A Gladiator Dies Only Once (28 page)

Cicero accompanied me. He had been up this winding path many times before, but seemed happy to take his time and indulge my wide-eyed wonderment.

At last we reached the villa. A slave greeted us, told us that his master awaited us in the Apollo Room, and asked us to follow him.

I heard Cicero release a gasp and then a groan. “The Apollo Room!” he muttered under his breath.

“You know the place?” I asked, my wonderment increasing as we traversed terraces, porticoes, and galleries. Everywhere I looked, I saw bits and pieces of Asia Minor that Lucullus had brought back to adorn his Roman home. Greek statues, ornamental plaques, sculptural reliefs, carved balustrades, dazzling tiles, magnificent rugs, shimmering draperies, colorful paintings in encaustic wax, superbly crafted tables and chairs, even entire marble columns had been shipped over the sea and up the Tiber to confront Lucullus’s engineers, architects, and decorators with the formidable task of creating from their disparate elements a harmonious whole. By some miracle, they had succeeded. Opulence and abundance greeted the eye at every turn; gaudiness and ostentation were nowhere to be seen.

“Lucullus entertains guests in various rooms, depending on his mood,” Cicero explained. “To each room is accorded a specific budget for the meal. The simplest meals—and they could be called simple only by the standards of Lucullus—are served in the Hercules Room; the plates are of simple silver, the food is traditional Roman fare, and the wines are of a vintage only slightly beyond the means of most of us mere senators. Lucullus finds the Hercules Room suitable for a simple afternoon repast when entertaining a few intimate friends—and that’s where I presumed we would be eating. But the Apollo Room! The couches are sumptuous, the silver plate is stunning, and the food is fit for the gods! The wine will be Falernian, you may be sure. No delicacy which Lucullus’s cook can imagine will be denied to us. If only Lucullus had warned me, I should have avoided eating altogether for the last few days, in preparation. My poor stomach is already grumbling in dread!”

For as long as I had known him, Cicero had suffered from irritable bowels. He suffered least when he maintained a simple diet, but like most successful politicians his life had become a whirlwind of meals and parties, and to refuse a host’s offerings would seem churlish. “My stomach is no longer my own,” he had complained to me once, groaning and clutching his belly after a particularly rich banquet.

At last we passed through a doorway into a magnificent hall. Along one wall, doors opened onto a terrace overlooking the gardens, with a view of the Capitoline Hill in the distance. The opposite wall was covered with a glorious painting celebrating the god Apollo and his gifts to mankind—sunlight, art, and music—with the Graces and the Muses in his retinue. At one end of the room, set in a niche, was a towering statue of the god, scantily clad and resplendent in his beauty, carved from marble but painted in such life-like colors that for the barest instant I was fooled into thinking I saw a being of flesh and blood.

The room might have accommodated scores of guests, but the gathering that day was much smaller. A group of dining couches had been pulled into a semicircle near the terrace, where the guests could enjoy the warm, jasmine-scented breeze.

We were apparently the last to arrive, for only two of the couches remained empty, those situated at either side of our host. Lucullus, reclining at the center of the semicircle, looked up at our arrival, but did not stand. He was dressed in a saffron tunic with elaborate red embroidery and a belt of silver chain; his hair, gray at the temples but still plentiful for a man of forty-six, was combed back to show his prominent forehead. Despite his reputation for high living, his complexion was clear and his waist no larger than that of most men his age.

“Cicero!” he exclaimed. “How good to see you—and just in time for the mullet course. I had them delivered from Cumae this morning, from Orata’s fish farm. Cook’s trying a new recipe, something about grilling them on a stick with an olive stuffing; he tells me I shall wish to die after one taste, resolved that life’s pleasures can achieve no higher pinnacle.”

“No matter what the pleasure, there’s always another to top it,” responded one of the guests. The man’s features were so like those of our host that I realized he had to be Lucullus’s younger brother, Marcus Licinius. They were said to be very close; indeed, Lucullus had held off running for his first office until his brother Marcus was also old enough to run, so that they could both be elected to the curule aedileship as partners; the games they had put on for the populace that year, the first to ever feature elephants in combat with bears, had become legendary. To judge by his comment, and by his clothes—a Greek chiton with an elegantly stitched border of golden thread—Marcus was as much an Epicurean as his older brother.

“Wanting to die after eating a mullet! Have you ever heard anything so absurd?” This comment, followed by a laugh to soften its harshness, came from the guest seated opposite Marcus, whom I recognized at once: Cato, one of the most powerful senators in Rome. Cato was anything but an Epicurean; he was a Stoic, known for expounding old-fashioned virtues of frugality, restraint, and service to the state. His hair was closely cropped and he wore a simple white tunic. Despite their philosophical differences, he and Lucullus had become staunch political allies, firm friends, and—with Lucullus’s marriage the previous year to Cato’s half-sister, Servilia—brothers-in-law.

Reclining next to Cato was Servilia herself. To judge by the ostentation of her red gown, silver jewelry, and elaborately coiffed hair, she shared her husband’s Epicurean tastes rather than her brother’s Stoic values. Her tinted cheeks and painted lips were not to my taste, but she projected a kind of ripe sensuality that many men would have found attractive. Her generous figure made it hard to be certain, but it looked to me that she was just beginning to show signs of carrying a child. Servilia was Lucullus’s second wife; he had divorced the first, one of the Clodia sisters, for flagrant infidelity.

The three other guests were the Greek companions of Lucullus whom Cicero had previously mentioned to me. The poet Archias was perhaps ten years older than his patron, a small man with a neatly trimmed white beard. Antiochus the philosopher was the most corpulent person in the room, with several chins obscuring his neck. The sculptor Arcesislaus was the youngest of us, a strikingly handsome and exceedingly muscular fellow; he looked quite capable of wielding a hammer and chisel and moving heavy blocks of marble. I realized that it must be his Apollo in the niche at the end of the room, for the face of the god was uncannily like a self-portrait; it was likely that he had painted the wall as well, which gave the same face to Apollo. Clearly, Arcesislaus was an artist of immense talent.

I felt an unaccustomed quiver of discomfort. After years of dealing with Rome’s elite, often seeing them at their weakest or worst, I seldom felt self-conscious in any company, no matter how exalted. But here, in the company of Lucullus’s brilliant inner circle, in a setting so overwhelmingly opulent yet so impeccably refined, I felt decidedly out of my depth.

Cicero introduced me. Most of the guests had some knowledge of me; their not-unfriendly nods at the mention of my name reassured me, if only a little. Lucullus indicated that Cicero should take the couch to his right and that I should recline to his left.

The meal was spectacular—grilled eel, succulent venison, roasted fowl, and a wide variety of spring vegetables with delicate sauces, all washed down with the finest Falernian. As more wine flowed, the conversation grew more relaxed, punctuated by peals of laughter. The members of Lucullus’s circle were completely at ease with one another, so much so that they seemed to speak a sort of secret language, full of veiled references and coded innuendoes. I felt very much an outsider, with little to contribute; mostly I listened and observed.

Servilia showed off a new piece of jewelry, a necklace of pearls linked by a finely wrought gold chain, and boasted of the bargain she had negotiated; the cost was roughly the value of my house on the Esquiline Hill. This prompted a discussion about money and investments, which led to a general consensus, myself abstaining, that land around Rome had become more expensive than it was worth, but a country house in Etruria or Umbria, complete with slaves to run it, could still be obtained at a bargain.

Marcus Licinius asked Cicero if the rumor he had heard was true, that Cicero’s chief rival in the coming race for consul was likely to be the radical patrician, Catilina. Cicero replied by quoting a Greek epigram; the point was obscure to me, but the others were moved to laughter. There was more talk of politics. Cato complained about a fellow senator who had employed an obscure but ancient point of procedure to outmaneuver his opponents; declining to name the man, Cato instead referred to him using a vaguely indecent nickname—presumably a pun, but it meant nothing to me. I think he was talking about Julius Caesar.

It seemed that Archias was in the midst of composing an epic poem about Lucullus’s campaigns in the East, hoping to complete it in time for his patron’s eventual triumph. At the urging of Cicero, Archias quoted a new passage. The scene was one the poet had witnessed himself: the sinking of the fleet of the one-eyed Roman rebel Marcus Varius off the island of Lemnos. His words were spellbinding, conjuring images full of terror, gore, and glory. At one point, he quoted Lucullus’s order to his men regarding the fate of the Roman rebel:

Take Varius alive, not dead;

Put no one-eyed man to the sword.

Disobey, and I’ll pluck the eyes from your head

And throw you overboard!

It seemed to me that a shadow crossed Lucullus’s face as he listened to these words, but afterwards he applauded as heartily as the rest of us, and promised Archias a place of honor at his triumph.

Over pheasant with pine-nut sauce, the conversation took a philosophical turn. Antiochus was a proponent of the so-called New Academy, a school of thought which argues that mankind possesses an innate faculty for distinguishing truth from falsehood and reality from fantasy. “The existence of such a faculty may be inferred if we consider the opposite case, that no such faculty exists,” said the corpulent philosopher, dabbing a bit of sauce from his chin. “Perception comes from sensation, not from reason. I see the cup before me; I reach for it and I pick it up. I know the cup exists because my eyes and my hand tell me so. Ah, but how do I know I can trust my eyes and my hand in this instance? Sometimes, after all, we see a thing that turns out not to be there after all, or at least not what we thought it was; or we touch a thing in the dark and think we know what it is, then discover it to be otherwise when we see it in the light. Thus, sensation alone is not entirely reliable; indeed, it can be quite the opposite. So how do I know, in this instance, that this is a cup I hold before me, and not some other thing, or an illusion of a cup?”

“Because the rest of us can see it, too!” said Marcus, laughing. “Reality is a matter of consensus.”

“Nonsense! Reality is reality,” said Cato. “The cup would exist whether Antiochus or the rest of us saw it or not.”

“I agree with you there, Cato,” said the philosopher. “But the point remains: how do I
know
the cup exists? Or rather, let me change the emphasis of that question: How do
I
know the cup exists? Not by my eyes and hand alone, for those two are not always trustworthy, and not because we all agree it exists, despite what Marcus may say.”

“By logic and reason,” offered Cicero, “and the accumulated lessons of experience. True, our senses sometimes deceive us; but when they do, we take note of it, and learn to recognize that particular experience, and to differentiate it from instances where we
can
trust our senses, based also on past experience.”

Antiochus shook his head. “No, Cicero. Quite apart from logic and reason and the lessons of experience, there exists in every man an innate faculty, for which we as yet have no name and governed by we know not which organ; yet that faculty determines, for each man, what is real and what is not. If we could but explore and cultivate that faculty, who knows to what greater degree of awareness we could elevate mankind?”

“What do you mean by a ‘greater degree of awareness’?” said Marcus.

“A realm of perception beyond that which we presently possess.”

Marcus scoffed. “Why do you assume such a state exists, if no mortal has yet attained it? It’s a presumption with no basis in experience
or
logic; it’s an idea plucked out of thin air.”

“I agree,” said Cato. “Antiochus is espousing mysticism, not philosophy, or at least not any brand of philosophy suitable for a hard-headed Roman. It’s all very well for Greeks to spend their time pondering imponderables, but we Romans have a world to run.”

Antiochus smiled, to show that he took no offense at Cato’s words. He opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off by our host, who abruptly turned his gaze to me.

“What do
you
think, Gordianus?” said Lucullus.

I felt the eyes of the others converge on me. “I think . . .”

I looked to Cicero, who smiled, amused at my hesitation. I felt slightly flushed, and cleared my throat. “I think that most men are like myself, and don’t give much thought to such questions. If I see a cup, and if I want what’s in the cup, I pick it up and drink it, and that’s the end of that. Now, if I were to reach for the cup and pick up a hedgehog instead,
that
would give me pause. But as long as a cup is a cup—and up is up, and down is down, and the sun comes up in the morning—I don’t think most people ever think about epistemology.”

Antiochus raised a condescending eyebrow. It was one thing for the others to challenge his ideas with other ideas, but quite another to dismiss the importance of the topic he had raised. In his eyes, I had shown myself to be hardly better than a barbarian.

My host was more indulgent. “Your point is well taken, Gordianus, but I think you’re being just a bit disingenuous, aren’t you?” said Lucullus.