Lucius shook his head. “If Catullus was responsible for your arrest, he won’t give up. He’ll be watching and waiting for another chance to ruin you. He may be watching even now. He may have seen you come here. It was madness for us to meet again.”
“I had to see you, Lucius.”
“And I had to see you, Cornelia.”
He touched her face. He kissed her.
Both of them had arrived expecting their tryst to be chaste, a meeting to talk and share their suffering, to acknowledge the terrible danger they had escaped and to say a final farewell; but the strain of their ordeal culminated in a physical desire beyond anything they had experienced before. Their union was more than a simple coupling of bodies; it was an affirmation that they were still alive. Lucius was shaken to the core of his being. He experienced a blissful release such as he had never imagined. He knew this would not be the last time they met.
Much later, as he was walking home alone and the haze of lust began to lift and he could think clearly again, the irony of the situation struck him so forcefully that he laughed out loud. Domitian’s relentless campaign for public morals had driven him back into the arms of a Vestal virgin.
AD 88
It was the fifth day before the Ides of Junius, the twentieth anniversary of the death of Titus Pinarius.
As he did every year on this date, Lucius conducted a simple ritual of remembrance before the wax effigy of his father that occupied a niche in the vestibule of his house on the Palatine. He was attended only by the freedman Hilarion, who had been his father’s favourite and who cherished the memory of his old master. In the years since he had been manumitted, Hilarion had married and started his own family, and in many ways was a more devout Roman than Lucius, observing all the holidays and the customary rituals for the benefit of his children. Lucius, since he had little interest in religion and had created no family of his own, observed few ceremonies throughout the year, but he never neglected to note the day of his father’s death.
As happened every year, he felt a little guilty as he honoured the memory of his father. At the age of forty, Lucius had not produced an heir; after he died, who would continue to honor the memory of his father and all his other ancestors? Two of Lucius’s three sisters had children, but they were not Pinarii.
It was also the twentieth anniversary of the death of Nero.
That anniversary was not especially significant for Lucius, except as it related to his own father’s death, but it meant a great deal to Epaphroditus.
To observe the occasion, he had asked Lucius to join him at the tomb of Nero on the Hill of Gardens.
It was a mild, clear day. Lucius decided to walk rather than be carried in a sedan. He told Hilarion to spend the rest of the day with his family if he wished, and set out alone.
Leaving his house, Lucius gazed up at the massive new wings that had recently been added to the imperial palace. Domitian had so enlarged the complex that it now occupied not just the whole southern portion of the Palatine but much of the rest of the hill. He had also given the complex a name; as Nero had called his palace the Golden House, so Domitian called his palace the House of the Flavians. The public rooms were said to be enormous, with soaring vaulted ceilings, while the rooms and gardens where the emperor actually resided were said to be surprisingly small and to lie deep within the palace, accessible only by secret doorways and hidden passages.
Lucius descended the Stairs of Cacus and crossed the marketplace and the Forum. He walked along the huge, cordoned-off area where a saddle of land connecting the Quirinal Hill to the Capitoline was being excavated to make room for a grand new forum that would facilitate passage from the centre of the city to the Field of Mars. The amount of earth being removed was staggering; the buildings that would fill such a space would have to be constructed on a truly monumental scale. This new forum was without doubt the most ambitious of the emperor’s building projects, but it was only one of many. Structures could be seen going up all over the city, and a great many older buildings, still damaged from the fires under Nero and Titus, were at last being restored. Everywhere he went in Roma, Lucius saw cranes and scaffolding and heard foremen shouting orders to their work gangs. The incessant banging of hammers echoed from all directions.
Everywhere, too, he saw the image of the emperor. Monumental statues of Domitian had been placed at every important intersection and in every public square. The statues were of bronze, decorated with gold and silver, and invariably portrayed the emperor in the ornate armour of a triumphing general. Walking across the city, a man was never out of sight of a statue of the emperor; from certain spots, one could see two or even three of them in the distance. There was no place in Roma where a citizen could escape the stern gaze of Domitian.
Along with his statues, Domitian erected commemorative arches all over the city, little replicas of the vast Arch of Titus in the Forum ornamented in the same excessively decorated style. On many of these arches, some brave, seditious wit had scrawled a graffito that consisted of a single word, ARCI – which, when said aloud, could be taken either as the Latin word for “arches” or the Greek word, arkei, meaning “enough!”
Almost as ubiquitous as the statues and the arches, and built on a massive scale, were the altars to Vulcan that Domitian had erected all over the city. The altars had been pledged by Nero, who as Pontifex Maximus had promised that propitiations to Vulcan would prevent a reoccurrence of the Great Fire. Nero had poured his energies into the building of the Golden House instead, and in the chaos that followed his death the plans for the altars had been lost. Vespasian had never seen fit to revive the project, and the result, many thought, had been the extensive fire that damaged the city, especially the Field of Mars, under Titus. Titus renewed the vow to build the altars, but he died before he could commence construction. It was Domitian who at last built the altars. They were enormous, carved from solid blocks of travertine more than twenty feet wide. On the days that animals were sacrificed to Vulcan, huge plumes of smoke could be seen all over the city as the priests appealed to the god to prevent another conflagration.
The devastation of the Field of Mars had allowed Domitian to rebuild the area to his liking. As Lucius crossed the flat expanse, he saw the new temples that dominated the skyline, along with a vast stadium for athletic contests and a grand theatre called the Odeum, intended for musical performances, not for plays. Domitian had banned the public presentation of plays altogether.
As Lucius began to ascend the Hill of Gardens, he saw that a number of other people were walking in the same direction. He noticed more people, and yet more, all converging on the same spot, the street that ran in front of Nero’s family cemetery, which was surrounded by a stone wall. Many in the crowd were dressed in black, as if in mourning. Some carried garlands of flowers.
Most of these people were his age or older – in other words, old enough to remember the days of Nero. Having raised no children, Lucius sometimes forgot that a whole generation had come up behind him that knew only the Flavians. But the predominance of people in their forties or older made the scattered younger faces in the crowd stand out all the more. The older people tended to look serious and somber, while the younger ones exuded a buoyant air of celebration.
Seeing his perplexed expression, a smiling young girl seized his arm. Her clothes were worn but she looked freshly scrubbed, as if she had just come from the baths. She had shimmering red hair and carried a garland of daffodils, violets, and poppies. “Smile, friend!” she said. “Have you not heard the good news?”
“What news?”
“He’s coming back!”
“Who?”
“The Divine Nero, of course.”