‘Hot, honeyed wine,’ said Cholon, his young personal slave, proffering an unadorned stone goblet. Aulus shivered slightly in the chill of the early spring air as he took the drink. ‘Your cloak, master?’
‘No, thank you,’ Aulus replied automatically, his voice a hoarse whisper.
His servant was unsure if he had heard him right, though he never doubted any response would be polite. It always was, whether the person addressed was a common soldier or the noble monarch of a Roman client-state. No one exemplified more than Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus the virtues of which Rome was so proud; he was upright, honest and brave, a soldier’s soldier revered by his men. The fickle Rome mob cheered him too, as a man who paid more than lip service to ancient freedoms, yet when his city was in turmoil and he was desperately needed in Rome, here he was skulking in this empty country villa. The mob would not cheer him for that!
Cholon knew that lesser men, enmeshed in the dirty world of politics, sneered derisively at what they saw as his master’s arrogance. They would hold that a senator and ex-consul showed insufficient gravitas when he discarded his home, his responsibilities, his friends, even his toga on such an occasion, but the general who had humbled the heirs of Alexander the Great and brought powerful Macedonia to heel, so that it was now a vassal-state to the Roman Republic, could ignore and withstand the disapproval of anyone. His family was as ancient as any in Rome: the death masks of his ancestors stood proud in their decorated cupboards. These lined the walls of the family chapel in the home of the Cornelii on the Palatine Hill, situated right above the broad avenue of the Via Triumphalis.
Had he been in that chapel and sensed the disapproval of those ancestors at this clandestine birth, he would have looked at their masks with disdain. Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus was the greatest of his tribe, the foremost exemplar of the family Genius. His mask, on his death, would take pride of place above the family altar when future generations gathered for prayers. He prized his reputation as much as the next man, just as he felt keenly the need to maintain his honour, yet he would not see another suffer to retain that, especially one he loved. He could not bear that his wife should be shamed in public for something he held to be entirely his own fault.
Marcia, feeling nervous, stifled a yawn as she sat watching the nameless woman cradle the child to her breast, encouraging it to feed, but the infant, having already taken its fill, did not respond. Occasionally the lady moaned, exactly reproducing the sounds she had uttered in labour through the tooth-marked leather strap, now discarded. She had given birth, fists clenched, several minutes earlier, flat on her back like a peasant. An inexperienced midwife, who had never before attended on a birth unsupervised, Marcia knew that very few deliveries would be as uncomplicated as this, yet for all the ease of the birth, things seemed set to change. The girl sensed trouble and the manner of her summons to attend this lady provided little reassurance. She had been dragged from the Lupercalian celebrations, so pertinent to her trade, with the promise of a rich reward if she came at once.
Since the baby came quickly there had been little time to spare for curiosity. The woman had fought with enormous will power to hold her cries as the child emerged from her womb, her voice never rising above the labour moans that she had emitted with increasing frequency. Marcia had been forbidden to slap the baby’s feet and the exhausted mother had waved away her attempt to bring the child to life with a sip of wine. Once the cord was cut the woman immediately suckled the infant, which fed greedily and silently, leaving Marcia to wonder anew at the strange circumstances surrounding the whole affair. It would be something to tell her friends, since she had never heard of a child being born in silence. Then with a slight shock, Marcia realised that she could tell no one; before being admitted to this barren bedchamber she had sworn the most frightful oaths to the Goddess Juno, never to reveal anything about this event.
Oaths or not, nothing could abate her curiosity. There were strange things to ponder, not least the fact that Marcia’s attempt to summon the slave, so that the husband who had administered these oaths could be told, had been abruptly halted; she found herself ordered by a violent gesture from the mother to remain still. The whole affair was a deliberate mystery and the person paying her fee, pacing to and fro next door, wanted it kept that way. The young midwife knew she was in the presence of nobility; the bearing of the man, despite his plain unadorned dress, left her in no doubt and the woman, this lady, was high-born too; it was obvious by her well-dressed hair, her expensive clothes and her demeanour. She had been given no names and her attempts to question the Greek slave who had summoned her to this house, pressing on her the first part of her fee, had met with a sharp and unpleasant response.
‘Attend upon the lady, deliver the child, and ask no questions. Be assured that the man who pays you this gold will not hesitate to kill you should you break any oath you are required to give.’
Come to that she did not even know the name of the slave! The child, half-asleep, was offered again, taking the teat in his mouth automatically, but still showing little enthusiasm for milk. The russet-gold hair and striking blue eyes were unusual, in sharp contrast to the jet-black hair and dark pupils of the boy’s mother and father. You could never tell with these things; Marcia knew, better than most, that families often threw up children who bore little resemblance to their immediate parents.
The woman moaned again as though she had not yet given birth. It was all so strange; they really should take him to his father. Then, with another slight jolt, the young midwife understood: this child was not to be acknowledged. Could this infant, this changeling, be the result of an adulterous union? Was the lady, seemingly so noble and refined, really no better than a common whore? The mother, still moaning, opened her clenched fist to reveal a glistening object, which she then wound round the infant’s puckered ankle. The gold of the chain flashed as it swung by the baby’s foot, causing Marcia to crane forward to see the charm. It was gold, shaped like an eagle in flight, with the wings delicately picked out to show proud feathers. As soon as it was securely attached the lady covered the whole of the small body in swaddling cloths. Then, kissing the child gently on the forehead, she pinched him hard. He immediately awoke from his contented state and in the way of all babies proceeded, in a very noisy fashion, to let the world know of his arrival.
Throughout this charade, Aulus had paced the barren atrium, cursing himself for the events of the past two years. His mind went further back to the triumph, celebrated at the successful conclusion of his wars on the Greek mainland, where, in a part fulfilment of the prophecy, ‘he had tamed a mighty foe’, having brought Perseus, King of Macedon, to Rome in chains, to be hauled along behind his chariot. Others carried the male children of that same king’s court, who would be educated as Romans and held as a blood bond for the behaviour of their fathers. The city had never witnessed such a triumph; not even the defeat of Carthage had introduced such wealth to the Republic. The slave beside him in his four-horsed war chariot might caution that all glory was fleeting, but the cheers of the crowds added to the unstinting praise of the Senate made it both hard to hear and impossible to comprehend. There was not a soldier in the legions that marched behind him on that day that did not feel immortal.
Aulus had brought back more than Alexander’s heir. The wealth that Perseus’s great ancestor had plundered from Greece and the Persian Empire came too, in a train of carts that took two whole days to wend its way from the city gates to the Capitol. Hundreds of finely wrought and valuable urns, full to the lip with gold coins, were carried in procession behind him. Still others followed, brimming with jewels and precious objects, all borne on the shoulders of men who had once been Macedonian soldiers, the most feared army in the world. Now they would be sold in the market-place and in such quantities that the price of male slaves had plummeted.