is their most famous temple so humble?”

“The priestesses have never allowed the temple to be enlarged. They say that the goddess founded it this way, and this is what she wanted. The kings have found other ways to embellish it. This garden, for instance, is entirely man-made. Early kings built great retaining walls and hauled in earth for the plantings. But the temple itself, and the image of the goddess, are as they have been since the days of legend.”

I could find no fault with this, having seen too many bloated temples erected to the glory of the rich and powerful rather than in reverence to a god.

White-robed priestesses were everywhere, speaking with the numerous visitors. Most of the latter had come to Cyprus to attend the Aphrodisia. As usual, many of the more prominent visitors brought gifts for the temple. To my astonishment there was a familiar face among the priestesses.

“Flavia!”

The woman turned and smiled. She had been speaking with some prosperous-looking people in Roman dress. She took leave of them and came to join us.

“So you have found time from your duties to pay the goddess honor, Senator?”

“Indeed. But I did not expect to see you here dressed as a devotee.” “At home I am a priestess of Venus of the Mariners. We enjoy reciprocal status with the sisterhood here. Aphrodite of Paphos is primarily a sea goddess, with beauty, love, and fertility as her secondary traits. The connection between our temples goes back for centuries, before the time of the Etruscan kings. Come along, I’ll show you the regalia.”

Nothing loath, we followed. Since the temple was so small, most of its belongings were in outlying buildings, most of them larger than the temple itself. We entered one of these, a low, one-story structure faced with a finely painted portico, its roof supported by severely plain Doric pillars. Inside, a number of visitors stood admiring a wall covered with nets. It was not what I expected.

“Looks like a fisherman’s storehouse,” I remarked.

“Look more closely,” Flavia advised.

So I went closer. The nets were extremely fine, almost like if oversized spiderwebs. They also glistened brightly in the light that streamed through the portico windows and door. Then I saw that they were made not of twine but of fine, golden chain.

“At the climax of the Aphrodisia,” she explained, “the priestesses will wear these nets when they go down to the sea to bathe and be renewed.”

“In the old story,” Alpheus said, “Hephaestus used a golden net to snare his wife, Aphrodite, in bed with Ares, her lover.”

“On the mainland,” she said, “Aphrodite lost most of her aspect as sea-goddess. You’ll recall that it was Poseidon who offered to marry her himself when he saw her in the golden net. Here in her most ancient shrine, the net was hers, not her husband’s.”

“Will you be participating in the festival rites?” I asked her. “Only as an attendant. A pity, really. I would love to bathe in the sea in full view of thousands of worshipers. Roman religious practice is so stodgy these days.”

“How true,” I commiserated. “Have you considered joining the Cult of Dionysus? It’s forbidden throughout Italy but still greatly esteemed in the Greek parts of the world.”

“I highly recommend the Samian rite,” Alpheus said. “It is very ancient, supremely orgiastic, and considered to be the holiest of all the Dionysian sects. The priestesses of Samos are renowned for their piety.”

“Sergius would never agree,” she said, sadly. “He is a banker, and Samos is not a particularly wealthy island. We’ll probably never go there. Come along and let me show you the image of the goddess. It isn’t what you might expect.”

This proved to be true. The interior of the tiny temple was dim, and wisps of incense smoke made graceful volutes in the air. As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, I beheld the goddess taking form at the rear of the chamber. She was represented in white stone, probably marble, but she could not have been more different from the polished, lifelike sculptures so familiar to us. The stone was roughhewn and porous, shaped in the vague semblance of a human form, its arms not separated from the body, nor the legs one from the other. An indentation midway up suggested a waist-line, two large but indistinct swellings represented breasts, and an ovoid shape at the top was her head. There were no discernible facial features.

I gazed upon this extraordinary image for a long time, somehow moved by it as I rarely was by the more famous statues of Aphrodite. With those, the observer was always conscious of them primarily as works of art rather than as objects of devotion. This seemed to me the cult object in its purest form. Gradually it came to me what I was seeing.

“This is the goddess still rising from the sea, still composed of sea-foam!” I said. “She has not yet achieved her full, divine form.”

“You are perceptive-for a Roman.”

It was not Flavia who had spoken. The voice reminded me of honey lightly flavored with smoke. I turned to see a woman of regal bearing, perhaps fifty years of age, once of a beauty to compare with Helen, and still wonderfully handsome. Her hair was black, parted simply in the middle, and her features bore the straight-lined perfection of the pure Hellene. Her skin was almost white, with the faintest olive tinge, and her eyes the clearest blue. I could see these things because she stood in the shaft of light admitted by the doorway. Her gown was purest white, and the light shone right through it, revealing a body unmarred by the years.

“I have been accused of many things but never an abundance of perception. Do I address the high priestess of this temple?”

“I am lone,” she said. I took this for affirmation.

I bowed. “I extend the respect and reverence of the Senate and People of Rome, my lady.”

She accepted this gravely as her due. “And I give you welcome to this holy place. I did not mean you any disparagement. It is just that Greeks understand this aspect of the goddess instinctively, while Romans usually just see a crude piece of stone. You are not a Roman of the usual sort.”

“I am told so by many of my fellow countrymen but never as a compliment.”

“I think your country values the wrong sort of man. Please come with me.”

Mystified, I followed her outside. Before her, the visitors parted hastily, some of them bowing almost as deeply as Orientals. Flavia and Alpheus fell in behind us, and we picked up a following of the younger priestesses, some of them visibly pregnant. Unlike Vesta, Aphrodite is not served by virgins. lone led us to a rather small but gnarled tree of a sort I had never seen before.

“This is the oldest tree in the garden,” lone said. “It was ancient when the kings first erected the terrace and planted the other trees. It is said to have sprouted from the stone when Aphrodite came here to found her temple. It is a myrrh tree, and there is no other like it on Cyprus, nor on the surrounding islands, nor on the nearby mainland. Kore, come here.” A beautiful girl of perhaps seventeen attended and drew from her girdle a small pruning knife, its blade shaped like the crescent moon, lone took the knife and with it cleanly severed a twig from a lower branch. This she presented to me solemnly. Somehow I knew that this was an act of deep significance.

“Please accept this and with it the favor and protection of the goddess.”

I took it. “I accept this honor, reverend lady, but I do not understand why you do this.”

“A man like you needs the protection of the gods far more than most.” With that she turned and walked away, trailed by her beautiful, fruitful priestesses. The visitors who had been watching this strange ceremony regarded me with wonder and envy. Flavia’s expression was more one of fear.

As Alpheus and I walked back to the harbor, he rattled on about what an extraordinary honor had been bestowed upon me. I still have that twig. It rests in my family shrine with the household gods; and in the many years since I received it from Ione’s hands its leaves have dried and shrunk, but none have fallen off. Has it protected me? No one I knew in those days is still alive, so perhaps Paphian Aphrodite has watched over me. But, if so, it has been as much a curse as a blessing.

When we reached the harbor, word had just arrived of a pirate attack on a town on the other side of the island, so I took my leave of the poet and sailed off. Of course, we found no pirates, only a town where they had recently been. This time the looting had been of the conventional sort, with only salable goods and persons seized.

When we got back to Paphos, I learned that Governor Silvanus had been murdered.