got a lot to learn, Beric.’
‘I see. And you’ve been learning on me, just because I happened to be there.’
‘Well, if you hadn’t happened to be there, it wouldn’t have been you I learnt on!’
She giggled, and suddenly, instead of being hurt and ashamed, he was wildly angry. He said, ‘I think I am going to tell your father—everything.’
Flavia answered lightly, but with anger answering his: ‘But, you see, he wouldn’t believe you, because naturally I wouldn’t dream of admitting it, and he’d have the skin taken off your back for saying such a thing!’
Could she really have said that? Flavia? He tried to struggle back. ‘I am the son of a king, Flavia!’
‘Very possibly,’ she said, and tucked in a curl that was beginning to slip, ‘but no one remembers that any longer except you. Actually you wouldn’t be here at all if the Divine Claudius hadn’t happened to be rather sloppy. All the Emperors get like that. Gaius wanted to make his horse a Consul.’ He gasped at that and she went on, still lightly. ‘And the thing about horses is that there’s always a groom to keep them in their places—with a whip. Natives have to be kept in order in much the same way. You heard what Gallio said. And felt it!’
‘Flavia!’ he said. ‘Flavia! You don’t mean it!’
‘Oh yes, I do,’ she said. ‘I waited here to tell you, because I’ve made up my mind to have nothing more to do with creatures like you. No, don’t try to touch me. I mean what I say.’
He half shouted, ‘I won’t stand this! I won’t have you treating me like dirt!’
‘You are dirt,’ said Flavia, ‘and you’d better get used to it,’ and she turned her back and left him.
The three old men in the dining-room were still talking. For a time they discussed these Christians, a little nervously. It was odd to find oneself at a party, even after absorbing the drink and sobering down, talking about such an unpleasant subject; but they had been upset by Tigellinus. They were wondering now about the whole structure of the State which these Christians, alone among the foreigners and atheists, definitely wished to destroy or at any rate did not support. ‘They believe in nothing, I understand,’ said Balbus; ‘they have no temples, no priests, and they say they are going to destroy the world!’
‘They always talk in terms of destruction: flames and judgment and violence,’ Crispus said. ‘They seem unable to understand what the State is.’
‘That’s because they are State-less, slaves and worse. When the police hear of a Christian meeting, depend on it, it’s in one of the tenements in the Aventine. They swarm in there; it ought to be cleared.’
‘Nothing but a fire’s going to clear that. You know, Balbus, these tenements are a disgrace, and I don’t care who the landlords are! Full of thieves and poisoners and Christians and cheap astrologers and the gods alone know what else!’
‘The common Jews aren’t so bad; they’re fine fighters and they make good citizens so long as they don’t quarrel with their neighbours; and at any rate they don’t obtrude their superstitions; I’ve met some very decent Jews.’
‘Of course. You must have had plenty to do with Jews in your time, Gallio.’
‘Eh?’ said Gallio, starting awake. ‘Jews. Yes, yes. Much more honest than the Greeks. Often won’t take a bribe. But excitable. Dear me, yes.’
‘You never came across any Christians, did you?’
‘Oh, sometimes. The strict Jews can’t stand them. Seems they’re slack about religious observations. Don’t insist on all this nonsense about special food.’
‘I told you so,’ said Balbus. ‘Atheists! Even the Jews think so. Sometimes I wonder, Gallio, whether it isn’t the worst of a career like yours—and a damned fine career, too—that in Provincial administration you’re having to deal all the time with inferior races, Jews and Greeks and that class of person. It must have been intolerably tedious.’
Gallio looked at him and scratched in his beard a moment. ‘Sure they are inferior?’ he said.
‘Well,’—Balbus was almost shocked—‘naturally!’
‘I don’t know,’ Gallio said, ‘seems different when you’re not in Rome. There was one Jew at Corinth. A little dark man. Queer way of looking at you—that’s why I remember him. Paul or some such name. Yes, Marcus Antonius Paulus. Curious how they remember Anthony still in the East. Kind of immortality, that.’
‘What had this Paul done?’
‘Nothing. Made some rather good tents. As a matter of fact, I bought some from him. But the other Jews wanted his blood. He’d put their backs up somehow.’
‘But was he one of these Christians?’
‘Don’t know. He seemed perfectly respectable. I let him go, of course. He didn’t strike me as inferior.’
‘All the same, these Levantines …’
‘There seem to be so many of them,’ Crispus said. ‘Now this fellow Erasixenos, I wouldn’t have asked him two or three years ago. But now…’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Yes,’ said Balbus, ‘our Divine Nero admires their taste so much! And the rest of us have to ask them to dinner.’
Crispus looked round; two or three of the slaves were still there. ‘Boys, you may go,’ he said quickly, ‘all of you.’
‘Ah, thanks,’ said Balbus, ‘though I wasn’t going to say anything treasonable! Only that Tigellinus makes me sick. To see the way he looked at your daughter!’
‘We’re old-fashioned, I’m afraid. Perhaps he isn’t as bad as he seems. I can’t believe everything I hear about the Emperor.’
‘You’d better start practising, then,’ said Gallio, and laughed shortly.
But Crispus went rambling on with his regrets. The wine made him reminiscent and long winded. But there was no hurry. No hurry for any of them. Nothing left for three old men, all more or less retired from public life, to do or change. So they could go on talking. ‘It was so different those first five years, Gallio,’ he said, ‘when your brother Seneca was Nero’s tutor. We all thought he might be going to be the philosopher-king at last: the old dream. Yes, yes. But it was only because things had got so bad just before, with all the informers and murders and confiscations and scandals, and women and slaves in high places. But, you know, Balbus, it seemed like a fresh start with every Emperor, and then …’ He shook his head and emptied his wine-cup.
‘I was only a child when the Divine Augustus died,’ said Balbus, reminiscent too, ‘but I can remember the grief there was in all classes. And I remember, too, my father saying that we’d got a scholar and philosopher in Tiberius, a true Roman, hard-working, modest—well, there, we all know what came of it, and my poor father knew, too, to his cost, before the end.’
‘I was out of Rome those last five years of Tiberius,’ said Crispus, ‘a young man on my first job in the Provinces. It wasn’t till I came back that I realised how things were at home.’
‘It was the gloom, the blackness on everything—wasn’t it, Gallio?’ Balbus said. ‘You couldn’t enjoy yourself nor feel secure. There was that unhappy madman, betrayed by his wife and his friends, and at last by his own scholarship, glowering and pouncing between here and Capri. And then when he died and young Gaius took over—Caligula they called him, remember, Crispus?—it seemed like the good old days. Yes, the exiles came back, there were free elections and free speech again; we thought Rome could be Rome … But it was hardly a year before the prosecutions and the tyranny came back; Gaius was as mad as Tiberius. The things we had to put through in the Senate! Enough to make one