Under Vesuvius(11)
And then we were swept off to be greeted by another pack of notables, after which it was time for the banquet proper to begin. We were led to an empty couch on a dais, where the magnates of the district reclined on couches at a long table. Other tables and couches stretched in long rows down the full length of the great central barge, and soon the servers were bringing in the first courses.
In traditional fashion they first brought out eggs prepared in every imaginable fashion, some of them from birds I had never heard of. This being a coastal town—and the banquet held on the water to boot—-it was fitting the most abundant and imaginative part of the feast were the fish courses. There were great varieties of shellfish along with the finned variety and great concoctions of lampreys, eels, octopi, squid, dolphin, and even skewered whale flesh. All this was accompanied by splendid wines, and soon the occasion was most convivial.
The talk was light and frivolous, which was not unusual. After all, this was not a pack of dry old philosophers debating the merits of Pythagoras’s harmonic theories. But there seemed something strange about all the talk, and eventually I realized what it was.
“Julia,” I said in a low voice, “do you realize that nobody has mentioned Julius Caesar once? Or Pompey or the eternal struggle between the populares and the optimates!”
“Odd, isn’t it?” she said. “These people aren’t interested in senatorial politics. They gauge status by wealth, not breeding. They compete through display and by outentertaining their peers, not by currying favor with the masses.”
“I find it a great relief. In Rome, I always find myself sprawled next to some old patrician who thinks he’s my better because his ancestors settled in Rome fifty years before mine, around a thousand years ago.”
“Well,” Julia said, “in Rome you certainly wouldn’t see their sort at the same table as the city’s elite.” She nodded toward the end of our table, where Gaeto and his flame-haired wife reclined between a shipping contractor and a priest of Mars, with their wives, and all of them getting along as convivially as any born peers.
“You’re letting your patrician snobbery show, my dear,” I chided her.
“But the man’s a slaver!” she protested.
“Your uncle Julius just made slaves of a whole nation.”
“Conquest is honorable,” she pointed out, “and degradation is the price of defying Rome. It’s not the same as making a living buying and selling human beings.”
That was it, of course: the buying and selling part. Just slaughtering a pack of barbarians and selling off the survivors was not the same thing at all. Patricians weren’t supposed to engage in trade. I wondered what she would think had she been present to see Uncle Julius auctioning off thousands of prisoners at a time, wheedling up the price with the touch of an expert. The slavers used to follow the legions like vultures, and Caesar knew exactly what he could get from them. I suppose Julia thought it was all right for him to sell them, since he hadn’t exactly bought them.
The servers brought out a specialty of the region: a fish stew containing a great variety of shellfish in a savory broth tinged with aromatic saffron. This is one of my favorite dishes, and I forgot all about slavers and Caesar while I dug into the scallops and oysters, cracked crab claws, and, at intervals, dipped bread into the broth.
“I see we’ve found your weakness,” said a woman named Quadrilla. She was the wife of the duumvir Manius Silva. She was a small, dark woman and her Coan-cloth gown rested on her like a shadow. On her head she wore a silver diadem set with black pearls. Her vulpine little face was engagingly acerbic.
“Keep me supplied with this,” I told her, “and you’ll have nothing but favorable judgments from me. This must be what the gods eat on their better days.”
“My husband exaggerates,” Julia assured her. “Much as he loves good food, he is boringly conventional in his public duties. I wish I could say the same for his off-duty activities.”
While these women discussed my shortcomings, I let my gaze roam over the crowd. Everyone seemed extraordinarily happy, except those who were too inebriated to feel much of anything. In true Baiean fashion, there were specially trained slaves to carry these off to their litters before anything unpleasant happened. I saw my freedman, Hermes, arm wrestling with a man who, from his short, two-striped tunic and small topknot, I took to be a charioteer, the two of them surrounded by attractive young women. Hermes was strong, but men who have spent years holding and controlling the reins of a quadriga have hands and arms like iron. Hermes lost the contest and his wager, but he seemed to care little for his defeat. He smiled blissfully as the girl next to him, her hair dyed a startling purple, massaged his sore arm.