Master and God (25 page)

There was an amulet on a very short string, such as an infant might wear; his daughter’s? Lucilla lifted out personal treasures carefully, guessing what each possession might have meant.

Wrapped in a piece of soft cloth was a small collection of jewellery. She did ask his brothers about that; they were vague, but Paulina consulted an aunt who said the simple rings, silver bangle, gold chains and various earrings had belonged to Clodia, his mother. His father had called him after his mother, Lucilla learned. The formal documents and citations gave his full title. Gaius Vinius Clodianus: that had been his name.

What Lucilla never told the others was that the chest he left her contained a large amount of money.

The soldier’s savings took the form of aurei – each worth twenty-five denarii or a hundred sesterces – those big gold coins that people rarely used but hoarded. Perhaps it was true that when Domitian took the throne he had awarded soldiers a bonus of twenty thousand sesterces, the huge sum first given by the Emperor Claudius. Lucilla never actually counted, but the quantity took her breath away. Knowing this gift was intentional, yet hardly daring to touch it, she thought very carefully about how to use the cash. In the end when their rent fell due she paid Vinius’ regular share out of his money. That way, she could keep the apartment as he must have intended. Years were to pass while Lucilla continued to pay rent as if for Gaius.

She used his second room as her evening refuge, altering it to suit her, but kept his bedroom just as he had left it. She even left an old cloak of his on a door peg, but she brought out the toy chariot and placed it on the stool beside the bed. Nobody else went in there. She cleaned, tidied, occasionally lay on his neat bed, thinking. She never felt able to wear most of the jewellery, apart from one set of earrings with pearl drops which she chose and wore in the Praetorian’s memory.

In the months after the news came, she discovered unexpected things about him. First, in the apartment itself, she noticed a wall niche in the corridor. It must always have existed. Before he left, Vinius had placed there two small bronze statues, the ‘Lares and Penates’ who traditionally guarded the fortunes of a Roman home: he had left Lucilla with her own household gods. His gods too, perhaps. Had he taken them when he divorced Verania? The bronze had no patina; the little statues looked new.

Lying on the ledge where flowers and offerings could be placed, he had left his front door key –
One for you; one for me. No duplicates. Agreed?

People continually talked about him. Paulina reminisced about his youth. ‘He was so good-looking before that happened with his eye. Lovely hair, and such long eyelashes – oh he was gorgeous! Very quiet as a lad, but he seemed happy. You want to talk to his aunties about him . . .’

The old man who owned the main house called Lucilla one day. Cretticus senior, his face seamed, rather staring eyes; he spent his time in a long daybed in the peristyle garden, apparently snoozing, in a nonagenarian’s dream-state. He was all there if you spoke to him though. ‘Sound fellow, your Praetorian.’

‘Not mine!’

‘Decent manners. Wonderful patience. Knew a thing or too; he took a lot of interest in the world. He always had time for an old codger. I shall miss our talks . . . Let me know if you need anything, Flavia Lucilla. So long as I am still here.’

Did he ask you to look out for me?

He would have done, if he had thought of it.
‘That man was a hero, girl. Did you know he won the civic crown for saving a life in battle?’

‘I found it. It is a little crumpled, but very beautiful.’

‘Keep it safe for him.’

You speak as if he is coming back.

‘He knew I had a weakness for hazelnut slices. He would often bring me one from the fine bakery on Ten Taverns Street. So thoughtful.’

Whenever Lucilla passed the bakery now, she bought pastries for Cretticus and chatted to him. When the pumice-seller gave up, the old man told Melissus to give her a good price on the lease for the spare shop, which he knew she wanted. ‘Trust a pretty woman to wind a helpless old-timer around her sneaky little finger!’ complained the agent. But he too was growing older and lazier, so he went along with it. Thus Lucilla was able to open a neighbourhood manicure and hair business as she had always wanted. Two lively girls worked for her; they tended customers on the street or indoors, and lived in an upstairs mezzanine. One was her slave Glyke, now returned without the baker’s boy though with suspicious bruises and unfeasibly good intentions.

After Alba, Lucilla had wondered if Vinius might have left her a farewell note at Plum Street, but there was nothing. Only his bequest now silently gave her comfort as she grieved; perhaps in some friendly way he had wanted that for her.

She never regretted running away from him. She believed he was not for her. She felt he had always made that clear. She could never have resolved the conflict she perceived between how much she wanted him and its impossibility. So at Alba, when he left her alone briefly, she bolted from their pavilion, rushed to the residential quarters, gathered her things and fled down the hill to the Via Appia. She hitched a lift on a cart, right then in the clear air of dawn, before most people were stirring. She went not towards Rome, but down south to the Bay of Naples, where she stayed at another imperial villa until she could be certain Vinius had left Rome.

Afterwards, sometimes she dared to remember being in his arms. How, after only clumsy couplings with others, she and this man had straightway come together as a perfect fit. How they moved together, in effortless synchronicity and with such deep pleasure. How when their exercise left them exhausted, she cried a little, so Vinius wiped her eye with his index finger, murmuring kindly, ‘No tears!’ before they both fell into profound sleep.

How her troubled mind had drowned in peace, her body melting against his . . .

He was dead. No point speculating. Cherish the past for what it was, an ideal, a signal that human happiness might be a possibility. Raise your standards. Make a decent life, Lucilla. Life is all there is.
If it’s only once, it must be good
. . . He had been right. If perfection only happened once, that was better than never. Now nothing for her would ever again entail complete despair. So thank you, Gaius Vinius Clodianus, son of Marcus, thank you for your good deed, a deed that brightened somebody’s dark world.

Onwards then. Life had to be gone through. In the year of the news of the Battle of Tapae, sad as she was, Flavia Lucilla picked herself up. Determined to improve herself, she stopped dallying with awkward lovers and ignored the fast set. She attached herself to a more cultured circle, keen to educate her mind. She dressed smartly but with taste. She was chaste, or at least careful, even though nobody knew it. She listened, learned to judge, tolerated many fools, made a few good friends, and eventually she suggested to a man she knew that they should be married.

He was a teacher. What could be better than that?

How she came to this marriage eventually was through mutual friends. By that time, Lucilla knew a lot of people. Many were at Alba, to which she returned whenever the imperial ladies went. There in particular she now explored society with better discrimination. At one point, as a tribute to Vinius, she tried to appreciate music; this was not a success, partly because it made her miserable on his behalf but also because she tended to drift off into her own thoughts.

For a brief period she dallied among the building project teams. Hearing one of the great Rabirius’ drawing assistants one day discussing business with a site supervisor, she had been struck by the power of professional men, relaxed in their expertise. It had an almost erotic effect, although subsequently when an architect tried to take up with her, Lucilla found him deceitful and indecisive, which soon cured her.

Eventually she alighted instead on the verge of Domitian’s literary circle.

Joining a writers’ group is a mistake even for professional writers – especially for them, if they have any self-respect. Lucilla was too inexperienced, so far, to take that attitude.

The girl would learn.

Although life on the frontiers was tricky, back in Rome it was a time of civic certainty. Domitian had returned from his initial success in Moesia to hold a Dacian Triumph (spurious, in the light of the coming defeat at Tapae) and to appoint himself Censor. Unlike his predecessors in that role, he held the post alone and was to be censor for life. This would involve him enforcing much moral legislation, particularly the Augustan divorce laws. He enjoyed regulating conduct. The main point was that the censor reviewed the lists and supervised the political orders; this gave Domitian full control of the Senate.

In case anybody ever missed his significance, he took to appearing at all public occasions, including Senate meetings, in full triumphal uniform. That meant parading with a laurel wreath on his best toupee, a gold and ivory sceptre, and elaborate white robes that signified the honorand was representing Jupiter. The one-day ceremonial regalia for a general had been extended to permanently suggest divinity.

Domitian felt himself to be under Jupiter’s personal protection, but his foremost devotion was to the goddess Minerva. Minerva was sometimes equated with the Greek Athene, though she had very ancient roots in Etruscan Italy. Helmeted and depicted carrying a tall spear, she was a goddess of war and warriors, but her patronage extended to significant peacetime activities: wisdom in general, medicine, commerce, crafts, music and poetry. At Domitian’s court this was particularly good news for poets, who cluttered up audience rooms, all hoping a well-disposed attendant would place an elegy in the Emperor’s bedroom, or a well-timed public recital would have them reading aloud just as he dropped by. Domitian had apparently stopped writing himself, but loved the tyranny of patronage.

Lucilla first engaged with this circle originally through Claudia, a pleasant woman married to the poet Statius; she had a daughter by a previous marriage to a different poet, a young girl who was extremely musical and whom Claudia closely chaperoned. Lucilla met mother and daughter at a recital, then heard a reading by Statius who had a famously good voice. He, like his father before him, had been a prizewinner in the literary category at the Naples Games, which were now defunct after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Coming to Alba, he hoped to become known for his magnum opus, an epic in twelve books called the
Thebaid.
He was still polishing this piece of work, though he regularly read excerpts. It told the story of the Seven Against Thebes, a Greek power struggle which involved episodes of extreme violence; that was not to Lucilla’s taste, especially in the period after Vinius died. However, the writer was a man much-liked, and with good reason, she thought; she learned simply to wonder quietly at the subjects authors choose.

An overheard discussion of the
Thebaid
one day made her realise her education’s deficiencies. Statius was not present, which was as well because he was so sensitive about reception of his work it was painful to watch. The discussion was about whether his poem, which might reflect on Domitian’s court, was either slathered with the grossest flattery or instead was deeply subversive and critical of the Emperor’s authoritarianism and the violence which underlay society. The concept that words could be so ambiguous was new to Lucilla. She was also straining to define phrases like ‘dactylic hexameters’, and to grasp whether she ought to regard these as thudding poetic metre or storytelling elegance.

Feeling disadvantaged, Lucilla might have gone off to some other clique, had she not come across the epigrams of Martial. His first book was recently published. These poems were easy: they were short, rude, witty and unpretentious – so readable that Lucilla could now see no reason to bother with any verse that was long-winded, overwrought and obscure. She began to discriminate between what she liked and what was fashionable. Such naïve honesty would, of course, bar her from the intelligentsia.

Lucilla battled with epic. The success of Virgil’s
Aeneid,
with its undisguised grovelling to the Emperor Augustus, had encouraged writers of long heroic poems. Professionals like Statius blatantly hoped to win handouts whereas the upper classes, the amateurs, dreamed of retirement from public life, devoting themselves to ten-year labours over cherished epic manuscripts. Hence the
Thebaid
of Statius was now only one in a plethora of grandiose efforts: Valerius Flaccus, in his
Argonautica
, had begun the modern trend when he used Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece as a metaphor for the youthful Vespasian’s involvement in the invasion of Britain. It was Statius’ friend, the teacher Nemurus, who advised Lucilla against reading this; he told her the central hypothesis – that in capturing Britannia, Vespasian had opened up the seas in the same way as Jason – was so flimsy, the bluff old emperor himself must have guffawed. ‘All you get are tedious displays of erudition, exaggerated imagery, monotonous style and wilful dullness.’

This was when Lucilla first decided Nemurus was worth cultivating.

Epicry was like a plague. Rutilius Gallicus, the newly appointed Prefect of the City, was thought to be penning a little something. A career administrator from Northern Italy, he was such a plodder, nobody would even ask him about it. Silius Italicus, a lawyer with a suspect past (he had worked as an informer for Nero), kept his head down these days too, devoting himself to his
Punica,
which in a mammoth seventeen books related the conflict between Scipio and Hannibal. From what had leaked into public circulation (given a good shove off the slipway by the author, said Nemurus), his models were the historian Livy, Virgil naturally, and Lucan’s
Pharsalia
, written under Nero, which had retold the rivalry of Caesar and Pompey. Lucilla was disappointed to hear this was not glittering heroics. Caesar came across as unpleasant, Pompey as ineffectual. ‘However,’ (Nemurus again) ‘Pompey goes to his treacherous death with stoic poise.’