Archives of the Catacombs

A grown man knows the world he lives in. For the moment, that world is Rome.
-- Pontius Pilate in Ben-Hur

The Flame in the Catacombs: Reel II

Julianna

Callista Atrebas

Julianna hears some news....

Leaving the young couple alone in the garden, Julianna turns back into her house. A party to prepare for, and people and things needing her attention. Now the servants say Lavinia has come to speak with Julianna. Lavinia, of all people, Julianna muttered to herself. Why this particular woman seemed to always seek out Julianna for advice and confidence was beyond her grasp.

Lavinia was young and wealthy, from an old Roman family, the finest of blood, the noblest of gens, destined for a great marriage and certain entry into the seats of power. The courtesan was not in her class by any means, but Julianna believed that coming to her allowed Lavinia to maintain her arrogant superiority--a flaw Julianna disdained, particularly in the young.

"Julianna, I have news", the younger woman called out. "Father has finally made the arrangements for my wedding. I am on my way to see Antonio, but I had to come here first. YOu must see the guest list."

Julianna gasped and for a moment looked back toward the courtyard. All the times Lavinia had come, chattering on about her betrothal, and Julianna hadn't quite paid attention. She moved further into the house. One thing I know, she must not yet learn of Antonio's true affection. And she must not discover Helena here...

Scutiger Terentius

letting our tale get a bit dirty --

Morning breaks over the gardens of Antonio's family domus, with sparrows and starlings rising out of the shrubbery like the smoke from the kitchens where the servants prepare a morning meal for the household. The birds flee before the scythe of a gardener, a slightly too well dressed gardener. His name is Scutiger, and he was once a scribe and secretary to Antonio's uncle Sulla, a legate in Syria.

The legate's death from a fever in Antioch left Scutiger without a position, and barely able to make his way back to Rome. Sulla's family took pity on Scutiger, as he ashamedly had hoped when he appeared on their threshold, and gave him work and meals with the household that still allowed him time for the respectability of working as a rhetoritician-for-hire around the scholae of the Aquiline Hill.

Two students only had asked the favor of Scutiger's tutelage in the arts of rhetoric, young men with dreams of speaking in the Senate that he knew would never be fulfilled. The gardening work was simple and basic, and to Scutiger not demeaning at all, even the task the other servants laughed at him for accepting -- going to the stables for the baskets of horse manure that made the flowers blossom so brightly. He composed plays in his head as he worked; plays which he might write down some day, even though the chance of their performance was about that of his students' speaking in the Curia someday.

Far down at the bottom of the ceremonial gardens, near the ancient city wall that bounded the northern line of the property, Scutiger carried his steaming basket of manure to an area he wanted to dig up for flower beds. It was a relatively untouched area, being far from the main residence, and he knew he'd have a freer hand with what he planted and how it was tended (plus, no one would see an occasional nap).

Scutiger took up the shovel leaning against the stones of the wall, and began turning and tearing the turf, then digging deep and turning the remarkably hard-packed soil beneath; the manure would indeed be needed here if this unpromising soil was to bear fruit. Methodically, his mind on a stage overlooking the Mediterranean and composing lines of deathless love and timeless betrayal, his body set to loosening and breaking up the large clumps of compacted soil mixed with blackened, charred bits. . .until his mind felt his body feel the shovel deflect with a "clank" off of an unseen object in the dirt.

Quickly to his hands and knees, he reaches for the spot where shovel and noise had intersected; fingers feel a mix of hardness and slickness, and they lift into the light a sculpture of odd lines and rough texture. It was a headless man holding a spear and setting on a horse, all strangely enlongated yet beautifully proportioned. The statue looked old and felt older, with the depth of its burial being deep enough to have been in the ground some time, but not deep enough, surely, to date back to the Golden Age of Saturn and the Titans: not to mention far too small.

No, this was the work of human hands, hands very much like Scutiger's. It was treasure, and found treasure, but found on the grounds of his patron. What did this sculpture mean, and to whom did it belong? Just as Scutiger thought this, a shadow crossed over the object in his hands. .

Scutiger Terentius

slow fade from Scutiger's hands, to a potter's hands. . .

. . .the wheel spins with a steady thump, thump of the foot-pedal beneath, grey-brown clay stiffly funneling up under the pressure of strong, gnarled hands, stopping suddenly as a voice cries out. . ."

---

Kriosa Lysias

The voice cries out...

"Oh no, we're all doomed!"

The potter turns around to see his aged grandfather, bent with age, enter the potting studio with his wife and another man, who is explaining to them the news he just heard in the forum...

Scutiger Terentius

If Lavinia marries Antonio. . .

. . .it is only a matter of time before the location of our fellowship is known in the Emperor's household." The elderly man nearly wept as he struggled to keep his composure, and the break in his voice matched the tears in the corners of his eyes, signs of agitation all the more disturbing for the control that they broke through.

"I never thought it could do such harm to tell Lavinia who her mother truly is. . ."

Scutiger Terentius

A quick cut to another stubborn, splendid fool

a grove of pines with the wind musically winding through the heavy, scented boughs; a group of women are gathering pine nuts below them for pesto (anachronism check?), and as the camera pans down from swaying tree branches to the stooping band of needle-sifters, the conversation grows steadily more audible:

"Why aren't we scrubbing and cleaning? Aren't there guests coming over tonight?" "I don't want to complain, an afternoon outdoors is wonderful, but it is odd." "I think it has something to do with that Chrestus our lady Cecilia keeps trying to talk to us about." "You mean we're picking up pine nuts for her *religion*?" "No, not that, I just think it's funny that only the servants who aren't part of her little Chrestiani group are up on this hillside -- if you ask me, there's something odd going on back there. . ."

Camera pan up from the heads turned back to the ground, along the panorama across the Roman hills, down to the red-tile roofs of the villa at the bottom of the hill. Brief slow zoom onto the villa, then. . .

the Senator's filia

Lepida Furius

In another part of Rome entirely, another storm brews

Camera pans over a wide-screen panoramic shot of the city of Rome, a vast sea of marble shining under theh ot summer sun. Then as the continuous, seamless shot proceeds, it focuses on one particular house--the pillared elegant home of a noble family--and enters through the portae and through the corridors. Servants and servant maids are busily at work in the midmorning air, though they are only peripheral shapes as the camera slowly swoops past them and past a final set of doors.

Here the camera stops and gives us a shot of the bright blue morning sky through an open colonnade. Filmy draperies of white gauzy material flutter desultorily beside the columns and sometimes sweep along the spotless mosaic floor. Beyond them in the atrium, a grand fountain splashes amid carefully tended greenery. The camera pans right, across an elegant table offering a silver bowl of fruit, a green-glass vase of flowers, and a small amphora of Chian wine. In the background, the walls display a variety of fine murals of Olympian gods and goddesses; the camera halts for a moment on a scene of domestic bliss, on Juno the queen of gods reclining on a jeweled couch as an attendant offered her emeralds for her hair.

The camera slowly pans down past the mural to reveal the edge of a golden couch, covered with fine scarlet. Panning right again, the camera encounters an elegant foot encased in a gilded sandal. The shot then widens to include the rest of the domina mistress of the house, a tall young woman dressed in a cool white stola, emeralds sparkling at her ears, wrists, and slender neck.

It still being morning, her thick ebony hair was not yet coiled and coiffed by her Greek slaves, but hung in a black cloud to her waist and covered the couch cushions.

That dark cloud was matched only by the storm in the domina's eyes. In her hand she held a small scroll--a letter from her husband, gone on government business. Absences were only to be expected, but she knew better. It wasn't business alone that was keeping the man in Gaul. Her husband's philandering tendencies were common whispering material among the colonnades of the Roman aristocracy. But she was a senator's daughter, bred to honor; the whispers stopped whenever she appeared, to be replaced with looks of compassion or--worse--of pity. And all her prayers to Juno queen of marriage had proved worse than vain.

With one sweep of her arm, she hurled the scroll across the room--and snarled when it crashed into the flower vase and upset it, with the maddening tinkle of shattered glass. Enough! She was going out--where, she did not know, but she had to leave the house for the day. To the bathhouse, to the library, to the forum, to Hades--she didn't know, and she didn't care.

The domina stood up, realizing her hair was still undone, and clapped her hands impatiently. "Where is my ornatrix?" she shouted. "Girl! Greekling! My hair! NOW!"

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