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

by Edward Lucas White

CHAPTER XXXII

PHORBAS

Olynthides had said to me:

"I make it a point always to forget the names of the slaves I buy for cash without any guarantees and resell the same way. I have as bad a memory for names as any man alive and I help my bad memory to be as much worse as I can. I'll forget your name in a few days. I am not sure I remember it now. What is it?"

I was ready for him, for I had made up my mind to change my name again and had selected my new name.

"Phorbas" I answered.

"Oh, yes!" he ruminated, "Phorbas, to be sure. I should have said Florus or Foslius or something like that. Phorbas! I'll remember Phorbas till after you are sold and the cash in my hands and you and your new master out of sight. Then I'll forget that too, like all the rest."

As Phorbas, Phorbas the Art Connoisseur, I began my life with Nonius. He was domiciled in a palace of a residence on the Carinae, which he had leased for the short term of his proposed stay in Rome. There I was lodged in a really magnificent apartment, with a private bath, a luxurious bedroom, a smaller bedroom for the slave detailed to wait on me, a tiny triclinium and a jewel of a sitting-room, gorgeous with statuettes and paintings, crammed with objects of art and walled with a virtuoso's selection of the best books of the best possible materials and workmanship.

There I spent some happy days. Nonius had told me I might go out all I pleased. I had replied that I preferred to remain indoors until we set out for Carthage. He smiled, nodded and said:

"I understand: do as you like."

I passed my time most agreeably, except for several intrusions by Libo's wife, Rufia Clatenna. She was a tall, raw-boned, lean woman, with unmanageable hair which would not stay crimped, a hatchet face, too much nose and too little chin, a stringy neck, very large, red, knuckly hands and big flat feet. She had a mania for economy and close bargains, seemed to regard her husband as an easy mark for swindlers and to be certain that he had been cheated when he bought me. She thought herself an art-expert, whereas she had no sound knowledge of any branch of art, no memory for what she had heard and seen, and no taste whatever. To demonstrate that her husband had made a bad bargain when he bought me she bored me with endless questions concerning the contents of her domicile, of which she understood almost nothing, and concerning famous composers, painters, sculptors and architects, as to whom she confused the few names, dates and works she thought she knew about.

Nonius came on us in his atrium while she was putting me through a questionnaire on every statue, painting and carving in it. The first time he saw me alone he said, smiling:

"You mustn't mind her; I put up with her, you can, too."

When he came into my apartment and told me he meant to set off from Rome next day, I ventured to express my puzzlement that he had bought me and never mentioned to me, since I came into his possession, any of the subjects on which he had questioned me and for knowledge of which he had, presumably, wanted me.

"Oh," he said, "I didn't buy you for myself. I know very little about art and music and am no connoisseur at all. I bought you for my cousin Pomponius Falco. He is as much interested in such matters as any man in Africa. He is richer than I and you'll find him the best possible master. He'll be at Carthage when we get there and I'll resell you to him soon after we land."

Nonius and Clatenna had no children, but doted on her sister's son, a lad of not much over twenty, lean as his aunt, but small boned and not unshapely. He was not, however, handsome, for he had a pasty, grayish complexion, thin lank hair, almost no beard, and a long nose suggesting a proboscis. His name was Rufius Libo, and he was Nonius Libo's heir. In his favor Nonius made a will a few days before we left Rome, leaving him his entire estate except a jointure to Clatenna, endowments to some municipal institutions in his home towns, legacies to various friends and manumission to faithful slaves. Of this will he had several duplicates made and properly witnessed and sealed. One of these he left on deposit in Rome; another he despatched to Carthage by a special messenger by way of Rhegium, Messana, the length of Sicily to Lilybaeum and thence by sea to Carthage; and he gave one each to Clatenna and to Rufius.

When he gave orders for the despatch of the copy of his will by the special messenger I was astonished, as I assumed that we were to travel by the same route. But I found that he meant to sail all the way from the Tiberside water-front of Rome to Carthage. This amazed me. And not unnaturally. For we Romans generally dislike or even abhor the sea and sail it as little as possible, making our journeys as much as we can by land and as little as may be by water, choosing any detour by land which will shorten what crossings of the sea cannot be avoided.

Among the few Romans whom I have known who enjoy sea voyages I count myself. Of all of them Nonius outclassed the rest. He worshiped the water and was happiest when afloat and well out to sea. He told me that he had spent more money on his private yacht than on any of his residences, and, when I saw her, I believed him. A larger, better designed, better equipped, better manned, better supplied, better appointed private yacht I never beheld. His rowers kept perfect time and made top speed all down the Tiber, her crew set sail like man-of-warsmen, her officers were pattern seamen and got the very most speed on their way from every condition of wind and weather. Rufius and Clatenna, while not as good sailors as Nonius and I, were notably good sailors and we had a very pleasant voyage until we were almost in sight of Carthage. Then we encountered a really terrific storm.

Now I am not going into any details of our disaster. I do not know whether all writers of memoirs get shipwrecked or all survivors of shipwrecks write reminiscences, but I am certain that of all the countless memoirs I have read in the course of my life, ninety-nine out of every hundred contained one or more accounts of shipwrecks, narrated with the minutest detail and dwelling on the horrors, agonies, miseries, fears, discomforts and uncertainties of the survivors and narrators with every circumstance calculated to harrow up their readers' feelings. I could write a similar meticulous narrative of my only shipwreck, and it was sufficiently uncomfortable, terrifying, ghastly and hideous to glut a reader as greedy of horrors as could be, but I am going to pass over it as lightly as possible and summarize it as briefly as I may.

Suffice it to set down here that we were not driven on any rock or reef or shoal nor did we collide with any other ship. Laboring heavily in the open sea, straining on the crests and wallowing in the troughs of the stupendous billows, the yacht, even as carefully built a yacht as Libo's, began to leak appallingly, the inrush of the water surpassed the utmost capacity of the pumps and the most frantic efforts of the men at them; the vessel settled lower and lower, labored more and more heavily and was manifestly about to founder.

The officers were capable men, the small boats sturdy and their crews and steersmen skillful and confident. Clatenna was brave and Libo magnificent. He kept his head, dominated his officers, and insisted that Rufius and I should embark in a different boat from that to which he and Clatenna trusted themselves. He personally saw to it that Clatenna and Rufius had, on their persons, each their copy of his will.

Both boats were successfully launched, and, as we drew away from the doomed ship, we saw a third and fourth put off with other valued members of his household. While a fifth and sixth were being swung overboard we saw, from the top of a huge swell, the yacht go under and vanish; saw, when we next rose on the chine of a billow, the water dotted with spars, wreckage and swimmers; saw, five or six times more, the three other boats: and then many times, high on a vast wave, beheld only the waste of lifeless waters, without boat or swimmer.

All night we floated and, not long after sunrise, we were seen and rescued by a trading ship from Carales in Sardinia, bound for Carthage.

At Carthage we were soon in the palace formerly Libo's and now the property of Rufius. He, on succeeding to his uncle's estate, at once rewarded with a huge donation the steersman of the boat in which we had been saved, saying that the other steersmen did their best, but that, if the others had been as dexterous as he, his aunt and uncle would not have perished by so deplorable and so untimely a death.

Within a few days he, now my owner by inheritance, sold me to Pomponius
Falco, as Nonius had intended to do himself.

Falco liked me at first sight and I him. He was a man between thirty-five and forty years of age, a natural born bachelor and art connoisseur. He was of medium height, of stout build, with curly black hair and a curly black beard, a swarthy complexion, a bullet head, a bull neck, a huge chest and plump arms and legs. He was by no means unhandsome in appearance and very jovial, good-humored, and good-natured; manifestly fond of all the good things of life and able to discriminate and appreciate the best.

For several days after I came into his possession I was his dearest toy. He spent most of his waking hours conversing with me about music and musicians, poetry and poets, literature and authors, paintings and painters, statuary and sculptors, architecture and architects, gems, ivories, embroideries, textiles, furniture, pottery and even autographs and autograph collecting. He seemed to appraise me an expert on all such lines and to be well pleased with his purchase.

Certainly I was as well clothed, fed, lodged and attended as if I had been his twin-brother.

Before he had owned me many days Falco said to me:

"Phorbas, I've been puzzling about you. You are a slave and you were sold to poor Libo and by Rufius to me as a Greek. Yet you have none of the appearance nor behavior of a Greek nor yet of a slave. You look and act and talk like a freeman born and a full-blooded Roman, and a noble at that. Please explain."

Now, of course, in imagining all the forms in which I might be assaulted by the perils which beset me, I had foreseen just such a query as this utterance of Falco's involved and I had pondered and rehearsed my answer. I realized that I must be ready with a reply wholly plausible because entirely consonant with the facts of our social life, as they existed, so that no one could take any exception to it. I thought I had framed such a reply.

"You know how it is," I answered easily. "A Roman master buys a young and comely Greek handmaid. In due course she has a daughter, legally also a slave and nominally a Greek, yet half Roman. When she is grown, if she happens to be comely and the property of a master like most masters, she has a daughter, a slave and spoken of as a Greek, yet only a quarter Greek. If she has a similar daughter, that daughter, a slave and called a Greek, is only one-eighth Greek. I conceive, from all I know, that my great grandmother, grandmother and mother were such slave women. I, a slave and ostensibly a Greek, am fifteen-sixteenths Roman noble, by ancestry, according to my reckoning. No wonder my descent shows in my bearing, manner and conversation."

This answer was, actually, not so far from the facts, my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother had, certainly, been Roman noblewomen, daughters indeed, each of one of the oldest and longest-lineaged houses of our nobility; and, like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather had been a Roman nobleman. But his father, my great-great-great-grandfather, had been a freed-man, manumitted in the days of Nero, acquiring great wealth, attaining equestrian rank during the last years of Nero's reign, and vastly enriched during the confusion of the civil wars, marrying a young and wealthy widow after Vespasian was firmly established at Rome by the crushing of the insurrection of Claudius Civilis.

Probably the general consonance of my answer with the facts made my utterance of it more convincing. Certainly it appealed to Falco.

"Just about what I conjectured," he said, smiling. "And will you tell me in what part of Italy and on what estate you were born and how you came by your air of aristocratic culture and by your marvellous dilettantism?"

"I know what I know and am what I am," I replied, "because I was, from childhood, treated just as if a son instead of a slave; pampered, indulged and made much of. That lasted till I was more than full-grown.

"The misfortunes of the family to which I belonged came so suddenly that I was not manumitted, as I should have been had my master had so much as a day's warning of his downfall. I was sold to a fool and a brute, as you have probably inferred from my back. The marks of his barbarity which I bear, and my lasting grief for the calamity of the household in which I was born, make me unwilling to tell you anything of my past previous to my purchase from Olynthides by Nonius Libo."

"Well," he said, "your feeling is natural and I shall not urge my curiosity on you. I mean to indulge you and even pamper you; mean to endeavor to indulge you and pamper you so you will feel more indulged and pampered than ever in your life, I'll make a new will, at once, leaving you your freedom and a handsome property. I expect to live out a long life, all my kin have been healthy and long-lived. But one can never be certain of living and I mean to run no risks of your having any more troubles. You deserve ease and comfort. And you shall have them if I can arrange it. I love you like a born brother and mean to treat you as well as if you were my twin."

The year in which Commodus killed the two lions, each with one blow of his trifling-looking little palm-wood club, in which year I was sold out of the Choragium, and purchased by Nonius, in which I crossed the sea, was wrecked and saved and resold to Falco, was the nine hundred and forty- first year of the City [Footnote: 188 A.D.] and the ninth of the reign of Commodus, the year in which the consuls were Allius Fuscianus and Duillius Silanus, each for the second time. In Africa, with Falco, I spent that and the following year very comfortably and happily, for I was as well clothed, fed, lodged and tended as Falco himself. I liked him, even loved him, and I felt perfectly safe.

The climate of Africa agreed with me, and I liked the fare, especially the many kinds of fruit which we seldom see in Rome and then not in their best condition, and some of which we never see in Italy at all. I admired the scenery, and I delighted in the cities, not only Carthage and Utica, but both Hippo Regius and Hippo Diarrhytus, and also Hadrumetum, Tacape, Cirta and Theveste, and even such mere towns as Lambaesis and Thysdrus, which last has an amphitheater second only to the Colosseum itself. They all had fine amphitheaters, magnificent circuses, gorgeous theaters and sumptuous public hot baths. Not one but had a fine library, a creditable public picture-gallery, and many noble groups of statuary, with countless fine statues adorning the public buildings, streets and parks. The society of all these places was delightfully cultured, easy and unaffected. I revelled in it and could not have been happier except that I never heard from Vedia or Tanno, let alone had a letter from either. And I wrote to both and sent off letter after letter to one or the other. For it seemed to me that a letter in this form could not excite any suspicion.

"Phorbas gives greeting to Opsitius, and informs him that after he had been sold by Olynthides to Nonius Libo, he survived the sinking of his owner's yacht and was sold by Libo's heir to Pomponius Falco, in whose retinue he now is. Farewell."

I sent off, at least once a season, a letter like this to both Tanno and Vedia. No word from either ever reached me. I could but conjecture that all my letters had miscarried.

Meanwhile, besides being reminded of it each time I wrote to Tanno or Vedia, I did not forget that I was a proscribed fugitive, my life forfeit if I were detected. I conceived that my best disguise was to dress, act and talk as much as possible in the character of dilettante art expert and music-lover, which I had assumed. Falco treated me, as he had prophesied, almost as a brother. I had a luxurious apartment in each of his town residences and country villas, and a retinue of servants: valet, bath- attendant, room-keeper, masseur, reader, messenger, runner and a litter with three shifts of powerful bearers. Everything Falco could think of in the way of clothing, furniture and art objects was showered on me and my slightest hint of a wish was quickly gratified. Also Falco supplied me a lavish allowance of cash. Therefore I could gratify any whim. Besides, my amulet-bag was intact and had in it all the gems which Agathemer had originally placed there, except only the emerald Bulla had sold for me.

I thought up everything I could do to make myself look completely a Greek virtuoso and as un-Roman-looking as possible. I patronized every complexion-specialist, friseur, perukier, manicurist and fashionable barber in that part of the world. I bought every hair tonic for sale in the colony. Between lotions and expert manipulation I succeeded in growing a thick curly beard, covering my chest as far as the lower end of my breast-bone and a thick head of hair so long that, even when elaborately frizzed and curled, my oiled and scented locks fell as far down my back as my beard spread on my bosom. Nothing could have made me look more Corinthian and less Roman.

I wore the gaudiest clothing I could find; tunics and cloaks of pure silk and of the brightest or most effeminate hues; crimson, emerald-green, peacock-green, grass-green, apple-green, sea-green, sapphire-blue, sky- blue, turquoise-blue, saffron, orange, amethystine, violet and any and every unusual tint; boots of glazed kidskin or of dull finish soft skin, of hues like my silk garments, always with the edges of the soles heavily gilded. And, for my shoes as well as for my garments, I chose particolored materials with the most startling or languorous combinations of unusual dyes. All my boots and shoes were embroidered in silver thread or gold thread, all my outer garments embroidered in crimson, deep green, deep blue, gold or silver, in big, striking, conspicuous patterns. I had elephants, lions, antelopes, horses, cattle, sheep, stags, goats, storks, cranes, even fish embroidered on my outer garments amid trees, vines, and flowers; roses, lilies, violets, poppies and others uncountable. I spent on such gewgaws a considerable part of my allowance, yet never exhausted Falco's lavish provision for me.

I also went in for jewelry, loading my fingers with flashy rings, wearing bracelets on both wrists, two or three on each, always two necklaces and even earrings, for which I had my ears pierced, like a Lydian.

When I conned myself in my dressing-room mirror, arrayed in such a superfluity of decorations and fripperies, I felt sure that no one would take me for a Roman.

In these apparently natural vanities and vagaries Falco humored me, enquiring of his friends concerning friseurs of acclaimed reputation, buying me any gaudy fabrics he saw, also presenting me with caskets of necklaces, amulets, bracelets, finger-rings and earrings. He rallied me on my oriental tastes, but aided me to gratify them.

He even came to feel his interest in jewelry and gems enhanced by my fad for them. He took to purchasing antiques in jewelry and rare and unusual gems and his hoard grew into a notable collection.

By the end of my second winter with Falco I had come to know intimately all his town and country palaces and all his dilettanti friends and had enjoyed to the full the many delights of the colony, not only its climate and fruits, its scenery and cities, its statuary and pictures, its libraries and public-baths, but its excellent performances of tragedies and comedies, and its spectacles creditable, not only as to chariot-racing but also as to beast-fights and exhibitions of gladiators. I found life in Africa extremely agreeable and looked forward to any length of it with contentment.

I may remark that during this time Cleander came to the end of his period of unlimited wealth, power and misrule. I was thus out of Rome at the time of his downfall and death and while the Praetorium had a score of Prefects in rapid succession.

In the spring of the nine hundred and forty-third year of the city,
[Footnote: A.D. 190.] and the eleventh of the reign of Commodus, the year
in which he was nominally consul for the sixth time, along with Petronius
Septimianus, Falco startled me, while we were dining alone together, as
Agathemer and I had used to dine together, by saying:

"Phorbas, you talk of Rome differently from any other man I ever heard talk of it. I have meditated over the quality of what you say of Rome, but I cannot analyze it or describe it accurately. Yet I may say that others talk of Rome as holy ground, but you alone make me feel that the soil inside the Pomoerium is holy ground: others talk of the grandeur of Rome; you make me realize its grandeur: others prate of their love for Rome: you, saying little, make me tingle with a subtly communicated sense of how you love Rome: others babble of how life away from Rome is not life, but merely existence; of how any dwelling out of Rome is exile, of how they long for Rome; you, by some sorcery, make me not only feel how you long for Rome, but have awakened in me a longing for Rome. I have never been out of this colony of Africa, not even into Mauretania. A man as rich as I and of equestrian rank can afford to travel, to visit all the interesting parts of the Empire, to live where he likes, anywhere in Italy or even in Rome.

"I have never wanted to leave this colony: I love every bit of it and especially my residences and estates. I have been satisfied here. When my friends argued with me and tried to persuade me to travel and especially to visit Rome, I never was convinced by their arguments. I have a dread of sea-voyaging, a dread accentuated by the death of poor Libo. who was an enthusiastic voyager and had a yacht as staunch and a crew as capable as skill could produce, money buy and judgment collect. Yet he perished. I did not need the warning of his fate to keep me ashore. Then again, I prefer to be a big frog in a small pond to being a small frog in a big pond, I am one of the most important men in this colony and, here in Africa, I am always somebody. In Rome I should be nobody.

"Yet, without my realizing it and later against my will, your conversation, in some subtle way, has so infected me with the desire to see Rome that I am going to brave the terrors of the seas, am going to sink myself into insignificance among the scores of richer and more influential men who cluster about Caesar. I am even going to put at the mercy of the sea my precious collection of gems, which I now value more than you and myself together and twice over.

"I have made all my arrangements. I have put my affairs in order, made sure that my estates will be properly managed in my absence, bought the best yacht to be had in the harbor of Carthage, and that is saying a great deal for its excellence, and I have ordered coffers in which to pack my beloved gems.

"Prepare to accompany me; within ten days we set off for Rome."

I knew Falco. Easy-going as he was, when he had taken a notion to buy and indulge a connoisseur-slave, collect gems or visit Rome, opposition, arguments, artfulness or stratagems were alike useless. I resigned myself to my fate.

I meditated over this fifth fulfillment of the prophecy of the Aemilian
Sibyl.

Since I had been with Falco and practically a free and rich man, I had made handsome sacrifices at Mercury's Temples in all the cities we visited which had temples to Mercury. The morning after Falco announced his intentions to go to Rome I went out alone and unattended; myself, in the market place of Carthage, bought two white hens; myself carried them to the Temple of Mercury and myself had them offered to the god.