A Gladiator Dies Only Once (33 page)

So I came to taste my first cherry; so I made the acquaintance of Lucullus, to whom I never spoke again.

The months that followed marked the pinnacle of a life which, to any outsider, must have appeared especially blessed by the gods. Lucullus celebrated a magnificent triumph (at which the rebel general Varius did not appear). Also, a son was born to him, healthy and whole. Lucullus named the boy Marcus, and was said to dote upon him shamelessly. His marriage to Servilia was less happy; he eventually accused her of adultery and divorced her. Whether the charge was true, or the result of a delusion, I never knew.

Those months brought other changes, some very sad. Our conversation about Lucullus was one of my last encounters with my dear friend, Lucius Claudius, who fell dead one autumn afternoon in the Forum, clutching his chest. To my astonishment, Lucius did make me heir to his Etruscan farm—he had not been jesting that day in his garden. At about the same time, Cicero defeated Catilina and won his campaign for the consulship, making him a New Man among the nobility—the first of his family to attain Rome’s highest office. Of my move to the Etruscan countryside, and of the great and tragic events of Cicero’s consulship, I have written elsewhere.

An era of enormous tumult was beginning. Steadfast Republicans like Cicero and Cato desperately looked to Lucullus, with his immense wealth and prestige, to rise up as a bulwark against the looming ambitions of warlords like Caesar and Pompey. Lucullus failed to meet their expectations. Instead he withdrew more and more from public life into an existence of sensual pleasure and seclusion. People said Lucullus had lost his ambition. Conventional wisdom presumed he had been corrupted by Greek philosophy and Asian luxury. Few knew that his mind had begun rapidly to fail, for Lucullus and Marcus did everything possible to hide that fact for as long as they could.

By the time of his death, several years after I met him, Lucullus was as helpless as a baby, completely under the care of his brother. A curious rumor attended his demise: one of his beloved cherry trees had died, and Lucullus, denied the delicacy he most desired, had lost the will to live.

Lucullus had faded from the scene, but the people of Rome recalled his glory days and reacted strongly to his death. Great funeral games were held, with gladiatorial contests and reenactments on a massive scale of some of his more famous victories. During the period of public mourning, his gardens were opened to the public. I braved the crowds for the chance to see them again. If anything, the exotic flowers were more beautiful and the foliage more luxuriant than I remembered.

Escaping from the crowd to walk down a secluded pathway, I came upon a gardener on all fours, tending to a rose bush. The slave heard my approach and glanced up at me with his single eye. I smiled, recognizing Motho. I thought he might recognize me in return, but he said nothing, and with hardly a pause he went back to what he was doing.

I walked on, surrounded by the smell of roses.

T
HE
L
IFE AND
T
IMES OF
G
ORDIANUS
THE
F
INDER
: A P
ARTIAL
C
HRONOLOGY

This list places all the short stories and the novels (published so far) of the Roma Sub Rosa series in chronological order, along with certain seminal events, such as births and deaths. Seasons, months, or (where it is possible to know) specific dates of occurrence are given in parentheses. The short stories previously collected in The
House of the Vestals
are followed by a double-dagger (‡); the stories that appear in the present volume are followed by an asterisk (*).

H
ISTORICAL
N
OTES

“The Consul’s Wife” grew out of two desires: to deal with Sempronia, one of the more remarkable women of her age, and to explore the role of the chariot race at this period of the Roman Republic. No one who saw the movie
Ben-Hur
as a child could ever forget the spectacular chariot race staged (long before the advent of computer-generated images) with live riders and horses and an audience of thousands.
Ben-Hur
left indelible images in my mind; for further research, I turned to
Sport in Greece and Rome
by H. A. Harris (Thames and Hudson/Cornell University Press, 1972), a
veddy
British take on Roman racing and gambling that includes an amusing list of translated Latin names for actual horses.

The
Daily Acts
referred to in the story actually existed, as we know from references to the
Acta Diurna
in Cicero and Petronius; my use of the
Daily Acts
owes a debt to a very funny but painfully dated hard-boiled mystery titled The
Julius Caesar Murder Case
by Wallace Irwin, published in 1935, in which the intrepid “reporter” Manny (short for Manlius) snoops out trouble along the Tiber.

As for Sempronia, readers may learn more about her in Sallust’s
Conspiracy of Catiline,
which gives an intriguing description of her pedigree, character, and motives; not only did she play a small role in that conspiracy, but she was the mother of Decimus Brutus, who with the more famous Junius Brutus was one of the assassins of Caesar. In an early draft of my novel
Catilina’s Riddle,
I wrote a lengthy passage describing her, which I later decided to cut; I was glad to be able to return to Sempronia in “The Consul’s Wife.” “That she was a daughter of Gaius Gracchus is unlikely,” writes Erich Gruen in
The Last Generation of the Roman Republic
(University of California Press, 1974), but it is intriguing to speculate that Sempronia might nonetheless have been a descendant of that radical firebrand of the late Republic who was murdered by the ruling class and achieved the status of a populist martyr.

“If a Cyclops Could Vanish in the Blink of an Eye” reflects on the domestic life of Gordianus. Cats were still something of a novelty in Rome at this time, and not universally welcomed. The cultural clash of East and West, as exemplified by the different worldviews of Gordianus and the Egyptian-born Bethesda, will increasingly become a part of the fabric of cosmopolitan Roman life, as the emerging world capital attracts new people and new ideas from the faraway lands drawn into her orbit.

Of all the historical incidents between
Roman Blood
and Arms
of Nemesis,
the most notable is the revolt of Sertorius; “The White Fawn” tells his story. The fabulous tale of the white fawn is given in several sources, including Plutarch’s biography of the rebel general. The discontent of those who flocked to Sertorius’s side presages the growing discord in Rome, where a series of escalating disruptions will eventually climax in the civil wars that put an end to the republic forever.

In 2000, on a book tour to Portugal, my publisher arranged a private tour of the excavations of a garum manufactory located directly beneath a bank building in downtown Lisbon (ancient Olisipo); that experience inspired me to take Gordianus to such a manufactory, and to uncover “Something Fishy in Pompeii.” Readers craving a taste of garum can make their own; consult A
Taste of Ancient Rome
by Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa (University of Chicago Press, 1992), which gives the recipe of Gargilius Martialis, who wrote in the third century A.D.

How Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, put a puzzle to the inventor Archimedes, who solved it in a bathtub with the cry “Eureka!”, is a famous tale from the ancient world. When I came across Cicero’s claim (in his
Tusculan Disputations)
to have rediscovered the neglected tomb of Archimedes, I decided there must be a mystery yarn to be made from such material, and so “Archimedes’s Tomb” came to be written. The sixteenth idyll of Theocritus, extolling the good government of Hiero’s reign, makes an interesting contrast to Cicero’s own
Verrine Orations,
which exposed rampant corruption and mismanagement in the Roman-run Sicily of his own time.