Rome's Lost Son(112)
Vespasian thought about it for a few moments and then sentimentality, for once, got the better of cold reason. ‘Very well, Titus, you can invite him; tell him to be at our house tomorrow at the second hour of the day, after I’ve finished greeting my clients.’
‘Of course, not all your clients have remained loyal,’ Gaius said, wiping his lips, moist with the juice of a pear that had rounded off the light lunch of bread, cold meats and fruit. ‘They all attended me for the first six months or so, once I got back, but then after you hadn’t been heard of for a while a few started to cultivate other senators.’
Vespasian swung his feet off his couch for one of Gaius’ boys to slip on his red, senatorial shoes. ‘Who, Uncle?’
‘Generally, the sitting consuls and praetors.’
‘No, I meant which of my clients?’
‘Oh, I see. I don’t have their names to hand but I know that Ewald has a list. He’ll give it to you before you leave.’
The steward acknowledged his master’s wish and went in search of the document.
Vespasian stood and allowed the boy to begin draping his toga around him. ‘Thank you, Uncle; if there is one thing that I can’t abide, it’s ingratitude.’
‘My feelings exactly, dear boy; that’s why I had Ewald make up the list,’ Gaius said as he patted his tonged curls into place with the help of a bronze mirror held up by another of his slave boys. ‘We should hurry if we want to be at the Senate House before Claudius starts his address; assuming, of course, that he hasn’t imbibed too much of this year’s vintage in his enthusiasm for the Meditrinalia. If Pallas is right then the Emperor’s going to set himself up for the most enormous, and fatal, piece of ingratitude.’
CHAPTER XVIII
THE PEOPLE OF Rome interrupted their business and cheered their Emperor as he passed, borne in a litter preceded by twelve lictors, down the Via Sacra from the Palatine to the Forum Romanum. They cheered and waved and applauded and then, as soon as the rearmost litter-bearer had passed, they immediately returned to their more pressing affairs, leaving the cheering to those further down the route so that the praise rippled down the street, desultory and conspicuously lacking the enthusiasm with which they had lauded Claudius at the beginning of his reign.
Claudius, for his part, either did not, or affected not to notice the lack of fervour with which he was received by his people; he reclined on his litter, hailing the crowd with a shaking arm – as much due to excessive drink as it was to his afflictions – while his head twitched erratically and his slack mouth oozed drool that he occasionally dabbed at with a handkerchief.
Two centuries of German Imperial Guardsmen surrounded the Emperor, tall and muscled, their hair and beards long but well groomed; their right hands gripped their sword hilts, ready for immediate action. They loped by with long strides, their barbarian trousers and strange tattoos reminding the people of Rome just how removed the Emperor was from them. But still they cheered, if only the bare minimum to ensure that Claudius was not insulted and would not decide to spend less money on the Ludi Augustales, the ten days of games that cumulated in the Augustalia, the celebration of the first Emperor’s achievements, due to be marked on the following day, three days before the Ides of October.
Vespasian stood next to Gaius amongst the other five hundred or so senators currently present in the city on the steps of the Curia, ready to welcome their Emperor. It had clouded over and a light rain now fell from the dull sky, dampening the wool of their togas and bringing out the scent of the urine in which they were washed.
The procession turned into the Forum and transactions along the arcades and the damp, open-air trial came to a brief halt, for politeness’ sake, until, with the Emperor’s passing, they could continue.
‘He does look his age,’ Vespasian commented out of the corner of his mouth as Claudius’ litter was set down at the foot of the steps. Pallas and Narcissus both accompanied it; the latter, with swollen ankles and making heavy use of a walking stick.
‘He looks eighty-four, not sixty-four,’ Gaius muttered. ‘He’s the same age as me and Magnus yet he looks as if he could be our father; his trouble is that he doesn’t abstain enough.’
Vespasian looked pointedly at his uncle’s corpulence. ‘Whereas you do, Uncle?’
Gaius rubbed his ample belly with affection, obscured not in the slightest by the copious folds of his toga. ‘A well-rounded physique is not necessarily the sign of reckless overindulgence; whereas bloodshot, baggy eyes that lack focus and a florid, to say the least, complexion does hint of excessive consumption of the fruit of Bacchus. And that, along with his almost complete baldness, his sagging arse and breasts, makes him look twenty years older than me and helps me to feel remarkably good about myself.’