Bruce Macbain - Roman Games

“No, but tell me what has happened. What are they shouting outside?” She gripped his hand and tried to struggle up on an elbow. He felt her trembling.

“Yes, yes, all right. The emperor has been assassinated. Before that, the Praetorian commandant and his men came here to take Amatia away and to, well, to deal with me.” She needn’t know every detail. “Then you went into labor and Amatia took command. I confess I’ve never seen anyone so magnificent. She refused to leave us. She sent a slave running for the midwife. And she convinced Petronius that I had joined their conspiracy to overthrow the emperor. Yes, that’s what it was all about. I don’t know if he believed her, but such force leapt from that woman’s eyes…Short and stout she may be, but at that moment, she seemed to tower over him like the great statue of Minerva come to life. Anyway he backed down.” “And had you? Joined them?” Pliny shook his head wearily. “At that moment I honestly don’t know.” For a while they were both silent. Then Calpurnia whispered, “And now, husband, I want to see my baby.” He covered his eyes with his hand.

A week later.

Domitian’s corpse had been carted away on a common litter by the public undertakers, as they did with paupers. His old nurse saw to his burial in an inconspicuous spot. The elderly Nerva, looking shrunken inside the voluminous folds of Domitian’s triumphal toga, had presided as emperor over the final day of the Roman Games. In the city, people waited nervously for the tramp of approaching legions, but, as it became clear that there would be no civil war, rejoicing broke out anew and continued for days.

A communique had been promptly released from the palace announcing that the tyrant had been killed. No names were named but the text underlined that his death had occurred at the fifth hour on the fourteenth day before the Kalends, the precise day and hour that had been widely prophesied. Plainly, Fate, or the stars, or call it what you will, had spoken. There was no gainsaying it. And Parthenius had even found the time, during those last hectic days, to throw together an imperial horoscope for Nerva. So that clinched the matter.

The dead emperor’s memory was formally damned by the Senate. In an orgy of hate, his arches and monuments were demolished, his name obliterated from inscriptions. The months Germanicus and Domitianus reverted to their old names, September and October.

The Deified Julius and Augustus had named the months Quinctilis and Sextilis respectively after themselves, but they had died with honors and the changes seemed likely to last; not so Domitian. It would be as if he had never existed. The following day Aurelius Fulvus, the city prefect, who had been a regime stalwart to the end, was removed from office, and Pliny was politely relieved of his post as vice-prefect, although with a commendation from Nerva for good work and a hint that, having shown such a talent for detection, there might be further assignments of a confidential nature. Pliny devoutly hoped there would not be. He had sunk into a deep funk, crushed by the double loss of his stillborn son and Verpa’s slaves. Apart from unavoidable duties, he hadn’t left the house in a week.

All that drew him out today was a desperate message from Hispulla. Corellius Rufus, her husband, had resolved to starve himself to death; she begged Pliny to come and reason with him. He approached this meeting with a heavy heart.

When he arrived he was dismayed to find Amatia there too. How should he feel about this woman who had saved his and Calpurnia’s lives while coolly condemning forty innocent human beings to death? Now, unexpectedly he was face to face with her one last time. Though he scarcely recognized her. She lay stretched on a couch beside the old man, looking nearly as ill as he did. Her hair hung limp around her drawn face. She too had decided to end her life.

Pliny went swiftly to his mentor, knelt beside the couch and took his hand. “Sir, I have lost much, am I now to lose you?”

The old man dismissed this with a stern look. “I told you once, my boy, that I only wanted to outlive that monster by a day, and I have done so, thanks to the bravery of Amatia and Iatrides and, though I hate to say it, the odious Parthenius-perhaps him most of all. Domitian could kill any number of us senators with impunity. His great mistake was in frightening the creature who put him to bed every night.”

“Sir, I know your part in all this. Why couldn’t you have confided in me?”

“And forced a role on you that you mightn’t have chosen for yourself? And a reputation for conspiracy that could follow you the rest of your days? No. It was better this way. You will be a valued senator and a trusted adviser. You have a distinguished career before you. Accept it and put this past unpleasantness out of your mind; that is what a philosopher would do. It’s all over and done with.” He smiled benignly and patted him on the shoulder. And as for that meeting where he himself had voted for his protege’s death? Well, what good would it do to confess that now?

All over and done with, Pliny thought ruefully. For the slaves certainly. He had forced himself to go to the Colosseum to view their charred remains, still smoking on the embers of the pyre where they had been burned alive. He regarded it as his punishment.

There had been no trial in the Senate; Nerva Caesar heard the case in private. Pliny laid out the facts and pleaded for the slaves-he had spent all night preparing his oration. But the emperor stopped him in mid-flight with a peremptory wave of his arm. The transformation of man into monarch, Pliny noted, had taken place with remarkable swiftness.

“Enough! I will not inaugurate my reign by involving a Vestal Virgin in scandal as Domitian would have done. You tell me the slave Ganymede attacked his master with a dagger. The fact that the man was already dead is a detail. No one wants to know that the Vestalis Maxima has committed a sordid murder. They want to hear that slaves are guilty and will get the punishment they deserve. If I let them off, not a senator in Rome will feel safe in his bed at night and it is crucial that I keep the Senate on my side in these early days.”

“But in the name of justice, sir…”

“Senator, justice and the law are rather different things-a lesson you should have learned by now. I will be as just as I can afford to be, no more and no less.”

Amatia interrupted his reverie. Raising herself on an elbow, she ventured a smile at him. “You were wrong, you know, Gaius Plinius. There is no civil war, no blood in the streets.”

Pliny inclined his head. “We have been luckier than we deserved. Perhaps the gods have pitied us.”

“Don’t thank the gods,” Corellius broke in, “thank Trajan, the governor of Upper Germany. He is content to hold his legions in check and wait for Nerva to die a natural death. He knows it won’t be long. I had his word on it.”

Pliny sighed. How much else was there that he hadn’t known?

For a long moment a silence hung between the three of them. Then Amatia spoke. “You may ask yourself, Gaius Plinius, why I didn’t destroy the letter and horoscope once I possessed them.”

He raised an eyebrow. He had wondered.

“I had a reason. I vowed to burn them at the underground chamber where my darling Cornelia lies buried, as an offering to her shade, so that she would know how I took vengeance for her. And a few nights ago, in secret, that is what I did. And the next day I petitioned Nerva to release me from my service to the goddess-which he has done. I am no longer the Purissima, but only a woman, alone. Nothing remains for me now but to die and, if the poets speak truly, my shade and Cornelia’s will soon be together again.” “Hades, they say, is a gloomy place.” “It won’t matter.” “Even if you encounter the mournful shades of forty slaves there?”