The Corpus Conundrum

Have I made a good case for considering this retreat my favorite, a place where I love to be? You are a confirmed city-dweller, I know, but even you must want it. I hope you do and that you will come to see it. Your company would only make this house that much more enjoyable.

  Farewell.

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  Actaeon: in mythology a young man who, while out hunting, stumbled upon Artemis and her nymphs bathing. Even though the violation was entirely accidental, Artemis turned Actaeon into a deer and set his dogs on him.

  Clientela: every wealthy Roman man had a number of people dependent on his generosity. ‘Client’ comes from a Latin word meaning to recline or lean on something. The upper-class man, the patron, was obligated to assist his clients if they were in financial difficulty. Clients were expected to appear at the patron’s house each morning for the salutatio, the greeting. Formal dress—the toga—was required.

  Congius: Roman unit of measure equal to 3.7 quarts.

  Diotima: female philosopher credited, in Plato’s Symposium, with being the one who taught Socrates.

  Empusa: a shape-shifting monster from Greco-Roman mythology. Some accounts say she had one leg of brass and the other a donkey’s leg, but she could take on the form of a beautiful woman in order to seduce men and drink their blood. She was related to a number of demons who seem to have originated in the Middle East. Ancient Babylonia had stories of the Lilitu, which gave rise to Lilith, Adam’s first wife (according to extra-Biblical tradition), who was turned into a monster, and her daughters the Lilu. Lilitu was considered a demon and was often shown as living on the blood of babies. Such stories were probably an effort to explain Sudden Infant Deaths. The Jewish versions of the demons were said to gorge themselves on men and women, as well as on newborns. Eventually Empusa was used in a general way to describe witches and demons. Empusa was the daughter of Hecate, tri-form goddess of the underworld.

  Epona: a Gallo-Roman goddess associated with horses, donkeys, and mules. Her cult had fertility overtones. She is shown in inscriptions riding a horse side-saddle, enthroned between two horses, or standing before a horse or horses. Her cult was spread over much of the Roman Empire by the auxiliary cavalry, especially those recruited from Gaul.

  Ergastulum: a structure used to confine slaves who were being punished or were particularly troublesome. It was usually at least partly underground and windowless or had windows placed too high to be reached. It is sometimes, as in Juvenal’s Satire 14.24, called a rustic prison (carcer rusticus). The emperor Hadrian (117-135) forbade their use.

  Exhedra: an outdoor eating area in a Roman house, usually at the back of the house off the peristyle garden. Some of those in Pompeii have slanted concrete benches instead of couches in the familiar triclinium arrangement.

  Euxine Sea: a common name in antiquity for the Black Sea. ‘Euxine’ means ‘kind to travelers.’ The Black Sea is anything but that. It has long been notorious for storms and tricky currents. Crediting something bad with an opposite quality was thought to be a way of averting the evil—apotropeia. Similarly, the goddesses known as the Furies were usually called the Eumenides, ‘the Kindly Ones.’

  Garum: a sauce made from scraps of fish and seafood. The material was allowed to ferment until a liquid developed. This was drained off and used to flavor foods. Amphorae found in Pompeii have raised the possibility that some garum may have been made only from fish with scales, so it would have been usable by Jews and other groups with dietary rules. Pliny the Elder makes a garbled reference to this (Natural History 31.44). He thinks that Jews eat only fish without scales, when the opposite is true.

  Marsyas: a satyr who challenged Apollo to a musical contest, with the stipulation that the winner could treat the loser any way he chose. Accounts vary, but the general theme is that the Muses, acting as judges, proclaimed Apollo the victor. He had Marsyas skinned alive to make him pay for his hubris.

  Milesian tale: a story with a convoluted, improbable plot, usually with bawdy overtones. Aristides of Miletus (2nd cent. BC) originated the form.

  Raeda: a covered coach with four wheels which could carry as many as six people. The driver sat in an open seat in the front.

  Sinus: when a man’s toga was properly draped, a pocket was created on his left side. By moving his arm away from his body he had a place to carry whatever he needed. On the day he was murdered Julius Caesar was handed a message about the plot. He slipped it into his sinus to read later.

  Tali: The Romans were almost compulsive gamblers. The emperor Claudius made people throw dice with him at dinner parties and, if they lost all their money, gave them more so they could continue to gamble. He also wrote a book on the subject (Suetonius, Claudius 33). Knuckle bones from an animal such as a pig were shaped into dice, called tali. Players threw four dice at a time, either by hand or from a small box. The Venus throw was the highest total possible. The Dog throw—also called the Vulture—occurred when the I came up on all four dice.

  Author’s Note

  Although it is a work of fiction, this book strives for historical accuracy (if I may be pardoned some anthropomorphizing). One of the most gratifying things any reviewer has ever said about my work was Library Journal’s comment that the second book in this series, The Blood of Caesar, was “outstandingly researched.” Two books which I found extremely helpful in writing this novel are Daniel Ogden’s Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford Univ. Pr. 2002), and J. D. P. Bolton’s Aristeas of Proconnesus (Oxford Univ. Pr. 1962). As Ogden’s title indicates, his book is a collection of passages from a wide range of ancient authors. Bolton’s book is the only study of Aristeas in English of which I am aware. It is fascinating how someone can write a book about a person who may have lived at any time during a two-hundred-year span and who may, or may not, have written a poem which no longer exists, except in a few fragments.

  The setting of this book is Pliny’s villa at Laurentum, which he describes in a long letter (Ep. 2.17). I have included my own translation of that letter as an appendix. Laurentum was a major town in the early days of the Roman Republic, but it seems to have shrunk to an insignificant village by the first century AD. Pliny does say, however, that it had three baths. He has a bath in his villa and, even though he has to rely on wells and springs as water sources, his bath includes two swimming pools. The frustrating thing about the description is that it is precise in some places—the two D-shaped colonnades—and imprecise in others—the rooms off the atrium used by his servants and guests. In my files I have six drawings of what the house might have looked like, all based on the letter and all different.

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