Roma - Saylor Steven (читать книги бесплатно .txt) 📗

“Is that the truth?”

Octavius laughed. “Of course not. I intend to see her completely broken and humiliated before she dies. Roma demands nothing less than the complete destruction of the Egyptian whore. She’ll be raped and beaten, kept in chains, starved, and tortured. When people see her crawling naked behind my chariot, they’ll wonder how such a wretched hag ever seduced a man like Antonius. Then she’ll be strangled in the Tullianum, but not before she sees the boy Caesarion killed before her eyes.”

“He’s only fourteen,” said Lucius.

“And he shall never be fifteen.”

Lucius had no choice. He agreed to act as Octavius’s emissary.

Through the trapdoor, in whispers, he negotiated with the queen’s handmaidens, Charmion and Iras. Cleopatra agreed to see him the following day, but only if he arrived alone, with no other Roman in sight.

The next day, Lucius arrived at the appointed time. He brought a gift for the queen. She had expressed a craving for figs. The basket that Lucius lifted up through the opening was full of plump, ripe figs nestled atop a bed of fig leaves. Iras accepted the basket. A little later, Charmion lowered a rope, and Lucius was allowed to climb up.

He had expected to find the three women cowering in a squalid little room, but the chamber was magnificent. Small openings high in the walls admitted beams of sunlight. The floor was black marble. The columns were red granite. The walls were painted in dazzling colors. Cleopatra sat on a magnificent throne in the shape of a vulture with its wings spread, ornamented with gold, silver, and lapis. She wore a cobra-headed diadem and a robe encrusted with jewels. Iras sat at her feet with the basket of figs.

“Will you not change your mind, Your Majesty?” said Lucius.

“Too late for that,” said Cleopatra. In one hand she held a fig. On her wrist were two puncture marks—the bite of the asp, which Lucius himself had obtained from one of the queen’s agents and hidden beneath the fig leaves. “Thank you, Lucius Pinarius. When I see Antonius in Elysium, I will tell him of the great favor you did me.”

Her eyelids fluttered and closed. Her head fell to one side. The fig dropped from her hand.

Lucius’s eyes filled with tears. “Was this a fitting end? Was this worthy of your mistress?” he demanded of the handmaidens.

Iras was silent. She had already joined her mistress in death. Charmion, beginning to stagger and sway, was using her final moments to straighten the queen’s crown, so that in death her appearance would be perfect. “It was very worthy,” she whispered, “as befits the last of all the Pharaohs.”

Lucius wept, but only briefly. He braced himself to deliver the bad news to Octavius….

To his grandson, Lucius merely said, “The queen submitted to the bite of an asp. The emperor wanted her for his triumph, but she cheated him of that victory, at least.”

“But even so, they say it was the greatest triumph of all time,” said the boy.

“So it was. A very great triumph, indeed. On that day, my cousin Gaius, who had been born Octavius but had become Caesar, took the name Augustus, to celebrate his elevation to divinity. The whole world was made to see that the emperor was worthy of worship—not just a king, but a god on earth.”

Lucius gazed at the statue of Cleopatra for a long moment, then reached for the boy’s hand and led him away.

As they were leaving the Temple of Venus, there was a stir of excitement in the square.

“The emperor! The emperor!” men shouted.

A litter appeared, splendidly appointed with purple and gold and surrounded by a veritable army of attendants. Onlookers fell back in awe. Within the litter, Augustus could clearly be seen, reclining on purple cushions. To Lucius, despite the jowls and wrinkles and all the other ravages of age, Octavius still looked like the callow boy who boldly laid claim to Caesar’s legacy, rode the whirlwind to greatness, annihilated every rival, and never looked back.

The ways of the gods were capricious and impossible to predict, thought Lucius, and their methods were often maddeningly obscure; and yet, surely, steadily, the story of mankind progressed. After many convulsions, the world had at last attained a state of stability and peace, perhaps even of perfection: one empire, ever expanding, to be ruled by one emperor, from one city, Roma.

Men like Romulus or Alexander or Caesar could seemingly arise from nowhere and change everything. If men could become gods, anything was possible. Might the older gods, like men, someday perish altogether? Who could say what might be occurring at that very moment somewhere else in the world—perhaps in some obscure backwater at the empire’s edge—where the birth of a certain man or movement might alter the world’s destiny once again? Perhaps Jupiter himself might be thrown down, to be replaced by another king of heaven! Not only one empire and one emperor, but one god: Might such a world not represent an even greater state of perfection?

Lucius banished the blasphemous thought, and concentrated instead on the earthly splendor of the receding retinue of Caesar Augustus, emperor of Roma, surely the greatest of all men who had ever lived or ever would live on earth.

But Lucius had almost forgotten the most important thing! He reached inside his toga and removed the necklace he was wearing.

“This is for you, my boy. I should have liked to wait until your toga day to present it to you, but I think you’re ready for it.”

“What is it, Grandfather?” The boy gazed at the amulet in his hand.

“Its origin is uncertain. I don’t even know the name of the god it represents. But when I received it, I was told that this talisman is older than Roma itself. It’s been handed down in our family for many generations, since before the days of Romulus.”

Young Lucius peered at the object curiously, unable to discern what it was meant to represent. After so many years and so many wearers, the details of the winged phallus had worn away. In outline, the shape appeared to be little more than a simple cross—not dissimilar, the boy thought, to the crucifixes upon which the Romans executed criminals.

“As it was handed down to me,” said his grandfather, “so I now hand it down to you, my namesake. You must vow to do the same thing yourself, in a future generation.”

The boy gazed at the pendant, then solemnly placed the necklace over his head.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The origins and early development of Rome represent one of the most exciting areas of historical study in the world today. Through most of the twentieth century, it was fashionable to dismiss the foundation accounts of the ancient sources as fabrications, but recent archaeological discoveries have given fresh credence to stories once dismissed as legends. Thus the epigram from Alexandre Grandazzi’s The Foundation of Rome: Myth and History that opens this book: “Legend is historical, just as history is legendary.”

I began my research for Roma by reading and rereading T. J. Cornell’s The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000 to 264 B.C.) (Routledge, 1995). If you want to know the specific sources for this period, and to understand the state of current Roman studies, read Cornell’s book.

In its opening pages, I was struck by the author’s comment that “all history contains an element of fiction,” and his observation that ancient historians, as opposed to their modern counterparts, openly practiced certain techniques in common with modern historical novelists. In the historical novel, Cornell notes, “and in pre-modern historiography…writers are permitted to reconstruct, from their own imaginations, the feelings, aspirations and motives of persons and groups, to conjure up plausible scenes—on the battlefield, on the streets, or in the bedroom—and even to put their own words into the mouths of persons in the drama. These conventions were accepted without question in antiquity, when history was at least in part a rhetorical exercise.”