“I rejoice to hear you welcome me,” I said. “After our last encounter, I despaired of hearing such words from your lips.”
She laughed musically. It did not sound forced, but it did sound practiced. “You must learn that I am not always to be taken so seriously. We women lack the reserve and control wielded by you men. We are more at the mercy of our emotions and express them freely. Aristotle himself says so, so it must be true.” Again the musical laugh.
“You sounded most sincere at the time,” I said, admiring her dress and makeup. She had made dramatic use of cosmetics, knowing that she was to be viewed by lamplight. She was lightly wrapped in a Greek gown pinned at the shoulders with jeweled brooches. Her breasts moved freely beneath it, showing that she wore no strophium.
“I usually do,” she said, enigmatically. “Come, sit by me and let me make up for my hard words of a few nights ago.” She took my hand and led me to a side of the room that was furnished in the Eastern fashion, with thick cushions on the floor near a low table of chased bronze. We sat, and Chrysis came from one of the side rooms bearing a tray of delicacies, a pitcher of wine and several small goblets.
“How do you like my little hideaway?” Claudia asked me as Chrysis filled the goblets. “Even Publius doesn’t know about it.”
“Unique,” I said. I had been studying the decorations, and they were indeed not what one would expect to find in the apartment of a patrician lady. Nor of a plebeian lady, either, for that matter. The frescoes on the walls, exquisitely rendered by one of the better Greek artists, depicted couples and groups performing intercourse in every imaginable position. The couples were not always of opposite sex, and one astonishing scene depicted a woman entertaining three men simultaneously. This sort of decor was quite common in brothels, although seldom of such high quality. It was not unknown in the bedrooms of the more uninhibited bachelors.
It was not at all common in the main room of houses, respectable or otherwise. We Romans are seldom shocked, except by the doings of our women.
“Yes, isn’t it? I have decided that since life is terribly brief, there is little point in stinting oneself on its pleasures. Besides, I love to shock people.”
“I am shocked, Claudia,” I assured her. “Generations of ancestrial Claudians are shocked as well.”
She made an impatient face. “That’s another thing. Why should we conduct ourselves to please a lot of dead people? Anyway, most of my ancestors were scandalous when they were alive, so why should their being dead make them such paragons of righteousness?”
“I am sure I do not know,” I told her. She handed me one of the small goblets.
“This is the rarest wine of Cos. It dates from the Consulate of Aemilius Paullus and Terentius Varro, and it would be a crime to water it.” I accepted the goblet from her hand and sipped at it. Ordinarily, we regard drinking unmixed wine as barbarous, but we make an exception for exceptionally rare wines, drunk in small quantities. It was indeed rich, so full-flavored that even a small sip filled the senses with the ancient grapes of sunny Cos. It had a strange, bitter undertaste. At the time, I thought that it might be from the evil that cursed the year of its making. Paullus and Varro had been the Consuls whose army had met Hannibal at Cannae. The wily Carthaginian had chosen to fight on a day when the incompetent Varro was in command, and the Roman army had been all but annihilated by the much smaller mercenary force commanded by Hannibal, the most brilliant general who ever lived. It was the blackest day in Rome’s history, and there were still some Romans who would touch nothing made during that Consulate.
“I am rather glad it has fallen out this way, Decius,” Claudia told me, “in spite of our misunderstanding. Isn’t this much better than meeting in a house full of overfed and drunken politicians?”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“You are the first man I have invited to my little refuge from the sordid world.” This, at least, I was happy to hear.
“I trust that you will remain discreet,” I said.
“As long as it suits me,” she said. “No longer than that.”
“Yet I urge you to be cautious. Periods of license are always followed by periods of reaction, when the Senate and People reassert their virtue by persecuting those who were not discreet in their debaucheries. The Censors love to publicly condemn highborn men and women who have lived too loosely.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, bitterness in her voice. “Especially women. Women who live to please themselves disgrace their husbands, don’t they? Men don’t dishonor their wives. Well, Decius, let me adopt the sibylline mantle and show you the future. Someday, my brother Publius will be the greatest man in Rome. No man, whatever his office, will dare to condemn me to my face then, and I care not at all for what is said behind my back.”