Agrippina! The world would not be the same without her. A new age would begin.
So deeply did Titus feel the impact of the news that he found himself unable to contemplate the activities of a normal day. Only some unplanned and irregular activity would be suitable to such a strange day. Following this impulse, he decided to discharge an onerous duty that had long been weighing on him. On this day, he would visit his brother.
Once every year or two he forced himself to see Kaeso, to offer his brother yet another chance to return to a normal, respectable way of life. Titus felt he owed that duty to the shade of their father, if not to Kaeso, who always refused him.
He left his house with a small retinue, as befitted a senator of his standing. There was a scribe with a wax tablet to take down memoranda. There was another slave who was versed in all the streets and byways of the city, so that Titus need never wonder where the closest tavern or silver shop or eatery might be. There was another slave who knew the names not just of every senator and magistrate in the city but of every person Titus was likely to meet, no matter how important or inconsequential, so that Titus need never search his memory in vain for a name or a title. And of course there were a number of brawny bodyguards, well-behaved fellows whose sheer size was so intimidating that they seldom had to use force to defend their master or to clear a way for him through a crowd.
The day was typical of late March, bright and spring-like one moment, blustery and overcast the next. Titus found the changeable weather invigorating and walked with a spring in his step. Agrippina was dead! The news had not taken Titus completely by surprise. Recently, Nero had summoned Titus to consult him about omens regarding his mother’s and his own immediate future; the young emperor said nothing of what he had in mind, but he was clearly desperate to finally rid himself of Agrippina. Thank the gods it was Nero who trusted and consulted Titus at that precarious stage of the power struggle, and not Agrippina! Like many in the court, Titus had walked a tightrope between mother and son for years, afraid to offend either party or to irrevocably throw his lot with one or the other.
The story of Agrippina’s demise had played out like a comedy of errors. According to rumours, Nero had tried on more than one occasion to poison her, but each time Agrippina had either been forewarned or had taken an antidote to save herself. Then the ceiling had fallen in above her bed – surely not by accident – and Agrippina escaped being crushed only because she happened to have been lying next to the headboard.
Then, saying that he wanted to patch things up with her, Nero invited Agrippina to his seaside villa at Baiae to celebrate the feast of Minerva. There he presented her with a splendid pleasure barge and persuaded her to take a cruise on the bay despite the blustery weather. But this was not an ordinary ship: one of Nero’s engineers had devised it to collapse on itself and sink without a trace, a circumstance that could be blamed on the choppy waves or a sudden squall but surely not on the young emperor. The ship duly collapsed and sank, but Agrippina – who had once supported herself by diving for sponges – was such a strong swimmer that she made her way to shore. Nero decided that his desperate mother, like a wounded tigress, needed to be disposed of straightaway. In the beach house where the bedraggled Agrippina took refuge, assassins arrived and did away with her once and for all.
An astrologer had once told Agrippina that her son would become emperor, but that she would have to pay for his greatness with her own life. Agrippina had flippantly replied, “Let him kill his mother, then, so long as he is emperor.” So it had come to pass.
Walking along the riverfront and through the Forum, Titus let himself be distracted by the sights and sounds of the city. Despite the constant tension and turmoil within the imperial household, for Roma and the empire the last few years had been a golden age. Seneca had taken charge of the actual running of the empire and had done a splendid job. Taxes had been reduced even as the services of the state had been improved. Nero’s love of music and poetry, his youthful enthusiasm, his theatrical personality, and his love of spectacle pervaded the culture. He had devised extraordinary entertainments for the populace, made all the more extraordinary by the fact that they were bloodless; though gladiator games were still a part of many holidays and festivals, Nero had decreed that no one should be put to death in the arena, not even criminals.
Roma thrived. It seemed to Titus that the world had never known a better moment. And now that the discord in the imperial house had come to an end with Agrippina’s death, who could say to what glorious heights Nero might ascend?
Titus left behind the gleaming marble and travertine monuments of the Forum and entered the Subura with its narrow, filthy streets. He was glad to have his retinue around him, especially his bodyguards. As a younger man he had dared to walk through the Subura at all hours alone and unarmed, but those days were long past. Yet even here, he thought, conditions had improved since Nero had taken power, thanks to the general prosperity of the empire and Seneca’s efficient city administration.
It occurred to Titus that the general well-being of the world made his brother’s hateful attitude towards existence all the more perverse and inexplicable. How could Kaeso detest the world so much when there was such joy and beauty in it? And of all places on earth, surely Roma was the most beautiful – though as he stood before the tenement where Kaeso lived, Titus had to admit that this was a gloomy-looking place, even worse than his brother’s last residence. If Titus had been reduced to living in such squalour and, like Kaeso, had to make his living as a common labourer – back-breaking work for a man of forty-one! – perhaps he would hate the world, too.
Titus left his retinue in the street, gave the bodyguards permission to play dice, and ascended the stairs to the highest floor. Why did Kaeso always live up so many flights of stairs? The stairway itself was littered with debris and filth – a discarded shoe, broken bits of pottery, a child’s wooden doll with its limbs missing, and at one landing not one but two rats, whom Titus interrupted in the act of copulation. How could Kaeso stand to live in such a place?
Titus knocked on the door. He heard movement within; in such places, the walls were so thin that one could hear everything. Kaeso opened the door. He smiled broadly. “Greetings, brother!”
Kaeso was as ill-groomed as ever – a bird’s nest could have been concealed inside his bushy beard – but in high spirits. Titus took this for a good sign. Perhaps their meeting would go well. He noticed that Kaeso was wearing the fascinum on a bit of twine around his neck.
“Greetings, brother,” he said.
“Come inside.”
Artemisia briefly looked in from the other room and perfunctorily greeted him, then disappeared. How plump and plain she looked, without make-up and with her hair unwashed. Chrysanthe was holding up much better, despite having given birth to their son and three daughters. Poor Artemisia had not even become a mother because her husband saw no point in bringing new life into the world.
“You seem happy, Kaeso.”
“l am.”
“May I ask why?”
“You won’t like the answer.”
“Probably not. But try me.”
“I am happy because the end of the world is very close now. Very close! Perhaps it will happen within the year.”
Titus groaned. “And this idea makes you happy?”
“Of course. It’s what we long for, to shed the trapping of this foul place and be reunited with Christ, to see the naked face of God revealed in all his glory.”