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Authors: John Maddox Roberts

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BOOK: The Temple of the Muses
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“Friends, enter these sacred precincts
In peace of heart and expectation of joy.
Here dread Ares has no home,
Nor does hardworking Hephaestus toil.
But only Dionysus of the grape, Apollo of the lyre,
Eros and the gentle Muses reign.
Here each man is a swain,
Each woman a carefree nymph.
Leave care and sorrow behind you.
For these have no place here.
Welcome, doubly welcome, and rejoice!”
I tipped the man handsomely and we entered. The grove consisted of a series of interlocking arbors in the form of a maze. Torches burned, perfumed to give a fragrant smoke. There was just enough light to make everything clear and to reveal rich colors, but no more than that. A step would carry you from plain view to dark intimacy as desired. Everywhere were small tables on which little lamps burned, the low-level light making the masked faces nearby look like something from another world. Among the tables wandered women in the abbreviated tunics of mythical nymphs, men costumed as satyrs, boys with the pointed ears and tails of fauns, wild-haired women in the leopard skins of Bacchantes. All of them
poured wine from amphorae or served delicacies from trays or danced or played wild music upon the syrinx and double flute and tambour. It was all quite licentious and abandoned to Roman eyes, but its joyous exuberance utterly lacked the fanatic hysteria of, say, the rites in the Temple of Baal-Ahriman.
“Come on, let’s find a table,” Hypatia urged. We wandered into the maze, taking so many turns that I despaired of ever finding a way out again. It is the virtue of such a place that you don’t really care if you ever get out. Eventually we found a table with a top no larger than the thumping tambours of the musicians. A bright-eyed girl placed cups on our table and filled them. As she bent over, her breasts nearly fell out of her brief tunic. Hypatia eyed her as she danced away.
“A pity it’s so cool,” she said. “Most of the year they wear less.”
We raised our cups and saluted each other. The cups were of finely polished olive wood, in keeping with the air of poetic rusticity. The wine was Greek, sharply resinous. A boy dressed as a faun brought a platter of fruits and cheeses. After the fanciful fare of the Palace, which was a delight to the eye and palate and a disaster to the digestion, this simple food was a distinct relief.
A troupe of Argive youths and maidens came through, performing the very ancient crane dance. Then came a huge, brawny man dressed as Hercules with a lion skin, who entertained the crowd with feats of strength. Then came singers who sang erotic verse or praises of the nature gods. There was no epic verse or songs of the deeds of warriors. It was as if all such unpleasantness had been banished for the night.
I found that one becomes a different person when wearing a mask. One is no longer constrained by the rigid views of one’s upbringing and may instead adopt the persona of the mask, or else dispense with all such coercion and see the world as a god looking down from a passing cloud. Just so a gladiator, in donning the anonymity of the helmet, ceases to be the condemned criminal or the ruined wretch who sold himself to the
ludus,
and becomes instead
the splendid and fearless warrior he must be out on the sand. Without my accustomed cosmopolitan, not to say cynical, poses, I could see these revelers and these performers as the very characters from pastoral poetry they pretended to be.
Hypatia, the hard-mouthed professional woman, became an exotic, flower-haired creature, her hands on the olive-wood cup like lilies made animate. I had always thought pastoral verse one of the silliest forms, but I was beginning to understand its attractions.
And I? I was growing rapidly drunk. The setting and the company provided an unwonted abandon, one to which I was not accustomed. At home, I always had to consider the possible political consequences of even my most private indiscretions. In a place like the Palace, I had to be ever mindful of who was behind me, as a matter of self-preservation. But here there was no one behind me. And, in any case, I was no longer Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, slightly disreputable scion of a prominent Roman family. I was a character in one of those poems where all the women are named Phyllis and Phoebe and the men are not men but “swains” and
they’re
all named Daphnis or something of the sort.
In short, I let my guard down completely. I realize this sounds like the utmost folly, but a life lived cautiously is a dull one. All the really careful and cautious men I ever knew were drab wretches, while those who eschewed caution had interesting if brief lives.
Before long, I had our serving-girl, or one just like her, seated in my lap, while a faun-boy occupied the same place on Hypatia. They sang and popped grapes into our mouths as general liberties were taken by all. I learned more ways to drink someone’s health in Greek than I ever dreamed could exist. Versatile language, Greek.
At some point during the night I found myself standing behind Hypatia, my hands on her lissome hips, and someone else’s on
mine. This might have been alarming, but it turned out that we were all doing the crane dance under the tutelage of the Argive youths and maidens. Like the bird for which it is named, the crane dance is a blend of grace and awkwardness. Hypatia supplied one and I the other. I had never danced before. Roman men never dance unless they belong to one of the dancing priesthoods. It seemed to me that these Greeks had happened upon a good thing.
The moon was very low when the whole reveling crowd poured out of the Daphne and wound its way up the spiral path of the Paneum. Live creatures mixed with the bronze ones along the path, cavorting and disporting themselves in the time-honored fashion of rural worshippers. In the heat of their exertions, many had divested themselves of clothing along with their inhibitions and sense of decorum.
In the sanctuary we all sang traditional hymns to Pan in the Arcadian dialect. The flickering light of the torches played over the bronze god and I thought I saw him smile, a real smile, not the fraudulent grimacing of Baal-Ahriman. The women draped their garlands around his neck and over his outsized phallus, and a few of the masked ladies begged him to help them conceive. If the fervor of the worship were of any help, they would all surely bear twins.
It was an easy walk from the Paneum to the Palace, but I was sorry to see the place again. I was weary of its plots and intrigues, and for all its luxuries it seemed a grim place after a magical night spent in the Daphne.
“I must leave you here,” Hypatia said as we approached the gate nearest the Roman embassy. “My protector keeps me in a house close by. It is forbidden for women to be housed in the Parthian embassy.”
“How will you come to me tomorrow?” I asked, reluctant to see her go despite my better instincts.
She pushed back her mask, came into my arms and kissed me. She was like a sack of wriggling eels, and I was ready to carry
her into a doorway and make good on the offer I had turned down in the Necropolis. But she pulled away and placed her fingers across my lips.
“It is too late now, the time is past. But look for me to come tomorrow evening. One with the right friends can go about freely within the Palace, and I have more friends than most. I will bring the book, and you will help me to establish myself in Rome.”
“I have given my word,” I said.
“Good night, then. Until tomorrow.” She turned and was gone.
With a sigh I staggered toward the gate. I remembered to take off my mask and stuck it inside my tunic. The guard at the gate sleepily returned my equally sleepy salute. The Palace was as lifeless as the Necropolis as I made my way across its elaborate pavements.
The embassy was, if anything, even more devoid of life, not even a slave stirring. That suited me perfectly. I was sure that, by this time, my appearance must confirm Creticus’s worst fears about me. I made my way to my quarters undetected and dropped my cloak to the floor, let my weapons clank onto a table, then thought better of that and locked them away in my chest. The mask I hung on the wall.
I left my tunic where it fell and brushed the vine leaves from my hair before collapsing into my bed. It had been one of the most eventful days of my life. Had it really started out with my visit to Baal-Ahriman? It seemed more like weeks ago. First the fine intellectual exercise of deciphering the trickery of Ataxas, then my flight through the Rakhotis, culminating in the Salt Market riot.
Then the night, which had begun in a city of the dead and ended in a veritable Arcadian fertility rite. Even at my most adventurous, I was unaccustomed to so many changes of venue and circumstance. In this place death lurked in many places and took many guises, but I would never die of boredom.
The memory of Hypatia writhing against me was unsettling,
but I knew that I would see her again the next night. Perhaps there was some other site of exotic debauchery we could try. And perhaps what she was to bring me would solve the mysteries surrounding the death of Iphicrates.
I was well pleased with the events of the day and the prospects for the morrow. It was just as well that I could go to sleep in such a state of complacency, because when I woke up, there was a dead woman in bed with me.
I
COULD NOT UNDERSTAND WHY A LEGION of cocks was crowing in my ear. Surely, with all their strange tastes, these pseudo-Egyptian Macedonians didn’t keep livestock in the Palace. Then my head began to clear and I realized that it was the embassy slaves raising the racket. Some of them were eunuchs and these added a falsetto quality to the uproar. What on earth had them so upset?
I struggled to a sitting position, rubbing my eyes to get them into focus. Right away, I knew that I had the sort of hangover that makes you certain that the gods robbed you of your youth in your sleep. My mouth tasted like the bottom of a
garum
vat. The resin from the Greek wine lent a certain dockside element to the foulness, as if my mouth had been tarred and caulked.
I glared blearily at the slave who stood in the doorway pointing at me and gabbling something in Egyptian. Others behind him stared wide-eyed.
“What are you pointing at?” I demanded. I intended to sound
forceful. But my voice came out in a croak. “Have you all gone mad?”
Then I realized that he was not pointing at me. He was pointing just to one side of me. With a prickling scalp I turned to see, then squeezed my eyes shut. It didn’t help. When I opened them again, she was still there. It was Hypatia, and she was quite dead. Were I a poet, I would say that her staring eyes were full of reproach, but they expressed nothing at all. The eyes of the dead never do.
She was naked, and the bone hilt of a dagger protruded from just below her left breast. There was a small wound below her left ear, and her lovely black hair was matted with blood. I saw her bloodstained gown on the floor by her.
“What is this?” Creticus came storming in and went pale when he saw the little tableau. Behind him were Rufus and the others.
“It isn’t …” I cursed my thick tongue.
Creticus pointed at me. “Decius Caecilius Metellus, I arrest you. Bind him and throw him in the cellar.”
A pair of burly, shaven-headed men came forward and laid hands on me. These were the Binder and the Whipper, the slave disciplinarians belonging to the embassy. They didn’t often get a chance to practice their skills on a free man and they made the most of it. They jerked my arms behind me and slapped manacles around my wrists. Then they hauled me to my feet.
“At least let me get dressed!” I hissed.
“Decius, you are not only a degenerate but a madman,” Creticus said. “I will go to talk to the king. Since you are part of the embassy, he can’t call for your head, but rest assured I’ll have you tried before the Senate and banished to the smallest, most barren island in the sea!”
“I’m innocent!” I croaked. “Bring Asklepiodes!”
“What?” Creticus said. “Who?”
“Asklepiodes, the physician! I want him to examine that body before these Greeks cremate it! He can prove that I am innocent!” Actually I was confident of no such thing, but I was desperate.
“Rufus! Go to the Museum and fetch him.” His shocked face nodded minutely. I was not even sure he understood my words.
The Whipper and the Binder hustled me through the halls and past goggling slaves, then down a flight of steps to the cellar. There they bolted a neck-ring on me and chained me to the wall. They talked to each other merrily in some barbarous tongue, their bronze-studded belts scraping my abused hide as they disposed of me. With their big bellies and thick, leather-banded arms, they looked like apes imitating men. Well, one doesn’t employ disciplinarians for their refinements. With a final test of my bonds, they left me to my thoughts. These were not pleasant.
Somehow, I had been neatly bagged. I was not sure how this had been done, but it seemed to have been done with my fullest cooperation. I was now assumed by everyone to be a murderer. The victim had been a free woman and a resident of Alexandria, although of foreign origin. At the very best, Ptolemy would allow me to be quietly shipped off to Rome. I had no doubt that Creticus would make good on his threat to impeach me before the Senate. Roman officials were allowed a certain license in foreign lands, but for a member of a diplomatic mission to disgrace the Republic was unconscionable.
How to get out of this? It had all been so sudden, and my mind so benumbed, that I had not been able to take in the circumstances, much less devise a defense. I knew a few basic facts: The woman was Hypatia, she was in my bed and she was unquestionably dead. What, if anything, was in my favor?
The knife buried in her body was not mine. I remembered with relief that I had locked my weapons away before retiring. Perhaps something could be made of that. I certainly had no reason to kill her, but I had enough experience with murder trials to know that a motive is the least of considerations, especially when evidence of culpability is strong. It was certainly strong in this case.
How had this been carried out? All too easily. The whole Palace had been sound asleep, and I had been too sodden to notice the arrival of marauding Gauls. Poor Hypatia had simply been deposited
in my bed and the murderers or their lackeys had strolled away, all of it as casual as tradesmen making a delivery.
But why had they not simply killed me? If Achillas and Ataxas were determined to put an end to my investigation, it seemed to me that the simplest thing would have been to deposit the dagger in
my
heart, not in some innocent woman’s. Not that Hypatia had been terribly innocent, either in her professional life or in her intentions toward the conspirators. A dungeon is an excellent place to mull over questions like this, free as it is from distractions. I don’t recommend it as a regular practice.
I wished that I could consult my friends Cicero and Milo on this. Between Cicero’s legal expertise and Milo’s criminal genius, they would have cracked this problem within minutes. Cicero had once told me that many men in legal difficulties failed to understand their situation because they always assumed themselves to be the focus of the problem. Each man exists at the center of his own personal cosmos and believes that he must be the foremost concern of gods and men. This is a grievous fallacy and must be guarded against.
I suspected that Achillas was behind everything. Ataxas was his accomplice and cat’s-paw. Milo had told me that he overcame the other gang leaders in Rome by simply thinking like them. In this way he could anticipate their every attack. The difficult part, he said, was in duplicating the thought processes of someone more stupid than oneself, which was always the case.
Achillas wanted me out of the way, but was I all that important? This was a man who lusted for the throne of Egypt. My investigation was causing him annoyance, threatening to upset his plans, but what was that in the context of his greater agenda? For more than a century it had been understood that the ruler of Egypt would be the one favored by Rome, and Rome had, for the sake of stability and consistency, opted to support the weak, foolish but traditional Ptolemies.
I was not Achillas’s problem. Rome was his problem.
And I had very thoughtfully given him a wonderful weapon to
use against Rome. I, a Roman diplomat, had murdered a free woman of Alexandria. And I had done it, not merely in the city, but within the Palace itself. The city was already poised to erupt in anti-Roman riots, and I had poured oil on the coals.
And there was that old Gaulish saying about two birds with one arrow or something of the sort. The traitorous Hypatia had to be disposed of anyway, so why not let her be my poor, innocent victim? And that turned my mind down other channels. Had her treachery been detected, or had it been planned by Achillas from the start? She might have been given a role to play, not understanding, of course, that she was to be paid with a dagger through the heart. An Athenian
hetaira
receives training comparable to an actor’s, and she knew well how to keep me off guard, lusting for the mysterious book and her skilled body alternately. And she knew that a beautiful woman cannot fail to control a young man by letting him know that she finds him irresistible. Or an old one either, for that matter.
I was distracted by a noise from the top of the stairs. The door opened and shut and there was a glow from the top step.
“Whoever you are, I hope you’ve come to let me go. I am innocent!”
“It’s Julia.”
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“I walked, idiot.”
“Oh. Ah, Julia, it might not be a good idea to bring that lamp too close. They dragged me from bed and didn’t give me a chance to dress. I’m, well, the only way to describe my condition is naked.”
She came on relentlessly. “If we’re to be married, I’ll have to learn the awful truth sooner or later. Besides, I believe that was also the state of that poor woman they found in your bed. Oh, Decius, what have you done now? I knew that you were reckless, but you’ve never murdered anyone before.”
“Do you believe I did?” If my betrothed thought I was a murderer, I was really in trouble.
“I know it can’t be, but the circumstances are so damning! The story is all over the Palace.”
“And I’ll bet I know who’s spreading it. Julia, Asklepiodes has to examine that woman’s body while it’s still in my room, if it hasn’t been moved already. I think Rufus has gone to get him, but I can’t be sure.”
“I’ll see about it,” she said. “Now tell me everything that happened.” So I did. She frowned deeply when I got to the part about going to the Daphne.
“You are telling me that you took a prostitute to Alexandria’s most notorious scene of debauchery?”
“Julia,” I protested, “she was my informant! I had to keep her happy!”
“How convenient! Would you have felt so compelled if she had been old and ugly?”
“Julia, don’t speak foolishly. Would the Parthian ambassador have an old and ugly concubine?”
“Listen to me, Decius. I will do what I can to get you out of this alive, but I am beginning to doubt your sanity. A man who can get himself into a situation this grotesque makes a very doubtful prospect as a husband, even without consorting with prostitutes.”
“I have to get that book, Julia,” I insisted. “It must be the key! With that I can prove the conspiracy, I will earn the gratitude of Ptolemy, I’ll be the latest savior of Rome and all will be forgiven!”
“You are pinning a lot of hopes on very little. The woman may have been lying about the book.”
“I don’t think so. I think this was a case where telling the truth was the easiest lure.”
“You are in no position to get hold of it,” she pointed out.
“Alas, yes. Not only am I chained like a recalcitrant slave, but security is probably tighter at the Parthian embassy than it is at the Roman.” Then something occurred to me. “Julia, didn’t the Parthian ambassador depend on Hypatia to help him in translating correspondence?”
“According to her, yes.”
“Well,
women are not allowed in the Parthian embassy!
So where did they carry out all this work?”
“You tell me.”
“He kept her in a house somewhere near the Palace. That is most likely where they went over the book from the Library, and it may still be there!”
“Surely Achillas would have collected it by now if it is so incriminating.”
“Not necessarily. Achillas thinks he had solved all his problems. He has no need to move swiftly now. I have to get that book!”
“How?” she said, practically.
“If this were Rome, I could just ask Milo and he would put a dozen experienced burglars at my disposal.”
“You will have noticed that this is not Rome.”
“That means I’ll have to do it myself.”
Idly, she fingered the chains that hung from my limbs.
“Yes, I admit that there are complications. I have to get free. Let me concentrate on that. You just find out where the house of Hypatia is to be found. The court women gossip a lot; some of them must know. She said she had many friends in the Palace.”
“I’ll do what I can, but I have a feeling that the safest thing for you would be a swift ship for Rome and a nice, safe trial before the Senate. My uncle’s influence …”
“I don’t want to be beholden to Caius Julius,” I snapped. “Besides, what good is the influence of a Consul if my own family wants me exiled for disgracing them? Just find out where that house is. I’ll bribe a slave to file these chains off if I have to. Now go. And see about Asklepiodes!”
She leaned forward and kissed me, then she whirled and was gone. She was a sweet, brave girl, but I knew that business in the Daphne would plague me for the rest of my life.
She left the lamp, and after a while this feeble light was sufficient for me to see my abode. It was the wine cellar. An open channel of running water passed through the room, and the amphorae of wine were set in the water to keep cool. An ingenious
system of underground channels connected Alexandria to the Nile, and the water ran through the basements of most of the buildings and houses of the city, supplying them with water and giving them drainage for the sewers.
Using this room for disciplinary purposes had a certain fiendish ingenuity, for the length of the neck-chain kept the wine forever out of reach, inflicting the punishment of Tantalus. Luckily, wine was the last thing on my mind. But the smell of the river water increased my already raging thirst.
BOOK: The Temple of the Muses
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