The Roman by Mika Waltari Page B

olive harvest was so good the price of oil fell. And my father�s underlings did not seem to respect him, but behaved unscrupulously when they saw how good- natured he was. They complained endlessly about their poor houses, their wretched tools and their oxen�s� illnesses. Occasionally my father grew angry and spoke harshly, in contrast to his usual attitude, but then they hurriedly produced a meal for him and offered him chilled white wine. The children tied a wreath around his head and played ring games around him until he was appeased and made new concessions to his tenants and freedmen. In fact, in Caere my father drank so much wine that he hardly saw a sober day there. In the city of Caere we met several potbellied priests and merchants who had folds in their eyelids and whose family trees went back a thousand years. They helped my father draw up his own family free, right back to the year when Lycurgus destroyed the fleet and harbor of Caere. My father also bought a burial place on the holy road in Caere. Finally a message came from Rome that everything was in order. The Censor had confirmed my father�s request to have his rank of knighthood returned to him. The matter would be put before Emperor Claudius any day now, so we had to return to Rome. There we waited at home for several days, since we could be summoned to Palatine at any time. Claudius� secretary, Narcissus, had promised to pick a favorable moment for the case. The winter was severe; the stone floors in Rome were icy cold and every day people died in the tenements from fumes from ill- cared-for braziers. In the daytime the sun shone and predicted
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    spring, but even the senators unblushingly had braziers put under their ivory stools during the meetings at the Curia. Aunt Laelia complained that the old virtues of Rome had gone. In the time cit Augustus, many an old senator would have preferred pneumonia or a lifetime of rheumatism to such unmanly coddling of his body. Aunt Laelia naturally wanted to see the feast of Lupercalia acid the procession, too. She assured us that the Emperor himself was the high priest and we should scarcely be summoned to Palatine on that day. Early on the morning of Idus in February, I accompanied her to as near the ancient fig free as it was possible to get. Inside the cave the Lupercalias sacrificed a goat in honor of Faunus Lupercus. The priest drew a sign on the foreheads of all the Lupercalias with his bloodstained knife and they all wiped it off again at once with a piece of holy linen which had been dipped in milk. Then they all burst into the ritual communal laughter. The sacred laughter which came from the cave was so lucid and terrifying that the crowd stiffened with piety and several distracted women ran ahead down the route the guards were keeping open for the procession with their holy bundles of sticks. In 11cc� cave the priests cut the hide of the goat into long strips with their sacrificial knives and then danced their sacred dance clown the route. They were all completely naked, laughing the sacred laughter and, with the strips of goatskin, whipping the women who had pushed forward onto the route so that they received bloodstains on their clothes. Dancing in this way, they circled the whole of Palatine Hill. Aunt Laelia was pleased and said that she had not heard the ritual laughter sound so solemn for many years. A woman who is touched by the Lupercalias� bloodstained strips of hide becomes pregnant within a year, she explained. It was an infallible remedy for infertility. She regretted that noble women did not want children, for it had been for the most part the wives of ordinary citizens who had come to be scourged by the Lupercalias, and she had not seen a single senator�s wife along the whole route. Some people in the tight-packed crowd of spectators said that they had seen Emperor Claudius in person leaping about and howling as he urged the Lupercalias on to the scourging, but we did not see