“No, no,” he said, “when the words are spoken and the light from his crown shines in the darkness and the holy bell begins to ring, then one trembles deep down in one’s stomach, one’s hair stands on end and even the most skeptical is convinced of his divinity. After that we eat a holy meal, usually ox meat if an old centurion has undergone blood baptism. When we have drunk wine, we all sing together.”
“We live in strange times,” I said. “Aunt Laelia is saved with the help of a Samaritan magician, my own father worries about the Christians, and you, old warrior, have become involved in Eastern mysteries.”
“In the East the sun rises,” Barbus went on. “In one way this bull-killer is also the Sun God and so the God of Horses too. But they don’t look down on an old infantryman like me, and there’s nothing to stop you learning about our god as long as you promise to keep quiet about it. In our circle there are both older and younger Roman knights who have grown tired of the usual sacrifices and idols.”
I had at that time grown tired of races and betting, the life of pleasure with vain and conceited actors from the theater, and of Pollio and his friends’ interminable talk of philosophy and the new poetry. I promised to go with Barbus to one of the meetings of his secret god. Barbus was very pleased and proud about this. To my surprise, on that day he really did fast and wash himself thoroughly. He did not even dare drink any wine and he put on clean clothes, too.
That evening he led me along the winding stinking alleys to an underground temple in the valley between Esquiline and Coelius. When we had gone downstairs into a dimly lit room with stone walls, we were received by a Mithraic priest with a lion’s head across his shoulders, who unquestioningly allowed me to take part in the mysteries.
“We have nothing to be ashamed of,” he explained. “We demand cleanliness, honesty and manliness from those who follow our god Mithras for peace in their souls and a good life the other side of death. Your face is clean and your stance upright, so I think you will like our god. But please do not talk about him unnecessarily to outsiders.”
In the room was a crowd of men both old and young. Among them I recognized to my astonishment several tribunes and centurions from the Praetorian Guard. Several were veterans and war invalids. All were dressed in clean clothes and wore the sacred Mithraic insignia of rank, according to the degree of initiation they had reached. In this respect, their army rank or personal wealth seemed to make no difference. Barbus explained that if an irreproachable veteran were initiated with blood baptism, then it was the wealthier initiates who paid for the ox. He himself was content with the raven degree, for he had not led an entirely blameless life and did not always remember to keep to the truth.
The light was so dim in the underground room that one could not distinguish many faces. But I could see an altar and on it an image of a god with a crown on his head, killing a bull. Then silence fell. The eldest in the congregation began to intone sacred texts which he knew by heart. They were in Latin and I could understand nearly all of them. I learned that according to their teachings, a constant battle between light and darkness, good and evil, was being waged in the world. Finally the last light was extinguished, I heard a secretive splash of water and a silvery bell began to ring. Many people sighed heavily and Barbus squeezed my arm hard. Lights from hidden apertures in the walls slowly began to illuminate the crown and image of Mithras.
I ought not to reveal any more about the mysteries, but I was convinced by the Mithras worshippers’ solemn piety and the trust in their life to come. After the victory of light and the forces of good, the torches in the room were lit and a modest meal brought in. The people seemed relaxed, their faces radiating joy, and they conversed together with friendliness, regardless of rank and degree of initiation. The food consisted of tough ox meat and the cheap sour wine of military camps.
From their pious songs and their talk, I had the impression that they were all honest if also simple men who were righteously striving to live a blameless life. Most of them were widowers or unmarried and found consolation and security in this victorious Sun God and in the companionship of their equals. At least they had no fear of magic and respected no other omens than their own.
I thought that they could only be of use and help to Barbus. But the Mithraic ceremonies did not appeal to me. Perhaps I felt much too civilized and young among all those serious-minded grown men. At the end of the meal, they did in fact begin to tell stories, but they were the same stories one can hear without any ceremonies around any campfire throughout the Roman Empire.
But my mind was often still in turmoil. At such moments I took my wooden goblet from my locked chest, caressed it and thought about my Greek mother, whom I had never known. Then I drank a little wine from the goblet to the memory of my mother and was at the same time a little ashamed of my own superstition. I did in fact feel my mother’s good and gentle presence. But I could never have told anyone about this habit.
I also began to torment myself with unsparing riding exercises, for I seemed to feel greater satisfaction from controlling a difficult horse and exhausting my body, than spending a tearful night with Claudia. Thus I escaped both a guilty conscience and interminable self-reproaches.
Young Lucius Domitius still excelled on the riding field, but his greatest ambition was to ride beautifully on a well-schooled horse. He was chosen as the best of the youths in the Order, and to please Agrippina, we other members of the Noble Order of Knights agreed to have a new gold piece struck in his honor. Only a year had elapsed before Emperor Claudius had adopted him.
On the one side of the coin, we impressed his clear-cut boy’s profile and around the portrait his new adoptive names: To Nero Claudius Drusus, and in memory of his maternal grandfather, Claudius’ brother, Germanicus. The inscription on the other side ran: The Noble Order of Knights rejoices in their leader. In fact it was Agrippina who paid for it and it was distributed as a souvenir gift in all the provinces, but was of course legal currency, as were all the gold pieces struck in the temple of Juno Moneta.
Naturally Agrippina could well afford this little political demonstration to her son’s advantage. From her second husband, Passesnus Crisus, who was only briefly stepfather to Lucius Domitius, she had inherited a fortune of two hundred million sesterces and knew how to increase it by her position as wife of the Emperor and close friend of the Procurator of the State Treasury.
The name Germanicus had older traditions and was grander than Britannicus, whom we did not like because of his epilepsy and his allergy to horses. Many stories circulated about his real descent, since Emperor Gaius had so suddenly and unexpectedly married the fifteen-year-old Messalina to the decrepit Claudius.
As one of Lucius’ friends, I was invited to the adoption feast and the sacrificial ceremonies connected with it. The whole of Rome recognized that Lucius Domitius had earned his new position by his noble descent as well as his own brilliant and pleasing nature. From this time on we called him only Nero. His adoptive names had been chosen by Claudius in memory of his own father, younger brother to Emperor Tiberius.
Lucius Domitius, or Nero, was the most versatile and talented of all the young men I knew, and was both physically and spiritually more precocious than his contemporaries. He liked wresding and defeated them all, although he was so much admired th‹at no one seriously tried to defeat him, to avoid hurting his feelings. Nero could still burst into tears if his mother or Seneca reproached him too severely. He was taught by the best teachers in Rome and Seneca was his oratory tutor. I had nothing against my young friend Nero, although I noticed he could lie both skillfully and plausibly if he had done something Seneca considered wrong. But all boys do that, and no one could be angry with Nero for long.