Empire (21 page)

Titus stepped farther behind the Praetorian, but not before Mnester’s eyes met his. It was only a brief look, but Titus was certain that Mnester recognized him, and in the other man’s eyes Titus saw his own doom. Mnester began to raise one hand, as if to point in accusation. Titus felt as if the floor lurched beneath him. His face turned hot and his heart pounded.

“Remember the auspices!” Titus whispered.

Claudius twitched his head to one side. “What’s that?”

“Remember the auspices, Caesar. The gods demand justice.”

Claudius slowly nodded his head. He called Narcissus to him and spoke in his ear. Narcissus crossed the room and spoke to the Praetorians at the door.

Mnester remained on the floor, his face and chest wet with tears but with the faint intimation of a smile at the corner of his mouth. It was the face of an actor at the end of a tragic play, exhausted by the role and still immersed in the cathartic moment, but ready to receive the accolades of the audience. He thought he had won Claudius’s pardon.

In the next moment he was made aware of his mistake. Praetorians surrounded him. One of them produced a leather strap attached at both ends to an iron rod. While two men held Mnester to keep him from struggling free, the strangling device was slipped over his head. Only two twists of the rod were required to sufficiently tighten the strap. Mnester’s face turned a vivid shade of red, then purple. His eyes bulged. Mucus erupted from his nose. His tongue protruded from his mouth. The only noise he made sounded disconcertingly like the squeaking of a mouse.

The man holding the rod gave it another full twist. Every part of Mnester’s body convulsed, so violently that the Praetorians barely maintained their hold. Then Mnester went limp.

His body was dragged from the room. Narcissus called a slave to clean
the floor where Mnester had emptied his bladder. The slave used Mnester’s discarded sleeping tunic as a mop.

“Are there m-m-more?” said Claudius in a hollow voice.

“Yes,” said Narcissus. “Several more.”

Claudius shook his head. “No more today. I’m tired. And hungry.”

“As you wish, Caesar. I’ll see that your dinner is made ready.”

“Cousin Titus will d-d-dine with me.”

Titus suppressed a groan. “If you’d rather be alone—”

“Oh, no, I insist. Run along, Narcissus. We’ll catch up.” He turned to Titus. “Thank you, cousin.”

“For what?”

“For helping me keep my nerve. I almost lost it. Mnester had to be p-p-punished.”

“Still, Caesar, there was no need for you to witness the unpleasantness.”

“No? Mnester betrayed me. He deserved to d-d-die. But his acting gave me great pleasure over the years. I owed it to him to witness his final performance.”

At dinner, Titus was the only guest. He said little. It was Claudius who filled the silence as he rambled from one topic to another, from the military situation in Britannia—conquered but still undergoing pacification by the general Vespasian—to his anger at the Jews, and all the trouble their religious fanaticism was causing, not just in their homeland but in Roma and Alexandria and every other city where their numbers were significant.

Claudius seemed completely disconnected from the events of the day. Titus could think of nothing else. A part of him remained braced for some terrible surprise.

He kept seeing Mnester’s face at the end. If Titus had said nothing, would Mnester still be alive? Titus had merely reminded Claudius of the auspices. Why did he feel a need to justify himself? Everyone else manipulated Claudius to gain his own ends. Titus had done so to save his own life.

Narcissus announced that a messenger had arrived with news about Messalina.

“Yes, where is she?” said Claudius, his voice slurred by wine. “Why is she not here for d-d-dinner?”

Titus felt a sinking sensation.

Claudius continued to eat. Chewing on a chicken bone, he said, “Well, Narcissus?”

“Messalina is dead, Caesar.”

Claudius sat back, looking baffled. He blinked a few times, gave a twitch of his head, then shrugged. He reached for his cup and drank more wine. He picked up another piece of chicken.

Narcissus waited, ready to be asked for more information. Claudius said nothing. Eventually, Narcissus cleared his throat and recounted the details. “Caesar’s agents surrounded her apartments in the Gardens of Lucullus. Her slaves offered no resistance. She was given a knife and offered the opportunity to take her own life. She announced that she would do so, but she lacked the courage. When she faltered, one of Caesar’s agents took the knife from her and finished the job.”

Messalina, stabbed to death! Titus was stunned by the enormity of it.

Claudius took a bite of chicken and chewed for a long time, staring into the distance.

“Does Caesar have any further orders?” asked Narcissus.

“Orders? Yes, Tell the b-b-boy to bring more wine.” He turned to Titus. “You are a good man, cousin. A man I can trust! Do you know, I think I shall make you a senator. Your grandfather was a senator, wasn’t he? We lost a few senators today and they’ll need to be replaced. How would you like that?” Claudius nodded thoughtfully. “I shall make you a senator on one condition: if I should ever think of m-m-marrying again, you must stop me. You will put it to a vote and have me stripped of my office. If I should ever so much as m-m-mention m-m-marriage, I give you and the other senators permission to kill me on the spot and put an old fool out of his misery!”

After dinner, Claudius bade Titus good night and retired.

The same courier who had fetched Titus earlier reappeared to escort
him out of the imperial house. They passed through the room where Titus had waited. Something was different.

“The statues,” he said. “Where are they?”

“What statues?” said the courier, looking straight ahead.

“The statues of Messalina and Mnester.”

“I don’t recall any such statues in this room,” said the courier.

“But you told me that story, about how the coins of Caligula had been melted down. . . .”

The courier shrugged and quickened his pace.

Even the pedestals were gone, and the green marble floor beneath had been polished to show no trace. The images of Messalina and Mnester had vanished as if they had never existed.

The weather was mild for mid-December. A crowd of dignitaries and members of the imperial household stood around the perimeter of the Auguratorium on the Palatine. The occasion was the fourteenth birthday of young Nero, the son of Agrippina, grandson of Germanicus, great-great-grandson of Augustus, and great-nephew and now adopted son of Claudius. Titus Pinarius was present, wearing his trabea rather than his purple-bordered senatorial toga and carrying his lituus. He was to perform the augury for the young man’s toga day, his passage to manhood.

Chrysanthe was among the guests, looking beautiful as always and only slightly uncomfortable in the company of the Roman-born matrons, who would always think of her as an Alexandrian. She devoted most of her attention to their son, Lucius, who at four was deemed by Titus to be old enough and sufficiently well behaved to attend such a ceremony and watch his father at work.

While he waited to be called upon, Titus surveyed the crowd. Many of the women were dazzling in their finery, but none stood out more than Nero’s mother. At thirty-six, Agrippina was still a strikingly attractive woman. Her hair was parted in the middle; long curls streamed like ribbons on either side and were gathered by a purple-and-gold fillet at the back of her head. Her stola was a garment of numerous layers and folds,
woven of a fabric of many colors. Her beaming smile showed her prominent canine teeth—a sign of good luck, many believed. Fortune had certainly smiled on Agrippina in recent years.

Despite his vow never to marry again after his humiliation by Messalina, Claudius almost immediately married Agrippina. It seemed the widower felt incomplete without a strong-willed and beautiful woman to manipulate him. Claudius’s choice of a bride had scandalized the city, since marriage between an uncle and a niece was incest. To forestall the fears of the populace that some supernatural calamity might result, Claudius had called on Titus to look for omens and precedents that favored his marriage to Agrippina, and Titus had obliged. Agrippina was grateful for this service. Titus’s prestigious role at this day’s event was the latest proof of her favor.

Fortune had not always smiled on Agrippina. The untimely deaths of her parents, her humiliating exile under Caligula, the loss of two husbands—she had endured all these trials and emerged triumphant. She had even outwitted the machinations of Messalina—for most people now agreed that it was Agrippina and her son who had been threatened by the jealousy of Messalina, and not the reverse. It was said that Messalina had once sent an assassin to kill Nero in his crib, but the man had been frightened off by a snake in the baby’s bed—actually the skin of a snake, placed there by his clever and vigilant mother. Agrippina had become a stirring exemplar of Roman womanhood. She had survived every setback, and her marriage to her uncle Claudius had made her the most powerful woman in Roma.

Also in attendance was the nine-year-old son of Claudius and Messalina, Britannicus. He was dressed in the old-fashioned long-sleeved tunic still worn by many patrician boys. His hair was long and unkempt. He seemed a bit shy and standoffish, observing the proceedings with a lowered brow and sidelong glances. What sort of fellow would he grow up to be? wondered Titus, trying to imagine a combination of his wildly different parents. What must the boy’s life be like these days, three years after the terrible death of his disgraced mother? Claudius had once been a doting father, but it seemed to Titus that he now neglected the boy. No doubt Britannicus reminded Claudius of Messalina. How did Claudius feel about a son who looked so much like the woman who had made a fool of him, and had been put to death on his orders?

Certainly Agrippina had no love for Britannicus. She had not only persuaded Claudius to adopt Nero, making him first in line of inheritance ahead of Britannicus, but had arranged for Nero to be recognized as an adult a full year earlier than was traditional—a young man’s toga day was usually between his fifteenth and seventeenth years—so that he could begin accumulating the honors and rewards of a public career. This was clearly in service to her agenda of elevating her son, but there was also a sound political argument for advancing Nero as quickly as possible. As long as Claudius had no adult heir, potential rivals might be encouraged to plot against him. And if Claudius should die, an orphaned Britannicus would be highly vulnerable, while Nero was just old enough, especially with his mother behind him, to act as a plausible ruler. Also to his advantage was the fact that Nero was the direct descendant of the Divine Augustus.

Neglected though he might be, young Britannicus was not alone. With him was his constant companion, a boy a year or so older, Titus Flavius Vespasian, son of the general of the same name. Titus had been brought up alongside Britannicus, with the same teachers and athletic instructors. The boy’s bright smile and outgoing personality presented a contract to Britannicus’s withdrawn, almost furtive manner.

The elder Vespasian was also present, along with his wife, who held their newborn son. In his early forties, Vespasian was a veteran of thirty battles in the newly conquered province of Britannia. His victories had earned him a public triumph in which young Titus had ridden alongside him in the chariot, and he had been rewarded with a consulship, the highest office to which a citizen could aspire. With a large nose, a mouth too small for his fleshy face, and a heavy, furrowed brow, Vespasian was not handsome; he had the perpetual expression of man straining to empty his bowels. His family fortune had started with his father, a tax collector in the province of Asia, but the Flavians were otherwise obscure. Behind his back, members of the imperial court complained of Vespasian’s uncouth manners and flagrant social climbing. To Titus Pinarius, on the few occasions when they had spoken, Vespasian had seemed forthright and without pretense, as befitted a military man. It did not seem quite proper that Vespasian should have brought his two-month-old infant to such a ceremony,
but clearly the general was eager to show the child off. To everyone who greeted him he insisted on introducing “the newest addition to the Flavians, my little Domitian.”