The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (15 page)

The fare served up is as excessive as the host. A partial list of appetizers includes roast dormice sprinkled with honey and
poppyseeds; Syrian plums and pomegranate seeds; fig-peckers marinated in peppered egg yolk and stuffed into peahen eggs; testicles
and kidneys; cheese tarts; lobster; sow's udder; and snapper in pepper sauce. A wild boar is roast, stuffed with live quail,
and garnished with cake piglets. A roast pig is brought in and the cook threatened with a beating for having forgotten to
gut it; but when he proceeds to slit it open before the horrified company, it disgorges a cascade of cooked sausages and giblets.
For dessert, cakes and fruits are served suffused with saffron; pastry thrushes are stuffed with nuts and raisins; quinces
are adorned with thorns to look like sea urchins.

No reader, ancient or modern, can fail to recognize in Trimalchio the eternal nouveau riche, who has the means to inspire
envy but inspires equal contempt for his lack of subtlety and the low-bred company he keeps. Nothing has changed in two thou
sand years to soften or mitigate that portrait - only recently the
Times
carried the story of six bankers who treated themselves to sixty-two thousand dollars' worth of vintage Petrus at one meal.
Each one of us probably carries with him the image of some news-making plutocrat whose money and gorgeous arm-candy he delights
in despising. We sneer at his greed but cannot help imagining ourselves in his place, consoling ourselves that we would know
the best and most tasteful ways of spending his riches if we had them. We might even imagine that we deserve them more than
one who puts them to such vulgar use. We flatter ourselves with the understated simplicity of our own tastes and picture ourselves,
invited to the ball, rejecting the garish display and all it represents.

Few critics doubt that, in the words of one, "the prototypes of the guests at Trimalchio's table were almost certainly actual
people known to Nero no less than to Petronius." We will never know, of course, whether certain characters correspond specifically
to courtiers of the author's acquaintance, but that is irrelevant. No one would suggest, either, that Trimalchio is an explicit
portrait of Nero, but the similarities between them would have been more than enough to cost Petronius his life if the emperor
had chanced to read the manuscript. There is, of course, their shared aversion to philosophers. Both are wildly profligate
and believe that a man is at least partly defined and ennobled by his willingness to spend recklessly. Suetonius' description
of Nero - "He thought that there was no other way of enjoying riches and money than by riotous extravagance, declaring that
only stingy and niggardly fellows kept a correct account of what they spent, while fine and genuinely magnificent gentlemen
wasted and squandered" - readily applies to Trimalchio. Both were shameless exhibitionists with terrible voices; both shared
a keen and well-informed interest in architecture. Both preserved their first beards in golden caskets. Both had dining rooms
with mechanical ceilings that opened to shower gifts and perfume on their guests. Both had a decided penchant for scenting
the soles of their feet. I think it's fair to assume that no one in Nero's court was ever offered the opportunity to read
the
Satyricon.

The thing about Trimalchio is that, for all his trumpishness, we cannot help but like him, as Petronius clearly intended us
to. He is brash, coarse, and temperamental, but he is also unapologetically himself, larger than life, a carousing Bacchus,
a hungry maw, still greedy at an advanced age for everything life has to offer. He is unstintingly generous to friends and
strangers alike and enjoys a surprisingly casual and empathetic give-and-take relationship with his slaves. He has triumphed
over terrible odds and come away with an unsentimental but not at all bitter assessment of the rules of the game: "Take my
word for it, if you have a penny you're worth a penny, you are valued for just what you have." Contrast this philosophy with
Nero's darker conviction that "no man was chaste or pure in any part of his body, but that most of them concealed their vices
and cleverly drew a veil over them; and that therefore he pardoned all other faults in those who confessed to him their lewdness"
and it becomes obvious that if Trimalchio is a stand-in for the emperor, he is one with all the mercurial cruelty, madness,
and blood-lust bleached out of him.

Every paradox of Petronius' personality and the dangerous choices he knowingly made come together and are illuminated by Trimalchio.
It seems obvious that, since the book cannot have been read by many, if any, of its contemporaries, it was written as a kind
of self-exorcism - part expiation, part wishful thinking - a drawn-out analytical exercise in which the author is attempting
to understand and justify his own impulses and conflicting desires. Petronius does not need Nero, his money, his influence,
or his protection; he sneers at the emperor's crude depravity, artistic mediocrity, and lack of aesthetic refinement; he finds
no intellectual peers at court. And yet he is not only attracted by the emperor's hospitality and intimacy, but also actually
co-opts them to his own mortal peril. Is it a fatal addiction to debauchery that killed him or a fatal addiction to observing
debauchees? Excess or introspection? Gaius or Titus? Either way, he can't help himself, but he can feel terribly confused
by his own conflicting desires. They inspire shame, self-reproach, anger. Which is better: intellectual sophistication or
naked power and the freedom to wield it? He can't compare himself to Nero, who is a fiend and does not offer a useful foil,
but he can contrast himself without guilt to Trimalchio, who represents all the forbidden attractions without the atrocity.
Trimalchio is the Frankenstein monster, created from Nero's body parts once the vicious heart, diseased mind, and incestuous
loins have been discarded. Because he is likable and his vices are generous, Trimalchio makes it ethically permissible for
Petronius to be perverse. Unlike Nero, he is the moralist's vulgarian. If Petronius can look at the emperor, his host and
boss, and see Trimalchio, he can remain at court, indulge his pleasures, and still distance himself morally from the orgy
of blood.

On the very first page of the
Satyricon,
Agamemnon poses a rhetorical question: "Must not those who live in kitchens always stink?" I imagine that this was the question
that haunted Petronius throughout his years - the good along with the bad - as guest and dean of the
Domus Aurea.
It is easy to see him harassed by it, waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the afternoon; pondering it solemnly in his
bath as the fading light and muffled din of the Roman evening wafted in on a dusty breeze; shaking it off as he set out in
his chair for yet another long night of pleasure (or feigned pleasure) at the palace. Maybe it came back to him as his retinue
glided through the palace gates while the guards held back the throngs of beggars, petitioners, and onlookers at spear-point.
Maybe he heard it again later as he reclined on his dining couch in Nero's banquet hall, deep in his cups in the dark hours,
as a slave girl anointed the soles of his feet with scented oil and the ceiling disgorged flower petals and perfume and the
artificial stars revolved through the artificial sky overhead. "Must not those who live in kitchens always stink?" It must
have been exhilarating and terrifying for him to see those words written down for the first time, a rebuke that had taken
almost a lifetime in the formulating. Finding the answer to the charge was the challenge he set for himself in the final years
of his life, in his work and in his death.
Is
there any way at all to live in the kitchen and not be a stinker? One way or another, it's a question we might all stand to
ask ourselves a little more often.

The life of a Roman aristocrat was largely a preparation for his death. A good death was the crowning glory of a life well
led and the sole necessary act of redemption for a flawed one. All contemporary philosophy and education, as epitomized in
Senecan stoicism, was geared toward instilling a fearlessness of death, an assiduous cultivation of personal dignity, and
a contempt for superstition that, if often set aside in the frenzy of debauch and intrigue, were readily available, more often
than not, at the moment of truth. This was especially true of patricians, for whom the option of suicide was an envied privilege
in the execution of a death sentence. The death of Socrates, of course, was the standard by which all suicides were judged.
If you ranked a mention in the histories or annals, or merely a fleeting hiccup in the marketplace of gossip, you could be
certain that your suicide would eventually be set up and assessed - occasionally favorably, but usually not - against that
of Socrates. It happened to every principal actor in this chapter, each one a suicide.

First to go was Seneca in 65, a conspirator in the plot to assassinate his former student (which failed, incidentally, only
because Piso refused to kill Nero in his own villa, since "to stain the sanctity of hospitality with the blood of an emperor,
however evil, would cause a bad impression"). Having waffled egregiously and somewhat hypocritically on his moral duty throughout
his life, Seneca proceeded to death in much the same manner. After delivering his final orations and dictating his final musings,
he hesitates several times (ostensibly out of sensitivity to his wife, who has begged to be allowed to join him in death)
before he opens the arteries at his wrists. The blood spills too slowly, so he slices at the veins in his legs and knees.
Even so, the process is "tedious" and he drinks poison - the same drug, his chronicler insists on pointing out, used by the
condemned in Athens. When that fails, too, he has himself carried into a bath and suffocates in the steam. An alternate account
has him surviving this, too, and having to be finished off by soldiers. It is an honorable end, aspiring to but falling well
short of the benchmark, lacking in resolve, dignity, and pacing, much like his life.

Nero died by his own hand in 68 as the troops of the rebel general Galba entered the city. One need hardly read Suetonius'
account to imagine its substance. In the middle of the night, barefoot in a tunic, Nero throws on an old cloak, covers his
face, and flees for the suburbs. He scrambles on all fours through the undergrowth, tearing his clothes and skin, before reaching
the humble refuge of a freedman's villa. Touchingly, among the very few who remain with him is his "wife" Sabina, the renamed
slave boy Sporus whom he had had castrated to replace Poppaea. He rests on a filthy straw mattress in a slave's room before
summoning up the nerve to stab himself in the throat, uttering an autoeulogy that will echo down the ages: "What an artist
the world is losing!" Until the very end, Nero entertained hopes of being spared to make his way out into the world as an
itinerant professional musician.

Tigellinus, predictably, sought to betray Nero the moment Galba entered Rome, placing his Praetorian Guards at the new emperor's
service. But he botched the surrender, resulting in his own arrest and the slaughter of some seven thousand guards. Family
connections saved him for the moment, but when Galba fell to his rival Otho barely seven months later, Tigellinus' time was
up. Surrounded by his mistresses in the public baths of Sinuessa, he shamefully prevaricated until finally slashing his throat
with a razor - an unseemly blade no patrician would ever have chosen - "still further defiling a notorious life by a tardy
and ignominious death."

For Petronius, no less than for the others, the death is a commentary on the life. But because very nearly the sum total of
our knowledge of the historical Petronius is confined to two paragraphs in Book XVI of Tacitus'
Annals,
it is much more than that. Besides the
Satyricon,
these five hundred words are our only window into his mind and heart. The death must do more than cap the life; it must represent
the life metonymically. And what a death it is.

Petronius is following the emperor to Campania but is detained at his villa in Cumae. He does not need to be told what his
house arrest portends and decides that it is time to abandon fear and hope alike. He declines to be hurried, however. His
death, like his life, is to be an orchestrated and choreographed entertainment for his friends, who are all present. He opens
his wrists then binds them up again, so that he might regulate the bloodletting and enjoy the full measure of his ebbing hours.
He engages his guests in casual conversation, steering it ever away from serious thoughts and from the temptation to wax heroic
to which Seneca had succumbed. Everything is to be light and pleasant. His guests, in turn, recite for him, "not thoughts
on the immortality of the soul or on the theories of philosophers, but light poetry and playful verses." It is presumably
during these moments that he allows the blood to flow, perhaps in a side room or bath so as not to upset his guests. He returns
to lavish gifts upon his slaves, freeing many. Because he leaves behind no wife or child who will need protection, he dictates
a detailed account of every secret of Nero's depravity to which he has been privy and sends it under seal to the emperor.
He then breaks his signet ring so that it cannot be misused after he is gone. He binds up his wounds yet again as they sit
down to dinner, as it would not become a conscientious host to spill blood on the dining table. The fare is modest but sublime,
all the best that the waters of Cumae have to offer: oysters, mussels, black and white sea acorns, raw spon-dyli in vinegar;
maybe Petronius indulges his weakness for sow's udder and aged Falernian. As the dessert dishes are being cleared away, he
reaches for one of his favorite objects, a beautiful myrrhine ladle worth more than three hundred thousand sesterces, and
smashes it to the ground, unable to bear the thought that it might find its way into the emperor's possession. It is his only
moment of melodrama and he smiles sheepishly, sorry not for himself but for the ruined ladle. Then, having eaten and drunk
his fill, heard a last song or two, Petronius kisses his friends good night and takes himself off to bed, just as he might
on any night, so that "death, though forced on him, might have a natural appearance."