Roman Games by Bruce MacBain Read Free Book Online

Doggedly he returned to his search.

Chapter Five

    The Nones of Germanicus. Day one of the Roman Games.
The second hour of the day.

    In the early morning haze a holiday crowd was already gathering in the Forum Romanum, elbowing the homeless who huddled there nightly.
    In Pliny’s mansion on the fashionable Esquiline Hill, the atrium was empty of clients; no time for them today. Instead, slaves tugged and pulled at the buckles of his cuirass while he sucked in his stomach, obedient to the prefect’s orders to appear in full fig. A civilian to his fingertips, Pliny hadn’t worn the loathsome thing in a dozen years and knew that he looked ridiculous encased in those sculpted bronze muscles. When he had served his military tribunate as an army accountant he had never drawn his sword in anger. He finally had to banish Calpurnia from the room when her praise of his dashing figure became too much to bear.
    * * *

    The Roman Games, inaugurated five centuries earlier, were the most ancient festival in the sacred calendar. Amid clouds of incense and the wailing of flutes the procession wound its stately way through the Forum and up the steep slope to the top of the Capitoline Hill and the triple temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Near the head, Pliny, puffing and sweating in thirty pounds of burnished bronze, struggled to keep step with his chief and the other prefects, vice prefects, magistrates, and ex-magistrates of the Populus Romanus who trooped behind the imperial family. Following these worthies marched, or in some cases danced, the priestly colleges: the college of Pontifices, whose chief was the emperor himself; the Fifteen Sacrificers, who interpreted the Sibylline Oracles; the Seven Banqueters; the Bird-Watchers; the Brethren of the Soil; the Leaping Priests of Mars, brandishing their spears; the Etruscan Gut-Gazers; and the Vestal Virgins, the keepers of the sacred flame, their faces shrouded by their long veils.
    But Pliny’s eye took in more than the pageantry and gaiety. The parade route was lined with red-plumed Praetorian Guardsmen, their oval shields decorated with moons and stars and scorpions. And beyond them, he knew, the city prefect’s plainclothesmen circulated in the crowd, ears stretched to catch any treasonous word.
    Behind the priests marched the five hundred or so members of the Senate, Pliny’s friends and colleagues, grave as statues, in purple-striped togas and golden laurel wreaths. And last of all came the pageant’s star performers: a dozen splendid, unblemished white oxen, hung with garlands, horns gilded, going placidly to their deaths.
    A more cynical mind than Pliny’s might have drawn an uncomfortable parallel between oxen and senators. Were the latter not gilded victims too, reserved for a later slaughter? Such thoughts may have lurked behind some of those grave faces, but not his. Senator Gaius Plinius Secundus had by now nearly succeeded in putting last night’s bizarre episode out of his mind like a bad dream.
    Cynicism was simply not in Pliny’s nature. He was an honest man, who never lied to anyone but himself. He needed to believe that his emperor was worthy of him, and to maintain this article of faith he could excuse much. It was lack of funds that made Domitian greedy and fear of assassination that made him cruel. Add to that the crowd of flatterers and informers who brought out the worst in him, and one could understand how a good emperor had gradually gone bad. Then what should decent men do? With so many bad men to serve the emperor ill, all the more reason why good men should serve him well. And as for those senators who insisted upon throwing their lives away in futile acts of defiance, what good had they done themselves or anyone else at the end of the day?
    From the top of the Capitolium, where the procession halted, the whole glorious city lay spread out before him. The greatest city in the history of the world, built by blood and iron, but equally by a native