Conspiracies of Rome (25 page)

    ‘What is that?’ I asked, pointing at the building.

    ‘That,’ said Lucius, ‘is something you have to see, tired as you are.’

    He sent the slave off to order food for us at his house. We would follow more slowly behind. ‘We’ll be safe enough as a pair. It’s not even dark yet,’ he said.

    We’d approached from the side. I moved back from the portico, so I could take it all in from the front. The portico was made of three rows of granite columns topped with Corinthian capitals. Above this was a long entablature. On this was the inscription: ‘Marcus Agrippa Son of Lucius Consul for the Third Time Made This’.

    ‘Who was this Agrippa?’ I asked.

    ‘He was the son-in-law of the great Augustus,’ Lucius replied. ‘He built this temple around the time your Galilean carpenter was born.’ He looked at me closely. ‘Or is he
your
Galilean carpenter?’ he asked. ‘I’m beginning to wonder what you do actually believe . . . But never mind this.’ Lucius turned back into well-informed guide. ‘The temple was almost entirely rebuilt by Hadrian a hundred or so years later. You know Hadrian? He was my favourite emperor – a man of great learning and of piety for the Old Gods.

    ‘Do you know about Antinous?’ he asked with a change of tone.

    I knew something, but shook my head. I’d read something of Hadrian’s catamite in the
Encyclopaedia
that Saint Jerome put together. Since I didn’t know what of this I should believe, I waited for Lucius to enlighten me. But he shrugged and turned back to his main theme.

    ‘The main structure is all by Hadrian,’ he said. ‘He left only the portico. He left Agrippa’s name because he was always too modest to have his own put on his works.

    ‘Let’s go in.’

    We walked through the portico and Lucius rapped on the huge bronze door. It wasn’t locked, but swung noiselessly open, just enough for a priest to stick his head round.

    ‘This building is shut until the consecration,’ he said officiously. ‘Come back for the ceremony.’

    Lucius pushed his usual key in the lock: ‘I am Lucius Decius Basilius,’ he drawled. ‘I go where I please. You will open the door now.’

    Another priest looked out, then withdrew his head. There was a whispered conversation inside. Finally the door opened and we entered.

    Nothing had prepared me for the astonishing beauty of the interior. It was one great circular room, topped by the coffered, hemispherical dome. The light of a very late afternoon entered obliquely through a hole, or
oculus
, at the centre of the dome. This fell directly on the upper part of the dome, and was then diffused lower onto walls of the most glorious polychrome marble. Around the walls, taking the weight of the dome, was a circle of elegant Corinthians.

    The overall impression in that late, golden light was of immense yet restful magnificence. I could hardly reconcile the people of the Rome I knew with the race that could have conceived and built something so completely wonderful. It was like the most beautiful and technically perfect ancient poem, enlarged and made into stone.

    We stood awhile in silence, then Lucius said: ‘It was built as a temple to all the Gods. Now it is to be stolen and given over to the worship of the Jewish Sky God of the Galileans.’

    Then I noticed for the first time the frantic work all around us. I was confused for a moment as to how I could possibly have ignored it. Workmen ran up and down ladders. They were taking down any obvious symbol of the old worship. Already, a giant cross was in place before one of the main recesses. There was a high altar that hadn’t yet been set in position.

    In another of the recesses I saw a pile of broken statuary. We walked over to this. The disfigured beauty of the Old Gods pierced my heart, lifting me for a moment from my own personal grief.

    ‘The “demons” are to be cast out,’ said Lucius flatly. ‘When I was last in here, they were still in the places given them long ago. Now, they have been pulled down, and the smashed fragments are to be burnt for cement. The walls are to be scraped. I am told there are to be twenty-eight cartloads of corpse parts delivered from the catacombs to complete the desecration. They’ll need to burn half a ton of incense to cover the stench of death. But these will be old relics. I regret to say your friend looks set to join this lot. He’ll be a nice, fresh, convenient martyr to add to the pile and inflame the passions of the mob.’

    Would Maximin have wanted this? Probably, he would. ‘When is the consecration to be?’ I asked.

    ‘Around the Ides of next month, I believe,’ said Lucius. ‘If Boniface is still sweating pus in Naples – a punishment, be assured, for his impiety here – it may all be delayed. Or this new plague may force delay. Or the dispensator may take his place. That’ll please the grisly old creep, I’m in no doubt.

    ‘Do you know, he helped stop my father’s legal challenge to the will that left everything to the Church? He was only a deacon back then. Even so, he was in thick with Pope Gregory. If beggaring his own family helped advance him in the corpse cult of the Galileans, he didn’t care shit.’

    Suddenly: ‘Did you miss something? Would you have me speak louder?’ Lucius wheeled round and spat the questions at the priest who’d let us in. He’d been following us round the temple.

    ‘My lord Basilius,’ the priest answered, looking panicky, ‘you speak too freely in this house of God.’

    ‘Well, you can speak freely too – that is, if you want a stick taken to your back one night. Fuck off back to your work, scum, and stop snooping on your betters. Do you hear me?’

    The priest walked away with a stiff dignity. The dispensator would have this on this desk well before breakfast, I had no doubt. But Lucius seemed untouchable. Perhaps I was too, if I kept in with him, but my own mouth shut. Just to make sure, though, that something acceptable got back, I turned and ostentatiously crossed myself as we left.

25

Lucius had his house not far away from the temple. I say house, but it was in fact a little palace – and mostly in good condition, once you got past the shabby brick exterior. We passed into a high, wide entrance hall, faced with marble that glowed a gentle pink in the fading light that came from above. In the centre was a fountain that still splashed water over a statue of a naked boy.

    A slave bowed low to Lucius and removed a cloth from a little block that I gathered was an altar to the household gods. Lucius took up a gold crucifix that had been placed on the cloth and spat on it, holding it upside down. As the slave took the thing away, Lucius prayed silently and scattered a few petals on the altar. ‘I feel cleansed from that,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Let’s eat.’

    Dinner was plain but good – bread, olives, a little baked rabbit, and plenty of wine mixed with clean water. We didn’t recline in the pompous manner of old, but sat opposite each other at a small table. Slaves stood behind to refill our cups.

    I stuffed myself and drank until I saw two lamp flames where only one had been. I began to feel better than I had all day. Drugged cakes are all very well. But nothing beats good food and plenty of wine.

    For a while, we discussed the arrangements for the following morning. We reviewed the progress of the day, and planned our course of further questioning.

    ‘Remember,’ said Lucius again, ‘you keep digging until the truth is exposed. We shall see what we unearth tomorrow.’

    I said I’d get Martin to lay in a supply of papyrus for our notes.

    We turned to other matters. I wanted to know more about Lucius, and I wanted to know something about Constantinople. ‘Tell me,’ I asked, struggling with the words – the drink was catching up fast on me – ‘about Constantinople. Is it really as grand as people say?’

    Lucius put his cup down. ‘Compared with Rome,’ he said, ‘it always used to be decidedly second best. Constantine had the place built in a hurry when he needed a new capital in the East. For the next few hundred years, his buildings kept falling down. Nowadays, though, it has no competition. And it is pretty good, if you can put up with all those dreadful churches. The buildings are huge and still fresh. The place has at least a million people. The nobility is rich. The baths are crowded. The shops have everything you could ever want. It costs the earth to live there, of course. Oh yes, and the emperor’s a complete bastard.’

    Lucius had my cup refilled, this time with unmixed wine. I asked him about Phocas. ‘The Church here in Rome liked him. Was he really that bad?’

    ‘Yes, he is that bad,’ Lucius insisted. He elaborated on what he’d said the other evening. Phocas was the most common emperor there had ever been. Lucius was as scandalised by this as by the man’s great personal ugliness. He’d been a lowly officer in the army on the Danube. The previous emperor, Maurice, had been unlucky in his wars on the frontier, and had put up taxes. The army had eventually revolted and put up Phocas as emperor. Maurice had found no support at home, and was soon put out of the way. This was the first successful revolution against a legitimate emperor in hundreds of years. The Christian ascendancy had until then stabilised the succession.

    Phocas, though, had turned out to be a complete incompetent. The barbarians had overrun the Danube provinces, getting all the way to Athens. Then the Persians had put up an alleged son of Maurice as the legitimate emperor and invaded. For a while, they’d kept up the pretence of keeping an old agreement with Maurice. Now, they’d dropped that and were talking about a permanent conquest of the provinces west of the Euphrates.

    As Lucius had said, all this left Phocas in serious trouble. There were no taxes coming in from the East. There was nothing to be got in Italy – not even though he’d restored Smaragdus as exarch, who’d previously been recalled for madness and oppression.

    The exarch of Africa had effectively declared independence and was plotting an invasion. The whole Empire was collapsing around Phocas. He was too useless to lift a finger in defence of the Empire, but kept control in the capital with a reign of terror. That was how Lucius had lost his expectancy from his Eastern relative.

    ‘Put to death for plotting, the swine claimed,’ he said. ‘More like he just wanted the cash.’

    I described my similar experiences with Ethelbert back home.

    Lucius raised his cup. ‘So we have still more in common – both robbed of our birthright by tyrants adored by these slimy clerics in Rome. May they all rot in the underworld.’

    He drained his cup. More was added.

    ‘But if the man is so dangerous, what could you have been thinking to go there?’ I asked.

    ‘Simple.’ Lucius gave one of his charming smiles. ‘I hoped I could charm the deformed pile of shit into giving me back some of the confiscated property. I got some inspired piece of flattery written in Greek and went out there to read it to him in person. You won’t believe how I sat in the ship practising the words until it sounded as if I really knew the language.

    ‘Then I got to Constantinople and found he could just about follow the prayers in Greek. His only fluency is in a kind of barbarised Latin. Still, I recited my poem, and it was interpreted a couplet at a time for him. I didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand it. But we both went through the motions. He grinned. He hugged me. He sent me off with a letter of commendation to Boniface and the promise of a consulship – just as soon as he could get round to reviving the office.

    ‘I suppose I should count myself lucky to leave his palace with the head still on my shoulders. There were more executions that day in the Circus. He even had the women and children put down. I was there to see it.’

    We sat awhile in silence. For all the horrors Lucius was describing, and for all that were attending me even now, I was feeling oddly comfortable. I was no longer alone, and no longer frightened of being alone. I had a friend – a friend who would surely see me right with Maximin, and perhaps much else besides.

    A slave fussed with one of the lamp wicks. Lucius sat up straight. ‘But I’m not much of a host. Let me show you the great
domus Basilii
. Parts of it are still worth a look.’

    Parts of it were indeed worth a look. None of it had fallen down. The roofs were still sound. The living quarters were simply arranged now, the grander furniture having long since been sold off. But the pieces that remained were nicely matched. The floors were covered with rich mosaics of scenes from the ancient mythology. Though tatty in places and often faded, the plastered walls still had their original paintings – country scenes, hunts, and some very interesting scenes of city life from a Rome not yet fallen into decay.