The River God's Vengeance(62)
While I spoke these reassuring words, I was studying the huge theater of Aemilius Scaurus, just a short distance upriver of the bridge. The water was well up the support works we had seen being set in place that morning, which now seemed so long ago. Thought of that time span made my stomach growl, reminding me that we had eaten nothing since pausing at the tavern after our visit to the lumberyard of Justus.
“Come along,” I said to Hermes, “enough sightseeing. We have important official business to see to.”
“In a whorehouse?” he asked.
“As it happens, yes.”
The Trans-Tiber area lay outside the walls and therefore outside the City proper, but the authority of the aediles extended to the first milestone on each of the roads leading away from Rome, and those were well out into farmland. Compared to the vast sprawl of cities like Alexandria and Antioch, Rome was a rather compact city, although disagreeably crowded.
As we walked, I informed Hermes of what I had learned at the widow’s house. “Why are you smiling?” I snapped.
“Well, I was right this morning! The theater really is made of bad timber and by the same people who built that insula!“
“You might take less satisfaction in the knowledge. Now I’m caught between two millstones. My Games could end in unprecedented catastrophe, or my family could disown me. It’s hard to choose.”
“Too bad we can’t torch the place,” he said.
“You would think of a criminal answer to this. Not only is arson the most heinous crime on the law tables, but that place would make a bigger, hotter fire than the Circus Maximus. Half the City would burn down.”
“I was just speculating idly,” he said, the scheming little rogue.
The relatively new Trans-Tiber district was a lively place. Over the centuries, successive censors and aediles had tried to expel from the City those elements seen to be parasitic or corrupting. These were the actors and gladiators, the whores, mountebanks, fortune tellers, and purveyors of foreign cults, in short, all the most interesting and entertaining people.
The result of these purification efforts was to make the Trans-Tiber the most raffish district of Rome, where the entertainment facilities were concentrated. It was also where most of the rivermen lived, or at least stayed, while they were in Rome. It lacked the concentration of wealth, power, and politics that was to be found clustered around the Forum, and it had no important temples or other sacred sites, but the inhabitants did not seem to miss these things. It was less crowded as well as more lively.
Best of all for my purposes that evening, most of it lay on higher ground than the eastern bank, and it did not suffer from the problem of jammed sewers and drains.
Of all the lupanaria in Rome, within or without the walls, the Labyrinth was the most famed. It was the largest, had the most harlots, offered the widest variety of entertainments and perversions (depending upon your interpretation of that word, of course), and enjoyed the greatest and most varied clientele. People came from all over the world to see the place. There was nothing in Alexandria, Antioch, or, for all I know, India or Babylon to match it. If whorehouses were temples, the Labyrinth would be the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.
It sat in the center of a sizable square, surrounded by fruit trees planted in enormous ornamental tubs instead of the clutter of monuments that crowded every public space in the City within the walls. It was four stories high and painted a glaring scarlet. Most of the buildings nearby were small taverns and inns catering to the rivermen’s trade, as well as to foreign visitors who wanted to escape the high prices and general squalor of the opposite bank.
The sign that let you know you had found the right place was infamous throughout the world. It was named the Labyrinth for the maze beneath the palace of Minos, and the sign was a statue depicting the most notorious queen of that palace, the insatiable Pasiphae. That queen, you will recall, was caused by Poseidon to conceive an inappropriate passion for an exceptionally beautiful bull, which her husband, Mi-nos, had refused to sacrifice to the god. Pasiphae sought the aid of Daedalus in consummating this difficult lust, which he accomplished by building a lifelike wooden cow and concealing the queen therein. The bull was deceived, the queen was presumably satisfied, and the result was the birth of the bull-headed Minotaur.
The statue depicted this bizarre coupling, but the artificial cow was represented symbolically by a pair of horns bound to the queen’s brow and cleft hooves covering her hands and feet. Otherwise, the voluptuous queen was depicted as nude, and the bull was more than merely realistic. Both figures were life sized and rendered in the most exacting detail. This day had turned into an extended art lesson.