CHAPTER 7

Hundreds of years before I was born, Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, saw his empire devastated by famine. He knew that Tellus, the goddess of the earth, was angry and had to be appeased. Uncertain of what he must do to save his empire, the king prayed and was given the solution in a dream:

By the death of cattle, Tellus must be placated. Two cows, that is. Let a single heifer yield two lives for the rites.

Pompilius solved the riddle by instituting the sacrifice of a pregnant cow —a single heifer yielding two lives —and the Festival of Fordicidia was born. The sacrifice of the pregnant heifer assured the fertility of the grain already planted and growing in the womb of Mother Earth. The unborn calf was a mediating being —alive but not yet born, innocent but sacrificed. The ritual, like most Roman religious rituals, spawned days of celebration and entertainment.

On the morning of Fordicidia, I met Seneca at the round temple of Vesta, joining thousands who crowded the streets to watch the ceremony. As usual, not many from Rome’s ruling class were in attendance. The true worshipers in Rome were the common people, not the artists or the intellectuals or the magistrates. Cicero once said that Rome had one religion for the poet, another for the philosopher, and another for the statesman. He was only partly right. The statesmen, it seemed to me, had no religion at all and used religion only to control the people. Poets and philosophers loved to write about religion but seldom practiced it. Only common citizens and soldiers on the battlefield truly believed in the power of omens and portents and the rites of purification and sacrifice.

Seneca made no secret of his disdain for all this foolishness. “Do you want to propitiate the gods?” he once asked me. “A true worshiper of the gods is he who acts like them.”

My own beliefs had been influenced heavily by the skepticism of the Greeks. Better not to believe in anything at all than to cringe before a god who is worse than the worst of men.

But here we were, Seneca and I, being jostled about by a mob laced with bloodthirsty adrenaline, straining to see the show unfolding on the great marble portico outside the temple of Vesta.

For the occasion, the temple servants had built a huge circular wooden platform, elevated by eight giant posts. An enormous black heifer stood at the top, anchored by chains attached to an iron collar around her neck and bolted to the platform. Muscle-bound slaves dressed in tunics did their best to keep the heifer calm. Other slaves, thinner and more agile, all wearing ghoulish masks, danced around the outside of the platform to the beat of drums. They gestured wildly, whipping the crowd into a frenzy.

As the music rose and the slaves danced more lasciviously, I became increasingly uncomfortable. The Greeks never acted like this.

To the left of the platform, dressed in flowing red garments, was Sejanus, the man in charge during Tiberius’s absence. He was a severe-looking man whose face bore the weathered vestiges of military campaigns. For today, Sejanus was Pontifex Maximus.

The man appeared to take no interest in the proceedings. He surveyed the onlookers, barely acknowledging the dancers as they took their gyrations to a new level of vulgarity. Women had now joined the sensual dance, but Sejanus stood stone-faced as if above it all, just waiting for it to end.

Under the platform, a beautiful young woman knelt with her chin held high and her hands open in front of her. She seemed lost in a trance, worshiping. Her long dark hair cascaded over her shoulders, shimmering in contrast to her pure-white robe. “That’s Flavia,” Seneca told me.

At that moment, most eyes were not on Flavia but were focused on the top of the platform, where the matron of the Vestals, a woman named Calpurnia, had just appeared. Calpurnia had recently turned thirty and was seven years away from completing her service.

“She takes her role very seriously,” Seneca whispered as if it were an ignoble thing. He regarded the whole affair as a charade. “I doubt she’ll ever marry.”

Calpurnia was a slight woman with red hair plaited and fastened by jeweled tortoiseshell combs and pins of ivory. I was sure she had spent hours preparing for this moment. Like Sejanus, she seemed unmoved by the dancers, staring toward the horizon over the heads of the crowd.

Just when I thought the crowd might explode with ecstasy, one of the slaves handed Calpurnia a long-handled knife. She grasped it with both hands and raised it over her head, prompting a full-throated bellow from the onlookers. The drums beat faster, the dancers kept pace, and the crowd pulsed with anticipation of what would happen next.

Calpurnia stepped behind the heifer, holding the knife aloft, staring at it as if it held some kind of enchanting power, and then swung it around with a violent double-fisted stroke that sliced the underside of the great heifer’s neck.

The drums stopped, the crowd hushed, and the heifer crumpled to its knees. Blood poured through a hole cut in the platform directly above Flavia’s head, drenching her in a crimson shower that matted her hair and covered her face and body. She knelt there as the blood cascaded over her, her palms upturned, blood soaking every inch of the once-white robe that now clung to her body like a second layer of skin.

After a minute, she wiped the blood from her eyes and opened them, a contrast of almond and white against the crimson face. She brushed her hair back, wiped her eyes a second time, and stood to face the crowd, holding her arms aloft. The Forum erupted in cheers, even louder than before. Tellus had been appeased; Mother Earth would yield her offspring; Rome would enjoy its bounty.

Still dripping with blood, Flavia walked over and knelt in front of Sejanus. The crowd quieted again as he placed a hand on her head and mumbled something I couldn’t hear. Flavia bowed her head and closed her eyes, soaking in the blessing from the second-most-powerful man in all of Rome.

“Welcome back,” Seneca said to me.

We left before the second part of the ritual, where the baby calf would be extracted and burned. The ashes would be saved by the Vestals and sprinkled on a bonfire during the Festival of Parilia.

We elbowed our way through the crowd until we found enough privacy to talk.

“She saw us in the crowd,” Seneca said. “We are supposed to meet in the Forum later, but I thought it would be important for her to know we were at the sacrifice.”

I was still getting used to being treated as a peer by Seneca. In a few hours he and I would be meeting with one of the Vestal Virgins. A man of my station and age would never have such opportunity apart from the influence of my friend and former teacher.

But I also knew that I could be honest with the man.

“The Greek gods are less bloodthirsty,” I said.

“I know,” Seneca replied without looking at me. “And the Greeks are not ruling the world.”