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IX. THEN, BRACCIANO
In the hills around Lake Bracciano (a large lake, larger than the old city center of Rome), Amalthea follows a winding road through more of Etruria. The Etruscans, at their high point 800-600 B.C., were a league of twelve powerful cities with names like Vulci, Tarquinia, Cerveteri, Volterra, and the like). It’s the kind of thing the ancient Greeks did on the other side of the Adriatic, favoring confederacy without the obligations of union (though the practical exercise in time of danger was always disappointing—whoever held the treasury paid off the marauders and let the other states fall into ruin). a Even in rare unison, they weren’t powerful enough to withstand a fierce invasion by hundreds of thousands of marauding Celts, who jogged across the Alps from what Caesar later lumped together as Gallia, Gaul (France, Switzerland, and Belgium, and snippets of Germany west of the Rhine).
Lake Bracciano is in the old Etruscan heartland. "Interesting," Darwin observes while sucking on a lemon ice from a roadside stand, "how modern Lazio, with Rome at its center, is a fusion of the southern part of the Etruscan world and the northern part of the Latin world." What he means is that the northern half of the Italian boot was Etruscan, while the southern part was Greek, and the middle part where Rome grew up was basically a no man’s land of primitive Latins, Sabines, Oscans, Umbrans, any number of local tribes. Remnants of their languages, and the names of their gods, survive in the Latin language itself, along with borrowings from Etruscan and Greek.
Darwin is a linguist in his own minor key, and he rattles on (to annoy Amalthea, you’re sure, though she presents a stony face): "Amalthea is a nymph in Greek mythology related to the nurturing qualities of goats. That may sound funny to the modern ear, but just as the buffalo was the shopping mall of North American natives, so the goat was the general store of many Asiatic nomads, including early Cretans. In the Third Millennium B.C., amid waves of migration and conquest and trade, a set of Indus Valley deities arrive in the western world. Among them is a chap named Dyaus (Sanskrit name, minor sun god in the Vedic literature). Amalthea is at once his mother, as these muddled tales go, and a nymph, later also the classic Sibyl at Cumae in Italy. It is the Dyaus nymph who fosters Zeus in Greek mythology, and her activites lead the goat’s horn to not only be placed in the constellations, but also establish the Latin tale of the cornucopia, ‘Horn of Plenty.’ Some etymologies connect the name with malthasso, Gr. ‘nurturing.’ Other connections lead to Gr. amelgo (‘to milk’) or Gr. amalla ‘sheaf of wheat.’ Hence, mel, ‘milk’ + thea, ‘goddess.’ In an economy whose stocks and bonds are cows and goats, a milk goddess would probably have her own talk show, not to mention book signings and large contracts."
"You are pushing it," Amalthea says (stifling amusement).
Darwin prattles on: "Then again, if it’s a wheat goddess, as in amal + thea, then you’d think the job is already taken by Demeter and Persephone, but that wouldn’t necessarily be so. Many of these divinities originated somewhere across the horizon, split into local nuances, and in post-polytheist hindsight become fused and shoe-horned together."
You’re thinking that it makes for a blurry but delightful picture. Seems like the kind of show Amalthea would revel in, if you ever got to know her better. Will she ever lose her aura of mystery? Your thoughts wander to the concept of aura, Latin for gold, which conjures up a halo, which is Greek, and means ‘shine’ or ‘glow.’ Painters have been hanging auras or halos on important figures since Neolithic times, but the Christians borrowed it from the Polytheists. That seems a bit odd, since the Christians lampooned the Polytheists as hicks or yahoos or country bumpkins, as the name paganos or paganus suggests. The Polytheists hung an aura or halo on their main gods and emperors, particularly the deity Sol Invictus—‘the Unconquered Sun.’ (When it’s not a crisp, clear glow but a sort of cloudy radiance, then it’s called a nimbus, Latin for ‘cloud.’)
Darwin, probably rambling quietly in his mind along thoughts very similar to yours, says: "Let me tell you something very important as we venture into the past. The Greek pantheon is not as close a fit for the Roman pantheon as most people casually think. Jupiter is not easily translated into Zeus, for example. The Greek Zeus liked to bugger every woman, every girl, every boy; every goddess and nymph he met, while the genuine smiter of thunderbolts from afar was really the Roman Deus Pater (God the Father), or Dius-pater, Diu-piter, recalling the Aryan or Vedic Dyaus, or even the Jewish Y’w’h. A few more cups of raw purple wine not well-lightened with the goddess’ spring water, and the linguistic slur or elision is easy to see."
Amalthea teases: "Then again, the Romans had Priapus."
"So they did," Darwin allows with a faint shrug. She won’t be getting the best of him while he is enjoying his lemon ice, and the warm wind blowing through his hair while he sits comfortably with his legs crossed across the back seat. Perhaps, like the dying Lawrence, he is already halfway in the shadows and enjoying both sides of life in the Etruscan manner. He even manages a wet smile around his ice while jiggling the little wooden stick against his teeth.
She ignores him as you arrive at the villa where her mother and aunts live. She jumps with athletic grace from the car and pulls open a black metal gate. At the bottom of a steep, paved driveway sits a two-story villa overlooking the wind-ruffled water of afternoon-gilded Lake Bracciano. Its black, shuttered windows remind you, with a shiver, of when you first saw Darwin’s house in Rome. Amalthea returns and rummages in the back, taking some objects out. You stare idly across the lake, where the colorful sails of tiny boats lean into the wind as they tack back and forth over the ancient caldera of a volcano. You are surprised when you see her striding purposefully down to the villa carrying a handbag in one hand and that bird cage with the cricket in the other. All this for a cricket? These are curious people, and you don’t even bother asking.
"Need to firm up our plans," Darwin says. You turn, startled, and see that he is chatting on a cell phone. "Vero!" he says to someone on the other end. "Gratias. Non hodie, sed nos tardemus in illam diem. Vero! Gratias, et vale." He puts the phone away. You realize he has been speaking with the other party in Latin.
(He used a pronunciation so fluid and musical it sounded a lot like modern Roman Italian—not like the watery, one size fits all church Latin, and definitely not the dreadful British schoolboy Latin invented in the 1830s with its 'Kikero' and 'waynie, weedie, weekie.' It is one of Darwin's passions in life to exterminate British schoolboy Latin all across the Anglophone world and replace it with true, Italian-sounding Latin.)
Could that party, on the other end of Darwin's phone conversation, be someone in the distant past, sitting in some hillside villa poking through a dish of olives and onions? Waited on by slaves? Perhaps using a cell phone in some arena while watching a Thracian gut a Myrmillo in a great purple spray of blood? Or perhaps that someone is at that very moment drinking good Falernian wine, and overlooking Homer’s ever-shifting wine-dark sea, which the Romans called Mare Nostrum (‘Our Sea’)?
(Geographers rank Oceans, like archdukes, as being above Seas, like dukes. For example, the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic were just two of the various coastal seas of the Mediterranean Ocean. Today, downgrading such ethnocentrism, it is simply the Mediterranean Sea, though still archduke over the same subordinate seas. Perhaps one day soon, the final downgrade would be to stop calling it the Middle of the Earth Sea and call it—what?—maybe Mar Colore di Vino or Mare Opaca Modo Vini, Homer's 'wine-dark sea.')
"I must tell you a rather shocking surprise," Darwin says to you. "You too will be temporarily borrowing someone else’s meat." As you recoil in horror, he says: "Most Romans were smaller than we are today. Big as we are, and for other obvious reasons, we’d stir up too much attention. We might be mistaken for escaped slaves, which would be bad enough—probably Germans, who tended to be bigger than southern Italians—or worse yet, as gladiators on the loose, and I don’t mean the glamorous kind that every woman swarmed over, but common criminals who were given a few more weeks to live in exchange for dying in entertaining ways. Oh, and there is another thing. If we went in our modern bodies, we’d be carrying unknown microbes by the trillion. We might start an epidemic and therefore Time would wink us into nonexistence to avoid putting a dent in history. Another possibility is that their bugs might kill us. We don’t have time to sit for weeks in some kind of acclimation chamber, because there isn’t one. So, the safest bet is to borrow someone’s body. Don’t worry, it’s the dernier cri, the latest scream, and they’ve never lost anyone yet."
"They?" you ask suspiciously, scared about changing bodies.
"The System or whatever you want to call it," Darwin says. "It’s a big secret, so you and I will never really know. Don’t worry—changing bodies is perfectly safe. Want to chicken out?"
You shake your head.
He leans forward and starts to whisper some conspiratorial information: "Amalthea—" but, just then, Amalthea comes back and throws herself into the car with a big sigh and toss of her hair. Slamming the door shut, she turns the key in the ignition. "Frustrating as always. Wouldn’t shut up. I had to put a towel over the cage and turn the lights out."
"She’ll quiet down," Darwin says.
You wonder: all this for a cricket in a cage? And what did he want to tell you about Amalthea and the System?
"I hope so." Amalthea starts the car, backs it onto the road in a frustrated, powerful turn that has you flying left and right, and away you go in a swirl of leaves and wind, back toward Rome.
"Onward," Darwin says.
"Backward," Amalthea corrects.
"Edward," you say. They both look at you, puzzled. You shrug. "Nonsense."
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