Текст книги "Empire"

Автор книги: Steven Saylor

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

Titus trembled so violently that he thought he might fly to pieces. He wept uncontrollably. He had no choice but to remain on his knees. He could not stand.

Nero shook his head and clucked his tongue. “Poor Pinarius! Did you not realize your predicament was all a practical joke?”

Titus stared up at him, baffled.

“A practical joke, Pinarius! That ridiculous family heirloom you insist on wearing gave me the idea. Where is it, by the way? Don’t tell me you’ve lost it.”

Titus pointed mutely to Kaeso, trapped in the basket atop the nearby pole.

Nero nodded. “I see. You gave it to your twin. How appropriate! Petronius always said it was in very poor taste for you to wear something that looked like a crucifix, since everyone knows you have a Christian brother. How amusing, I thought, if Pinarius should find himself among the Christians.”

“You… you planned for this to happen?”

“Well, not all of it. I had no idea you’d run out to greet me like this. But how perfect! Truly, this is one of those rare, fortuitous moments that sometimes happen in the theatre, when everything comes together as if by magic.”

“But I could have been killed. I could have been burned alive!”

“Oh, no, you were never in danger. I instructed the guards to lay in wait and apprehend you outside the latrina – you had to go there sooner or later – but not to harm you. Well, no more than they had to, to convince you to go with them. You’ve had quite a scare, haven’t you? But inducing terror is one of the functions of the theatre; Aristotle himself says so. Terror, and pity – which you will feel soon enough. Was it not delicious, to feel the hot breath of Pluto on you, and then, when all hope was lost, to escape unscathed? I fear your arsonist brother shall have a different fate.”

Cupping Titus’s chin, Nero directed his gaze to Kaeso. With his other arm, Nero mimed the act of hurling a thunderbolt. The pole on which Kaeso was trapped burst into flames.

Titus was unable to look away. He watched – horrified, spellbound, stupefied.

Never before had he felt the presence of the gods as powerfully as he did in that moment. What he felt was beyond words, almost too intense to bear. This was the place, unlike any other, where the characters in a tragedy arrived; this was the moment of utmost revelation, so terrible that a mere mortal could barely endure it. What Titus felt was wonderful and horrible, bursting with meaning and yet utterly absurd. It was Nero who had brought him to this moment – Nero, who loomed above him, smiling, serene, godlike. To have devised this moment, Nero was without question the greatest of all the poets or playwrights who had ever lived among humankind. Titus felt again, now magnified beyond measure, the awe he had experienced when he heard Nero sing of burning Troy. Truly, Nero was divine. Who but a god could have brought Titus to this supreme moment?

Nero gazed down at him and nodded knowingly. “And when this is done, Pinarius – when the smoke clears and the embers die down – we shall retrieve that amulet of yours from your brother’s ashes, and you must wear it every day. Yes, every hour of every day, so that you may never forget this moment.”

AD 68

“You are a man now, my son. You are the heir of the Pinarii. Sometimes the passing of the fascinum has taken place at the death of its wearer, sometimes while the wearer is still alive. It is my decision to pass it to you now. From this moment, the fascinum of our ancestors belongs to you.”

Titus Pinarius was repeating a ceremony that had been enacted by countless generations of the Pinarii since a time before history. He lifted the necklace with the fascinum over his head and placed it around the neck of his son. Titus was fifty. Lucius was twenty-one.

But the mood in the household was not jubilant. Chrysanthe averted her eyes. Their three daughters wept. Hilarion lowered his face, and the other slaves followed his example. Even the wax masks of the ancestors, brought into the garden to witness the ceremony, seemed melancholy.

The garden itself was full of colour and fragrance, surrounding them with roses and flowering vines. Like every other part of their splendid new home on the Palatine, the garden was remarkably spacious and exquisitely maintained, a place of beauty and elegance, especially on a warm day in the month of Junius.

As one of the emperor’s most loyal subjects, always ready to take the auspices, to give him trusted advice, and to encourage his endeavours, Titus had prospered greatly in the last few years. Thanks to Nero’s generosity, he had acquired a considerable fortune and owned properties all over Italy. The old house on the Aventine had begun to seem cramped and antiquated. It was a proud day when the Pinarii moved into a newly built mansion only a few steps away from the Palatine wing of Nero’s Golden House.

Titus made ready to leave the house. He wore his trabea – the same one he had worn long ago when he first joined the college at the invitation of his cousin Claudius – but the lituus he selected was his second-best. The ancient ivory lituus he had inherited from his father he decided to leave behind.

“Are you sure I can’t come with you, father?” said Lucius. There were tears in his eyes.

“No, son. I want you to stay here. Your mother and sisters will need you.”

Lucius nodded. “I understand. Goodbye, father.”

“Goodbye, son.” They embraced, then Titus embraced and said farewell to each of his three daughters. The youngest was ten, the eldest sixteen. How like their mother they all looked!

Chrysanthe and Hilarion followed him to the vestibule. Hilarion opened the door for him. Chrysanthe took his hand.

Her voice was choked with emotion. “Is there no chance-?”

Titus shook his head. “Who can say? Who knows where the gods will lead me this day?”

He kissed her, then drew back and took a deep breath. Quickly, not daring to hesitate, he strode out of the house and into the street.

The last member of his household he saw was Hilarion, who looked after him from the doorway. Titus paused and turned back.

“You’ve served me well, Hilarion.”

“Thank you, Master.”

“How old are you, Hilarion?”

“I’ve never been entirely certain, Master.”

Titus shook his head and smiled. “However old you are, you still look like a boy to me. Still, I suppose, if you were a freedman, this would be the time for you to think of starting your own family. You know that I’ve left instructions to Lucius that you should be manumitted, in the event…”

Hilarion nodded. “Yes, Master, I know. Thank you, Master.”

“Of course, I would expect you to continue to serve Lucius. He’ll need a slave – a freedman – he can trust. Someone loyal, like you, with intelligence and good judgement.”

“I’ll always be loyal to the Pinarii, Master.”

“Good.” Titus cleared his throat. “Well, then…”

“Shall I close the door now, Master?”

“Yes, Hilarion. Close the door and bar it.”

The door closed. Titus heard the heavy bar drop into place. He turned and walked quickly up the street.

He passed no one. The street was deserted. Perhaps that was a good sign.

He reached the nearest entrance to the Golden House, the one he was accustomed to using almost every day, but found it blocked by a massive bronze door. Titus had never seen the door closed before; invariably, at any hour, he had found the entrance open and guarded by Praetorians. Today there were no guards in sight.

He raised the heavy bronze knocker on the door and let it drop. The sound reverberated up and down the street. There was no response.

He used the knocker several times, self-conscious about the noise he was making. No one answered.

He would have to try another entrance. Probably the closest was the original entrance to the old imperial house, the one built by Augustus, which was now essentially the back entrance, the farthest from the grand vestibule of the Golden House at the south end of the Forum. Titus had not used that entrance in a long time.

Not all of the rebuilt Palatine was taken up by the Golden House or by private residences. His route took him through an area of shops and taverns that normally catered to a very exclusive clientele. The shops were all closed and shuttered, but one of the taverns was open and seemed to be doing a good business, especially for so early in the day. Passing by, Titus heard the drunken patrons inside singing a song:

Mother-killer,

Wife-kicker,

Who’s sicker than Nero?

Burned his city,

Killed his baby.

Crazy maybe? Nero!

Suddenly a group of men rushed by. They looked panic-stricken. One of them Titus recognized as a fellow senator, a staunch supporter of the emperor, like himself, but the man was wearing a common tunic instead of his senatorial toga. The man recognized Titus and grabbed his arm.

“What in Hades are you doing in the street, Pinarius? You should be home with your family. Or better yet, get out of town. Don’t you have a country estate to go to?”

The man hurried on without another word.

Titus saw more people coming up the street. They were brandishing clubs and chanting a slogan. Titus did not stay to hear what they were saying. He quickly headed in the opposite direction.

He passed through empty streets and came to a small square with a public fountain. A marble statute of the emperor stood nearby. Titus groaned. Someone had put a crude stage wig on the head, tilting it askew, and tied a sack and a sign around the neck. The sign read: THIS ACTOR HAS EARNED THE SACK!

Titus shuddered. The sack was the sort into which a convicted parricide was sewn up before being thrown into the Tiber to drown.

It had come to this. When had it all gone wrong?

Was it when Nero, tired of Seneca’s advice, dismissed his old tutor and replaced him with the cold-blooded, insanely suspicious prefect of the Praetorian Guards, Tigellinus? Things had certainly taken a turn for the worse after that.

Or was it when the senatorial conspiracy against Nero came to light? The bloodshed that followed tore the city apart, but what choice did Nero have but to ruthlessly suppress the plotters? To be sure, Nero might have flung his net too wide. The senator Piso and a handful of others were certainly guilty, but what about Seneca, Petronius, Lucan, and so many others who had made the court of Nero such a vibrant place? All were gone now, either executed or forced to commit suicide. Their deaths had been as memorable as their lives, and were already the stuff of legend.

Petronius held a lavish banquet, then cut his wrists and bound them up so that he could slowly bleed to death while he conversed with his closest friends. He was said to be as witty and outspoken as ever that night, thumbing his nose at Nero by dictating a letter in which he listed all the emperor’s sexual partners and the intimate details of their couplings. His final act as the arbiter of elegance was to seal the letter and send it to Nero.

Shortly after the punishment of the Christians, Lucan fell out with Nero and was forbidden to publish more poems. Nevertheless, verses attributed to him were widely circulated, in which he accused Nero of starting the Great Fire. When he was arrested for conspiring with Piso, Lucan was pressed to name accomplices and shamed himself by implicating his mother, then took his own life. While he bled to death he recited the words of a dying soldier from his poem about the civil war:

My eyes are opened wide by death’s mark.

You who go on living do so in the dark.

The gods keep you blind so that you may endure,

But I see the truth: death is the cure.

Seneca, whom many suspected of wanting to replace his protege as emperor, spoke bitter words when Nero’s Praetorians came for him. “Is this how all my efforts to educate him end? All my teaching, for this? He killed his brother and his mother, and now he kills his tutor!”

Seneca’s wife decided to die with him. They cut their wrists and lay side by side. But death was slow to come. Seneca took poison – hemlock, in emulation of Socrates – but that did not work either. Finally he was placed in a hot bath to quicken his bleeding and was suffocated by the steam.

When Nero was told that Paulina still lived, he declared that she had done nothing to harm him and ordered that her wrists should be bandaged. Paulina survived. Following the dictates of her husband’s will, she cremated Seneca without funeral rites.

Tigellinus’s investigation of the conspiracy became so far-flung that Titus began to fear suspicion might fall even on him. But no one was more loyal to Nero than Titus. The emperor never doubted him.

As each conspirator was convicted, Nero confiscated the guilty man’s assets. By Roman law, traitors always forfeited their property to the state. Still, the confiscations caused a great deal of grumbling. People said that Nero convicted wealthy men simply to lay his hands on their estates. It was true that Nero needed all the money he could get. The lavish construction of the Golden House and the massive rebuilding of monuments and temples all over Roma had sent the emperor deeply into debt. People complained when he proposed that the resurrected city should be called Neropolis, but had he not purchased the right to rename it?

Money – that was the problem, thought Titus. If Nero still had money, he might yet be in control of the city, the Senate, and the empire. But all Nero’s money was gone. The treasury was empty. When Titus realized the severity of the situation, he had offered to donate his own property to the public coffers, a token of his gratitude for all the blessings Nero had showered on him. Nero only laughed. Even Titus’s considerable wealth was a pittance compared to Nero’s debts, a drop of water in the ocean.

Trouble in the provinces had also taken a toll. The bloody uprising of Boudica in Britannia, earlier in Nero’s reign, had been summarily dealt with, but the revolt that had been going on in Judaea for the last two years was more vexatious. Nero had appointed Vespasian to put down the Jewish rebellion. Resistance along the coast and in the northern part of Judaea had been quelled, but the city of Jerusalem, a hornet’s nest of fanatics, had so far resisted the Roman siege. It was in Jerusalem that the cult of the Christians had originated, Titus recalled. Why was that part of the world such a breeding ground for dangerous ideas and so resistant to Roman rule?

There had also been a revolt led by Vindex, the governor of Gaul, ostensibly against Nero’s exorbitant taxes. The revolt had been suppressed, but not before Vindex’s slanders about Nero’s personal life incited a great deal of prurient speculation across the empire.

Titus sighed. As crushing as events in the public sphere had been – the Pisonian conspiracy, the rise of Tigellinus and the loss of Seneca, the decimation of Nero’s inner circle, the vast expenditures required by the rebuilding of the burned city, the troubles in Britannia and Judaea and Gaul – perhaps the most pivotal event of all was the death of Poppaea Sabina. Was that when the trouble really began?

Poor Nero! With his own eyes, Titus had seen the emperor’s remorse after the death of Poppaea. Nero had been drinking heavily that night. The imperial couple were heard shouting at each other. Nero flew into a rage. No one witnessed what happened, but the physician who examined Poppaea later told Titus that only a kick in the belly could have caused the bleeding that killed both her and her unborn child.

Nero was inconsolable. Instead of cremating Poppaea in the Roman way, he had her body filled with fragrant spices and embalmed. Some said that this was in deference to her peculiar religious beliefs, but Titus thought it was because Nero could not bear to see her beauty consumed by flames.

It was purely by chance one day that Titus noticed a boy who might have been Poppaea’s double. The boy’s name was Sporus and he was a servant in the imperial household. When Titus drew Nero’s attention to the uncanny resemblance, Nero was instantly infatuated. But his attraction was not merely sexual or even romantic; Nero seemed to think that Sporus was linked in some mystical way to Poppaea, that his dead wife had returned to him in the form of a boy. This strange notion became such an obsession that Nero induced Sporus to undergo castration. Nero declared that by an act of divine will he had transformed the boy into a girl. He called his creation Sabina, which was Poppaea’s cognomen.

In a ceremony that exactly duplicated his wedding with Poppaea, Nero took Sporus, now Sabina, as his wife. Such a thing could never have happened when Agrippina or Seneca held sway. Titus took the auspices and Tigellinus performed the ritual, and from that day forward Nero dressed Sporus in Poppaea’s gowns and treated the eunuch in every way as his wife. Seeing the two of them quarrel at a banquet and then make up and dote on each other, Titus was sometimes startled by the illusion that Poppaea was still among them.

It seemed to Titus that Nero’s transcendence of male and female was yet another manifestation of the emperor’s divine nature. Nero’s appetites were not to be proscribed by the presumed limitations of the mortal body. The god-emperor could re-make a boy into a girl, and could even, after a fashion, resurrect the dead.

But not everyone possessed Titus’s delicate insight. Inevitably, cruder minds made the unconventional relationship the butt of jokes. “If only his father had taken such a wife,” went one, “there would never have been a Nero!”

Titus gazed for a long moment at the desecrated statue of Nero beside the little fountain. He climbed onto the pedestal, intending to remove the ridiculous wig and the parricide’s sack, then heard a group of men coming towards him. They sounded drunk and were singing another verse from the ditty he had heard from the tavern:

Performed in Greece

And took a crown.

Winning clown: Nero!

Fit for gods is

The Golden House.

Or fit for a louse: Nero!

The men carried clubs of some sort; Titus could tell because he heard them banging the clubs against the walls of the buildings they passed.

Titus jumped from the pedestal and hurried on.

It was no use now, raking over the past, trying to understand how Nero had landed in such a mess. Titus tried to remember the good times. The Golden House was surely the greatest architectural wonder of the age, even if parts of it were still unfinished. Nero had dared to build a house truly fit for a god to live in, a place so beautiful that every vantage point offered a delight to the eye and each of its hundreds of rooms invited visitors to indulge in boundless luxury. What parties Nero had held there, presenting the best and most beautiful performers from every corner of the world, offering the most sumptuous banquets, and making available the most refined and esoteric of sensual pleasures. “Pain is for mortals,” Nero had said. “Pleasure is divine.” To be a guest in the Golden House was to be a demigod, if only for a night.

The good times in the Golden House had been unforgettable, but no times had been better than the days of Nero’s grand tour through Greece. Away from the censorious gaze of fusty Roman senators and their wives, the emperor had performed publicly in the legendary theatres of Greece, playing the great roles – Oedipus, Medea, Hecuba, Agamemnon – always with Titus to take the auspices before his appearances. Some churlish critics complained that the emperor’s skills as a singer and actor were mediocre at best, despite the many prizes he won. Vespasian, who went along on the tour, actually fell asleep during one of Nero’s recitals. Only a select few, like Titus, were able to appreciate the full range of the emperor’s brilliance.

Wherever Nero appeared, the theatre was filled to capacity; everyone wanted to see an emperor on the stage. For the classic dramas, Nero declaimed while holding a tragic mask, in the ancient Greek style. For more modern productions, when the other actors went bare-faced, for propriety’s sake Nero still wore a mask, not of a character but of his own face. The effect, to Titus, only heightened the drama. How strange it was, to see a mask of the emperor and to know that the emperor himself was behind it. And how strikingly the whole logic of the theatre was reversed by having an emperor on the stage. Normally the audience felt invisible, with the power of their collective gaze focused on one man, but who in the audience could feel invisible when the emperor himself might be gazing back at him? Spectators became spectacle, actor became observer. Theatre had begun as a sacred institution, and once upon a time plays were religious rites. Nero had restored the sanctified power of the theatre, making it a truly transcendent experience. Over and over again, Titus was awed by the god-emperor’s genius.

Titus at last arrived at the entrance he was seeking, the original forecourt built by Augustus. The armour of the Divine Augustus was still in place, as were the original bronze doors and the marble lintel above them with its relief carving of a laurel crown. But, to Titus’s dismay, the two laurel trees that flanked the doors, which had been there since Livia had planted them and had miraculously escaped the Great Fire, were naked and withered. He reached for one of the branches. The brittle, black wood snapped off in his hand.

A comment Titus had once made to Nero and Poppaea echoed in his head: “I believe those two laurel trees will survive as long as there are descendants of the Divine Augustus.” Now the trees were dead. Titus shuddered, more unnerved by the sight of the withered trees than by the roving gangs in the streets.

The huge bronze doors were shut. Titus pushed on one of them. It was very heavy and at first refused to budge, but at last he managed to push it open just far enough to slip through the gap.

What had once been the vestibule of Augustus’s modest home was now a garden open to the sky. There were cherry trees and grapevines, roses and other fragrant flowers, and shrubberies shaped to look like animals. Beyond this garden lay a meadow planted with grass, where an artificial stream cascaded down to rocky waterfalls. Hallways and rooms lay beyond, and then more gardens, and more rooms.

As he rambled through the house, seeing and hearing no one, Titus was sometimes inside and sometimes outside; to pass from interior to exterior was a kind of magical act in the Golden House, so perfectly did its design bring the two together. Inside, Titus often felt that he was in the heart of nature, surrounded by lush paintings of greenery, shimmering green mosaic floors, bubbling fountains, and high windows open to the blue sky. Outside, Titus often felt as if he were in the most beautifully furnished room imaginable, surrounded by marble columns and ivory lattices, sumptuous draperies, and furniture made of stone and elegantly wrought metal and strewn with plush cushions.

Decorating both the gardens and the room were a great many statues.

Nero had plundered the whole empire to find enough pieces to decorate his vast house; from Delphi alone he had taken 500 statues. Some depicted the gods and some mortals, some were quaint and some erotic, some were remarkably realistic and others boldly heroic. Some were new and some old, but all were freshly painted, so convincingly that they looked as if they might move or speak at any moment.

The painters who had decorated the Golden House were the best in the world. Along with the statues, virtually every wall was painted, as were the enormously high ceilings. To create borders and frames, the painters had used geometric patterns and medallions and images from nature – leaves, shells, flowers – while they filled the larger spaces with illustrations that depicted the great stories of mankind and the gods. The colours were incredibly rich and vibrant; the compositions were exquisite. There were so many rooms – hundreds of them – that Titus, as often as he visited, had never been in the Golden House without finding himself in a room he had never seen before, filled with paintings entirely new to him, each more beautiful than the last.

Equally dazzling were the floors and walls covered in marble and the soaring marble columns. There was rich green marble from Sparta, yellow marble veined with black from Numidia, and regal porphyry from Egypt, but these were only the more common types. There were colours and patterns of marble in the Golden House that Titus had never seen anywhere else, brought to Roma in great quantities and at enormous expense from all over the world.

Many of the floors, inside and out, were decorated with mosaics. Beautiful pictures were framed by multiple borders made from dizzying geometric designs. The mosaics showed sailors catching fish, harvesters at work in fields of grain, gladiators in the arena, charioteers in the circus, scholars in their libraries, women dancing, priests offering sacrifices, children at play. The tiles shimmered, catching the light at many different angles, so that the images seemed to live and breathe beneath one’s feet.

As Titus moved from garden to garden, from building to building, from room to room, he was struck by the utter stillness. The entire palace seemed deserted. The quiet was unnerving. At last, after descending the stepped terraces on the Forum side of the Palatine, he entered a building and heard a noise from the next room. Before Titus could decide whether to conceal himself, a lion came striding towards him through the doorway.

Nero kept an extensive menagerie in one of the gardens at the far side of the Golden House, at the foot of the Esquiline. Evidently the beast keepers had fled along with everyone else, and someone had left the cages open.

The big cat paused for a moment. It stared at Titus, twitched its whiskers, and flicked its tail. It was a magnificent specimen, with a fine tawny pelt and a magnificent mane.

Titus stood frozen to the spot. He felt a bead of sweat trickle down his spine. He reached reflexively to touch the fascinum, which was not there. He had given it to Lucius.

The lion cocked its head, shook its mane, then appeared to reach a decision. It sauntered straight towards him.

Titus resisted the urge to run. He had seen condemned criminals run from lions in the arena. The result was never good. It occurred to him that he might try shouting at the animal, to see if he could frighten it, but he found himself unable to speak.

The lion reached him, tilted its head forward, and rubbed its face against Titus’s thigh. The beast emitted a noise that Titus first took for a growl, then realized was a purr. The lion looked up at him with large eyes, then rubbed its face against his other thigh.

His hand trembling, Titus dared to touch the lion’s mane. The creature stuck out its long, rough tongue and licked his hand.

Slowly, Titus turned and backed through the doorway, keeping his eyes on the lion. The creature watched him with a quizzical expression but made no move to follow. It threw back its head, opened a mouth full of sharp fangs, and yawned.

As soon as he was out of the lion’s sight, Titus began to walk very quickly, and then to run.

Rounding a corner, he collided with a pair of middle-aged household slaves, the first people he had seen since he had entered the Golden House. The male slave tumbled onto his backside and dropped the bulging sack he was carrying. The sack burst open. There was a great deal of clanging as silver cups and plates and serving implements went flying across the marble floor.

The female slave steadied herself and clutched the bulging, makeshift sack she was carrying, which appeared to be a bedsheet gathered at the corners. The woman stared at Titus, her eyes wide.

Titus caught his breath. Before he could speak, the female slave blushed a deep red and blurted out, “Polished! We were taking them… to be polished!”

All the scattered pieces had come to rest except for a small plate. With a ringing noise of metal against marble, the plate rolled on its edge in an ever-decreasing spiral. At last it tipped to one side and settled with a rhythmic clatter. The pieces of silver gleamed brightly on the floor, unsullied by the least hint of tarnish.

Titus ignored the slave’s obvious lie. “Where is everyone?” he asked.

The woman shrugged. “Gone their separate ways.”

“And your master? Where is the emperor?”

“We saw him in the grand courtyard a while back. Sitting at the foot of the Colossus. It’s straight ahead-”

“I know where it is,” said Titus. He hurried on. Behind him he heard the two slaves squabbling as they gathered up the scattered silver.

Entering the grand courtyard, whether for the first time or for the hundredth, inevitably produced a sensation of awe and vertigo. Everything was beyond human scale. The surrounding portico was suitable for giants, with soaring marble columns that alternated between black and white, as did the oversized marble paving stones underfoot. Zenodorus had convinced Nero that simple black and white would make the most striking yet at the same time the most harmonious showcase for the gigantic gilded statue that stood in the centre of the courtyard, towering higher than any other object in sight.

From the neck down, the naked statue, with its ideal physique, certainly did not resemble Nero, who had a protruding belly and spindly legs. But Zenodorus had done a splendid job of capturing Nero’s face, which was instantly recognizable even at a great distance. The statue represented the emperor in the guise of Sol, with sunbeams radiating from his head.

Titus spotted four tiny figures at the base of the Colossus. One of them, recognizable by his purple-and-gold robes, was Nero, who seemed to be lying flat on his back. He was also singing, if it could be called that, emitting long notes that echoed across the vast courtyard.

Of the three other figures, one, apparently male, was pacing back and forth, while the other two, a male and a female, stood close together, talking. All three stopped what they were doing and looked up as Titus approached, peering at him with trepidation. Eventually Titus drew close enough to recognize Epaphroditus, Nero’s personal secretary, and Sporus, with whom he had been conferring. The pacing figure was one of Nero’s most trusted freedman, Phaon. The three of them recognized Titus and sighed with relief.