Authors: Jeremy Reed
Hierocles drank with the fatality of a kamikaze. He made a fist at Heliogabalus but let it drop to a limp-wristed gesture. Something about his anger wouldn’t finally subside but kept flickering on the surface. One more glass, and he finally collapsed, mouthing at Heliogabalus as he went, ‘Faggot. We’ll both die.’
Heliogabalus called for Antony to assist him in carrying his drunken lover to bed. He knew the pattern by now and how Hierocles would most likely crash for the next twelve hours and wake up in a sorry state, full of a drunk’s churningly repetitive remorse.
Sensing the moment was right, his mother paid him a brief visit,
full of her plans to issue decrees about who should have the right to wear jewels on their shoes, who should dress in certain colours, sit in a certain place in the Senate or drive a particular make of car. Symiamira’s obsession with ritual usually left him exhausted, and today was no exception. His mind went into shut-down at mention of her exhaustive catalogue of observances. He knew very well that her demands irritated the people and made her unpopular. Word had got out that she had decorated her rooms like a brothel and that she regularly had prostitutes instruct her in bizarre sexual techniques. Still dressed in her négligé, he knew her to be even more radically out of touch with the people than himself. She lived for nothing but pleasure and whatever kinky permutations of sex she could add to her already expansive repertoire.
She wanted him to spend the morning with her so that she could tell him of her new conquests. Her inexhaustible need to narrate the intimacies of her promiscuity had once amused him, but now he found it tedious for the repetition it brought. Something of her shamelessness had begun to jar with him, and partly because it interfaced a characteristic he recognized in himself.
He left her on the terrace, with Antony catering for her gastronomic demands, such as lobster garnished with asparagus, goose liver and truffles for breakfast. Free of her, he was none the less reminded of the increasing pressure being put on him by the Senate to appoint his adopted cousin Alexander joint caesar. He had sensed the danger in such a move right from the start, for the boy was popular not only with the Senate itself but also with the equestrian order on account of his quiet, philosophical nature and the justice he argued for in all matters. Their contrasting natures provided fuel for Heliogabalus’ critics to compare him unfavourably with his cousin, an equation he made little attempt to do anything about. But he couldn’t disguise the fact that he was concerned. People had taken to whispering in his presence and sharing conspiratorial jokes at his expense. It was a practice that had spread to street corners, and he guessed the military were to blame. These days they made little attempt to conceal their disrespect and were doubtless feeling out the territory before plotting a
coup.
Transport was, of course, waiting to whisk him downtown. He always travelled with one of his pet leopards sitting with him in the rear, as a token of the style for which he stood. Antony, who had managed to get free of Symiamira, joined him as they headed towards the unprecedented event of an emperor addressing a crowd of the city’s rent boys.
The convention was to take place in a dockside bath-house, one notorious for its sexual practices and its popularity with sailors. The baths, shunned by most citizens, had earned the name Onobeli on account of the ready availability of sex there. Heliogabalus was used to visiting the place in disguise and making his identity known only to the most special of his conquests. As they crossed town he had a sudden flash as to how young he was to be doing an emperor’s job. Most people his age were relatively carefree, whereas he had to think for an empire.
Crossing town was like connecting to the city’s modem. They sped into the Via Sacra and Via Nova, which crossed the Forum, and arteried their way through a maze of narrow streets. Every where shop-owners were unloading crates of vegetables brought in from the surrounding countryside, and bulky carcasses of cattle and sheep were being offloaded into warehouses. The stench in the butcher’s area was ammoniac and would increase with the heat of the day.
Visiting the river was always the high point of his routine. No matter that the city’s sewers uniformly discharged into the Tiber’s muddy undertow – the big Cloaca Maxima opening into the river at the level of the Ponte Rotto – he thrilled at the current’s rip and the cosmopolitan tang to the district. It was here that he met real people rather than the arrogant despots who presided over government.
There was a building on fire as they approached one of the bridges, the smoke billowing into black cumuli before going off on the wind. The memory of the great fire in Nero’s reign had left each successive generation afraid of a recurrence. It would take so little to reduce the city to base-line grit. Part of him didn’t care. It would burn off the good and the bad, and the people would have to start
out all over again. He had no reverence for history or the attempts of civilizations to outlive themselves.
He pressed Antony’s hand, and they accelerated away through smoke that looked like fog scrolling dense spirals over the bridge. For a time they were enveloped in it and drove on through a massive grey cloud and out the other side to a shore littered by semi-derelict buildings and warehouses with faded industrial lettering. There were several baths in the district, all of them frowned on by the authorities and functioning in a run-down state for a gay clientele. This was the underworld he should have been cleaning up instead of granting it his personal seal of approval.
They drove around the back of a large disused warehouse and continued down an alley into a labyrinthine complex of streets. Even here he could smell smoke in the air, like the fire was spreading its news across the face of the sky. They parked up at the rear entrance to the bath-house, and he remained there checking his makeup in a mirror. If he had a reputation for making up in a way that shocked his contemporaries, then he was determined to capitalize on it today. He looked like a stage artist in white cake as he met his face in the compact. For an agonizing moment he didn’t recognize himself in the split between what he hoped to see and the image with which he was confronted.
The bath-house, as he had anticipated, was already full to maximum. It looked like the majority of the city’s rent boys had turned out for the occasion, each dressed according to his particular code. A stage draped in purple had been set up in what was once a small auditorium, and the huge audience was grouped around the speaker’s lectern. Men hung out under the vast girth of cylindrical pipes or sat perched on the rim of the large bronze basin placed central to the bathing area. Others could be seen taking a quick dip in the pool, their bodies arching in and out of the wreathing cumuli of steam.
Heliogabalus moved through the crowd unafraid, safe in the knowledge he was amongst friends. He could see couples disappearing into back rooms, determined to miss no opportunity to practise their profession. A band had struck up a medley, the music
meshing with the underworld aura that permeated the place. Some of the boys had naked torsos splashed with red tattoos in imitation of the Egyptian sailors to be found on the docks. These boys wore earrings and were proud of the erotic lexicons written on their skins in the form of a private vocabulary. Some had chosen flowers’ others symbolic creatures such as the jackal, the eagle or the eye of Horus.
He was in no immediate hurry to begin and took his time in soaking up the atmosphere of the place. One of the small bronze basins had been used as a receptacle for his favourite red roses, and these formed a heady shock of colour in a space that had otherwise been left undecorated. He was inwardly glad of the lack of ceremony attached to his visit. He liked the run-down lawless impression the building created and wouldn’t have wished its character changed for anything. He had lived out most of his sexual expressions here and intended to continue in this way.
The rotunda lighting the building was tarnished by a patina of grime. It looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned for years, unlike the fastidious upkeep given his suite of rooms at the palace. To his amusement a group of dancers and performance artists began to put on a show to celebrate his arrival. Some of Rome’s most prominent transvestites gave signature to a dance that was both provocative and tragic. At the end, the leader of the group lay down and simulated being stabbed, while roses were laid over his body.
There were fire-eaters, magicians, hermaphrodites and finally a singer whose theme was that of Nero’s great fire, a subject that seemed ideally suited to the day given the earlier conflagration in the suburbs.
When Heliogabalus rose to speak he was greeted with a solid roar of applause. The bath erupted with the sort of welcome he received nowhere else these days.
He began his talk by commending the gathering on their chosen profession. ‘Male prostitution’, he said, ‘requires an imagination superior to its female counterpart. Its risk implied a corresponding invention, for same-sex relations, lacking as they did an opposite, involved the recreation of the body as a mythic ideal.’
He went on to talk of how he regarded the gathering as a fraternity, each of them representing family. He spoke of the colour and difference they brought to Rome and of his delight that their calling offended the Senate. He was quick to add that ‘deviation originates from within that which it perverts’ and that the reaction to male prostitution was invariably conditioned by the normal being hung up on the perverse.
In his eccentric way he suggested they study books on sex, not just Ovid’s
Amores
but a variety of ancient writers who discussed the priapic cult: Greek, Egyptian and Roman. Sex, he said, was a serious study, and the enhancement of pleasure could be brought about not only by experimentation but by knowledge.
He spoke of society’s fear of the individual and of how he as emperor had refused to compromise, no matter the opposition from the government and Army. He encouraged them to remain true to their calling, in the knowledge that even if all civilizations ended in ruin the individual was the unit which counted. He said he knew this in spite of his years and that it was better to burn and die young than continue unfulfilled into old age. He called himself their patron and promised to reward them with pensions in difficult times. Each of them, he said, on leaving today would receive a substantial gift as well as his protection for as long as he was emperor.
His speech over, a guitar wailed from a recess in the building, all the collective pain of the assembly given voice in those bruised notes. Again and again the player sounded his wounded call as the dancers returned to the performance area. Treating Heliogabalus as a friend rather than emperor, each made a skittish run at him to present him with a rose before returning to a gestural mime in which they acted out the process of a number of rent boys competing to win a client’s attention. Striking up various poses from coquettish, to butch, to provocative, to dismissive, one of them eventually succeeded in winning the client over by his sassy walk.
After the actors had gone off and music cut across the bathhouse, there was a run for the pool. People jumped into the water in a serious of vaporous explosions and were soon joined together in an aquatic orgy. Heliogabalus stood and looked on through the
rolling clouds of steam at the geometry of bodies as complexly linked as a plate of spaghetti. The amazing configuration increased as he watched, the whole spectacular display being conducted for his benefit as he stood rooted in the auditorium.
When he and Antony walked back outside he felt an immense compassion for all those he had addressed today. Their lives were difficult, and they would always be society’s outcasts.
As they headed back through the dockside complex Antony, who had been visited by a courier during the proceedings, told him that a man called Seius Carus had been arrested for trying to incite the Alban Legion to make Alexander emperor.
Heliogabalus took the news calmly, even though his murder had clearly been intended. Again he could feel the vulnerable point in his neck come alive. He suspected Antony of deliberately downplaying the incident, so that he wouldn’t grow unduly alarmed. But the prospect of having to return to legislate over the culprit severely dented his mood. He resented state affairs making inroads into his life, and when he looked out at the city it was to superimpose a grey mood on a blue sky.
They drove back through a city that had suddenly come alive. The centre was congested, and someone, probably claiming to be a prophet or a messiah, had attracted a crowd who formed an attentive hub at the man’s feet. Heliogabalus’ own admiration for the miracle-worker Apollonius of Tyana, about whom he had read, made him sympathetic to all myth-makers providing they didn’t challenge his rights as caesar.
Back at the palace he was immediately informed by the centurion responsible for the man’s arrest of Carus’ attempts to trigger a revolution. The Army wanted the man executed as an example of what happened to those who tried to subvert the emperor’s rule. And, to make matters worse, Hierocles was up and about, insisting that his word was law when Caesar was absent.
Part of Heliogabalus resented the way the incident had been blown up out of all proportion, largely, he suspected, to satisfy the instincts of the morally vindictive. When he entered the hall where judgement was to take place, he could see a badly made-up Hierocles
sitting in the place reserved for the emperor. He was sprawled in his seat in an undignified manner, his eyes looking blotchy and wasted.
It was a bad start to proceedings, and when Heliogabalus took his place next to Hierocles he could feel the silent disapproval of the soldiers burn him like a rash cobbled across his skin. His friend’s presence and the embarrassment it caused placed him at an immediate disadvantage, and the undertow could be heard in a brief snatch of laughter that came from somewhere near the back of the hall. If it had been left up to him he would simply have had the criminal banished from Rome and sent to one of the islands. He despised capital punishment and the whole judicial machinery it set in progress. When he looked at Carus he could scent the man’s fear coating him like a glaze on a pot. He assessed his age as about thirty; muscular build, long eyelashes for a man, coarse features, and his misfired cause suddenly gone dead in him. He wondered if Carus had ever really believed in his short-lived rebellion and how he would have benefited even if he had been successful in promoting Alexander’s cause. When Heliogabalus hesitantly made eye contact with him there was a brief flickering attempt on Carus’ part to keep his attention. He knew without doubt that the man was resting his entire appeal on the hope of the emperor’s clemency.