Dear and Glorious Physician (13 page)

He was met by Sextus and a troop of soldiers, helmeted, shielded and armed, as usual on the day of justice. Diodorus shouted at Sextus, his face flaming with wrath, “How now, is this the earliest you can drag yourself out of bed to meet and escort me? Am I a provincial dog of a magistrate that I deserve no honors or escort, but must drive like the meanest peasant from my own home?”

Sextus was accustomed to the tribune’s bad humor on these days, but he was not accustomed to such an attack on his integrity as a soldier and a worthy and loyal officer. So he was taken aback. He did not retire into obedient and military reserve, as was his training when tongue-lashed by his superior. He blurted out, “Why, noble Diodorus, I have only obeyed your express orders. You have constantly refused to be escorted, and have ordered that no soldiers remain about your house.” He looked at Diodorus with dismay, and his soldiers kept their faces blank, and stared before them, carrying the fasces and the banners.

Diodorus pulled up his horses so hard that they reared, and a hoof just missed Sextus’ face. He did not step back, however. His young eyes were filled with both reproach and bewilderment.

“Now, by Zeus!” Diodorus bellowed, lashing the horses. “Where is your military discretion!” He got the horses under control, and swore at them. “You will not only accompany me to the Hall of Justice but will return to my house with me and remain there at my orders!”

He roared off, and Sextus shook his head dismally. He then sharply ordered his troops to follow him after the tribune. Diodorus’ chariot was now enveloped in hot white chalky dust at the end of the cobbled street. Sextus and his soldiers began a military trot after him, and the humiliation of the young soldier was complete when passers-by jeered at them. He gritted his teeth.

Whether or not the magistrates were more tedious than usual and the tax collectors’ reports more boring, or the local nobles and merchants more complaining, it seemed to Diodorus the worst day he could remember. He shouted, he thumped his fist on the table, he scattered papers, he denounced, he insulted, he ascribed shameful ancestry to magistrates, judges, nobles and tax-gatherers alike. They had heads like asses; their mothers had been engaged from puberty in unmentionable obscenities; they were totally illiterate; they were inhabitants of the most depraved and most contemptible country in the world. Their wits were like flies. Antioch was a cesspool, and they worthy inhabitants of it. He despised them all in vivid language. At some time he had unpardonably offended the gods, otherwise he would not be here. He consigned them all to Pluto, and impugned their honesty, their decisions, their records. They were thieves, liars, idiots, cripples. Though his wrist was bound with leather thongs he sprained it by his table-thumping, and his face, swollen and scarlet, seemed about to burst. He would eat nothing; when offered wine, he expressed his opinion of it and spat.

When he roared off in the afternoon, his head one cauldron of pain and his neck muscles in spasm, those he had left were, for the first time, as one. The tribune was mad, of course, and he was a beast, like all Romans. Tax-gatherer and merchant put heads together and condoled with one another. The magistrates expressed their fervent hopes, in low and whispering voices, not only that the tribune would soon descend into hell, but Rome with him.

Sextus had provided himself and three of his junior officers with horses, and they dashed after Diodorus’ chariot. They could hardly keep up with him. He drives like Apollo, thought Sextus, still smarting, without the beauty of Apollo. He should enter the races in the circus. Gods, he will kill those poor beasts! But his soldierly heart was filled with consternation. The tribune was apparently ill and temporarily out of his mind. Sextus invoked Ares as he fled along the rutted road after Diodorus. The humid heat was intense, and under their armor the gloomy soldiers sweated, and their shields were too heavy. One or two wondered what punishment would be given them for what transgressions.

The senator, Carvilius Ulpian, was graciously sitting in the outdoor portico with his sister-in-law, Aurelia, sipping one of Diodorus’ more expensive wines and commenting upon it to himself in expressive language. Aurelia, the good matron, was busily using her hands in sewing, a vulgar and common habit shared by her sister, Cornelia, who would never be a fashionable lady. They were startled by a thunder of hoofs and the sight of a large cloud of luminous dust in the distance. The senator started to his feet, his white robes dropping around him. “Now, by Mithras, is that the Minotaur approaching?” he cried. “Or Pluto bursting through the earth?”

“It is probably only Diodorus,” said Aurelia, undisturbed. “This is always a bad day for him. But are there not other horses with him?” She put aside her sewing and stood up to see and to listen. An optimistic young woman, she never thought that anything out of the ordinary could be ominous. “Is he bringing guests for dinner?”

“If those are guests they are probably charioteers out on practice,” said the senator, shielding his eyes from the late afternoon sun and craning to see. Then he began to laugh, now glimpsing Diodorus lashing his horses and standing up like a racer in his chariot, and the soldiers hurtling behind him, all enveloped in radiant clouds of dust. He clapped his hands and cheered, like one cheering the chariots in the circus. “He will make it! He will be the first at the gate!”

“Good heaven, and in this heat,” murmured Aurelia. “And with his headache. Why is Sextus with him, and the others?”

“Am I his wife that I should know what Diodorus ever does?” asked the senator reasonably, and still laughing.

Diodorus thundered to the gate, sprang from the chariot and tossed the reins aside. His followers roared up, and barely managed to avoid the halted chariot; their horses danced and pranced and reared all about it, and screamed in distress. Sunlight glanced off the soldiers’ armor and off their helmets, and the horses were covered with foam. Diodorus burst through the gate at a brisk trot and then into the outdoor portico. He glared at the senator and ignored his wife.

“What! Are you still here?” he demanded roughly. “Not beginning to yearn as yet for your Corybantes and bacchantes, nor pining for your favorite gladiators and actors?” He was panting, crimson of brow, and dripping with sweat.

“Beloved,” Aurelia began, astonished at this rudeness and alarmed at her husband’s appearance. She took a step towards him, but he waved her away. “Go to your quarters, woman,” he said, not looking at her, and Aurelia gathered up her sewing and vanished through the pillars of the house, tears in her eyes. Never had Diodorus spoken to her like that before.

The senator was not disturbed. He stood there in all his tall elegance and his face was humorous. He thought Diodorus a boor, a military imbecile whose temper, like that of all soldiers, befitted more an animal than a man. He cocked his eyebrows, smiled, and regarded the goblet in his hand quizzically. “Bacchus would disdain such wine, my good friend and brother, and so, even if I yearn, no bacchantes are hovering about me.”

The soft insult made Diodorus shake. He stood before this smooth patrician, with his fine hands and expertly folded toga, like a wild, dark figure of a military barbarian, covered with dust, his eyes glaring, and his fierce and reddened face convulsed. His panting was loud in the evening stillness. He took off his helmet and dashed it onto the stones. Carvilius Ulpian took a delicate sip of the wine and shook his head deploringly. The helmet rolled and rattled.

The senator sat down again, gracefully. His sandals were of silver laced with gold. “Sit down,” he suggested, like a man playing host to one of inferior station. “Have some wine. It will refresh you. Is the headache still very bad? My physician here with me has a potion which is very beneficial. Shall I call for his services?” He sat in his chair, a foreign figure majestic and at ease on the crude portico and in front of a house he thought plebeian in the extreme and fit only for an overseer of slaves.

“May Mercury curse your physician!” said Diodorus. He flung himself into his chair and began to wipe his streaming forehead with his hands. When the senator offered him his own perfumed kerchief for the task, Diodorus rejected it with an oath. The senator laughed. “It must have been an exciting day at the Hall of Justice,” he remarked, helping himself to a coarse sweetmeat from the silver plate beside him on the table. He looked about for a servant. It was too much to expect that a servant would be on hand in this barbarous household, so the senator poured some wine for the tribune and handed it to him with a bow. Diodorus wanted to refuse it, but his mouth was dry and parched with dust and fever, so he snatched the goblet and emptied its contents in one long swallow. Now he began to feel embarrassed that he had insulted a guest, even if that guest was only his brother-in-law. He sat, knees aspraddle, and his strong and sinewy body bent forward, his head dropped slightly. He stared at the interior of the empty goblet and said somberly, “I am one festering sore.”

Carvilius Ulpian wondered where his own servants were. The plebeian looseness and ease in this household had no doubt infected them and the rascals were probably cavorting with the other slaves. However, he relaxed. He found the air of Syria to be quite salubrious and pleasantly warm, for he was a thin-blooded man.

The senator understood that Diodorus was less apologizing to him than being sullenly resentful that he had committed a gross breach of good manners, gross even for a soldier. He settled his aristocratic features into a pleasant and comprehending expression, and his small pale eyes, of no particular color, took on the benign look he reserved for his clients, particularly large landowners who wanted favors for a respectable fee.

The tribune stood up and stripped his breastplate from him, loosened his leather girdle and his short sword, and threw them onto a chair. He stood revealed in his homespun linen tunic the color of red earth, which the industrious Aurelia had spun, woven and sewn for him. His sturdy legs and arms and chest were covered with bristling black hair, and he exuded strength, masculinity and sweat to such an extent that the senator closed his delicate eyes. Soldiers, he reflected, were inevitably violent and stupid, and Diodorus was no exception. Though Cornelia, that simple woman, protested that the books the senator was constantly compelled to send to Antioch were for Diodorus’ own use, the senator did not believe it. A Vandal. He and his father and all their ancestors had a reputation of absolute integrity and honor and soldierly qualities and virtue in Rome. That, the senator considered, was the quality of them, unimaginative, boorish and unintelligent. Still, though the Augustales laughed at Diodorus, and even cold-faced Tiberius Caesar smiled at the mention of his name, he had influence among those in Rome like him, and one never underestimated the power of tribunes and the military, mindless though they were.

Diodorus filled his goblet again, some of the wine falling on his hands. The red sunlight splashed on the white walls of the house, and made rosy columns of the pillars. A warm sweet scent drifted from the gardens at the rear of the house, and palms chattered. It was quiet and peaceful, and good for the nerves of a gentleman lately from Rome, where the very air reeked with intrigue. Diodorus sat down. He repeated in a less sullen but in a harder tone, “I am one festering sore.”

The senator sighed, looked at his jeweled hands pensively. It could not be escaped. But he tried. “Surely not,” he said, “in all this pleasantness, and in the power you hold in the province. Caesar is much pleased with you. He said to me just before I left, ‘My greetings to our good Diodorus, and tell him I know of no other province or country so well governed’.”

“He means,” said Diodorus ruthlessly, “that I am not a thief or a liar, and I send him his taxes promptly, and that I deal as justly as possible so that Syria will cause him little trouble.”

The senator sighed again. He had a narrow head of sleek dark hair. His mouth was slightly effeminate, and a trifle too full and red for a man. Diodorus went on, and now his voice trembled a little. “I remember my old comrade in arms, Gaius Octavius, whom you delicates called Augustus. When you wrote me he had died at Nola, his father’s old home, in the arms of his wife, my heart broke. I do not recognize his successor as my Caesar, not in my heart, even though you speak of him as a divinity. Divinity!”

The senator looked about him quickly. He hoped there was no one spying, one who could repeat such treasonable statements. He coughed, and murmured, “A man should be discreet. Do not look so irate, my Diodorus. If I remember rightly, you complained in letters to me that your ‘old comrade in arms’ had finally destroyed the Republic and extinguished political liberty. I burned your letters, of course, as they were dangerous.”

“Nonsense,” said Diodorus, with ire, and full of umbrage. “I wrote him a letter to that effect myself. Old friends, old soldiers, are honest with each other. I was like a son to him. We quarreled about the honors he had accepted, and my father quarreled with him on the same account. Yes, the Republic died with him, and it was not entirely his fault, but he was a good soldier, better, in my opinion, than Julius Caesar himself. One forgives a good soldier many things, though not, of course, usurpation of power, and so I chided him frequently, and he said to me, when he was an old wise man, ‘Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die’.”

In spite of himself the senator was surprised, and he felt his first respect for Diodorus, who could scold Caesar with impunity and receive an apologetic reply.

“This rascal, now crowned with oak leaves, and a cold-blooded person, may technically be my Emperor, and I serve him as a soldier, as my father served Gaius Octavius, but I do not have to pretend to adore him and regard him as one of the gods.” Diodorus shifted in his chair wrathfully. “And I want to go to my farm near Rome and forget your accursed mobs, and all your politics and depravity, and be with my family under my fruitful trees.”

“And also forget that you are a soldier, my fiery Mars?”

Diodorus hesitated. “If Rome needs me as a soldier, then I must respond. I am not needed in Syria. Send one of your scoundrels here instead; he will be more fitting in this damnable place than I.” He heaved a tremendous sigh. “At least my Caesar was virtuous, and his wife was his beloved until his death, for a whole fifty years. Tell me: Is Tiberius such a man?”

The senator rubbed his chin and his eyes darted about the portico and through the open door. He said tactfully, “I am a man who is not quarrelsome, and my business is politics, and though I see Caesar often we discuss nothing controversial!”

“In other words, Tiberius has ignored my letters, and you have not discussed them with him.” Diodorus’ vehement eyes sparkled.

“Patience, patience,” murmured the senator, and wondered when dinner would be served. He was beginning to get a headache himself. He said, hopefully, “There will be guests for dinner?” Guests would possibly have a quieting effect on this rambunctious soldier.

“Guests!” exclaimed Diodorus. “No. Do I invite inferiors to my house? You do not know Antioch. I tell you, I fester here! If I did not visit the procurator in Judea once a year or so I should expire of boredom and rage. Did you expect a banqueting such as you are accustomed to in Rome with Tiberius?”

Oh, gods, thought the senator in dismay. He said reasonably, “Why do you so resent Tiberius? After all, he is a magnificent soldier, has lightened taxation when he could, in the name of economy, is a comparatively honest and honorable gentleman, is just in his dealings with the provinces, and has consolidated the Empire. As for banquets, as a soldier Tiberius does not enjoy them. Did you think him a Bacchus?”

“I was with him on one campaign,” said Diodorus, gloomily, and rubbing his aching forehead. “He could not compare with Gaius Octavius,” he added defensively. “But he is a silent, cold-spirited man. He defers too much to you senators — he permits too many loose tongues to wag, and that is not the way of an emperor. No discipline — ”

“Nevertheless, unlike your beloved Octavius, he is a Roman of your own kidney. When he mounted the throne there were less than one hundred million sesterces in the Treasury. Now the amount grows month by month. He is frugal.”

“Nevertheless, he uses vicious spies and informers, as no soldier should do,” said Diodorus. “When a man is afraid of his compatriots and fears assassination, one should examine the man.” Again he regarded the senator with ire. “Why does he not answer my letters?”