“At your orders, Your Excellency,” said Secundus, who vanished quickly.
Slowly Domitian rose to his feet, the bottom of his toga stained with the bits of vomit and tongue, and walked over to her and looked her in the eye. “Your beloved Athanasius couldn’t die with honor in the arena, could he? Couldn’t take the status that Ludlumus gave him as Chiron—a far better station than any playwright deserved—and thank the gods for making him more immortal than his forgettable comedies? No, he had to poke us in the eye and shake a fist at the gods. He had to mock us with this travesty, and in so doing merely tell us he is still alive and that our retribution was not too harsh but too light. You and I, Helena, will have to remedy that. I will see you in my bedchamber shortly.”
With that Caesar turned his back on her and Domitia and stalked out to meet with his generals. Helena looked at the empress, whose expression of horror only further worried her as to what more divine misfortune could possibly befall her and Athanasius.
III
Much like Athanasius himself, his hometown of Corinth straddled two different worlds. The Greek city was built on the Isthmus of Corinth, that narrow stretch of land that joins the Peloponnesus to the mainland of Greece, about halfway between Athens and Sparta. The well-to-do city had two main ports, one on the Corinthian Gulf, which served the trade routes of the western empire, and one on the Saronic Gulf, serving the trade routes of the eastern empire. As such it was at the crossroads of trade, culture and religion.
The Pegasus had docked in the port city of Lechaion in the Corinthian Gulf. By nightfall it would be departing from the port city of Kenchreai on the Saronic Gulf on the other side of the isthmus. In between was the Diolkos, the overland stone ramp that connected the two ports after centuries of costly attempts to dig out a canal had failed. The Pegasus would be rolled across the isthmus on logs, as the ancient Egyptians had rolled blocks of granite to make their pyramids. The journey was a good 43 stadia and would take ten hours.
That’s how long Athanasius had to warn his family and escape before anybody knew the tribune interrogator was missing when he failed to show up in Kenchreai.
As he walked down the gangway and around the harbor crates and cranes, Athanasius knew he was defying Marcus’s instructions by visiting his family estate outside the city, just as he did when he went to Maximus. But a growing fear for the safety of his family had been gnawing him for days. He had to warn them, help them escape. There were thousands of islands in Greece, far away from the big ocean traffic, where he could lose himself, just like his forefather, the original Vasiliki, who had killed some ancient general who had taken his sister as a sex slave and then hid out in the Minoan city of Vasiliki in Crete. When he returned to public life, friends and strangers called him by his new name. He could do that, maybe someday get Helena to join him, after Domitian was finally dead.
He thought of his mother and two older sisters and two younger brothers and their families. More than two dozen nieces and nephews in all. How in the world could he protect them all or get them all out of Corinth? It seemed impossible. Whatever the case, he resolved to be steadfast and firm and demand the family flee. His plan was clear: to send them back to the islands from whence they came.
Even from the harbor he could see Corinth’s acropolis in the distance, where the great Temple of Aphrodite once stood before an earthquake leveled it. Now there were several smaller temples dedicated to the goddess in the city, each with statues boasting the face of Helena. The first one greeted him and all visitors to the harbor as he walked toward the taxi station. The sight aroused both pride and anguish. He had hoped to return in triumph with Helena and the success of Opus Gloria.
Athanasius hailed a cisium at the station, put his sack of belongings in the compartment under the seat and told the taxi driver to take him to town, where he would switch to another cab. The cisiarri yanked the reins on his two mules, and the open carriage with two wheels started down the limestone Lechaion Way south toward the town.
They drove along the colonnade of Corinthian columns and pulled up to the Roman arch near the Perine Fountain. He got out, paid the driver and walked through the agora of public buildings and shops, passing the tribunal bema from which Paul the Apostle spoke to his parents’ generation in Corinth some 20 years before he was born.
Athanasius headed straight toward his favorite temple of Aphrodite next to the city’s theater, which could seat 18,000 and where he used to spend so much of his youth and staged his first play. Almost a hundred years before he was born, the Greek geographer Strabo boasted that the city’s famous Temple of Aphrodite employed more than one thousand prostitutes. Athanasius recalled only about 300 growing up, less in number than the days of the year, which wreaked havoc with the math of a peculiar contest of religiosity among the local Greek boys that stirred quite the resentment among local Jewish and Christian girls.
He also recalled some tension with the Christian community in Corinth, mostly because the Apostle Paul had lived in the city for almost two years. Here he wrote his infamous Book of Romans, which was about as controversial as John’s Book of Revelation. All Athanasius remembered as a child were the jokes about the Corinthians simply being Corinthians in response to the apostle’s call for stricter sexual mores. His mother and father knew a couple who were Paul’s right-hand leaders, a woman named Priscilla and her husband Aquila. His father thought it blasphemous that the new superstition allowed such lofty status for a woman. His mother, meanwhile, never got over how swiftly the superstition could carry her friend off to the far corners of the earth with this crazy evangelist.
Athanasius listened carefully to the conversations in the air as he walked through the public squares. No news yet about his death except that it was anticipated. He stopped off at the theater with a statue of himself, the hometown boy. He had hoped to bring Helena here to meet his family and show her that she wasn’t the only one to get statues in her honor. He had also hoped to impress his cousins by presenting Aphrodite herself in the flesh.
Helena’s statue was in front of the Temple of Aphrodite. There she was, a fifteen-foot-tall Helena in stone representing the goddess Aphrodite. Athanasius stood before her, thinking about the model for the even larger version in the works back in Rome and if it would ever see the light of day now that she was linked to him, the notorious Chiron.
“Now there’s a handful,” said a voice, and he turned to see a stranger.
Athanasius looked him over, and then around, worried about spies and assassins waiting for him. It was possible that news of his escape from Rome had outraced the Pegasus to reach Domitian’s informants here in Corinth.
He decided it was best to simply get out of town, before some cousin or childhood friend recognized him. “Isn’t she?” he told the stranger and walked away.
He hailed another cab, driven by a young man with smooth, dark features and a fixed smile for tourists. “Where to, Tribune?”
“The Argos Farms,” he said, naming a neighboring farm past his family’s estate. He would double back on foot to reach his home, cut through the groves to the stables in back and avoid the front drive off the main road.
The driver nodded. “That’s a good twelve stadia outside town. It will take us an hour.”
“I’ll pay you for your way back too.”
“At your service, Tribune.”
Athanasius climbed in and off they went, leaving the statue of Helena and tourists behind. He was headed home.