Empire (30 page)

Some passersby overheard the man’s ranting and were outraged. They shook their fists, shouted curses, and threw stones at the Christians, then hurried on.

Titus strode into the gathering. He walked up to Kaeso. His brother had a blissful expression, lit by the flames. He did not notice Titus at first. Finally he lowered his eyes and looked at his brother in surprise.

“Titus! Why are you here?” Kaeso looked perplexed, then smiled. “Have you come to join us at last?”

“I came to see that you were alright, Kaeso.”

Kaeso grinned and nodded. “Words can’t describe my joy!”

“At what? Seeing the city of our ancestors burned to the ground?”

“This is the end of the world, Titus. The day we’ve been waiting for, longing for.”

“Don’t be absurd! Come with me, before it’s too late.”

“ ‘Too late’? Those words have no meaning now. This is the end of all things, the end of time itself. Praise God!”

Suddenly the burning building collapsed. The Christians let out a collective sigh of ecstasy at the awesome sight, but as showers of cinders and bits of flaming debris swept toward them, they retreated in confusion. Even Kaeso gave a start and staggered back from the fiery blast. The golden amulet at his breast glittered bright red in the firelight, like a flaming cross.

Without thinking, Titus reached out, grabbed the fascinum, and gave it hard yank. The twine necklace snapped. Titus turned and ran back the way he had come, clutching the talisman in his fist, desperate to return to the bridge and be reunited with his family.

Let Kaeso perish in the flames, if that was his desire. Titus would not allow the fascinum of his ancestors to be lost in the conflagration.

For days the fires continued to rage.

From his country estate on the far side of the Tiber, Titus could see the distant glow of the flames at night. During the day he could see great columns of smoke.

Eventually the glow grew dimmer and the smoke diminished. Had the fires been extinguished?

The news he received from neighbors and passersby was confusing and contradictory. The fires had been contained but continued to burn in isolated areas; the fires had spread all the way across the Field of Mars to the Tiber, consuming the whole city, so that nothing was left to burn; the fires had been put out several times, but someone kept setting more fires. It was impossible to know what to believe.

Was his house still standing? If the house was lost, Hilarion and the two slaves should have come to join him, but they had not. Was the house destroyed, then, and were all three slaves dead?

At last Titus decided to venture back to the city. Lucius wanted to
come with him. Feeling anxious and uncertain about what he might find, Titus was glad to have his son for company. They took bodyguards with them. Who knew what degree of order prevailed in the city?

As they neared the Tiber, the smell of smoke grew stronger. That was not a good sign. But no vast clouds of smoke loomed over the city. There was very little traffic on the road, and they crossed the bridge with almost no other people in sight. It was as if Roma had been completely abandoned. But this was a temporary illusion. The fire had not reached the waterfront, leaving the wharves and warehouses intact, and here and there they saw sailors and dockworkers going about their business. Nor had the fire consumed the Capitoline Hill. Above them, the great temple precinct, including the most ancient and sacred Temple of Jupiter, appeared to be unscathed.

Titus had intended to head directly to the house, but Lucius suggested they scale the Capitoline first; from its summit they could see virtually the entire city and ascertain the state of things. Titus acquiesced, in part because he dreaded finding his house in ruins and was willing to postpone the discovery a little longer.

Long ago, when he first came to Roma, Titus had stood on the Capitoline and gazed out over the city, marveling at the view. Now he stood with his son in the same spot and was aghast at the extent of the damage. To be sure, while small fires still burned in a few scattered locations, in most places the flames had been extinguished. And the extent of the damage was not as great as he had feared. The worst of the devastation was on the Aventine and the Palatine and in the low area between the Palatine and the Esquiline. Much of the Forum was undamaged, the Field of Mars had largely escaped the ravages of the fire, and only a few areas of the Subura had been destroyed. Looking toward the Aventine, he could not tell whether his house still stood or not. Some parts of the neighborhood looked blackened and charred but others appeared unscathed.

When Titus had first stood on this spot to take in the view, Kaeso had been beside him. Where was his brother now? Titus touched the fascinum at his breast and whispered a prayer to Jupiter, greatest and most powerful of gods, that his brother was still alive, and—since the world had not ended, as Kaeso had so joyfully predicted—that he had seen the foolishness of his beliefs and was ready to repent of his atheism and return to the worship of the gods.

They descended from the Capitoline and headed to the house. As they drew nearer, they saw that some houses had been burned and others had not; the caprice of the fire followed no discernible pattern. They rounded a corner, and Titus saw the house of his nearest neighbor. The place was a pile of smoldering rubble. His heart leaped to his throat. He could hardly breathe. He took a few more steps, and his own home came into view.

The house still stood. The wall adjacent to his neighbor had been scorched and blackened, but there was no other sign of damage.

Lucius cried out with joy and ran ahead. He reached the entrance, hesitated for a moment, then disappeared. Were the doors standing open? Surely Hilarion had the sense to keep them shut and bolted. Titus quickened his pace. Before he reached the house, Lucius reappeared. The boy looked stunned.

Titus reached the entrance and saw the cause of his son’s distress. The doors had been smashed and ripped from their hinges. In the vestibule lay two mangled bodies. By their tunics, Titus recognized the two young bodyguards he had left to protect the house.

He walked slowly through the house, from room to room, speechless.

His home had been ransacked. Every portable object of value left behind when the family had fled had been taken—vases, lamps, rugs, even some of the larger pieces of furniture. Gone was the antique chair in which Cato the Younger had once sat.

What the thieves could not take they had destroyed. The marble statue of Venus in his garden had been overturned and broken into pieces—an act of wanton desecration. Floor mosaics had been shattered, as if beaten with a hammer. Wall paintings had been smeared with excrement. In the room where Titus slept, the bed he shared with Chrysanthe had been destroyed, the wooden frame broken and the bedding ripped apart.

It was as if the rampant destructiveness of the fire had infected the looters with an insane desire to cause as much damage as possible. Or was this the envy of the poor for the rich, allowed by chaos to manifest itself unchecked? Titus was appalled at the hatefulness of those who had done such a thing to his home. He had never realized that he lived among such people. He thought of the angry mob that had gathered outside the Senate House when the fate of Pedanius’s slaves was decided. Were those the sort
of people who had done this? Perhaps men like Gaius Cassius Longinus were right to be so suspicious and disdainful of the Roman rabble.

Titus entered the slave quarters. These small rooms, furnished with simple pallets for sleeping, were largely unmolested; there was little of value in them to be stolen or damaged. From the next room he heard a faint scuffling sound. It occurred to him that the thieves or some other vagrants might have taken refuge in this part of the house. He was about to call for the bodyguards to join him when a familiar face peered around the corner.

It was Hilarion.

The young slave looked at first fearful, then relieved, then ashamed. He ran to Titus and dropped to his knees.

“Forgive me, Master! The day after you left, men broke into the house. We had no way to stop them. There were too many. They killed the bodyguards. They would have killed me, too, if I hadn’t managed to hide myself. Please, Master, don’t punish me!”

“Hilarion! Of course I won’t punish you. But why didn’t you come to the country estate and bring me the news?”

“You told me to stay here, Master. And it was a good thing I did, because that night the neighbor’s house caught fire. I ran and found some vigiles, and they managed to stop the flames from spreading to this house. There was always the chance the fire might come back, so I couldn’t leave. Oh, Master, I’ve been so frightened here, all alone, especially at night. There’s been so much violence—people killed, boys and women raped, horrible crimes!”

Titus pulled the slave to his feet. “You did very well, Hilarion. Thank the gods you’re still alive!”

They managed to find a bit of food in the pantry. Titus sat with Lucius and Hilarion in the garden. The sight of the broken Venus made him lose his appetite.

Titus stood. “I’m going for a walk. Alone.”

“But, father, surely you should take one of the bodyguards with you,” said Lucius.

“No, they’ll stay here with you and Hilarion. I am a Roman senator, a patrician, and a blood relation of the Divine Augustus. I will not be so intimidated that I cannot take a walk around my city without armed men to protect me!” Titus strode to the vestibule and left the house.

He wandered through the city, awed by the scale of the destruction. In once-familiar areas he became hopelessly lost; streets had been filled with rubble and landmarks had vanished. On a slope of the Esquiline he came upon a troop of vigiles working to put out one of the remaining fires. The vigiles were covered with mud and soot and looked utterly exhausted, yet still they labored. What a foul slander, that anyone should have accused such men of arson and looting!

As twilight began to fall, there was a terrible beauty in the way the blanket of clouds reflected the somber glow of the still-smoldering city, as if the sky were a vast, mottled bruise above the wounded earth. Roma was like a beautiful woman who had been terribly scarred. She was still recognizable, however damaged, and still beloved. Titus would never abandon her.

Above him on the Esquiline a slender tower rose like a finger pointing to the sky. The tower was located in the Gardens of Maecenas, one of the imperial properties where Nero sometimes resided; the gardens appeared to have escaped the devastation. It was the hour of twilight, and all was still. From the tower, Titus heard the music of a lyre and a man singing. The voice was thin and reedy, but strangely poignant.

The song was about the burning of Troy—Troy, most glorious of the ancient cities, more beautiful than Memphis or Tyre, which the Greeks had conquered by deceit and burned to the ground; Troy, from which the warrior Aeneas had fled to Italy and founded the Roman race. Troy had burned; now Roma burned. The song seemed to come from a half-forgotten dream. The melody, slowly strummed upon the lyre, cast an eerie spell.

Titus suddenly realized that it was the voice of Nero he heard. Stepping back and gazing up, Titus saw a figure in purple and gold standing at the parapet of the tower, strumming a lyre and gazing at the city. The young emperor had returned to Roma and found the smoldering ruins of Troy.

Nero reached the end of a verse. The music stopped. There must have been others with him on the parapet, for the silence was followed by quiet applause and voices urging him to sing another verse. Nero obliged. Titus listened, enthralled, but one of the vigiles, his face black with soot, put his hands on his hips and spat on the ground.

“This fire is the most terrible thing to happen to Roma since the Gauls sacked the city,” the man muttered, “and what does the emperor do? He sings a pretty song. Can’t hit a note, can he?”

Titus had no idea what the man was talking about. To him, the song was unspeakably beautiful, strange and mysterious, unbearably sad yet filled with hope. It did not matter that Nero was not a great singer; he had the soul of a great poet. What a contrast Nero presented to Kaeso, who had stared at the flames and grinned like an idiot. Nero responded with a lament that would wring tears from a god.

Gazing up, listening raptly to each word of Nero’s song, transported by each note, Titus clutched the fascinum in his hand, glad to have it back in his possession at last. At that moment he felt that all his ancestors were watching him, just as all the gods were surely watching Nero.

With his wife and son beside him, Titus Pinarius stood before the wax effigies of his ancestors in the vestibule of his house. As he looked from face to face and recited each of their names to honor them, Chrysanthe lit small candles and Lucius set one candle in each niche. Were his son’s hands shaking? They were all nervous and excited about the day’s upcoming events.

Titus was thankful that he had taken the wax effigies when he fled the city; unlike the objects the looters had stolen or destroyed, the masks of the ancestors were truly irreplaceable. Returning them to their niches had been the first step in restoring the house to its former glory. Titus had not yet found a skilled artisan to repair the floor mosaics—such artisans were in tremendous demand—but the wall paintings had been meticulously cleaned, the broken statue of Venus had been reassembled and patched and painted so that one could hardly tell it had been damaged, and many of the stolen or destroyed furnishings had been replaced. He had even found an antique folding chair almost identical to the one Cato had owned. In the months since the fire, thanks to a great deal of hard work and at considerable expense, Titus’s household had gradually returned to normal. Many people in Roma had not been so fortunate.