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XXII. LIBRARIANS IN THE HOUSE OF ULPIAN
The great house of Ulpian is in the north near the Praetorian Guard barracks, near Darwin’s town home in your age. You and ‘Drusus’ meet with the librarians, both Romanized Egyptian-born slaves. They live and work in the library, which a two-story rectangular building with rows of windows, and portico entrances lined with columns. The library is a semi-detached wing of the main complex, which you reach via a pleasant, covered arcade lined with statues, fountains, and plants.
Leaving the din of the streets, you and Darwin climb to the portico and use iron rings to knock. House slaves swing the heavy wood and iron doors open to let you enter. They close the gate, which reduces street noise to a distant roar. You enjoy the splash of small fountains built in clamshell cornices in the corners of this large room. It's an impluvium, common in better Roman houses, whose name means "letting rain in." Overhead is a dome about 20 feet in diameter, painted with faux blue sky and clouds, and in the center is an oculus, or ‘eyelet’ opening, about three feet across. From the oculus, and from high windows, a soft, glowing natural light fills the hall. As in the Pantheon, rain falls through the oculus and splashes on the floor, amid a mosaic Mare Nostrum. Ornate brass drain holes empty this puddle-sea.
The scholarly interests of the estate’s owner, Ulpian, are immediately evident, as is the Roman talent for lifting fine art from conquered provinces. You smell fresh leather, papyrus, linen, and ink—recognizable across ages. Distant kitchen noises, and the sounds of relatively well-off kitchen slaves, drift through long polished corridors steeping in regal silence. You smell distant cooking aromas of fish and garum. You see gilt molding on the walls, which undulate in crisp, geometric edges to enclose pillars and doorways. Deeply polished natural marble statues reflect mythological themes. The floor is a huge mosaic, with a circle in the center containing a map of the Roman Empire (fading toward central Africa to the south; into the Persian Empire to the east; into wooded wildernesses to the north (where the Teutonic forest was then thick as any jungle, and fierce Teutons under Arminius gobbled up three legions in 5 A.D. to forever stop the Romans from crossing the Rhine; and beyond Britain westward into unknown Atlantic waters).
The librarians Marcellus and Polybius appear in the main doorway, beyond which you spy a book-lover’s dream: shelves upon shelves of wooden dovecotes filled with scrolls, all bathed in a honey-colored light that pushed through fine windows that look like wafer-thin soapstone. On the southern exposure, thick wooden shutters can be seen, half-closed to block out the hot sun but let in dry breezes.
"Welcome," Marcellus says, to which Polybius adds: "We were expecting you." In the twilight of the corridor, they look alike: two dark-skinned, balding men, medium height and build, with short black hair bordering on frizzy. They do not wear the toga of free men, but crisp white tunics bordered in colored silk (Marcellus’ in mossy green, Polybius’ in subdued burgundy). Their features are a mix of Ethiopic or Libyan, and Coptic (Egyptian). They remind you of the handsome, pensive, animated faces you see on late Graeco-Roman funerary paintings done in the subject’s lifetime and then buried in the dry soil, attached like a window on the wooden coffin lid, with the subject’s face staring out into eternity. They are a lapidary microcosm of Ulpian’s vast wealth. Along with his books, they are his most elegant property. They walk in quiet steps with serious demeanor. Drusus says quietly aside to you: "They are not only highly educated scholars, but teachers to the children of Ulpian. These two men oversee a library that’s almost a branch of the great library at Alexandria. The scrolls they casually read could revolutionize what we know about history."
"We swore not to try and remove anything," you whisper back.
"I knew I could rely on your honesty to keep me out of trouble," Drusus says.
Marcellus, the younger, looks a bit pained. You and Drusus are rude to whisper to each other, but Marcellus doesn’t feel quite privileged to tell you to shut up and behave like civilized people. No matter how kind and accommodating he and the older man, Polybius, who has a lot of gray in his hair, may be, there is a definite pecking order among all Romans. Slaves are nominally at the bottom, but a wealthy man’s top household slaves may live better than the average freeborn working stiff. This doesn’t sit well with the local citizens, who stay fat, dumb, and happy with plenty of wine, bread, sweets, and violent games—Joe Sixpack before electricity.
The slaves (and extreme sophisticates) Marcellus and Polybius visibly size you up. Who are you? What are you? How should they treat you? What can they get away with? Most likely, being foreigners, you are persons of substance and won’t take much bullying before someone mentions it to Ulpian, with unpredictable results. High-level slaves like these two may own property, including slaves, but they are still property and may be subject to a good dressing down or a whack on the ear. You find these two a curious mix of cold arrogance one moment, human warmth the next, and always a certain sly calculation in the way their eyes shift from thought to thought. They move through life with a cat’s cautious turns and stops, while you, as a free person, are accustomed to barging around, ready to react in unbridled fury to perceived insults. Perhaps they envy you that freedom, and look down on you for it at the same time, the way a Roman admires, yet looks down on, a wild German from the wrong side of the Rhine.
Several child slaves—a brown-haired boy with large, serious eyes, and two blond girls in Greek-style unisex tunics or chitons—appear holding silver trays of wine, water, bread, cheese, olives, and chopped onions. "Please," Marcellus says, "refresh yourselves." He waves to the children, then to you and Drusus. You wander in a small procession around the grand library room, through a semi-dark corridor lavishly plastered and painted with reliefs and clever tromp l’oeil. Whoever the artist was—his work lost, like so much of Rome, in the barbarian invasions and then over a millennium of neglect and decay—he specialized in creating realistic draperies out of painted wood and stone, superimposed on a background that itself looks real enough to touch. Ulpian, an equestrian from a long line of senators, generals, and wealthy businessmen, owns a fleet of grain ships, farms that produce olive oil, warehouses in Ostia and Portus, and a whole lot else. In your world, he might happily work from the smoky heights of a Manhattan or Chicago skyscraper, or perhaps a giant tower in Hong Kong or Frankfurt, but this is his Wall Street, and he is one of its tycoons.
"The Lord will see you in the eighth hour," Polybius says as he hurries after his boss. It is now about noon, so that gives you roughly an hour to snack and then look around. As you sip your watered wine, and crunch a mix of cheese and onions so that your palate feels like it needs an oculus to let in fresh air, you note that the child slaves hover at a discreet distance. They fidget and occasionally shove each other, or hiss at each other, but they are afraid of the librarians and know they must behave. Seeing the sadness and pity in your eyes, Drusus gives you a lingering warning look over the white rim of his porcelain wine cup. Leave everything alone. We are only here to observe, and we cannot change a thing without endangering your very existence.
You see at least twenty artisans at work in the library alone, as you and the three others saunter in for a tour. Scribes sit in cubbyholes, transcribing older texts that are worn from usage. Other technicians are in an adjoining room, where they maintain the supplies reflecting varied methods of writing down records, from across the empire. You see plenty of inkwells and reed dipping-pens all around. The preferred briefcase of the day appears to be a round reed basket resembling a modern sewing kit. Paper (papyrus, imported from the Nile region) comes in 33-foot rolls that can be cut to fit individual projects. The paper is beautiful in its own right, sort of a stiff, glossy light to wheat color; the best quality shows almost no plant fibers. The front page on which one writes is the recto, and the back the verso. There are no lines on a scroll, but the practiced hand creates neat vertical columns, left to right, top down, in regular lines. You read a scroll from left to right, simultaneously rolling it up on its spindle, or umbilicus, with your right hand while unrolling it with your left. When you’re done, you rewind it—sort of an early tape deck, one might say. Each roll is called a volumen, kept in a cubbyhole with a titulus or label on the shelf-edge. You’re wondering about the old stylus and wax tablet—those still exist, little wooden frames containing beeswax. Another writing material is parchment, made from certain animal skins (vellus, hence vellum). You also see evidence of the codex, eight folded sheets of paper (making a signature of 16 pages) stitched and bound with wooden boards to form the earliest recognizable modern books. The Romans preferred to keep their public records on scrolls, however, as in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. The two librarians show you around, chattering proudly about their latest imports—a complete library of classic plays, for example, recently created to order at a library in Athens.
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