The bestiarius stood with his feet planted apart and his chest puffed out, and bellowed at the crowd. ‘Is the lion hungry?’
The crowd roared again.
‘Shall we feed him?’
Another roar, and the bestiarius dropped the neck rope and pulled on the other as hard as he could, his muscles rippling and taut, heaving the man up the pole again until he was dangling off the ground, his feet kicking frantically and his head twisting from side to side in terror as the lion continued to pace the perimeter, eyeing him now, flexing its shoulders and then coming to a halt and pawing the ground.
In a flash it leapt, and the crowd gasped. It happened so quickly that the man had no time to scream. The lion sank its jaws into his back and wrenched him from the pole, shaking him violently to and fro, breaking his bones just as if he were a beast caught on the plains of Africa. The bestiarius released the rope entirely and stood back with the crowd. A fountain of blood erupted from the man’s neck, spraying the boys in the front row. The lion dropped his body, sat down on his haunches and began to eat. It took a huge bite from the man’s chest, crunching through the ribs and leaving a gaping hole in his side, ripping out one lung and swallowing it, the windpipe and arteries hanging down from its jaw. It slurped them up and took another mouthful, this time from the abdomen, gorging itself on the man’s stomach and intestines, its face dripping with blood and bile.
Scipio turned to Julia, who had been watching with rapt attention. ‘That’s the end of the entertainment here,’ he said. ‘It will carry on all night in the Field of Mars, but I promised my friend Terence that I’d look in at the play he’s put on specially for the games, in the peristyle garden of his patron Terentius’ house on the Palatine. Before then, Polybius and I have arranged to meet. I want to tell him something that Terence told me, and Polybius apparently has something to tell me. Will you come along?’
‘My mother will find I’m missing, and send out the Vestals to hunt me down,’ Julia said, smiling. ‘But that’ll make it more fun. She’s not watching now, so we can go.’
They stood up, making their way through the others seated on the stand, Fabius following them. Already the crowd around the lion had begun to disperse, some moving to the other wagons where the executions had yet to happen, others heading off towards the Field of Mars. Fabius glanced at the lion as they passed by, its stomach visibly bloated, the man’s dismembered body reduced to a mess of blood and bone. The lion had taken the man’s head in its jaws and crushed it as they passed. He remembered the feast that would follow the sacrifice of the bulls in the Forum, and the slabs of meat that the priests would hand out to be roasted on a fire below the rostrum. Fabius had promised to meet Hippolyta’s slave girl Eudoxia there later on, so he hoped that Scipio and Julia would not stay too long at the play. He was already beginning to feel hungry.
Back in the Forum they met Polybius inside the Basilica Aemilia, the great law court where he had been addressing a gathering of Greek scholars and teachers who had been brought by Aemilius Paullus to Rome for the triumph. As they arrived, he was seeing off a cluster of white-robed men with flowing grey beards and unshorn hair, holding wound-up scrolls and staring haughtily ahead. Scipio turned to Polybius, grinning. ‘Unless I’m mistaken, my father has captured Greek philosophy and brought it to Rome.’
‘They are not captives, but a delegation from Athens,’ Polybius muttered. ‘Come at your father’s invitation to teach the miscreant youths of Rome how to think.’
‘You sound sceptical, Polybius.’
‘I’ve seen what it’s like in Athens. The wisdom of the true philosophers, of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, has been diluted and debased, by men who think that wearing the robe of a teacher and sporting a flowing white beard qualifies them for our esteem. Most are men like those ones: constitutionally incapable of original thought, yet trying to peddle their muddled ideas to the weak and the gullible. Rome is like a bright but uneducated youth, eager for learning, but with no critical facility. These men do not teach philosophy, but mere sophistry, wordplay, and will only speak in riddles as the Sibyl does, but without the benefit of Apollo to guide them.’
‘You underestimate us, Polybius,’ Scipio said, looking at him with mock seriousness. ‘To most of us these men are mere ornaments, like those bronzes and paintings we took from Macedonia. They will provide after-dinner entertainment in the villas of Rome and Neapolis, at Herculaneum and Stabiae. It will doubtless become imperative to have a Greek philosopher among one’s slaves, just as it has become the fashion to have a Greek doctor and Greek musicians. But they’d better have some good tricks up their sleeves. Nobody at those dinner parties will actually listen to what they say. They will be mere performers.’
‘Even so, Scipio, I know you will attend their lectures. You are too inquisitive to stay away. Beware of Greeks speaking in forked tongues.’
Julia nudged him. ‘Does that include you, Polybius?’
Scipio laughed, and slapped Polybius on the back. ‘Not a chance. What Polybius really loves is the war horse and the boar spear. Isn’t that right, Polybius? That’s why you’re so fascinated by us Romans. You love our practicality. For you, to study history is not to muse about the human condition like a philosopher, but to understand past battles and find out the best way to use a skirmishing line or deploy light cavalry. Am I right?’
Polybius eyed him keenly. ‘Speaking of hunting, I hear that your father has given you the Macedonian Royal Forest as a coming-of-age present. Did you know that I learned to hunt there as a boy? It has the best boar in any forest south of the Alps.’
Scipio glanced at Julia. ‘See what I mean? Mention boar spear, and he’s yours.’ He turned back to Polybius, grinning. ‘You’re right. I can’t wait to get there. But it’s really only a temporary present while Macedonia is my father’s personal fiefdom, in the afterglow of Pydna. In a few years’ time he reckons that Rome will try to annex Macedonia as a province, and they’ll send out a praetor. The forest will no longer be mine to hunt in, so now’s my chance.’
‘You said you wanted to see me,’ Polybius said.
Scipio nodded, suddenly serious. ‘Since we last saw you, Publius Terentius Afer has been telling Fabius and me about Carthage.’
‘Terence the playwright? You keep interesting friends.’
Scipio nodded. ‘Terence was a slave in Carthage, and his mother was an Afri from the Berber tribes of Libya, related to Gulussa’s Numidians. Do you remember the model of Carthage I made in the academy?’
‘The one you used to plan a possible assault on the city? I remember wondering how you’d got the details. I’d been meaning to ask you, but then the call to arms got in the way. Rome hasn’t bothered having spies in Carthage since the end of the war against Hannibal, and now Romans who try to enter the city are turned away. It is said that great construction works are afoot, but all of it behind the high sea walls and so invisible to ships sailing by.’
Scipio glanced behind. ‘Tell him, Fabius.’
Fabius cleared his throat. ‘My mother worked in the household of the senator Publius Terentius Lucanus, who kept Terence as a slave and freed him after educating him and seeing his talents as a playwright. Terence and I became friends while he was still a slave. He told me that Carthage was far better for hide-and-seek than Rome, because of the tightly clustered houses around the foot of the Byrsa, the acropolis hill. When Scipio years later said that he was planning to build a model of Carthage, I brought Terence along and he advised on the construction.’