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

by Edward Lucas White

Domiciled in the Choragium and busy there and in the Colosseum I spent almost a year. Until the approach of winter put a stop to spectacles in the arena and after the outset of spring permitted their resumption, I was not only continuously busy, but entirely contented. Of the dreary and tedious winter between, which was intensely dispiriting and appeared interminable, the less I say the better. I do not want to remind myself of it.

I was of course free from the bodily miseries which had made my winters at Placentia and Nuceria so terrible: I did not suffer from cold, hunger, vermin, sleeplessness, overwork, exhaustion, weakness, blows and abuse. I was, on the contrary, comfortably lodged and clothed, well attended, lavishly and excellently fed and humored by the procurator.

But at Placentia and Nuceria I had solaced myself amid the horror of my situation by reminding myself that I was, at least, alive, and, as long as I was in an ergastulum, entirely safe from any danger of being recognized and executed. Here, in Rome, often in the arena, under the eyes of sixty thousand Romans, thousands of whom had known me in my prosperity and hundreds of whom had known me familiarly from my childhood, I was, every instant, in peril of recognition and of betrayal to the secret service. While I was actually in the arena I was so busy or so exhilarated by my participation in the most magnificent spectacle on earth that I never worried a moment. I seldom worried while I was occupied with any of my duties in the Colosseum or Choragium, although I knew I was very liable to recognition, for the passages and vaults of the Colosseum and the courtyards of the Choragium were habitually visited by men of sporting tastes; gentlemen, wealthy idlers, noblemen, senators, courtiers, even the Emperor himself. I was, in my intellect, conscious of my danger; but, while I was occupied, it did not perturb my feelings.

During the idleness of the long winter my peril did rob me of sleep, of appetite and of peace of mind. I had continually to devise excuses for remaining in my lodgings, for declining invitations to banquets, for keeping to myself. I dreaded that the procurator himself was growing suspicious of me. He had, in the kindness of his heart, thrown in my way offers of opportunities for outings, for diversions, for entertainments, which any man in my situation might have been expected to accept with alacrity. My refusals, I felt, might set him to thinking. He was entirely loyal to the Emperor and the government. If the idea ever crossed his mind he would, at once, have reported to the secret service that it would be well to take a look at Festus the Beast-Tamer; he might be other than he appeared. The anxiety caused by these thoughts preyed upon my mind.

Without reason, apparently. The procurator, as I look back on that deadly winter, seems to have accepted all my peculiarities without question. If I would remain content and quell obstreperous beasts when spring opened as I had until autumn ushered in winter, I might do and be anything I pleased. If I pleased to mope in my quarters, pace under the arcades of the courtyard, lie abed from early dusk till after sunrise, what mattered that to him? Such, apparently, was his attitude of mind. He gave orders that I was to have my meals alone in my quarters, as I requested. He had brought to me, from the libraries of the Basilica Ulpia, most of the books I asked for. I had read all the books on catching, caring for, curing, managing, taming and fighting beasts which formed the library of the Choragium. After they were exhausted I asked the procurator for more. As he had a cousin among the assistant curators at the Ulpian Library he was able to gratify me. After I could learn of no more books on beasts I took to comedies and read Naevius, all of Menander and Caecilius, and most of the best plays of other writers of comedies; then. I turned to histories, which I thought safe, and spent my days for the remainder of the winter sleeping early, long and late, eating abundant meals of good food, walking miles round and round the big courtyard under the empty arcades, exercising in the gymnasium of the Choragium, steaming and parboiling and half-roasting myself in its small but very well-appointed and well-served baths, and, otherwise, reading every bit of my daylight. I kept well and I remained safe, ignored and unnoticed. The procurator kept his word as to shielding me from visitors, and he said he had much ado to succeed, for the ease and certitude with which, in the open arena, before all Rome, I approached a lion or tiger which had just slaughtered a criminal and lapped his blood, seized the beast by the mane or scruff of the neck, as if he had been a tame dog, and led him to a postern or into his cage, roused much interest, much curiosity, many enquiries and not a little desire to see me closer, question me, talk with me, get acquainted with me and learn the secret of my power.

I thanked the procurator for his resolution and success in rebuffing would-be patrons eager to pamper me. Also, all winter, I dreaded that he would he less lucky or less adamantine when spring came.

Thus passed my fourth winter since my disaster.

I might have been spared much of my anxiety during the winter if I had learned sooner that such aloofness as mine was no novelty to the procurator, that he had, among his most valued subordinates, a man even more unsociable than I, and even more highly esteemed and more sedulously pampered. This was the celebrated and regretted Spaniard, Mercablis, who, for more than thirty years, was accorded by the Choragium a home of his. own, a retinue of servants and the fulfillment of every whim, of which the chief was his determination to have as little as possible to do with any human being except his wife and their three children, for he was not a slave, but a freeman. In his way Mercablis was as celebrated as Felix Bulla the brigand or Agyllius Septentrio the actor of mimes, and the memory of his fame yet lingers in the recollections of the aged and in the talk of their children and grandchildren. For it was Mercablis who, for half a life-time, invented, rehearsed, and kept secret till the moment of its display the noon-hour sensational surprise for each day of games in the Colosseum.

I have, in my later years, met many persons who congratulated me on my luck in having personally known and frequently talked with Mercablis, just as many have similarly envied me my encounters with Felix Bulla. For myself I have never plumed myself on such features of my adventures, though they are not unpleasing to recall.

When, in the spring of the next year, while Fuscianus and Silanus were consuls, I came to know Mercablis and to consider him, I arrived at the conclusion that his inclination for solitude and his aloofness were not the result of any dread of strangers or of any need for seclusion, like mine, but the product of a disposition naturally churlish, crabbed, and unsocial.