CHAPTER 5

None of the lessons Seneca taught me about Roman justice compared to the lesson I learned following my own crucifixion.

Marcus and I both returned that night to our families and reported what had happened. My two dislocated shoulders, the scrapes on my back, and the scars around my ankles and wrists left no doubt about my story. My mother looked at my swollen face with dismay and shock. My ribs hurt too, and I assumed that was from the beating I had taken from Caligula before I started fighting back.

Yet Caligula’s family proved too powerful for the charges to stick. His mother, Agrippina the Elder, was the granddaughter of Augustus Caesar and the stepdaughter of Emperor Tiberius Caesar.

She was the same Agrippina who had lived on the battlefield with her husband while Rome fought the Germanic tribes. It was on those battlefields that the boy nicknamed “Little Sandals” had been born. After Germanicus died, Agrippina claimed that an aristocrat named Piso had poisoned her husband, and all of Rome believed her, though Piso remained in Syria. Agrippina had returned from Antioch with the ashes of her dead husband, Germanicus, in an urn. His body had been cremated, though it was said in Rome that his heart had been untouched by the flames. The emperor bestowed on his widow the title “the Glory of My Country.”

My family was no match for the woman whose fame rivaled that of Tiberius Caesar. And in Rome, family status mattered more than justice.

Seneca wanted to ban Caligula from the school, but Agrippina wouldn’t hear of it. Caligula denied that he and his friends had anything to do with my crucifixion. “Surely the family of Theophilus has other enemies,” he claimed. “Perhaps they broke into the barracks and took him away in the middle of the night.”

Lucian claimed that on other nights he had seen me sneaking out of the barracks to engage in some kind of mischief in the city. He said that I would normally return just before dawn. That’s why he didn’t worry about it when he saw my empty cot. Two other boys confirmed his story. The rest, all except Marcus, claimed they didn’t know anything.

The patronage of Germanicus’s family was far more important to the school than my own family’s, so ultimately Caligula was believed. Seneca resigned in protest, drawing the ire of Agrippina and elevating the entire incident so that the tongues of every gossip in Rome could talk of little else. It was widely reported that Caligula and I had fought and that I had been crucified later that night.

But word of Caligula’s parliamentary disease did not leak out.

Though my father pulled me from the school, I had already become notorious. I would be walking down the street and would notice others walking toward me, whispering to each other. I had no doubt what they were talking about.

“That’s the boy who got crucified. He’ll probably be scarred forever.”

Marcus was also yanked from the school formerly taught by Seneca, but unlike me, he followed the great teacher to a new school of rhetoric. My parents decided that I needed a fresh start outside Rome so the controversy could die down. They sold a field adjacent to the Tiber —a piece of land that had been in the family for decades —so they could send me to Greece, where I could complete my training in rhetoric and law.

“You are going to the school founded by Apollonius Molon in Rhodes,” my father told me one night. My heart leapt at the news. “It’s where Julius Caesar became a great orator and received his education in Roman law. It’s also —”

“Where Cicero studied,” I interrupted. “Cicero went to Rhodes as a stuttering boy and left as a rhetorical genius.”

Since the night of my crucifixion, I had wallowed in self-pity. Seneca had tried to teach me not to trust my emotions. But I couldn’t keep from feeling sorry for myself and angry that Caligula and his gang would go unpunished. I had heard my parents talking about sending me out of the country, and I hadn’t wanted to leave. But I had never expected this!

“When do I leave?” I asked.

“First thing in the morning.”

It took less than a week at the Molon School of Rhetoric for the novelty to wear off. This was going to be a lot of hard work! The Greeks believed in discipline of body, mind, and soul. Unlike Seneca, who seemed to have a halfhearted belief in Stoicism, the Greeks took their Stoicism seriously. Virtue, they claimed, was sufficient for happiness, and nothing except virtue was good.

At the Molon School, they frowned on the emotional and flowery rhetoric of the other great rhetorical institution —the Asiatic School. Our instructors sarcastically called the Asiatic teachers “the dancing masters.” We were told to hold our heads high, argue our points with confidence, appeal briefly to their emotions, and then sit down. They told us the same thing that Apollonius Molon had told Cicero more than a hundred years earlier: nothing dries more quickly than a tear.

At first I loved the rhetorical training but hated the grueling physical regimen. Yet after a few months, as my body transformed under the watchful care of my instructors, I came to appreciate the physical aspects as well.

In Rome, training in gymnastics was mostly reserved for young men preparing for military service. Not so with the Greeks. They believed in whipping every young man’s body into shape. They embraced gymnastics for its own virtues —self-discipline, the molding of the body, the pure joy of competition. My instructors believed that to be a great orator one must also be in peak physical condition.

We started each day before dawn with a large breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, rare meat, roasted grain, and goat’s milk. They had a saying at the school: eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a commoner, and dinner like a slave. After breakfast, we began our studies and voice exercises. We would often recite our passages by the sea so that we could develop volume and project our voices. Later in the morning, once the sun had risen and the heat became a factor, we recited the same passages while walking uphill so that we learned how to maintain our tone and volume even when short of breath.

The afternoons found us training in the gymnasium. I had studied gymnastics and wrestling in Rome, but my previous training paled in comparison to this. Every day brought a new form of competition. I became more than proficient at pancratium, the sport of hand-to-hand combat that combined boxing and wrestling. I often dreamed of using my newfound skills against Caligula or even Lucian. My frame was not large enough to beat the best students in the school, but I learned to hold my own against students my size.

In Rome, the sons of aristocrats loved being spectators, watching the slaves do battle in the arena or race the chariots. Romans exercised out of necessity, keeping their bodies in shape because that’s what self-disciplined Romans did. But the Greeks still believed in the body beautiful. At least at the Molon School, physical training was an obsession, and it was one I learned to enjoy.

The Molon School also improved my confidence. Here there was no shame in being the first to raise your hand and engage your tutor more pointedly than the others. It was at Rhodes, on the edge of the Aegean Sea, that I learned self-confidence and became a man.

It was there that I learned about the Greek gods. My favorite was Apollo, the god of music, oracles, sun, medicine, light, and knowledge. Apollo was the giver of prophecy and oratory. For example, Epimenides, a Greek herdsman, fell asleep for fifty-six years and woke with the gift of prophecy from Apollo. He later uttered the immortal words about Zeus: “In him we live and move and have our being.”

Unlike Epimenides, I didn’t get much sleep at Molon. But my shoulders slowly healed by the shores of the Aegean, with the exception of a sharp pain that would sometimes shoot across the front of my left shoulder when I tried to lift something heavy over my head.

Like Epimenides, I was awakened to my own gifts in the Molon School and at the temple of Apollo. My body and soul grew there, and I consider those years to be among the happiest of my life.