Andivius Hedulio: Adventures of a Roman Nobleman in the Days of the Empire Part 48

I was asleep almost as soon as I lay down.

I awoke with a terrific headache and an annoying buzzing in my ears, awoke only partially, not knowing where I was or why and without any distinct recollections of recent events. My first sensation was discomfort, not only from the pain of my headache, but also from the heat of the sunrays beating on me, and that despite the fact that I could feel a strong cool breeze ruffling my hair and beard.

I sat up and looked about me. Agathemer was snoring. The sun was not low; in fact, at that time of the year, it was near its highest. I had slept till noon!

Then, all of a sudden I realized that the s.h.i.+p was wholly strange to me and that it was headed not southeast, but northwest. That realization shocked me broad awake. At the same instant I saw the s.h.i.+pmaster approaching. He was not Orontides, nor was he at all like him. He had small feet, was knock-kneed, tall, lean, had a hatchet-face and red hair.

"Awake at last!" he commented. "You lads must have dined gloriously last night. You don't look half yourselves, yet."

He stared at me, and at Agathemer, who had waked, into much the same sort of daze in which I had been at first.

"Neptune's trident!" the s.h.i.+pmaster exclaimed. "You two aren't the two lads I was to convoy! Who are you and how did you get here?"

"We were hunting for our s.h.i.+p after dark," Agathemer said, "and somebody hailed us. We asked whether it was Orontides and the answer that came back was: 'Aye, Aye!' We were pretty thoroughly drunk and were glad to be helped aboard and shown our beds. That's all I know."

"Kingdom of Pluto!" the s.h.i.+pmaster cried, "my name's Gerontides, not Orontides. I heard your question, but you were so drunk I never knew the difference: probably I shouldn't have known the difference if you had been sober. I was on the lookout for two lads much like you two who had part paid me to carry them to Genoa. They'll be in a fix."

"'Bout s.h.i.+p," said Agathemer, "and put back to Ostia. You can't be far on your way yet. We'll pay you what you ask to set us ash.o.r.e at Ostia."

"I wouldn't 'bout s.h.i.+p," said Gerontides, "for twenty gold pieces."

"We'll pay you thirty," said Agathemer.

"Don't bid any higher, son," Gerontides laughed. "If you were made of gold, to Genoa you go. I've a bigger stake in a quick landing at Genoa than any sum you could name would overbalance. Best be content!"

And content we had to be, no arguments, no entreaties, nothing would move him.

"I'll be fair with you," he said. "The lads I took you for had paid me all I had asked them except one gold piece each on landing at Genoa. That's all you'll have to pay me."

Nothing would budge him from his resolution. Agathemer in despair drowned his misery in flageolet playing. It seemed to comfort him and certainly comforted me. The crew were delighted. After a voyage as easy and pleasant as our cruise with Maganno, we landed on the eighth day before the Ides of September, at Genoa, paid our two gold pieces and set about getting out of that city as quickly as might be. We avoided, of course, the posting- station where we had changed horses while in couriers' trappings. But there was a posting-station at each gate of Genoa and we, having talked over all possibilities in the intervals of flageolet playing, were for Dertona. We had little trouble in buying a used travelling-carriage.

Horses we did not have to wait long for, as hiring teams were luckily plentiful that day and Imperial agents scarce. Off we set for Milan.

We were in haste but there was no hurrying postillions on those mountain roads. We nooned at some nameless change-house and were glad to make the thirty-six miles to Libarium by dusk. The next day was consumed in covering the thirty-five miles to Dertona. From there on we travelled, in general down hill, and so quicker, but not much quicker, so that a third day entire was needed for making the fifty-one miles to Placentia.

Placentia, a second time, was unlucky for us. It might have been worse, for we did not again encounter Gratillus, or anyone else who might have recognized me. But I made a fool of myself. I am not going to tell what happened; Agathemer never reproached me for my folly, not even in our bitterest misery; but I reproached myself daily for nearly three years; I am still ashamed of myself and I do not want to set down my idiotic behavior.

Let it suffice, that, through no fault of Agathemer's, but wholly through my fault, we were suspected, interrogated, arrested, stripped, our brand- marks and scourge-scars observed and ourselves haled before a magistrate.

To him Agathemer told the same tale he had told to Tarrutenus Spinellus.

It might have served had we been dealing with a man of like temper, for travellers from Aneona for Aquileia regularly pa.s.sed through Placentia turning there from northwest along the road from Aneona to northeast along the road to Aquileia.

But Stabilius Norba.n.u.s was a very different kind of man.

"Your story may be true," he said, "but it impresses me as an ingenious lie. If I believed it I'd not send men like you, with their records written in welts on their backs, with any convoy, no matter how strict, on the long journey to Aquileia, on which you'd have countless opportunities of escape. I do not believe your tale. Yet I'll pay this much attention to it: I'll write to Vedius Aquileiensis and ask him if he owned two slaves answering your descriptions and lost them through unexplained disappearance or known crimping by Dalmatian pirates at about the time you indicate.

"Meantime I'll commit you to an _ergastulum_ [Footnote: See Note H.] where you'll be herded with your kind, all safely chained, so that no escape is possible, and all doing some good to the state by some sort of productive labor. A winter at the flour-mills will do you two good."

Our winter at the mills may have benefited us, but it was certainly, with its successor at similar mills, one of the two most wretched winters of my life. And Agathemer, I think, suffered every bit as acutely as I. We were not chained, except for a few days and about twice as many more nights; as soon as the manager of the _ergastulum_ felt that he knew us he let us go unchained like the rest of his charges.

This was because of the structure of the _ergastulum_. It was located in the cellars of one of the six or more granaries of Placentia, which has, near each city gate, an extensive public store-house. The granary under which we were immured was that near the Cremona gate. Above ground it was a series of rectangles about courtyards each just big enough to accommodate four carts, all unloading or loading at once. It was everywhere of four stories of bin-rooms, all built of coa.r.s.e hard-faced rubble concrete. The cellars were very extensive, and not all on one level, being cunningly planned to be everywhere about the same depth underground. Where their floor-levels altered the two were joined by short flights of three, four or five stone steps, under a vaulted doorway, in the thick part.i.tion walls.

Each cellar-floor was about four yards below the ground level so that a tall man, standing on a tall man's shoulders, could barely reach with his outstretched fingers the tip of the sill of one of the low windows. These windows, each about a yard high and two yards broad, were heavily barred with gratings of round iron bars as thick as a man's wrist, set too close together for a boy's head to pa.s.s between them, and each two bars hot- welded at each intersection, so that each grating was practically one piece of wrought iron, made before the granary was built and with the ends of each bar set deep in the flinty old rubble concrete. The inmates need not be chained, as no escape was possible through the windows, though raw night air, rain, snow at times and the icy winter blasts came in on us through them.

Similarly no escape was possible up the one entrance to the cellars, which was through an inner courtyard, from which led down a stone stair with four sets of heavy doors; one at the bottom, one at each end of a landing lighted by a heavily barred window, and one at the top. Between the inner and outer courtyard were two sets of heavier doors and two equally heavy were at the street entrance of the outer courtyard. On the stair-landing was the chained-up porter-accountant seated under the window on a backless stool by a small, heavy accountant's table on which stood a tall _clepsydra_ by his big account-book. Checking the hours by the _clepsydra_, he entered the name of every human being pa.s.sing, up or down that stair, even the name of the manager every time he came in or went out. By him always stood a wild Scythian, armed with a spear, girt with a sabre, and with a short bow and a quiver of short arrows hanging over his back. Similar Scythians guarded the doorways, a pair of them to each door.

The slide by which the grain was lowered into the _ergastulum_, the other slide by which the flour, coa.r.s.e siftings and bran were hauled up, were similarly guarded. Escape was made so difficult by these precautions that, while I was there, no one escaped out of the three hundred wretches confined in the _ergastulum_.

There we suffered sleepless nights in our hard bunks, under worn and tattered quilts, tormented by every sort of vermin. Swarming with vermin we toiled through the days, from the first hint of light to its last glimmer, s.h.i.+vering in our ragged tunics, our bare feet numb on the chilly pavements. We were cold, hungry, underfed on horribly revolting food, reviled, abused, beaten and always smarting from old welts or new weals of the whip-lashes.

It was all a nightmare: the toil, the las.h.i.+ngs, if our monotonous walk around our mill, eight men to a mill, two to each bar, did not suit the notions of the room-overseer; the dampness, the cold, the vermin, the pain of our unhealed bruises, the scanty food and its disgusting uneatableness.

The food seemed the worst feature of our misery. So, in fact, it appears to have seemed to our despicable companions. Certainly, of the food they complained more than of the toil, the cold, the vermin, the malignity of the overseers or even of the barbarity of the Scythian guards. Anyhow their fury at the quality of their food brought to me and Agathemer an alleviation of our misery. For some hotheaded wretches, goaded beyond endurance, jerked the bars of their mill from their sockets and with them felled, beat to death and even brained the cook and his two a.s.sistants.

After their corpses had been removed, the floor swabbed up and the murderers turned over to the gloating Scythians to be done to death by impalement, Scythian fas.h.i.+on, with all the tortures Scythian ferocity could devise, the manager went from cellar to cellar, all through the _ergastulum_, enquiring if any prisoner could cook. No one volunteered, and, when he questioned more than a few, everyone denied any knowledge of cookery.

A second time he made the tour of his domain, promising any cook a warm tunic, a bunk with a thick mattress and two heavy quilts, all the food he could eat and two helpers; the helpers to have similar indulgences. On this second round, in our cellar, a Lydian, nearer to being fat than any prisoner in the _ergastulum_, admitted that he could make and bake bread, but vowed that he could not do anything else connected with cooking.

Spurred on by his confession and tempted by the offers of better clothing and bedding and more food, also by the memories of Agathemer's cookery the winter before, I blurted out that Agathemer could not make bread, but could do everything else needed in cookery. Agathemer, after one reproachful glance at me, admitted that he was a cook of a sort, but declared that he was almost as bad a cook as the wretch just murdered. The overseer bade him go to the kitchen and told him he might select a helper; the baker would have been the other helper. As helper Agathemer, naturally, selected me.

After that we suffered less. The slaves acclaimed Agathemer's cooking; for, if their rations were still scanty by order of the watchful manager, at least their food was edible. Far from being ultimately killed, like our predecessors, and continually threatened and reviled, we were blessed by our fellow-slaves. We slept better, in spite of the vermin, on our gra.s.s- stuffed mattresses, under our foul quilts, we s.h.i.+vered less in our thicker tunics. We were not too tired to discuss, at times, the oddities of our vicissitudes, to congratulate each other on being, at least, alive, on my not being suspected of being what I actually was, and, above all, on the safety of our old, blackened, greasy, worthless-looking, amulet-bags, with their precious contents. To be reduced to carrying food to three hundred of the vilest rascals alive was a horrible fate for a man who had, two years before, been a wealthy n.o.bleman, but it was far better than death as a suspected conspirator. And Agathemer was hopeful of our future, of survival, of escape, of comfort somewhere after he had sold another emerald, ruby, or opal. Nothing could, for any length of time, dim or cloud the light of Agathemer's buoyancy of disposition.

BOOK III

DIVERSITIES

CHAPTER XXII

THE MUTINEERS

Our promotion from the mills to the kitchen took place early in March of the year when Manius Acilius Glabrio, after an interval of thirty-four years since his first consuls.h.i.+p, was consul for the second time and had as nominal a.s.sociate Commodus, preening himself, for the fifth time, on the highest office in the Republic, which he had done little to deserve, and while he held it, did less to justify himself in possessing, since he left most of the duties of the consuls.h.i.+p to Glabrio, as he left most of the Princ.i.p.ate to Perennis, his Prefect of the Praetorium. All of this, of course, we learnt later in the year; for, inside our prison, we knew nothing of what went on in Placentia, let alone of what went on in Italy and in Rome itself.

We had been cooking for more than three months, when, about the middle of June, our attention in the cellars was distracted from doling out food, as that of the wretches we served was distracted from eating their scanty rations, by an unusual uproar in the street outside of our windows. We could descry, in the morning sunlight, military trappings, tattered cloaks, ragged tunics, dingy kilt-straps, sheenless helmets, unkempt beards, and brawny arms in the crowds which packed the narrow streets. The mob seemed made up of rough frontier soldiery, and we marvelled at the presence of such men in Italy.

The uproar increased and we heard it not only from the streets but from the courtyards; we could not make out any words, but the tone of the tumultuous growls was menacing and imperative. After no long interval the doors at the foot of the one stair burst open and there entered to us three centurions, indubitably from distant frontier garrisons, accompanied by six or seven _optiones_ [Footnote: See Note F.] and a dozen or more legionaries. The privates and corporals stood silent while one of the three sergeants addressed us:

"No one shall be compelled to join us. Every man of you shall have his unforced choice. All who join us shall be free. Such as prefer to remain where they are sit down! All who select to join us stand up!"

If any man sat down I did not see him. Through the door we flowed without jostling or crowding, for at the first appearance of a tendency to push forward the sergeant's big voice bellowed a warning and order reigned. Up the stair we poured, pa.s.sing on the landing the mute, motionless porter- accountant and his Scythian guard, cowed immobile between two burly frontier centurions; out into the courtyard we streamed, more and more following till the courtyard was packed. The whole movement was made in silence, without a cheer or yell, for, like the porter and the Scythians, the most unconscionable villains in our _ergastulum_ quailed before the truculence of the frontier sergeants.

In the outer court, at the suggestion of one of those same centurions, every man of us drank his fill at the well-curb, pairs of the legionaries taking turns at hauling up the buckets and watering us, much as if we had been thirsty workhorses. After they had made sure that none had missed a chance to quench his thirst, they roughly marshalled us into some semblance of order and out into the street we trooped, where we found ourselves between two detachments of frontier soldiers, one filling the street ahead of us from house-wall to house-wall, the other similarly blocking the street behind us. Between them we were marched to the market- square, where we had plenty of room, for we had it all to ourselves, the soldiery having cleared it and a squad of them blocking the entrance of each street leading into it, so that the townsfolk were kept out and we herded among the frontier soldiery.

Their centurions, to the number of eighteen, stood together on the stone platform from which orators were accustomed to address or harangue such crowds as might a.s.semble in the market-square. Before it we packed ourselves as closely as we could, eager to hear. About us idled the soldiery not occupied in guarding the approach to the square.

One of the sergeants made a speech to us, explaining our liberation and their presence in Placentia. He called us "comrades" and began his harangue with a long and virulent denunciation of Perennis, the Prefect of the Palace. Perennis, he declared, had been a slave of the vilest origin and had won his freedom and the favor of the Palace authorities and of the Emperor not by merit but by rank favoritism. He maintained that Perennis, as Prefect of the Palace, had gained such an ascendancy over Commodus that besides his proper duties as guardian of the Emperor's personal safety, surely a charge sufficiently heavy to burden any one man and sufficiently honorable to satisfy any reasonable man, his master had been enticed into entrusting to Perennis the management of the entire Empire, so that he alone controlled promotions in and appointments to the navy, army and treasury services. In this capacity, as sole minister and representative of the sovereign, Perennis had enriched himself by taking bribes from all from whom he could extort bribes. By his venality he had gone far towards ruining the navy and army, which were by now more than half officered by hopeless incompetents who had bought their appointments. As a result the legionaries garrisoning the lines along the Euphrates, the Carpathians, the Danube, the Rhine and the Wall, since they were badly led, had suffered undeserved mishandling from the barbarians attacking them; and even the garrisons of mountain districts like Armenia, Pisidia, and Lusitania had been mauled by the bands of outlaws. He instanced the rebellion of Maternus as a result of the incompetence and venality of Perennis.