Oracle of the Dead(2)

“How fitting,” Julia said. “Ulysses and Aeneas both invoked Hecate before entering the underworld.” She caught my look. “Well, after all, Aeneas was an ancestor of my family.” Sometimes I wondered about Julia.

Plotius made the introductions. The chief priest of Apollo was named Eugaeon, and I have forgotten the others. They extended the customary welcome, all the more enthusiastically because I was a Roman praetor. While they did this, they ignored their black-robed colleagues. It was as if these people did not exist. I refrained from asking, willing to go along with whatever local custom prevailed.

Then we got the tour of the temple. As I had thought, the interior revealed far greater antiquity than the exterior with its veneer of white marble and its new, Doric columns. It was murky inside, despite the coating of white paint, which covered what appeared to be older paintings and low-relief carvings. The statue of Apollo was pretty but looked out of place in this gloomy setting. He was in his rarely depicted aspect as Apollo the Far-Shooter, holding a bow with a quiver of arrows by his thigh. This is Apollo in his aspect as avenger. I was certain that one of the old terra-cotta images had once occupied its plinth, or perhaps one of wood. There were rude Italian gods in this place for many centuries before the Greeks came with their graceful deities.

Back outside, we were turned over to the other lot for the real purpose of our visit. They stood where we had first seen them. None of them had as much as touched the lowest temple step. To my surprise, the first to greet us was one of the women.

“Does the praetor seek wisdom?” she asked, oddly.

“Well, I have a fair store of it already,” I began. Julia hit me in the ribs with an elbow. “I can always use more, of course.”

“Praetor,” Plotius said, “this is Iola, chief priestess of the Oracle.”

“The Oracle is the source of all knowledge,” she said in that thrillingly portentous voice employed by religious charlatans everywhere.

“Then it has some competition,” I observed. “The Sibylline Books, the various prophetesses situated here and there—” another elbow from Julia.

“Frauds,” Iola said succinctly.

“How so?” I asked.

“They claim to speak for gods. Our Oracle communicates with the dead. Have you ever known a god personally?”

“Well, they’ve only come to me in dreams,” I admitted.

“But I will wager you have known a great many dead people.”

“Um, never thought of it that way,” I said, flustered as always when some total loon employs good logic.

She nodded. “Just so. Come with me.” She turned and led us around to the rear of the temple, with the other sacerdotes and bitches in attendance.

“Why is the entrance around the back?” I wanted to know.

“To face the sunrise,” the priestess explained. “At sunrise on Midsummer Day, the sun is positioned precisely in the center of the doorway and shines straight down the shaft.”

“That must be impressive,” I said. Roman religion does not make a great thing of the solstices and equinoxes, except to have festivals in their general vicinity, such as Saturnalia. This may have been because, prior to Caesar’s reform of the calendar, it was so difficult to predict when they would fall.

The ground fell away behind the temple, so that the cave entrance was situated in the center of a middling hillside. The area around it was positively overgrown with vegetation associated with death, funerals, and graves: asphodel and hemlock, myrtle, cornel, towering cedar, and other, equally evocative plants.

“It’s a gloomy gardener that planted this place,” I said.

“Nothing was planted here, Praetor,” said Iola. “All is as it has always been. The growth here obeys the will of the gods we serve.”

“Don’t be such a Skeptic, dear,” said my ever supportive wife.

The entrance was smaller than I had pictured, and less rugged. It was a tall, narrow doorway surrounded by facing stones carved in a peculiar and antiquated fashion, the designs being similar to the ancient figures and patterns I had seen plastered over in the temple. The stone was deeply weathered and stained and bore no writing in any language. It looked older than the Lapis Niger and I suspected that it predated the appearance of writing in Italy. For the first time I began to take seriously the suggestion that this shrine was indeed Aboriginal. Just before the entrance, instead of the usual altar, there stood a broad stone table laden with cult objects: more chaplets of asphodel, miniature thyrsi or wands of cornel wood tipped with small pinecones, amulets depicting a tripartite woman’s face, caps of dogskin, and so forth. There was also a tray of cups and a pitcher, all carved from wood and blackened with age.