Empire (47 page)

“Do you recognize the subject?” asked Epaphroditus.

“It’s Melancomas, of course,” said Dio. “Was it done from life?”

“Yes. Melancomas modeled for the sculptor just a few months before he died. This is the original, not a copy. The hands that molded this marble were guided by eyes that beheld Melancomas in the flesh. The statue and the man himself occupied the same room in the same moment. The painting was also done from life, so the delicate colors of the flesh and the hair are as accurate as possible. What you see before you may be the most true-to-life image of Melancomas that exists. You can understand why I was so excited to obtain this piece.”

During his brief but remarkable career, the Greek boxer Melancomas had become the most famous athlete in the world. The life-size statue depicted a naked youth with his broad shoulders thrown back, his brawny chest lifted, and one muscular leg firmly planted before the other. His shapely arms were extended before him. Wavy blond tresses framed his strikingly handsome face, which expressed serene concentration as he used one hand to wind a leather strap around the other. The statue was so realistically
rendered and colored that it seemed almost to breathe. Epaphroditus had chosen to install it not on a pedestal but at ground level, so that instead of looming above them, Melancomas seemed to be standing among them. The effect was uncanny.

Melancomas had become famous for his unique fighting technique: he hardly touched his opponents, and on a few occasions won matches without landing a single blow. Using remarkable dexterity and stamina, he could duck punches and dance around his opponents until they fell from exhaustion. His bouts became legendary. Men came from great distances to see him compete. There had never been another boxer like him.

An equal claim to fame had been his extraordinary beauty. Some said that Melancomas’s face was the reason why so few blows were ever landed against him: seeing such perfection, no man had the heart to spoil it. Five years ago, when Titus, then thirty-three, presided at the Augustan Games in Neapolis, he took Melancomas for a lover. When the boxer died suddenly and unexpectedly, Titus had grieved, and so had many others.

“You wrote an elegy for Melancomas, did you not, Dio?” said Epaphroditus.

The sophist needed no further encouragement to quote from his work. He rose from his chair and stood before the statue. “ ‘When Melancomas was naked, nobody would look at anything else; the human eye was drawn to his perfection as iron is drawn to the lodestone. When we count the vast number of his admirers, and when we consider that there have been many famous men and many beautiful men, but none was ever more famous for being beautiful, then we see that Melancomas was blessed with a beauty that we may truly call divine.’ ”

Dio inclined his head. The others rewarded him with applause. “I saw Melancomas myself on a few occasions,” he went on. “Truly, the statue does him justice. What a dazzling throwback he was; what a splendid anachronism!”

“Why do you say that?” said Lucius.

“Because nowadays, the ideal of male beauty has become so very confused. I blame the Persians and their influence. Just as they gave the world astrology, which has found its way into every corner of our culture, so they introduced to us an ideal of male beauty very different from that handed down to us by our ancestors.

“Melancomas embodies the old ideal. As long as there are young men like him, we are reminded of that perfection which the old Greeks quite literally put on a pedestal, capturing it in stone for the world, and for their descendants, to witness and aspire to. They believed that nothing in the world was more beautiful than the physical splendor of the masculine form, which found its most sublime embodiment in the young athlete: a runner’s legs and backside, arms fit to throw a discus, a lean and well-proportioned torso, a face that radiates calm intelligence and the potential for wisdom. Such a youth is a model for other youths to aspire to; he is a worthy protégé to whom older men are drawn because he offers such great hope for the future.

“The ideal offered by the Persian is quite different. They find women more beautiful than men, and as a result they think the most beautiful young men are those who look most like girls. They find beauty in pliable eunuchs and boys with slender limbs and soft bottoms. More and more you see this taste for feminine beauty embraced by the Greeks and Romans. As a result, fewer and fewer young men aspire to the old ideal; instead of hardening their muscles with exercise, they pluck their eyebrows and put on cosmetics. So a specimen like Melancomas—a youth whose splendor can be compared to the most famous of the old statues—stands out all the more. He is the exception that proves the rule: our standard of male beauty now, sadly, is the Persian standard.”

“And to think, Titus actually had the fellow,” said Martial, gazing at the statue over the brim of his cup and pursing his lips. “No wonder my dear patron was so heartbroken when the young man died. Frankly, I’d settle for a boy one-tenth as pretty as Melancomas—if the boy would simply show up!”

“Have you been stood up again, Martial?” Lucius smiled. This was the poet’s perennial complaint.

“Yes, again! And this boy was so promising. Lygdus, his name was. He picked the place, he picked the time . . . and never appeared. I was abandoned, but not seduced—left to consort with my left hand yet again.”

The others laughed. No matter how abstruse or rarefied the arguments put forward by the philosophers, Martial could be always counted on to bring the conversation back down to earth.

“But can a boy be
too
beautiful?” asked Dio. “Can beauty pose a danger to its possessor, especially the Persian style of beauty?”

“What sort of danger?” said Martial.

“I’m thinking of writing a discourse on the question, using as my subject the eunuch whom Nero married. Sporus, he was called. His story fascinates me. You knew Sporus, didn’t you, Epaphroditus?”

“Yes,” said Epaphroditus quietly. “So did Lucius. Epictetus also knew her.” The three of them exchanged thoughtful glances.

“Good. Perhaps the three of you can give me further details to advance my argument. Everybody knows Nero castrated the youth and took him for a wife precisely because of the boy’s resemblance to the beautiful Poppaea. Nero dressed Sporus in Poppaea’s clothing, made hairdressers style his hair in the fashion of the day, and surrounded the boy with female attendants, just as if he were a woman. Otho was drawn to Sporus for the same reason, his resemblance to Poppaea. And then came Vitellius, who drove the poor eunuch to suicide out of a desire to exploit the boy’s beauty for his own depraved amusement. What a strange and finally tragic path the boy’s life took, all because of his resemblance to a beautiful woman. Had the boy been plain, or had he been beautiful in the manner of Melancomas, one imagines his life would have been very different.”

Lucius looked at Epictetus to see his reaction. The Stoic’s face was turned away from the others, as if something at the far corner of the garden had drawn his interest. When Epictetus turned back, his face showed no emotion.

Martial laughed. “Sporus was pretty but had an ugly end. Vitellius was ugly, and had an uglier end! Perhaps you should write a discourse comparing those two, Dio.”

Dio shook his head. “As a rule, I avoid discussing the lives of our emperors, even those who came to a bad end. My object is to deliver morals, not debate politics.”

“But haven’t you heard?” said Martial. “Our enlightened new emperor has declared free speech for all. No subject or person is off-limits, not even Titus himself. Allow me to quote my patron: ‘It is impossible for me to be insulted or abused in any way, since I do nothing that deserves censure, and falsehoods are beneath my notice. As for emperors dead and gone,
they can avenge themselves if anyone should slander them, if in fact they are demigods and possess divine power.’ ”

“Did you write that speech for him?” asked Lucius.

“I most certainly did not,” said Martial. “Titus is quite capable of writing his own speeches. And what he says, he means. There’ll be no more payments to those who turn in others for seditious talk, as happened under his father. We all know Vespasian had an army of paid informers, and there are whole rooms in the imperial library filled with dossiers about perfectly innocuous citizens. I suspect there’s a file on every one of us here. But Titus has pledged to burn those documents, and to put the informers out of work. He’ll even punish the most notorious of them, who maliciously spread lies about innocent men.”

Lucius sighed. “The subject shifts to politics—at last!”

“I thought politics bored you,” said Martial.

“Yes, but only one thing bores me more: talk about pretty boys.” The others laughed. “No, hear me out,” said Lucius. “Every one of us here is a bachelor, true, but we are not all boy-lovers. I think I must suffer from the emperor Claudius’s complaint. My father, who knew him quite well, told me for a fact that cousin Claudius was aroused only by girls or women; he had no interest in boys or men. The beauty of Melancomas would have been lost on him. A discussion of male beauty, no matter how grandiose, would have bored him to tears.”

Martial laughed “As it b-b-bores you, Lucius? I think your cousin Claudius simply never met the right b-b-boy!”

“Our reigning emperor certainly doesn’t suffer from Claudius’s complaint,” observed Dio. “Titus buried his first wife, divorced the second, and, despite his reputed dalliance with the beautiful queen of the Jews—and with brawny Melancomas here—he seems to like eunuchs best of all. Is it true, Martial, that Titus keeps a whole stable of pretty eunuchs in the palace?”

“It’s true. Each is prettier than the other.”

“A fact which provides yet more evidence for my thesis regarding the triumph of Persian standards,” said Dio. “You’d think the emperor would seek another Melancomas. Instead, he surrounds himself with castrated boys.”

Lucius laughed and threw up his hands. “Do you see what’s happened?
The conversation veered briefly to politics, then circled directly back to sex.”

“The subject is eunuchs, who have no sex,” said Martial.

“Enough!” declared their host. “To please Lucius Pinarius, we will talk about something else. Surely there must be some other topic worthy of discussion, in a world so enormous.”

“We could talk about the world itself,” suggested Lucius. “Did you know that the general Agricola has discovered that Britannia is an island? It’s true. The land mass to the uttermost north doesn’t go on forever, as people thought. It ends in a stormy, frigid sea.”

Dio laughed. “That information might be of some interest, if anyone had a reason to go to Britannia. I’d much prefer to travel south. Epictetus, you’ve hardly said a word. Didn’t you just come back from Campania?”

“Yes. I took a brief trip down to Herculaneum and Pompeii, and then across the bay to Baiae. I may have found a rather lucrative position in the home of a very wealthy garum maker. His villa is built right next to the manufactory, which stinks of fermenting fish, but the house has a spectacular view of the bay, and the brat I’ll be teaching is not a complete barbarian.”

“But how could you bear to leave the city?” asked Martial.

“Granted, Campania isn’t Roma,” said Epictetus, “but anyone who’s anyone in Roma has a second home on the bay, so interesting people are always coming and going. The social scene is the same as in Roma, but along with dinner parties they have boating excursions and banquets on the beach. Some people live there year-round, like your friend Pliny.”

“You dropped in on him, as I suggested?” said Martial. “Good old Pliny, a bit of a bore but always good for a drop of wine and a bed for the night.”

“I didn’t find him boring at all. In fact, he told me about some rather odd things going on down there.”

“What sort of things?” said Lucius.

“Strange phenomena,” said Epictetus.

“Oh, Pliny loves that sort of thing,” said Martial. “Collects every odd fact in the world and puts them in a book.”

“He’s rather worried about the earthquakes they’ve been having.”

“You’ll have to get used to earthquakes if you move to Campania,” noted Epaphroditus. “There were a couple of big ones back in Nero’s
reign. You must remember, Epictetus, you were there with me when Nero performed for the very first time in public, in Neapolis. An earthquake struck the theater in the middle of his song—the ground surged like a stormy sea—but Nero just kept singing. No one dared to get up! Afterward, he told me that he considered the earthquake a
good
omen, because the gods were applauding him by shaking the ground. The moment he was finished, everyone got up and ran for the exits. And no sooner was the place emptied than the whole building collapsed! And what did Nero do? He composed a new song, an ode of thanks to the gods, since they saw fit to stave off the catastrophe until after he finished his performance, and not a single person was injured. Ah, Nero!” Epaphroditus wiped a nostalgic tear from his eye.

Epictetus responded to the story with a brittle smile. Now that he was a freedman, he no longer needed to pretend to share his former master’s fond memories of Nero, but he was discreet enough to keep his opinions about the late emperor to himself. “Yes, earthquakes are common in Campania,” he said, “but lately they’ve been having two or three tremors every day. It was nerve-rattling, let me tell you. And earlier this month, a great many springs and wells in the vicinity ran dry, sources of water that have always been reliable in the past. Pliny says that something must be happening deep in the earth. It has people worried. They say . . .” He lowered his voice. “They say that gigantic beings have been seen, walking through the cities by night. They skulk in the forests. They even fly through the air.”

“Giants?” said Lucius.

“Titans, one presumes. The gods of Olympus defeated them aeons ago and imprisoned them in Tartarus, the deepest caverns of the underworld. The people in Campania are afraid the Titans have broken free and made their way to the surface. That would explain the tremors and the divergence of the subterranean water channels. These Titans are always seen coming from the direction of Mount Vesuvius.”