EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian (4 page)

“Boy, stop loafing and grab that line,” one of the crewmen shouted once while Periander stood talking to me on deck. No sooner had he got hold of the line as instructed than another sailor yelled, out of contrariness, “Peri, toss me back that bolt there, by your feet.”

Periander gave an exaggerated sigh and rolled his eyes.

“Castor and Pollux preserve us,” he said. “Watch this, Ant.”

Without letting go of the rope he held in both hands, with bare toes agile as a monkey’s he nipped up the little metal cylinder that lay on the board beside his left foot and pitched it at the second man, evoking a volley of laughter and whistles all around. The crewmen all were well pleased with such exhibits of agility, showing off their pet’s tricks to entertain the passengers. Meanwhile, Periander, touching in his eagerness to befriend me, talked, pranced, cajoled, teased, and showed off his own cache of tricks, sleights of hand taught to him by various members of the crew, capering about like a faun of Pan transported to the realm of Oceanus.

Periander’s right elbow reposed at a grotesque angle, having healed that way after an injury. When I asked what happened, thinking he must have fallen from the mast pole or undergone some other accident on board, Periander shrugged, looked away, then looked me in the eye and said, “Broke it. My dad.”

I only now realize what Periander, the slave of a slave, must have endured within the awful confines of that ship, and with what grace and wit, a born survivor. I wonder what Hadrian might have made of him. At the time, however, I remained far too naïve to perceive his circumstances. The ship’s crew treated me with civility, even deference, for already the aura of empire had cast around me a mantle of safety none dared to breach.

Once we passed beyond mainland Greece, heading out of the Aegean into the Mediterranean, we recalled the events of Odysseus’s journey, and wondered whether we might be passing those lands where he and his crew encountered the lotus-eaters, the Cyclops, Circe, and Calypso, while their ships managed to escape both Scylla and Charybdis.

Poseidon bore no grudge against our own ship’s captain or crew. No sirens waylaid us, and with the help of Zephyrus we soon passed Sicily and hove into port at Ostia, south of Rome. There, the captain gave thanks to Portuna astride his dolphin with an offering of honey cakes and wine.

Periander begged me not to go ashore, to stay on board.

“Don’t go to that old school, Antinous. Stay here. Stow away and hide until we cast off again. We’ll jump ship next port, you and I, sail to Africa. It’ll be a grand life. We can search for treasure, hunt wild animals, go fight pirates—”

I shook my head. “Pompey got rid of all the pirates hundreds of years ago.”

“Then we’ll be pirates,” Periander said.

“I can’t. They’re expecting me, and besides, what will you tell the emperor’s courier? You’ll have to lie.”

“No, I won’t,” he said, and sliced me with a smile like a knife. “I’ll just push you overboard and tell him you fell into the sea.”

T
HERE ON THE
dock at Ostia I was greeted by a servant from the palace. He wore linen finer than I had ever worn. My new toga with its purple stripe—a parting gift from my grandfather—seemed shabby by comparison. Soon enough, though, I would find myself garbed in tunics of even finer quality, the costume of a court page.

While we waited on the dock for my trunk to be carried off the ship and then loaded onto the imperial barge, I waved goodbye to Periander, still on deck. He scowled, made a rude gesture with one hand, and turned his back on me for good. I hoped my imperial escort hadn’t noticed that exchange.

As a guest of the emperor, I was spared the usual necessity of an inventory of my belongings by the customs officers waiting to collect import fees from passengers who disembarked dockside. Trunk stowed at last, with the smell of the sea in my nostrils still, I felt both frightened and exhilarated by whatever new experiences might now lie in wait ahead, a reality I could not even begin to conceive, and my gaze turned inland once my escort and I stepped into the river craft that carried us on an anabasis via the Tiber into the waiting arms of that mistress of the world, Rome herself, eternal city.

AIR

II. A
IR

R
OME LOOMED LARGER
than I had imagined. Its circus and amphitheatre, white marble temples, palaces, libraries, and the public edifices around the forum rose above the throngs of people (many of them poor, hungry, and desperate) who crowd the city’s streets all day and cause an unending cacophony in its thoroughfares.

Except for those wealthy few whose mansions and villas, wreathed about with pleasure gardens, recline upon the surrounding hills, most of the city’s inhabitants dwell in apartment complexes rising like hives full of honeycomb, and likewise buzzing with activity all of the time. Shoddy construction and cheap materials cause frequent conflagrations, since whenever one apartment catches fire, those surrounding it go up as well, and often take adjacent buildings with them, taxing the city’s firemen to the limits of their strength and available resources. At first it seemed surprising how often smoke soiled the air, or blazes lit the nighttime skyline, illuminating the tangle of carts forbidden to traverse the streets on business by daylight, but no one else ever seemed panicked by these incidents, and soon I also learned to ignore them.

We new arrivals at the imperial paedagogium had been given a few days to be introduced at the palace, settle into our own quarters, and acquaint ourselves at the school before we were allowed to go off on our own to explore the great city sprawled like a wanton across the seven hills, and proclaimed eternal by Emperor Hadrian himself.

Senses engorged by new sights, sounds, smells and tastes, I meandered along her streets, visited the various quarters of the metropolis and sampled the wares of merchants whose offerings represented all the riches of the far-flung empire right there in its pulsating heart. Everything is available in Rome, if only you agree to the price: Queen Money, to quote Horace, rules all.

The hawking of street vendors competed with curses flung by pedestrians, braying mules, hammers on anvils, mourners hired to wail after funeral processions, cymbals and drums punctuating religious celebrations, barking dogs, tavern patrons, crying babies and screaming children, robbery victims shouting at pickpockets, fullers singing at their work, and detachments of army recruits on parade through the middle of the street, the hobnails of their boots clanging against the paving stones. And beneath those stones, under the feet of the multitudes, the Cloaca Maxima, a vast sewer main that flows beneath the city like the dark twin of the Tiber.

On game days the spectators at the Flavian amphitheatre, almost seventy thousand strong, take in the sights of gladiators at battle, of exotic animals such as lions, tigers, giraffes, elephants, ostriches, and rhinos exhibited and slaughtered by the droves, and of various horse and chariot races. I was told the shouting of the crowds on such days could be heard far off in the countryside, sounding almost as if they were calling the hogs that root for acorns in the woods beyond the rustic farmlands. The chariot races and other events at the Circus Maximus drew even larger mobs, for the circus can hold almost four hundred thousand souls.

At the site where Caesar was assassinated, I noticed a large number of cats always lounging about, as if in hopes of communication with the great man’s spirit. Befriended by a few of these strays, I gave ten sestertii to the priest at a nearby shrine of Isis, for he had taken it upon himself to be sure these local denizens, sacred to the goddess, always had food and water.

Each time I passed the temple of Vesta with its eternal flame, and the house of her consecrated virgins, I recalled the story of a Vestal virgin who consorted with a man, breaking her vow to the goddess. Upon being discovered, she was buried alive, upside down—a punishment deemed appropriate for her sacrilege. Her consort was merely whipped to death.

In the multi-storied market halls of Trajan’s Forum, people of every nationality appeared, and during each visit I saw clothing, jewelry, and hairstyles such as I never dreamed of back home. Some of the more extravagant merchants displayed custom-made mosaics of the items they purveyed. Captivated by these tile images, I decided to seek out the particular artist whose designs I found most colorful. From him, I commissioned a mosaic featuring a ship to send to Deucalion, in thanks for his many kindnesses while he hosted me in Nikomedia.

The variety of goods available at market every day, and the quality of the selections for those able to afford such purchases, astonished me: cheeses, olives, olive oil, thyme-scented honey gold in its comb, fruits, nuts, herbs, spices, wine, smoked fish, dried fish, silvery stringers of fresh-caught, fish sauce, eels, sausages, poultry, meats, game, and bread baked fresh each day from flour provided by the ocean of grain pouring in from Egypt, about eight thousand tons each week.

One might find furniture handmade by the best wood carvers and iron wrights in Italy; silks and brocade from China; linen, papyrus, cosmetics and perfume from Egypt; wools and finely tooled leather from Gaul; carved ebony and ivory from Africa, along with terra cotta and carved wooden figurines for making offerings or shrines. Slaves, horses, oxen and other domestic creatures were purchased in the livestock markets nearby. Even human hair, lustrous blue-back skeins sheared from the heads of Indians, might be bought and made up into wigs, for those whose own locks failed them.

The price of goods shocked me at first. A loaf of bread, a cup of wine, each cost a quarter of a sestertius, while a bath cost one sesterius—four times what men paid back home. A cheap prostitute, as I later learned, might charge half that. Soldiers earned up to twelve hundred sestertii a year, common workers maybe two or three sestertii per day—just enough to stay fed and bathed.

My favorite snack soon became a bowl of soup made from day-old bread stewed with grain, peas or beans, topped with olive oil and a palmful of rosemary, “queen of the garden,” as the vendor proclaimed each time he added it. Most Roman citizens ate such soup or bread as their daily ration. I, however, ate so many strange new treats that my stomach began to strain against my imperial tunic and forced me to curb my appetite.

On an impulse one afternoon I used almost half a week’s allowance from home to buy a length of silk in the fabric stalls for ten sestertii. Blue as the Argus-eyed peacock and shot through with fine gold thread, the color reminded me of my mother. I had a seamstress cut it up and then hem the little squares to create a set of hand cloths for my personal use. From then on, I always kept one tucked somewhere in the folds of my outer garment.

I soon grew fond of visiting the spice quarter upstairs at the market, whose merchants traveled difficult land routes to and from the East to bring back frankincense, myrrh, ginger, turmeric, cloves, camphor, sandalwood, cardamom, sesame, cinnamon, and nutmeg, with a brown musty fragrance I particularly enjoyed. The exotic aromas offered a respite from the streets, which reeked of animal manure, fuller’s urine, fish, rotted vegetables, the flung-out contents of chamber pots, and bodies and clothing too long unwashed. The three pepper sellers, Italians from the southern coast who sang at their work, always laughed to see me coming. Every time I drew near a display of their wares, I began to sneeze. At least I always had a cloth handy.

T
HE IMPERIAL PAEDAGOGIUM
offered a curriculum intended to educate and finish young men as imperial pages and civil servants, but in truth we were a pack of beautiful boys, a seraglio of youths discovered and brought in from all over the empire.

The school itself was perched in Caput Africanae, a street hugging the Caelian Hill, and its facilities included classrooms, a library, living quarters both private and common, a gymnasium and training fields.

Our head master was a bald, thin-lipped freedman who took his duties seriously. He set a schedule that had us up by dawn, even though we might be required to stay out late into the night whenever royal banquets required our presence.

Mornings were spent studying philosophy, rhetoric, literature, mathematics, and geography, with music lessons twice a week before lunch. In the afternoons, we exercised, wrestled, trained with weapons, or competed in various athletic events. I noticed, in particular, one handsome older boy who excelled at archery. He was called Korias.

Those of us who served as grooms soon spent our early mornings and evenings before supper helping the stable master feed, exercise, bathe and brush the imperial horses. A pack of hunting dogs followed at our ankles and amused us with their antics while we made our rounds of the stables at the edge of the palace grounds.