Venus in Pearls(6)

Demaratus was a small dark man dressed, groomed, and bearded like a Greek, but one look told me his ancestors had worked gold for the pharaohs. He favored me with a smile full of dazzling teeth.

"Greetings, Senator! How may the firm of Demaratus be of service to the Senate and People of Rome?" He was a foreigner, but he could sling the old formula like a citizen.

"Actually, I am on a mission for Caesar," I told him.

"Ah! The gold leaf to adorn the new temple of Venus Genetrix? Please inform the Dictator that the leaf is being hammered out even as we speak. Come, I will show you."

This wasn't what I was there for, but I've learned far more by indirection than by asking questions directly. I followed him inside and saw some twenty men seated on the floor in a row. This was where the hammering noise was coming from. Before each man was what appeared to be a stack of sheepskin cut square, about twice the width of a man's hand on each side.

Before the men sat a woman playing a lively tune in the Lydian mode on a double tibia, keeping time for them like a ship's hortator. They were pounding these sheepskin cubes with big-headed wooden mallets. After each tenth blow the men turned the sheepskins over with a dexterous flip of the hand, then continued pounding on the other side. Apparently they could continue this monotonous labor forever, and they'd been doing it for a long time. Their arms, particularly their forearms, were tremendously developed although they were not otherwise muscular. At a trill from the tibia each man tossed his hammer in the air, twirling, caught it in the other hand as it came down, and continued to pound.

"Very impressive," I said. "What am I looking at?"

This is how gold leaf is made." He showed me how the gold was first hammered as thin as possible with a hammer and anvil, which is very thin indeed, then was cut into small squares and placed between layers of thin sheepskin, the skins bound into stacks of a hundred or more, then pounded for hours by these mallet-men. The pieces would treble or quadruple their size under this treatment and become so fine that they seemed to weigh nothing and would cling to any object one desired to gild.

"When the gilders apply the leaf to the new temple," he went on, "they will bond it fully to the stone, metal, or wood by passing a red-hot iron a fraction of an inch from the surface. No further treatment is needed save a gentle burnishing."

"He's not planning to gild the whole temple, is he?"

"Not at all. But the altar is to be gilded, the capitals of the columns, the details of the frieze and the pediment, all the interior pilasters, the base of the statue and the entire ceiling. It will be a most lavish use of gold leaf, worthy of a Ptolemy."

"Or a Caesar. This is wonderful," I told him, always happy to learn something new. "But alas, it is not gold leaf I wish to inquire about but gold chain."

"Chain? Has Caesar another project? I've already returned to him the gold left over from the aegis of Venus."

"Returned? Caesar himself gave you the gold to make the chains?"

"But of course. Why buy gold when you already have plundered gold in your possession?"

That made sense. "In what form was this gold?"

"When Considius undertook the pearl contract, he told Caesar that my firm would handle the gold-work. Caesar sent it in the form of six golden Gaulish cauldrons, all carefully weighed. These we melted down into bullion form. When the chains were completed, I returned the remaining gold to Caesar."

"But those cauldrons were part of Caesar's triumphal trophies."

"The cauldrons you will see in the triumph will be replicas of gilded copper."

"You simply can't trust anything any more," I said. He shrugged philosophically. "Was this the largest order you've ever undertaken?"

"The aegis of Venus? By no means. It required something less than five hundred sixty yards of fine chain. Just last year, the Cumaeans adorned their temple of Neptune by draping the interior with a great fisherman's net of golden chain. This required more than seventeen hundred yards of chain of a much heavier gauge than I used for the aegis. Pompey has consistently ordered wonderful golden chains, manacles, and neck-rings to bind the many noble and royal prisoners who adorned his memorable triumphs. At least he used to." We observed a moment of silence to acknowledge the passing of that great but difficult man.

This talk of chains called for another tour of the facilities, and I saw the workmen hammering gold bars into plates, then cutting the plates into thin rods with shears, drawing the rods into long wires, twisting the wires around mandrels of the requisite size and shape, snipping the coils thus formed into rings, linking the rings into chains, and then, the most difficult task of all, soldering all the links in glowing furnaces.