György Spiró - Captivity

“This house is no longer mine!” Claudius cried out. “I have had to mortgage it, and my name is still on display in the Forum! Eight million sesterces I had to pay for the unprecedented honor of becoming one of Caligula’s priests, which he was so gracious as to offer me! Never in my life did I have more than a hundred thousand! Never! And even that I could never have spent either! It started with my house burning down! Augustus rebuilt it, but apart from that I got no more money from him! I’ve lived, and still live, off loans! I can be evicted from here at any time! Made homeless! Where will that leave my daughters and servants?”

Philo asked after the emperor’s health, at which Claudius — a grandson of Augustus and Mark Antony, and priest to Emperor Caligula — just shrugged his shoulders.

“He pretends to have gone mad,” he said. “But he’s just wicked. He’s putting on an act. He’s testing boundaries just the way an adolescent does.”

Philo then asked what sort of reception might Alabarch Alexander encounter with him.

Claudius mused.

“He’s unpredictable,” he said. “He has one thing and another running through his head, but as to what comes out on top at any moment even the gods cannot say.”

Claudius and Philo then started talking about authors and scrolls, mentioning the name of the historian Cordus, and, forgetting about Uri, they wandered off into another room. So Claudius had a copy of Cordus’s celebrated scroll, which Augustus himself had ordered be burned. Cordus, having come into conflict with Sejanus, starved himself to death, and the writer’s daughter, Marcia, had preserved a copy of the book and was now having it republished. Cordus had eulogized the virtues of Brutus and Cassius, Julius Caesar’s assassins, barely concealing his Republican sympathies. Uri gazed longingly in the direction Philo had headed: he would be reading through it right now. Uri was left standing alone in the hall and did not know what he should do.

In stormed a black-haired, plump woman in disarray, wearing a dirty gown and barefooted. She stared at Uri.

“What are you doing here?” she squawked in Latin.

Uri was just about to answer but the woman rushed onward out of the hall.

She might be Messalina, Claudius’s wife.

Nothing happened, so Uri strolled over to the window and looked out; a neglected house stood opposite, the shutters on its windows closed; maybe that was Agrippa’s house.

Why would the houses of Claudius and Agrippa have been built next to each other?

Was Claudius’s house, he wondered, the same as the one whose rebuilding Augustus had financed? Eight hundred thousand sesterces was what Augustus had bequeathed to Claudius, so he had more money now than he remembered. Uri himself had read Augustus’s will in some old copy of the Acta Diurna ; it had caused quite a stir at the time that the emperor should have thought of such an unsuccessful grandson.

A slim, round-shouldered man with a square head and disheveled black hair entered the room and stopped short.

“Who are you?”

“I came with Philo of Alexandria, who has gone off with Claudius to read something,” said Uri.

“And?”

“And they left me here,” said Uri.

The round-shouldered man pondered.

“If you’d like something to drink or eat, sir, come into the atrium,” he said.

Uri thanked him and followed.

It was a big house, with lots of half-empty, barely furnished rooms. The atrium was simply vast.

Two adolescent girls in rumpled dresses were pecking distractedly at food whilst seated on a carpet.

“Claudius’s daughters, Antonia and Octavia,” the round-shouldered man introduced them; they did not look up. “How should we address you, sir?”

“My name is Gaius Theodorus,” said Uri “A Jewish Roman citizen.”

“Narcissus, slave,” said the round-shouldered man. “What wine may I pour for you?”

“None, thank you.”

“Some fruit?”

“Perhaps a bit, yes please…”

Uri ate as he gazed at the girls, who were lazily sprawling and not at all pretty.

A man turned up and set himself down familiarly next to one of the girls. He was followed by three more, all sleepy and rumpled; they must have woken up in one of the rooms somewhere not long before.

“We’re going to the baths,” one of them threw out to Narcissus. “We’ll be back in the afternoon.”

“As you wish, sir.”

Servants swarmed in. One started to cook, three more carried logs for the fire. A few men, some elderly, some young, also wandered in, and Narcissus poured them glasses of wine. They requested hot water; Narcissus sprinkled spices into the watered wine, which he then placed on the fireplace. Uri lounged in a corner and looked around in amazement at this unusually busy morning traffic in the roomy atrium. Did all these people live here, or had they only come as guests? They were certainly very much at ease, as if the house was theirs. Maybe it was, in fact, theirs, if these were Claudius’s creditors.

Narcissus was lying prostrate on the floor and started to copy something, groaning from time to time. Uri crawled over on all fours and took a look before exclaiming:

“That’s Aquila’s shorthand!”

Narcissus looked up.

“You know it?”

“I learned it when I was a child,” said Uri.

“It’s very difficult,” sighed Narcissus. “This is a speech of Claudius’s; he always writes that way, but often he himself can’t make it out. It’s my job to put it into normal lettering.”

“Give it to me, I’ll do it,” said Uri.

“But, sir…”

“I’ve nothing to do anyway,” said Uri, setting himself on his belly.

Narcissus the slave sat back on his heels and, impressed, held his peace.

Uri could see objects superbly well when they were close to his eyes, and Claudius’s shorthand was not unsystematic. A scribe by the name of Tiro, a freedman of Cicero’s, was said to have invented a system of shorthand, and this had been refined by Aquila, one of Maecenas’s freedmen. Tiro, possibly following an older, discarded, Greek syllabic system of writing, denoted frequent phonetic junctions with specific downward and upward squiggling lines, while Aquila went further by dropping the declined and conjugated endings of nouns and verbs; after all, it makes no difference what function a word serves or what conjugation applies to it as long as a person either knows it anyway or is able to deduce it from the context. On checking his work, a conscientious note taker will also write in the word endings while the original intention is still fresh in his mind, but Claudius had neglected to do that, so Narcissus had good reason for his groaning.

“Just tell me, though, what the speech is about,” Uri looked up, screwing his eyes up tightly.

“Virtue and pleasure, in the manner of Democritus,” said Narcissus.

“Thanks.”

Uri became immersed in working out the text. He quickly realized that Claudius had mixed Greek words in with the Latin, so he was supposed to render these too in Latin.

It was almost ready when Narcissus called him to the table. There were about two dozen people sitting around a huge table, and no one showed any interest in Uri’s joining them to eat. It struck him that it was far from easy to tell which of them might be slaves and which senators.

Seated next to him on the right was a quiet young man with broad cheekbones and thin blades for lips who was addressed as Titus; then next to him was a hulking, ruddy-faced fellow who was constantly gabbing even with his mouth full, Sabinus by name, who the signs indicated might be the elder brother of Titus; on his left sat a certain Dexter, a thin man with a protruding Adam’s apple; next to each of Claudius’s daughters with their unimpressive outer appearances reclined their suitors, one of them answering to the name of Gnaeus, the other, Lucius. Strolling around, a certain Diespiter hacked up the food on a golden platter. A Lupus, Asinus, Celer, and Lusius were listened to with some respect, and Uri dimly recalled that these men had already been consuls. One bashful man was known as Afer, and a fat, elderly gentleman seated at the head of the table was identified as Appius; he was, apparently, the father of the Lucius who was the suitor of one of Claudius’s daughters. Posides, a round-faced eunuch, was patted genially on the back by everyone he approached. An old woman, Aelia, was humming loudly and rocking back and forth as she reclined. Slaves called Pallas and Callistus changed the plates, and a young man, Helius, mixed the wine. Everyone knew everyone else, just like one big family. At one point Messalina dashed in, made an excuse that she had lots of things to do, and raced off again. Several of the servants were reclining at the table, a long way from Uri, who therefore could not see their faces, though he was able to hear them addressed as Myron, Polybius and Harpocras. Even though it was past noon by then, Messalina was still not properly dressed. Philo and Claudius had not shown up again, and must have become absorbed in scrolls somewhere, so once the eating had finished Uri went back to work, again lying on his stomach.