Empire (20 page)

“Surely that’s not necessary.”

“It is,” said the Praetorian.

“And if I refuse?”

“You’re here at the emperor’s request. This is the prescribed procedure. You can’t refuse.” The guard crossed his arms. Titus saw that the man had positioned himself to block the door. He felt a tremor of uneasiness.

As he removed the trabea, he was reminded of his first visit to the imperial residence, long ago, and the audience with Caligula. He drove the memory from his mind with thoughts of how Caligula had met his end, bleeding from thirty stab wounds. That was the reason, after all, for this indignity: Claudius had never forgotten the violent manner of his predecessor’s death, and had no intention of meeting a similar fate.

Once upon a time, it had seemed that the emperor was invulnerable and untouchable, protected by the gods; the beloved Augustus and the detested Tiberius both lived to be old men and died in bed. But the violent end of Caligula changed all that. His murder proved that an emperor could be made to bleed and to die just like any other mortal. Caligula’s assassination rid the world of a monster but set a terrible precedent; that was why Claudius, instead of rewarding the tribune Cassius Chaerea, eventually had the assassin put to death. No man could be allowed to kill an emperor and get away with it, not even by the man who had benefited most by becoming the next emperor.

At last the indignity was done with, and Titus was allowed to dress. Clutching his lituus, he was shown not into a formal reception room but into the emperor’s private study. The shelves were crammed with scrolls and the tables covered with scraps of parchment. Maps, genealogical charts, and lists of magistrates were hung on the walls. The dust in the air made Titus sneeze.

Claudius was fifty-eight but looked older. His purple toga was askew, the way one sometimes saw togas on old men who could not look after their appearance and had no one to do it for them. There was a dark spot just above his chest; while Titus watched, Claudius clutched that bit of cloth and used it to wipe the spittle from the corner of his mouth. He
seemed fretful and distracted, shuffling through piles of scrolls and glancing this way and that before looking at Titus.

“You must p-p-perform an augury for me, Titus.”

“Certainly, Caesar.” This was the title Claudius preferred to Dominus. “What is the occasion?”

“The occasion?” Claudius put his fist to his mouth and made a strange noise. “The occasion is a decision that I have to m-make.”

“Can you tell me more?”

“No, not yet. But I can say this: someone will d-d-die, Titus. If I make the wrong decision, people will die, and for no reason. Or I could d-die. I could die!” Claudius gripped the folds of Titus’s trabea. Titus saw fear in his cousin’s eyes, such as he had seen on the day of Caligula’s murder.

“People have died already, of course, because of
her
. Because I was an old fool and believed everything she told me. Polybius, with whom I spent many happy hours in this room, reading b-b-books no one but the two of us had ever heard of . . . and my good friend Asiaticus, whom I would have acquitted of treason except for her meddling . . . and young Gnaeus Pompeius, the last descendant of the triumvir, stabbed to death in his b-b-bed in the arms of a b-b-boy—all dead, because she wanted them dead! And when I think of the family members and old friends I’ve sent into exile, because of her scheming—oh, Titus, you are lucky man, that you never crossed her!”

Titus nodded, his mouth dry.

“But before I say another word, you m-m-must take the auspices. I’m afraid to do it myself.”

“But I still don’t understand the purpose of the augury.”

“You needn’t know. The gods know my mind. They know what I intend to do. You must merely ask if they favor my intentions—yes or no. Here, we can do it in the garden off the study. There’s a clear patch of sky to the north.”

With Claudius standing behind him, Titus marked a section of the sky. For long, tense moments the two men watched in silence, until finally two sparrows appeared, flying from right to left. Titus was ready to declare that the auspice was negative, when from nowhere a hawk descended on the sparrows, seizing one of them in its talons. The hawk with its prey flew in one direction, the surviving sparrow in the other. From the empty
sky a single sparrow feather drifted down and landed on the far side of the garden.

Behind Titus, Claudius sucked in his breath. “Without question, a favorable omen! Do you agree?”

Titus’s heart pounded. “Yes,” he finally said. “The gods favor your action. What do you intend to do, Caesar?”

Titus felt his cousin’s hand on his shoulder and flinched. Claudius seemed not to notice his reaction. “Thank the gods for the Pinarii! I could always unburden myself to your father, and though the gods took him from me, they gave me you in his stead.”

Claudius shambled across the garden and picked up the feather, groaning as he bent and straightened. There were flecks of blood on the vane. “For years, I’ve b-b-been an utter fool, allowing Messalina and her lovers to make a cuckold of me. I believed all her lies, accepted all her evasions, trusted her above all those who tried to warn me. But now the truth has finally c-c-come out, and it’s worse than anything I could have imagined. Messalina has behaved like a whore. She kept a house on the Esquiline under an assumed name and she ran the place like a b-b-brothel, allowing other highborn women to meet their lovers there, staging all manner of orgies. They say that once she gathered prostitutes from the Subura and held a c-competition to see who could satisfy the most customers in a night—and she was the winner! Can you imagine, the wife of the emperor took p-p-payment to have sex with any man who wanted her, one after another! What would Great-Uncle make of such a thing?”

He turned to look at Titus. Titus could think of nothing to say.

“I see you’re too shocked to speak, Titus. No words can express your outrage, I’m sure. And what could you possibly say that would bring me comfort? But I haven’t told you the worst of it yet. Messalina has entered into a b-b-bigamous marriage with the consul Gaius Silius. They even held a ceremony, with witnesses, as if the marriage were a legal union, blessed by the gods. I suppose they intended to stage my funeral next!”

Titus at last found his voice. “But, Caesar, how can you know these things?”

Claudius’s answer was the same as Chrysanthe’s. “Slaves talk,” he said. “And so d-d-do free men, under torture.”

“Does Messalina know you’ve discovered her secrets?”

“A slave warned her. She fled to her house in the Gardens of Lucullus—the love nest she acquired from Asiaticus, when she tricked me into executing the poor fellow. Praetorians have surrounded the grounds. She awaits her fate.”

“Gaius Silius?”

“Dead, by his own hand.”

“And . . . her lovers?”

“Yes, her lovers. Her many, many lovers!” Claudius toyed with the feather, pulling his fingers down the shaft to tatter the vane. The blood on his fingertips he wiped on his toga, where the purple wool absorbed it without a trace. “Come with me, Titus. I need at least one p-p-person in the room whom I can trust.”

One by one the lovers were paraded before Claudius to make their confessions and receive his judgment.

Claudius sat on a thronelike chair on a raised dais. Praetorian guards were stationed at either side of him and at various places around the room. Titus stood on the dais beside Claudius and next to one of the Praetorians, a hulking brute who stank of garlic. Physicians claimed that eating garlic gave a man strength, and to judge by the muscles on this specimen, they were right.

Claudius’s most trusted freedman, Narcissus, oversaw the proceedings. He was a quintessential imperial bureaucrat, fussy about his appearance, snappish with underlings, wheedling but insistent with his master. As each of the accused men was shown into the chamber, it was Narcissus who read the charges and conducted the interrogation.

Some of the men complained that they had been blackmailed into submission by Messalina. Others openly admitted that they had sought her sexual favors. Some begged for mercy, while others said nothing. It made no difference; when the moment came for Narcissus to ask the emperor for his judgment, Claudius looked each man in the eye and declared, “G-g-guilty!”

Most of the men were citizens, and had the right to die by beheading, the fastest, least painful, and most dignified form of execution. But a few
of the accused were foreign-born; they could expect to be beaten to death, strangled, or perhaps thrown to wild animals. There were also slaves among the accused, most of them from the imperial household but some belonging to outsiders; rather than charge them with committing adultery—the idea that another man’s slave might have copulated with the emperor’s wife was too scandalous to contemplate—Narcissus accused the slaves of colluding with Messalina and assisting her conspiracy. Their punishment would be crucifixion.
They’ll die like Kaeso’s so-called god, on a cross,
thought Titus, touching his breast and wishing he had the fascinum to protect him.

The number of Messalina’s lovers was staggering, and the repetition of the process was numbing. Titus would gladly have fled, but he had no choice but to see and hear everything. His cousin wanted him to act as mute witness to an ordeal that was almost as painful and degrading for Claudius as it was for the accused.

Or was Claudius playing a cruel game with him? If Narcissus and his agents had uncovered Messalina’s dalliances with all these other men, how had they failed to identify Titus? At any moment, Titus half expected to hear Narcissus call his name, to feel the hands of the garlic-stinking Praetorian upon him, and to be thrust before Claudius to beg for his life.

Could Claudius be that devious? He seemed to have become more simpleminded as he had grown older, but perhaps that was merely the ruse of a truly ingenious mind. Titus looked sidelong at his cousin, who was wiping a bit of drool from his mouth, and tried to imagine him not as the rather sad fool he appeared to be but as a master manipulator. Claudius not only had outlived virtually everyone else in his family but had managed to become emperor. Was his survival the result of blind chance, or careful design?

Yet if any proof of Claudius’s blindness was required, surely it was the spectacle taking place before them, as one lover after another was produced to demonstrate just how unaware Claudius had been.

Narcissus called out the name of the next man to face judgment: “Bring forth Mnester!”

Titus’s heart skipped a beat. Claudius groaned.

Mnester’s golden hair was mussed and he wore only a brief, sleeveless
sleeping tunic, as if he had just been pulled from his bed. His eyes were wide with fright as he peered around the room. Titus took a couple of steps back and to the side, concealing himself as best he could behind the hulking Praetorian. Had Mnester seen him already? Titus thought not. He held his breath.

Narcissus read the charges: numerous counts of adultery with the emperor’s wife and taking part in a criminal conspiracy to kill the emperor.

Claudius was close to tears. “Mnester, how c-c-could you?”

“But, Caesar, you yourself ordered me to submit to her.”

Claudius looked baffled. “Did I?”

“Do you not recall? I tried to resist her, and I begged you to take my side, but you ordered me to do whatever she commanded, no matter how degrading. You said those very words to me: ‘You must do anything she asks.’ And as a result you can see for yourself how I’ve suffered!”

Mnester lurched forward and dropped to his knees. Titus gave a jerk, for suddenly he was visible to Mnester, but the actor kept his face down and his eyes averted as he pulled his tunic over his head. He was not wearing a loincloth. Naked, he prostrated himself before Claudius, showing the lash marks across his broad back.

Mnester was racked by sobs. “Do you see how she mistreats me, Caesar? Many times, I wanted to come to you and complain, but I was too afraid of her. Afraid for my very life, Caesar!”

Mnester had not seemed very frightened when Titus had last seen him naked; indeed, the actor had seemed an eager participant in everything that had happened. But even though Titus saw through the lie, he was moved by the man’s lament. Mnester was a superb actor, and this was the performance of his life. The tears that streamed from his eyes were real, and so were the fiery red lash marks across the rippling muscles of his back.

Claudius was unnerved. He put one hand to his mouth and shook his head. His eyes glistened with tears.

Mnester glanced up. Titus saw the flash of hope in his eyes. “Please, Caesar, I have been foully used, degraded, humiliated, made the plaything of a woman who had the power of life and death over me. Have pity on me, I beg you! Banish me from Roma, send me to the wilderness, but spare my life!”

“She used you, yes,” muttered Claudius, “just as she used me.”

Titus looked sidelong at Claudius and saw that his cousin was completely dazzled by the performance. Titus saw the contrast between the two men and at the same time he grasped the connection between them: the aging, hunched emperor gazed raptly at Mnester as if the handsome, prostrate figure before him were the idealized personification of his own suffering. Was this not the highest achievement an actor could attain?