But now the small, lifeless body bobbed to the surface and for one unruffled moment lay on its back, eyes wide-open and fixed, staring upward unseeing toward the two centurions leaning over the ship’s rail. In that same instant the oars descended, and the knife-sharp edge of one near the stern sliced diagonally across the drowned infant; the oar shivered with the unexpected added burden, but it bore the mangled small corpse beneath the thick waters, and up through them rose a trickle of dark crimson.
“She wasn’t dead when she was thrown in,” Cornelius said, “and that wasn’t long ago. Perhaps from one of the bridges back there, or maybe a wharf. Or even a boat ahead.” His shoulders trembled in an involuntary shudder. “Longinus, I could kill a man in battle without blinking, but I couldn’t throw an infant into the Tiber. By the gods, how can any man do it?”
“Nevertheless, hundreds do it every year, Centurion. We were speaking of those slaves over there on the Emporium’s docks and these galley slaves rowing us. And this drowned baby, and countless others who simply lost when the gods rolled the dice. The fickle gods, my friend, the unfeeling, stonehearted gods.”
“Don’t blame the gods, Longinus. Blame rather Rome’s mounting vanity and greed, her selfishness, cruelty.”
“You know I’m not blaming the gods, Cornelius; I have no more faith than you have even in their existence. They are nothing but pale nobodies, fabrications in which not even intelligent children believe.”
“Fabrications, yes. Our gods are inventions, but they serve a purpose and are necessary.”
“Necessary?” The centurion’s face had twisted into a heavy scowl. “Why, Cornelius?”
“Because they fill a place, supply a need, Longinus. It’s the nature of man to look to some higher power, isn’t it, some greater intelligence? Else why would one invent these gods; why would primitive peoples carve them from wood and stone; why would we and the Greeks and the Egyptians raise great temples to them?”
“Do you contend then that people worship these carved sticks and stones as symbols of some higher intelligence and power rather than the carved objects themselves, even primitive peoples? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Some—many, in fact—have become confused, of course, and in seeking to worship this mysterious divinity they go through a form or ceremony of worshiping the symbol. But what I’m trying to say, Centurion, is that it is the nature of mankind to look to something higher, something more intelligent, more powerful, better, yes, than man himself, better even than such an exemplary man as our beloved”—now his tone was sarcastic—“Emperor, or his most worthy Prefect. And if man seeks such a being to worship—and all men, mind you, even savages, even those wild tree worshipers in Britannia do it—doesn’t it stand to reason that there should be such a being?”