Herod Agrippa yelled: ‘If you seek the executioner’s sword, lay your head on that block. You will serve to test the sharpness of the sword’s edge. You add to your heresy the greater sin of disloyalty. Executioner!’
Not everybody watched the severing of Ezra’s head. There were women who averted their eyes and the eyes of their children, and there were also Temple guards and secret policemen who had been ordered to keep a sharp watch for such members of the Nazarene faith as had slunk from their hiding places to witness the death of the first apostolic martyr. While Ezra’s head, severed far from neatly, was being hurled to the dogs and the blood on the block was being wiped off with a wet rag, one of the guards pointed. An old man with a grey beard looking shiftily about him. This old man saw that he was being pointed at and he tried to lose himself in the crowd. James, waiting for the block to be thoroughly cleansed, looked about him and betrayed a sign of distress that his execution should be the occasion of one or more of his brethrens being put into danger. This sign was noted. But soon James was incapable of further innocent betrayal. He laid his head down without waiting for the executioner’s assistant to do it for him, the cleansed sword was raised to the innocent sun, then it swept down and sliced through James’s neck as through a cheese. Blood fountained, the crowd groaned and then began to disperse. The guards and policemen followed the path that was being pointed.
Peter was not arrested until the beginning of the week of the unleavened bread, that is on the eve of the fourteenth day of Nisan, also called Passover Eve. He was found almost by chance in a disused cellar under a burnt and abandoned house in the north-west of the city. A child’s ball had rolled into it, the child went down to recover it, there being stone steps leading down but no door, and happened to come up when a couple of policemen were taking time off to eat a bit of bread. ‘Man down there,’ the child said. When taken, he admitted freely to being who he was, and was hauled at once to the fortress of Antonia, which was not far away. He was a valuable prisoner, and four relays of soldiers took turns in guarding him. On the first night, when a scullion brought food and water, with a guard standing behind him, Peter said:
‘How long?’ The guard said:
‘Lucky, you are. You’re kindly allowed to live till after Passover. Gives you a bit of time to brood over things, doesn’t it? Eat your nice dinner.’ The metal plate with its dry bread and a ragged chunk of nameless overboiled meat clanged on the stone floor; along with it thudded a clay pitcher. Then the door clashed shut. Peter ignored the food. He knelt on the cold stone and prayed aloud, saying:
‘Lord, I heard you say that night that now seems a long time ago: not my will but your will be done. Those are my words now. Yet you made me head of the church, the first mortal father of the faithful. I have work to do, and I pray by your power I be allowed to do it. But everything is in your hands. Lord, I believe. Lord, I trust. Lord, above all I love. At least, I think I love. May our enemies be forgiven. May the faith live. May I see the kingdom. But not,’ and he raised his voice as if addressing a fishing confederate hard of hearing, ‘until I’ve finished the work. Amen.’ He sighed, drank some water and nibbled at the bread. Then he went over to the hard pallet and lay on it. Soon, prayer being the best of soporifics, he began to snore.
In his palace bedchamber Herod Agrippa brooded on the purge from Cyprus. It had so far done little except augment his pains. He considered, in that phase before sleep in which fantasy rows away from the shore of reason, that he deserved better of his body than this. He had caught and imprisoned the chief enemy of the state. He was not sorry that the time of the paschal celebrations forbade the spilling of blood. There was leisure to prepare for a full-dress trial in which the secular and the sacred would conjoin in the rhetoric of abomination, the case against the Nazarene faith could receive its most considered articulation, and the beheading of the father of lies who was also an ignorant fisherman could be presented as an act of piety shedding the ultimate credit on Israel’s monarch. He would go down in history as the saviour of the race. He basked, just before sleep, in the contemplation of that ennoblement; it was almost as good as a medicine.
The Empress Messalina obtained her military escort, whose commander was Marcus Julius Tranquillus. The maniple of picked veterans, some of whom wore Britannic gashes like medals, marched before and behind her gilded litter, which had handles left and right as well as fore and aft and called for the brawn of eight carriers. These were all rather dull Germans, who had the look of men who thought, in so far as they thought at all, that they might as well be doing this work as any other. The covered litter had a couch in it, on which the Empress lay. Occasionally a chosen male friend would lie with her. It pleased her to copulate while being borne through the busy Roman streets; it made the act almost public. Marcus Julius Tranquillus did not lie with her; nor was he yet commanded to. He was somewhat severe of countenance and took his duties seriously. Moreover, he seemed to be in pain and, when he walked, he had to lean on a blackthorn stick. He did not walk much in the Empress’s service; his place was with her in the covered and curtained litter, sitting primly at the foot of her couch. He intrigued her rather; he was handsome and evidently brave and had been in battle; he was serious and she liked seriousness for ten minutes of the day or thereabouts.
The undoubted beauty of Messalina and her immoral kind must always create problems for such philosophers as, discoursing on beauty, truth and goodness as related values, end with a mystical desire to promote the relation into an identity and even conjure a deity who possesses these values as attributes. God, say some philosophers, manifests himself in the sublunary world in particular beauties, truths and acts of benevolence; properly, the values should be conjoined to shadow their identity in the godhead, but this happens so infrequently that one must suppose divinity condones a kind of diabolic fracture or else, and perhaps my book is already giving some hint of this, he demonstrates his ineffable freedom through contriving at times a wanton inconsistency. If this is so, we need not wonder at Messalina’s failure to match her beauty with a love of truth and goodness. She was a chronic liar and she was thoroughly bad. But her beauty, we are told, was a miracle. The symmetry of her body obeyed all the golden rules of the mystical architects, her skin was without even the most minuscule flaw and it glowed as though gold had been inlaid behind translucent ivory, her breasts were full and yet pertly disdained earth’s pull, the nipples nearly always erect, and visibly so beneath her byssinos, as in a state of perpetual sexual excitation, the areolas delicately pigmented to a kind of russet. The sight of her weaving bare white arms was enough, it is said, to make a man grit his teeth with desire to be encircled by them; the smooth plain of her back, tapering to slenderness only to expand lusciously to the opulence of her perfect buttocks, demanded unending caresses. The face was the face of a virgin whose dedication to chastity transcended the mere forms of the Dianan cult, which is for the most part a pure hypocrisy; the brown eyes were wide and widely spaced, the nose disdained that excess, interpreted as strength of will, which disfigures most Mediterranean countenances, and the lips were less than perfect only perhaps in their excessive moistness, which seemed to argue a superfluity of saliva, and in their slightly thrust attitude suggesting a permanent pout of dissatisfaction. Her appetites, indeed, were not easy to satisfy, and they were seated not only, as with most women, in the crucial nerves that guard the centre of generation, but in outlying sectors of her body which might be thought too remote to catch fire. Her hair, Julius thought with a disloyalty which he was quick to quell, was of a richer and more odorous darkness even than that of his wife Sara. Messalina found only one man in her life capable of granting her the multiple satisfactions she craved, and her meeting with this man led to her undoing. Her imperial husband was old and as incompetent in bed as in other fora of activity, and their marriage had been sprung by Gaius who, knowing Messalina’s proclivities, had thought to humiliate his stuttering uncle by the mismatch.
On their firs
t journey together, Messalina engaged the captain of her guard in pleasant conversation with no hint of condescension in it. Her voice was as beautiful as her person, suggesting doves and honey and wallfruit reaching the highest pitch of ripeness. She said or sang: ‘They tell me you did well in Britain, Junius.’
‘Julius, madam.’
‘Of course. The Caesar who was killed. But you have been killing the enemies of Caesar.’
‘I would hardly call the Britons enemies of Caesar, madam. Tribes quite content to be left alone to get on with fishing and ploughing and fighting among themselves.’
‘So,’ she cooed, ‘you disapprove of the great civilising Roman mission, as my imperial husband calls it?’
‘I didn’t say quite that, madam.’
‘Oh, you may speak freely with your Empress. After all, you and I are to be friends, isn’t that so?’
‘My Empress is too good. I am the least of my Empress’s servants. But I have to confess – this is a little difficult to adjust. My trade was killing. And now – I sometimes wonder at my appointment.’
‘Simple enough, my dear friend. The captain of my personal guard should be brave, honourable, discreet – presentable. I have it on your superior officer’s testimony that you are the first three of these things. The other I am able to judge for myself. Tell me – are you a married man?’
‘Yes, madam. And I recently became a father.’
‘Good. Married men are more discreet than single ones. They have to be. They have something to lose. Tell me about your wife. Is she beautiful?’
‘Very. But, of course,’ (the courtier creaking to life) ‘not so beautiful as—’
‘Yes yes yes yes. And her name? Is that beautiful too?’
‘Sara. A Jewish name. And our daughter’s name is Ruth. Short sharp names.’
‘Like birdcalls, yes. And why should a Roman officer of ancient Roman stock choose to marry a mere colonial?’
‘Love, madam.’
‘Oh then I approve. I approve of love, Junius I mean Julius. Love is the whole of life. Life is nothing without love. Love cuts across all our barriers, our formalities, our vows, our duties. Tell these slaves we’re here,’ she added, pulling the curtain aside the width of three fingers. Julius knocked with his stick against the outside of the litter. And then, with some pain and difficulty, he got up and got out. ‘Poor boy,’ Messalina cooed. They had arrived at an estate beyond the Servilian Gardens, in the thirteenth district of the city, just north of the Ostian Gate. Julius thought he knew whose estate this was. Discretion, he told himself. Messalina said: ‘I shall be here for an hour or so. You’d better dispose the guard around the house, in the grounds, very discreetly. You know whose house this is?’
‘No, madam,’ discreetly.
‘Good, very good. Full marks for discretion.’ She smiled bewitchingly and then swayed towards the gate. When she was lost to view, one of Julius’s men, not known for his subservience, looked his captain full in the eyes and made a throat-cutting gesture. He said:
‘If she was mine—’
And so the work went on, if you could call it work. There was also the question of Julius’s glandular responses to the almost daily propinquity of his Empress, so naked under her lawn. The body followed nature, blind goddess, sister of Fortuna, and knew nothing of words like love and fidelity. What precisely was his work? This Sara, giving the breast to Ruth, had asked often enough. Oh, I have to guard the Empress’s quarters. Do you see much of the Empress? Hardly anything. She’s pretty remote from us common soldiers. I’ve heard different. From whom, Sara? Everybody knows about her. One of these days, Julius feared, she would issue a command while they swayed towards a discreet indiscretion of hers on the Esquiline or near the Naumachia Augusti, the Marine Theatre not far from his own rented house, or beyond the Gardens of Lucullus on the Via Pinciana. So, Junius I mean Julius, you find your Empress unattractive, I have had men whipped for such ingratitude. Come over, put your hand here. His nights in bed with Sara were, thanks to blind nature, becoming riotous. Women were not fools, women always knew what was going on. He could well imagine Sara confronting the Empress, woman to woman, with ‘Leave my husband alone or I’ll scratch your eyes out.’ Eyes would be out, certainly, but no woman would do the scratching. There were cruel Syrians and Pannonians on the imperial payroll, adept at that manner of punishment for laesa maiestas.
Julius rose early one morning in country air, hearing the crowing of cocks and the snuffle of pigs. He and his men had slept soldierly rough in farm quarters. The farm bordered the estate of a certain Laturnus, just south of the gate which opened on to the Via Asinaria. In the manor house the Empress was staying the night with—Julius knew who, but was discreet even with himself. He had taken a rough breakfast of bubbling warm milk fresh from the cow and a piece of yesterday’s bread with conserve of blackberries. Now he sniffed the good air and foresaw a damnable future for himself. She would be found out one of these days, and he would be indicted for disloyalty to the Emperor. It was his duty, always discreetly, to drop a word to one of the Greek functionaries on the Palatine. But Messalina’s private intelligence service would have him discreetly stabbed before he got so far. The misery on the face of the young man with a growth of black beard who now came from the direction of one of the barns, scratching as from an uneasy sleep in straw, was, he was sure, a mirror of his own. The young man looked at the uniformed and sworded Julius somewhat fearfully and strode in the direction of the Via Asinaria with a speed that could be termed furtive. Julius called cheerfully:
‘A moment. All right, you’re in no danger. Haven’t we met?’
The young man paused and frowned: had they?
‘A wrestling match. You were one of the wrestlers. The other one wore cat’s claws. He is no longer with us.’
The young man spoke. His Latin was not good and it contained gutturals that might be Greek. He said: ‘Yes. I remember the occasion. But I didn’t have time to look at the spectators. It seems as though I’ve been sleeping where I shouldn’t. I didn’t know they had military guards on farms.’
‘I’m part of an imperial escort, awaiting the morning’s orders.’
‘I want nothing to do with imperial escorts.’
‘You’re no longer wrestling?’
‘Wrestling to live but not doing very well at it. Some of us are barred from making a living. An imperial decree.’
‘Are you a Jew?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Jews shouldn’t be here at all. Don’t worry, I shan’t report you to the police. I’m married to one of the daughters of Israel.’
‘Her name her name?’ the young man panted with great urgency, opening and closing his fists.
‘Sara.’
‘No. No. It’s not possible. Does she ever speak of a man named Caleb?’
‘Frequently.’
Caleb nearly collapsed with the relief of his discovery. Julius took him to the farm quarters and gave him a cup of milk, cooler now than it had been.
There was a couple in a bedroom of the manor house of Laturnus, now away in Sardinia, not yet ready for breakfast. It was not a luxuriously appointed bedroom; it had something rustic about its furnishings. But the bed was huge and deep. The naked Messalina lay with her lovely arms entwined about the nakedness of Gaius Silius, a patrician young man of rather empty handsomeness. He said:
‘Why do those soldiers have to tramp around outside? I feel – well, watched.’
‘The Empress requires protection. From her numerous enemies. Don’t worry, dear Gaius. They say nothing. They daren’t. For that matter, they see nothing. The Empress Messalina pays her social visits. Business visits too. They’re quite in order. There’s nothing to feel frightened or guilty about.’
‘You, my love,’ Gaius Silius said, more at ease, ‘are one of the eternally innocent. You don’t know what guilt feels like. Your skin’s untouched by the lines of – oh, you know, remorse, compassion—’
‘Cr
uelty? Am I cruel?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Cruelty,’ she said, having read this somewhere and at once recognised the truth of it, ‘is one of the sharp sauces of love. All the rest is just – well, policy, self-protection, being the Empress.’
‘The Emperor too,’ Gaius Silius said somewhat primly, ‘he has his right to self-protection. How would the Emperor feel if he knew he was being cuckolded?’
‘At least,’ she said, catching something of his primness, ‘I don’t flaunt it, do I? Claudius makes sheep’s eyes at his own niece, puts his gouty fingers in her bosom when he thinks no one’s looking. Ugh, an old man’s lust. The Emperor is above taboos like incest. I think Agrippina will have to drink something that disagrees with her. And perhaps her dribbling uncle could share the cup.’
‘Sometimes, meum mel, you – what can I say—?’
‘Revolt you? Frighten you? Never be frightened of clear thinking, Gaius. And never enter on anything you’re unwilling to pursue to the end. I sometimes think that you thought you could get into the Empress’s bed without having to pay for it. Messalina is a whore, but she’s different from all the other whores. She costs nothing. The stupidest slut of a village and the first lady of the Empire have that in common. But the Empress Messalina, my dearest heart, costs everything. As you’re to find out. How is the beauteous Lollia Paulina these days?’
‘I don’t know. She’s at Herculaneum. She lives her own life. I say nothing. She says nothing.’
‘If she ever were to say anything,’ Messalina said tenderly into his right cheek, ‘her jewels would be stuffed down her throat. She’d be crammed like a goose with them. I’d have her before me covered with them, like starlight as that stupid poet said, and then she’d be stripped to her buff, link by link of pearls and amethysts, and they’d be rammed down her throat.’ Gaius Silius could sense the excitement in her hot breath. She then said: ‘Certain things have to be done, dearest Gaius. You and I are to be together for ever and ever, or as near that as makes no difference. This is one bed you don’t steal away from with a couple of coins on the coverlet and your fingers to your lips. I want you for myself, and by Castor and Pollux’ – (she grasped with sharp nails that part of his body which they had so jocularly named) – ‘I don’t let you go.’