But to show he was aware of the gossip in Rome, he said, “I know Plautia Paulina personally. As far as I know she went wrong in the head after letting a young philosopher—Seneca, I think his name was—and Julia, Emperor Caesar’s sister, meet in secret at her house. They were exiled because of this and Julia finally lost her life. Plautia Paulina couldn’t stand a charge of procuring, became temporarily insane and, going into mourning, she withdrew into solitude. Naturally a woman like that gets strange ideas.”
Lugunda had been sitting all this time crouched in a corner of the hut, watching us intently, smiling when I smiled and looking anxious when I was serious. Vespasian had absentmindedly looked at her occasionally and now surprisingly said, “Generally speaking, women do get funny ideas in their heads. A man can never be quite sure what they have in mind. The god Caesar had the wrong idea about British women but he didn’t respect women particularly anyhow. I think that there are good women and bad women, whether barbarians or civilized. For a man there is no greater happiness than the friendship of a good woman. Your wild one here looks like a child, but she can be more useful to you than you think. You probably don’t know that the Iceni tribe has applied to me and offered to buy the girl back. The Britons don’t usually do such things. They usually reckon that members of their tribe who have fallen into the hands of the Romans are lost forever.”
He spoke laboriously to the girl in the Iceni language and I understood little of what they said. But Lugunda looked confused and crept nearer to me as if seeking protection. She answered Vespasian shyly at first and then in a more animated way until he shook his head and turned again to me.
“This is another hopeless thing about the Britons,” he said. “The people who live on the south coast talk a different language from the inland tribes, and the northern tribes don’t understand anything of the southerners’ dialect. But your Lugunda has been chosen since infancy by her priests to become a hare-priestess. As far as I can gather, the Druids think they can look at a child even in infancy if it suits their purposes and see whether it can be trained for the priesthood. This is necessary, for there are Druids of many different grades and ranks, so they have to study all their lives. With us, a priest’s office is almost a political honor, but with them the priests are physicians, judges and even poets, insofar as the barbarians can be said to have any poetry.”
It seemed to me that Vespasian was by no means as crude and ignorant as he himself liked to make out. He seemed to have adopted this role in order to draw out other people’s self-assurance.
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It was news to me that Lugunda had been marked as a Druid priestess. I knew she was not able to eat hare flesh without being sick and that she would not tolerate my catching hares with snares, but this I had presumed was some barbaric whim, for different families and tribes in Briton have different sacred animals, in the same way that Diana’s priest in Nemi may not touch or even look at a horse.
When Vespasian had once again spoken to Lugunda, he burst out laughing and slapped his knees.
“The girl doesn’t want to go home to her tribe,” he cried, “but wants to stay with you. She says you are teaching her magic which even their priests know nothing about. By Hercules, she thinks you are a holy man because you haven’t tried to touch her.”
I replied with annoyance that I was certainly no holy man. I was just bound by a certain promise and anyhow, Lugunda was only a child. Vespasian gave me a sly look, rubbed his broad cheeks and remarked that no woman is ever completely a child.
“I can’t force her to return to her tribe,” he said, after thinking for a moment. “I think we’ll have to let her ask what her hares think about it.”
The following day, Vespasian held the usual inspection in the camp, spoke to the soldiers in his crude way and explained that from now on they must be content with cracking their own skulls and must no longer go out after the Britons.
“Do you understand, dolts?” he barked. “Every Briton is your father and your brother, every British hag your mother, and even the most tantalizing maiden your sister. Go out to meet them. Wave your green branches when you see them, give them presents, let them eat and drink. You know only too well that the rules of war punish individual plundering with death at the stake. So see to it that I don’t have to scorch the hides off you.
“But,” he continued grimly, glowering at them, “I’ll scorch the hides off you even more if you let any Briton steal as much as a single horse or even a sword from you. Remember they are barbarians. You must civilize them with mildness and teach them your own customs. Teach them to play dice and swear by the Roman gods. That’s the first step to higher culture. If a Briton strikes you on the cheek, then turn the other cheek to him. I have indeed heard of a new superstition which demands that one does that, whether you believe me or not. However, don’t turn the other cheek too often, but settle your differences with Britons by wrestling, steeplechasing or ball games, in the British way.”
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