Empire (26 page)

Writing something worthy of being delivered in the Senate House, without a slave to transcribe and edit, was rather hard work, he realized. But it was also quite absorbing, as he found himself rubbing out awkward sentences and reworking them, coming up with new ideas that needed to be inserted inside other ideas, and rearranging the order of his arguments. Before he knew it, dawn had broken and the house had come to life around
him. Slaves were scurrying up and down the hallway, some of them clearly surprised to see their master awake so early. The smell of breakfast farina wafted from the kitchen.

Titus was suddenly very hungry and in the mood for something sweet. He called to one of the girls and told her to bring him a bowl of steaming-hot farina with honey and dates and pine nuts. “You know how I like it,” he said.

After breakfast, he summoned his usual retinue of slaves and headed for the baths. Often he patronized a small establishment on the slope of the Aventine above the Circus Maximus. The place was old and small, and a bit drafty, but conveniently close to his house. But on this day Titus decided to go to the Baths of Agrippa. He was in the mood for a bit of luxury and spectacle, and the Baths of Agrippa always provided that. As well, there was plenty of space in the galleries to do a bit of work, in case he wanted to polish his notes a bit more.

The baths were out on the Field of Mars, a fair distance from his house. He considered taking a sedan or a litter, but decided to walk instead. Titus did not want to become one of those effeminate fellows who never stepped outside his house without being carried by slaves.

As he strode through the markets along the Tiber and then through the busy neighborhood around the old Circus Flaminius and the Theater of Pompeius, it seemed to Titus that there were a great many people headed the other way, toward the Forum, and that they all looked rather serious. There was a mood in the air, an atmosphere of tension. His bodyguards noticed it, too. Titus saw them draw more closely together, looking this way and that with more than their usual wariness.

Titus could not think what was happening, and forgot all about it once he arrived at the baths. He never ceased to marvel at the grandiose beauty of the place, with its high ceilings, splendid marble columns, and galleries of famous paintings and statues. The sheer luxury of the hot plunge, the cool plunge, the warm plunge, and then a thorough massage did much to rejuvenate him after his restless night. He watched the swimmers in the long pool for a while, narrowing his eyes at the glimmer of the morning sun reflected off the water and feeling its warmth on his face. He nibbled some dried figs and almonds and sipped a much-watered cup of wine, and forgot all his cares for a while. He even forgot his speech, and did no more
work on his notes. When he was finally ready to be dressed in his toga, he saw by the sundial next to the long pool that if he did not hurry he would be late for the taking of the auspices—not his duty on this occasion—and the opening of the day’s business in the Senate.

He decided to hire a sedan and told the bearers to move at a fast pace. His bodyguards trotted alongside, but the other slaves lagged a bit; they would catch up and wait outside the Senate House in case Titus needed them. The ride was so smooth that he was able to take out the wax tablet and review his notes. Taking a sedan was not such an indulgence, he decided, if one used the time to do a bit of work.

The bearers took the most direct route, between the north side of the Capitoline Hill and the Temple of Venus built by the Divine Julius. Before Titus knew it, they were approaching the Senate House from the back side. He looked up from his notes, distracted by a strange noise that came from the direction of the Forum: it sounded like the roar of the ocean, or the crowd at the Circus Maximus. As the sedan rounded a corner, Titus saw something he had never seen before: the area before the steps of the Senate House was thronged with people. There were hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands. There was no reason for them to be there; this was not a festival day, and there was no public ceremony requiring their attendance. What were all these people doing here?

The sedan came to a stop at one end of the steps. Hitching up his toga, Titus ascended a few steps, then turned to take a closer look at the crowd. It was made up mostly of men of the common sort, ill-groomed and dressed in drab tunics—the citizen rabble of Roma. He looked at their faces. They did not look happy. Some of them seemed to be drunk, but that was inevitable in any large gathering. Some were clustered in smaller groups, talking among themselves or listening to a speaker. What were they talking about? Why did they appear so angry and agitated?

Titus threw a few coins to the sedan bearers, who disappeared at once. “Wait for me here, at this spot,” he told his bodyguards, feeling an unaccustomed uneasiness. Usually he allowed his bodyguards to loiter around the Forum while he was in the Senate House, rather like dogs let off a leash, but on this day he wanted to know that they would be exactly where he had left them when he came out.

Halfway up the steps he ran into a fellow senator, Gaius Cassius
Longinus. Under Claudius, as governor of Syria, Cassius had amassed a great fortune. His learned commentaries on the law had established him as the Senate’s leading expert on all matters judicial. Still, Titus could never forget that Cassius’s ancestor and namesake had been one of the assassins of the Divine Julius. Cassius’s eyesight had begun to fail; he was often in a foul mood, and today was no exception. Titus, who was much junior to Cassius in the Senate, usually would have given the older man a nod and no more, but he could not resist asking Cassius if he knew anything about the crowd before the Senate House.

Cassius squinted at the throng and scowled. “They’re here to plead for mercy for those slaves,” he said.

“Really? There are so many of them.”

“Are there? Then it’s a blessing that I can barely see them. I’m told they’ve been arriving all morning, and more are arriving every moment. You know, our ancestors saw this sort of thing all the time—mobs gathering to demonstrate in the Forum whenever there was a debate in the Senate. Sometimes the mobs would riot. Sometimes it was like this every day in the Republic, especially toward the end. Can you imagine the chaos?”

Titus gazed out at the crowd. So this was an old-fashioned Roman mob! “They look unhappy, but they’re not that badly behaved.”

“Not yet!” Cassius shuddered. “What I find so appalling is the reason they’re here. When their ancestors broke a few patrician heads for plebeian rights, or rioted at the behest of the Gracchi brothers to help the small landowners, or even when they burned down the Senate House after the rabble-rouser Clodius was killed, at least they were fighting for their own self-interest as citizens. But this shameless assembly of freedmen and citizens are here to argue for the benefit of slaves. It’s disgusting! Imagine, during the Spartacus revolt, if the rabble had gathered to tell the Senate, ‘Stop what you’re doing! Perhaps this gladiator fellow has a point!’ ”

“It’s not quite the same thing,” said Titus cautiously.

“Isn’t it? The law is the law, and these people are here to spit on the law—for the sake of slaves! Nero should summon his Praetorians and drive them all into the Tiber.”

“I think there might be too many of them to do that,” said Titus. Truly, outside the Circus Maximus, he had never seen such a large gathering.
Was he imagining it, or had the crowd grown more unruly in the last few moments? He gathered the folds of his toga and hurried up the steps.

He was just in time to join his fellow senators on the crowded porch for the taking of the auspices. They were favorable, though Titus thought the augur was being rather generous in his interpretation of a crow’s flight. Then the senators filed inside, pausing to light a bit of incense and say a prayer at the Altar of Victory before filling the tiers of seats that faced each other across the long chamber. There was a large turnout. Titus thought there must be more than two hundred senators present.

Once all the senators were seated, Nero arrived. Followed by Seneca and a retinue of scribes and secretaries, he strode up the length of the hall to take his chair on the dais at the far end. To Titus, it seemed that the young emperor did not walk with his usual self-confident swagger; had the sight of the gathering outside unnerved him as much as it had the senators? Titus also took note of the emperor’s appearance. Nero had grown a beard, or at least a partial beard, something no emperor had worn before him; the hair was trimmed to leave only the growth beneath his jaw, while his cheeks and chin were clean-shaven. The effect was to provide a golden frame for his square face.

Even more striking was the emperor’s costume. Since the death of Agrippina, Nero’s mode of dress had grown more eccentric. On this occasion he was outfitted in his customary purple and gold, but his garment was not a toga but a gown of the sort either a man or woman might wear at home in the evening, and on his feet were what looked like slippers rather than proper shoes.

The garment left much of Nero’s arms bare. Gone, Titus noticed, was the golden arm bracelet encasing the lucky snakeskin that Nero had long worn to honor his mother. After Agrippina’s death, Nero had declared that he could no longer stand the touch of the bracelet on his skin, indeed could not stand even to look at it, and had thrown it into the sea from the terrace of his villa at Baiae.
The emperor no longer has his amulet,
thought Titus,
and nor do I,
wishing as he often did that he still possessed the fascinum of his ancestors. He could have used a bit of luck on this day.

The preliminary business of the Senate was dispensed with quickly so that the members could deal at once with the pressing issue of the murder
of Lucius Pedanius Secundus and the punishment of his household slaves. The facts of the case were read aloud by a scribe. The man’s delivery, even when reading the most salacious details, was completely without emotion, but at various points some of the senators made rude, mocking noises. To be killed by a slave was shocking but also shameful, and to have it happen under such circumstances—a rivalry over yet another slave—was the stuff of scandal. If Pedanius had escaped death, he would have been a laughingstock. Instead, he was a victim of the most frightening crime imaginable, a deliberate act of violence perpetrated in his own house by one of his own possessions.

The texts of the relevant laws were then read aloud. The statutes were just as Titus had remembered and recited to his brother the day before. If a slave should murder his master, all the slaves in the household must be interrogated under torture and punished with death, without exception. The four hundred slaves had already been interrogated. Now they were confined under guard in the house of Pedanius to await the judgment of the Senate. Meanwhile, in preparation for immediate executions, crucifixes were being prepared along the Appian Way outside the city.

Nero, on his dais, said nothing and merely observed the proceedings, as he often did when the Senate was carrying out its routine business.

The members were invited to rise and address the question at hand: on this occasion, was the law to be carried out fully and faithfully, without amendment or mitigation?

Without waiting to be called on, many of the senators simply shouted their opinions, and a general clamor filled the hall. Titus heard cries of “Kill them now, at once!” and “The law is the law!” But he also heard a substantial number of voices shouting, “Too harsh!” and “Mercy!” and “There should be exceptions!”

Nero covered his ears, as if the cacophony caused him pain. He gestured to Seneca, who stepped forward and called for order. “Will anyone speak formally in favor of rescinding or mitigating the penalty?” said Seneca.

There was a hubbub in the hall and a great many heads turned, but no one stood. Seneca was opening his mouth to speak again when Titus loudly cleared his throat and rose to his feet.

Seneca looked at him in surprise. “Do you wish to speak, Senator Pinarius?”

“I do.”

All eyes turned to Titus. His face grew hot. He felt light-headed. His palms were suddenly sweaty. If he wasn’t careful, the wax tablet containing his notes would slip right out of his hands—

He realized that his hands were empty. The tablet! Where was it? Titus looked around and saw it nowhere. Had he been holding it earlier, during the taking of the auspices? He couldn’t remember. Could he have left it in the hired sedan? Titus felt completely at a loss. Meanwhile, the eyes of the entire Senate were boring into him. The room was utterly silent.

He would either have to sit down without saying a word, and look a complete fool, or he would have to speak without his notes. Could he do that? He had pored over them so intently, surely he could remember at least the major points, if not all the elegant phrases he had laboriously worked out. Titus cleared his throat again and took a deep breath.

“Caesar,” he began, nodding to Nero, “and my esteemed fellow senators, we are all aware of the crowd that’s gathered outside our front door. I must say it took me quite by surprise when I arrived here. I think it’s taken us all by surprise. I’ve never seen anything like, have you?”

“No, but I’ve never seen a herd of giraffes, either,” shouted one of the senators. “What has either to do with the law?” This was met with scattered guffaws and a few cries of “Hear, hear!”

“Well,” said Titus, feeling flustered, “once upon a time the common people had their own assembly, and they did have some say in the making of laws. . . .” Titus realized that he was straying far from his notes.

“What sort of talk is this?” someone shouted

“Seditious talk!” someone said. “Rabble-rousing!”

Titus raised his hands to quiet the clamor. “I’m merely saying that something has stirred up all those people. Every one of you in this chamber is stirred up, as well. Perhaps we should at least state the case of those who are asking for mercy, so that we can examine the argument clearly.” There, that was better, he thought, feeling that he had quieted his listeners and regained their full attention. He noticed that a scribe was taking down his words, no doubt using the shorthand famously invented by Cicero’s secretary, Tiro.