A Pillar of Iron: A Novel of Ancient Rome

  “I have written several plays, in which comedy is entwined with tragedy, and the Greeks have received them with considerable acclaim. But I must do it all anonymously, because of my parents. I have made parodies of the most weighty of Greek plays, including Oedipus Rex and Elektra, and even the Romans laughed at them heartily, though Romans are not notable for their sense of humor. They prefer buffoons and clowns and broad situations to subtleties, and does this not argue that there remains some primitiveness in them? The Greeks love games, but they prefer the games which display the human form in agile grace, and are not mainly tests of strength. But then, in Rome power rings on stone. In Greece beauty stands in marble.

  “Still, I long for Rome. My father wishes to see his daughters there, and their husbands and children. He intends not to engage in business on his return. He said to me, ‘If one is to live to a peaceful old age, one must not become known to governments. Let not the eye of politicians alight on you!’ I believe him.

  “Dear friend, be cautious and circumspect. Do not arouse more animosity than you can afford. We send our affection to you, and our blessings.”

  Marcus rerolled the letter with a powerful feeling of love for his friend. But he also smiled. Noë’s concern for him was ludicrous. He was only a modestly successful young lawyer, now almost the sole support of his family through the gifts of grateful clients. (Some could not give him a copper.) He had practiced his profession for hardly more than a year. Clients came to his house on the Carinae, or to the house of Scaevola. The old pontifex maximus had given him a small room in his house, austerely furnished with but a table and two chairs, and shelves for his books of law, and with no window and no light except for a dim lamp. For this, Marcus paid his mentor a little but regular fee. The room was stifling even in the winter, for no air came except that which wafted through the door, which must be closed during consultations and confidences. Inevitably, it stank of sweat and parchment and damp stone and’ burning oil. “The odor of learning,” said Scaevola with a solemn face. “Or, perhaps, the odor of perfidy. When was a lawyer not perfidious, especially in these days?”

  He had had many arguments with Marcus concerning clients. “What?” he exclaimed. “You will not take a client who is overtly a criminal? But, have you not agreed that even criminals are entitled to just representation before the law? What a fool you are, Apollo. But I should not call you Apollo. The Apollonian light shines without restraint on all men, but your light would shine only on the just. Pah.”

  “I have no hesitancy in defending criminals,” Marcus had protested. “But I must be assured that in the particular crime under discussion the man is innocent of it, no matter his past. How, then, can I defend him with all my might?”

  “He is still entitled to representation. Put aside your scruples, or you will never be a rich man. But you do not care for riches!”

  In this, Scaevola was wrong. Marcus had begun to care for riches, for he was by nature prudent and did not deprecate the idea that a man was worthy of his labors. He had a family which must be protected. Still, he could not bring any eloquence to his command in behalf of a man obviously guilty of a foul deed.

  “It is the credo of lawyers that no man they defend is guilty, in spite of the facts,” Scaevola said. “It is a matter of a little juggling in your mind.”

  Marcus could not toss clubs in his mind to form a pattern he desired. “I am no juggler,” he said, to which Scaevola replied, “Then, you are no lawyer.” He added, “If you defend only those you believe to be guiltless of the crime of which they are accused you will want for bread. Remember, a man is innocent until proved guilty before a magistrate. That is Roman law. Law is an exercise in wits. It is like a combat in an arena, my simpleton.”

  Marcus understood, and it caused him anxiety for his future.

  “A lawyer must believe he is cleverer than other men, and particularly that he is more astute than a magistrate. But, you have no sense of irony. Who knows what was the intention of the formers of the laws? An intelligent lawyer must interpret them for the benefit of his client.”

  But Marcus was tremendously concerned by the fact that the tyrant, Cinna, was reinterpreting the strong, masculine, and just laws of old Rome. Even Cinna did not dare flout the written law and Constitution, but he had a host of subservient lawyers eternally busy in the reinterpretation of them. This would lead inevitably to chaos, injustice and outrage, and inevitable tyranny. The law stated that a man’s property was inviolate. But Cinna’s new tax laws violated that ancient provision of a proud country. A man’s property, it now appeared, was inviolate only against private thieves. But not against the government, which was engaged in constant and giant theft, sucking up the people’s substance and returning only sewage and debt. It did this with unchallenged impunity, and modern Romans did not protest; this demonstrated the pusillanimity to which they had descended. The populace now extolled the Gracchi, who had robbed the industrious of corn for the idle and profligate. No doubt the Gracchi had been virtuous men in their private lives. But their minds had been corrupted by sentimentality. They had been stoned to death by an infuriated people, and for a long time their execution had appeared just. Now they were heroes of a degraded populace, which despised honorable labor and preferred free bread and circuses.

  Not for the first time did Marcus realize that governments are enemies of the people. Now, as he stood in the spring sunshine on his paternal island, he considered the Theocracy of Judea, of which Noë had written him. Laws not based on the Law of God were evil laws. The end was national death.

  How long would Rome endure, his beloved country?

  He held the letter of Noë in his hand as he leaned against the sacred oak, and looked with trouble at the rushing river, lemon-colored in the light of spring. But a musing part of his brain engaged itself in admiration of the scene and the season. Spring was golden, not green. The tender tufts of trees gleamed with yellow, and shrubs and bushes burst into the fair light in all shades and hues from amber to primrose, from delicate gilt to glimmering honey. The whole appeared to have been plunged into aureate springs, then lifted again into place between its two rivers which rejected it and the daffodil-tinted sky. Only the grass, faintly emerald, disturbed the gilded appearance, the frail golden showers drooping from willow and birch, the tight golden stars of poplars and oaks. The view of Arpinum across the river seemed drenched in shadowy gold as it climbed hills still brazen from winter. Summer and autumn were not so fragrant as spring, so jubilant in the renewed celebration of life. The earth exhaled and the heart stirred, even the heart of a young and troubled and somewhat despondent Roman.

  He looked at the bridge that led to the mainland, the arched bridge of memory, and he thought of Livia. He thought of her as he remembered her more than ten years ago, a maiden of wildness and fragility, with glowing hair and strange blue eyes and virgin breast. As his mother had prophesied she remained forever young and chaste to him, safe from years and time, safe from sorrow and change. The faint spring wind sounded like her remembered song, unearthly and pure and pondering. Like the nymphs on many Grecian vases she was pursued but forever uncaught. She was a dream that did not pass, and she left no shadow.

  As he thought this the old savage sickness took him again, the old unappeased longing. He felt that he was in a large vessel, inexorably moving down the river while Livia stood on the island as a maiden, with hair and palla flowing in the wind, her hand upraised in farewell. He fled with time; she remained as a pure hue always imprisoned, yet shining, in Alexandrian glass. All about him was in activity, but where Livia stood the trees did not change their color, the sky did not darken or flame in dawn and sunset, the sun did not arch from horizon to horizon. It was always spring, and she was forever young and forever lost. The river took him away, but Livia sang her song to the wind and eternity.

  He had learned sternly to shut the lid of his mind upon Livia, as one shuts the lid of a jeweled box upon a treasure and then forgets it for a while. But
there was something about the light today, the descending sun, the scent of the earth, that held up the lid against his pressing hands. Livia lived; she was not a dream at all. It did not matter that no one spoke her name to him in Rome, that he did not know where she dwelled, or even if she lived at all any longer. She was a breathing presence to him; he heard her voice, clear and a little mocking, as he remembered it. He felt, if he only turned his head quickly in that Umbrian light he would see Livia again, like a dryad under the trees, fleet as a breath, as radiant as a vision. “Livia,” he said aloud. He did not turn his head, but he was certain that some emanation of her was near him, like the dear ghost of one who was dead yet lived. The Livia he knew and loved was not the wife of Lucius Sergius Catilina, having an existence under some unknown roof, forgetting him, busy with random things and apprehensions. She was Livia, and she had no other name. She was bound to his spirit as a vine is bound to a tree. His mother urged him to marry, for Quintus was in the army and he might be killed. The name of the Ciceroni lived still formless in his loins.

  He knew, however, that he must marry some day, for the sake of unborn sons. But that time was not now, while Livia still embraced him in dreams and fantasies. To marry would be to commit adultery. He had a fear that marriage would take from him something ineffable, something poetic which fell like a brilliant shower still on the mundane city of reality. The random woman in Rome, yes. But—not yet!—a wife on the hearth and at a loom in his house. Livia still occupied all the rooms of his heart.

  The spring wind was becoming cooler; he could feel it even through his wool cloak and in the folds of his long blue tunic and in the crevices of his leather shoes. The light was not so ardent now; it was fading from the walls and cherry roofs of Arpinum. The river sang; it was darkening to hurrying brown. He could hear the lowing of distant cattle as they came from the meadows. He heard the lonely voices of sheep. Eunice and, Athos would be directing the five slaves who lived with them on the duties of the evening. He must leave this bank, this golden forest, and return to the farmhouse for his supper. And then, silent and bereft, he would sit in what once was his father’s library and read before retiring to his empty bed.

  Yet, as if imposed on this scene, on this time, the aureate island remained, with its lovely dryad who never departed. It was to know this vision again that he had returned to the island through dangerous villages and towns, in this most dangerous time, against the pleas of his mother and her warnings. But no one disturbed Eunice and her diligent Athos. They lived in peace, and it was this peace he had sought. There were moments when he had found it. There were moments when he forgot the war, when he forgot the courts, forgot even his parents and his brother. He lived in amber. Each night he said, I must return, and each morning was a new day that was a replica of the one that had gone before. It was not only love for the island and its tranquillity that held him here. It was a dream and the dream was all that mattered. Eurydice was here, in fields of asphodels, and he recoiled from climbing up to a world of clangor and duties and grief, and the harsh ring of power and the hot exigencies of men. He must return, as did Orpheus, leaving Eurydice forever behind. But not today! And surely not tomorrow.

  Loneliness, with diaphanous forms of delight, was to him as yet preferable to plangent life. He had not come in vain. The island of dreams was more real to him, more desirable, more blissful, than anything the world of Rome could offer him, even if it were power and fortune. Here he could write the poems and the delicate essays that had gained a publisher for him in Rome. He wondered, sometimes, if all men kept a dream within them even to great age, if all had a secret island where their limbs were free and they looked upon other suns and stared at other moons. If they did not, then they had truly died.

  He did not hear the stealthy glide of a large boat near him. He did not start at the fierce eyes that gazed at him. He was listening to the choruses of song in the trees; he was watching the urgent flight of birds against the sky. So he heard no hushed footstep creeping upon him. The citron light was sparkling on the upper houses of Arpinum, and the west was a lake of gold on which floated rosy mist.

  When he felt iron arms suddenly seize him he could not believe it. So, at first, he only dimly struggled, numbly outraged. He was not frightened. He turned his head and saw four men in cloaks about him, the hoods falling over and concealing all but their mouths, which were cruel and triumphant. One of the men struck him sharply in the face, and he tried to recoil. But they held him. Another spoke angrily, “No, there must be no mar, no sign! Restrain yourself.”

  He did not recognize the voice. For an instant he thought these men were his own slaves; there were rumors that slaves were in revolt all over Italy against their masters. But another man said, “We must do what we must do, as it was commanded. Let us be quick about it, for I hear the bark of a dog, and who knows what brute will burst out upon us.” The voice was not rude as the voice of a slave. It had the cultivated accents of Rome. He, still incredulous, looked down at the hands that held him in such an immovable grip. They were not the hands of slaves, though they were strong. In a wildly clarified light he saw that one hand bore a ring, and it was a handsome ring artfully contrived.

  “What is this?” he cried. “Who are you? Unhand me, animals!” He thought of thieves, of vagabonds, of criminals from Arpinum. He opened his mouth to shout for help, but instantly a wad of cloth was forced between his teeth.

  It was then that for the first time he thought: Death.

  He struggled with all his strength, forcing his feet into the cool and yielding earth. Now he cursed his former supercilious attitude concerning physical prowess and dexterous throwing and heaving by using the strength of the antagonist against him. However, sudden and terrible fear gave him some strength; once he actually broke away from his captors, but they soon seized him again, laughing gleefully between their teeth. Panting, he tried to see their faces in the shadow of the hoods, but he saw only their violent mouths.

  They began to strip him, very carefully, holding him strongly against his struggles, as if they wished not to tear his garments. One removed his cloak, folded it and laid it down neatly on the grass. Another took from him, very dexterously, his long tunic and unfastened his leather girdle and purse with its few coins. These were placed in an orderly fashion on his cloak. They unlaced his shoes, put them side by side beside the heap of clothing. Marcus was so fascinated by this meticulous arranging of his effects that he stood still to watch in the clutch of the restraining arms. One man reached for the golden amulet of Pallas Athene which Aurelia Caesar had given him so long ago, but another man said, “No, he would not remove that, his amulet, while swimming. It would be his protection.”

  Then Marcus understood that he was to have an accident, and that explained the fact that no sharp knife or dagger had been used to dispatch him surely and at once.

  “His feet must not be soiled with earth or scratched with stones,” said one of the men who was apparently the leader. So Marcus was lifted in strong arms and carried to the bank of the river, which was now suddenly on fire with the sunset. He was laid almost lovingly in the boat, his ankles and feet held in hard hands. Then two of the men stealthily rowed to the middle of the river, while Marcus looked despairingly at the flaming sky and prayed for help and life. Death, in the abstract, had never seemed horrible to him, for he could philosophize with Socrates that a good man had nothing to fear in this life nor the next. Now, in his youth, he was overwhelmed with terror. Nothing mattered to him but that he must survive. He felt the sliding of the boat over the hurrying waters; the current was very swift here and would be arduous even for the most accomplished swimmers, and as the river had been fed by icy springs from the mountains it would be deathly cold and paralyzing even to one of great muscular power. Quintus, himself, the mighty swimmer, never ventured into the river until summer was on the land.

  “The current is furious,” said one of the rowers in a tone of satisfaction. “He will not linger long.”


  The air was already chill upon Marcus’ bare flesh, but he sweated with fear and dread as he was held in the bottom of the boat. Two of the rowers were carefully examining the island to be certain that there were no watchers, no one who could raise an alarm. Now the waters rocked the boat impatiently, and waves slapped the sides.

  “Would it not be better to wait for twilight?” asked one of the men.

  “No, for at twilight he would be missed and there would be searchers, with dogs,” replied another impatiently. “It must be done speedily.”

  The rowers had reached the center of the narrow river. They turned broadside to the current to hold the vessel. The four men regarded Marcus without animosity; he could feel the intensity of their hidden eyes. They smiled at him almost in a friendly fashion. “Drowning,” said one, “is not an unpleasant death. There are worse ways to die. Be grateful that we did not disembowel you or strip your flesh from your bones.”