The Greatest City in the World
We found Rome guarded by the dead. Tombs lined the roads that led into the city. Beggars ran alongside us or called from the tombs, where some of them seemed to live. I was shocked. There were poor people in Leptis Magna too, of course, but I had never seen so many diseased, so many starving, so many without limbs. We quickly ran out of small coins to give to them, and my father was in professional paradise.
“Look at that dislocation!” he exclaimed, peering out of the carriage. “I would have to spend years before I saw one of that kind in Leptis, and here I have seen three in the course of an hour! And look – terminal stage elephantiasis! What a place this is for a physician! There is nowhere like Rome!”
My mother and I exchanged a despairing glance, and she opened her travelling box to find some food to give to a dreadfully thin child who was reaching a pitiful little hand up to our carriage. My father was greedily following a clubfoot with his gaze. I sat, feeling miserable and not knowing where to look. It all seemed so sad, so dirty and poor. Where was the glorious Rome we had heard so much about?
As the streets grew narrower and the houses taller, I began to feel terrified simply by the city’s sheer size. By now, we would have reached the centre of Leptis Magna. And there were crowds everywhere – the roads were choked with carts and people walking and riders and soldiers. So many people! It was as if they were all being sucked up, swallowed by a huge monstrous mouth.
“How many people live here?” I found myself asking.
“A million, perhaps more,” my father replied. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”
It was magnificent – but it terrified me. It was too big. I felt as if I were drowning.
Carriages were not allowed into the city until nightfall, so when we stopped at a mansio to rest, my father left the luggage in the carriage with a slave, and hired some bearers to carry us onwards in litters.
“The Emperor is expecting us,” he said. I had never seen him so nervous.
As we went deeper into the city, the noise grew and grew. Six-storey tower blocks – called insulae because, like islands, they reared up from the sea of people around them – blocked daylight from the streets. People leaned from their windows to chat with their neighbours, and more than once we had to scoot to avoid a chamber pot being emptied. Arguments and love songs, politicians thundering away, all mingled with the shouts of people selling everything from vegetables to perfume, fish sauce to fine scarves.
“Caput mundi!” my father said, as proudly as if he had built Rome himself. “Head of the world, the greatest city there is.”
Just as he said that, our bearers stopped. An old man’s even older donkey had died in the middle of the road, spilling its baskets of onions everywhere. Helpful Romans, annoyed Romans, pick-pocketing Romans and just plain curious Romans had gathered around. The road was completely blocked.
“Now I see why they demanded an hourly rate,” my mother said dryly, peeking through the curtains of the litter. “It will take us a day to reach the palace.”
In the end my father hired some more people to clear the way in front of us, and we went slowly onwards. I stared out of the litter, amazed at everything. Everywhere I looked there were more roads, more streets of hammering smiths or busy vegetable markets, more glittering temples heaving out smoke from sacrifices, more steaming bathhouses, more jingling dancers and priests winding their way through the crowds. And the words! So many babbling barbarian voices, so many shrill Roman dialect curses being shrieked, so many arguments and jokes and fights! Even the walls shouted, for wherever I looked there was more rude graffiti than I had ever seen before. All these things were in Leptis Magna too, but there was so much more of them all in Rome. If Leptis was a busy fish pond, Rome was the ocean.
My father was beaming, but my mother sat up as straight and taut as if she were a prisoner. I was terrified, but excited too. Soon we had left the ordinary streets and entered the heart of Rome, where the most important buildings were. Now things were different. There were more soldiers around, and more people in togas, fewer in tunics. Marble glared back the sunlight from arches built to honour great men. The straight lines of the inscriptions made me think of sword cuts, slicing down, then slashing up. Columns towered above the bustling, toga-clad officials. Upon each one, like an eagle watching for prey, perched a statue. Gods and emperors seemed to follow us with their painted eyes, their gilded crowns flashing golden in the sun. And there, among them—
“A girl on a horse!” I exclaimed. I pointed. There was a statue with a girl like me, wearing girls’ clothes, astride a horse.
“That’s Cloelia,” my mother said shortly.
“So girls do ride! Can’t I have a horse?”
My mother tutted and my father laughed.
“Cloelia was captured by Rome’s enemies in the ancient days of Lars Porsena. She escaped from her captors by stealing a horse and swimming a river, and she took the other captives with her. She was brave, but that was wartime. Horses are for men in Rome, and not just any men – knights and senators.”
I was silent. I watched the statue until it was out of sight. The stone girl, voiceless, unnoticed, looked out over the heads of everyone bustling in Rome. Then, as if a river swept me away from her, she was gone.
My father kept up a commentary, pointing out the temples to different gods, the forums built by Julius Caesar and the Senate House.
“Why are there so many soldiers?” I exclaimed, as yet another cohort in jingling armour and scarlet cloaks strode past. “There were fewer in Leptis Magna and we had the Garamantes on our doorstep.”
My father and mother exchanged a glance.
“The Emperor is a military man,” my father said. “He likes the army.”
This still seemed odd to me, but a moment later, I had forgotten about it. For we had reached the enormous entrance to the Palatine Hill, the palace where the emperors of Rome lived. Looking back, I saw the busy forum with dignified senators crossing it, deep in conversation with each other. But when I looked ahead, I saw only soldiers with stony faces and eyes that were about as kind as those of the statues; less, in fact, for the painted eyes of the gods often seemed to smile at me.
Our litter bearers stopped. Soldiers milled around. One centurion flicked open the curtain of our litter with his truncheon and examined us without a smile. I heard questions, orders and instructions. The spears in the hands of the soldiers were like the thorns on a cactus, glinting. I’d once grasped a cactus fruit by mistake and I remembered the pain. I kept my eyes on the spears.
But people were expecting us. The gates opened and we were carried in; then they shut with a crash behind us.
“You were inside the palace? The real, emperor’s palace?” Your eyes are wide. “How big was it?”
I think hard. What can you possibly compare it to? I realise for the first time, perhaps, how different your world is to mine. The biggest things you’ve ever seen are the sky and the sea. The biggest things built by man – well, you can’t imagine anything other than our farmhouse. You haven’t even seen Londinium.
“Imagine the most magnificent house you’ve ever been in. It has porticoes, passages, courtyards and gardens. Then imagine that house is surrounded by another house, more courtyards, more pools and gardens, more offices and workrooms. Then surround it with yet another, pathways and passages all branching like a tree. And another. And another. That was how it felt to walk into the palace of the Emperor of Rome.”
Now you are really listening. Power is like the sun: you can’t ignore it.
You just have to try not to get burned up.
The noise from the city died away as we followed our escort, who was not a soldier this time, but a Greek slave who managed to look down his nose at us despite being a slave. I followed at my mother’s heels, trying not to stare as we passed pillars of different coloured marbles, statues covered in silver and gold, murals and mosaics like glittering jewels. Banners and curtains wafted in the breeze, and there was the sound of dancing water from hidden gardens. I caught the occasional glimpse or scent of beautifully dressed people drifting about like nymphs.
Door after door was opened for us and closed behind us. Then, at last, the slave stopped before a door that opened like a picture frame onto a sunny garden, where a woman and two young men sat in golden chairs. Beyond them was only blue sky.
“The imperial family,” the slave murmured.
The woman who rose to meet us was Julia Domna, wife of the Emperor. She looked like her pictures, but with one difference – her skin was much darker than it had been painted. Her dark brows almost met in the middle, and her face was severe, with a strongly carved nose and deep-set brown eyes. Her hair was done in a way I had never seen before; it looked almost like a helmet, but you could see it had taken hours of painstaking work to create those regular, regimented braids. It framed her face like a setting frames a jewel. She was not beautiful, but one look at her told me I would never dare disobey her.
Beside her, in golden chairs, sat two men in their twenties. One was older, and very like the Emperor’s statues, if the statues had been in a scowling, bad mood. The other, younger one looked more like his mother. I guessed at once that the older one was Bassianus, who was always called Caracalla, and the younger one was Geta.
I remembered the arch of Septimius Severus in Leptis Magna. On that stone, the brothers had been shown grasping hands with their father, tall and straight and in complete agreement. Concordia: peace. But the men in front of me were not calm, dignified marble heroes. Caracalla’s face was red and puffy and his eyes were sharp and watched every move we made. Geta was pale and fidgety, and he seemed to know when Caracalla’s knife-blade eyes were on him.
Even from a distance, I noticed how Caracalla leaned forward as if about to pounce, and how Geta cringed away from him, while trying to pretend he was not afraid. The cats stood like that back at home, when the older kitten was bullying the younger one into a fight he would never win. No, there was no concordia here.
“Doctor – I have heard much about your skill,” Julia Domna said, sweetly.
My parents walked towards her, responding to the Empress’s welcoming smile and her outstretched hand. I hung back, feeling tongue-tied and shy.
A shadow fell across me. I turned and looked up, into the face of the Emperor himself, Septimius Severus.