Perhaps the gladiator didn’t really speak. It was probably his own overheated imagination. He shoves through the crowd, finds his slaves and steps out into the clean, cold air.
Clodia loved that poem. She cried when he recited it to her for the first time. She was poet enough herself to understand everything he was doing.
‘It’s my sparrow exactly, as if he were alive again. It’s just how he used to hop here and there, always staying close to me. it per iter – it’s so sad, my darling. But it’s perfect. Thank you, I shall never forget it.’
He won’t be writing any poems on the death of Metellus Celer. Some fool will, cloaking reality in fine words about fortitude, sacrifice and steadfast service to the ideals of the Republic. He ought to have his papyrus stuffed down his throat, until he chokes for breath as Metellus Celer is choking now.
Twelve
The funeral is huge. Fitting for a son of one of Rome’s great noble families, a man who was both praetor and consul, a military leader who turned back Catiline in the Apennines, a man who was already crowned with honours and would have earned greater honours if he’d lived. One of the old school, who really believed that pro bono publico meant something.
The Metelli clan has gathered in force, along with all those under its protection. The roots of the clan flex invisibly in the soil that nourishes it, drawing on a rich humus of favours asked for and given, of protection offered, services rendered, loyalty tendered. The blustery grey day with flurries of rain deters no one. Every Metelli client, dependant and hanger-on is here, with his children at his side and even a grandchild sitting on his shoulders to mark the passing of their patron. To see and to be seen is the thing. No one should be able to say, ‘And where were you, at his funeral?’
The spirits of the Metelli ancestors, wearing their death masks, are making ready to lead the litter that carries the dead man. Musicians are tuning their instruments. Hired mourners, the pick of their profession, are drinking hot wine with honey, to lubricate their throats. Their voices will have to hold out through hours of wailing dirges. Heralds have been criss-crossing the streets since dawn, to announce the funeral and the route of the procession. Everybody knows it already, but when they hear the heralds they rush to get a good vantage point among the crowds that line the streets. It will be a long wait, but worth it because on a day like this you don’t want to miss anything.
The death masks of the Metelli ancestors are famous. When they ride the streets in their chariots it seems as if the dead breathe again, and the old days have returned. Great feats of ancient heroes come to life. Captured elephants from the wars against Carthage bellow in fury, trampling the stones of the Forum. Temples are raised overnight, and the blood of Rome’s enemies streams like wine. The ancestral spirits gorge on the sight of the Rome that they have helped to create, and then, satisfied, they go back to their places of honour in the Metelli house.
The ancestors will be proud to recognize their son, and to welcome him into the Underworld. He deserves to join them. His death mask has been made, and he will be numbered and remembered among them for ever. They are generals, lawyers, politicians, governors of faraway provinces, men who by wit and force spread Roman power like a tide over the world. The life of Quintus Caecilius Metellus – Metellus Celer, Metellus the Swift – joins the lives of his ancestors in an eternal present, which is also the eternal present of Rome. At the next Metelli funeral, his spirit will stand in its chariot, masked, watchful for the honour of the clan.
Metellus Celer’s formal elegies will be spoken in the Forum, in the presence of his family and the great men of Rome with whom he belongs. The people crowding the streets have stories of him, too. They liked him, on the whole, although he had no charisma and never cared to woo them. Wooing was not a part of his political vocabulary. He was stern, straight, orthodox, and he did what he said.
He’d helped to fight down the Catiline conspiracy, which everyone knows would have brought ruin on Rome. Murder and arson and eating little children – or so they say. It’s Catiline’s enemies who do all the talking now, his friends being mostly dead. Old Catiline made his worst mistake when he made an enemy of old Chickpea. Didn’t he know that was the way to get his name blackened for generations? He’d have minded that even more than getting his head chopped off after the last battle against Marcus Antonius. They brought that head all the way back to Rome. A man can only die once, but a reputation dies a thousand times.
They brought back that stinking head because they wanted to make sure we all knew just how dead Catiline was. He had charisma all right. Bucketloads of the stuff.
Still, he’s dead, and maybe we’re all the better for it. When you listen to old Chickpea your heart’s so swayed that you believe Catiline was first cousin to a viper. And then you remember other things, like the way he never cared for gold, and the way he loved his friends, and you wonder. But it’s not worth going over the ins and outs of it; not if you know what’s good for you in today’s Rome, the Rome that really exists rather than the one that might have happened. Best just to pass the time of day, and stick to the subject of the dead man we’ve come out to honour.
– Metellus Celer, he was a fighter all right. One of the old school. Not given to a lot of smiling and soft-soaping his enemies.
– He had his enemies all the same.
(Let a silence fall. Don’t follow that one up. There are rumours everywhere that it wasn’t a natural death. Poison, they’re saying. But you never really know who you’re talking to, out in the streets, or which faction they belong to. This bloke looks all right, but discretion is the better part of valour, as they say.)
– He’d’ve been all right. They were going to make him Governor of Our Province.
– A nice little plum to drop in your lap. Lovely juicy trade routes, just waiting to be squeezed.
– But you’ve got to bear in mind all those nutters up north. Whoever gets Our Province has to deal with them as well: your long-haired Gauls with the trousers. There’s your Avernians, your Helvetians, your Aedui – they’re supposed to be our allies now, but don’t count on it, they’re slippery as fuck, the Aedui. The further north you go, the worse it gets. All those lunatics in Germania – terrifying they are, racing along with these ponies they train to fight, according to what I’ve been told. I never saw them myself. Once the Germanii get the Bellovaci going it’ll be time to pack up shop.
– You were posted up there, then?
– That’s right. Stationed at Massilia for five years. We were sent up to the border for six months, because the Avernians were making trouble. That was far enough north for me. Leave them alone to murder each other in peace is what I say, the plunder’s not worth the aggro. All we need now is some Governor getting the idea it’s up to him to pacify Gaul. Thank the gods I’m out of it. There’s nothing that your Gaul likes better than plotting against the tribe next door, making treaties and breaking them, getting blind drunk and swearing vows which even Hercules couldn’t keep, only they’ve got to because a vow’s sacred with them, you see.
– Well, fair enough, so it is here.
– But what I’m saying is, we don’t go making vows we can’t keep. But your Gaul, get a few cups inside him and he’s rampant, quarrelling with anybody and swearing oaths on his mother’s life. And their chiefs are the worst. ‘I vow to avenge the honour of my third cousin once removed by marriage by riding my horse through six Legions.’ That’s the kind of lunacy they come up with, and next thing all the rest are standing up and yelling that they’ll do the same. So, just when you think everything’s calm, the alarm sounds and the Gauls are hammering at you, screaming out gibberish, red hair all over their shoulders, great big shields in front of them with what look like hundreds of snakes wiggling about all over them, and a spear that’s got your name on it. It stands to reason, in the long run they haven’t got a hope in hell and they all get slaughtered, but in the short term they’ll have your head on a pole. So it’s lucky for us that they’re
half the time at each other’s throats. Your Gaul’s a fighter. If that lot ever got together and “developed the concept of a common purpose”, as old Chickpea keeps saying we’re the only ones in the world who know how to do, then those Gauls’d be over the Alps like they were jumping molehills. Never underestimate your Gaul, that’s what I learned in Massilia. (I’m going on a bit. Get me started on the Gauls and I can’t stop. He seems to be following it, though.)
– So who do you reckon they’re going to give Our Province to then, now Metellus has gone? (He was following all right. He’s not stupid, this one. Knows that’s the big question. Whoever gets Gaul, gets to raise an army as big as he can prove himself fit to lead. Once you’ve got an army like that, it’ll go with you to Hell’s gates if you tell it to. And who’s going to stand in your path, then? But keep it casual.) Could be Julius Caesar, from what I heard.
– Caesar? You reckon?
– Think about it. Listen, you hear that noise? They must be getting close.
They are getting close. The sound of pipes shrills above the keening of the mourners. There’s a rumble of chariot wheels. People count the chariots as they appear, bearing the chief mourners and the masked ancestral figures. After the mourners, the body of Metellus Celer himself, propped on its bier, dressed in a purple-edged flowing toga.
The embalmer has done a superb job. Even after lying in state for days, there is no mottling of decay on the face. Perhaps he was not poisoned after all. People say that a poisoned corpse corrupts fast, and often the family are forced to hold the funeral immediately. But Metellus Celer has lain in state in the Metelli house for five days. His body has the air of something neither dead nor living. The grey-yellow face has already become a mask. It represents the man who has gone, rather than revealing him to the public gaze one last time.
The eye sockets are shrunken. The skin is stretched tight, and the jutting nose has the look of a scaffold that holds the structure together. The magnificence of his clothing, the glitter of his bier and the freshness of the flowers heaped up on him contrast strangely with this mummified relic. (And where did they find such flowers, in grey January? How many riders have galloped from the south, at the Metelli command, with a sheaf of lilies in one hand, and a sword in the other?)
A sigh ripples along the procession route, chasing the bier. This is what it all comes down to, all the glory and wealth, and being one of the great ones who rule Rome. This is what happens at the end of being able to go where you like and do what you like and think of what you’d like to eat for dinner and be sure that you’ll find it on your table.
Metellus Celer was known for knowing where his money came from, and where it went. Not tight-fisted exactly; just prudent. But even for him, the time has come when the only coin he can use is the one set under his tongue, to pay Charon so that he’ll row him across the Styx. There’s no skimming across that river in a glamorous private pinnace. No, it’s Charon’s creaky old boat for everybody, and he grumbles as he picks up the oars.
Somehow you see it more clearly, the mystery of death, when it’s a great man who dies. It makes going home all the sweeter, with the prospect of a beaker of something hot to warm you up, and then a fat roast capon with fish sauce. Even if all you’ve got to look forward to is pottage, you’re still better off than Metellus Celer is now.
Catullus follows the crowd as far as the Forum, and then he turns away. She is inside, with all the Metelli, hearing the funeral orations. There will be long elegies on her dead husband, followed by speeches in praise of the ancestors whom her husband has joined.
It’s one of those weighty occasions that define Rome to itself. The dead man isn’t just a man any longer, great or insignificant; he’s part of Rome’s public story. Every virtue that Metellus Celer possesses will reflect back on to Rome.
Catullus has no place there, and yet he couldn’t keep away from the funeral entirely. He stood and watched them all go past, and saw the blank, blind face of Metellus Celer go past, too, seeing and recognizing nothing.
Although Catullus is wrapped in his warmest cloak, there’s a chill that nothing can keep out. He’s alone. He didn’t want to share this spectacle with friends. He can’t shake off the feeling that he’s helped to ambush an unarmed man. Clodia is inaccessible and will remain so for nine days after the funeral feast. Even after the purification, there is a year of mourning to come. And how are they to meet, with people watching every move she makes? Rumour will harden into accusation if she isn’t careful.
But he is sure that she had nothing to do with it. She could never plan a death like that. He sees her run across the room to him and throw her arms around his neck. Her arms are strong and slender and her breasts press against him. She is quick and warm, laughing, and then she pushes him away from her and says, ‘Let me look at you.’
Clodia’s there now, this minute, gazing ahead and thinking her own thoughts. The speeches will go on for ever but she’ll keep a mask on her face, like her husband. She will be attentive, sombre but controlled. She will know that people are watching her reactions.
Before they put Metellus Celer inside the family vault on the Appian Way, custom demands that the dead man’s eyes be opened one last time. He’s not sure why. Maybe, long ago, people thought it was necessary to be sure that the dead were really dead, before they were separated for ever from the land of the living. Who will open those eyes? One of the male Metelli: it will have to be. He hopes and prays that it will be. But the image that haunts him is of Clodia herself, leaning over her husband, lifting his eyelids with her thumbs and then staring into his eyes, and of his eyes staring back, sightless and accusing.
It is also the custom for one of the family to kiss the dead man for the last time. Over and over in his imagination, Clodia’s warm lips meet that grey-yellow flesh, and taste its decay along with a faint tang of the embalmer’s gypsum.
Thirteen
There is poison everywhere. It jumps to his ears and his eyes. It’s like the time eight months ago when Clodia thought for a week that she might be pregnant. Everywhere he went, women’s bodies swelled ripely under their tunics, when he could have sworn that only the day before they’d been flat-bellied girls. Babies howled all night long. Friend after friend sent messages, proud and bashful, to announce a wife’s pregnancy.
It can’t really have been like that. He’s a poet, he makes things up. He even makes people up. Clodia accused him of that once. ‘You don’t know who I am! You only know the woman in your poems.’
But she loved the poems. He knew that. No one, not even Clodia, could fake that slow, warm, delighted smile.
Poison. He heard Lucius berating the cook for buying mixed wild mushrooms from a market stall instead of from their usual supplier, who came in from the country with a basket over his arm and knew every mushroom like his own child.
‘Are you trying to poison us? In this household, false economy is not a virtue!’
Then there was that imbecile Egnatius in the bathhouse yesterday, telling some rigmarole about a girl who sent poisoned sweets to her rival, but the younger sister whom she sent to deliver the basket peeped under the cloth, saw honey and almonds, and swiped just one.
‘Just one, and she was rolling on the ground in agony. It’s true, I had it from someone who knows the girls’ aunt.’
A flash of teeth and a roll of the eyes to see just how much he’s the centre of attention. Yes, you’re like a child, my dear Egnatius. A grown man with a sodden mass of napkins hanging around his knees.
Later on, in the Forum, a group of pompous baldheads debated the niceties of an inheritance case that had been dragging and droning its way through the courts for longer than even they can have been alive. One of them hee-hawed confidentially, nodding his head like a donkey which has been tethered outside a school of rhetoric for so long that it thinks it’s a polished debater: ‘And then – hee-haw – it has to be said that there was some question – hee-haw – of potentially improper interference in the seq
uence of events, if you understand me, the sequence of events leading to the decease of – hee-haw – the deceased.’
And they were off, muttering about decoctions, potions, preparations and symptoms –
The decease of the deceased. You barbarian. Ye gods, if language were ever granted a triumph, you should be led in rags and chains in the procession. The populace of Rome should hurl the contents of their chamberpots over your heads, until the outside matches the inside.
All the grave donkey heads bobbed up and down, as solemn as the judges they longed to be. Wag away, you impotent, prating word-slaughterers. If you want to see the decease of the deceased, you’ve only to look in a mirror.
Wherever Catullus went, poison haunted him. He passed two little boys sharing a pie on a doorstep. In a flash, sharing changed to fighting.
– Give it back here, you bastard!
One snatched, the other snatched back and half the pie fell in the dust. One boy was left holding a good-sized piece, the other none. Quick as a flash, the pie-less boy gobbed on the pie.
– Go on, eat yer pie then, he jeered.
But the other boy, pale with fury, kept his head. ‘Think I want to poison myself?’ he said, and dropped the remainder of the pie in the gutter.
It’s as if Catullus has been asleep, and suddenly he’s woken up to what everybody else knew all along. A nod and a wink. Poisoners can become celebrities, masters of their profession. Rome is full of them. Even Dr Philoctetes said so, when he was measuring out a dose of digitalis for Catullus, at the height of his fever. ‘If a physician is not precise, he will soon see the other side of the drugs he employs. Medicines’ – and he stared at the ceiling with a lofty expression – ‘medicines are Janus-faced, my dear young friend. They turn one way to heal, and the other to kill. There is no country for poisoners like Rome; even Egypt must acknowledge that we are masters of those profane arts.’