John Roberts - The Year of Confusion

“Amazing. It’s so simple, absolutely elegant. Is there anyone here who’s known for that sort of dodge?”

“They don’t work in Rome once I learn about them,” he said grimly. “Oh, I’m not against a bit of chicanery now and again. The gods send us these fools so they can be fleeced, and it angers the gods when you turn down their gifts. But a big job like that can give us all a bad name, especially when the fool is rich and well connected. That’s the sort of thing that brings the aediles down on all of us.”

“Who has tried it most recently?” I asked him.

“Let me see-there was a man called Postumius, a freedman who worked for a while at the headquarters of the Reds. See, having that position, it was easy to convince people that he had all sorts of inside information, when he was nothing but a clerk. I gave him a warning-just broke his arm and told him I’d cut out his tongue if he tried that trick again in Rome.”

“Admirable forbearance. Do you know if he’s still in Rome?”

“He is. I’ve seen him around these last few months. He took my advice and traveled Italy and Sicily for a while, but the problem with a habit like his is that it makes you real unwelcome quick, so you have to keep traveling. He just couldn’t stay away from the Great Circus for long, I guess. But I’d know if he was up to his old tricks.”

“Have you any idea where he might be found?”

“Well, Senator, last I heard he was clerking at the Temple of Aesculapius, on the Tiber Island.”

“It was most enthralling,” Julia told me the next morning. “Callista met us right after the ceremony-she’s a foreigner so of course she couldn’t take part-Servilia was there, with a sizable bodyguard, and Atia, with an equal number.”

I was being shaved, always a delicate procedure with my rather battered and scarred face. “Did Callista hint at what business Caesar and Servilia had with her the day I visited?”

“She and Servilia were both being intriguingly discreet about it. They just barely acknowledged knowing one another. Anyway, we all got into Servilia’s litter-it’s a rather large one, you know.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Callista is very unaccustomed to traveling in a litter, would you believe it? She says she always walks. It’s some sort of philosopher’s austerity, I think. I can hardly imagine walking everywhere in Alexandria, but if she lives at the Museum like so many of the professors she doesn’t really need to go much of anywhere, I suppose.”

“And this marvelous conveyance took you where?” I prodded.

“You’re trying to rush me again, dear. Don’t do that.”

“Sorry.”

“So the four of us were carried across the river into the Trans-Tiber and up the slope of the Janiculum almost to the top, where the flag flies. There are hardly any dwellings up there, it’s mostly just the ruins of the old fort, but there are a few new houses since even the Trans-Tiber is getting crowded these days. We stopped at a beautiful little house surrounded by an exquisite garden full of fruit trees and flowering shrubs. At least they will be flowering in the spring. They’re rather bare right now but the proportions of the garden are beautiful.”

I relaxed in my chair. She would get around to what I wanted to hear in her own good time.

“So,” she went on, “we went inside and were greeted at the door by the most amazing woman.”

“Amazing how?” I asked.

“To begin with, she wore a gown that seemed to be made of a single long strip of fabric wound several times around her. It fit very closely, but was really quite modest and incredibly graceful. It was made of a very thin cotton dyed in bright colors. The lady herself was rather dark but quite beautiful in an exotic fashion, with huge black eyes. Her hair was black, too, parted in the middle and gathered behind and very long, almost to her heels. Her hands were painted with henna in very intricate patterns. She had dots and stripes painted on her face in red and blue.”

“I think I will recognize her in a crowd now.”

“Don’t be facetious. She bowed in the most charming manner-used her hands and arms, feet, head, all moving at once. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What else? Was she tall, short, plump?”

“She was quite, well, quite feminine. Very small, but formed like some extremely ancient concept of Aphrodite. Rather full breasts and hips but with a waist I think my hands could have spanned. All this was very obvious because her gown was so tight. Oh, and it left her navel exposed.”

“Anything unusual about her navel?”

“She had a huge ruby or garnet in it. Wherever she comes from, they must artificially stretch a girl’s navel, the way some people stretch the earlobes or lips to wear jewelry.”

“So it’s safe to say that she’s not some runaway Greek slave woman. I suppose that would have been too simple.”

“Servilia introduced us and told her what we wanted. Ashthuva led us into a quite spacious room lit by what seemed hundreds of lamps and candles. Its walls and ceiling were painted all over with constellations, marvelous to see.”

“What was the style of painting?” I asked her.

“That’s an odd question. Well, the treatment of the familiar figures, the lion, the Capricorn, and so forth, looked rather Greek.”

“Were these paintings new or had they been there for a while?”

She thought about it. “Now that you mention it they looked rather fresh. I could still smell the paint, and the ceiling wasn’t smudged with lamp soot. But then the whole house looked new, as well as the plantings in the garden.”

“Very good. What next?”

“On one wall she had a bookcase. It was in the honeycomb style, but much larger than usual because it held star charts instead of ordinary scrolls. She asked us the birth dates of those whose horoscopes we wanted cast, and she went to the case and drew out several of the charts and took them to a broad table. She unrolled some of them and weighted their corners with little linen sandbags.”

I started to say something but she hurried on. “And before you ask, the charts gave every appearance of being quite ancient. They weren’t made of papyrus or parchment, and they were in a style that was not Greek or Roman or Egyptian. In fact, they resembled no style of art I have ever seen. And the writing was utterly incomprehensible, just tiny squiggles attached to long, straight lines. Yet the constellations were perfectly recognizable, once you understood the stylization of the art.”

“Who went first?”

“Atia. She gave Ashthuva young Octavius’s birth date and time and Ashthuva went over a sheet that seemed to be some sort of conversion table. I could make out a column that listed the Roman consuls of the past fifty or so years, and next to it a list in Greek of the Olympiads and the successive archons of Athens and next to that a column of writing in that odd language from the charts. It was pretty clear that this was her way of translating Roman and Greek dates into her own system. It was not ancient like the charts and it was written on very fine parchment.”

“Quite clear,” I commended. “There was no nonsense with braziers and arcane things burning? No purification ritual or mysterious libations?”

“None of that, and what if there were? We have plenty of those things in our own religion.”

“Yes, but it seems to make more sense when we do it.”

“Anyway, astrology is not a religion. How could it be? It makes no provision for the will of the gods, nor of their mutability. It involves no sacrifices or appeals to higher powers. It simply deals with human destiny as it is determined by the positions of the stars and planets at the moment of birth and their relations and juxtapositions as they change throughout life.”