Robert Silverberg: Getting to Know the Dragon

I reached the theater at nine that morning, half an hour before the appointed time, for I knew only too well how unkind the Caesar Demetrius could be to the unpunctual. But the Caesar, it seemed, had arrived even earlier than that. I found Labienus, his personal guard and chief drinking companion, lounging by the theater entrance; and as I approached, Labienus smirked and said, “What took you so long? Caesar’s been waiting for you.”

“I’m half an hour early,” I said sourly. No need to be tactful with the likes of Labienus—or Polykrates, as I should be calling him, now that Caesar has given us all new Greek names. “Where is he?”

Labienus pointed through the gate and turned his middle finger straight upward, jabbing it three times toward the heavens. I limped past him without another word and went inside.

To my dismay I saw the figure of Demetrius Caesar right at the very summit of the theater, the uppermost row, his slight figure outlined sharply against the brilliant blue of the morning sky. It was less than six weeks since I had broken my ankle hunting boar with the Caesar in the interior of the island; I was still on crutches, and walking, let alone climbing stairs, was a challenge for me. But there he was, high up above.

“So you’ve turned up at last, Pisander!” he called. “It’s about time. Hurry on up! I’ve got something very interesting to show you.”

Pisander. It was last summer when he suddenly bestowed the Greek names on us all. Julius and Lucius and Marcus lost their good honest Roman praenomina and became Eurystheos and Idomeneos and Diomedes. I who was Tiberius Ulpius Draco was now Pisander. It was the latest fashion at the court that the Caesar maintained—at his Imperial father’s insistence—down here in Sicilia, these Greek names: to be followed, we all supposed, by mandatory Greek hairstyles and sticky pomades, the wearing of airy Greek costumes, and, eventually, the introduction on an obligatory basis of the practice of Greek buggery. Well, the Caesars amuse themselves as they will; and I might not have minded it if he had named me something heroic, Agamemnon or Odysseus or the like. But Pisander? Pisander of Laranda was the author of that marvelous epic of world history, Heroic Marriages of the Gods, and it would have been reasonable enough for Caesar to name me for him, since I am an historian also. And also there is the earlier Pisander, Pisander of Camirus, who wrote the oldest known epic of the deeds of Herakles. But there was yet another Pisander, a fat and corrupt Athenian politician who comes in for some merciless mockery in the Hyperbolos of Aristophanes, and I happen to know that play is one of Caesar’s special favorites. Since the other two Pisanders are figures out of antiquity, obscure except to specialists like me, I cannot help but think that Caesar had Aristophanes’s character in mind when coining my Greek name for me. I am neither fat nor corrupt, but the Caesar takes great pleasure in vexing our souls with such little pranks.

Forcing a cripple to climb to the top of the theater, for example. I went hobbling painfully up the steep stone steps, flight after flight after flight, until I emerged at last at the very highest row. Demetrius was staring off toward the side, admiring the wonderful spectacle of Mount Etna rising in the west, snow-capped, stained by ashes at its summit, a plume of black smoke coiling from its boiling maw. The views that can be obtained up here atop the great theater of Tauromenium are indeed breathtaking; but my breath had been taken sufficiently by the effort of the climb, and I was in no mood just then to appreciate the splendor of the scenery about us.

He was leaning against the stone table in the top-row concourse where the wine sellers display their wares during intermission. An enormous scroll was laid out in front of him. “Here is my plan for the improvement of the island, Pisander. Come take a look and tell me what you think of it.”

It was a huge map of Sicilia, covering the entire table. Drawn practically to full scale, one might say. I could see great scarlet circles, perhaps half a dozen of them, marked boldly on it. This was not at all what I was expecting, since the ostensible purpose of the meeting this morning was to discuss the Caesar’s plan for renovating the Tauromenium theater. Among my various areas of expertise is a certain knowledge of architecture. But no, no, the renovation of the theater was not at all on Demetrius’s mind today.

“This is a beautiful island,” he said, “but its economy has been sluggish for decades. I propose to awaken it by undertaking the most ambitious construction program Sicilia has ever seen. For example, Pisander, right here in our pretty little Tauromenium there’s a crying need for a proper royal palace. The villa where I’ve been living these past three years is nicely situated, yes, but it’s rather modest, wouldn’t you say, for the residence of the heir to the throne?” Modest, yes. Thirty or forty rooms at the edge of the steep cliff overlooking town, affording a flawless prospect of the sea and the volcano. He tapped the scarlet circle in the upper right-hand corner of the map surrounding the place that Tauromenium occupies in northeastern Sicilia. “Suppose we turn the villa into a proper palace by extending it down the face of the cliff a bit, eh? Come over here, and I’ll show you what I mean.”

I hobbled along behind him. He led me around to a point along the rim where his villa’s portico was in view, and proceeded to describe a cascading series of levels, supported by fantastic cantilevered platforms and enormous flaring buttresses, that would carry the structure down the entire face of the cliff, right to the shore of the Ionian Sea far below. “That would make it ever so much simpler for me to get to the beach, wouldn’t you say? If we were to build a track of some sort that ran down the side of the building, with a car suspended on cables? Instead of having to take the main road down, I could simply descend within my own palace.”

I stared the goggle-eyed stare of incredulity. Such a structure, if it could be built at all, would take fifty years to build and cost a billion sesterces, at the least. Ten billion, maybe.

But that wasn’t all. Far from it.

“Then, Pisander, we need to do something about the accommodations for visiting royalty at Panormus.” He ran his finger westward across the top of the map to the big port farther along the northern shore. “Panormus is where my father likes to stay when he comes here; but the palace is six hundred years old and quite inadequate. I’d like to tear it down and build a full-scale replica of the Imperial palace on Palatine Hill on the site, with perhaps a replica of the Forum of Roma just downhill from it. He’d like that: make him feel at home when he visits Sicilia. Then, as a nice place to stay in the middle of the island while we’re out hunting, there’s the wonderful old palace of Maximianius Herculeus near Enna, but it’s practically falling down. We could erect an entirely new palace—in Byzantine style, let’s say—on its site, being very careful not to harm the existing mosaics, of course. And then—”

I listened, ever more stupefied by the moment. Demetrius’s idea of reawakening the Sicilian economy involved building unthinkably expensive royal palaces all over the island. At Agrigentum on the southern coast, for example, where the royals liked to go to see the magnificent Greek temples that are found there and at nearby Selinunte, he thought that it would be pleasant to construct an exact duplicate of Hadrianus’s famous villa at Tibur as a sort of tourist lodge for them. But Hadrianus’s villa is the size of a small city. It would take an army of craftsmen at least a century to build its twin at Agrigentum. And over at the western end of the island he had some notion for a castle in rugged, primordial Homeric style, or whatever he imagined Homeric style to be, clinging romantically to the summit of the citadel of Eryx. Then, down at Syracusae—well, what he had in mind for Syracusae would have bankrupted the Empire. A grand new palace, naturally, but also a lighthouse like the one in Alexandria, and a Parthenon twice the size of the real one, and a dozen or so pyramids like those in Aegyptus, only perhaps a little bigger, and a bronze Colossus on the waterfront like the one that used to stand in the harbor at Rhodos, and—I’m unable to set down the entire list without wanting to weep.