Once or twice in Rome, Caenis saw Vespasian's wife. She was neither beautiful nor fashionable; rather too dark, and bony-looking (thought Caenis, who was in that respect quite well made). Flavia Domitilla seemed neither happy nor unhappy. Still, she became the mother of a daughter and two sons; the elder boy was a charmer, people said. As far as Caenis knew, the woman's husband treated her with good humor and respect. Perhaps he loved her; possibly she loved him. These were things that in Roman society remained private between a man and his wife.

Marriage certainly helped his career. Flavius Vespasianus ran again for aedile; though he only scraped into sixth place on the list that did not matter; since there were six vacancies. Two years later, at the age of thirty, he became eligible for the rank of praetor. At those elections Caenis almost missed finding his name in the Gazette; he had romped home, the first time he ran, right at the head of the list.

PART THREE

THE HERO OF BRITAIN

When the Caesars were Caligula and Claudius

SEVENTEEN

Almost three-quarters of a century afterward, in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, the historian Suetonius had to mention Antonia Caenis in one of his essays on the Caesars. The Emperor Domitian had once been rude to her, which illustrated perfectly Domitian's defective character, for it was accepted that being rude to Caenis was the act of a charmless boor. In another way too, the freedwoman and secretary of Antonia the Younger was impossible for a historian to overlook.

Caenis would have liked to know, during the next fifteen or twenty years, that she was working her way into the end of a paragraph in the work of a chronicler whose titles included not just The Lives of the Caesars but Famous Prostitutes, and as a particular highlight the slim volume Greek Terms of Abuse. She would have liked to own a dictionary of Terms of Abuse herself—in order, for one thing, to express more fluently her views about historians.

What were twenty years to a literary biographer? The period from one mad emperor, through another who was merely inconsistent and undignified, and on to yet another madman: undisciplined men with monstrous wives, a handful of territorial adventures, a lively set of poisonings and stabbings on stairways, a financial scandal here and a legal outrage there, ambition, greed, corruption, lust—just technical ingredients. Useless to rise up booming like a cow over its lost calf because a historian, who needs to move on his narrative slickly to the next cogent point (or the next racy scandal), has slid over in the second half of a sentence the whole dismal, humdrum, suffering course of the best years of some woman's life.

Caenis knew better than to hope her story would become the triumph of the obscure. She did not suppose it would even be told.

* * *

So, once Vespasian had left her, she sat and listened to the silence of Antonia's slowly dying house. No one here even knew of her devastating blow.

This silence seemed to stretch ahead for the rest of her life. She might die young. Plenty did. Or she might last another forty years. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing expected of her; nothing for her to expect. All her duties to Antonia were done. There was nothing else.

She considered the alternatives. She could set herself up in a pretty salon for the gentry—music and good conversation, raffish elegance and fairly clean sheets. She could live chastely in single state, being sour and strict with her own slaves. She could pool resources to buy a lock-up shop with some skinny freedman: marry him, and snap at him, and struggle. She could in fact marry anyone in the Empire she liked, except the six hundred men who were members of the Senate. Augustus had debarred those from marrying freedwomen; he decently allowed the senators anybody else, though he obviously preferred them to stick to one another's sisters, daughters, and aunts. (Caenis had always reckoned that otherwise there was not much chance for some of the senatorial sisters, daughters, and aunts.) Vespasian had not even managed that; his new wife's father was only a knight.

She could jump off a bridge. Useless; she swam too well.

She could simply go on, as she had always known she must.

* * *

So she went on. Her patroness would have expected it. More important, she expected it of herself.

Afterward, she was proud of her tenacity, and glad. Glad because having lived her own life she could value all the more the rewards she eventually did win; glad too because it made her braver when she realized that she had to give them back.

Her first action now was to find somewhere new to live. Born in a palace, she went to live in a slum. Caenis, who had spent her happiest years in the most select private house in Rome, exchanged it for two rooms and a scullery on the squalling fifth floor of an unspeakable tenement. She remained perfectly calm about it. This was her own choice: She was short of ready cash; she avoided obligations; it was her own. She could have done better; she had endured worse. She remained calm even though for the privilege of living here on her own she was paying an unbelievable rent. As a ploy to forget a lost lover, the irritation this flagrant rent caused her was ideal.

She lived among the grueling goat paths that bordered the Via Appia in the Twelfth District. It was a dense plebeian settlement, added to the ancient city environs by Augustus. Her own block had been destroyed by fire, then rebuilt by landlords with an eye to future compensation, when it all collapsed again. They had invested little in the fabric, and there was even less chance they would pay for improvement or simple maintenance.

To find her apartment she turned off the narrow hubbub of the Via Appia, down a pitted side road just wide enough for two wheeled vehicles to sidle past one another in the night, and into a lane where a single handcart might squeeze; there she lived high above a yard bordered by flaking tenements. All the blocks looked the same, and all the apartments inside them were arranged identically. The first week she forgot her way home three times; no point asking directions; in this rabbit warren street names were unknown. Panic-stricken, she chose markers: the fountain with three conch shells where in due course she recognized the women washing one end or another of their recalcitrant children, the corner where the sharp smell from the tannery caught the back of her throat, the midden, the tired walnut tree, the local market.

Life held its compensations; in Rome there would always be mullet and oysters. There were cold meats and hot pies. She could bathe every day. She could escape to the theater. She could sink her teeth into the sweet golden flesh of a luxurious nectarine. . . .

The ground floor of her tenement was leased to a wineshop and a furrier, and used also by a morning nursery school. Whenever she came in or went out the vintner winked at her, the furrier whistled, but the schoolmaster only stared. For some time Caenis foolishly supposed the schoolmaster's nature was more refined than the others'.

Everybody hated the landlord. Not simply because of his outrageous rents. He was a seedy, leery capitalist who preyed on the lower levels of society while pretending to render favors in providing desperate folk with a roof over their heads; all his roofs leaked. He lived on the first floor. Although in subletting her apartment he had made great play to Caenis of the fact that her rent would include the provision of stair-sweepers, porters, and water-carriers, these functions were in fact all delegated to one African slave called Musa, who had a bad leg. The landlord's name was Eumolpus. In Roman tradition he was almost certainly not the owner of the ground lease for the building, nor even the principal mortgagee.