“Therefore,” my father went on, “the time has come to talk about my family. What I do, I do thoroughly. Minutus and I will travel to Rome and there I shall retrieve my rank of knight in conjunction with the centenary festivities. Minutus will receive the mantoga in Rome in the presence of his family. And he will receive a horse in place of the one he has lost here.”
For me this was a surprise of which I had not even dared dream. At the most I had thought that sometime, thanks to my boldness and talents, I should be able to return to my father the honor he had lost through the Emperor’s whim. But it was not news to the freedmen. From their behavior, I realized they had long been putting pressure on my father in this direction, for they themselves had honor and benefits to gain from my father’s regaining his knighthood. They nodded now and explained that they had already been in contact with the freedmen of Emperor Claudius, who looked after important matters in the administration of the State. My father also owned property on Aventine and land in Caere, and so more than fulfilled the conditions of income demantled of the rank of knight.
My father bade them be silent and explained.
“All this is of less importance,” he said. “The essential thing is that I have at last succeeded in acquiring the necessary papers on Minutus’ ancestors. This has demantled a great deal of judicial knowledge. At first I thought I should quite simply adopt him on the day he came of age, but my counsel persuaded me that such a measure would not be favorable. In that case his legal Roman descent would have been in doubt forever.”
After unfolding a mass of papers, my father read aloud from them and explained them more thoroughly.
“The most important of these is a marriage contract between Myrina and myself, certified by the Roman authority in Damascus. This is indubitably a genuine and legal certificate, for after my wife had been made pregnant by me in Damascus, I was very happy and wanted to strengthen the position of my heir-to-be.”
After looking at the ceiling for a while, he went on:
“Investigating into Minutus’ mother’s ancestors has been much more difficult, for at the time I did not regard it as essential and so we never even talked about it together. After long investigations it has been definitely shown that her family originally stemmed from the city of
Myrina in the province of Asia, near the city of Cyme. It was my counsel who advised me to start from this city in my search, because of the similarity of name. It later turned out that her family, after losing their fortune, moved from there out to the islands, but their origins are
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extremely aristocratic, and to confirm this, I have had a statue of my wife placed in front of the courthouse in Myrina and also have made several donations in her memory. In fact my deputy had the whole of the court-house rebuilt; it was not large and the city fathers themselves offered to trace back Myrina’s family to ancient times, yes, back to one of the river gods, but this I thought unnecessary. On the island of Cos, my deputy found a venerable old priest in the temple of Esculapius, who remembered Myrina’s parents very well and could confirm on oath that he was the brother of Myrina’s father. At the death of their honest but impoverished parents, the children dedicated themselves to Apollo and then left the island.”
“Oh, how I should like to meet that uncle of my mother’s,” I said eagerly, “if he is the one and only living relative on my mother’s side.”
“That won’t be necessary,” my father hastened to say. “He is a very old man with a bad memory and I have seen to it that he has a roof over his head, food and someone to lead him until he dies. All you need remember is that on your mother’s side, you are of noble Greek descent. When you are adult, you can remember the poor city of Myrina sometime with a suitable gift, so that the matter is not completely forgotten.
“I also,” he went on quickly, “belong to the Manilian family by adoption, and my name is therefore Manilianus. My foster-father, that is your legal grandfather, was the famous astronomer Manilius, who published a work on astronomy which is still studied in libraries all over the world. But you have undoubtedly wondered about your other name—Mezentius. This brings me to your real descent. The famous Maecenas, friend of the god Augustus, was a distant relative of mine and held his hand over my father’s parents, even if he did forget them in his will. He on his part was descended from the rulers of Caere, who were kings long before Aeneas fled from Troy. In this way Roman blood also runs in the former Etruscans. But legally speaking, we should count ourselves as members of the Manilianus family. In Rome it is better to keep silent about the Etruscans, for the Romans do not like to be reminded that the Etruscans once ruled over them.”
My father was speaking in such a dignified way that we all listened in silence, and only Barbus remembered to fortify himself with wine occasionally.
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