|
XXXVIII. CUMAE, AND BETRAYAL
You come down from the Alban Hills into the long flat stretch of fertile land that lies along the Tyrrhenian coast. Now it is wild territory, with Latin towns here and there, but one Roman emperors and wealthy aristocrats will come down this way to build their sea resorts around the old Greek city of Neapolis, New City.
With the gift of Romulus, you have purchased four strong horses, and you follow the path that will one day be the greatest of all Roman roads, the Appian Way. For five days you travel relentlessly, sleeping in hidden groves without fires to protect yourselves from bandits. You are less worried about the wild animals, including wildcats and wolves, than you are about your own species.
Finally you come down into the precincts of the Greeks. As you pass through Greek towns, Polybius is glad to speak his own accented Coptic Greek, which came to Egypt with Alexander the Great (hundreds of years after the time in which you now find yyourselves).
The eeriest sight is passing through the Phlegrean Fields, where the drifting sea mist that has darkened so much of your journey mingles with thick gouts of steam issuing from fissures in the meadows and mountainsides. The heavens here perpetually look as if it were evening, sometimes night, but never bright day. Every once in a while, you pass the skeletal remains of a sheep or a cow. Twice, you even pass the bones of a human, one being the remains of a shepherd whose tattered tunic still lies wrapped around his hip bones, and the other being a dead soldier who did not receive proper burial but lies exposed, and his soul wanders the fields at night. You throw handfuls of earth and Polybius speaks a rite for the dead from Homer, as the words were spoken on the plains of Ilion, but you do not pause to bury him, for your fear is greater than your propriety.
You come into the town of Cumae, which is the greatest city of its time in this part of Italy. Merchant ships from around the Mediterranean sit in her ports, and the warehouses are busy moving tons of grain and other goods. Naval biremes with bronze and iron rams on their bows sit in port, waiting to escort merchant vessels back to their respective mother cities in Greece. You are reminded of Ostia, and not unjustly. This is a city that dates back to the Bronze Age, and the locals claim to be descended from Minoans, though they only speak of Sea People, by which you take them to mean the Phoenicians, founders of Carthage and other great cities around the Mediterranean.
"We would love to stay and sightsee," Darwin says when Polybius grows enchanted with news of the fine libraries here, "but we are on a very tight schedule. Before our window closes, and we are marooned here, and turn into pale shades" (he dramatizes to frighten Polybius) "we must visit the Sibyl, hear what she has to tell us about the gods and about the future of the world, and then quickly we must return so you can enjoy your library."
The cave of the Sibyl is not far from the acropolis of this Euboian city, whose founding goes back at least to the Bronze Age, when Minoans or Cretans (the bull dancers) came here in their Homeric sailing ships. Legend has it that Odysseus himself came ashore, and some would like to imagine that he stepped into the Underworld by the shores of Avernus.
The Sibyl dwells in a temple complex, at the end of a long tunnel carved from stone. You go together, and the librarian trembles, and even you who have grown up in the age of science feel the eerie spell of this place. For one thing, it is not one woman who prophecies the future here, but a cult of priestesses. The chief among them is Amalthea, and she pays particular interest in her namesake from the distant future.
The Sibyl sits over a crack in the ground, from which a thin stream of vapor steams constantly. The Sibyl sits on a pedestal with her feet on a cushion to one side, and holds her hands in a large tray of sacred water. She is a tall woman, with gray hair, and it is clear she was beautiful in her youth, and even now is handsome though her face is pale and lined. Her eyes are abnormally large and dark, and you suspect that your local police department would have a field day in here finding various leaves and mushrooms that induce euphoric and visionary states. This is, after all, a practice that must go back to Neolithic times, involving powerful herbs that must have been known to the shamans (male and female) of every age. You know that the Egyptians, whose arcane knowledge is at least as old as that of Babylon, may have given such powers to the soothsayers at Delphi, as well as the Sibyls at Libya in Africa and other famous places. This is not an isolated doorway between worlds, therefore, but a body of knowledge great in both time and space.
The meeting with the Sibyl, in itself, is brief and mysterious. She seems delirious, with greenish matter frothing from the corners of her mouth, laurel leaves and who knows what else she chews to help the infernal smoke bring visions of the gods and of the future. She does beckon Amalthea to her, and holds the young woman, entranced. Amalthea stands obediently and doesn’t move, while the Sibyl holds one hand behind the young woman’s back, and clasps hands with her with her other hand. The Sibyl becomes radiant at some vision of the aura surrounding Amalthea, then blanches and draws back. Her features become greenish-black like Alban stone, and her eyes close in a sinking motion of sheer grief. Amalthea herself becomes frightened and runs from the Sibyl, whose final gesture is a grasping and then a loss, much like Demeter losing her daughter, or ????, Proserpina to the unyielding claws of the Underworld. This is, after all the core (no pun intended) of all that the White Goddess of the Neolithic, or Mesopotamian Kubaba, or Homeric Kybele, or Attic Demeter, or Roman Magna Mater was really all about: the mystery of a very simple thing, the entry of the seed, the offspring, into the ground, and the emergence one gestation later of a new mother, bearing more offspring. This is the other great technological revolution of the Stone and Ice Ages, beside the discovery that fire can be reproduced by humans. This is the secret, which made the tribes of the shamans who found it, from nomads into farmers, and thence into the first kings of the first cities. That is of course many thousands of years before even this glimmering between the late Bronze and early Iron Ages, when you stand in this cavern by the lake over which no birds can fly. This is the knowledge that the first geniuses were after, the holy grail, the critical mass, the atomic pile, the theory of all things: at harvest time we get the life-giving maize, the nourishing corn, on which cluster the offspring. We eat some and put the rest in the earth, so that they disappear like Persephone, and nine months later at harvest time we get back the mother, and again she is loaded with offspring. This is the yearly cycle of the earth goddess. Civilizations and cultures have risen and fallen, but this truth endures, along with that of fire, and the elemental knowledge of birth and death that results in the more complex elaborations of Isis/Osiris and even Mary/Jesus. Great rivers rise and fall, bringing black soil to feed this cycle. The sun himself, and the moon, move in the sky in cycles that the priests figure out over time hang together with this yearly gestation. The daily passage of the sun himself (or herself, in the earliest story-beds, like Amaterasu of Japan’s early Shinto, where it is the moon, Der Mond, that is masculine, in a lost but fascinating variation on that common Cavendish banana of mythology that has obliterated all competitors) is subservient to this mystery. It is at least in traction with the entire clockwork of interlocking gears, levers, trapments, escapements, and whizzing comets under the many crystal domes of Pythagorean and Ptolemaic heaven. Later, fancier, and ever more embellished corpora of thought, exemplified in libraries like the mother of all knowledge at Alexandria, will be burned by Christians and what is left later by Moslems after the end of Classical times. Perhaps the only echo will lie in one name visible for miles, like a glorious concordance of symmetrical blue domes, the fact that that greatest church of Classical Christianity, which perchance survives today, in Istanbul, bears the name ‘Holy Wisdom,’ or Hagia Sofia. It’s almost an idolatrous departure from the strictest theological norms.
With this dire vision the interview with the Sibyl ends. Her priestesses usher you out, and draw curtains to hide her slumping, darkened figure. This is hardly the beautiful young woman whom Apollo sought to love, and who kept refusing the god’s attentions until he offered her anything she wanted. She asked for eternal life, and was granted it. However, she forgot to ask for eternal youth, and so she has aged and aged, until she is little more than a cricket or a cicada, who is kept in a birdcage. When children ask her, in the old Roman and later Italian singsong, "Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?" the Sibyl replies in her cicada voice "I want to die."
You emerge in the libraries upstairs where countless scrolls dating to generations of oracular visions are stored in dovecotes farther than the eye can see. Polybius, though still shaken by what has transpired in the earth below, has eyes that gleam when he sees a library whose wealth puts his own, and his master Ulpian’s, to shame. He begins speaking with the scribes and priestesses, and asks to see every nook and cranny of the grand temple.
Meanwhile, you and Darwin comfort Amalthea, who has asked to go into a garden. There, in the shade, where warm air comes as if from another world, from a warm paradise where birds twitter and honeybees nuzzle in the sun, and a divine cascade of flowers like that on the meadows of life and death pours its libations of sweet smells down on drunken human senses, she falls asleep. You and Darwin hang back, letting the young priestesses and students bring wine, blankets, bread, herbs, anything that will restore Amalthea. Their looks are grave, their eyes haunted by what they have seen in their ceaseless movement between the worlds of the living and the dead.
What is more disturbing yet, you spot once again the silent guardian who never draws near. Petasus, wrapped in his cloak, his face shadowed under a peasant’s broad hat, stands leaning on his staff. Somehow, though there is only darkness under that straw brim, you sense that his eyes are boring through you, and you wonder why. This occurs while you and Darwin sit in the garden with unconscious Amalthea, and you glimpse the dark messenger through a hedge as if looking from this world into the next. As soon as you see him, the vision is gone.
That evening, Polybius has not rejoined you. As you and Darwin sit awake on a moonlit patio of the temple, where you are guests, you hear a commotion. It starts in the library, where lanterns flicker on, and footsteps fly over marble walkways. You hear the wail of the Sibyl, then the angry shouting and threats of a senior priestess, and the terrified shrieks of a dozen girls, and finally the clattering heels and clanking armor of the temple soldiers. The door of the garden flies open, and in comes a priestess surrounded by soldiers and frightened girls. "Is he here?"
You and Darwin jump to your feet in respect, spilling your wine. "Is who here?"
"The Egyptian with the stony face, whose expression hides treacherous thoughts."
"Polybius?" you say, "no, we have been wondering what happened to him."
"I know the answer to that!" says the captain of the guard, under a plumed Argive helmet. Cloak flying, he points over the garden parapet, over the plum and olive trees slumbering in the full moon, down over the houses whose pale walls resemble eyelids closed in slumber, down onto the sea that shines like glass. There, on the moonlit waves, a dark sail is spread, and a ship silently sails. "There he is, on an Etruscan merchant ship, and we can guess where he is headed."
"What crime has he committed?" you ask.
"I think I already know," Darwin says darkly. "Oh my poor luck."
Amalthea stirs from her couch, running to the wall overlooking the sea with her hands held to her temples. "The Sibyl saw my death, and she saw the escape of this wretched Libyan with a sacred scroll. It’s all clear now!"
"What is clear?" the priestess demands as the guards surround you. Rough hands seize your arms.
"Polybius is an agent of Carinus and his evil supporters. They saw an opportunity to come back in time, to the early Sibyls who gathered their visions of the future into the nine fabled books that they will offer soon to Tarquin, king of the Romans, the Etruscan. Tarquin will refuse them at the price she bids. She destroys three of the books and offers him the remaining six at the same price again, out of spite. Tarquin again refuses, and she consigns another three to the fires. Finally Tarquin buys the remaining three books, which foretell the glorious future of Rome. They remain under lock and key in a wooden shrine on the all-sacred Capitoline Mount, until Jupiter sends a bolt of lightning in the first century B.C. which burns his temple to the ground."
You see it now: Carinus, the evil and petty little man who rules Rome as augustus before the accession of Diocletian and soon after him Constantine, wants the sacred information of the Sibyl. Carinus is interested in only his own ends, so all Polybius is after is one small scroll. In return for this, one can well imagine that Carinus (who loved to promote the vulgar and the petty) will have Ulpian and his ancient family put to death, and award the entire estate to Polybius, and probably make the library slave a Senator and a Patrician, as well as Chief of one of the important priesthoods.
"We cannot let this come to pass!" Darwin cries. "Let us go. We well hunt him down and bring him back."
|
