Dear and Glorious Physician (36 page)

She loved her own children by Diodorus, little Aurelia and Gaius Octavius, but she seemed to love the son of Diodorus and Aurelia even more. The merry Priscus was affectionate and devoted, and adored his stepmother, and for all his affable nature he had a deep sense of responsibility, though he was hardly five years old. He was as a father towards his little sister, whose hair resembled her mother’s and whose soft brown eyes glimmered with sweetness, and towards his little brother, not yet two, who toddled gravely about on the grass and inspected flowers like a philosopher. Little Gaius recalled his father astonishingly, and sometimes this amused Lucanus. But Priscus stirred his heart with pain, for his face was the face of his dead sister, Rubria, and he had Rubria’s vivacity and gaiety.

Gaius wished to inspect the fireflies, but Iris caught him just as he stumbled and held him on her knee, kissing him. Her golden hair was illuminated briefly by a last lance of sunlight before it expired behind the darkening hills with their gilded crests. Gaius inspected his mother’s face seriously, then leaned his dark round head against her bosom, and she bent over him. “Though he barely speaks as yet,” said Iris, “he has the most profound thoughts and asks the most profound questions of the world.” She glanced at Lucanus. “Like his dear and beloved brother,” she added, softly.

Lucanus said nothing; he had tried, all these months, to hold himself apart from his family for terror of loving them too much. He was filled with a wild restlessness and anxiety. He must leave as soon as possible or these children and their mother would seize his heart and break it with grief in their hands. He watched the burnished moon quivering over one hill. To him the moon was like an old skull, weathered with sorrow and tragedy. Its beauty, therefore, did not move him, for it was the beauty of death, just as in love there is always that threatening beauty.

Iris was watching him from under her lashes. She saw the white gloom of his face, the rigidity of his expression, and his withheld eyes. She sighed. Then she said, “I was never a woman of so ardent a temper that I could tell my emotions freely. But you must understand, my dear son, what it means to me to have my family with me, and you home at last after all those years. Is it not wonderful that you have been appointed, through the graciousness of Caesar, to be the Chief Medical Officer in Rome? You will be in the city three days a week only, and then will return here, where the household needs you. And your mother most of all,” she added, in a lower tone.

Lucanus’ lips parted, then he was silent again. He looked at the beautiful ring Diodorus had had made for him; the tribune had intended to present this ring to his adopted son on his return. It had been most cunningly and exquisitely made, a broad and intricately carved band of gold in which was set a large green emerald. On this emerald there had been imposed the golden caduceus, the sign of the physician, the staff entwined by two serpents and surmounted by the wings of Mercury inset with rubies. To Priscus had been left the knightly ring of his father, yet it was not so marvelous and rich as this, and, to Lucanus, it was not half so significant. Diodorus had not forgotten Lucanus in the matter of money. He had made him the beneficiary of a very large sum and had appointed him, in the event of the death of their mother, the guardian of his children. But, Lucanus told himself, though his mother was old, almost thirty-eight, she was in good health and could be expected to live a number of years yet.

He saw that he must speak now, though he had avoided this for over six months, fearing to disturb his mother and heighten her grief. He said, as gently as possible, “I must tell you, Mother. I cannot accept the appointment of Tiberius. I cannot remain here.”

Iris waited. Lucanus gazed at her, expecting tears and protests and disbelief. But Iris waited calmly. Then she said, “Tell me, my son.”

And so he told her, and she listened, her head bent, her hands absently fondling little Gaius, who was falling asleep. Priscus and Aurelia busily pursued the fireflies, and their young chatter and laughter mingled with the evening songs of the birds, and the moon rose higher and the pungent scent of earth and the cypresses and the newly flowering trees became insistent. All at once the tips of the cypresses silvered.

Iris was so silent after Lucanus had finished speaking that he said at last, “You do not understand.”

“Yes,” said Iris, “I understand. You are very like Diodorus, my dear son, and this makes me happy. You have the same sternness and discipline of character, the same dedicated duty, rare things in this debauched world. You are aware, of course, that the path you have laid out for yourself is a sorrowful and lonely one, and filled with sharp stones, and lighted by no sun?”

“Yes,” he said. “But that does not matter. I have long known that the world holds no promise of joy for me, or happiness.”

“I had prayed,” said Iris, “that you would marry and bring your wife to this house, and that there would be grandchildren to rejoice me.”

Lucanus shook his head.

“You have not forgotten Rubria,” Iris said, and sighed again.

“I shall never forget her.” Lucanus hesitated, then spoke abruptly. “Mother, I love a woman who seems to me Rubria reborn. It is in her nature that I have found the resemblance, the same gentleness and soft gaiety, the same pureness of character, the same womanly strength. Her name is Sara bas Elazar. That is all I can tell you. To me she mingles in my mind with Rubria so that they are one and the same. Yet as Rubria vanished, so she must vanish from my life.”

This, to Iris, was a great calamity. Tears stood in her eyes. “The love between a man and a woman is a holy thing, my son, and is blessed.”

“It is not for me,” said Lucanus, with firmness, and his mother saw his face. After a while he said, “I have written today to Caesar, thanking him for his offer, but refusing it. Rome has no need of me, as I have told you. The city is full of excellent sanitoria and excellent physicians. There is even a good sanitorium on an island in the Tiber for the most abandoned of slaves and criminals. But in the cities and towns and lost places along the Great Sea there are few places for the sick and the poor.”

Though she understood, Iris was a little baffled. So handsome and gifted a young man, and of such wealth, and with a loving family, and looked upon by Caesar himself with graciousness! Yet he would abandon all these for the faceless multitudes in cities without a name for her.

“I wish to be free,” said Lucanus. “The more wants a man has, the less freedom. I want nothing for myself.” His hands lay still on his knees, and they were like carved stone in the rising moon, and the marvelous ring on his finger faintly glittered. He wore a simple cheap tunic. His wardrobe was as poor and limited as a humble freedman’s. Yet, thought his mother, he has a majesty beyond that of Caesar’s and a nobility like the gods’. Her heart suddenly lightened, and she was mysteriously comforted, and she looked at the darkening sky as if she had heard a voice from it.

The nurses came from the pleasant house behind them for the children, and Iris rose. When the nurses bore the children away she followed them with her blue eyes, which were tenderly misted. Then she put her hand on her son’s shoulder. “God be with you always, my dear Lucanus,” she said, and left him.

Keptah found Lucanus alone in the mellow moonlight under the glossy myrtle trees. The cypresses leaned blackly against the moon, and a great stillness enveloped the gardens. Keptah sat down in Iris’ chair and stared at his old pupil. “You have told your mother,” he stated.

Lucanus moved restlessly. “I have told her. She understands.”

“You have the most amazing view of life,” said Keptah. “As I do not have that view, though honoring yours, I can only be astonished. Yet, of course, it was ordained.”

“By whom?” asked Lucanus, contemptuously. “I have ordained my life.”

Keptah shook his head. “No.” He paused a moment. “You are also in error about a number of things, and this error must be corrected or you will not truly find your way. To you nature is chaotic, swept with the winds of anarchy, senseless, inspired only by violence, and clamorous but essentially purposeless life. Civilization, to you, is man’s pathetic attempt to bring order to nature, to regulate it into some form of meaning, to guide its pointlessness into some semblance of significance. To you nature in its seeding, its growth, its death is a sum without an equation, a circle encompassing nothingness, a tree that flowers and bears fruit and dies in a grim desert. Such thoughts are lethal; they are freighted with death.”

“What else?” said Lucanus, impatiently. He thought that Keptah was becoming as tedious as Joseph ben Gamliel.

Again Keptah shook his head. “You are wrong. Nature is absolute order, ruled by absolute and immutable laws laid down at the beginning of the universe by God. Civilizations, so long as they agree with nature and its laws, such as creation, freedom of growth, the dignity of all that lives, and beauty of form, and reverence for the being of God and their own being, survive. Once they turn to rigidity and anonymousness under the State, and regulation of large and small forms to one flowerless level, the degradation of the best to the fruitless masses of men, the rejection of freedom for all — then nature must destroy them, through wars or pestilences or quick decay. You are in the midst, in these days, of the workings of the Law.”

“We are only continuing the endless conversations on the same matter which we have had all these months,” said Lucanus, wearily.

“I will not discuss it again,” said Keptah. “I only wish to remind you that you are wrong. Man is not the poor, voiceless, and suffering creature you think he is. He is a Fury, born of Hecate, and only One can save him from his self-determined fate.”

He waited for the stubborn Lucanus to speak, but he did not. Then Keptah said, “Are you of flesh and blood, and not stone? Your concern for men is impersonal, though compassionate. I fear it is even vengeful. You are still young. The world is full of kind and loving women. You should have a wife.”

Lucanus flushed and turned to him angrily. “Who are you to speak so? You have never married.”

Keptah looked at him strangely. “Aeneas and Diodorus were not the only men who loved your mother. I have known Iris since she was a child. You think me presumptuous, I who was once a slave?”

“I think of no man as a slave,” said Lucanus. He stared at Keptah, and his hard young face softened for a moment.

“But all men are slaves. They have willed it so. Only God can free them, He who gave them freedom at their birth, though they have renounced it and always will renounce it.” Keptah stood up. Then, without speaking again, he left Lucanus.

Lucanus looked at the sky, which was now exploding with blazing stars. He suddenly thought of the Star he had seen as a child. The Egyptian astronomers had told him of that Star. It was only a Nova. At first they had believed it a meteor, but it had moved too slowly, had been too brilliant, too steadfast in its passage. It had vanished by the next night. Lucanus remembered the deep stirring of his heart when he had seen that Star, the passionate and nameless assurance which had come to him, the intense joy. Now he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sensation of profound loss and sorrow, and he covered his face with his hands.

The next day, Plotius, the captain of Caesar’s own Praetorians, arrived at the house of Diodorus in his official chariot, surrounded by a picked detachment of the guards. As he had visited this house often since Diodorus’ death and had become very fond of Keptah, whom he honored as a wise man, his visit aroused no consternation. Keptah invited him to have refreshments, but Plotius said, “I have not come today for a fruitful gossip with you, my good Keptah. I have come on orders of Caesar. He wishes to see the son of Diodorus, Lucanus, at once.”

When Keptah showed some alarm, Plotius smiled. “You will remember that Caesar delivered the funeral oration. He has repeatedly mentioned, in my presence, his deep regard for Diodorus, and his determination to honor his memory. I believe that Lucanus sent him a message yesterday, and he wishes to discuss the contents of that message with him.”

“I think I know what it is,” said Keptah. “Lucanus has refused the appointment of Chief Medical Officer in Rome.”

“Is the physician mad?” said Plotius, marveling and nodding.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Keptah.

Plotius, in his armor and clothed with the strongest laws of Rome, accompanied Keptah into the bright gardens where Lucanus was playing, like a child, with his brothers and sister. Little Aurelia was riding on his back; he was pretending to be an untamed horse, to the delight of the children, and he was making ferocious noises and tossing his yellow head. Plotius thought it a most beautiful scene. He was also amazed at Lucanus’ handsomeness. But when the young physician saw his visitors he removed Aurelia from his back and waved away the disappointed children, who ran off to play at the far end of the gardens. Priscus returned after a moment, fascinated as always by the armored soldier who often brought him sweetmeats and declared him to be the young Diodorus himself.

“You want me?” asked Lucanus, who had never seen Plotius before though he had heard of him from Keptah’s letters.

“Greetings,” said Plotius, raising his right arm in the stiff soldierly salute. “You are Lucanus, son of Diodorus Cyrinus? I am Plotius, Captain of the Praetorians in Caesar’s household. You are to come with me for an audience with Caesar.”

Lucanus glanced at Keptah. Keptah said, “When Caesar commands, Caesar must be obeyed.”

“Very well,” said Lucanus. He brushed blades of grass from his tunic. He hesitated. “I have no grand apparel. I must come as I am.”

“You shall not insult Caesar by appearing before him like a crude shepherd,” said Keptah, with a smile for Plotius. “Here, my good friend, is a young man of considerable wealth. Yet he affects to be a poor countryman. Come, Lucanus, I have a fine toga, which I had made for myself, and for the arranging of the folds of which I have trained a very intelligent girl.”

He took Lucanus’ reluctant arm. The young man had colored with annoyance at the raillery in Keptah’s tone. Plotius watched them go into the house. Priscus, as usual, was wistfully fingering the hilt of the short broadsword.

“Ah,” said Plotius, “you will make a soldier as fine as your father.” He unsheathed the sword and gave it to the boy, who grasped it with his strong and brown little hand. His tanned cheeks glowed, and his eyes lighted. “Now,” said Plotius, “thrust like this, turning the wrist so.”

“I will serve Caesar,” said the child, thrusting and feinting at Plotius. “I will be a great soldier.” The other children returned to watch, and Priscus proudly ignored them, though watching them out of the corner of his eye. Aurelia clapped her hands and screamed in admiration as Priscus stamped like a fencer and mightily handled the heavy sword. The little girl’s hair was like a golden moon about her pretty face.

Keptah returned with Lucanus, who was clothed in a most regal toga now. A stableboy was bringing one of the household’s finest horses to the gate, an Idumaean stallion. When Lucanus mounted it and controlled it with expert mastery, Plotius thought of Phoebus, for the horse and the horseman stood against the passionately blue sky like statues suddenly embued with life.

Lucanus rode silently beside Plotius’ chariot into the city, the other Praetorians mounted behind them. He is very strange, thought the captain. He said to Lucanus after a while, “Rome is in a very festive mood today. The people are honoring Cybele, and her temple overflows.”

“I know nothing of Rome,” said Lucanus, curtly. “I passed only outside its walls on the way home.” Plotius shrugged, and the conversation died. But Plotius continued to admire Lucanus’ horsemanship and the way he sat on the stallion. He was certainly godlike. The ladies of Rome would go mad over him.

Long before they entered the city through the Asinara Gate, Lucanus could see Rome, white and bronze and golden on its Seven Hills, crowding against the cerulean sky. There she was, enormous, swollen not only with Romans but with men of many nations and many tongues, a city fierce and depraved, the mistress of all law, the mistress of the world, glorious in potency and color, the hub of her tremendous roads, fed by her great aqueducts which brought fresh clean water countless miles from distant streams and rivers, and by her ships from every corner of the earth. Here was Rome, the devourer, the destroyer, more terrible than her eagles, before whose fasces uncounted millions of Germans, Arabs, Gauls, Britons, Egyptians, Armenians, Jews, Spaniards, Sicambrians, Indus, Greeks, and Nubians, and myriad other peoples, bowed in terror. The sun blazed on distant walls and gleaming columns; it gilded far temples in blinding gold. All the wealth of the world was here, all its power, perversions, and evils, all its strange appetites and stranger gods, all its depravities and tongues and customs and lustings, all its beauties and arts and philosophies, all its intrigues and plottings. No wonder, thought Lucanus, that Diodorus had at once loved and hated his city.

The stone road, the pride of Rome, thronged with horses, chariots, wagons, and carts, loaded with merchandise and produce. An aqueduct ran alongside, its high waters gurgling in the warm spring sunlight. Fields of poppies and yellow buttercups blew on the borders; the air was filled with the ferment of the earth and with the sweat and effluvium of the caravans. Plotius ordered some of his lictors to surround him and Lucanus and to clear a passage. Lucanus, in spite of himself, was caught up in curiosity and fascination. He looked down at the teeming dark faces of his fellow travelers; he smelled the odor of spices and garlic; the air thundered with pounding feet and hoofs and the rattling and creaking of unnumbered vehicles. His eyes hurt with the shifting and vigorous color and the vivacious sun. “The traffic,” said Plotius, with disgust, “becomes worse every day. Every other road leading to Rome is as badly overcrowded. Yet Rome is never surfeited; she is like a vast mouth eternally open and eternally gulping. She is like Cronos, who devoured his children.”

Clouds of noisy cheeping swallows sailed over their heads and added to the furious din of men and vehicles and horses which seemed to shake the road. The cultivated fields on each side glistened with the almost unbelievable green of young crops set out in rows on the red and fecund earth. Infrequent copses of myrtle, oak, and cypress trees cast an occasional shade on the burning stones, and here and there, beside a blue and shallow stream, stood clusters of great willows drooping their frail jade hair downwards to their pale and mottled trunks and the shining water. The tumultuous road wound past white villas set in gardens, and pastures full of mild cattle, and groups of chained slaves raising new walls or repairing them.

Now the yellow dust thickened and became a bright haze over the travelers, and a powdering like gold appeared in the folds of Keptah’s precious toga which was so artistically draped over Lucanus’ light blue tunic. Lucanus attempted to brush it off, but it clung to the fine linen. His stallion sneezed and snorted. Plotius thought it ridiculous for a man in a toga to ride a horse. He had offered to return Lucanus to his home in his chariot, but this had been coldly refused by the young man.

As they approached closer and closer to the city Lucanus’ sense of excitement grew, and a very human curiosity. Rome was seven hundred years old, and old, now, with ancient sin. It was fitting that she had been founded on a fratricide. However, her decline had begun with the decline of the Republic into an absolute empire. Her world-flung banners rode with the whirlwind; her might was maintained by a hundred legions, and spies and informers and murderers by the multitude. Intrigue suffocated the once honest air of the Republic. But that inevitably was the course of empire, the course of power and ‘world leadership’. Lucretius’ poem,
De Rerum Natura
, which Lucanus had read, had a double meaning, one for the latrines of Rome and one for the latrines of the Roman spirit. In the physical latrines mothers frequently abandoned unwanted newborn children; in the spiritual latrines men had abandoned their faith and their character.

What did it matter that Gaius Octavius, Augustus Caesar, had boasted that he had found a city of brick and had converted it to a city of marble, which gleamed and glittered in the sun? Better, thought Lucanus, a humble city with justice than a marble sepulcher for the transcendent virtues. But still he was excited. The cavalcade stopped at the gate, and the incomers were scrutinized by the soldiers on guard, with their drawn swords. The top of the gate snapped with the banners of Rome, and the terrible stone eagles stared furiously down at the road and the restless crowds of men and animals and vehicles. Plotius and his entourage were admitted with salutes and rode through the gate, leaving behind them a deafening uproar of impatience. And now they were in the enormous city, enveloped and devoured by it.

If Lucanus had been dazed by sound and noise on the road, he was completely dazed now by the city. The rest period occurring after the noonday meal was over, and as they proceeded along the Via Asinara they were slowed to less than a trot by the multitudinous shopkeepers, clerks, and bankers on the way back to work. Though Gaius Octavius had declared that all Roman citizens should wear the toga, the majority of hurrying men wore the short tunic of many colors, blue, scarlet, yellow, white, brown, crimson, and green, and shades of all these hues. Most were afoot; a few of the more affluent were carried in litters. Chariots and horsemen tried to force passage over the flat or cobbled stones. The traffic was made more congested when groups of ebullient citizens insisted on halting in the very middle of the street to discuss business or exchange gossip. When forced to break up by the force of the traffic itself, they took refuge in the doorways of shops and taverns, there to shout and gesture and swear and laugh, or to conclude a bargain. The road was hemmed in by the tall houses, sometimes of as high as eight stories, where women leaned on window sills to scream at children who had escaped the courts in the rear and were adding their uproar to the general din. Here most of the buildings were built of the flat, long red brick of an earlier era. Men pushed carts on which smoky braziers stood, and on the top of these braziers sausages and small pastries sizzled. Other carts, propelled by their owners, were filled with cheap merchandise for the consideration of the women who stretched from their windows and shrilled down at the vendors and insulted their wares, or nodded at a held-up length of wool or linen or cotton of violent tint, and at other sundry offerings. To Lucanus the city reeked worse than Antioch and Alexandria, in spite of the endless sanitary laws, but it was a more gigantic reek, and almost awesome in consequence. His nostrils were stricken by foul odors, by the hot odoriferousness of cooking victuals, by oil and animal offal, by the pervading miasma of millions of latrines, by astringent dust and the smell of sun-heated stone and brick. Here the cool spring of the country had been lost in an immense and choking heat, as of midsummer. Eddies of hot air flowed from other streets as from ovens. And everywhere clamor, running, shouting, expostulating, and the pound of wheels and hoofs, and billowing clouds of pigeons and swallows. When the lictors of the Praetorians broke up a particularly large mob of merchants who were vociferously disagreeing with each other in the very center of the street, Lucanus was aware of scores of indignant black eyes turned upon him and his escort, and, because of the noise, he could only see writhing mouths emitting curses. The Urbs feared no one, not even Caesar.

What most impressed Lucanus, and dizzied him, was the height of the city, the tall buildings, the looming apartments, crowded together and thrusting against each other, contrasting in their colors of red and yellow tufa and grayish green peperino, their arches filled with eddying groups swirling like water. The city, contained by its walls and gates, had only one way to grow, and that was upwards. As a consequence all the streets boiled like impetuous rapids, and the citizens, forced to push shoulder or elbow into a neighbor for passage, were understandably irritable and were often given to blows or open quarrels because of blocked movement. As Lucanus was now approaching a wealthier quarter, this confusion and noise was compounded by walls, higher buildings, circuses, theaters, private homes, and government establishments, covered with marble of many colors, not only white, but golden and brown and red and occasionally a slab of dazzling black. Rome had absorbed all the gods of her conquered nations into one seething pantheon of religions, and temples jutted everywhere, through whose bronze doors poured endless conclaves of worshipers, those going carrying sacrifices and those emerging emanating the scent of incense. Many, awaiting friends, stood in porticoes, gesticulating, spitting, arguing. Now tall and fluted columns appeared, on which soared bronze or iron or white marble statues of gods and goddesses and mounted heroes, prickling up like giant pikes from the seething crowds and jostling buildings and temples, sometimes perched on each side of wide stairways leading to public buildings and places of worship, and sometimes leaping from a broadening of the road and in the center, surrounded by small circles of earth filled with brilliantly colored flowers in the midst of fountains, or gleaming with mosaics. And over it all — all the stunning clamor of millions of voices, hordes of vehicles and horses, all the power of Imperial Rome and her marbled hills — arched the hot blue sky like a domed and suffocating cover over a steaming and colossal pot.