The Confessions of Young Nero Read online

  XII

  My everyday life, however, continued to be an adventure. I looked forward to my training with Apollonius, all the more so because it was something I had secretly arranged and it had nothing to do with making me into a noble Roman. Instead, the wrestling moves and holds took me back to Greece, back to the land of the gods and the demigods. The running united me with all those who had run in Olympia or Delphi. There was no way to measure the speed of a race once it was over, and so each race stood on its own, forever. I was faster than most boys my age and delighted in crossing the finish line ahead of them. Best of all I liked overtaking them. In the long jump, Apollonius taught me how to swing the weights and propel myself farther. It did not come naturally to me, but with patience I improved.

  No one in the training grounds knew who I was. I had taken another name—I called myself Marcus and gave myself a familial name not connected to anyone of importance. No one ever came to watch me, except Anicetus, so people assumed I was an orphan or a ward; in any case, not anyone of importance. I loved the freedom of being nobody. I think all children want this freedom. That does not mean they would be content with it forever.

  Apollonius was around forty years old and had been in Rome since he was thirty. He came from the Athens area; his last competition was at Nemea, when he was in his midtwenties. He had competed in the stadion and the double stadion and won both.

  “And that was the most exciting day of my life,” he said. “I look back on it and say, ‘That day I gave my utmost.’ Very few people can say that. Perhaps soldiers in battle, but few others. I can remember the names of all the other contenders, where they were at the start, at the halfway point . . .” He sighed, embarrassed. “Any athlete can do the same. In some parts the race is a blur; in others, as clear as a perfect glass vessel. At the moment of finish, we are as close to gods as we will ever be. Then we fall back to earth . . .”

  “To win the stadion is to be the champion at any one meet,” I said in awe. The stadion was the original event at Olympia, a short race that could be run on only two or three breaths. The man who won that could call himself the fastest man in all the world—that day.

  “Yes, and a good one to retire on. Younger athletes would surely appear the next cycle. There are always younger ones and faster ones coming up from behind you. Being beaten is something one never gets a taste for. So I was content to watch the games after that; once I was no longer competing, I could observe more keenly what others did right—or wrong. I began to train men, to teach them what I had learned. In running, though, although technique can help—pacing, how to move the arms, how to hold the head—speed is something you are born with. Strength can be bestowed through training regimens, but speed—no one knows the mystery of speed and why one man has it and another not. I see that you have it. Be careful not to squander it.”

  His words puzzled me. “How could I squander it?”

  “By not using it. By neglecting it. Or by hiding from others the gift of having it.”

  “Outside the competition track, I will have little opportunity to use it.” And once it is known who I am, I will have no opportunities at all, I thought.

  Instead of arguing, he sympathized. “More’s the pity. But attitudes are changing here in Rome. If they were not, I would not be in such demand.” He waved his hand toward all his students practicing in the palaestra, the wrestling yard. “Now, about wrestling—you have a gift for that, too, because it relies as much on balance and timing as on actual strength, and like running, those are gifts you are born with—or not. Hercules is the patron of wrestling, Hermes of running. Those two endeavors are from the gods.”

  But not from the noble Romans, I thought. “The aristocrats of Rome will never taste those delights,” I said. “They do not bestir themselves to do anything beyond wallow in the baths. And only soldiers exert themselves or feel sweat on their brows. Romans are so crass.”

  Apollonius laughed. “The Greeks are not all as noble as you imagine. It is true the four main competitions—Olympia, Nemea, Isthmia, and Delphi—give only a wreath, a palm, and inscribe the name of the winners. But there are hosts of other contests held all over Greece in which money prizes are given, and not just to the winner, but to the others, even down to fifth place. There are many entertainment events, like torch and boat races, and even donkey-cart races. And musical and poetry contests.”

  “Music contests!”

  “Oh, yes. They have trumpet and herald contests, but the most prestigious are the cithara singers. They compete at Delphi but also at many lesser festivals, and at those they earn huge amounts of money!”

  “If only we had those at Rome, instead of gladiator and wild-beast shows.” The sweet memory of the long-ago cithara player in the palace came back to me.

  “Do not berate Rome so,” he said. “Nothing can equal the Circus Maximus for chariot racing.”

  I had yet to see it. I would have to persuade Anicetus to take me, as an invitation from Claudius would obviously never come.

  “Enough talk, young Marcus! No more dallying! Now go into the changing room, smear on the oil, and get ready for training! I’d say today we should concentrate on the jump. I have some new brass weights for you . . .”

  • • •

  The days passed in a dreamy mix of athletic training, exploring the lush public gardens around the villa, and wandering by the banks of the Tiber as the wind stirred the rushes growing out of the mud. I thought of the stories of babies put into baskets and sent to their fates, usually because they were the offspring of a god and a mortal, like Romulus and Remus and Perseus. I found myself peering into the tangle of rushes and half expecting to find such a basket, although I told myself those were just myths. Still, I was looking for something miraculous to come into my life.

  No one now claimed to be the child of a god, but in many family lineages there were gods. In my own there was Venus, hundreds of years ago. But what would it feel like to be half god, not just a long-ago splinter of one?

  There was never anything in the rushes but birds’ nests and drifting sticks and leaves. But a miracle came into my life from a different direction.

  • • •

  He is still alive,” said Anicetus one day when we finished with our lesson. “I daresay the one thing that will lure you from Apollonius today is a visit to a very old man.”

  I drummed my fingers. I had been looking forward to practicing the trachelizein, the neck hold in wrestling. I was close to mastering it. “An old man?” As if I cared about an old man.

  “A very old man. His name is Alexander Helios.”

  Alexander Helios . . . Alexander Helios . . . I thought hard but came up with nothing. A Greek man, obviously. “An old philosopher?”

  “Come now, Lucius, you know more than that!”

  Helios . . . “A priest of Apollo?”

  “Think cousin, dear boy. Think of the many marriages of Marc Antony. He married both Octavia and Cleopatra, besides a couple of other women first. There were children from each—of course there would be, knowing Antony. You descend from Octavia. Alexander descends from—”

  I gasped. “The boy in the Triumph? Cleopatra’s son?”

  “The same. The very same. We were wondering about him, yes? Well, I have found him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Not absurdly far from here. If we hurry, we can see him this afternoon.”

  “If he marched in Augustus’s Triumph, how old do you think he is now?”

  “Old.” Anicetus laughed, then finally added, “I would guess mideighties.”

  I did not dare to ask how Anicetus had found him. It seemed too good to be true, but I knew Anicetus had ways. How fortunate I was to have him for a tutor!

  It was a bit of a trudge, going across the Tiber and all the way to the Caelian Hill where he resided, but I would have walked ten times as far. The son of Cleopatra!
Someone who had witnessed firsthand all the Roman history that was only that to me, history. To have sailed away from Alexandria, seeing the lighthouse growing ever smaller and vanishing beneath the horizon. To have seen the living Augustus. To have served under Drusus as he pushed across the Rhine into wild German territory.

  We reached the gentle hill and began to climb. Large houses lined the street, their painted windowless walls offering no glimpse of what lay inside, slender tops of cypresses betraying private gardens within. Finally, near the summit, Anicetus halted in front of a smaller house that looked out of place among its neighbors.

  “Umbrella pine at the corner—house is ocher colored—”

  Gingerly he made his way to the door and knocked. A slave answered it and confirmed that this was the house of Alexander Antonius.

  Of course! In Rome he would have taken his father’s family name. Helios would have been long discarded as foreign.

  Anicetus talked, gesturing in his disarming way, and soon the slave was nodding along with him and opened the door for us.

  “Please tell the honored master that his cousin seeks to meet him,” said Anicetus, as he gripped my shoulders and turned me to face the slave. “This is Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, grandson of Antonia the Elder and great-grandson of Antonia the Younger, your master’s half sisters.” Soon we were standing in the atrium, awaiting the man himself. It was a long wait, and while we stood there I looked around. The house was modest, the decorations spare. This for the son of a queen? But a long-ago queen, a queen who had lost her realm.

  “Don’t ask too many questions,” whispered Anicetus. “Let him do the talking. He might find it tiring, and so we should not tax him.”

  At last a man appeared at the far end of the atrium, leaning on a slave. He looked thin and delicate, but not weak. As befitted a proper Roman, he had obviously put on a toga to welcome his unknown guests. Approaching us, he nodded and held out his hands.

  “Welcome, my cousin,” he said, addressing me. Then he turned to Anicetus. “How did you find me? I fancied I had been quite forgotten in Rome. If you ask anyone, I daresay they would tell you I was dead.” His voice was not the quavering, reedy rasp I expected but still strong.

  “Some did,” Anicetus admitted. “But I was persistent.”

  We adjourned to a private reception room and he ordered refreshments to be brought. “The kind for special guests,” he told the slave, with a wink.

  Then he settled himself on a couch and looked at me, still standing before him. “Do you like history, boy?” he asked. “And please sit down. Take this stool.”

  “Yes, sir, I do like history. But being who I am, I cannot escape it, so it is all to the best that I do like it.”

  “Being who you are? And who is that?”

  Anicetus looked at me, indicating, Tell him what you know, what you have been taught.

  “I have a double dose of Marc Antony, having him for both a great-grandfather and a great-great-grandfather, and a single dose of Augustus, having him for a great-great-grandfather. I have also a dose of the noble Germanicus, and—”

  He laughed. “Enough, enough. It is a wonder your blood flows at all—with all those doses I would think it clogged.”

  “Sometimes it feels that way, sir.”

  Now the slave appeared with tall goblets filled with fresh juice of the pomegranate, mixed with crushed apples. A tray inlaid with mother-of-pearl followed, heaped with dark-skinned grapes.

  “You will have to clear it out. Filter out all those ghosts and keep only that which is you.”

  “I fear it is impossible to strain out one’s ancestors, sir.”

  He sighed and put his goblet down on the veined marble top of a three-legged table. “Wise beyond your years, then. But make it so that your descendants brag of your blood that flows in their veins. Look forward, not backward.”

  I felt disappointment seep through me. Did that mean he had erased all the things I was longing to hear about? I sipped my juice and made a study of looking down into it.

  “Of course, at my age I can only look backward. But for the longest time I tried not to,” he said.

  Relief! He was going to share his past!

  “Still, Iphicrates had a saying—‘My family history begins with me, but yours ends with you.’ It’s not a bad motto to have,” he went on.

  “Tell me about Augustus!” I asked. That seemed safest. No one could take umbrage at that, or suspect a trap, or hesitate to speak freely.

  “Augustus . . .” He cocked his head and ransacked his memory. He had fine features—a thin nose, high cheekbones, shapely lips. If I squinted, I could make him younger and see what a handsome man he had been. He looked nothing like the bust of the beefy Antony. He must have gotten his features from Cleopatra. It was impossible to tell what color his hair had been, or whether it was curly, straight, thick, or thin. It had vanished into only a few sandy wisps around his ears.

  “Augustus . . . I first knew him as an enemy, the man who killed my parents and stole my country and took me as a prisoner and spoil of war to Rome. I was only ten years old then, and although in truth he was quite young himself, he seemed like a monster to me. I did not know what he would do to us—to my sister and brother and me—but I never imagined he would let us live. For months we waited to see what he would do to us, kept guarded in a villa outside Rome.” He stopped and helped himself to one of the grapes. Clearly the memory was such a distant one that reliving it was not threatening, and he savored his treat. It seemed rude to interrupt, so I waited.

  He resumed. “It was the middle of summer, the hottest time of the year, when we were summoned to be in his Triumph. His henchmen brought out heavy gold chains and weighed us down with them. We were instructed to walk slowly before his chariot. For hours, it seemed, we walked through walls of people staring at us, behind the canvas with the painting of our mother. But there were no jeers for us; there were cheers for Augustus but silence for us. When the procession reached the foot of the Capitoline Hill, I took a deep breath and braced myself. We would now be separated and taken to the dungeon and killed, like all royal prisoners of war paraded in a Triumph.”

  He was recounting this so calmly. Perhaps the terror of it had worn away, even the memory of the terror.

  “I felt our mother and father watching us. I prayed to be strong, not to disgrace them with crying or cowardice. And then—Augustus stepped out of his chariot, came over to us, and took our hands. He had us march up to the Temple of the Capitoline Jupiter with him, help lay his Triumphal laurel crown at his altar. Then he commanded one of his slaves, ‘Take them to the house.’ He put his hands, his very gentle hands, on my shoulder. ‘You have a new home now,’ he said.”

  He reached for another grape and settled himself farther back on the couch. “And that is how we came to live with Octavia, his sister, in a house full of cousins. Our two half sisters were near our age—Antonia the Elder and Selene and I were around ten and Antonia the Younger was eight; little Ptolemy was youngest of all, at six.” He took a long drink from his goblet. “So the five of us became close. Octavia was the kindest stepmother I could have imagined. She welcomed us and never treated us differently even though we must have been a constant reminder of her husband’s desertion.”

  “What were they like, my grandmothers?” I asked. I was descended from both Antonias.

  He smiled. “Both admirable in every way, especially Antonia the Younger, who was also comely to look upon. I am sorry that you just missed knowing her. She died just about the time you were born.” He looked at Anicetus. “Did you not tell me that he was born the year Caligula became emperor?”

  “Indeed he was,” confirmed Anicetus. “In December.”

  “The lady Antonia died in September,” said Alexander.

  Tactfully he did not say how she died—by her own hand, although some said Caligula had poisoned
her. In any case, she had been so disgusted by the degradation she saw around her that she was eager to leave and join her beloved husband Drusus, waiting for her almost fifty years.

  “What happened to all of you afterward?” I asked. I knew that Selene had been wed to Juba of Mauretania and become queen there. But the rest?

  He related Selene’s marriage, then added, “Of all of us, she tried hardest to keep the Ptolemaic dynasty alive. She built a city much like Alexandria, calling it Caesarea, and issued coins with her name of Cleopatra on them. But, in the end, her lineage did not last. There are no descendants of Antony and Cleopatra left. My brother Ptolemy died young and unwed. Augustus married me to a plebian woman, the best way to ensure my family line would cease being aristocratic. But in any case, we had no children. I never sought a place in Roman politics; instead I joined the army and served with Drusus in Germany.”

  He pulled himself to a sitting position. “I made an honorable name for myself; I served with distinction and had the privilege of being in the army that crossed over the Rhine, although we could not hold the territory beyond it.” He laughed. “Even that was a long time ago. When I was sixty, I retired. That was when Tiberius was emperor. Then I faded into obscurity, so that by now you had a hard time finding me.”

  “You have seen so much,” I said in awe.

  “Yes, the procession of life that has passed before me is a long one. I saw Augustus grow old and die; likewise with Tiberius; I have outlived all my siblings and cousins. I feel as old as one of the mummies in my native country. I fancy I must look like one, too.”

  “Oh, no, sir!”

  “You flatter me, cousin. But the gift of flattery is not a bad one to have. Well, I have survived and even had a commendable life. I trust my mother, if she is looking, is satisfied with that.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “Mother, we cannot all be rulers.”