Excerpt
YIELD NOT TO EVILS
CHAPTER I
In the Time of Augustus, the Golden Age of Rome . . .
Octavia Felicia was nine years old the first time she saw a man kill another man. Her father’s gladiator, the Minotaur of Crete, had dispatched an overmatched opponent in the Amphitheater of Antium.
On that autumn morning, her father, Vibius Octavius Felix, had taken her to see the Minotaur at the packed venue and sat her next to him in their private box. This was the first time he had ever taken her anywhere by himself. Private times, intimate conversations with her father were foreign to her. She relished the moment.
She was fascinated by the combatants’ macabre dance, at times cagey and at others frenetic. The slash of a saber and the shower of blood captivated her. With her uncanny perception—which, when she was at home in her father’s garden, allowed her to follow the rapid beats of her splendid sunbird’s wings—she counted the crimson beads in the air and predicted correctly where they would fall.
That year she had become numb to death. She and her parents had temporarily fled Rome for their ancestral home along the western Italian coast because of a plague that had killed hundreds, including Octavia’s beloved great-uncle, Tiberius Octavius. Even the Imperator Caesar Augustus had been struck ill, but he miraculously recovered.
In the Amphitheater of Antium, their box sat in the curved, stepped tier carved into the crag along the shore. With a nibble of some honeyed bread, Octavia doused the taste of the salty air as the sea breeze passed over the raucous crowd of 10,103; she had tallied as many during a lapse in action. Having never been to an amphitheater or theater before, she was only accustomed to seeing so many people crammed into the snarl of narrow streets surrounding the Palatine Hill in Rome, where she lived.
Whenever something exciting happened during a fight, Octavia peered up at her father so they could share in the moment, but he never brought his dark eyes to meet hers.
As the gladiators fought, Vibius said to her, without looking her way, “Your grandfather taught me to never fear death. I gather it did him good, because he got his head lopped off and displayed as a dinner ornament by that lecher Marc Antony. Me? I fear death, and that’s why I’m alive and that principled old fool father of mine is not. The irony is that I now deal in death. Irony, like our name, Octavius Felix. Those bitch goddesses Fortune have never smiled on us.”
“But they have, Tata,” Octavia protested, squinting up at her father with the dazzling sun behind him. “With the Minotaur. Wasn’t it from his winnings that you finally had enough money to qualify for the Senate?”
“Hush, you clever girl,” he snapped, glaring down at her. He whispered hoarsely, “Don’t ever let anyone know that a gladiator is responsible for our renewed prosperity. Gladiators are the lowest of the low, contemptible servile butchers.”
Over the years to come, Octavia would not hold the Minotaur in such low regard. She was kind to the Cretan, and he remained docile in her presence, despite his namesake. Her father had named him after the legendary monster of Crete, which had the body of a man and the head of a bull. Over a millennium ago, the sea god, Neptune, had sent King Minos of Crete a beautiful snow-white bull for sacrifice, but the king refused to part with it. Furious, Neptune bewitched Minos’ wife, Queen Pasiphae, into falling madly in love with the animal, and their coupling produced the Minotaur, the Bull of Minos. The King had the ferocious creature locked away in the Labyrinth created by his architect, Daedalus.
Twelve years Octavia’s senior, the Minotaur was a colossal figure with arms twice the size of her torso, and a chest nearly as thick as a poplar’s trunk. Beneath his polished bronze cowl and mask, sculpted in the form of a horned bull’s head, he was doe eyed, with a soft, round face. Mute, he communicated with Octavia by hand gestures. She saw him occasionally over the years when he came to her father’s lavishly decorated house on the Palatine. They used to play with her pet sunbird, Archimedes, the swift and ornery little creature attacking the Minotaur with its curved bill while he tried to cradle the purple and green bird in his massive hands.
When she first saw the Minotaur in the Amphitheater of Antium, he was a burgeoning star. By the time Octavia was a betrothed Roman maiden of fifteen, the Cretan behemoth had become the greatest gladiator who ever lived.
His illustrious career spanned eleven years, with an unblemished record of seventy-five victories, no defeats, and two early ties. Most succumbed to his spear, saber or mere presence. He was the undisputed lord of the arena. Images of him—be it on banners, as sculptures and figurines, or etched on walls—spread all across the Roman world. His rabid fans filled every arena in which he fought.
As one of those ardent fans, Octavia saw a number of his fights at Rome’s only stone amphitheater, the Amphitheater of Taurus, on the Field of Mars along the east bank of the Tiber River. She saw many other gladiators perform there, but there was one who stood out from all the rest: a brash young gladiator named Pantera.
There was no sight more salacious to a maiden of fifteen than Pantera. Octavia could not keep her eyes on him, but she could not turn away, either, as the fervor in her stomach became difficult to contain. Pantera was as stout as Hercules and as beautiful as Apollo. His body was magnificently sculpted, each muscle exquisitely shaped, chiseled by the gods. His armor befitted his beauty and skill. Embossed with panthers, it was crafted in black steel and silver, with a greave for his left leg and a right shoulder guard with segmented arm plates. He wore a visored helmet and carried a small, round shield in his left hand and the short stabbing sword in his right.
After every contest, the crowds chanted his name—“Pantera! Pantera! Pantera!” Women screamed and hollered, throwing their perfumed handkerchiefs at him when he took off his helmet to bow to the crowd. His exposed face did not disappoint: a boyish countenance with stern eyes the color of the sea, complimented by a lush thatch of blond hair.
Over the last year, Octavia had gone to watch four of Pantera’s fights and he had won them all with swiftness and a savage grace, coupled with a flare for showmanship. Not one of his opponents survived the encounter. With each bloody victory, the more he enthralled her. Yet she was not alone. The voices of Pantera’s fans had grown boisterous over the last two years, rivaling those of the Minotaur. Pantera fought throughout Italy, Macedonia, and Achaia, amassing thirty-two victories with nary a defeat in his four-year career.
Pantera was owned by the extremely wealthy ex-consul, Decimus Antonius Lautus, who had been a member of the senate for sixteen years. Octavia’s father and Lautus had crossed paths in the Senate House, but hardly ever conversed because of their unequal stature. Vibius was stuck near the back rows of the Senate House, with the other undistinguished members, while Lautus’ place was on the front bench.
Her father had always refused to pair the Minotaur and Pantera, viewing the young gladiator as nothing more than a neophyte trying to make a name for himself by challenging the best. He actually turned down the unique offer of a guaranteed purse for the fight, which was against the norm, as winner take all was customary and the way in which Vibius accumulated his wealth. Nevertheless, the fans continued to clamor for the fight.
In late spring, before Octavia’s summer wedding, Augustus planned to hold the Secular Games in Rome, commemorating the traditional passing of a generation after a century and the tenth anniversary of his restoration of the Republic. With the military genius of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the foremost general in the Roman world, Imperator Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, known commonly then as Octavian, had vanquished that drunkard Marc Antony and his Egyptian siren Cleopatra.
Like a modern-day Cincinnatus, who had relinquished the dictatorship and returned to his farm after saving Rome from invasion, Octavian subsequently abdicated the authority the Senate had bestowed on him in the time of crisis, along with the Roman territories entrusted to him and those he had conquered. The Senate, forever grateful, conferred to the reluctant Octavian the provinces of Spain, Gaul and Syria for a decade. The Senate also voted him the honor of a new surname, Augustus, which meant “revered,” and changed his official name to Imperator Caesar Augustus. He was also given the title of First Citizen of the Senate, as he was commonly addressed thereafter.
The Games were to celebrate not only the passing of one age, but the arrival of a new one: the Golden Age of Man had returned. As the eminent poet, Virgil, had prophesied decades ago in his Eclogue IV, with Augustus’ arrival, the “Iron Age shall cease, the Golden Age arise . . . and under his guidance, with mankind’s old wickedness done away, the earth shall be free from never-ceasing fear.”
The Games would coincide with the First Citizen’s promotion of the Roman religion and his social legislation, devised to purify morals and encourage the family. The new laws criminalized adultery for both men and women, penalized the unwed who were of marriageable age, and rewarded married couples who were fruitful.
Augustus encouraged mass participation in the scheduled nighttime and daytime sacrifices to the Fates, Ilithyia the goddess of childbirth, Mother Earth, and Jupiter and Juno the King and Queen of the Gods. Theatrical performances and chariot races were to follow each ceremony. To close the Games, Augustus had something special planned, which Octavia anticipated with both excitement and dread.