From somewhere within the house rose the sound of a warbling voice — a man singing unnaturally high, or else a woman singing very low. It grew louder as I pulled Tiro closer to the inner wall. The sound seemed to come from behind a thin tapestry. I pressed my ear next to a lecherous Priapus surrounded by equally lecherous wood nymphs, and could almost make out the words.
'Quietly, Tiro,' I whispered, gesturing for him to help me lift the tapestry's bottom edge and roll it upward, revealing a narrow, horizontal slit cut through the stone wall.
The aperture was wide enough so that two could comfortably stand abreast and share the view it afforded down onto Chrysogonus and his company. The lofty room in which he entertained rose from the marble floor to the domed roof without interruption. The window through which we peered was cut at a sharp downward angle, so that no edge obscured our view — a spy hole, plain and simple.
Like everything else in Chrysogonus's house, the dinner was sumptuous and overblown. Four low tables, each surrounded by a semicircle of nine couches, were gathered around an open space
at the room's centre. Cicero or even Caecilia Metella would no doubt have balked at the idea of entertaining more than eight visitors at a time — few unwritten laws of Roman manners are more unyielding than that which holds that a host should never gather more visitors at his table than he can comfortably converse with at once. Chrysogonus had gathered four times that number at four tables piled high with delicacies — olives slitted and stuffed with fish eggs, bowls of noodles flecked with the first tender asparagus sprouts of the season, figs and pears suspended in a yellow syrup, the carcasses of tiny fowl. The mingled smells rose on the warm air. My stomach growled.
Most of the guests were men; the few women among them stood out on account of their obvious voluptuousness — not wives or lovers, but courtesans. The younger men were uniformly slender and good-looking; the older men had that indolent, well-groomed look of the very rich at play. I looked from face to face, ready to dart from the window until I realized there was not much chance that any of them would look upward. All eyes were turned on the singer who stood in the centre of the room, or else cast fleeting, sly glances at Sulla or in the direction of a young man who sat fidgeting and chewing his fingers at the table of least distinction.
The singer was dressed in a flowing purple gown embroidered in red and grey. Masses of black hair streaked with white rose in great waves and ringlets in a coiffure so architecturally complex it was almost comic. When he turned in our direction I saw his painted face, made up in shades of chalk and umber to cover his wrinkled eyes and heavy jowls, and I recognized at once the famous female impersonator Metrobius. I had seen him a few times before, never in public and never performing, only in glimpses on the street and once at the house of Hortensius when the great lawyer had deigned to let me past his door. Sulla had taken a fancy to Metrobius long ago in their youth, when Sulla was a poor nobody and Metrobius was (so they say) a beautiful and bewitching entertainer. Despite the ravages of time and all the vagaries of Fortune, Sulla had never abandoned him. Indeed, after five marriages, dozens of love affairs, and countless liaisons, it was Sulla's relationship with Metrobius that had endured longer than any other.
If Metrobius had once been slender and beautiful, I suppose at one time he must have been a fine singer, too. He was wise how to restrict his performances to private affairs among those who loved him, and to limit his repertoire to comic effects and parodies. Yet despite the hoarse voice and the strained notes, there was something in his florid mannerisms and the subtle gestures of his hands and eyebrows that made it impossible not to watch his every move. His performance was something between singing and orating, like a poem chanted to the accompaniment of a single lyre. Occasionally a drum joined in when the theme became martial. He pretended to take every word with utmost seriousness, which only enhanced the comic effect. He must have already begun changing the lyrics before we chanced on the scene, because the young poet and aspiring sycophant who had ostensibly authored the paean was suffering a visible agony of embarrassment.
Who recalls the days when Sulla was a lad, Homeless and shoeless with not a coin to be had? And how did he pull himself up from this hole? How did he rise to his fate, to his role? Through a hole! Through a hole!. Through the gaping cavern of well-worn size. That yawned between Nicopolis's thighs!
The audience howled with laughter. Sulla shook his head disdainfully and pretended to glower. On the couch next to him, Chrysogonus practically glowed with delight. At the same table Hortensius was whispering in the ear of the young dancer Sorex, while Rufus looked bored and disgusted. Across the room the rewritten poet blanched fish-belly white.
With each succeeding verse the song grew increasingly ribald and the crowd laughed more and more freely. Soon Sulla himself was laughing out loud. Meanwhile the poet chewed his lip and squirmed, changing colours like a coal in the wind, blanching white at each impiety and blushing scarlet at each tortured rhyme. Having finally caught the joke, he seemed at first relieved — no one would blame him for the travesty, after all, and even Sulla was amused. He managed a timid smile, but then he withdrew into a sulk, no doubt offended at the wreckage that had been made of his patriotic homage. The other young men at his table, having failed to tease him to laughter, turned their backs on him and laughed all the louder. Romans love the strong man who can laugh at himself, and despise the weak man who cannot. The song continued.
It is not true that Lucius Cornelius Sulla was homeless as a boy. Neither, I imagine, was he ever without shoes, but in every account of his origins, his early poverty is stressed.
The patrician Cornelii were once a family of some influence and prestige, generations ago. One of them, a certain Rufinus, held the consulship, back in the days when the office actually denoted a man of integrity and character. His career ended in scandal — imagine those righteous days when it was illegal for a citizen to own more than ten pounds of silver plate! Rufinus was expelled from the Senate. The family declined and dwindled into obscurity.
Until Sulla. His own childhood was blighted by poverty. His father died young, leaving him nothing, and in his younger days Sulla lived in tenements among ex-slaves and widows. His enemies have charged that his rise to power and wealth, after such humble beginnings, was a sure sign of corruption and depravity. His allies and Sulla himself like to dwell on the mystique of what they call his good fortune, as if some divine will, rather than Sulla's own purpose and character, propelled him to so many triumphs and so much bloodshed.
His youth gave no sign of the great career to come. His education was haphazard. He moved among theatre people — acrobats; comedians, costumers, poets, dancers, actors, singers. Metrobius was among his first lovers, but far from the only one. It was among the vagabonds of the stage that his lifelong reputation for promiscuity began.
They say that young Sulla was quite charming. He was a big-boned, square-jawed lad with a stocky frame, his wide soft middle compensated by muscular shoulders. His golden hair made him stand out in a crowd. His eyes, so I have heard contemporaries recount, were as extraordinary then as now — piercing and pale blue, dominating all in their gaze and confounding those who gazed back, appearing merely mischievous while he perpetrated the most atrocious crimes, looking terrible and severe when he was merely intent on pleasure.