"What?"
"Hieronymus made notations having to do with the movements of the stars and such. You're a keeper of the calendar, aren't you? I thought perhaps you gave him instruction."
He snorted. "Do you seriously think I would waste my time giving sacred instruction to one of my niece's minions, and a foreigner, at that? Now tell me, Finder, are you wasting Calpurnia's time? Have you discovered anything of interest? Are you at all close to doing so?"
"I'm doing my best," I said.
And in some ways doing much better than you,
I thought, for still there was no relief for Uncle Gnaeus. No wonder he was so irritable!
He snorted. "Just as I thought. You've found nothing, because there is nothing to find. This menace to Caesar that consumes my niece is entirely imaginary, created from thin air by that haruspex, Porsenna."
"If that's true, then why did someone murder Hieronymus?"
"Your friend was poking his nose into other people's business—powerful people, dangerous people. Who knows what embarrassing or incriminating information he may have uncovered, having nothing at all to do with Caesar? The Scapegoat surely offended someone, but his death is hardly proof of a plot against Caesar."
What he said made sense, yet I found myself recalling the cryptic "key" that Hieronymus had mentioned in his journal. I repeated the words aloud. " 'Look all around! The truth is not found in the words, but the words may be found in the truth.' "
"What in Hades is that supposed to mean?"
"I wish I knew," I said. Then, seemingly from nowhere, a memory came to me, and I felt a sudden chill.
"What's that look on your face?" said Uncle Gnaeus.
I shivered. "A long time ago, in a public latrine here in the Forum, I was very nearly murdered. By Hercules, I'd almost forgotten! It was thirty-five years ago, during the trial of Sextus Roscius, the first time I worked with Cicero. A hired killer followed me into a latrine near the Temple of Castor. We were alone. He pulled a knife—"
"All very interesting, I'm sure, but perhaps you could leave a man in peace!"
I turned and left at once, almost feeling sorry for Uncle Gnaeus. Judging by the silence, he still had not managed to begin relieving himself.
The crowd had grown even thicker than before. I looked in vain for a way to pass through. The din of the shouting and laughter was deafening.
I realized I had no desire to return to my seat in the stands. I had seen quite enough of doomed, humiliated prisoners, of Caesar in his ceremonial chariot, and of lictors and cavalry officers and marching legionaries.
I suddenly longed to be anywhere else. I started walking, heading away from the triumph, fleeing the crush and the noise. At length, taking a roundabout path of least resistance, I found myself at the Flaminian Gate in the old city walls.
I kept walking. Once through the gate, I was outside the city proper, on the Field of Mars. When I was a boy, much of this area had still been literally a field, with vast parade grounds. Some areas of the Field of Mars remained undeveloped, but in my lifetime the greater part of it had been filled with new tenements and temples and public buildings. It had become one of the liveliest neighborhoods of Rome.
But on this day, the streets were almost deserted. From beyond the Capitoline Hill, which now loomed between me and the Forum, I could still hear the roar of the crowd but more and more faintly as I continued to walk toward the great bend of the Tiber. I felt a sense of freedom and escape—from haughty Uncle Gnaeus, from Caesar, from Calpurnia, from my fretful wife, and even from Rupa, my constant companion in recent days.
At length I came to the new neighborhood of shops and apartments that had sprung up around Pompey's Theater, where I had come to visit Arsinoë. Was she there still, returned to her high prison, but alone now, without Ganymedes to look after her?
I wandered past the empty porticos. All the shops were closed. I came to the entrance to the theater itself. The gate was open and unmanned. I wandered inside.
The tiers of seats were empty. I gazed up row after row, fascinated by the play of sunlight and shadow on the repeating semicircles, all the way to the top, where the Temple of Venus stood. Lost in thought, I slowly ascended the steps.
I remembered the enormous controversy that erupted when Pompey announced his plans to build the theater. For centuries, conservative priests and politicians had thwarted the construction of a permanent theater in Rome, arguing that such an extravagance would lead the Romans to become as decadent as the stagestruck Greeks. Pompey circumvented their objections by adding a temple to the complex, so that the whole structure could be consecrated as a religious building. The design was clever; the rows of theater seats also served as steps leading up to the sanctuary at the summit.
"Can you hear me?"
I was not alone. A lone figure with a white beard, dressed in a tunic of many colors, had stepped onto the stage.
"I said, can you hear me up there? Don't simply nod. Speak."
"Yes!" I shouted.
"No need to yell. That's the whole point: acoustics. I'm barely talking above normal volume now, and yet you can hear me perfectly well, can't you?"
"Yes."
"Good. La-la-la, la-la-la. Fo-di-da, fo-di-da." He continued to utter a series of nonsensical noises. I realized he was a performer limbering his throat, but I laughed aloud anyway.
"Well, I can see you're going to be an easy audience!" he said. "Sit. Listen. You can help me with my timing."
I did as I was told. I had come here seeking escape, after all. What better escape could I hope for, than a few moments in the theater?
He cleared his throat, then struck a dramatic pose. When he spoke again, his voice was utterly different. It had a rich, dark tone, full of curious inflections. It was an actor's voice, trained to fascinate.
"Friends and countrymen, welcome to the play. I am the playwright. This is the prologue—my chance to tell you what to think about the tale you're about to see. I could let you simply watch the play and make up your own minds—but being fickle Romans, I know better than to trust your judgment. Oh that's right, jeer and boo . . ." He broke from his pose. "Well? Jeer and boo!"
I obliged him with what I imagined would be a suitably obscene jeer, involving his mother.
"That's better," he said, and continued his soliloquy. "I know why you're all here: to celebrate a great man's good fortune. Not a good man's great fortune; that would be a different matter—and a different man."
I obligingly laughed at this witticism, which was clearly a jab at Caesar, the sponsor of the upcoming plays. My laughter may have sounded a bit forced, but Decimus Laberius—for now I recognized the man, one of the leading playwrights and performers of the Roman stage—seemed not to care if my reactions were sincere as long as I gave him a token response to help him with his timing.
"But why am
I
here?" he continued. "To be perfectly candid, I had rather be at home right now, with my feet up and my nose in a book. I've had enough of all this carrying-on and celebrating; it grates on an old man's nerves. Yet here I am, with a new play produced on demand, and why? Because I'm desperate to beat that fool Publilius Syrus out of the prize? No! I don't need a prize to tell me I'm a better playwright than that babbling freedman.
"No, I am here because the Goddess of Necessity compels me. To what depths of indignity has she thrust me, here at the end of my life? You see me at twice thirty years, a broken man. When I was thirty—or better yet, half thirty—oh, how young and proud I was! No power in heaven or on earth could bend me to its will. Neither begging nor bribery, cajoling nor threatening could move me one iota. But now—look at me jump!" Laberius executed a sudden leap and barely stopped himself from tumbling head over heels; his awkwardness was so convincing that I laughed out loud. He paused for a moment, as if waiting for the laughter of a huge audience to subside. "A most unbecoming activity for a man my age! So why do I jump? Because a certain man demands it.
"No, that's unfair. The fellow does not
demand
it. He asks. He makes a polite request. He says, 'Laberius, dear friend, best and boldest of playwrights, would you be so kind . . .' And Laberius—jumps!" He executed an even more fitful leap with a hair-raising recovery.
"And here's the rub: it matters not a fig that I should stand here and complain; he merely takes my mutterings as a compliment. Look, he's laughing now!" Laberius pointed at the box of honor in the midst of the seats, which was as empty as the rest of the theater. He shook his head. "Bitter are the twists and turns of Fortune. My own success has made me another's slave. The dazzling jewel of Fame had turned me into another man's ornament. My gift for words renders me . . . mute. But oh, can I jump!" Again he took a leap, but something in the halting movement was more pathetic than absurd, more pitiful than funny. I did not laugh at all.
He cocked his head. "Do you remember that game we played when we were boys called king of the hill? Well, I imagined I was very nearly at the top of that hill for a while, but then I took a tumble, and now I find myself at the bottom—just like all of you—looking up at the winner, who's so high above me I have to squint to see him." In a quavering childlike voice, so strange it gave me gooseflesh, he quoted from the ditty boys sang when they played the game:
"You will be king
if you can cling
to the height.
Do the thing
to prove you're right,
send 'em tumbling
with all your might!"
I sat forward in my seat, no longer pretending to be his attentive audience but genuinely riveted. In my mind, his voice conjured images of boys at play, so seemingly harmless in their rush to compete. But I also saw fields of dead bodies and heads on stakes, the terrible outcomes of those boyhood games carried into the world of men. I was reminded of how completely an actor could command the stage, controlling his audience's emotions with a change in the tone of his voice or a simple shrug of his shoulders.
"Ah, but I suppose I was getting too big for my toga anyway," said Laberius with a sigh. "I was due for a bit of taking down. Weren't we all, O people of the toga? We forgot the way of the world. All cannot be first, and the highest rank is the hardest to hold on to. From the pinnacle of success, the only direction is down. A man has his day and falls; his successor will fall in turn, and his successor, and so on. Only the immortals hold fast to their place in this universe, while everything around them changes in the blink of a god's eye.
"We rightly fear the gods. We rightly fear certain men, but mark my words: the man who is feared the most has the most to fear—"
A shrill voice, coming from behind me, interrupted him. "Laberius, you old fraud! You will
never
dare to speak that line from the stage. Why are you even bothering to rehearse it?"
I looked over my shoulder and saw a striking figure, a man perhaps in his forties with touches of silver in his dark beard. He struck me as the type who's quite handsome in his youth but runs to fat in middle age. He was striding down the aisle toward the stage, followed by a troupe of actors.
"I'll rehearse the prologue just as I wrote it!" snapped Laberius. "Whether I deliver it that way . . . is another matter, and none of your business, Publilius Syrus. If the temper of the audience and the exigencies of performance call for a bit of spontaneous rewrite—"
"How about a spontaneous exit?" The newcomer had passed me and was fast approaching the stage. "You shouldn't even be here. This is the hour scheduled for
my
troupe to practice, and you know very well that we rehearse in secret. I can't have eavesdroppers plagiarizing my best lines."
"How dare you, Syrus? As if I would steal a single one of your tired platitudes. You—you
freedman
!"
"That right, insult a man who's actually made his way in this profession by merit! Go on, Laberius, off with you! Disappear! Send a puff of smoke out of your rear end and vanish through a trapdoor."
"You're the one who resorts to such vulgar stage effects, Syrus. I rely on words and the instrument of my body—"
"Well, get your instrument out of here! And take your assistant with you."
I cleared my throat. "Actually, I am not this man's assistant. I only happened to be—"
"Whoever you are, get out! Or I'll have Ajax throw you out." Syrus gestured to one of his actors. Whether Ajax was his name or his role in the play, it suited the man's brawny build. I suddenly regretted having wandered off on my own without Rupa.
I had no desire to become involved in a brawl between rival playwrights, though I was curious about the men themselves. Both Laberius and Syrus were listed by Hieronymus as frequent guests at Marc Antony's parties. Syrus must have known Hieronymus; he had sent a message of condolence to my house.
I headed out the way I had come, and was walking down a long portico when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see Laberius.
"What did
you
think of my prologue, citizen?"
I shrugged. "Amusing. Provocative, I suppose. I'm not a great follower of the theater—"
"Yet you laughed in all the right places, and when I did the bit about the boys playing king of the hill, it gave you chills, didn't it? Admit it!"
"It did."
"Come with me, Citizen." He took my arm and steered me to a nearby doorway. The door was plain and unadorned, but the chamber into which it opened was quite grand. We had entered by a side door into the great meeting room in the theater complex. Pompey had built it expressly to accommodate gatherings of the Senate. The hall was an oval-shaped well, with seats on either side descending in tiers to the main floor. Marble was everywhere, in many colors and patterns. The design and workmanship of even the smallest detail was exquisite.
A common citizen like me is seldom allowed into such a place. I must have gawked like a tourist, for Laberius laughed and gave me a friendly pat on the back.