The Boat of Fate by Keith Roberts Page B

repair of aqueduct channels and the restoration of furniture. Nothing was too small for him to tackle, though he took most pride, obscurely, in his manufacturing of beds. The sideline had come about largely by accident. A few years before he had acquired a gang of skilled slaves from an Ostian businessman who had succeeded in bankrupting himself. He had no real use for them at the time, but they had been knocked down for next to nothing and my uncle was a man who hated the thought of any useful commodity going to waste. The speed with which they could produce a bed was nothing short of wonderful; and Lucullus, by virtue of his curious persuasiveness and wide range of contacts, had succeeded in re-equipping half the households of the city. Couches of all shapes and sizes issued from the little manufactory off the Argiletum in a steady stream; and I, who was largely involved in matters arising from minor contracts, spent most of my days immersed in the intricacies of headboards and frames, webbing and cushions. It was an odd fate for a would-be leader of the Empire.
    The eccentricities of Uncle Lucullus were many and varied, so varied that he seemed to contain within himself every contradiction imaginable. Normally he was the meanest of men, but he was capable of bursts of startling generosity. He was a shrewd businessman, yet he was often guilty of acts of gross stupidity. One of the stories that circulated about him fits so well with his character that I’m sure it must be true. He had a fine house, on the Viminal; one day he decided he was not enjoying the respect due to his station, and let it be known through Subura that he was willing to receive clients. The following morning his porch was invested by an anxious swarm of beggars, some dolled up in the ancient and degraded toga, all clamouring for the benefits of his wisdom and wealth. My uncle was delighted with the effect, and so far forgot his habitual parsimony as to shower the mob with gold. The following day its numbers, of course, doubled; the night after that the din from the street woke Lucullus in the small hours. The house was besieged by a chanting mob, all hoping for a share of this sudden and mysterious largesse. My uncle, enraged at the loss of his sleep, appeared among them with a horse-whip; he was severely buffeted in the ensuing brawl, narrowly escaping with his life. For weeks afterwards small aggressive groups tended to follow him about in the streets; he eventually shut himself up in his house, refusing to make an appearance till the plebs, traditionally fickle, had found other objects of amusement.
    To this misplaced vanity he added an acute hypochondria. He snivelled and coughed his way through the winter months, swathed in a dozen or more assorted tunics and scarves; in the summer he developed violent and I’m sure largely imaginary hay fever. He was also perennially convinced his eyes were failing, and that he would one day go stone blind. That on its own would never have surprised me, for the light he habitually worked by was dim enough to ruin anybody’s sight. If, as often happened, the rest of us stayed on after dark he would make a perfect nuisance of himself, stamping round the workshop snuffing out a taper here, extinguishing a lamp there, till he had reduced us to the same Stygian gloom; he viewed each unnecessary flame as a positive financial haemorrhage, and an insult to his business acumen. On grand days he sported a concave emerald, through which he would peer in lordly imitation of the Emperor Nero; other times he would fall into a fit of fretting and wailing, summoning oculists half a dozen at a time to attend him. Then we would spend hours pounding up his salves: the Unconquerable, prepared in accordance with a secret Thessalian formula, the Victorious (as used by the Pharaohs of Egypt) and many more. He would lie back in his chair, damp pads over his eyes, while Abinnaeus, with a set face of resignation, dripped the stuff on to