The Nero Prediction (19 page)

He said, "It came to me on the journey up from Baiae, when everyone was applauding me for surviving mother's plot. It really is most unfortunate that the ordinary Roman people never have a chance to go down there, to experience its festival atmosphere. It would uplift, them, don’t you think, to a new level.”

The prospect of the vulgar Roman mob swamping the elegant seafront of Baiae with its villas and pleasure gardens and floating feasts appalled me. “Caesar, surely you don’t mean…”

“Of course I don’t. We can’t take Rome to Baiae, but we can take Baiae to Rome.”

His face was bright with animation but I had no idea what he was talking about. “Caesar?”

“What is Baiae? It is a festival, it’s song and dancing, it is feasting on the water. That is what I’m going to bring to Rome. I’m going to throw a splendid festival so people forget all about…” He made a circular movement with his right hand to encompass the tragedy of March 18. “All about that. I even have a name for it: Juvenalia, the Youth Games. Since I’m only 21, that’s appropriate, isn’t it? The setting will be around water, just like in Baiae. We’ll use Augustus’s lake, the one across the Tiber where he recreated those old naval victories of his. We’ll set up booths and stages for entertainment around its shores. After the performances there will be feasts on pleasure boats. The lake will be alive with lights and music.” He rolled his eyes to heaven as if he could already hear it, raised his hands like a conductor. “I promise you, people will swear they are in Baiae!” 

I felt a chill of unease. “Performances dominus?”

“Of course. I want all the most talented young people to go on stage, play their part in promoting dance and music, me included, of course. The only question is when is the luckiest time for me to perform. Normally I'd ask Balbillus but Poppaea says he's just as conservative as Seneca and Burrus and that's bound to cloud his judgment. On the other hand she's all on fire about your diviner and thinks we really ought to give him a chance. Of course I'll get Balbillus to confirm the results afterwards. What do you think?"

The prospect of Nero performing in front of the mob had me sweating. What would the conservatives say? I didn’t like being a cog in the machinery of a scheme to control Nero by playing on his credulity either. But Poppaea and Tigellinus were two reasons why I couldn't tell him that. So what I said was, "Yes dominus, although it's said that fortune tellers, like water clocks, seldom agree."

"Well they ought to, if they're any good. Bring him to me."

Poppaea had me repeat everything Nero had said while she watched me intently with her scintillating blue eyes. "Wait until tomorrow afternoon and then ask for Thallus at the Jewish synagogue in Subura."

I waited but I wasn't idle. I had a man I trusted keep an eye on Ptolemy, Poppaea's pompous little astrologer with the high soled shoes. Early the next morning Ptolemy called on her. Shortly before midday he dispatched a messenger to an undisclosed address in Subura.

That afternoon I visited Thallus. Like all of Rome, Subura was crowded, although with the town's seediest elements. The shrieks of prostitutes soliciting clients competed with the cacophony of street corner musicians and the bellows of vendors hawking cheap wares. Whining beggars were everywhere, mimes, jugglers, comedians. Although I had my bodyguards with me and wore a plain cloak, I kept my hand on my purse.

The Jewish synagogue was in a back street of an area of back streets, an old, sooty building with tiny barred windows. On the thick, studded door was a seven-pointed bronze star. Something had been scrawled next to it that had recently been painted over. On closer inspection it was possible to make out the words: "He comes."

It reminded me that this synagogue had been the scene of that confrontation between the Christian faction and the conservative Jews the year after my arrival in Rome, the one after which Christian leaders like Mark the Lion had been exiled. Mark had stalked back in, Rachel had confirmed that.
You have been chosen.
I felt a sudden chill as I scanned the crowds for his face. There were eyes on me but I didn’t see his.

I approached a vendor of unleavened bread who looked up at me with a worried expression on his face. A ragged boy sat on the pavement next to him.

“Fresh bread dominus?” he said nervously, obviously taking me for an official.

I gave him a coin. He smiled obsequiously when he saw it was silver. “I seek someone called Thallus,” I said.

"Thallus, Thallus, where have I heard that name before?"

"He's a cripple."

"Not the sorcerer?"

"He's a diviner."

 The vendor touched the boy's shoulder and said something to him in Hebrew. "The boy will show you."

Thallus's house was two blocks northeast of the synagogue where the ground starts rising up the Cispian Hill. Like most of the residences in the area, the facade was windowless and not many times wider than the door.

A black man with a heavy, protruding brow answered the door. He glared suspiciously at me. "Yes?"

I allowed my courtly demeanor to make its impression before I answered. He eyed my guards and began shifting his feet. "My name is Epaphroditus. I've come to see Thallus. I think he's expecting me."

"Wait," he said as he closed the door in my face. It was a full minute before the door reopened. "Come."

I told my guards to wait outside and followed him. He took me to a modest peristyle which framed a well-kept little garden on three sides. A windowless, single story building which looked like a private shrine enclosed the north side. In front of it stood a sundial. Wind chimes of different sizes and shapes were everywhere. Even in the apparently motionless air, some of them tinkled lazily.

A round, red-faced man of perhaps sixty sat under a grapevine canopy of bright green spring leaves. His bloated nose suggested the wine soak but his blue eyes twinkled with intelligence.

"Thallus?"

He nodded, not in answer to my question but to indicate that he'd taken my measure. "You're Nero's, aren't you?"

"How did you know?"

He indicated the wind chimes with his thumb. "They told me."

I fought off a laugh. "How did they do that?"

"Everything that happens is caused by something that happened immediately before.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“Then you will also have heard that the stirring of a single leaf tells a story that stretches back all the way to the beginning of time and reaches forward all the way to the end. The wind chimes are one with the flux just as leaves are but they speak more eloquently."

I frowned, the impatient frown of a man on imperial business. "The emperor sends for you."

Thallus uncovered his legs. His thighs and his calves were emaciated but his knees were swollen to twice the normal size, probably with arthritis. "When Caligula sent for me, this is what happened."

So that was the identity of Thallus's disappointed client. I said, "Nero is not Caligula."

"Nor was Caligula. Not at first."

"We need to be alone," I said.

Thallus dismissed the black slave with a nod.

 I went on, "Should the emperor ask, you'll confirm that some time ago I inquired whether or not I was destined to murder my master. Your answer was negative."

Thallus's eyes searched the shadows in mine. Perhaps what he saw there made him nod his head.

We left immediately. Furvus, for this was the black slave's name, carried his master on a saddle strapped to his back and dragged a bleating goat behind him. All the same it was a challenge to keep up with him as he strode up the Palatine hill. As high above the ground as the passenger of a shoulder-born litter, Thallus gazed down upon passers-by, as serene as Hannibal on his elephant.

Nero was rehearsing in the palace gardens when we arrived. Poppaea sat on a cloak at his feet that was embroidered with the signs of the zodiac. A gently wind toyed with her amber hair, radiant in the sunshine. Tigellinus lounged next to her, handsome and relaxed. Poppaea’s husband Otho wasn’t there because he was busy packing his bags. Nero had just given him the governorship of Lusitania on the far side of Spain. Were Poppaea and Tigellinus putting more than their heads together? Probably not. Spies were everywhere. They had too much to lose. A dozen courtiers lounged on couches placed at a more respectful distance. 

Nero struck a load chord on his kithara. "Behold!" he cried, "here comes Aeneas bearing Anchises. What fidelity!"

This slight joke, referring to the Trojan hero who fled from Troy with his father on his back, was greeted by a loud outburst of laughter and applause.

Nero banished the courtiers with a wave of his hand. "Enough of your sycophancy. Away with you! I need to consult with someone who'll tell me the truth." By unspoken agreement only Poppaea and Tigellinus stayed and of course so did I, stylus and wax tablet in hand.

Nero's frivolity evaporated. For what seemed a long time he stared into the diviner's face. "Have you foretold your own future?" 

"Yes Caesar."

"How will you die?"

There was a hint of humor in the diviner's eyes. It looked like he’d heard this question before. "The future will kill me, Caesar."

There was none in Nero's. "Can't you be more specific?"

"I'm afraid not Caesar. The diviner can't see his own future as clearly or as truly as he can see another's."

"Why?"

"Just as if he were looking at himself in a mirror, his own fears and hopes cloud the image."

"That makes sense to me, although I'm sure Balbillus will deny it. Very well, proceed."

The diviner nodded. "If Caesar would phrase an inquiry as a question, a question which can be answered with a yes or a no."

"All right, am I destined to perform in public? That's my question."

Black Furvus, careful to be downwind, cut the goat’s throat and slit open the abdominal cavity but it was the diviner himself who lifted out the liver, oriented it and placed it carefully in a shallow silver basin decorated with Etruscan demons.

His bloody finger traced a circle on the smooth surface of the organ. "This is the microcosm of the universal giant Humbaba just as the sky is the macrocosm." The finger pointed to a tiny red protrusion on the otherwise unmarked surface. "Here, in the northeast, the most favorable of all locations, is a mark. The answer to your question, Caesar, is that yes, you will perform before your people soon."

Nero, who was by this time squatting beside the diviner, drew in his breath. "When?"

"The answer is everywhere around us, Caesar, if we only had the skill to decipher it. The ancients believed, for example, that the behavior of the sacrificed animal shortly before death was pregnant with information not found in the intestines themselves."

"Look here Tigellinus!" It was the voice of Poppaea, a little too ingenuous. She was pointing out a little pile of goat droppings on the clipped grass near where the animal had been killed. Tigellinus squatted over them, shaking his head with the wonder of it all.

Furvus gathered them for Thallus. "Nine. Caesar," said the diviner. The finding is that you will perform during the ninth month of this year. September."

“September,” Nero repeated, looking over our heads into the sky, that lovely serene, wide eyed expression when he heard music where others heard only the wind.

It definitely had the festival air of Baiae, the Youth Games of September 19, the setting even looked a lot like a wooded seaside bay, especially at night. Nero wanted the whole of Rome to attend, over two million people, but of course that was impossible. So Tigellinus saw to it that only the senatorials, equestrians, rich citizens and wealthy freedmen were invited.

Dressed in trousers and wearing the floppy Phrygian felt cap, Nero performed his latest composition
Attis
, accompanying himself on the kithara as he sang the part of the effeminate youth who was so beautiful that the earth mother goddess Cybele fell in love with him and out of jealousy made him castrate himself so he couldn’t make love to anyone else.
Attis
was an appropriate piece because Cybele was the goddess of nature whose cult was celebrated most fervently in spring just as Nero’s Juvenalia was the spring of his career. Everyone got the point. Nero discreetly turned his back on his audience when he did the dreadful deed and there was a slightly awkward moment, for me anyway, as he struggled to extricate the necessary prop from his Phrygian trousers. But it really was magical the way fresh vegetation shot up from the spot where Nero cast his severed sexual parts, an ingenious example of theatrical mechanics, particularly challenging because the stage was a raft.

All great performers, of course, have their own claques that spur on their idols with rhythmic chants and hand clapping. Nero’s outdid the rest. His Augustiani, as he called them, made up of long haired young Roman knights, showered extravagant applause on him, chanting, as they clapped, “Beautiful!”, “Augustus!”, “Unconquerable Caesar! “Apollo!”.

He’d asked me, very hesitantly for the master of the world, whether I thought that his Augustiani would perhaps call him Apollo during their acclamation because he’d been thinking things through and it had seemed to him that being identified with the god of song would strike the right chord.

At first the idea startled me. Yet Apollo had been Augustus’s patron deity, he’d built a magnificent temple for him right next door to his home on the Palatine. I visited the temple often because it had a very well stocked library, one of the oldest in Rome. The reading room was presided over by a huge statue of Augustus dressed up as Apollo strumming his golden lyre. If Augustus, who couldn’t play a note, could dress up as Apollo, why shouldn’t Nero, perhaps the greatest musician of his time?

I passed the suggestion on as a command.

So it was as Apollo that Nero sailed out of the lake at midnight, down the canal and across the Tiber back to the Palatine. With a mind sufficiently fogged with wine like mine was, it seemed that he had indeed brought Baiae to Rome.

Nero’s performance, the climax of the Juvenalia, was the talk of Rome. The plebs complained loudly because they hadn’t been invited. For the same reason the conservatives complained only in whispers. They also consoled themselves that Nero hadn’t made any attempt to hide his imperial splendor. He had been presented by an ex-consul. His tutor Seneca and the praetorian prefect Burrus had been his prompters. The raft had been lined with Praetorian Guards in full dress armor. Everyone around him, including me, glowed with the warmth of imperial favor. But privately Nero fretted. His sleep was interrupted by dreadful nightmares, he told me, in which he was pursued by the avengers of matricide, the dreaded Furies, wielding torches and flails. He felt bottled up, he said, was about to explode. He needed to express himself and private performances were not enough to vent his creative energies. He would find relief only if he appeared as an artist in front of his people, the plebs, his audience.