Render Unto Caesar (6 page)

I may see some prettier parts of the city today, because today I go into the forum to start my business. I will tell you about it if I see anything interesting.

The door opened abruptly, and Menestor came in with little Erotion.

“I fetched him,” said the little girl proudly.

“Sir?” asked the young man. “You wanted me?”

Hermogenes waved his pen and got ink on his hand. He sighed and looked for a blotter to wipe it off. “Yes. We need to be about our business. Do you know if I need to greet our host before we set out?”

“I think he's gone out, sir,” said Menestor. “In the sedan chair, while you were still asleep. But I know that there's a dinner party for you this evening. Stentor was asking me what you like.”

Hermogenes nodded: he'd been invited to the dinner party. “We'll be back in plenty of time for that. Very well, then, tell Stentor we're going out and will be back this afternoon, and go fetch Phormion. Oh, and if you can, ask Stentor how I can send a letter home.”

“Yes, sir.” Menestor left again.

Erotion lingered, curious. Hermogenes smiled at her. “I am writing a letter to my daughter,” he informed her. “I told her how well you speak Latin.”

The girl beamed. “What's your little girl's name?”

“Myrrhine.”

“Mur-ree-nee. That's pretty. Did you tell her my name?”

“I did.”

“Oh!” Erotion was surprised and delighted with the idea that a little girl in a faraway city would know her name. “Tell her I wish her health!” she ordered eagerly.

Hermogenes nodded and wrote,

Little Erotion asks me to say that she wishes you good health, as do I. Greet Aunt Eukleia for me, and Nurse, and all the household. Remember you must be kind to Aunt Eukleia, even if she does tell you not to practice your acrobatics, because she is very sad after losing her husband and her own house. I miss you very much, and I hope I can finish my business soon and come home to my own darling daughter.

He blew on the ink to dry it.

“Will your daughter be able to read that?” Erotion asked him.

Reading must seem a marvelous accomplishment to Erotion. No one bothered to educate female slave children. “Yes, she can read.”

The child nodded wisely. “I thought so. I knew she'd be a lady.”

He thought of Myrrhine practicing cartwheels in the garden, skinny legs in the air and tunic around her waist. “She
will be
a lady,” he said cautiously. “Now she is just a little girl.”

“Will she write back?”

“She may, but I think there will not be time for me to receive her answer. It is a long, long way to Alexandria. By the time she receives this, I will probably already be on my way home.”

“Oh.” Erotion picked her nose. “I have to go help my mother now.”

“You are a good girl to do that. Good health to you.”

He rolled up the letter, inscribed the address on the back, and tied and sealed it. Then he took out a second sheet and wrote carefully,

MARCUS AELIUS HERMOGENES OF ALEXANDRIA, TO LUCIUS TARIUS RUFUS, CONSUL OF THE ROMANS, VERY MANY GREETINGS.

 

My lord, you do not know me, but you have had dealings with an uncle of mine. He has recently deceased, and I am his heir. He has bequeathed me some business which involves yourself, and since I am eager to resolve all his commitments and set his estate in order, I have come to Rome to see you. I hope that you will grant me an appointment to discuss this business with you at your convenience. I am staying in the house of Titus Fiducius Crispus on the Via Tusculana.

I pray that the gods grant you health.

He read the letter over, then gave a nod of satisfaction. He had written in Greek, since his Latin spelling tended to the erratic, but that should present no difficulty. Rufus undoubtedly spoke Greek, and would certainly have a secretary to deal with his Greek correspondence. And the tone was right. Rufus would probably think the “business” involved a legacy of some kind, and grant an early audience. He rolled and sealed this letter as well, then went back to the sleeping cubicle to put on his belt, cloak, and sandals.

When he came back to the dayroom, Menestor and Phormion had arrived. With them was Crispus's cupbearer, Hyakinthos.

“Stentor says you need pilot,” said the boy in clumsy Greek. “In order that you not lost. I speak Greek.”

Hermogenes regarded him a moment. The boy was about thirteen, tall and slender, with long black hair and dark eyes. He wore a fine orange tunic, short enough to show more of his thighs than was really respectable. He shifted uneasily under the scrutiny.

“I hope it is no trouble to you,” Hermogenes told him.

“No,” replied the boy, relaxing a little. “I like to go to the forum.”

“We do need a guide,” said Menestor approvingly. “Sir, Stentor says that if you want to leave your letter on the table, he'll have someone collect it later. Titus Fiducius shares a courier service with some other men of business, and he sends letters out every day.”

Hermogenes nodded and left the letters on the table. He turned to the big trunk, which had been set against the wall next to the lampstand, fished out the key on its chain around his neck, unlocked the chest, and took out the box of documents relating to the debt—the original documents, of which the ones in the basket were copies. He handed it to Menestor; after a moment's thought he added the papers that proved his own citizenship, and the party set out.

The center of Rome was, indeed, very much grander than its outskirts. It was also, plainly, grander than it had been a generation before, and in another generation would be grander still: everywhere there was building work. Old brick temples along the Sacra Via were being renovated in marble; new porticoes, new basilicas, and new monuments sprouted like mushrooms. Hyakinthos pointed them out in his rudimentary Greek: “That
up,
on the Palatine—that the Temple of Apollo,” “That the Parthian Arch. Two year old,” “That the Temple of Caesar the God.”

The morning streets were crowded, quite different from their shadowed emptiness the previous afternoon. Slaves in plain tunics, carrying baskets of shopping, rubbed elbows with citizen-women in their long fringed stoles. Occasionally there was a male citizen draped in a snowy toga, hurrying about on business. Water sellers and pastry vendors competed to cry their wares; sedan chairs lurched along the road, usually with a togaed gentleman swaying high above the sweating bearers. The occasional covered litter sailed past like a merchant ship among the small craft, carried smoothly upon the shoulders of eight bearers, its occupant invisible behind fine curtains.

Foreigners were common. Hermogenes spotted a couple of northern barbarians before they'd even reached the Sacra Via—Germans or perhaps Celts, fair-haired men with beards, dressed in breeches. There were probably many other northerners who were wearing Roman dress, for there were far more blond and red heads among the crowd than he had ever seen in Alexandria. A pair of women from one of the caravan cities of the East stood together at a cloth merchant's, dressed in long dark cloaks from head to foot, their necks and veils hung about with gold; a Phrygian eunuch priest sat begging in a public square, chanting the praises of the Great Mother in a reedy voice and occasionally striking a tambourine; a stout man in the stitched shirt and trousers of a Parthian, his beard dyed blue, pushed frowning through the crowd. The commonest sort of foreigner, however, was certainly the Greeks. The himation—the rectilinear cloak of the Greek East—was almost as common on the street as the curved Roman toga, and on every other corner he heard the accents of Athens or Antioch, Ephesus or his own Alexandria.

Down the Via Tusculana they went, and down the Sacra Via, past the temple of the Deified Julius and into the Roman forum. The crowds were even thicker here, and there were far more togas. Hermogenes commented on it, and Hyakinthos hesitated.

“You can say in Latin,” Hermogenes told him gently.

“Oh,” said the boy, blushing. “Yes. Well, Romans are supposed to wear the toga if they have business in the forum. Otherwise they mostly don't bother.”

Hermogenes was taken aback. “Should I wear a toga, then?” He had no idea how one
did
wear the garment: the drape did not look easy.

“You're not a
real
Roman,” Hyakinthos told him immediately. “I don't think anyone will mind. As a matter of fact, they'd—” He stopped.

“What?”

When the boy said nothing, Hermogenes asked in amusement, “The officials I must approach would sneer at a Greek in a badly draped toga?”

Hyakinthos seemed surprised that he had guessed this. “Yes, sir, they would!” He looked at Hermogenes appreciatively and added, “That's a very nice cloak. They'll be more impressed by that than by a toga. You have to be rich to have a cloak like that, but every citizen has a toga.”

“Then let us proceed to the record office—but I would like to visit a barber's first, if I can.”

There were no barbershops in the forum. They walked the length of it, past the temples, the law courts, the statues, the towering-columned public buildings, right to the far end, where a particularly tall and plain building frowned down upon the marketplace. Hyakinthos led them up a stairway into an arcade of shops. “This is the Tabularium,” he explained. “The record office you want. The front faces the other way, though, into the Campus Martius. We have to go through—but there may be a barber's in here.”

There was. Hermogenes sent Menestor and the boy off to buy something to eat for breakfast while he himself submitted to the razor. They returned just as the barber was finishing, Menestor with a double-handful of fried sesame cakes wrapped in vine leaves, Hyakinthos with both hands and his mouth full.

“Menestor said you wouldn't mind if I had some too, sir,” he said in a muffled voice.

“Nor do I,” agreed Hermogenes, “but leave some for me!”

They walked into the Tabularium eating sesame cakes. Undignified, Hermogenes thought resignedly, but they were good cakes, and he was hungry.

Depositing the documents proved to be quicker and easier than he'd anticipated. While the archives had been built for official papers, the public slaves who ran it had established a profitable sideline in providing safe storage for private papers, for a fee. The face of the young clerk in the entrance hall sharpened with interest at the sight of Hermogenes's cloak, and he smiled with satisfaction when he heard what was wanted. He took the box of documents, then fished out a bronze coin, placed it across a small iron balance weight, and hit it with a mallet. The coin broke jaggedly in half, and he gave one half to Hermogenes. “You know how these work?” he asked.

Hermogenes nodded and slipped the half coin in his purse. When he came to reclaim the documents, he would have to produce his half of the coin, which the clerk would match with its mate before handing over the box. “Will you keep your half of the token with the documents?” he inquired.

The clerk shook his head. “No. I'll tag your documents and put them upstairs in the archives. We keep the tokens down here. Here, I'll show you.”

He took string, beeswax, and two small papyrus tags from a box on his desk; he tied the string round the box and secured one tag to it, then attached the other to the coin with the wax. On each tag he wrote a string of letters—FIIIXLII—then glanced up. “The letters mean your documents go up to the corridor on the third floor on the forum side of the building,” he explained, “and that they're the forty-second lot stored there.”

He opened another large box at the side of his desk; it contained three separate compartments, each already containing numbers of other tagged half coins. He set the token in the compartment labeled FIII. “When you come back, tell whoever's on duty that it's in forum three,” he ordered. “I'll put the documents there now: they'll be perfectly safe until you come back to claim them. If you lose the token, we can probably give you the documents if you tell us they're lot forty-two in forum three and describe them accurately—but
try
not to lose it, because it makes it hard.”

“Thank you,” said Hermogenes, and paid him. As he closed his purse again he decided he would have to find somewhere else to keep his token. Leaving it in his purse meant he risked losing it every time he spent some money.

They went back out into the forum, and Hermogenes stretched, feeling a sense of accomplishment. He had sent Rufus a letter asking for an appointment, and he had done all he could to ensure the safety of his vital documents. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the consul's response.

“Hyakinthos,” he said, and smiled at the boy. “What should a visitor do in Rome?”

It turned into a pleasant day. Hyakinthos took them back through the forum, this time pointing out everything of interest (Hermogenes made a mental note to tell his daughter about the gilded milestone labeled with the distance to Alexandria, among other cities). They visited a couple of temples, which, as was common, contained many fine works of art. The Temple of Caesar the God, Hermogenes discovered with amazement and awe, contained Apelles'
Aphrodite Rising from the Waves,
a towering masterpiece of Greek painting: it lived up to its reputation. There were other famous Greek masterpieces as well—sculptures by Praxiteles and Phidias; paintings by Polygnotos and Apelles. In fact, Hermogenes thought sourly, the temples of Rome did not seem to contain anything made by an Italian.

When the glories of Art and Architecture began to pall, they did some shopping. They turned right down the narrow Vicus Tuscus, which was lined with shops. Hermogenes bought a small leather bag to keep his token in, and a jar of good wine as a present for his host. Phormion greatly admired a lamp decorated with molded chariots, but could not quite bring himself to part with any of his savings to buy it.