Boy Caesar (11 page)

‘That’s my problem,’ Jim said. ‘I need you to tell me what licence I have to recreate Heliogabalus in contemporary terms. What matters to me is making him live now. My sources are too sketchy for me to lean on historical fact.’

‘I’ve no objection to your partially inventing history,’ Martin replied. ‘I’m all for students being original. What I don’t want is a purely psychological thesis. One that uses Heliogabalus as the baseline for a case history.’

‘Part of my work will, of course, be gender-based,’ Jim said. ‘There seems little doubt that his enemies were provoked by the fact that he was so openly gay.’

Martin laughed. ‘No objections. If we’re to believe Lampridius, then Heliogabalus was the first – probably the only – Roman emperor openly to discuss the possibilty having a sex-change. This
opens up a fascinating area of study that I hope you’ll explore. I think you’ll find Nero had similar tendencies, or at least he transferred them to his male lovers.’

‘Yes, to Sporus, wasn’t it? I’m glad you see this as a rich area of research. Although I think I’m right in saying there’s a pathology attached to Nero, which is not the case with Heliogabalus.’

‘I think so, most certainly,’ Martin replied. ‘Nero turned by degrees into a psychopath, committing one crime to cover for another. There’s certainly no evidence that Heliogabalus shared this tendency. But I’m still curious as to why you should choose such an obscure emperor as the subject for your dissertation.’

‘Empathy,’ Jim laughed. ‘But also the desire to rehabilitate him to history. He’s in many ways the emperor who has gone missing. It’s like he’s been sucked into a hole in the middle of the galaxy.’

‘There’s also the question of ritual,’ Martin added. ‘What for instance did his cult worship, other than the sun? Nobody’s ever made it clear, at least not in the way that we know about constituents of Mithraism or the rites conducted as part of the Elysian mysteries. I’d like you to tell me something about the cult of Elagabal. Allusions to it are few, but it shouldn’t be too hard to reconstruct.’

‘What we do know’, Jim said, feeling his assertiveness return, ‘is that he sacrificed animals in his temple and also underwent the
taurobolium.
There’s also an allusion to him having celebrated the rites of Salambo and if I recall correctly a reference somewhere to him throwing animals off a high tower as part of some ritual.’

‘Good,’ Martin said. ‘I’m sure if you follow your sources you’ll hit on the right trail. It’s an area in which I’m particularly interested. And what about his three marriages? They were surely organized around motives of religion –’

‘Perhaps, but there were other reasons. I think his first marriage to Julia Paula was undoubtedly dominated by the feeling he should marry into the Roman aristocracy. It seems to have been an attempt on his part to infiltrate the patrician classes.’

‘You mean because he himself was a foreigner?’

‘Precisely. He had no kudos in Rome other than a tenuous claim to be an Antonine.’

‘But his second marriage, though, to the Vestal Aquilia Severa, was undoubtedly an attempt to superimpose his own god on Rome’s existing one,’ Martin said.

‘Without question. Although his perversity was such that the idea of violating an off-limits woman was probably an additional incentive.’

‘I see you’ve got his psychology well sewn up,’ Martin approved. ‘And the third marriage? The motives behind this have always seemed obscure to me.’

‘Anna Faustina was, of course, an aristocrat. She was the great-granddaughter of the emperor Marcus Aurelius through his fourth daughter Arria Fadilla. We know little about her, although she seems to have been implicated in a plot involving two senators aimed at deposing the emperor. That she wasn’t executed again points to Heliogabalus’ benign nature.’

‘Weren’t all these women middle-aged if I remember correctly? And none of them particularly attractive?’

‘So we’re led to believe. They all seem to have been in their mid-forties and long past the age of producing an heir. I imagine they were a cover for his sexuality.’

‘It would seem so,’ Martin said. ‘It’s hard to get away from gender when considering Heliogabalus. He was clearly looking to marry mother figures, I suppose.’

‘A not unreasonable conclusion,’ Jim said, with inflected irony. He could sense that he had more than held his own and displayed his knowledge to reasonable effect. He judged from Martin’s tone they were nearing an end to the meeting, something enforced by his supervisor’s habit of studying his snakeskin loafers as a preliminary to winding down.

‘I’d like to see some more work from you in about eight weeks,’ Martin said. ‘Perhaps with some of the ideas we’ve discussed today incorporated into the thesis. It’s shaping up well.’

When Martin stood up Jim felt relieved he had acquitted himself commendably. The feelings were almost compensatory, given the bad things that had happened earlier. He walked out of the room feeling elated, the hole in his nerves momentarily stitched, as he briefly forgot Danny and his invidious threat.

As a reward Jim decided to go and do some reading in a little café in Monmouth Street.

The staff never bothered him there and left him free to work at his table for as long as he wished. He was still reading the Penguin edition of
The Lives of the Later Caesars
and using the book as an overview on the often mad, depraved and perversely inhuman personalities who ruled over the declining empire. In most cases their pathologies were inseparable from their actions, and he found himself fascinated by the belief common amongst them that they were gods. The drive towards self-divinization, a recognition conferred on the emperor by the Senate, was at the roots of the megalomania so often displayed by the tyrannical individuals written up in the
Augustan History.
Although Jim didn’t see madness as belonging to a hereditary genotype, he was none the less fascinated by the irregularities of behaviour attributed not only to the later caesars but also to their prototypes such as Caligula and Nero.

Jim occupied himself with this network of thoughts as he headed off in the direction of the café. Decadence, he reminded himself, involved a total preoccupation with the moment. To live as Heliogabalus had, fast and recklessly, meant addressing the moment without concern for an illusory future. By magnifying the instant and living within its register, Heliogabalus had succeeded in maximizing immediate sensation. Immediacy, Jim realized, was also the counterthrust to an acute awareness of threatened mortality.

When he looked around him at faces in the street, bleached from long hours of sitting in front of terminals, he was aware they were working for a future they would probably never meet. All the rewards offered for their corporate lifestyles were conditional on service. It was a system he despised. He was determined to be free at all costs.

Walking always allowed him to think in sustained sequences. It was for him the best method of booting up ideas programmed in his unconscious. He ignored the red buses blasting their way down Gower Street towards an irate gridlock at the lights. Unable as yet to contemplate life without Danny, he took advantage of the high that came with the thought of beginning a new life. He felt a brief-lived
but intense excitement at the prospect of being without commitments, a rush that almost immediately gave way to feelings of vulnerability and isolation. Looking for comfort it was Masako to whom he turned. He was suddenly glad he had taken up her offer to stay. The thought of going back to her flat later was a welcome one and an incentive to work hard throughout the afternoon.

He carried on walking, his mind full of his thesis. It was odd, he reflected, to be out in London with a little-known emperor in his head and to be preoccupied with restructuring his life. It was the business of imagination to recreate history, and he got off on the thought of feeding this outrageous third-century Syrian youth some of his own intransigent ideas about the nature of the individual in contemporary society. He saw the two of them bonded by a conspiratorial pact. They were subversives, and their weird hyperlink was maintained by a sort of cyber-telepathy.

He had just got into Monmouth Street when he stopped dead in his tracks. Something made him look across the road to the entrance to Neal’s Yard. The bare-footed emaciated person emerging from the yard was none other than Slut. Dressed in leather and denim, and seemingly impervious to the wet streets, he had a carrier of groceries in one hand. Jim backed up against the wall, quite certain he hadn’t been seen, and watched Slut go off down the street towards St Martin’s Lane. The man carried a bad aura and kept his eyes turned down to the pavement.

Jim watched him go with the certain knowledge that he meant evil. There was something about his debasement lived on his skin. The almost colourless eyes and ravaged features were a pointer to the twisted emotions that undoubtedly governed his thinking. He took a last look at Slut disappearing into the crowd before slipping into his café. He felt safe there in its bohemian ambience and in the unpretentious atmosphere that it offered. Things were basic but perfectly acceptable. He sat down at a table by the window and thought of Masako. Her image lived in him today like a single carnation in a vase. He looked out at the revisiting shower, then quickly lost himself in his work.

He wished he’d never married Julia, and she’d quickly driven him to drink. As he lay in bed with the early morning haze fuzzing the park, he could think of nothing but Hierocles. They had met only yesterday in the steamy fog of one of the more notorious bath-houses, but one thing had led to another and now he was obsessed.

It was cold for early summer. The great shock of burgundy roses arranged in a vase by his bed were at odds with the sea-chill that hung over Rome. The smoky morning sky was flecked with pointillistic drizzle. He needed a drink and didn’t care that he allowed for no resting point in his intake.

He realized he would have to put an end to this marriage, which anyhow had been little more than a political move on his part. In marrying Julia he hadn’t anticipated encountering so formal a partner. Her lack of humour, the correctness instilled in her by her father and her refusal to experiment sexually left him feeling cold in her company. Nothing about her turned him on, least of all the possessiveness that came from her insecurity. Alone with her, she wouldn’t let him be but endlessly questioned him as to his friends, whereabouts and the amount of time he spent downtown.

At first he had put it down to the fact that she was at least twice his age. She was not unattractive but evidently still carrying the scars of an earlier marriage, and their chemistries hadn’t gelled. More tedious was the fact that she had taken to having him followed. He was aware that she knew all about his visits to the public bath-houses and the dockside area of the river and that her inquisitiveness gave him grounds to annul the marriage. While he wished her no harm he wanted her out of his life.

He felt too young to be restrained by her class-bound consciousness and her beliefs in strict monogamy. The structured life she wanted for them was the exact opposite to his idea of freedom.

What the drink couldn’t erase in him was the knowledge of his
mortality. The taste of it was so acute at times that he longed to die in order to be free of the apprehension. When the awareness of death peaked in him then the sensation was like sex. He surfed it ecstatically in the process.

It was with good cause that he recollected Seneca’s writings, and they were always a source of comfort to his solitary thoughts. As he lay in bed, he remembered a line about the transience of all things in the essay ‘On the Shortness of Life’. It came to him now: ‘Your speed in using time must compete with time’s own rapid pace.’

He slept apart from Julia, not only because he brought boys to his bed but out of a need to reflect in the quiet hours on his destiny. He remembered that at some time in the night Antony had visited him, just for the warmth and symmetry their bodies created. Their relationship was an easy one and free of all tensions. When his life was too crowded, turning to Antony was like jumping from a high building to land safely on warm sand.

He wasn’t in the mood for business with the Senate today. They disapproved of the temple he had built to his god in which he worshipped and sacrificed. They would rather the money had been spent on the military or a new office tower and challenged him over the funding. It would soon be procession time, and he intended to lead the rites in having his god conducted across the city from one temple to another. It was to be an extravaganza like no other and a ceremony in which Eastern rites were dubbed on to a Western aesthetic.

But, for the moment, his mind was occupied with thoughts of Hierocles. He was young, darkly attractive, considered, as a performer,
déclassé
and had undoubtedly at some time or other been somebody’s favourite. He had assured Heliogabalus that he was no longer kept – and whether it had been said to please him or not he felt sure he had found his match.

He called Antony to his room, although he knew it was still an unsociably early hour. He wanted to tell him about his meeting with Hierocles and ask him to assist with the ceremonies tomorrow. No matter the hour, he knew Antony never objected or lost his consistent sense of cool. The homeostasis of his mood seemed untouched by the irregularities that affected the majority of people.

When Antony came in, already dressed and carrying a bowl of grapes that seemed to have been polished to a shine, Heliogabalus felt free to abandon himself to camp. He lay across the bed in the exaggerated pose of a fallen angel, hamming it up as a diva whose tempers left him shredded by passion. He knew that Antony would soothe his head, massage his shoulders and generally play mother.

‘I met somebody in one of the baths yesterday,’ he announced, determined to keep Antony in suspense. ‘A real pretty boy but one with an edge. Could be dangerous. About my age, drives in the arena sometimes, big green eyes and a mischievous sense of humour. No education and a bit rough but…’