The Blood of the Martyrs (4 page)

He half shouted, ‘I won't stand this! I won't have you treating me like dirt!'

‘You
are
dirt,' said Flavia, ‘and you'd better get used to it,' and she turned her back and left him.

The three old men in the dining-room were still talking. For a time they discussed these Christians, a little nervously. It was odd to find oneself at a party, even after absorbing the drink and sobering down, talking about such an unpleasant subject; but they had been upset by Tigellinus. They were wondering now about the whole structure of the State which these Christians, alone among the foreigners and atheists, definitely wished to destroy or at any rate did not support. ‘They believe in nothing, I understand,' said Balbus; ‘they have no temples, no priests, and they say they are going to destroy the world!'

‘They always talk in terms of destruction: flames and judgment and violence,' Crispus said. ‘They seem unable to understand what the State is.'

‘That's because they are State-less, slaves and worse. When the police hear of a Christian meeting, depend on it, it's in one of the tenements in the Aventine. They swarm in there; it ought to be cleared.'

‘Nothing but a fire's going to clear that. You know, Balbus, these tenements are a disgrace, and I don't care who the landlords are! Full of thieves and poisoners and Christians and cheap astrologers and the gods alone know what else!'

‘The common Jews aren't so bad; they're fine fighters and they make good citizens so long as they don't quarrel with their neighbours; and at any rate they don't
obtrude their superstitions; I've met some very decent Jews.'

‘Of course. You must have had plenty to do with Jews in your time, Gallio.'

‘Eh?' said Gallio, starting awake. ‘Jews. Yes, yes. Much more honest than the Greeks. Often won't take a bribe. But excitable. Dear me, yes.'

‘You never came across any Christians, did you?'

‘Oh, sometimes. The strict Jews can't stand them. Seems they're slack about religious observations. Don't insist on all this nonsense about special food.'

‘I told you so,' said Balbus. ‘Atheists! Even the Jews think so. Sometimes I wonder, Gallio, whether it isn't the worst of a career like yours—and a damned fine career, too—that in Provincial administration you're having to deal all the time with inferior races, Jews and Greeks and that class of person. It must have been intolerably tedious.'

Gallio looked at him and scratched in his beard a moment. ‘Sure they are inferior?' he said.

‘Well,'—Balbus was almost shocked—‘naturally!'

‘I don't know,' Gallio said, ‘seems different when you're not in Rome. There was one Jew at Corinth. A little dark man. Queer way of looking at you—that's why I remember him. Paul or some such name. Yes, Marcus Antonius Paulus. Curious how they remember Anthony still in the East. Kind of immortality, that.'

‘What had this Paul done?'

‘Nothing. Made some rather good tents. As a matter of fact, I bought some from him. But the other Jews wanted his blood. He'd put their backs up somehow.'

‘But was he one of these Christians?'

‘Don't know. He seemed perfectly respectable. I let him go, of course. He didn't strike me as inferior.'

‘All the same, these Levantines …'

‘There seem to be so many of them,' Crispus said. ‘Now this fellow Erasixenos, I wouldn't have asked him two or three years ago. But now…' He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Yes,' said Balbus, ‘our Divine Nero admires their taste so much! And the rest of us have to ask them to dinner.'

Crispus looked round; two or three of the slaves were still there. ‘Boys, you may go,' he said quickly, ‘all of you.'

‘Ah, thanks,' said Balbus, ‘though I wasn't going to say anything treasonable! Only that Tigellinus makes me sick. To see the way he looked at your daughter!'

‘We're old-fashioned, I'm afraid. Perhaps he isn't as bad as he seems. I
can't
believe everything I hear about the Emperor.'

‘You'd better start practising, then,' said Gallio, and laughed shortly.

But Crispus went rambling on with his regrets. The wine made him reminiscent and long winded. But there was no hurry. No hurry for any of them. Nothing left for three old men, all more or less retired from public life, to do or change. So they could go on talking. ‘It was so different those first five years, Gallio,' he said, ‘when your brother Seneca was Nero's tutor. We all thought he might be going to be the philosopher-king at last: the old dream. Yes, yes. But it was only because things had got so bad just before, with all the informers and murders and confiscations and scandals, and women and slaves in high places. But, you know, Balbus, it seemed like a fresh start with every Emperor, and then …' He shook his head and emptied his wine-cup.

‘I was only a child when the Divine Augustus died,' said Balbus, reminiscent too, ‘but I can remember the grief there was in all classes. And I remember, too, my father saying that we'd got a scholar and philosopher in Tiberius, a true Roman, hard-working, modest—well, there, we all know what came of it, and my poor father knew, too, to his cost, before the end.'

‘I was out of Rome those last five years of Tiberius,' said Crispus, ‘a young man on my first job in the Provinces. It wasn't till I came back that I realised how things were at home.'

‘It was the gloom, the blackness on everything—wasn't it, Gallio?' Balbus said. ‘You couldn't enjoy yourself nor feel secure. There was that unhappy madman, betrayed by his wife and his friends, and at last by his own scholarship, glowering and pouncing between here and Capri. And then when he died and young Gaius took over—Caligula they
called him, remember, Crispus?—it seemed like the good old days. Yes, the exiles came back, there were free elections and free speech again; we thought Rome could be Rome … But it was hardly a year before the prosecutions and the tyranny came back; Gaius was as mad as Tiberius. The things we had to put through in the Senate! Enough to make one ashamed to bear one's grandfather's name. And then Gaius was murdered and the Divine Claudius came shambling and stammering on; but still, he was no tyrant. No, Gallio, he kept the Provinces together and he might have done well for Rome, but for trusting his wives and his freedmen. It didn't send him mad, being Caesar, but whether Nero is going the same way as Tiberius and Gaius—what do you think, Gallio?'

‘He's not mad; he's bad,' Gallio answered. ‘It would take more than my poor brother and Burrus to hold a boy like that. He took after his mother. And she was a devil. But he only murdered her for a worse woman yet. Women and slaves!'

‘But, oh dear, why must the gods treat us like this?' said Crispus.

‘Why? I'll tell you. We're to blame ourselves. Power's a nasty, dangerous stuff, bad enough for a grown man. Poison to a boy. Even if Nero hadn't had that mother. And we've been so afraid of civil war again—and the gods know we had reason to be afraid—that we let these Julio-Claudians have power. Tons of it. Enough to burst them, to send them mad. We gave it them with both hands—anything to keep us out of a civil war. We wouldn't see that it was more than they could stand, any of them.'

‘Augustus stood it.'

‘He didn't have it from childhood. And it wasn't all in his hands, either. There was still a Senate and People of Rome with a will of its own that it could make known. And certain powers not given up. But now: think! We've given everything. Civil and military power. Judicial and executive. Haven't we, Balbus?'

‘It's not possible to run an empire efficiently unless there's power at the centre; what we complain about is its misuse. It keeps on getting into the wrong hands—creatures like
Pallas and Narcissus in the last reign—not even Italians!—and now men like Tigellinus and all those clever little snakes of freedmen, who can't even get the whip marks off their backs, and women like Poppaea—the Divine Empress creeping from one bed to another—oh, it makes my blood boil!'

Gallio laughed. ‘Drink and cool down. It's our doing. Not that we could have helped it. Being what we are. And the world as it is. The people who want power are the ones who get it, and it's not a thing that decent people want. You wouldn't like to be Emperor, would you, Crispus?'

‘The gods forbid!'

‘Nor I. We've some regard for our souls. It's the ones without souls—women and half-men like these Imperial Ganymedes, and brutes without education like our dear Tigellinus. They're the kind that want power. And take it.'

‘But the Emperors?'

‘Can an Emperor have a soul? Ask my brother: Seneca'll tell you fast enough! Poor little silly Imperial soul, smothered to death with flattery and luxury and pride and anger uncontrolled. No, you can't have it both ways. Not power and a soul.'

‘At any rate,' said Crispus, ‘it isn't so bad in the Provinces; they say that in Gaul, for instance, there is something nearer the old Roman life.'

‘Comes of being a week's journey from the capital. Gaul can't be gathered up into the same bundle of power as Rome. But suppose now—well, I'm no poet, this is more my nephew's line!—but say one could get letters—and legions—to and fro to the Provinces in a matter of hours: flying horses! Well, then, they'd be under the same power too, and no different.'

‘In the same fear and shame as we are.'

‘Yes, but mark you, Crispus, the Empire'd be that much more efficient. The Imperial administration that much more unified. No rebellions possible. Can't have it both ways. See, Crispus?'

Balbus, who had been calming down, swirling the wine round in his cup, broke in: ‘I'm not so sure, Gallio; is it all so damned efficient? What about the finances? Rome
could live on what she made and took—well, in the usual way!—under the Republic. If you were a citizen that meant a decent security. But an Imperial Court with all the trimmings is a different matter; it's upset the balance of things. It has to be fed and paid for, with imports all the time, and I'm not sure if that's going so nicely. Here in Rome, half the citizens are on the dole. And I'd like to know just how the Exchequer are paying for these pageants and parades and cardboard imitations of the Olympic Games that are got up to keep their minds off reality!'

Crispus sighed. ‘We all need to have our minds taken off reality these days. It's nice to think of those two young people starting life together. Though I could have wished your Candidus hadn't chosen to go into the Praetorians.'

‘He'd set his heart on it,' said Balbus, ‘and it's certainly a career. When the old ways of looking at things are breaking down—the continuity of the family and all that—well, young people want to make their own lives. We shall have to see the astrologers, Crispus, and get them to fix a day.'

Gallio grunted. ‘Astrologers! Mean to say you believe in that sort of nonsense, Balbus?'

‘Well, my dear fellow, there's a lot in it, y'know—'

‘Lot of moonshine. Well, good night, Crispus, and thanks. Coming, Balbus? Yes, of course I'm walking. Think I'm going to be carried about in a litter like one of Nero's nancies? You don't know old Gallio!'

When he had seen his two old friends off, Crispus went along to bed, still sighing and shaking his head and wondering if it could be true that the Emperor was no better than the rest, that something was really wrong, so badly wrong that it could not be put right by going back—back to the manners and decencies and truthfulness and civilisation of Augustus—or farther. The slaves, however, waited to clear up, and Lalage was waiting to be paid. Hearing Crispus call for his personal servant to give him the usual ten minutes‘ bedtime massage, Argas came back to the dining-room. But by then Beric was there again, sitting on the end of the couch in his old place and glaring across the table at the other couch where Candidus had been. He shouted at Argas to get out and keep out. Argas who had seen what happened, the
spilled wine and the blow! Argas shrugged his shoulders and went out. ‘No good,' he said to Sannio, ‘the Briton's there. And a nasty temper he's in.'

‘Well,' said Sannio, ‘the little cat's done the dirty on him. Sitting there as if butter wouldn't melt in her claws. Oh my, oh my!'

Phaon was crying, clutching and rubbing himself where Tigellinus had pinched him. ‘I hate him!' he said, ‘I hate him, I'd like to kill him!'

Argas caught hold of him. ‘No, you don't,' he said, ‘you don't, Phaon.' And he whispered some words to Phaon which seemed to calm him down. The slaves yawned. They would have liked to go to bed, but they knew they'd catch it if they left the clearing-up till morning. Lalage was talking in a corner to Manasses, quite low, about something which seemed to interest them both. Sannio made a dirty joke, but Argas didn't laugh.

At last Lalage said, ‘Well, I shall go in, temper or no temper, and make that precious Briton of yours pay up. And extra for Tigellinus!' She patted Phaon and he smiled a little. The accompanist had nodded to sleep on a bench.

Lalage went into the room quietly, for she could be very quiet, and found herself behind Beric; she stood and watched him, for something seemed to be happening to him which was the kind of thing she understood. He was standing beside the couch where Candidus had been and he was talking to empty air, but, as Lalage listened, it became quite plain what he was doing. ‘Now, you swine,' he snarled, ‘you Aelius Candidus, you've struck me. Struck me before witnesses. Me, a king's son.' He clutched about with his hands, felt at his belt, drew out a knife and pulled its edge across his thumb. Then he lifted it and held it point down and spoke again to emptiness, again from snarling misery. ‘No, go down on your knees, Roman, and beg for your miserable life. Say it. Say it after me. I, Aelius Candidus, in fear and trembling, beg of you, Beric, son of Caradoc the King …'