Fortunately Seneca and Prefect Burrus are sensible men and they succeeded in stopping her. Seneca was chosen as Consul after writing a malicious satire on Claudius to please the Senate. Now no one can hear Claudius called god without laughing. It was really simple revenge for his exile. But we who know about things in Rome are aware that he deserved it after the scandal over Agrippina’s sister. The poor girl lost her life too, in the end. I don’t know what we can expect when an eloquent philosopher makes decisions in State affairs. Things are not what they used to be. The young people even go about indecently dressed like Greeks, now that Claudius is no longer here to make them wear togas.”
Aunt Laelia gabbled on for some time before I could get away from her. As I hurried to my father’s house on Viminalis, I noticed that die atmosphere in Rome had become freer than before. People dared to laugh. The innumerable statues in the forum were covered with jokes which were read aloud for everyone’s amusement. No one bothered to scrape them off, and although it was only afternoon, I saw in the streets quite a number of drunken cittern-playing youths with long hair.
Tullia’s atrium was filled as before with a crowd of people seeking audience or some favor, and clients, and also—to my sorrow—Jews, whom my father would never be rid of. Tullia stopped talking to two well-known old gossips and to my astonishment came up to me and embraced me warmly. Her plump fingers glittered with rings and she had tried to hide the loose skin at her neck with a many-tiered necklace of jewels.
“It’s high time you returned to Rome from your travels, Minutus,” she cried. “When your father heard you had disappeared he was ill with worry, although I reminded him of his own conduct in his youth. I can see that you are quite well, you bad boy. Did you get involved in a drunken brawl in Asia, that you’ve got such ugly scars on your face? I was afraid your father would grieve to death over you.”
My father had aged, but in his capacity as senator, he bore himself with even greater dignity than before. When I looked at him after this long time, I noticed that his eyes were the most sorrowful I had ever seen on any man. We could not talk easily to one another, however glad he was to see me. I was content to tell him about my experiences and I belittled my imprisonment. Finally I asked him, mostly in jest, what the Jews still wanted of him.
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“The Procurator in Judaea is now Felix, the brother of the treasurer Pallas,” said my father. “You must know him, the man who married a granddaughter to Cleopatra. Owing to his cupidity, complaints have been pouring in. Or rather, the Jews are eternal troublemakers for whom no one is good enough, and now someone has again gone and killed someone else somewhere. I think the whole of Judaea is in the hands of a band of brigands. Plundering and burning are going on there and Felix obviously cannot maintain order. The Jews are trying to take the matter to the Senate. But which of us wants to become involved in such things? Pallas is much too powerful to offend. And the Senate has genuine troubles in Armenia and Britain to contend with.
‘We meet at the Palace now,” my father went on. “Agrippina wants to listen behind a curtain to the discussions in the Senate. It’s certainly more comfortable there than in that fearful Curia, where some of us have to stand, if by some miraculous chance all of us happen to be there at the same time. You get frostbite in your feet there in the winter.”
“And Nero?” I asked eagerly. “What do you think of him?”
“I know that Nero wished he had never learned to write, the day he had to sign a death warrant for the first time,” said my father. “Perhaps one day he really will be the hope of mankind, as many genuinely believe. In any case, he has handed back part of the jurisdiction to the Consuls and the Senate. Whether this is a show of respect for the city fathers or to avoid having to go to trials in order to attend more pleasant amusements, I could not even guess.”
My father was obviously talking just for the sake of talking. He frowned, looked absently beyond me and did not seem to have the slightest interest in affairs of State. Suddenly he looked straight at me.
“Minutus, my only son,” he said, “what are you going to do with your life?”
“For two years I have lived in a dark cave,” I said, “humiliated and more wretched than a slave. A whim of the Goddess of Fortune has taken away two years of my life. If I were even capable of a constructive thought, then it would be that one day I shall retrieve those two years and be glad to be alive as a man, without moping unnecessarily and denying the bounties of life.”
My father gestured toward the room’s polished walls, as if including in the gesture all the pomp and grandeur of Tullia’s house.
“Perhaps I too live in a dark cave,” he said with deep melancholy in his voice. “I submit to duties for which I have not asked. But you are flesh of your mother’s flesh and must not be lost. Do you still have her wooden goblet?”
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