Venus in Pearls(3)

The image stood beneath a frame of beams shaped like a doorway with a pulley in the center of the lintel. A few yards to the rear of the statue was a rope and windlass arrangement, with a ladder and a pile of heavily padded cloths. I had seen this sort of apparatus many times before. It had been used to raise the statue onto its pediment and soon would be employed to lift it onto a huge float that would be borne on the shoulders of Caesar's men at the head of the procession.

"May I be of assistance, Senator?" The speaker was a young woman whom I did not recognize at first, but some subtle cast of her features identified her as a member of Caesar's small family. She wore the spotless white robe of a priestess, and she was attended by a number of slave girls, also clad in white.

"Chloe!"I said.

She beamed. "I am amazed. The last time you saw me I was ten years old."

I now remembered the occasion. It had been at a wedding celebration during the consulship of Pompey and Metellus Scipio, so the girl was now about seventeen. Of course, her real name was Julia, like my wife and every other woman of that family, but the Caesars usually gave girl children Greek nicknames. Besides Chloe I knew a Thisbe, a Helen, a Circe, and a poetically inclined girl called Sappho.

My own wife had been called Briseis as a girl before she decided that Julia would remind everyone of who she really was.

"I would know you anywhere. You've only grown more beautiful." This gallantry was not entirely insincere. She was an attractive girl with huge eyes that were set just a little too close together, a common flaw in that family. But she had the grace and dignity that were drilled into the Caesars of both sexes from birth.

"You are very flattering." Then the smile disappeared. "You're here about the pearls, aren't you?"

"Your great-uncle has assigned me to investigate."

"I just do not understand it!" she said, showing her distress. "Yesterday we performed the evening sacrifice, closed the tent, and left. This morning we reopened the tent, and the pearls were gone! With all the soldiers guarding this place, how could it have happened?"

"Who was last to see them?"

"I suppose I must have been," Chloe said. "I dismissed my girls after the sacrifice and stayed behind to perform a rite that may be observed only by patrician members of the Julian family. That took only the time it takes for a spoon of incense to burn on the altar." A trifling time, not enough to accomplish anything seriously nefarious. "After that, I rejoined my girls, and we returned to Caesar's house."

"May I see the statue?"

She gestured to the slave girls, and they carefully drew the precious cloth away from the sculpture.

As might be expected from a man of Caesar's wealth and taste, she was glorious. The goddess was executed in bronze, an unusual thing, since Venus is usually sculpted in white marble. The metal was of the rare alloy called Corinthian in which the copper was alloyed not only with tin but also with silver and gold, which produces a paler color than the common red bronze and which does not turn green or black with age. It had been polished to a golden glow that truly looked like divine flesh. Her abundant hair was a separate casting of pure gold, her eyes formed of mother-of-pearl and sapphire. I recognized it as the work of Rhoton of Cyprus, one of the greatest sculptors of the day.

She was somewhat larger than lifesize and was without any of her usual attendants or attributes. She was not performing any of the subtly provocative acts one so often sees in sculptures of this goddess: wringing water from her hair after a bath, fastening her sandal, gazing into a mirror, and so forth. Instead she stood in the attitude of a deity bestowing a blessing, her weight distributed evenly on both feet, arms out with palms raised.

She was also nude, and this was the reason for that breastplate. In those days, unlike the Greek habit, it was not the Roman custom to portray this goddess entirely naked. Even when she was so sculpted, she was often painted with a symbolic golden modesty-garment. Caesar's "breastplate" was not the military sort but rather a mantle of pearls that would drape her from shoulder to thigh. It was inspired by the aegis, the magical mantle of the Greek Athena, usually depicted as a serpent-fringed goatskin but always described in sacred verse as a breastplate or shield.

"I haven't yet seen this garment," I told Chloe. "But I have heard that it is marvelous."

"It is sublime," she said. "More than thirty thousand pearls strung on something like two hundred eighty yards of fine golden chains. You can just see through it. To one entering her new temple, she will seem to be wearing the seafoam of her birth."

"It sounds heavy," I noted.