Caesar Dies | Page 2

vices of the Greeks and Syrians, had pleasure been so organized or
its commercial pursuit so profitable. Taxes were collected rigorously.
The demands of Rome, increased by the extravagance of Commodus,
were merciless. But trade was good. Obedience and flattery were well
rewarded. Citizens who yielded to extortion and refrained from
criticism within hearing of informers lived in reasonable expectation of
surviving the coming night.
But the informers were ubiquitous and unknown, which was another
reason why the Romans and Antiochenes refrained from mixing
socially more than could be helped. A secret charge of treason, based
on nothing more than an informer's malice, might set even a Roman
citizen outside the pale of ordinary law and make him liable to torture.
If convicted, death and confiscation followed. Since the deification of

the emperors it had become treason even to use a coarse expression
near their images or statues; images were on the coins; statues were in
the streets. Commodus, to whom all confiscated property accrued, was
in ever- increasing need of funds to defray the titanic expense of the
games that he lavished on Rome and the "presents" with which he
studiously nursed the army's loyalty. So it was wise to be taciturn;
expedient to choose one's friends deliberately; not far removed from
madness to be seen in company with those whose antecedents might
suggest the possibility of a political intrigue. But it was also unwise to
woo solitude; a solitary man might perish by the rack and sword for
lack of witnesses, if charged with some serious offense.
So there were comradeships more loyal the more that treachery stalked
abroad. Because seriousness drew attention from the spies, the deepest
thoughts were masked beneath an air of levity, and merrymaking hid
such counsels as might come within the vaguely defined boundaries of
treason.
Sextus, son of Maximus, rode not alone. Norbanus rode beside him,
and behind them Scylax on the famous Arab mare that Sextus had won
from Artaxes the Persian in a wager on the recent chariot races. Scylax
was a slave but no less, for that reason, Sextus' friend.
Norbanus rode a skewbald Cappadocian that kicked out sidewise at
pedestrians; so there was opportunity for private conversation, even on
the road to Daphne of an afternoon in spring, when nearly all of
fashionable Antioch was beginning to flow in that direction. Horses,
litters and chariots, followed by crowds of slaves on foot with the
provisions for moonlight banquets, poured toward the northern gate,
some overtaking and passing the three but riding wide of the skewbald
Cappadocian stallion's heels.
"If Pertinax should really come," said Sextus.
"He will have a girl with him," Norbanus interrupted. He had an
annoying way of finishing the sentences that other folk began.
"True. When he is not campaigning Pertinax finds a woman
irresistible."
"And naturally, also, none resists a general in the field!" Norbanus
added. "So our handsome Pertinax performs his vows to Aphrodite
with a constancy that the goddess rewards by forever putting lovely
women in his way! Whereas Stoics like you, Sextus, and unfortunates

like me, who don't know how to amuse a woman, are made notorious
by one least lapse from our austerity. The handsome, dissolute ones
have all the luck. The roisterers at Daphne will invent such scandalous
tales of us tonight as will pursue us for a lustrum, and yet there isn't a
chance in a thousand that we shall even enjoy ourselves!"
"Yes. I wish now we had chosen any other meeting place than
Daphne," Sextus answered gloomily. "What odds? Had we gone into
the desert Pertinax would have brought his own last desperate adorer,
and a couple more to bore us while he makes himself ridiculous.
Strange--that a man so firm in war and wise in government should lose
his head the moment a woman smiles at him."
"He doesn't lose his head--much," Sextus answered. "But his father was
a firewood seller in a village in Liguria. That is why he so loves money
and the latest fashions. Poverty and rags--austerity inflicted on him in
his youth--great Jupiter! If you and I had risen from the charcoal-
burning to be consul twice and a grammarian and the friend of Marcus
Aurelius; if you and I were as handsome as he is, and had experienced a
triumph after restoring discipline in Britain and conducting two or three
successful wars; and if either of us had such a wife as Flavia Titiana, I
believe we could besmirch ourselves more constantly than Pertinax
does! It is not that he delights in women so much as that he thinks
debauch is aristocratic. Flavia Titiana is unfaithful to him. She is also a
patrician and unusually clever. He has never understood her, but she is
witty, so he thinks her wonderful and tries