The Kingdom of the Wicked (63 page)

       'How long since Otho seized power?'

       'A few weeks.'

       'Who helped him to it?'

       You know Tigellinus?'

       'I know the bastard. A few weeks, eh? It seems hardly fair to allow him to get settled in.'

       And so Vitellius disclosed to his troops an affability he had not previously shown, embracing odd common soldiers as far as his belly would permit, showering gold pieces on them, inviting even centurions to share his breakfast, a meal which tended to be prolonged until it could be fairly called dinner, and obtaining a cheering proclamation without much difficulty. How sordid all this is. When Otho got the news that the legions of Vitellius had already been sighted in northern Italy, he reluctantly marched at the head of the Thirteenth, ready to parley, and was suicidally depressed when he found he was committed to battle. He was not a fighting man. In his tent outside Brixellum he spoke harshly to Tigellinus, who had unexpectedly changed from uniform into the garb of a civilian traveller:

       'Did not expect it? What do you mean — you did not expect it?'

       'I did not,' Tigellinus smoothly said, 'expect such a state of unpreparedness. I gave you my support on a different understanding. Even under my first master Nero there was a sort of stability. Which, I must admit, Nero at length totally liquidated. After all, my loyalty is to Rome.'

       'Meaning whoever is capable of taking Rome?'

       'You can put it like that, yes. It's no unpatriotic act to leave you now, Otho.'

       'I'm still called Caesar,' Otho said, loudly though with little conviction.

       'So briefly. So terribly briefly. Still, you're entitled to the honorific. Vale, Caesar.' He gave the ancient European salute and left the tent. One of Otho's senior officers came in and looked inquiringly at his master. Otho said:

       'No, I know what you're going to suggest. Leave all that to Vitellius.’

       ‘Do we fight, Caesar?'

       'Well, we certainly don't surrender. But I've no real taste for civil war. I think I'd better get my papers in order.'

       This took a long time. To his secretary Britannus he gave certain simple signed instructions. No punishment of deserters. All manifests of Otho's supporters to be burnt, along with all private letters which might incriminate his friends. No records, in other words. Though an exception could be made for Tigellinus. 'I'll retire now. I don't want to be disturbed till dawn. I recommend that you go into retirement. Somewhere remote and safe. You know you're provided for.'

       'I'm grateful, Caesar.'

       Otho, like so many of the personages of my story, was completely bald, but he had always worn a well sculpted toupee that dissimulated his condition even to friends and concubines. Now he took this off. In a mood of total serenity he ate a light supper and then went to bed. By his bed a good sharp dagger was waiting. At dawn the army of Vitellius roared into the camp, pillaging in a fierce red light that was the shepherd's warning. In the tent of Otho they found the body of Otho, neatly pierced, the face above the wound relaxing from the contortion of death into a deep peace. The hair above the face was very neatly disposed. It was what was known as a Roman end.

       Vitellius ate his way into Rome, crunching the votive bunches of grapes that peasants humbly handed him, digging his blunt fingers into watermelons, calling for grilled meat from the stalls by the roadside. The first ceremonial banquet would be of three days' duration.

       Tigellinus was wallowing in a bath of bubbling mud in the establishment of a certain Laetus on the outskirts of Rome when he heard the news that his days were numbered, indeed his hours. One naked handmaiden was kneading hot red mud into his groin while another shaved him. He embraced the kneader with hungry fervour before politely saying to the shaver: 'Give me that razor. Then leave me, both of you. A gentleman sometimes has to be alone. There are certain things a gentleman can only do for himself.' The girls snatched up bathrobes and giggled their way out. Tigellinus grasped the razor by its white bone handle, mumbling to himself.

       'Well, little Nero, it was a good run. True to one's nature. I was always true to mine. Well, until recently. A gentleman should never scheme to obtain power. Power comes to those who can use it — for whatever end. I was a bad man, Nero. Totally bad. That in itself ought to be pleasing to some god or other. But I don't know his name. I rose out of the mud. And here I am. At the last.' He scored both forearms very deeply and watched with a kind of admiration the rich red flow. 'Sleepy, a little sleepy. Back to the mud, Tigellinus.' He sank into it.

       A man like Tigellinus could be regarded as a supererogatory element in the reign of an emperor like Vitellius, whose main distinctions were gluttony and cruelty and a willingness to indulge both at the same time. There was, for instance, the time when he sat alone at table, gorging brains, livers and pancreases seethed in cream and honey, having already taken a morning snack of the sacrificial meats offered to the gods and additional bevers of sturgeon, oysters, pies made of small wild birds and sickeningly sweet pastries, what time he gloated over the forthcoming dessert of the execution of a good citizen named Octavius. Octavius stood near the block, far enough away from the dining table to ensure that no blood would stain its napery, while the axeman waited to his left and his wife, Livia, wept and pleaded on his right. With courtesy Vitellius said:

       You will forgive my dining at this solemn moment in your life, Octavius. I have a busy day. I must eat when I can. Have you anything to say before the carver ah carves?'

       'I die deservedly, Caesar,' Octavius said. 'There is no worse crime than being a fool. You should write a treatise called A Short Way with Creditors.'

       'Oh, Caesar,' Livia sobbed, 'he did only good to you, sir. He sold his mother's house to get you the money you said you needed. Be merciful. He won't do it again.'

       Vitellius choked on that, spraying the air with fragments of stewed milt. Octavius said to his wife: 'Go now, Livia. Remember me as I was.' Vitellius said to her:

       'No, don't go, Oliva or Lavia or whatever your name is. You can still remember him as he was for a second or so. A capitate husband, so to speak. You realize, of course, that your crime is rather greater than his. You pleaded for his life. You said in effect that the imperial verdict was unjust. Headsman, try out your blade on an easy neck — delicate, swanlike I think the poets would say.'

       'I congratulate you, Vitellius,' Octavius said. 'I thought Gaius and Nero were the ultimate monsters. You do better than both. And you'll meet the same end. If you don't burst first like a poisoned dog.'

       The screaming Livia was carried to the block while Vitellius ate with relish. This was no exceptional day for him. The exceptional days were marked by consumption of the great Minerva pie, which was compounded, under a thick crust of flour and eggwhite, of the organs of pikes, carp, pheasants, quails, partridges, peacocks, flamingoes and lampreys and the execution not merely of creditors but of close friends who came to the banquet smiling. There was always plenty to eat for Vitellius.

       What can one say of this Rome except that it was in great need of moral redemption and that it had missed its chance? And what can one say of the corruption of the present writer, who admits to a gross fascination in the recording of bloody misrule and a certain reluctance to return to the lives of small people who sweep, bake bread, make decent marital love, perform their humble duties to the community but raise yawns more than admiration when they become matter for a book? God, if he exists and does not recognize Petronius, may think differently, but you are not God.

Marcus Julius Tranquillus and his wife and daughter left Rome at an opportune time. Julius's uncle, who was ageing and lonely, made them welcome in his villa in Pompeii, which lay not far from the fertile slopes of Mons Summanus, a mountain which had erupted recently and would not, so the astrologers decreed, erupt again for at least a century. Julius, a retired soldier, took to what many veterans did for health and pleasure in those days: he cultivated a garden. But he tended his uncle's grounds, which had been neglected, for profit also. He added to the garden two acres of unused paddock: the soil was so rich here with the past effusions of the volcano that it cried aloud to he planted and harvested. So Julius grew salad greens, cucumbers, melons and marrows, plucked plums and cherries, and tended vines which produced wine so miraculous that it was called the tears of the gods; the few quiet Christians around (of whom Julius was no longer one) went further and called it the tears of Christ. When Julius's uncle died, full of years and still dreaming of the return of the republic, the property went to the nephew. Julius prospered, employing two boys and his own son-in-law in the planting, tending and marketing. Ruth had married the son of a Greek bridging engineer named — like his father — Demetrios, who had migrated hither as a child with his family from western Cyprus. While the Roman Empire was setting to history the worst possible examples of morality and rule, it was also, distractedly as it were, proclaiming the virtues of intermarriage, which I have always held to be one of the hopes of a humanity which has tried to thrive too long on divisiveness.

       Julius was growing old now, irongrey but not bald, muscular and sunburnt but given to shooting pains in the back and thighs. Sara was less old, but she too was greying and her body, which had been slender as a sword, had rounded to an acceptable matronliness. She retained her old cynicism about the ways of God and empires. The day was enough and whatever the day brought — the kitchen tasks, the laying of the red dust, the feeding of the hens and pigeons, the evening gossip over the tears of the gods, the stroll with her married daughter through a town grown soft in its cultivation of pleasure, well planned however, full of ridiculous statues and refreshing fountains. It was a town of baths and brothels, fantastic fashions in dress and hair for the patrician women, lavish dinner parties for the rich, a general tolerance of Oriental faiths though not of Christianity, games and plays and singing contests, a balmy climate, Mons Summanus recovered from his sickness and puffing slackly and benignly.

       One day Sara's brother Caleb and his wife Hannah came unexpectedly, leading a grey donkey on which their household gods were bundled and corded. They were travelstained and weary but swiftly revived after a warm sluice and a cup of the divine lacrimation. They unloaded their beast and sent it to graze in the orchard among the plum windfalls.

       How long are you staying?' Sara asked.

       'Myself not at all. Hannah, until I get back. If I ever do.' Hannah was thin with a grief she could not lose nor seemed to wish to. Caleb was hardy enough but looked older than Julius. His nose seemed more assertive than before, his cheeks had shrunken. They had had no further child; they had settled to an unphilosophical resentment of the death of their son.

       'There's room for her.'

       'She's a good hand with the needle. And her cooking isn't bad.’

       ‘And you go where?'

       'Well, it's a long story,' Caleb said to Julius and Sara, as they sat over the cool jug. 'I'm going back to Jerusalem. I take ship from Puteoli. I've waited how many years for this? And it comes when I'm too old, an old married man with no son to promise a future to.'

       'What future?' Julius asked. 'What's going on?'

       'You get no news here?'

       'News of what?'

       Caleb sighed heavily, sitting on his ornate little chair nursing his cup, his shoulders hunched. 'The Romans always ran Palestine badly. Our people put up with a lot but there had to be a limit. The procurator Florus has forced this on the people. Robbing the Temple, God help us. What do the Jews do? Sit back and let him do it? They hit, at least the Zealots did. There've been some Roman deaths. Florus ordered a massacre and some woman there tried to stop it. Daughter of Caligula's puppet — I forget her name.'

       'Bernice or Berenice,' Julius said. 'I saw her in Caesarea. A pretty little woman. No fool.'

       'Now she's gone on to the Roman side,' Caleb said. 'Perhaps she can't be blamed. The Jews burned down her palace in Jerusalem. The Jews can sometimes be very ungrateful. But the Jews at the moment are mad, and who can blame them?'

       'Where did you learn all this?' Sara asked.

       'It's come through to Rome. There are prayers in the synagogues. It's the war at last. The Romans brought this on themselves. I've got to get out there.'

       'To be killed,' Hannah started to sob. 'They won't win, they can't. It's going to be butchery.'

       'Oh, yes,' Caleb admitted. 'They've got the legions coming in from Syria. And we, they, the Zealots, have stones and a few knives and no organization. No unity, no control. The Sadducees want to keep out of it and the Pharisees aren't sure. As for the Nazarenes —’ He looked straight at Julius. 'It's the end of the Nazarenes.'

       'I thought it would be, some day,' Julius said. 'God hasn't been helpful to the Nazarenes. Or to the Jews. I lost faith. I see now it was Paul I had faith in.'

       'You're no longer one of them?'

       'No longer. I attached my faith to something else. Something more in keeping with the needs of a retired centurion.'

       'He means,' Sara said with some scorn, 'he's been washed in the blood of the white bull. Nonsense like the other thing. But more fanciful nonsense. Mithraism, they call it.'

       'In what way,' Julius asked, 'is it the end of the Nazarenes?' He felt a lump like hard cake in his mouth.

       'How could the Nazarenes be trusted? They don't believe in war. They turn the other cheek. They won't die for the Temple.'

       'And quite right too,' Sara said. 'Why should anyone want to die for a chunk of stone?'

       'He's ready to die for it,' Hannah sobbed. 'Men are fools.'