Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

faces, as if we were barbary apes, the shit in the latrines being shoveled over, another day, another day.

They even have an emperor here, as if we were the army on a campaign, or a deputation in Hispania. It is the old fart himself, a marble bust thereof, around which they put the purple nightshirt, and a breastplate and greaves. They march him behind the SPQR, goose-stepping and pounding on the drums, jingling the sistrum, and roaring Ave!

O to kiss a pig’s butt and it ripe with diarrhea!

Once when I was in Old Granny’s Pisspot, that windowless judgment down by the Maxima, black as Egypt on a Thursday night, a wealth of rats traveling in all directions, jugged all over again because the monster’s spies had found another nest of philosophers and stirred us up with their sticks and frogmarched us before a hogjowled magistrate who sentenced us from behind his nosegay, looking at us sideways, to three months’ darkness, or longer, subject to the emperor’s pleasure, once when I was going fishbelly white and blind as a mole because the emperor emits little yipes of horror when he hears of a philosopher in Rome, a letter came to me from God knows where or how, it was tossed in with the mildewed bilge they fed us.

A letter! It was from Apollonius.

Esteemed Musonius, it said, it was written in Greek. Esteemed Musonius, than whom no one is more able in philosophy, my heart is sore pressed to learn that you are detained by the government. And so on and so forth, and he would come to see me.

The next handing around of the slop I asked the guard if his imperial majesty’s postal service, famed for its delivery of eclogues from the Caucasus to Celtiberia and of sycophantic procurators’ lies from the Pillars of Hercules to the spice groves of Arabia Felix, extended to this colicky whore’s ass of a jail?

— He is here, he whispered.

— He? Who?

— The wizard.

— Apollonius?

— Him.

— Me hercle, nai gonades kynoi!

And then there was a scratching about in the dark, and the slit of gray light up the corridor that one saw when the guards slipped in and out opened up into a rectangle of glare, and light even got into my cell, strange as snow in the desert.

I could see him in black outline only, legs as spindly as a stork’s, nose huge, dressed in some antique robe with fringes, something one’s Etruscan maiden aunt would turn up in at the Circus.

— Musonius?

— The wretch himself.

I should not have replied in despair, for it is more painful to the free to see you jailed than it is to be jailed.

— Menippus here.

Menippus? He was, like Damis, one of the master’s henchmen. He wanted to make a trial run, he said, before he brought the Philosopher. Meanwhile, he had brought another letter, which I read by the light of the open door up the passage.

Apollonius the learner to Musonius the philosopher, greeting! I would like to come share your lodgings in order that I might share your conversation, it said, so help me Jupiter and Hera. Unless, it went on, you cannot believe that Herakles freed Theseus from the dreary house of Hades. Answer, dear soul, what you would have me do. Errôso.

— I shall take your answer down, Menippus hissed at me in the half dark.

I dictated, his stylus flicked at the wax.

I said that he was not to come. I could see Nero having the hysterica passio into a perfumed handkerchief at the report that the most spiritual of philosophers, the stringy haired, barefoot ascetic Apollonius had moved into a jail cell with the red Rufus. I can defend myself, I said. My mind is stronger than ever. I have done no wrong. Find my students and talk with them, until we can converse in the quiet and peace befitting philosophy. I said that to fit in with what I knew to be his style. He knew that like randy old Socrates I could talk philosophy in stables and at the baths, in the fish market and on the road, practically anywhere except at a rich man’s table, where the level of conversation is below that of a dovecote of whores conniving to up their prices.

He would never find the cobbler who was one of my best disciples, old Marcus who had a true flare for the Pythagorean poetry of things and a noble grasp of stoic wisdom. Nor would he stumble upon the Senator who keeps his philosophy to himself, or the slavewoman Dorcas whose dignity of mind I would place beside that of Cicero. More than likely he would ferret out, such is my luck, the scamp Fabricius who follows me for my knuckly rhetoric, as he calls it, and who spends half his time at the gymnasia ogling backsides and pretty eyes and the other half pumping his seed onto the garret ceiling or alley walls or tiles of the public baths. But the boy has a mind and a lovely imagination, and Apollonius probably has the Platonic flare for a snub nose and black curls and a peplon that stops in the middle of the butt. And when Nero throws Fabricius in the jug, he’ll take it like a man.

Aie! Apollonius, Apollonius.

He wrote again. He reminded me that Socrates, refusing help from his friends, was executed.

I wrote back that Socrates died because he would not take the trouble to defend himself. I shall defend myself.

Errôso.

He has since learned for himself what the inside of a Roman prison is like. Pythagoreans and Stoics are all one to the imperial police.

Roma, you old baggage and suet sack, you are worthy of your Nero.

A DELEGATION CAME of trembling splendor, Consuls of the dead they said they were. One lifted a hand. Their patrician faces and beautiful feet seemed to me to be godlike, their eyes a fidget of light.

— We are the wardens, they said.

I confused them with the other