We looked at all the rooms in the house and I saw the cobwebs in the corners, the wretched couches and some other poor furniture, and I suddenly realized that our noble and much respected Aunt Laelia lived in the depths of poverty. All that remained of Manilius the astronomer’s library were a few rat-chewed scrolls, and Aunt Laelia was forced to admit that she had even sold his portrait bust to the public library below Palatine. Finally she broke down and wept bitterly.
“Just blame me, Marcus,” she said. “I’m a bad housekeeper because I have seen better days in my youth. I shouldn’t have been able to keep this household going if you hadn’t sent money from Antioch. I don’t know where the money has gone, but at least it hasn’t gone on luxuries, wine and perfumed ointments. I still hope that my destiny may change any day now. This has been foretold. So you mustn’t be angry with me or ask me for a careful rendering of accounts of the money you sent me.”
But my father assured her that he had not come to Rome as an auditor. On the contrary, he deeply regretted he had not sent more money for the maintenance and repair of the house. But now everything would be changed, just as had been foretold to Aunt Laelia. My father bade Barbus unpack and spread the rich Eastern cloths on the floor. He gave Aunt Laelia a silk robe and a silk cloth, hung a necklace of jewels around her neck and asked her to try on a pair of soft red leather shoes. He also gave her a handsome wig, so that she wept even louder.
“Oh, Marcus,” she cried, “are you really so wealthy? You haven’t acquired all these expensive things in some dishonest way, have you? I thought perhaps you had fallen victim to the vices of the East, as Romans so easily do if they stay there too long. So I was uneasy when I saw your swollen face, but it was probably the tears which dimmed my sight. When I look at you with greater equanimity I shall get used to your face, which perhaps doesn’t look quite so unpleasant as I first thought.”
In fact Aunt Laelia feared and believed that my father had only come to take over the house and send her away to a life of poverty in the country somewhere. This belief was so deep-rooted that she kept repeating that a woman such as she could not possibly like it anywhere else but in Rome. Gradually she became braver and reminded us that she was after all the widow of a senator and was still a welcome visitor in many of the old houses in Rome, although her husband, Gnaius Laelius, had died so long ago as in the time of Emperor Tiberius.
I asked her to tell me about Senator Gnaius Laelius, but Aunt Laelia listened to my request with her head on one side.
“Marcus,” she said, “how is it possible that your son speaks Latin with such a dreadful Syrian accent? We must put that right or he’ll sound very foolish in Rome.”
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My father said in his untroubled way that he himself had spoken so much Greek and Aramaic that his own pronunciation was almost certainly strange.
“Perhaps so,” said Aunt Laelia pungently, “for you are old and everyone knows you’ve picked up foreign accents on military or other duties abroad. But you must appoint a good tutor in rhetoric or an actor to improve Minutus’ pronunciation. He must go to the theater and listen to the public readings by authors. Emperor Claudius is particular about the purity of the language, even if he does let his freedmen speak Greek on matters of State, and his wife does other things which my modesty forbids me to mention.”
Then she turned to me.
“My poor husband, Senator Gnaius,” she explained, “was neither stupider nor simpler than Claudius. Yes, Claudius in his time even betrothed his son, who was a minor, to the daughter of the prefect Sejanus, and himself married his adoptive sister, Aelia. The boy was as scatterbrained as his father and later choked to death on a pear. I mean that my departed husband Laelius in the same way strove for the favors of Sejanus and thought he was serving the State in this way. You, Marcus, weren’t you in some way mixed up in Sejanus’ intrigues, since you vanished so suddenly from Rome before the conspiracy was revealed? No one heard from you for years. In fact you were struck from the rolls of knighthood by dear Emperor Gaius simply because no one knew anything about you. I know nothing either, he said jokingly, and drew a line through your name. Or that’s what I heard, although perhaps whoever told me wanted to spare my feelings and not reveal everything he knew.”
My father answered stiffly that he would be going to the State archives the next day to have the reason for his name being struck off the rolls investigated. Aunt Laelia did not seem all that delighted to hear this. On the contrary, she asked whether it would not be safer to desist from digging into what was now old and rotten. When Emperor Claudius was drunk, he was irritable and capricious, even if he had put right many of Emperor Gaius’ political mistakes.
“But I realize that for Minutus’ sake, we must do what we can to restore the family honor,” she admitted. “The quickest way would be to give Minutus the mantoga and ensure that he comes before the eyes of Aelia Messalina. The young Empress likes young men who have recently been given the mantoga and invites them into her rooms to question them a deux on their descent and their hopes for the future. If I weren’t so
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