Saturnalia (15 page)

Far up the slope of the Capitol, just below the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, I could make out the dark, forbidding
crag of the Tarpeian Rock, where traitors and murderers are hurled to their deaths. From the frantic gaiety of the earlier evening, all was transformed to a sinister gloom.

It was with thoughts of this sort that I made my way through the narrow, winding streets to my home, acknowledging the greetings and good wishes of weaving drunks, stepping over the recumbent bodies of those who had partaken too lustily and hadn’t made it to their own doors, thoughts of gloom and demons wended their way, inevitably, to the witches. What were they doing that night, out on the Vatican field?

At my house I had to let myself in, since my slaves weren’t about to answer my knock at the door. I went to my sleeping room and finally unburdened myself of my toga, which had been making my arm sweat all evening. I began to undress for bed, then stopped, sat on the edge of the bed, and thought. I was wide awake. If I lay down, it would only be to stare at the ceiling until the sun came up.

There was no help for it. I had been in Rome for three days, being cautious, trying to cover myself, trying to restrict my investigation to talking to people. It just wasn’t natural. I couldn’t get my mind off those
strigae
and their fascinating rites outside the walls. Enough of safety and caution. It was time to do something stupid, dangerous, and self-destructive.

I got up, removed my sandals, and put on a pair of hunting boots that laced up tightly above the ankle. I changed my senator’s tunic for one of deep blue and threw on a dark cloak that had a hood and covered me to the knee. I wasn’t the helmet of invisibility, but it might do. I replaced my dagger and
caestus
and thought about belting on a sword. No, that would be overdoing it. My days of guerilla fighting in Spain had taught me that, for a spy on renonnaissance, a fast pair of feet are a surer defence than any weapon.

Minutes later I was back in the streets and hurrying, as fast as the uncertain light allowed, toward the river. From my home, the quickest way across was by skirting the northern end of the cattle market and crossing the river by the Aemilian Bridge. This access to the city was rarely closed off at night because throughout the night farmers from the countryside drove their carts in for the morning markets. The bridge gate was closed only in emergencies. According to legend it takes only one Roman hero to defend a bridge.

Once across the river, I was on the Via Aurelia and in country that was a part of ancient Tuscia. The noise of the creaking farm carts disturbed me, so I took a side lane to the north to get away from them. Soon all I could hear was the occasional hoot of an owl, for the weather was too cool for many insect sounds.

The Vatican field is very large, and I began to feel rather foolish in having followed my impulse. How was I going to find a few celebrating witches in this expanse of farmland? Still, it was peaceful and rather pleasant to be walking along so civilized a Roman road, paved even though it was just a farm lane, beneath the soft light of the moon. The air smelled pleasantly of new-turned earth, for it was time for the winter sowing. At intervals I saw herms set up, most of them of the old design: a square pillar topped with the bust of a benevolent, bearded man and, halfway down, an erect phallus to bestow fertility and ward off evil spirits. Fine family tombs were situated by the road, for the dead could not be interred within the old City walls.

This was the face of nature we Romans love, nature tamed and turned to the human purposes of production or religion. We have always preferred tilled fields to wasteland; flat, arable ground to hills and mountains; gardens to forests.
Wild nature has no appeal for us. Pastoral poets sing the praises of nature, but their dreamy idylls are really about the tame sort, with nymphs and shepherds frolicking among wooly lambs and myrtle groves and stately poplars. Only Gauls and Germans love the real thing.

I decided to give up on my mission and simply enjoy the beautiful, fragrant night, so near the city, yet so far from its crowding and bustle. Then my spine turned to ice when I heard the unearthly cry of a screech owl and I remembered that the words for witch and screech owl were one and the same:
striga.

Let Etruscans busy themselves with the guts of animals. We Romans know that the most powerful omens come from lightning, thunder, and birds. I am not superstitious, but my scepticism wanes at night and returns with daylight.

The sound had come from my left, and I walked until I found a path leading in that direction. It was not paved, but was a well-trodden dirt lane so old that much of it was sunken two or three feet beneath the surface of the surrounding fields. It takes many, many generations for the tread of bare or sandaled feet to wear a path so deep, for the lane was too narrow for farm carts. It must have been there long before Romulus, perhaps before even the Etruscans, when only the Aborigines inhabited Italy.

The lane led me through the plowed fields away from the road, away from tombs and herms. The ground grew rougher, with heaps of stones piled up where the plows had turned them up, only some of them seemed to have been piled with greater regularity than others, and here and there I saw single, daggerlike, standing stones such as you see in some of the islands and in the more remote parts of the Empire, where ancient peoples worshipped gods whose names we do not
know. I had not thought that any such were to be found so near the City. But then, I thought, perhaps I was letting the moonlight and my imagination deceive me. Maybe they were just big stones, too large for the plowmen to haul away, and instead stood on end to take up less ground.

I came to a low hill topped by a dense copse of trees. At the uttermost limit of hearing, I thought I detected odd, rhythmic sounds, thumpings as of small drums, and perhaps a chanting of human voices. I thought that now would be an excellent time to return to the City. Instead, having determined upon a course of foolishness and danger, I took a deep breath and stepped away from the sunken lane. I began to walk toward the wooded hill.

The new-plowed earth was soft beneath my boots and soon I detected something else: Besides the regular furrows there were many other indentations there. I crouched to see what they might be and the moonlight revealed that lines of footprints other than my own led from the lane to converge upon the little hill. I straightened, checked that my dagger was loose in its sheath, and my
caestus
was handy, then I went on.

At the base of the hill the sounds were far more plain. The thumping of the drums was now mixed with the skirling of flutes and the rhythmic chants were punctuated by loud, seemingly spontaneous cries. If these formed words they were in a language I did not know. The beat of the music was something primitive and stirring, touching me on a level below my overlay of Roman culture, as the sight of the standing stones had touched me.

At the edge of the trees I could see a faint, ruddy glow from within the copse. These were not cultivated orchard trees; no apples or olives for this sacred spot. For the most
part they were ancient, gnarled oaks, rough-barked, their trunks home to owls and their roots the abode of serpents. Beneath my boots the dry, crenellated leaves of the trees crunched faintly, like parchment or the flaking remnants of Egyptian mummies.

From the limbs of the trees I could see dangling strange objects made of feathers and ribbons and other materials I could only guess at. Wind harps made soft music that could scarcely be heard over the noise from the center of the grove.

Placing my feet with great care, barely daring to breathe, I walked through the trees, my eyes straining through the gloom for hidden sentries. The Spaniards had always been too lazy to set sentries, but Italian witches might be more careful. I thought of what Urgulus had said: that there was a
mundus
on the sacred ground of the witches. These passages to the underworld are rare and are greatly revered, for it is through them that we communicate with the dead and the gods below. There was one in Rome and others up and down the Italian peninsula. I had never heard of this one.

I began to see shadows, as of human forms passing between me and the source of the light. Now I moved even more cautiously, stepping from tree to tree, trying to work my way closer while remaining invisible myself. I could see that I was approaching a clearing, and that it was filled with people whirling, dancing, clapping, chanting to the rhythm of pipe and drum. The trees were beginning to thin, but I saw a dense clump of bay at the very edge of the clearing between two oaks and I made my way toward it.

My nerves were on edge as I sidled from tree to tree, even though the frenzied revelers seemed to be paying no slightest attention to anything outside the clearing. I could get no clear look at them beyond an occasional glimpse of shining
flesh, but the voices I could hear seemed for the most part to be those of women.

At the clump of bay I lowered myself to a crouch. I was within a few feet of the clearing, but the branches and foliage of the bush were so thickset that I couldn’t see much. I lay down flat on my belly and began to creep forward. My weapons dug painfully into my belly, but that was the least of my worries. These people held their rites in remote secrecy specifically because they did not want to be observed by profane eyes. They would be inclined to punish anyone who spied on them. I was reminded of the stories of the Maenads, those wild female followers of Dionysus who were wont to tear apart and devour any man unfortunate enough to stumble upon their woodland rites. And these celebrants, whoever they were, seemed to be in a state of Maenadic frenzy.

When only a final low-hanging branch remained before my eyes, I very carefully moved it aside with my hand and had my first clear view of the revels within the glade.

In its center burned a massive bonfire that cast flame and sparks high into the black night overhead. Besides the blazing logs and faggots in its heart, I could see the shapes of what I hoped were sacrificial animals, and there was a heavy smell of scorching meat in the air. But the fire and its victims did not rivet my attention. The women did.

The only men I saw were those playing instruments and these, unlike the women, wore masks that completely concealed their faces. All the others were female, perhaps a hundred of them, all dancing with demented vigor. None of them wore proper clothing, although many were scantily draped in animal skins and all wore abundant vine wreaths and chaplets. There were no children, the youngest of them being at least nubile. There were a few aged hags, but the greater part
of them were women of childbearing age. The greatest shock, though, was that not all were peasant women.

When the first patrician lady flashed before me, I doubted my senses. Then I began to pick out more of them. Some may have been of the noble plebeian families, but I recognized a few of them, and these were all of ancient patrician families. The first to whirl before my eyes was Fausta Cornelia, Sulla’s daughter and the betrothed of my friend Milo. Then I saw Fulvia, who seemed to be right in her element. And, as I might have guessed, Clodia was there, managing to appear cool and languid even in the midst of such festivities.

The contrast between the patrician ladies and the peasant women was far greater than I might have imagined. Far from being leveled by the removal of their clothing, the contrast was rendered even more vivid. The peasant women had unbound their hair to let it stream wildly as they danced. Even the palest of them were darker than the noble women, their arms and faces burned darker still by exposure to the sun. Hair lightly furred their arms and legs and grew in dense thatches beneath their arms and between their legs.

The elaborate coiffures of the patricians stayed in place during their wildest gyrations. Their skins, protected from the sun all their lives, were whiter than pearl and they wore costly cosmetics. They were slender in contrast to the broad-hipped stockiness of most of the peasant woman. Most striking, though, was that except for their scalps, the patrician women had been divested of every trace of hair with tweezers, wax, and pumice stone. Next to the intense animality of the rural witches, these Circes of Rome looked like polished statues of Parian marble.

If I had not already been pressed solidly to the ground, my jaw would have dropped. They were like members of unlike
species, as different as horses and deer, united only in their devotion to this orgiastic celebration. What was it Clodia had said to me only the night before?
I indulge in religious practices not countenanced by the state.
She had certainly been understating the matter.

I felt that I had no cause for surprise or shock. The state religion was just that: a public cult in which the gods could be propitiated and the community strengthened and united through collective participation. There were other religions and mystery cults all over the world. From time to time, usually when faced with a crisis, we consulted the Sibylline Books, and they sometimes directed us to import a foreign god, complete with cult and ritual. But this was only after lengthy discussion by the pontifexes, and it was never a degenerate Asiatic deity. Many religions were permitted in Rome, as long as they were seemly and did not involve forbidden sacrifices or colorful mutilations, as when the male worshippers of Cybele, in their religious frenzy, castrate themselves and fling their severed genitalia into the sanctuary of the goddess.

No, what made my spine crawl was not the nature of this celebration but the fact that it was native, not some exotic import from an Aegean island or the far fringes of the world. Its sacred grove was within an hour’s walk of Rome and had probably been going on there for countless centuries. Here was a religion as ancient as the worship of Jupiter, in Jupiter’s own land, yet unknown to the vast bulk of the Roman people, little more than a whispered rumor among the common people.

And there was the participation of the patrician women. That, at least, was not so astonishing. Wealthy, indulged, and pampered, but shut out from public life or any sort of meaningful activity, they were usually bored and were always the
first to pick up any new foreign religious practice to appear in Rome. And the three I recognized were just the sort to seek out any strange cult, just so it was sufficiently exciting and degenerate.