As darkness came, we wended our way to my house. Cato and Cassandra had prepared a room for Carbo. They were delighted to have a guest to fuss over, and I had brought them a bag of pastries and a jar of wine to keep them cheerful during his visit. They had the unkillable sentimentality of old house slaves, and treated Carbo as if he were a general come home to celebrate a triumph, having defeated all the barbarians in the world single-handed.
As he staggered wearily off to his bed, Gnaeus Carbo turned to me and said something terribly obvious but unexpected and weighted with much trouble to come.
“Decius, my friend, let me tell you something: If the Senate thinks Lucullus will wait until March to invade Armenia, they are wrong. He ordered me to return to my legion no later than the end of January, even though that means a sea voyage at the worst season. He will strike before March, while the Senate dithers here.”
I bade him good night and retired to my own room to think. What he had just said was almost certainly true. One thing our generals knew above all else was that the Senate could debate forever. They dithered with Hannibal at the gates and they would dither while Lucullus made an unsanctioned invasion of Armenia. If he were successful, he would say that he had informed the Senate of his intentions and they had not forbidden him to act. With the loot of Armenia in his purse and his army at his back, the Senate would grant him a triumph, give him a title, perhaps Asia-ticus or Armenicus or some such, and that would be that. Should he fail, he would be condemned and exiled, although in all likelihood one of his subordinates would probably murder him, as Perperna had murdered Sertorius. As I have said, politics was a high-stakes game in Rome in those days.
5
THE NEXT TWO DAYS WERE MERCI-fully uneventful. Rome is usually very quiet the day after a public holiday, and the first day was no exception. The second was devoted to an annual religious ceremony of the Cae-cilian gens. All of the oldest families have these private rites, and it is forbidden for a family member to describe them outside the family. On the third day, things began to happen again.
While it was yet early in the day, I returned from my morning calls to find Gnaeus Carbo packed and ready to set off on the next leg of his journey, to his native Caere. Before he left, he took a small pouch from his belt and shook out two identical bronze disks.
“Would you do me the honor of accepting one of these?” He handed them to me and I examined them. Each was embossed on one side with the face of Helios, pierced just above his crown so that the charm could be worn on a chain or thong. On the reverse side had been carved both our names. They were tokens of hospitium. They represented a very ancient custom of reciprocal hospitality. This meant far more than a friendly overnight stay. The exchange of these tokens imposed a most solemn obligation on both parties. When one visits the other’s place of dwelling, the host is obliged to provide the guest with all necessities, to render medical attention if the guest falls sick, to protect him from enemies and give him aid in court, and to provide him with a funeral and honorable burial should he die. To underscore the sacred nature of hospitium, below our names was carved the thunderbolt of Jupiter, god of hospitality. We would incur his wrath should we violate the requirements of hospitium. We could pass these tokens to our descendants, who would be obligated to honor them long after we both should be dead.
“I accept, gladly,” I said, touched by the gesture. It was just the sort of old-fashioned honor I could have expected from an old-fashioned man like Gnaeus Carbo.
“I will take my leave, then. Farewell.” With no more ceremony, Carbo shouldered his pack and walked out of my house. We remained good friends until he died many years later in Egypt.
I took the token to my bedroom and placed it in the little wooden box of carved olive wood inlaid with ivory where I kept many such tokens, some of them going back for generations and entitling me to hospitality from families in Athens, Alexandria, Antioch, even one from Carthage, a city that no longer exists. As I put it away, something about the token tickled a memory at the back of my mind, but it failed to elicit any great insights. Just then I had too much on the front of my mind to pay much attention to phantom memories lurking at the back.
Foremost in my thoughts, getting in the way of all rational consideration of my very real problems and dangers, was Claudia. Try as I might, I could not drive the woman from my mind. I kept remembering her as I had last seen her, with the lamplight making a corona around her. I tried to think how I might have acted differently, but I could not. I tried to think of a way to make things right between us, but I could think of nothing. These were bad thoughts to be entertaining when I was concerned with murder, arson and the likelihood of a treasonous conspiracy involving highly placed Romans and a foreign king who was the sworn enemy of Rome.