As I say, I could not help but encounter him eventually. From time to time I saw him eyeing me from afar at some grand occasion of state; but I never gave him the satisfaction of returning his glance. And then came an evening when I could no longer avoid direct contact with him.
It was a banquet at the villa of my father’s younger brother, Demetrios. With my father dead, Demetrios was the head of our family, and his invitation had the power of a command. What I did not know was that Demetrios, for all his sacks of gold and his many estates in the hinterland, was angling for a political post in the new Roman administration. He wished to become Master of the Cavalry, not a military position at all—for what sort of cavalry could seaborne Venetia have?—but simply a sinecure that would entitle him to a share of the city’s customs revenues. Therefore he was cultivating the friendship of Pompeius Falco and had invited him to the banquet. And, to my horror, he had seated me at the proconsul’s right hand at the dinner table. Was my uncle willing to play the pimp for the sake of gaining a few extra ducats a year? So it would appear. I was ablaze with fury. But there was nothing I could do now except go through with my part. I had no wish to cause a scandal in my uncle’s house.
Falco said to me, “We are companions this evening, it would seem. May I escort you to your seat, Lady Eudoxia?”
He spoke in Greek, and accurate Greek at that, though there was a thick-tongued barbarian undercurrent to his speech. I took his arm. He was taller than I had expected, and very broad through the shoulders. His eyes were alert and penetrating and his smile was a quick, forceful one. From a distance he had seemed quite boyish but I saw now that he was older than I had thought, at least thirty-five, perhaps even more. I detested him for his easy, confident manner, for his proprietarial air, for his command of our language. I even detested him for his beard, thick and black: beards had not been in fashion in the Greek world for several generations now. His was a short, dense fringe, a soldier’s beard, that gave him the look of an emperor on one of the old Roman coins. Very likely that was its purpose.
Platters of grilled fish came, and cool wine to go with it. “I love your Venetian wine,” he said. “So much more delicate than the heavy stuff of the south. Shall I pour, lady?”
There were servants standing around to do the pouring. But the proconsul of Venetia poured my wine for me, and everyone in the room noticed it.
I was the dutiful niece. I made amiable conversation, as though Pompeius Falco were a mere guest and not the agent of our conqueror; I pretended that I had utterly accepted the fall of Byzantium and the presence of Roman functionaries among us. Where was he from? Tarraco, he said. That was a city far in the west, he explained: in Hispania. The Emperor Flavius Romulus was from Tarraco also. Ah, and was he related to the Emperor, then? No, said Falco, not at all. But he was a close friend of the Emperor’s youngest son, Marcus Quintilius. They had fought side by side in the Cappadocian campaign.
“And are you pleased to have been posted to Venetia?” I asked him, as the wine came around again.
“Oh, yes, yes, lady, very much. What a beautiful little city! So unusuaclass="underline" all these canals, all these bridges. And how civilized it is here, after the frenzy and clamor of Roma.”
“Indeed, we are quite civilized,” I said.
But I was boiling within, for I knew what he really meant, which was, How quaint your Venetia is, how sweet, a precious little bauble of a place. And how clever it was of you to build your pretty little town in the sea as you did, so that all the streets are canals and one must get about by gondola instead of by carriage. And what a relief it is for me to spend some time in a placid provincial backwater like this, sipping good wine with handsome ladies while all the local lordlings scurry around me desperately trying to curry my favor, instead of my having to make my way in the cutthroat jungle that surrounds the Imperial court in Roma. And as he went on praising the beauties of the city I came to hate him more and more. It is one thing to be conquered, and quite another to be patronized.
I knew he intended to seduce me. One didn’t need the wisdom of Athena to see that. But I resolved then and there to seduce him first: to seize such little control as I could over this Roman, to humble him and thus to defeat him. Falco was an attractive enough animal, of course. On a sheer animal level there surely was pleasure to be had from him. And also the other pleasure of the conqueror conquered, the pursuer made the pursued: yes. I was eager for that. I was no longer the innocent of seventeen who had been given as bride to the radiant Heraclios Cantacuzenos. I had wiles, now. I was a woman, not a child.
I shifted the conversation to the arts, to literature, to philosophy, to history. I wanted to show him up as the barbarian he was; but he turned out to be unexpectedly well educated, and when I asked if he had been to the theater to see the current play, which was the Nausicaa of Sophocles, he said that he had, but that his favorite play of Sophocles was the Philoctetes, because it so well defined the conflict between honor and patriotism. “And yet, Lady Eudoxia, I can see why you are partial to the Nausicaa, for surely that kind princess must be a woman close to your heart.” More flattery, and I loathed him for it; but in truth I had wept at the theater when Nausicaa and Odysseus had loved and parted, and perhaps I did see something of her in myself, or something of myself in her.
At the evening’s end he asked me to take the midday meal with him at his palace two days hence. I was prepared for that and coolly begged a prior engagement. He proposed dinner, then, the first of the week following. Again I invented a reason for declining. He smiled. He understood the nature of the game we had entered into.
“Perhaps another time, then,” he said, and gracefully left me for my uncle’s company.
I meant to see him again, of course, but at a time and a place of my own choosing. And soon I found the occasion. When traveling troupes of musicians reach Venetia, they find a ready welcome at my home. A concert was to be held; I invited the proconsul. He came, accompanied by a stolid Roman retinue. I gave him the place of honor, naturally. Falco lingered after the performance to praise the quality of the flutes and the poignance of the singer; but he said nothing further about my joining him for dinner. Good: he had abdicated in my favor. From this point on I would define the nature of the chase. I offered him no further invitations either but allowed him a brief tour of the downstairs rooms of my palace before he left, and he admired the paintings, the sculptures, the cabinet of antiquities, all the fine things that I had inherited from my father and my grandfather.
The next day a Roman soldier arrived with a gift for me from the proconsuclass="underline" a little statuette in highly polished black stone, showing a woman with the head of a cat. The note from Falco that accompanied it said that he had obtained it while serving in the province of Aegyptus some years ago: it was an image of one of the Aegyptian gods, which he had purchased at a temple in Memphis, and he thought I might find some beauty in it. Indeed it was beautiful, after a fashion, but also it was frightening and strange. In that way it was very much like Quintus Pompeius Falco, I found myself thinking, to my own great surprise. I put the statuette on a shelf in my cabinet—there was nothing like it there; I had never seen anything of its kind—and I resolved to ask Falco to tell me something of Aegyptus the next time I saw him, of its pyramids, its bizarre gods, its torrid sandy wastes.
I sent him a brief note of thanks. Then I waited seven days and invited him to join me for a holiday at my Istrian estate the following week.
Unfortunately, he replied, that week the cousin of Caesar would be passing through Venetia and would have to be entertained. Could he visit my estate another time?