Oracle of the Dead(12)

“Praetor,” said our host Duronius, “the neighborhood is full of the wildest rumors. Of those here, only you and your wife were actually there when the body appeared. Perhaps you could tell us exactly what happened.”

“Of course, but I cannot tell you exactly what happened, only what I observed.” At this I saw the philosopher Gitiadas nod approvingly. So I gave them a perhaps overly lurid recitation of my experience, trying to make it as entertaining as possible. Julia then told the tale as she and the other women experienced it. Her account was much more respectful of the holiness of the site and stressed their awe at the surroundings and the uncanniness of the Oracle. Some of the company had visited the Oracle personally, and agreed that their experiences had been much the same, minus the corpse.

“You had an uncommonly straightforward answer from the Oracle, contradictory though it seemed,” said the beautiful Sabinilla. She wore a white-blond wig that could only have been made from German hair. Her gown was of transparent Coan cloth and she had a cat’s appearance of bonelessness as she lounged on the couch. “I asked her if my husband would recover from his illness and she said, ‘Follow the sun to Vulcan’s pool.’ Later, a physician told me that if we had gone west to Sicily, there is a healing hot spring at the base of Aetna where my husband might have been cured, but by that time he was dead so it wasn’t much help.” Others agreed that they had been given similarly confusing answers that sometimes proved to make sense in retrospect.

“My men have not yet found an access to the river where the priest’s body might have been thrown in. It is most vexing.”

“Praetor,” said Gitiadas, “I confess I have never visited this Oracle and her mysterious tunnel, so much of this is new to me. You say that the water bubbled violently as if boiling, but it felt no more than warm?”

“Yes, that is how it was.”

“Bubbles are merely air moving through liquid. When water boils, air forms somehow and moves upward to the surface, by a process much debated among scholars. Other than by the boiling process, in order to make bubbles, air must somehow mix with the water from this layer of air in which we breathe, which exists above the level of the sea. If the water of the subterranean river has no access save the cave of the Oracle, where are all those bubbles coming from to make it froth so violently? The river must touch the air somewhere very near the spot where it enters the cave.”

This was amazingly good sense, and I couldn’t imagine why I had not thought of it before. I suppose one must be a philosopher to deduce things so logically. It gave me much to think about, and I fear I was rather withdrawn company for a while. Eventually the best wine came out—a Cretan vintage I had never heard of—and I got back to my duties as a guest.

“Does anyone know,” I asked, “why the cult of Hecate has lasted so long in these parts while it has died out almost everywhere else in Italy?”

“Hecate has the Oracle,” Porcia said, “but the Oracle was there before Hecate.”

“That’s just an old tale,” Sabinilla protested.

“Oh, tell us about it,” Julia urged.

“Well,” Porcia began, “we Campanians hold ourselves to be the original people of these parts, and we regard the Greeks and Romans as newcomers, but truth is there were people here even before we came here from somewhere else. I’ve heard them called Aborigines, but that’s just a name the Greeks gave them. They called themselves something else. It’s said they were great magicians, and they used to have all of Italy and the islands to themselves. They built their temples of huge stones and you can still see some of those here and there. It’s said they carved that tunnel down to the river, and they had the Oracle, or some sort of god, in that place. The temple above was built by their descendants on top of an even older one, before the Greeks changed it to their liking.”

I remembered the sense I’d had that the decorations of the temple covered older, cruder figures, and the carvings around the tunnel entrance had struck me the same way. About the Aborigines I was more Skeptical. Certainly, some sort of people inhabited Italy before the first Latins arrived, and I had seen some of those temples and monuments of ponderous stones as large as any the Egyptians had utilized that Porcia spoke of. But it seems to me that all the defeated and subjugated people in history somehow acquire the reputation of having been great sorcerers. I find myself wondering how, if they had such potent magic at their command, they always got themselves conquered by unmagical but soldierly people. To carve and move big stones all you need is a lot of time, a lot of manpower, and an odd idea of what it is the gods want.