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XXIV. WRONG YEAR, AND DARWIN’S NEW PLAN
Later in the afternoon, after your meeting with Ulpian, when Ulpian has retired to the privacy of his bath for a relaxing whoop with several attractive slave girls, you and Darwin (Drusus) return to the library. There, you chat with the two librarians. They have figured out that you are a few kernels higher in the pecking order than they, even when your free status and their proprietary status are taken in to account. Ulpian has ordered them to serve in any reasonable manner possible, and they seem eager to please. They can recite entire books from Homer or Sophocles, the dialogues of Plato, or the philosophy of Democritus. They have a certain polish (although frowned on as, frankly, ‘degenerate’ even now, many centuries after the passing of the stern Republican world) that the wealthy Roman wishes would rub off on his sons—maybe not the entire polish, but enough of a veneer so that the youths can appear in society, where status matters, and ramble a bit about rustic shepherds in Attica, or the hooks that bind atoms together, or Aristotle’s observations about how to create dramatic arts (still taught in your time).
"You visitors look vaguely Roman, yet you seem to be from far away," Polybius says with polite caution as you four sit in a small garden behind high walls. You sit on stone chairs around a marble table doubling as a sundial, with an elaborate brass Mercury standing on one winged foot while doing a kind of ballet gesture while pointing into old Sol himself, Sol Invictus, the Unconquerable Sun, worshiped by Ulpian. The sun cult is hot (no pun intended) at the imperial court, and Carinus is said to daily offer incense in a special shrine at the palace. Ulpian didn’t get where he is today by worshiping the wrong divinities. That would be really left-handed (sinister, as in gauche).
"We have indeed traveled some distance," Drusus said while comfortably sitting back with his hands folded in his lap. "We lately have admired the dark waters at Nemi. Have you been there?"
The two librarians exchange alarmed looks. "Yes," Polybius says, "in the recent past, we accompanied our Lord on a seaside vacation at Granuluntum. Do you know it?"
You picture the oddly shaped villa by the shade at Avernus. Drusus says: "We rode past, and honored any roadside shrines we encountered."
"It will bring you luck," Marcellus says while sipping wine. He idly pops a fig in his mouth, so that his lips glisten. "Do you have many books at home? Where is your home?"
"America," you blurt out.
"Armorica?" they echo rather blankly. "You are Gaulish?"
"Something like that," Darwin says quickly. "
"We have many books," you say, trying not to mention your considerable digital media library that rivals Ulpian’s library in sheer numbers, but fits in a briefcase. You play it safe by tossing the ball in their court. "What are the concerns of your Lord in maintaining his wonderful collection?"
"Our Lord is of an ancient line, almost like the Julians and the Ahenobarbi. Our Lord is keenly interested in matters of religion, which are essential to the welfare of the state."
Marcellus presses on this point: "Since ancient times the Roman people have cursed and sworn by the name of Hercules. Mihercle, they say, ‘My Hercules!’"
Polybius scoffs. "The Greeks thought too much, which is why they are now slaves in Roman households. The Roman grandmother whispers fairytales to the children at night, and the Greek teacher makes the children memorize poetry by day. It is all the same thing."
Marcellus frowns at his boss. "I want to know what lies under the surface. If you are right, those pretty poems about Olympian gods are just fancy versions of what grandmothers secretly tell by moonlight. Then why do we exist? What meaning is there?"
Polybius offers the usual canned answers. "Today’s humans are descended from better and stronger people in the past—golden age, giving way to silver age, giving way to age of iron, and ultimately age of earth." As he rambles on, you sadly see there is nothing forward looking in this view. At best, in the religious sense, it is the Jews who introduce the concept of some future redemption by a messiah, and the Christians who formalize that in to the return of their slain founder. Time passes differently here—slowly, almost imperceptibly. The years are measured by what pair were consul when, but that’s just a boring roster of guys named Marcus who all wore white and thought alike. Nothing much happens in human history until the arrival of natural science around 1750. Even Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps the first real scientist who questions natural phenomena without recourse to religious dogma, has one foot in the past and makes a living casting horoscopes for the gullible of his time. Something is missing here in ancient Rome, and in fact in the whole world up to some point in time from the Humanist revolution of Erasmus that led to the writing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. You begin to see a major key to understanding this alien world in which you’ve landed. This society, and the people in it, don’t seem headed toward some grand salvation for all mankind, or some scientific enlightenment in which men treat each other well and enjoy toasters that never burn the toast. They don’t have a clear sense, whether it’s an illusion or not, of moving toward some target. Instead, with their shorter life spans and harder lives, they perhaps dream that one day they will have enough to eat, won’t have to worry about cruel rulers, and maybe get to dip into that cornucopia (‘horn of plenty’) that is a material version of paradise. It will take the long night of the Middle Ages for the heavenless Olympian mythos and the downward looking but upward striving Underworld to bubble in alembics all over Europe before combining in a concept of attainable heaven. Your contemporaries have only the vaguest concept—harps, angels—what lies beyond the Pearly Gates. Here in ancient Rome, the Pearly Gates are strictly of this earth, firmly shut, and owned by grotesque monsters who fancy themselves gods in this life and have no thought of any existence beyond this earthly one. You do recall that there is quite a bit of interest in the future, but it is a dark and scary interest that always asks "how bad will it be?" rather than ‘how good?" You’ve already met the future’s oracles: the Sibyls, who inhaled infernal fumes or took drugs, and then generally screamed and fainted at what they saw—no wonder the Romans never held a world fair.
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