Читать книгу Domitia - S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould - Страница 10

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“It is of no use in the world, Plancus, your attempting to reason me out of a fixed resolve,” said the lady Longa Duilia, peevishly. “My Corbulo shall not have a shabby funeral.”

“Madam, I do not suggest that,” said the steward humbly, rubbing his hands.

“Yes, you do. It is of no good your standing on one leg like a stork. Shabby it must be—no ancestors present. As the Gods love me, you would not have me borrow ancestors of Asclepiades, our client, who has lent us this villa! He may have them or not, that is no concern of mine. Will you have done preening yourself like an old cockroach. I say it would be an indignity to have a funeral for my Corbulo without ancestors. O Times! O Morals! What is the good of having ancestors if you do not use them?”

“But, Madam, they are in your palace at Rome in the Carinæ—or at the Gabian villa.”

“And for that reason they are not here. Without the attendance of his forbears, my Corbulo shall not be buried. Besides, who is there to impress here with the solemnity? Only a lot of wretched sailors, ship sutlers, Jew pedlers and petty officials, not worth considering. I have said it.”

[pg 36]

“But, Lady, Lucius Lamia agrees with me——”

“Lucius Ælius Lamia—it will not exhaust your lungs to give him his name more fully—is not as yet one of the family.”

“Madam, consider how Agrippina did with Germanicus—she had his pyre at Antioch, and conveyed his ashes to Rome.”

“Agrippina was able to have the funeral conducted with solemn pomp at Antioch. There were the soldiers, the lictors, great officers and all that sort of thing. Here—nothing at all. By the Immortals—consider the expenses, and none to look on gaping but tarry sailors and Jew rag-and-bone men.”

“Madam!”

“Silence. Without ancestors!—as impossible as without wood.”

To understand the point made so much of by the widow, the Roman funeral custom must be understood.

On the death of a noble or high official, his face was immediately moulded in wax, into a mask, or rather, into two masks, that were colored and supplied with glass eyes. One was placed over the dead face, when the corpse lay in state, and when he was conveyed to his funeral pyre, and the first effect of the rising flames was to dissolve the mask and disclose the dead features.

The ancient Greeks before they burned their dead laid gold-leaf masks on their faces, and in a still earlier time the face of the corpse was rouged with oxide of iron, to give it a false appearance of life.

But the second mask was preserved for the family portrait gallery.

When a Roman gentleman or lady was carried forth to his funeral pyre, he was preceded by a procession [pg 37]of actors dressed up in the togas and military or municipal insignia of departed ancestors, each wearing the wax mask of him he personified. For these masks were preserved with great care in the atrium of the house.

Now as Longa Duilia saw, to have her husband burned at Cenchræa, without a procession of imitation ancestors, would be to deprive the funeral of its most impressive feature.

Plancus had advised the burning at the port, with shorn rites, and that the ashes should be placed in the family mausoleum at Gabii, and that the utmost dignity should be accorded to this latter ceremony sufficient to content the most punctilious widow.

But this did not please the lady. The notion of a funeral with maimed pomp was distasteful to her; moreover, as she argued, it was illegal to have two funerals for the same man.

“That,” said Plancus, “hardly applies to one who has died out of Italy.”

“It is against the law,” replied Duilia. “I will give no occasion to objection, offer no handle to informers. Besides, I won’t have it. The respect I owe to Corbulo forbids the entertainment of such an idea. Really, and on my word, Plancus, I am not a child to be amused with shadow pictures, and unless you are making a rabbit, a fish, or a pig eating out of a trough, I cannot conceive what you are about with your hands, fumbling one over the other.”

“Madam, I had no thought——”

“I know you have none. Be pleased another time when addressing me to keep your hands quiet, it is irritating. One never knows where they are or will [pg 38]be, sometimes folding and unfolding them, then—they disappear up your sleeves and project none can guess where—like snails’ horns. Be pleased,—and now pawing your face like a cat washing itself. Please in future hold them in front of you like a dog when sitting up, begging. But as to the funeral—I will not have it cheap and nasty. Without ancestors a funeral is not worth having.”

“Then,” said the harassed freedman, “there is nothing for it but to engage an embalmer.”

“Of course—one can be obtained at Corinth. Everything can be had for money.”

As Plancus was retiring, the lady recalled him.

“Here,” said she, “do not act like a fool, and let the man charge a fancy price. Say that I have an idea of pickling Corbulo in brine, and have brought an amphora large enough for the purpose. Don’t close with his terms at once.”

When the steward was gone, then Longa Duilia turned her head languidly and summoned a slave-girl.

“Lucilla! The unfortunate feature of the situation is that I must not have my hair combed till we reach Gabii. It is customary, and for a bracelet of pearls I would not transgress custom. You can give my head a tousled look, without being dishevelled, I would wish to appear interesting, not untidy.”

“Lady! Nothing could make you other than fascinating. A widow in tears—some stray locks—it would melt marble.”

“And I think I shall outdo Agrippina,” said Duilia, “she carried her husband’s cinders in an urn at the head of her berth and on appropriate occasions howled in the most tragic and charming manner. But I shall [pg 39]convey the unconsumed body of my Corbulo in state exposed on his bier, in his military accoutrements all the way to Rhegium, then up the coast to Ostia and so to Gabii. There will be talk!”

“You will be cited in history as a widow the like of which the world has never seen. As for Agrippina, in your superior blaze she will be eclipsed forever.”

“I should prefer doing what Agrippina did—make a land journey from Brindisium, but—but—one must consider. It would be vastly expensive, and——”

But the lady did not finish the sentence. She considered that Nero might resent such a demonstration, as exciting indignation against himself, in having obliged Corbulo to put an end to his life. But she did not dare to breathe her thought even into the ear of a slave.

“No,” she said; “it would come too expensive. I will do what I can to honor my husband, but not ruin myself.”

When Longa Duilia had resolved to have her own way, and that was always, then all the entire family of slaves and retainers, freedmen and clients knew it must be done.

The vessel after a brief stay at Cenchræa had left for Diolcus where it had been placed on rollers and conveyed across the isthmus, and was launched in the Corinthian Gulf.

Nero had been engaged for some days in excavating a canal between the two seas. He had himself turned the first sod, but after getting some little way, rock was encountered of so hard a quality that to cut through it would cost time, toil and money.

He speedily tired of the scheme, wanted the money [pg 40]it would have cost for some dramatic exhibition, and was urged by Helios, a freedman whom he had left in Rome, to return to Italy, to prevent an insurrection that was simmering. Nero did not much believe in danger, but he had laden his fleet with the plunder of Greece, he had strutted and twittered on every stage, carried off every prize in every contest, and was desirous of being applauded in Italy and at Rome for what he had achieved, and exhibit there the chaplets he had won.

Accordingly he started, and hardly had he done so before the Artemis with spread sail swept down the Corinthian Gulf.

The ship, a Liburnian, of two banks of oars, was constructed very differently from a modern vessel. The prow was armed above water-mark with three strong and sharp blades, called the rostra, the beaks, which when driven into the side of an enemy would tear her open and sink her.

The quarter-deck was midships, and served a double purpose, being raised as high as the bulwarks it served as an elevated place where the captain could stand and survey the horizon and watch the course of the vessel, and it also served to strengthen the mast.

On this quarter-deck, on a bed of state, lay the body of Cnæus Domitius Corbulo, with his sword at his side, and the wax mask over his face. At his feet was a tripod with glowing coals on which occasionally incense and Cilician crocus were sprinkled, and on each side of his head blazed torches of pinewood dipped in pitch.

The poop had a covered place, called the aplaustre, in which sat the steerer. The hinged rudder had not then been invented, it was a discovery of the Middle [pg 41]Ages, and the head of the vessel was given its direction by the helmsman, gubernator, who worked a pair of broad flat paddles, one on each side.

The rowers, under the deck, were slaves, but the sailors were freemen. The rowers were kept in stroke by a piper, who played continually when the vessel was being propelled; and the rowers were under the direction and command of a hortator, so called because his voice was incessantly heard, urging, reprimanding, praising, threatening.

The captain of a Roman vessel was not supreme in authority on board ship as with us, but if the vessel contained military, he was subject to the control of the superior military officer.

The passage down the Corinthian Bay was effected without difficulty, before a favorable wind, but as the vessel was about to pass out of it, the wind suddenly changed and blew a squall from the west. And at this moment an accident occurred that was seriously embarrassing. Whilst the captain was standing near the steersman giving him directions relative to the passage of the straits, a wave rolling in caught the paddle, and caused it by the blow to snap the bronze bolt of the eye in which it worked, and the handle flying up and forward, struck the captain on the forehead, threw him down, and he fell against the bulwark so as to cut open his head. He had to be carried below insensible.

The Artemis lay under shelter till the gale abated, and then consultation arose as to what was to be done.

Lucius Lamia took the command, he was competent to manage the vessel, with the advice, if needed, of the mate. He and all were reluctant to put back to Lechæum, the port of Corinth, on the Gulf, and the broken [pg 42]eye in which the paddle worked was repaired with a stout thong, which, as the steersman said, would hold till Adria was crossed and Rhegium was reached.

The squall had passed, and the look of the sky was promising; moreover the wind was again favorable.

“Sir,” said the mate, “my opinion is that we should make all speed across Adria. This is a bad season of the year. It is a month in which sailing is overpassed. We must take advantage of our chances. While the wind blows, let us spread sail. The rowers can ship their oars; should the wind fail, or prove contrary, they will be required, and they may have a hard time of it. Therefore let them husband their strength.”

“So be it,” answered Lucius Lamia.

And now the Artemis, with sail spread, leaning on one side, drave through the rippling water, passed the Straits into the Adriatic, with the mountains of Ætolia to the north, and the island of Cephalonia in the blue west before her; and as she flew, she left behind her a trail of foam in the water, and a waft of smoke in the air from the torches that glowed about the dead general on the quarter-deck.

[pg 43]