rhomaioi

"Come live with me and be my love - -
And we will laugh at all the nasty old men with the narrow little minds.
Suns will set and suns will rise - - again and again - -
but for us, when our brief light has vanished,
there will be one long, unending night of sleep.

"So give me a thousand kisses, and then a hundred more,
Then another thousand, then a second hundred,
Then still another thousand, and then another hundred;
And then , when we've had so many thousands,
We'll lose count so as not to know - -
lest some jealous fool envy us the staggering total of our kisses."

No. No, it's not one of mine. I wish it were. Catullus. He wrote during the time of the Divine Julius - - more than four centuries ago. I wonder if he'll survive. But I can never know that, can I? I hope he will though. I've always liked Catullus. He probably won't, though.

You have been my salvation, you know. No, no - - you have. I should never have thought a simple slave in a filthy little brothel in stinking Piraeus could - -. I'm sorry. That sounded dreadful, didn't it. I'm sorry. It's just that I've spent my entire life in books. I've never been very good with real people.

You see, I always thought Alexandria was the answer. And it wasn't. Or maybe it was? I don't know.

It is said that Alexandria shall never go hungry. When Dinocrates, the Great Alexander's architect, was laying out the city walls, he used flour, rather than lime, to mark the earth - - and so it is said the city will never want for food. Well, food for the body. But what of the soul's nourishment?

Have you ever been to Alexandria? No, I don't suppose you have. Alexandria. It was heaven there for a time. All those books! Heaven. Absolute heaven. (Snort) I wonder what my pious little sister, the hermit's wife, would say about that, eh?

What did my poor father do to deserve us? A daughter who's a religious fanatic, one son who is a congenital idiot and the other, thank you, who lives for whores and poetry. And drink. Drink, yes, drink. Not to forget drink. Drink. Very important thing, drink.

My brother really is an idiot. A drooling, babbling idiot. Was born that way. Can't help it. Unlike my sister and me who chose our special afflictions.

So it's time for me to put aside my books and go home and learn the business of business. The fine art of ledger-making. The astounding poetry in contract-making. The breathless romance of drachmas. You see, my father isn't doing very well. For that matter, who is these days? He's getting old. He needs help. My sister prays for him, of course. But he needs practical help. That means me. Whoa, there's a shock, eh? Apollonios as &quotpractical help"? Poor old Timagenes would just spin in his grave to hear that - - ha!

He was my father's steward. He died last winter. Mehercule, he was old. He was ancient when my grandfather bought him. When I was little, he terrified me. Still does, a bit. Even in his grave. Especially in his grave. So old, so thin and so severe. And yet, not without a certain sense of humor. But so dry. Oooh, ever so dry. He liked puns, you know. But puns so erudite and obscure that only he ever really understood them - - ever really appreciated them. Sometimes I think how alien and alone he must have felt, living in a world of laughter only he could hear. Guess that's why he always seemed so distant. Timagenes. I wonder where he is now. Laughing uproariously at an indelicate misuse of the subjunctive in his beloved Elysian Fields - - or weeping in my beloved sister's strait-laced Christian hell? &quotInteresting question, that," as he would say, never even lifting his eyes from the lines of figures in the wax tablets before him. So many amphorae of this, so many bales of that.

Alexandria. You know, I was there once before. When I was a boy. Father took me with him on a buying and selling trip. He was selling olives and buying books. And such Books! Elegant little Alexandrine volumes. Scrolls for him to hawk in Athens and points north. He took me with him as he went the rounds of the copyists - - the ones attached to the Museum and to its sister libraries. As he marched himself officiously down the aisle - - he'a always had the most entertaining waddle - - as he wobbled down the aisle he cut a quite a swath through the sea of dark-eyed scribes. He gobbled up his precious merchandise left and right. That's all books are to him - - merchandise. An investment to be resold at a carefully calculated profit. There is no romance in the man. None.

Ah, but for me, those stacks of brand new scrolls were almost magical. No, no - - they were magic. They whispered of far-away places and ancient times. Of the expression of inexpressible beauty. You know I can still hear the quiet susurration - - the &quotquiet susurration" of the endless rows of black-haired calligraphers as they took the ancient words and transferred them to acres and acres of fresh papyrus. You should have been there - - absolute mountains of scrolls, each one carefully decorated with brilliant purple and green and gold bosses, each one wrapped with scarlet thongs around a splendidly painted cover of the finest Pergamene parchment.

Have you ever seen papyrus - - I mean the best papyrus - - just as it's made ready for writing? It's wonderful. Just wonderful. They gently level off the surface with a special pumice, you see - - and then they draw ever-so-thin rules with lead - - so they can keep the long lines of lettering even. But what's really wonderful is the smell. I mean, that's the best part of it. The heady aroma of new papyrus and fresh ink. There is nothing in the world like it. Except old papyrus, perhaps. Have you ever been in a really old library? I must take you up to the library of Pantainos in Athens sometime. It's in the Ptolemeion, near the market. Oh god, the smell of the dust there, mixed with the incredibly delicious pungent aroma of the slowly rotting papyrus - - it's - - it's almost like sex. It's better than sex. Well, not better than sex with you. But you know what I mean - -? I mean it's - - . . .

Alexandria. So full of light. So alive. So ancient and yet so - - timeless. I don't know what it was about Alexandria. It was so beautiful then. Maybe it was the smell. I know, I'm sorry, I'm on this smell thing. But each city, each country, each person has a different smell, you know. Athens here, Athens has a dry, dusty, academic kind of smell, the smell of an irredeemable yesterday, the smell of grief - - the grief born of a faded glory - - but Alexandria in those days smelled to me of life and laughter and adventure and irreverence - - it smelled of ancient mysteries and modern miracles - - of science and art and endless sheets of fresh papyrus eager for ink. Damn!

But not anymore. Today it smells of hatred and intolerance, of ignorance and fear. And loss. It smells of death. Not just of people, but of hope. They burnt the Serapeum, you know. A mob of Christians - - led by their most pious bishop, Theophilos - - burnt the Serapeum. The most beautiful building in all the known world. It was, you know. Even Ammianus Marcellinus that gossipy old historian of my father's generation - - even he said so. For centuries - - centuries - - the wealth of Egypt was lavished on that extraordinary sanctuary. The sanctuary of Serapis, mighty Serapis. Mighty Serapis, God of Alexandria. Harumph. Not so mighty anymore. Gone the dazzling colonnades, gleaming in the bright Egyptian sun. Gone the dark, rich, cedar-scented corridors. Gone the priceless art. Gone the splendid statuary. Gone the irreplaceable libraries. Gone the long, and until now, unbroken tradition of holiness. Now, it's just a burnt out shell. Picked over by thieves and relic hunters. The morning after they burnt it, I sat near the ruins of the Museum staring mindlessly out across the harbor to the Pharos, the Ptolemy's great lighthouse - - and I cried.

Christians love to tell us about their wondrous vision of the future. My pious little sister and her monk-husband, love to go on about that. Well, all I can say is "By your good works, shall ye be known." That morning in the harbor, with the smell of burnt papyrus still choking my nostrils, had I any doubts about what kind of people Christians really are, those doubts were utterly washed away by my tears. By their "good" works, I can assure you I know them. I know who they are and what they are. And I know the world they are making for us and I swear I do not want to live in it. I can not live in it. No one can live in it. This world, this heaven on earth for which they strive has no life in it. It, like their religion is wedded to death and washed in the blood they love to drink to the Glory of their god.

You know, I think of my sister going on about the taurobolion - - you know the taurobolion - - that ancient initiation where the sacred bull is sacrificed above you and you are purified in the sweet, hot flood of its consecrated blood. Oh, she was so horrified when she learnt that Father - - our Father - - had actually gone through one in his youth. "How disgusting! Eeuw!" And yet every week or even more often, actually, she and her - - they drink the blood and eat the flesh of their Divine Master. They worship the instrument of death that took him away from them. And they dare to look down their noses at our Father's taurobolion. Something that meant so much to him. I saw the pain in his face as she shat her sermons in his face, disfiguring the memories of his youth. As gruesome as that taurobolion was, at least it was real. None of this mealy mouthed symbolic cannibalism my sister refuses to call by its rightful name. Such hypocrites.

(Tears) I'm sorry.

So anyway. I stayed on in Alexandria after they burnt the Sanctuary and its libraries. I stayed on. I tried to - -. I - - I stayed. Hoping. But the city had died - - the shining idea of it had died - - there was nothing there but a hulking, stinking corpse drained of everything good by bloodsucking religious fanatics. The empty, broken, burned-out marble colonades of its temples and libraries like the bones of defeated soldiers bleaching in the relentless, ruthless, soulless, mad-making Egyptian sun.

And so I came home. Or rather, I came here. It feels more like home than home. Dusty old Athens. Where nothing has changed in a thousand years. Not even the bedclothes. But I have to go home to my real home. To my Father and to my Father's business. To my sister. To my brother. To the church. Oh, yes, the church. Father's made that perfectly clear.

"If you don't publicly convert and soon," he writes me, "When I die, our slaves will be freed. Don't you realise that it is against the law for a non-christian to own a christian slave? Half our slaves are christians. By the Great Goddess, it's a slave's religion - - and those that aren't christian will claim to be christian just to be set free! Convert! Convert! Convert! Think of your family for once!"

As if I didn't understand all that. As if he were anymore of christian that I could ever be. It's all just so much posturing. And for what? For what? Money? Power? They don't mean anything to me. Yes, well. I'm young. And intellectual. Money and power never means anything to someone like me. Particularly someone like me who has always had access to them. I suppose you'd do anything for a bit of money and power, eh? And you'd be much wiser than I. Probably. Slaves are practical. They have to be. Poets and would-be poets aren't. They don't even know how to begin to be. Arrgh!

"Think of your family for once." Well what about thinking about me. Just me. What about me? Don't I matter? Of course not. I am a gentleman and a gentleman thinks of family and polis and emperor first.

Who am I? What am I? And for that matter, who and what are we? Hunh? Elegant barbarians, that's all. Mindless idiots who declaim carefully borrowed passions in perfect Greek like trained dogs, we worship a Jewish god, some of us - - we wear Chinese silk, if we can afford it - - and we call ourselves Roman - - Roman. In honor of a city most of us will never see. What the hell are we?

Nam te omnia saecla noscent et qui sis fama loquetur anus. Every century shall know you and Fame in your old age tell what you are.

There's a line and a half, eh? Catullus again. Gaius Valerius Catullus, a man now dead and gone some four and fifty hundred years. Catullus who, were he - - magically - - to appear before me - - or I before him - - could understand me perfectly, and I him, so little has our carefully preserved, rhetorically perfect Latinity changed.

Or our Greek, for that matter. Let me speak Greek to Homer - - let him reply, that blind yet visionary genius who defined for us what it means to be Greek - - Homer, fifteen hundred years in his grave - - give or take a few centuries. Yet Homer and I - - Homer and I - - so distant from each other in time, we could understand each other. We could. Or would we? I who have so thoroughly immersed myself in his verses - - as any other educated man of today does - - even the Christians do - - I who know his words as intimately as if they were mine own. And yet, would we understand each other? Could we? What do I really know of him and his world? And more to the point, what would he make of me and mine? Is his wine-dark sea the same wine-dark sea I see out that dirty little window over there?

We chant and mumble our cautiously preserved philosophies in elegant elegiac couplets and dactylic hexameter. We explain, we annotate, we criticize, we haven't had a single original thought in centuries. Or have we? Have we and never noticed? Have we grown a third leg and sprouted new eyes and never noticed our own growing monstrosity - - so wrapt were we in imitating the inimitable perfection that was the crowning glory of our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-whatever. No wonder the Christians are burning down the temples and the libraries. At least it's something new and different, eh?

That morning in the harbor, I felt as if we'd jumped off the edge into the abyss. And where and when we will land, if we land, is anybody's guess. But did we jump off the edge into the abyss that day? Haven't we really been falling for a long time? Perhaps we are no longer what we think we are. I know I'm not. Perhaps we never were? I think of the Divine Claudius as a young man dreaming of the Republic. The Republic which never existed and certainly never could exist in his world. And what of The Famed Democracy of dusty old Athens, eh? Are not slaves human too? Why did the Athenians never notice that, and extend the franchise, when they was theirs, to their hairdressers, cooks and stablehands?

I know, I'm lecturing again. I can't seem to help it anymore. (Pause) I woke up last night in tears. I lit a lamp and watched you sleep.

Did you know you look just like a little child when you sleep. We all do, I suppose. We are all children in the arms of Morpheus. So sweet and innocent. And it is our curse that we are forbidden to see that part of ourselves. You looked so peaceful. Little red ears. Your quiet, little snore - - you snore, you know, you do. I looked at you last night and Alexandria and my sister and all that - - shit seemed to wash away in the sweetness of your smile. But then your face darkened. Don't know why. Another one of your bad dreams I guess. I took you in my arms and I held you until the bad dream passed away. For you and maybe for me.

For a long time now I have thought there was nothing to live for. And then I got roaringly drunk one night and as the expression goes, in vino veritas, I found you. In a stinking little whorehouse in stinking little Piraeus. You came as a huge shock. A huge shock. Are you enough to see me through, though? I don't know. But I think I'll try.

I'll go back to my father's estates. I'll learn the business. I'll marry the heiress. Have lots of fat little babies. Sons to carry on the family name. Daughters to cement my business dealings. I'll become a pillar of the community. A pillar of the church. Just like the Emperor Julian, I'll pretend I'm one of them - - I'll put on that outward show of Christian piety that is far more important to them than the real thing. I'll become everything they clamor for me to be and more. But there will always be a little corner of myself that none of them can ever touch. None of them can ever understand. And none of them will ever know about it, if I can help it.

I made a sacrifice for you today. On the altar of Aphrodite, there in Konon's sanctuary in the south end of the harbour. I did.

Please, let me go to old Krateas and buy you from him. Please! I could just do it, you know - - but I'd rather you agreed to it first. I don't want to take you against your will.

Oh, stop crying. Come on. Are you afraid I'll come to mistreat you? There are laws against that sort of thing, you know.

Or are you going to tell me again you're afraid I'll treat you too well. That you don't deserve to be happy. You little fool. You're so doom and gloom. Just like me. That's why we deserve each other. What is it you've gone through that makes you suffer so? Unlike me, you never seem to want to talk about it. I don't know why. Well, maybe I never let you. I'll have to work on that.

Come. Serve me. Serve me and I shall chase away your nightmares and, if I'm lucky, you'll chase away mine.

Look at me. Come on. Come on. I shall buy you, my foolish little slave boy. But first, a thousand kisses and then a hundred more. And perhaps, if we're very lucky, we'll learn to love the smell of papyrus burning in the morning.

-o-o- FINIS -o-o-

Chrysos, Apollonios and Anthea are excerpted from a larger piece, RHOMAIOI, a series of loosely related dramatic monologues and poems focusing on the experiences of ordinary people in Late Antiquity (roughly from the 2nd through the 6th century C.E.). It is a fascinating and tumultuous epoch of human experience - - a period which has bequeathed to the modern world much of our religious and political structure - - and yet for most people it is mysterious and misunderstood. It is in a very real sense mythological. "Rhomaioi" is Greek and means "Romans." It is the word the ordinary citizen of the "Roman" Empire would use to describe himself in the Greek-speaking East.