Robert Harris - Pompeii

The weight of the torches was making his arms ache. He went outside and stacked them on one of the wagons, then leaned against it, thinking. More of Ampliatus’s men had arrived. The loading had finished and they were sprawled in the shade, waiting for orders. The oxen stood placidly, flicking their tails, their heads in clouds of swarming flies.

If the Augusta’s accounts, back at the Piscina Mirabilis, were in such a mess, might it be because they had been tampered with?

He glanced up at the cloudless sky. The sun had passed its zenith. Becco and Corvinus should have reached Abellinum by now. The sluice gates might already be closed, the Augusta starting to drain dry. He felt the pressure of time again. Nevertheless, he made up his mind and beckoned to Polites. “Go into the baths,” he ordered, “and fetch another dozen torches, a dozen lamps, and a jar of olive oil. And a coil of rope, while you’re at it. But no more, mind. Then, when you’ve finished here, take the wagons and the men up to the castellum aquae, next to the Vesuvius Gate, and wait for me. Corax should be coming back soon. And while you’re at it, see if you can buy some food for us.” He gave the slave his bag. “There’s money in there. Look after it for me. I shan’t be long.”

He brushed the residue of brick dust and puteolanum from the front of his tunic and walked out the open gate.

HORA SEPTA

[14:10 hours]

If magma is ready to be tapped in a high-level reservoir, even a small

change of regional stress, usually associated with an earthquake, can

disturb the stability of the system and bring about an eruption.

— VOLCANOLOGY (SECOND EDITION)

Ampliatus’s banquet was just entering its second hour, and of the twelve guests reclining around the table only one showed signs of truly enjoying it, and that was Ampliatus himself. It was stiflingly hot for a start, even with one wall of the dining room entirely open to the air, even with three slaves in their crimson livery stationed around the table waving fans of peacock feathers. A harpist beside the swimming pool plucked mournfully at some formless tune.

And four diners to each couch! This was at least one too many, in the judgment of Lucius Popidius, who groaned to himself as each fresh course was set before them. He held to the rule of Varro, that the number of guests at a dinner party ought not to be less than that of the Graces (three), nor to exceed that of the Muses (nine). It meant that one was too close to one’s fellow diners. Popidius, for example, reclined between Ampliatus’s dreary wife, Celsia, and his own mother, Taedia Secunda—close enough to feel the heat of their bodies. Disgusting. And when he propped himself on his left elbow and reached out with his right hand to take some food from the table, the back of his head would brush Celsia’s shallow bosom and—worse—his ring occasionally become entangled with his mother’s blond hairpiece, shorn from the head of some German slave girl and now disguising the elderly lady’s thin gray locks.

And the food! Did Ampliatus not understand that hot weather called for simple, cold dishes, and that all these sauces, all this elaboration, had gone out of fashion back in Claudius’s time? The first of the hors d’oeuvres had not been too bad—oysters bred in Brundisium then shipped two hundred miles round the coast for fattening in the Lucrine Lake, so that the flavors of the two varieties could be tasted at once. Olives and sardines, and eggs seasoned with chopped anchovies—altogether acceptable. But then had come lobster, sea urchins, and, finally, mice rolled in honey and poppy seeds. Popidius had felt obliged to swallow at least one mouse to please his host and the crunch of those tiny bones had made him break out in a sweat of nausea.

Sow’s udder stuffed with kidneys, with the sow’s vulva served as a side dish, grinning up toothlessly at the diners. Roast wild boar filled with live thrushes that flapped helplessly across the table as the belly was carved open, shitting as they went. (Ampliatus had clapped his hands and roared with laughter at that.) Then the delicacies: the tongues of storks and flamingos (not too bad), but the tongue of a talking parrot had always looked to Popidius like nothing so much as a maggot and it had indeed tasted much as he imagined a maggot might taste if it had been doused in vinegar. Then a stew of nightingales’ livers . . .

He glanced around at the flushed faces of his fellow guests. Even fat Brittius, who once boasted that he had eaten the entire trunk of an elephant, and whose motto was Seneca’s—“eat to vomit, vomit to eat”—was starting to look green. He caught Popidius’s eye and mouthed something at him. Popidius could not quite make it out. He cupped his ear and Brittius repeated it, shielding his mouth from Ampliatus with his napkin and emphasizing every syllable: “Tri-mal-chi-o.”

Popidius almost burst out laughing. Trimalchio! Very good! The freed slave of monstrous wealth in the satire by Titus Petronius, who subjects his guests to exactly such a meal and cannot see how vulgar and ridiculous he is showing himself. Ha ha! Trimalchio! For a moment, Popidius slipped back twenty years to his time as a young aristocrat at Nero’s court, when Petronius, that arbiter of good taste, would keep the table amused for hours by his merciless lampooning of the nouveau riche.

He felt suddenly maudlin. Poor old Petronius. Too funny and stylish for his own good. In the end, Nero, suspecting his own imperial majesty was being subtly mocked, had eyed him for one last time through his emerald monocle and had ordered him to kill himself. But Petronius had succeeded in turning even that into a joke—opening his veins at the start of a dinner in his house at Cumae, then binding them to eat and to gossip with his friends, then opening them again, then binding them, and so on, as he gradually ebbed away. His last conscious act had been to break a fluorspar wine-dipper, worth three hundred thousand sesterces, which the emperor had been expecting to inherit. That was style. That was taste.

And what would he have made of me, thought Popidius bitterly. That I—a Popidius, who played and sang with the Master of the World—should have come to this, at the age of forty-five: the prisoner of Trimalchio!

He looked across at his former slave, presiding at the head of the table. He was still not entirely sure how it had happened. There had been the earthquake, of course. And then, a few years later, the death of Nero. Then civil war, a mule-dealer as emperor, and Popidius’s world had turned upside down. Suddenly Ampliatus was everywhere—rebuilding the town, erecting a temple, worming his infant son onto the town council, controlling the elections, even buying the house next door. Popidius had never had a head for figures, so when Ampliatus had told him he could make some money, too, he had signed the contracts without even reading them. And somehow the money had been lost, and then it turned out that the family house was surety, and his only escape from the humiliation of eviction was to marry Ampliatus’s daughter. Imagine: his own ex-slave as his father-in-law! He thought the shame of it would kill his mother. She had barely spoken since, her face haggard with sleeplessness and worry.

Not that he would mind sharing a bed with Corelia. He watched her hungrily. She was stretched out with her back to Cuspius, whispering to her brother. He wouldn’t mind screwing the boy, either. He felt his prick begin to stiffen. Perhaps he might suggest a threesome? No—she would never go for it. She was a cold bitch. But he would soon be warming her up. His gaze met Brittius’s once more. What a funny fellow. He winked and gestured with his eyes to Ampliatus and mouthed in agreement, “Trimalchio!”