Steven Saylor - Catilina's riddle

It was unthinkable that the event should take place anywhere but Rome, and since Eco's house was the logical place, he had offered early in the year to organize the details. That role in itself would have been a sufficient gift for Eco to give his brother, I thought. Eco had worked out the expenses and had asked me for a sum which I thought generous but reasonable. I discovered only later that he had more than matched the sum himself.

The day began with the erection of a yellow canopy over the garden. Slaves trotted about on the roofs of the porticos, hoisting the edges of the canopy and pulling the corners tight to fit them onto hooks. Below, more slaves began assembling tables and covering them with cloths and setting dining couches all about. Many of the couches were quite exquisite, with finely carved legs and plush pillows of many colours; the best of the couches (as well as the best of the serving slaves) Eco had borrowed from some of his well-heeled clients. From the kitchen came the clanging of pots and the bustling sounds of slaves hard at work.

Our morning meal, however, consisted humbly enough of fresh figs and bread. I watched Meto as he hungrily bit into his handful of bread, and saw no evidence of the doubt and dismay that had visited him the night before. He seemed rested, quietly excited, and only a little nervous. Good, I thought; let nothing spoil this day.

After eating, the family departed for the baths. Two women slaves came along to attend to Bethesda and Menenia. The slave whose dudes included grooming and barbering Eco would also be joining us. On this day Meto would receive his first shave.

We did not travel on foot, for Eco had rented a team of three litters and litter bearers for the day. They were waiting for us at the foot of the little trail leading down from the house to the Subura Way. Diana squealed with delight when she saw the broad-shouldered slaves and the long, elegant Utters. Bethesda tried to hide her surprise behind a cosmopolitan moue. Menenia smiled knowingly. Meto blushed and looked almost embarrassed at being offered such a luxury.

'Eco,' I said under my breath, 'this must have cost—'

'Papa, it's only for one day! Besides, it's a special rate. I arranged it over a month ago. At the time the owner thought, of course, that on this date the elections would just be over and the out-of-towners would have already gone back to the countryside, leaving no one to hire his Utters. I got them for next to nothing.'

'Still—’

'Climb in! Here, you can share this one with Diana. I'll ride with Meto, and the women can ride together. The slaves will follow behind on foot.'

And so I took a ride through the streets of Rome with Diana on my lap. I would be a liar if I said that it was anything less than an absolute delight. Even at that early hour traffic was beginning to thicken, but what did it matter that we had to pause at every street corner, when everything we passed held such fascination for Diana? The smell of baking bread delighted her as much as the scents that wafted from me perfume seller's shop; she clapped her hands and laughed at a group of bleary-eyed rustics emerging from a brothel, finding them quite as absurd and amusing as a team of half-naked acrobats who had decided to practise their handstands and cartwheels in a little square off the Subura Way. She bestowed a smile and a friendly wave on two grey-haired slave women who smiled but did not wave back, too burdened with their morning shopping, and then she did the same to a pair of gaunt, unshaven brutes whom I knew to be paid assassins; the two looked rather chagrined and waved weakly back. All things were equal in Diana's eyes; everyone and everything was equally fascinating. That, I thought, is what it means to be a child and why we long for childhood in our dreams; later on we are forced to choose and discriminate at every turn. Being a man and a citizen and a grown-up meant, for example, having to choose at times between the likes of Catilina and Cicero — and what fun was that, compared to Diana's simple delight in looking and laughing and accepting without question each moment of being alive?

After a while we veered off the Subura Way and took a series of smaller streets that skirted the foot of the Oppian Hill and eventually intersected with the Sacred Way. Here we turned right and shortly came to a halt just outside the Forum, at the steps leading up to the Senian Baths.

Inside the main entrance, beneath a shaded portico, the men and women parted ways. Diana was peeved at the separation and pouted, then was quickly distracted when Menenia leaned down and said that they would take turns brushing one another's hair. Diana abandoned me at once, and I watched her skip away towards the women's baths, flanked by Menenia and Bethesda holding her hands, and the two slave women following behind with their burden of unguents and brushes and combs.

'She has quite a way with children,' I said, looking after Menenia and her long black hair.

'Yes,' said Eco, nodding and smiling. 'I don't suppose—' 'Not yet, Papa.'

He led us into the recently rebuilt and enlarged men's baths. The size was impressive, sprawling, almost Egyptian in scale. Even so, Eco complained about the crush. 'Normally you'd have room to swing your elbows,' he sighed, 'but with so many men in the city for the election — well, you see how full it is.'

We made our way to the central courtyard, where two naked wresders were grappling on the lawn. Their companions stood by, either cheering them on or stretching their own muscles. Beneath the shaded portico a group of Stoics, fully dressed, sat in a circle. As we passed them, I overheard two of them arguing the merits of

Cicero's rhetorical style versus that of Hortensius, but it seemed to me that most of the philosophers were more interested in watching the naked young athletes.

Within the walls I was struck at once by the smell of the place (water on stone, bodies filthy and bodies clean) and the vague booming echoes that bounced from the domes in the ceiling (men laughing, boys whispering, water sloshing and dripping and splashing, the rhythmic slapping of wet feet against paving stones). We stripped out of our tunics and piled them onto the waiting, outstretched arms of Meto's barber. The slave folded them neatly and stored them in a niche in the wall, then returned with towels and strigils for our use.

We bathed first in the warm pool, which was gently scented with hyacinth, then in the hot pool, which made Meto yelp and lift his bottom from the water — and inspired the men already immersed to their necks to croak with laughter that echoed about the high-ceilinged room. Meto took no offence and merely laughed with them, suppressing another yelp as he lowered himself delicately but resolutely into the steaming, swirling water.

Scraped clean by the strigils, our faces flushed and our beards softened by the hot water, we removed ourselves from the pool and took turns submitting ourselves to the barber's blade. Meto went first, for this was his special day and the first time a razor would touch his face. The slave got into the spirit of things and made quite a production out of what could have been accomplished with three or four simple passes of the blade. There was, to be sure, a fair amount of downy growth on Meto's cheeks, almost invisible except when seen at certain angles in the light, while on his upper lip and his chin there was hardly any hair at all. Nevertheless, the barber approached the job as if he were faced with a grizzled veteran who had not shaved in months. He whetted the long, slender blade against a leather strop, rapidly, passing it back and forth until Meto, watching the guttering metal, became fascinated. The barber applied a hot, steaming towel to Meto's face and cooed to him like a charioteer calming a steed. He circled about him and delicately applied the edge of the blade to Meto's cheeks, jaw, neck, and chin, and, saving the most vulnerable and difficult spot for last, to his upper lip. Meto flinched more than once — being shaved is, after all, the most intimate duty a man can entrust to a slave, and real trust is built only with time. But the man did a splendid job. When it was over there was not a single drop of blood to be seen anywhere, neither on the towel nor the blade nor on Meto's freshly shaved face. Meto seemed almost disappointed not to have been wounded, but he was fascinated by the novel sensation of touching his own denuded flesh.