Roman Games(91)

The old man dismissed this with a stern look. “I told you once, my boy, that I only wanted to outlive that monster by a day, and I have done so, thanks to the bravery of Amatia and Iatrides and, though I hate to say it, the odious Parthenius—perhaps him most of all. Domitian could kill any number of us senators with impunity. His great mistake was in frightening the creature who put him to bed every night.”

“Sir, I know your part in all this. Why couldn’t you have confided in me?”

“And forced a role on you that you mightn’t have chosen for yourself? And a reputation for conspiracy that could follow you the rest of your days? No. It was better this way. You will be a valued senator and a trusted adviser. You have a distinguished career before you. Accept it and put this past unpleasantness out of your mind; that is what a philosopher would do. It’s all over and done with.” He smiled benignly and patted him on the shoulder. And as for that meeting where he himself had voted for his protégé’s death? Well, what good would it do to confess that now?

All over and done with, Pliny thought ruefully. For the slaves certainly. He had forced himself to go to the Colosseum to view their charred remains, still smoking on the embers of the pyre where they had been burned alive. He regarded it as his punishment.

There had been no trial in the Senate; Nerva Caesar heard the case in private. Pliny laid out the facts and pleaded for the slaves—he had spent all night preparing his oration. But the emperor stopped him in mid-flight with a peremptory wave of his arm. The transformation of man into monarch, Pliny noted, had taken place with remarkable swiftness.

“Enough! I will not inaugurate my reign by involving a Vestal Virgin in scandal as Domitian would have done. You tell me the slave Ganymede attacked his master with a dagger. The fact that the man was already dead is a detail. No one wants to know that the Vestalis Maxima has committed a sordid murder. They want to hear that slaves are guilty and will get the punishment they deserve. If I let them off, not a senator in Rome will feel safe in his bed at night and it is crucial that I keep the Senate on my side in these early days.”

“But in the name of justice, sir…”

“Senator, justice and the law are rather different things—a lesson you should have learned by now. I will be as just as I can afford to be, no more and no less.”

Amatia interrupted his reverie. Raising herself on an elbow, she ventured a smile at him. “You were wrong, you know, Gaius Plinius. There is no civil war, no blood in the streets.”

Pliny inclined his head. “We have been luckier than we deserved. Perhaps the gods have pitied us.”

“Don’t thank the gods,” Corellius broke in, “thank Trajan, the governor of Upper Germany. He is content to hold his legions in check and wait for Nerva to die a natural death. He knows it won’t be long. I had his word on it.”

Pliny sighed. How much else was there that he hadn’t known?

For a long moment a silence hung between the three of them. Then Amatia spoke. “You may ask yourself, Gaius Plinius, why I didn’t destroy the letter and horoscope once I possessed them.”

He raised an eyebrow. He had wondered.

“I had a reason. I vowed to burn them at the underground chamber where my darling Cornelia lies buried, as an offering to her shade, so that she would know how I took vengeance for her. And a few nights ago, in secret, that is what I did. And the next day I petitioned Nerva to release me from my service to the goddess—which he has done. I am no longer the Purissima, but only a woman, alone. Nothing remains for me now but to die and, if the poets speak truly, my shade and Cornelia’s will soon be together again.”

“Hades, they say, is a gloomy place.”



“It won’t matter.”



“Even if you encounter the mournful shades of forty slaves there?”



She stiffened at that. “For what it’s worth, I regret their deaths. Don’t think unkindly of me, my friend. We’re all a mixture of elements, aren’t we?”

As she spoke, a light burned in her eyes like the last flare of a dying flame. Then she sank back again on the cushions.

“Madam—Amatia—if I may, I have one question to ask you and then I will leave you in peace. Why did you stop Petronius from cutting off my head?”

“Ah.” She made a little smile. “Because Rome needs principled, decent men like you. The things I said to you that day—I spoke in anger. You aren’t a bad man. You deserved a better master. And there was another reason too. Childless as I am, I seem to have the soul of a mother. Calpurnia is dear to me, I could not abandon her. What do the doctors say?”