The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (13 page)

Out of the Dark Ages comes the story of one man whose life's arc closely reproduces this maturation process - the emergence
of the modern Western European nations from their rough infancy under Germanic tutelage. It is far from certain where, when,
or even if this man ever actually lived; even if he did, medieval embellishments of his biography tend to obscure hard facts
under layers of romanticizing mythology. The earliest extant accounts of his life date to the early thirteenth century, but
tales and legends had been circulating throughout Catholic Europe for centuries prior to that, probably dating back to Frankish
Gaul. His story has been told and retold, most recently in Flaubert's
Three Tales.
His legend is depicted in stained glass in the cathedrals of Chartres and Rouen. Chaucer invokes him several times in
The Canterbury Tales-,
Gawain prays to him; in England alone, seven ancient churches were dedicated to him. He was Julian, the patron saint of hospitality.

Julian was the beloved only son of a noble couple of the Anjou - in one account, the duke and duchess of Angers themselves.
He was a spoiled, callow youth addicted to hunting and given to capricious cruelty to animals. Out hunting one day, and separated
from his companions, Julian maliciously wounds a sleeping stag. Before dying, the stag speaks to him, predicting that he will
one day kill his own parents. Hoping to avert the prophecy, Julian flees his native country, leaving his grieving parents
to believe that he has died.

He eventually makes his way to Jerusalem, where he joins the Knights Hospitallers in valiantly defending the city against
the Muslims. On being falsely informed that his father has died, thus freeing him from the prophecy, he heads home but somehow
ends up in Galicia, where he defeats a host of Moors besieging a castle. The grateful castellan rewards him with an estate
of his own and a beautiful wife, with whom he lives happily for several years.

One day while he is out on the hunt, an old couple arrive at his castle. They are his parents, who have wandered the lands
pursuing rumors of his survival. Julian's wife receives them graciously, feeding them and giving them her own bed to rest
in. Julian returns from the hunt, sees two figures in the bed and, believing he has caught his wife in adultery, slaughters
them as they sleep.

In abject penance, Julian abandons his home and his fortune, followed by his faithful wife. After years of mendicancy, they
settle in a hut by a swift stream on the pilgrimage route to Santiago, where they live in exemplary poverty and humility,
providing food and shelter to pilgrims and ferrying them across the dangerous current.

One stormy night, a voice calls to them from the far side of the stream. At great peril, Julian crosses the water and greets
the traveler, a foul-smelling beggar in filthy rags and such an advanced stage of leprosy that he has lost his nose. Julian
grasps him by the thighs and lifts him into the boat, holding him so closely that their lips almost meet and greedily inhaling
his pestilent breath in an ecstasy of self-abasement. Back in the hut, Julian and his wife feed their guest and build a roaring
fire, but nothing can warm the chill in his bones. Julian tries to revive him with the warmth of his own body, but to no avail.
The leper asks Julian's wife to strip and join him in bed, claiming that nothing but the warmth of a woman will do the trick.
True to his vow of humility, Julian allows her to fulfill the request, but when she pulls the blanket aside the bed is empty.
A voice on the storm announces that their visitor had been none other than Christ in disguise and that Julian is now fully
absolved of his sin.

Another seven years they continue to live and toil for the poor, until they are murdered in their beds, like Julian's parents,
by a band of passing thieves.

It is not entirely clear why the story of St. Julian the Hospitaller was so immensely popular in the Middle Ages. It certainly
incorporates a great many themes of everyday medieval life religion, the Crusades, pestilence, the dangers of travel, arbitrary
violence, the casual cruelty of noblemen, redemption through suffering. I have a suspicion, however, that its popularity lay
in the subconscious journey - personal and cultural - that it describes, one that told the people of the Middle Ages both
where they had come from and where they saw themselves going.

If we think of Julian as a nation, we can see him starting out on his life's journey as a brutal pagan Frank, Saxon, Visigoth,
or Lombard. He is cruel, wantonly destructive, and faithless, but through a series of trials, tests, punishments, and humiliations,
he is gradually transformed into the very model of a humble, abject Christian. Certainly, it is hard to picture a hardened
Frankish warrior willingly drinking disease from a leper's lips or offering him his naked wife. We tend to imagine the Middle
Ages as a place of darkness, fear, ignorance, and superstition, but I doubt that people of those times saw their situation
quite so starkly. They had, after all, emerged from an era far darker, more mysterious, and dangerous than theirs, and even
among the illiterate there must have been some vague awareness of the deep fog in which their forebears had been enshrouded.
Julian was their story, the Frank who became French, the Anglo-Saxon who became English, the Visigoth who became Spanish,
the pagan who embraced the true Church.

They could have made him the patron saint of anything: crusaders, ferrymen, lepers, or pimps. Instead, they made him the patron
saint of hospitality because his transformation and redemption made possible the reawakening of a forgotten but cherished
tradition that had lain dormant for many centuries. Scenes of domesticity, cooking, the life of the peasantry, romance, and
the pageantry of noble hospitality had all but disappeared from art and literature under the Germanic hegemony of the Dark
Ages. Now, under the divine protection of a new patron, the appurtenances of domestic hospitality were resurgent everywhere,
from religious iconography to the emerging vernacular poetry. Hospitality was back in business, just in time for capitalism,
colonialism, gunpowder warfare, and the Renaissance.

CHAPTER VII

GAIUS, TITUS, LUCIUS

Must not those who live in kitchens always stink?

Petronius,
Satyricon

In the history of hospitality, there are those who are invited to the party and those who are not. Those who are not invited
participate just as fully in this history as those who are because it is their very absence that defines the opposing camp,
since you cannot include someone without excluding someone else. Like ancestral spirits at a shamanistic ritual, those who
cannot be seen often make up the majority of those who are present.

You would imagine that those who are invited would be smug, while those who are not would be bitter and insecure. And yet,
it is an interesting truth about human nature that this situation tends to arouse bitterness and insecurity on both sides
of the fence. Of course, the uninvited may initially experience envy, but pride will usually transmute their bile into jeering
contempt and haughtiness, as anyone who has ever watched the Oscars on television will attest. We all know how easy it is
to ascribe hubris to others - tragic theater could hardly exist without it.

The bitterness of the invited, however, is a little more complex. You may start out feeling pretty good about yourself, but
that won't last unless you're a fool. Instead, you often begin to question the value of inclusion. Am I worthy of being included?
Is this company beneath me? Any initial sense of self-satisfaction at being included becomes adulterated with an unstable
admixture of guilt, self-doubt, and disdain for one's fellow participants. That, in turn, will probably give rise to self-loathing,
resentment of those you rightly suspect of sneering at your participation, and, ultimately, reactionary exclusionism.

I knew these feelings intimately as a child growing up in England. As an American and a Jew, middle-class and intellectual,
there was no natural place for me among the confident, athletic, and cosmopolitan children of British, French, Belgian, Persian,
and Lebanese aristocrats who peopled my school. I looked down upon their thoughtlessness, their booklessness, their casual
obliviousness to self-doubt, while I wanted only to be just like them in everyway. Mine was a home of chaos, illness, anxiety,
and nonconformity; theirs were places of decorum, serenity, and secure social standing. This made me turn against myself even
more scathingly and hate the people I longed for. I was certain that I was smarter than them but that they knew something
I could never know. How could they be so calm and sure of themselves otherwise?

I was anything but a misfit. I strove tirelessly, if vainly, to attain a sense of belonging. I cultivated a gift for making
friends and never lacked for invitations to country weekends, but I was always lonely in company because I was forever on
my guard against being denounced. No one ever outed me, of course, because the harsh searchlight of paranoia makes people
(including oneself) appear flatter, more one-dimensional, than they really are. With hindsight, it is clear to me that most
of my friends were perfectly decent people who had never scorned me as an insecure wanna-be, but to this very day it is difficult
for me to believe that anyone likes me as much as he claims or feigns.

Maybe that's why I keep inviting them over for dinner.

In the year 60, the Roman proconsul to Bithynia was recalled to the capital to serve in the court of the emperor Nero. Not
much is known about the life of Titus Petronius Niger - who has also been identified as Gaius Petronius - other than that
he was of an extremely wealthy and illustrious family, but what is certain is that he immediately fell into intimate companionship
with the emperor, who was in awe of his ability to ally the most refined sophistication to the appearance of unaffected simplicity.
Within a year of his arrival, he was distinguished by the extraordinary and unprecedented title of
arbiter elegantiae
- the arbiter of elegance, or master of good taste - giving him the first and final say in all of Nero's aesthetic choices
and diversions. 'The emperor," says Tacitus, "thought nothing charming or elegant in luxury unless Petronius had expressed
to him his approval of it." During his brief ascendancy, Petronius was in full control of coordinating the emperor's banquets,
orgies, musical entertainments, games, and guest lists.

But, as men more powerful and ruthless than Petronius were to discover, being close to Nero could be as dangerous as being
in his disfavor. The appointment of Ofonius Tigellinus as commander of the Imperial Guard in 62, less than two years after
Petronius' return to Rome, marked the beginning of his downfall. Petronius played to Nero's artistic pretensions, Tigellinus
to his cruelty; predictably, cruelty won. By 64, Tigellinus was known to be organizing the emperor's banquets and the arbiter's
position was becoming increasingly precarious. In 66, Tigellinus implicated Petronius, along with many of Rome's most eminent
politicians and intellectuals, including Seneca and Lucan, in the failed plot of Gaius Calpurnius Piso to overthrow Nero.
Rather than await the inevitable, Petronius slew himself at Cumae.

Like Seneca and Lucan, Petronius left something for the world to remember him by. Some time between being named Nero's favorite
and killing himself, he wrote a masterpiece of prose, a nasty bit of documentary satire that, in its surviving fragments,
has come down to us as the ultimate record of decadence at the Roman banquet table. Less obviously, but perhaps more durably
as an object lesson, it offers a very revealing insight into the conflicted heart of the real insider, of one who both reviles
and is helplessly drawn to the glamor of inclusion, and who suspects that he may have lost himself at the host's elbow. Most
critics tend to see Petronius' work as an indictment of Neronian vulgarity and depravity, or at best as an amoral portrait
of the nouveau riche. I see it, however, as documenting the efforts of a man to come to terms with his own ambivalence about
always being at the top of the A-list. The
Satyricon
is best read not by those who despise the elite and scorn excess, but by those who are secretly attracted to them despite
themselves.

Like Americans, Romans of the early empire had a tendency to romanticize their flinty pastoral origins and lost moral rectitude,
while viewing their current prosperity as a mixed blessing. Wallowing in ornate decadence, many a Roman poet made an excellent
living harking back to the ancestral farmstead with its olive groves, beehives, and virtuous, hardworking, simple-living
Quir-ites,
who often had to make do with a mere handful of slaves. Almost every patrician had his villa in the Alban hills, Etruria,
or Campania where he played the humble homesteader, raising his own vintages, eating homegrown bread and cheese. Every soldier
recalled the glorious triumphs of bygone days, when
real
Romans were the army's backbone and you came home after a hard-fought campaign to hear Latin being spoken on the streets of
the capital, instead of this bastardized babble of Greek, Gaulish, Syrian, German, and Hebrew. Like Americans, Roman orators
at the pinnacle of Rome's power enjoyed nothing quite so much as to lean on the crutch of patriotism while predicting the
imminent swamping of the
patria
in debauchery, corruption, sloth, and indulgence. When the poet Horace, in the very opening years of the empire, bemoaned
the glory days when "private estates were small, and great was the common weal," he was only reiterating in sublime Latin
what was being said in coarse vernacular on every street corner and from the speakers' stump in every forum.

Nero's villa, the
Domus Aurea,
or Golden House, was the epitome of all that ordinary Romans had come to despise in their degenerate rulers. It replaced the
Domus Transitoria,
partially destroyed in the great fire of 64, which was said to have been started and fanned by the henchmen of Tigellinus
in order to clear the central city for Nero's monumental dream house. Whether or not the fire was set intentionally, the Golden
House and its grounds were built precisely atop the three neighborhoods that had been entirely leveled. The estate covered
some two hundred acres on the Palatine and Oppian hills and spanned the entire valley to the Esquiline. The grounds centered
on a vast artificial lake and boasted temples, vineyards, pastures, orchards, and herds of wild beasts - a veritable
rus in urbe.
The estate kept growing, eating away at the city; a popular song, claiming that "Rome is becoming one house," advised Romans
to flee to Veii, "if that house does not soon seize upon Veii as well." The palace itself, an oversized Mediterranean peristyle
villa, had a triple colonnade running along its entire length (which Suetonius asserts to have spanned a mile) and in the
vestibule a statue of Nero more than one hundred feet tall (the
colossus
after which the Colosseum was named). Pliny claims that the entire facade was gilded. The house had two bathing pools, one
of salt water, the other of sulfur, and an enormous ramp of running water to cool the air in the dining room. Nero plundered
all of Greece to furnish its 150 rooms. The walls were encrusted with marble, gold, gems, mother-of-pearl; the mosaics on
the vaulted ceilings played out epic scenes from Greek mythology. "There were dining-rooms with fretted ceilings of ivory,
whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main
banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens." The
Domus Aurea
was not quite complete at Nero's death in 68, but he was able to live and entertain there for several years, at its dedication
saying merely that "he was at last beginning to be housed like a human being."

No one was quite able to pinpoint the moment at which old-fashioned Roman virtue had succumbed, but historians, moralists,
and poets spoke with one voice in naming the perfidious Orient as its killer. The Greeks had been infected by the arts of
luxury from conquered Persia and had passed on the disease to Rome, where it incubated and spread throughout the second and
first centuries B.C. Pliny could not say it plainly enough: "The conquest of Asia . . . introduced luxury here." He despised
such Asiatic luxury, as did Horace, Martial, Strabo, Livy, and anyone else who sought to score an easy hit with the disaffected.
Crankiness aside, they weren't entirely wrong. The Romans were indeed irrepressible assimilators; they copied or adapted Hellenic
styles of poetry, history, writing, architecture, worship, and mythology. One did not necessarily have to be a reactionary
to consider the secondary consequences of colonialism upon Roman society and morals to be less than salutary. No sooner had
they conquered the Greek colonies in southern Italy and Sicily than
liquamen
- the Roman version of the salty fish condiment
garos
- became ubiquitous in their cooking. The modern addiction to expensive wine, Phrygian marble, Persian nard, Indian mushrooms,
Cyrenaican silphium, Egyptian cotton, slave labor, sodomy, gold, and, ultimately, autocrats was simply a nasty virus the Romans
had contracted in their travels. Seneca tells with puritan dismay of how Apicius (one of several Apicii to whom the famous
cookbook is ascribed), having squandered one hundred million sesterces on banquets, and with only ten million left, killed
himself rather than risk starving to death. Real Romans killed themselves for honor, not dinner.

When it came to setting precedents for depravity, the Romans were awfully diligent and inventive, but too much has been written
about Roman excess - especially in food and sex - to make it worth retelling here at any great length. Still, it's hard to
resist, especially when writing about hospitality, and even more especially when the excesses of the early emperors make today's
ill-omened headlines read like excerpts from a provincial crime blotter.

The Romans' appetite for self-indulgence was whetted under the empire, and grew progressively sharper under the first five
emperors, the so-called Julio-Claudian dynasty. Rome had had dictators before, under the republic, but these were appointed
by the Senate during military emergencies for fixed terms of six months (the fighting season) and were generally, with a few
notable exceptions, in no position to abuse their limited power. In principle, even the imperator was nothing more than a
high-ranking magistrate subordinate to the Senate, but that was a mere technicality. No senator was going to keep Augustus,
Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, or Nero from his Asiatic luxuries.

Julius Caesar was the founder of the line but is not included because he never assumed the title imperator. This is just as
well for any study of imperial depravity, for his worst crime against hospitality seems to have been to have put his baker
in irons for serving one kind of bread to Caesar and another kind to Caesar's guests. Marcus Cato summed it up well when he
called Caesar "the only man who undertook to overthrow the state when sober."

His adopted son Octavian, later Augustus, the first Roman emperor, was almost as restrained. Although he loved to gamble and
enjoyed hosting banquets, he could be very choosy about his guests and was known to be a frugal eater and drinker. Indeed,
he often ate before his guests arrived, showed up late at table, and then withdrew early - tendencies that, while not criminal,
were not necessarily those of an attentive host. Later in life, however, he began to exhibit tentative signs of the behavorial
patterns that would be so successfully developed and refined by his successors. Scandalously effeminate in his youth, he became
a notorious adulterer in maturity, going so far, while dining at the home of one senator, to seduce the man's wife in his
presence, "bringing her back to the table with her hair in disorder and her ears glowing." In the midst of a dire famine,
he once held the notorious "supper of the twelve Gods" at which he blasphemously assumed the role of Apollo. These incidents,
while only modestly reprehensible by the standards soon to be set, were specifically cited as precedents for much worse in
the years to come. He was the only Julio-Claudian emperor whose death was not openly celebrated by the people of Rome.