Roma Eterna

  “Indeed. I have been transferred to Constantinopolis, where I am to be the new procurator. It is the highest administrative post in the former Eastern Empire.” His eyes were glittering with self-satisfaction. But then his expression changed. A kind of sadness came into them, a kind of tenderness. “Lady, you must believe me when I tell you that I greeted the news with a mixture of feelings, not all of them pleasant ones. It is a great honor for me. And yet I would not have left Venetia so quickly of my own choosing. We have barely begun to know each other; and now, to my immense regret, we must part.”

  He took my hands in his. He seemed almost to be at the edge of tears. His sincerity seemed real; or else he was a better actor than I suspected.

  A kind of numbness spread through me.

  “When do you leave?” I asked.

  “In three days, lady.”

  “Ah. Three days.”

  “Three very busy days.”

  You could always take me with you to Constantinopolis, I found myself thinking. There would surely be room for me somewhere in the vast palace of the former Basileus where you now will make your home.

  But of course that could never be. A Roman rising as swiftly as he was would never want to encumber himself with a Byzantine wife. A Byzantine mistress, perhaps. But mistresses of any sort were no longer what he needed. Now was the time for him to make an auspicious marriage and undertake the next stage of his climb. The procurator’s seat at Constantinopolis would detain him little longer than his proconsulship in Venetia had; his path would lead him before very long back to Roma. He would be a flamen, a tribune, perhaps Pontifex Maximus. If he played his cards right he might some day be Emperor. I might be summoned then to Roma to relive old times, perhaps. But I would not see him again before then.

  “May I stay this night with you?” he asked, with a strange new note of uncertainty in his voice, as though expecting that I might refuse.

  But of course I did not refuse. That would have been crass and petty; and in any case I wanted him. I knew that this was the last chance.

  It was a night of wine and poetry, of tears and laughter, of ecstasy and exhaustion.

  And then he was gone, leaving me mired in my petty little provincial life while he went on to Constantinopolis and glory. A grand procession of gondolas followed him down the canal as he made his way to the sea. A new Roman proconsul, so they say, will be arriving in Venetia any day now.

  From Falco I had one parting gift: the plays of Aeschylus, in a finely bound volume that had been produced on the printing press, which is one of those new inventions of which they are so proud in Roma. My first reaction was one of scorn, that he should give me this machine-made thing instead of a manuscript indited by hand. And then, as I had done so many times in the days of my involvement with this difficult man, I was forced to reconsider, to admire what at first sight I had seen as cheap and vulgar. The book was beautiful, in its way. More than that: it was a sign of a new age. To deny that new age, or turn my back on it, would be folly.

  And so I have learned at first hand of the power of Roma and of the insignificance of the formerly great. Our lovely Venetia was only a way station for him. Constantinopolis of Imperial grandeur will be the same. It was a powerful lesson: I have been thoroughly educated in the ways of Roma and the Romans, to my own great cost, for I see now as I never could have seen before that they are everything and we, polished and refined as we may be, are nothing at all.

  I had underestimated Quintus Pompeius Falco at every turn; I had underestimated his race the same way. As had we all, which is why they once again rule the world, or most of it, and we smile and bow and hope for their favor.

  He has written to me several times. So I must have made a strong impression on him. He speaks fondly, if guardedly, of our times together. He says nothing, though, about hoping that I will pay a visit to Constantinopolis to see him.

  But perhaps I will, one of these days, nevertheless. Or perhaps not. It all depends on what the new proconsul is like.

  A.U.C. 2543: 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 ost
ensible 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.

  “Well, Pisander, what do you say? Has there ever been a building program like this in the history of the world?”

  His face was shining. He is a very handsome man, is Demetrius Caesar, and in that moment, transfigured by his own megalomaniac scheme, he was a veritable Apollo. But a crazy one. What possible response could I have made to all that he had just poured forth? That I thought it was the wildest lunacy? That I very much doubted there was enough gold in all his father’s treasury to underwrite the cost of such an absurd enterprise? That we would all be long dead before these projects could be completed? The Emperor Lodovicus his father, when assigning me to the service of the Caesar Demetrius, had warned me of his volatile temper. A word placed wrongly and I might find myself hurled sprawling down the very steps up which I had just clambered with so much labor.

  But I know how to manage things when speaking with royalty. Tactfully but not unctuously I said, “It is a project that inspires me with awe, Caesar. I am hard pressed to bring its equal to mind.”

  “Exactly. There’s never been anything like it, has there? I’ll go down in history. Neither Alexander nor Sardanapalus nor Augustus Caesar himself ever attempted a public-works program of such ambitious size.—You, of course, will be the chief architect of the entire project, Pisander.”

  If he had kicked me in the gut I would not have been more thoroughly taken aback.

  I smothered a gasp and said, “I, Caesar? You do me too much honor. My primary field these days is historical scholarship, my lord. I’ve dabbled a bit in architecture, but I hardly regard myself as qualified to—”

  “Well, I do. Spare me your false modesty, will you, Draco?” Suddenly he was calling me by my true name again. That seemed very significant. “Everyone knows just how capable a man you are. You hide behind this scholarly pose because you think it’s safer that way, I would imagine, but I’m well aware of your real abilities, and when I’m Emperor I mean to make the most of them. That’s the mark of a great Emperor, wouldn’t you say—to surround himself with men who are great themselves, and to inspire them to rise to their full potentiality? I do expect to be a great Emperor, you know, ten years from now, twenty, whenever it is that my turn comes. But I’m already beginning to pick out my key men. You’ll be one of them.” He winked at me. “See to it that that leg heals fast, Draco. I mean to start this project off by building the Tauromenium palace, which I want you to design for me, and that means that you and I are going to be scrambling around on the face of that cliff looking for the best possible site. I don’t want you on crutches when we do that.—Isn’t the mountain beautiful today, Pisander?”

  In the space of three breaths I had become Pisander again.

  He rolled up his scroll. I wondered if we were finally going to discuss the theater-renovation job. But then I realized that the Caesar, his mind inflamed by the full magnificence of his plan for transforming every major city of the island, was no more interested just now in talking about a petty thing like replacing the clogged drainage channel running down the hillside adjacent to this theater than a god would be in hearing about somebody’s personal health problems, his broken ankle, say, when his godlike intellect is absorbed with the task of designing some wondrous new plague with which he intends to destroy eleven million yellow-skinned inhabitants of far-off Khitai a little later in the month.

  We admired the view together for a while, therefore. Then, when I sensed that I had been dismissed, I took my leave without bringing up the topic of the theater, and slowly and uncomfortably made my way down the steps again. Just as I reached the bottom I heard the Caesar call out to me. I feared for one dreadful moment that he was summoning me back and I would have to haul myself all the way up there a second time. But he simply wanted to wish me a good day. The Caesar Demetrius is insane, of course, but he’s not really vicious.

  “The Emperor will never allow him to do it,” Spiculo said, as we sat late that night over our wine.

  “He will. The Emperor grants his crazy son his every little wish. His
every big one, too.”

  Spiculo is my oldest friend, well named, a thorny little man. We are both Hispaniards; we went to school together in Tarraco; when I took up residence in Roma and entered the Emperor’s service, so did he. When the Emperor handed me off to his son, Spiculo followed me loyally to Sicilia, too. I trust him as I trust no other man. We utter the most flagrant treason to each other all the time.

  “If he begins it, then,” said Spiculo, “he’ll never go through with anything. You know what he’s like. Six months after they break ground for the palace here, he’ll decide he’d rather get started on his Parthenon in Syracusae. He’ll erect three columns there and go off to Panormus. And then he’ll jump somewhere else a month after that.”

  “So?” I said. “What business is that of mine? He’s the one who’ll look silly if that’s how he handles it, not me. I’m only the architect.”

  His eyes widened. “What? You’re actually going to get involved in this thing, are you?”

  “The Caesar has requested my services.”

  “And are you so supine that you’ll simply do whatever he tells you to, however foolish it may be? Piss away the next five or ten years of your life on a demented young prince’s cockeyed scheme for burying this whole godforsaken island under mountains of marble? Get your name linked with his for all time to come as the facilitator of this lunatic affair?” His voice became a harsh mocking soprano. “‘Tiberius Ulpius Draco, the greatest man of science of the era, foolishly abandoned all his valuable scholarly research in order to devote the remaining years of his life to this ill-conceived series of preposterously grandiose projects, none of which was ever completed, and finally was found one morning, dead by his own hand, sprawled at the base of the unfinished Great Pyramid of Syracusae—’ No, Draco! Don’t do it! Just shake your head and walk away!”

  “You speak as though I have any choice about it,” I said.