Allan Massie - Nero_s Heirs

She poured me a cup of wine. The woman withdrew to the kitchen. The girl stretched herself out. She was still wearing the same shift and displayed breasts and thighs.

'She'll make us some food,' she said. 'She's not my mother, you know.' 'So what is she?'

'She just took me in. Now, you could say I'm a lodger. I pay rent, quite a lot, depending…'

'I see,' I said, and reached down and, putting my arm round her, raised her up. She turned and kissed me. I slipped my hand under her shift. For a moment she let it rest there. Then she led me through to her room and the tumbled bed.

I didn't send all that last chapter to Tacitus; an edited version merely. I am even puzzled as to why I wrote it in such detail. At first I thought it was because it showed me in a good light, and therefore demonstrated Domitian's ingratitude. But that isn't really so. I even doubt now whether Vitellius would have put Domitian to death had I not intervened to save him. It would have been foolish, given Vitellius' own uncertainties, and the negotiations he still maintained with Flavius Sabinus. To have killed Vespasian's son would have been to destroy any chance of extricating himself from his own terrifying position. For that is the truth, I've no doubt: Vitellius was living in a nightmare, and fully conscious of the likely consequences of his unthinking weakness which had compelled him to give way to the demands of Caecina and Valens. Yet there were also moments when he believed in himself as Emperor.

Aulus Pettius kept Domitian safe. He was never forgiven. Within a few weeks of becoming Emperor Domitian ordered him to remove from Rome. I suppose he was fortunate Domitian acted so early in his reign, while the balance of his mind was not completely overthrown. I last heard of Aulus Pettius living in misanthropic retirement in the wild country of Boeotia. He used to write to me occasionally. I was his only correspondent. Later, that was to be one of the charges brought against me: that I had maintained a treasonable correspondence with an exile. Certainly our letters, which were intercepted and copied, could not fail to have displeased Domitian. We wrote of him with disdain. But I have run ahead of myself. I find it hard now to keep my thoughts in order. This enterprise on which I embarked so reluctantly has come to exert a strange fascination over me.

Was it to recall the girl Sybilla that I wrote that last chapter in such detail?

She was Sicilian. At first I took her for a prostitute and the moon-faced woman, whose name was Hippolyta, for her pimp or madam. The relationship was different and more complicated. Hippolyta had indeed found her on the streets, fallen (as Sybilla told me) in love with her, and bought her from the man who ran her. That was extraordinary enough. What was more extraordinary was that Hippolyta tolerated Sybilla's desire for men, though, as the girl told me, 'only one at a time'. She kept her mostly a sort of prisoner in the apartment, and Sybilla did not object. 'What is there out there,' she said, 'except the opportunity now and then to pick up a man? Now that I have you, for the time being, I've no need to go out.'

She was an inventive and delightful lover, all the more delightful because she despised and forbade any expression of emotion. I did with her all that I had longed to do to Domatilla. Sometimes, as I lay panting in her arms, damp skin against hot damp skin, her thick black hair over my face, I would see through the tresses the moon face of Hippolyta watching us. She never said anything, just looked, then turned away.

How strange that those two weeks of intense political excitement when the fate of Rome hung in the balance, my life perhaps with it, and the smell of blood hovered in the air, should have been for me days, too, of an equally intense eroticism. The other day, passing a stall where a merchant was selling spices, I found myself trembling. All at once I was a young man again, and did not know why, till, breathing in, I smelled Sybilla's body, which she never washed but sponged with an infusion of spices. That was real, as my other memories of her are not. What do they amount to? I can't even picture her face: only a little mole to the side of her mouth, just above a rather thick upper lip. And what else? The feel of her strong thick thighs as she wrapped her legs round me. I see Hippolyta's moon face more clearly than I see Sybilla's, though my lips and tongue ran over every inch of it.

Balthus lies among the hounds again. These memories of Sybilla revive my desire for him. It is as if by forcing myself on the boy I could regain what I found in congress with her – an absurd fancy.

1 shall write nothing of Sybilla to Tacitus, but she dominated my life in the days that followed.

One day I said to myself: does it matter who is Emperor so long as I have this?

Another day, Domatilla, in my mother's house, said to me, 'Is something wrong? You don't look at me as you used to.'

Some would have us believe that in happier times men contended over principles, now for office and power alone. Not having lived in these golden days, I cannot tell whether our times are degenerate, or whether politics has ever been a business condemned to nastiness and brutality. You, Tacitus, as a learned historian, will be able to settle this unanswerable question.

I was a partisan of the Flavians, on account initially of my love for Titus and friendship with Domitian. Then I was inspired by the idealism of Titus' talk of the meaning of Empire. But can I acquit myself of selfish motive? Can I pretend that I was activated by love of my country or a desire for peace? And if I cannot, then can I suppose that those who deserted Vitellius for Vespasian – Caecina and Bassus first of all – had any such honourable motives? Is it not more probable that fear lest others should outstrip them in the fickle regard of Vitellius, and hope that their treachery would be well-rewarded, drove them to betray the man to whom they had sworn faith, when they suspected that his cause was on the way to being lost?

In the city we awaited news from the north, not knowing even whether battle was joined, or whether neither side dared to be the first to attack. Rumours abounded, were discounted, though men know in their hearts that rumour is not always wild; it is sometimes correct.

So, when it was reported that Antonius Primus, having defeated Vitellius' army before Cremona, had, being angered by the support that city had given to the enemy, permitted his soldiers to abandon themselves to the extremes of lust and cruelty, sacking the city, murdering the citizens, raping the women and boys, and finally setting fire to the buildings after four days of slaughter, some said the report was too horrible to be true, others that its horror could not have been invented. And, indeed, those who believed the worst were proved right, as is commonly the case.

The news was brought to Vitellius, who had retired for a few days to a villa in the woods of Aricia between that town and Lake Albano. There, it was said, he rested himself in the shade of his gardens. Like those beasts which relapse into torpor when sufficiently well-fed, he chose to forget past, present, and the fearful future. It required the news of the disaster at Cremona to rouse him from sloth.

But his first act on returning to the city was to deny the report which had brought him back.

Flavius Sabinus told me that the so-called Emperor's judgement was no better than his nerve.

'In concealing the gravity of his position,' he said, 'he is making it impossible to redeem the situation. He refuses to listen to any talk of the war. If anyone returns from the front with bad news, he either has him clapped into prison or put to death. He behaves as if nothing can be true unless he chooses that it should be.'