I wandered past the empty porticos. All the shops were closed. I came to the entrance to the theater itself. The gate was open and unmanned. I wandered inside.
The tiers of seats were empty. I gazed up row after row, fascinated by the play of sunlight and shadow on the repeating semicircles, all the way to the top, where the Temple of Venus stood. Lost in thought, I slowly ascended the steps.
I remembered the enormous controversy that erupted when Pompey announced his plans to build the theater. For centuries, conservative priests and politicians had thwarted the construction of a permanent theater in Rome, arguing that such an extravagance would lead the Romans to become as decadent as the stagestruck Greeks. Pompey circumvented their objections by adding a temple to the complex, so that the whole structure could be consecrated as a religious building. The design was clever; the rows of theater seats also served as steps leading up to the sanctuary at the summit.
"Can you hear me?"
I was not alone. A lone figure with a white beard, dressed in a tunic of many colors, had stepped onto the stage.
"I said, can you hear me up there? Don't simply nod. Speak."
"Yes!" I shouted.
"No need to yell. That's the whole point: acoustics. I'm barely talking above normal volume now, and yet you can hear me perfectly well, can't you?"
"Yes."
"Good. La-la-la, la-la-la. Fo-di-da, fo-di-da." He continued to utter a series of nonsensical noises. I realized he was a performer limbering his throat, but I laughed aloud anyway.
"Well, I can see you're going to be an easy audience!" he said. "Sit. Listen. You can help me with my timing."
I did as I was told. I had come here seeking escape, after all. What better escape could I hope for, than a few moments in the theater?
He cleared his throat, then struck a dramatic pose. When he spoke again, his voice was utterly different. It had a rich, dark tone, full of curious inflections. It was an actor's voice, trained to fascinate.
"Friends and countrymen, welcome to the play. I am the playwright. This is the prologue-my chance to tell you what to think about the tale you're about to see. I could let you simply watch the play and make up your own minds-but being fickle Romans, I know better than to trust your judgment. Oh that's right, jeer and boo…" He broke from his pose. "Well? Jeer and boo!"
I obliged him with what I imagined would be a suitably obscene jeer, involving his mother.
"That's better," he said, and continued his soliloquy. "I know why you're all here: to celebrate a great man's good fortune. Not a good man's great fortune; that would be a different matter-and a different man."
I obligingly laughed at this witticism, which was clearly a jab at Caesar, the sponsor of the upcoming plays. My laughter may have sounded a bit forced, but Decimus Laberius-for now I recognized the man, one of the leading playwrights and performers of the Roman stage-seemed not to care if my reactions were sincere as long as I gave him a token response to help him with his timing.
"But why am I here?" he continued. "To be perfectly candid, I had rather be at home right now, with my feet up and my nose in a book. I've had enough of all this carrying-on and celebrating; it grates on an old man's nerves. Yet here I am, with a new play produced on demand, and why? Because I'm desperate to beat that fool Publilius Syrus out of the prize? No! I don't need a prize to tell me I'm a better playwright than that babbling freedman.
"No, I am here because the Goddess of Necessity compels me. To what depths of indignity has she thrust me, here at the end of my life? You see me at twice thirty years, a broken man. When I was thirty-or better yet, half thirty-oh, how young and proud I was! No power in heaven or on earth could bend me to its will. Neither begging nor bribery, cajoling nor threatening could move me one iota. But now-look at me jump!" Laberius executed a sudden leap and barely stopped himself from tumbling head over heels; his awkwardness was so convincing that I laughed out loud. He paused for a moment, as if waiting for the laughter of a huge audience to subside. "A most unbecoming activity for a man my age! So why do I jump? Because a certain man demands it.
"No, that's unfair. The fellow does not demand it. He asks. He makes a polite request. He says, 'Laberius, dear friend, best and boldest of playwrights, would you be so kind…' And Laberius-jumps!" He executed an even more fitful leap with a hair-raising recovery.
"And here's the rub: it matters not a fig that I should stand here and complain; he merely takes my mutterings as a compliment. Look, he's laughing now!" Laberius pointed at the box of honor in the midst of the seats, which was as empty as the rest of the theater. He shook his head. "Bitter are the twists and turns of Fortune. My own success has made me another's slave. The dazzling jewel of Fame had turned me into another man's ornament. My gift for words renders me… mute. But oh, can I jump!" Again he took a leap, but something in the halting movement was more pathetic than absurd, more pitiful than funny. I did not laugh at all.
He cocked his head. "Do you remember that game we played when we were boys called king of the hill? Well, I imagined I was very nearly at the top of that hill for a while, but then I took a tumble, and now I find myself at the bottom-just like all of you-looking up at the winner, who's so high above me I have to squint to see him." In a quavering childlike voice, so strange it gave me gooseflesh, he quoted from the ditty boys sang when they played the game:
"You will be king
if you can cling
to the height.
Do the thing
to prove you're right,
send 'em tumbling
with all your might!"
I sat forward in my seat, no longer pretending to be his attentive audience but genuinely riveted. In my mind, his voice conjured images of boys at play, so seemingly harmless in their rush to compete. But I also saw fields of dead bodies and heads on stakes, the terrible outcomes of those boyhood games carried into the world of men. I was reminded of how completely an actor could command the stage, controlling his audience's emotions with a change in the tone of his voice or a simple shrug of his shoulders.
"Ah, but I suppose I was getting too big for my toga anyway," said Laberius with a sigh. "I was due for a bit of taking down. Weren't we all, O people of the toga? We forgot the way of the world. All cannot be first, and the highest rank is the hardest to hold on to. From the pinnacle of success, the only direction is down. A man has his day and falls; his successor will fall in turn, and his successor, and so on. Only the immortals hold fast to their place in this universe, while everything around them changes in the blink of a god's eye.
"We rightly fear the gods. We rightly fear certain men, but mark my words: the man who is feared the most has the most to fear-"
A shrill voice, coming from behind me, interrupted him. "Laberius, you old fraud! You will never dare to speak that line from the stage. Why are you even bothering to rehearse it?"
I looked over my shoulder and saw a striking figure, a man perhaps in his forties with touches of silver in his dark beard. He struck me as the type who's quite handsome in his youth but runs to fat in middle age. He was striding down the aisle toward the stage, followed by a troupe of actors.
"I'll rehearse the prologue just as I wrote it!" snapped Laberius. "Whether I deliver it that way… is another matter, and none of your business, Publilius Syrus. If the temper of the audience and the exigencies of performance call for a bit of spontaneous rewrite-"
"How about a spontaneous exit?" The newcomer had passed me and was fast approaching the stage. "You shouldn't even be here. This is the hour scheduled for my troupe to practice, and you know very well that we rehearse in secret. I can't have eavesdroppers plagiarizing my best lines."
"How dare you, Syrus? As if I would steal a single one of your tired platitudes. You-you freedman!"