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XLIV. RETURN AND END
You are glad and surprised to see Amalthea. "I thought you were dead!"
She offers that white grin that makes her honey-skin glow. "You know what they say: Time heals all things. Listen, there is no time for explanations. Come along quickly while we can!" She extends a hand, you take it, and together you hurry along to some destination where she is towing you. "Take a good last look," she says. The two of you might seem perhaps an odd but hardly a memorable vignette on the crowded streets of ancient Rome with her million inhabitants. Amalthea adds: "You have to get through the only window still open, and I don’t know for how long."
You will be glad to get back to your world, but in some small ways you will miss this overpowering goddess of cities. You understand now what is meant by Roman concepts like the Genius (guardian or local spirit) of Rome, and Roma Divina (the Deified Rome). Of those living in Rome in the age of Constantine, eight of ten of carry the blood of manumitted slaves somewhere in their personal history, and most are of foreign stock. Particularly now that the Oriental religion of the Atheists, or Chrestus-worpshippers, is embraced as the state cultus, hardly anyone would understand these echoes of the distant past. You, however, have walked not only the streets of the late empire, but also the hills of the Iron Age settlers who made a cemetery where the Forum Romanum would later be. There is simply no going back.
"Hurry!" Amalthea says as she leads you to the newly constructed Baths of Diocletian, located in the northeastern part of the city not far from the Praetorian Guard barracks. You are two tiny figures lost amid tens of thousands as you cross the travertine walkways of the outer gardens and courtyards of this sprawling complex. Its outer structure is a rectangular arcade (1200 x 1060 Roman feet) roughly a tenth of a U.S. mile to a side, containing towers, arches, colonnades, gardens, shops, and temples. Overall, the complex probably comfortably served 10,000 persons at a time (the largest baths, those of Caracalla, served 16,000 at a time, and there were nearly 1,000 smaller baths throughout the city). You press on into the inner structure, which is oddly reminiscent to your eyes of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. That Church of the Holy Wisdom, dome 30 meters or 98 feet in diameter, to be built over 200 years in the future by the Christian emperor Justinian I in Constantinople, will be modeled on giant structures of Imperial Rome like these baths. Medieval and Renaissance basilicas like the Duomo (‘dome’) in Florence and St. Peter’s in Rome, and modern marvels like Grand Central (railroad) Station in New York City (76 acres, whose main concourse is 200 ft long, 120 ft wide, and 120 ft high). The Pentagon building covers 29 acres.
The inner structure of the Baths of Diocletian is a complex of arcades, gymnasia, shops, malls, even libraries, covering several acres and comparable in size to any of the largest shopping malls of your time. Today you do not tarry over the sumptuous mosaic floors, or dawdle under the gilded and ornate inside walls. Thousands of voices rise like the whispers of insects under the cavernous and vast ceilings. As you hurry along with Amalthea, you reflect again, as you have so many times, that you can understand how the average Roman citizen could not have imagined that these wonders would one day be tumbled ruins. The average Roman cannot imagine that one day almost nothing would be left of his wondrous city and its empire. These vast baths will be little more than building materials appearing haphazardly in many city blocks of the Rome of your time. Eleven halls of one bath block form a part of the National Museum today.
Amalthea tows you, still by the hand, so fleeting she is almost a blur. Left and right you go, past startled citizens and hustling slaves. Your way is guided by shafts of light that course down from the ceilings, sun-dial fashion, illumining the hours of the day and the gods of every moment. You hasten from one concourse into another, like modern travelers rushing to catch a train or an airplane. Today, you have no time to gawk. You hurry through the lounges, where speakers and entertainers run through their acts, surrounded by rapt and involved citizens. You pass the changing rooms (men on one side, women on the other side of the concourse). You bypass the shouting in the gymnasia, where boxers pound each other with leather-and-iron gloves, and wrestlers practice the latest Greek or Egyptian take-down technique. You bypass the races, the ballgames, the weightlifters, the acrobats, and the dancers, as you continue through the halls of the main concourse.
You smell the faint, underground coal-smoke of the hypocaust, which heats the walls and ceilings of the warm areas (how well you recall it from the night you passed through its peripheral flues with the slave Bodo!). You pass the tepidarium where bathers cautiously enter lukewarm waters. You pass the caldarium, the hot pool, where bathers have to wear wooden clogs so as not to scald their feet on the sizzling hot floors either in or outside the water--you can imagine the suffering of slaves in the underground galleries, who stoke the fires that make this enormous engine work. You recall that the outflow of oceans of waste water from baths all over the city flows through the public latrines, flushing away waste, and ends up in the great sewers and ultimately in the Tiber.
Now you arrive at your destination. In you go, with slaves chasing you yelling that you must first change and pay and obey a hundred other rules. You do not even pay attention to whether it is the women’s or the men’s or the children’s hour here. Amalthea moves faster and faster, and you must run to catch up as she holds your hand in an iron grip that seems superhuman in its strength, yet gentle in its firm kindness. You have no choice but to trust her totally. You are almost grateful when you feel that whirling, confused movement through time, because any moment now armed guards will come running, as they would in any day and age. As you enter the great hall of the frigidarium, where bathers look up from the cool waters where they are cooling down after a languid hour in the warm and hot baths, you sense that the waters rush toward you from below in a froth, like the rushing and splattering tides in the mysteriously lit blue grotto of Tiberius and Nero at Capri. At the same time, overhead, daylight assumes a dreamy, milky quality around the massive arches that lean left and right. "Hold on!" Amalthea cries loudly. Still holding your hand, she sheds her Roman clothing with her free hand. Somehow, in the blink of an eye, fashionable modern clothing appears on her lithe figure. Her long dark hair flies as though newly washed and dried, and sunglasses glitter dark-blue over her eyes. She looks elegant in a short black dress and high heels, with modest but expensive gold jewelry. You look down on yourself and see that you are once again the person you were when all this started.
You are no longer in the frigidarium of the Baths of Diocletian. The men walking toward you are not frowning guards in tunics and light leather (sort of rent-a-legionaries) but disapproving church ushers who hold a finger on their lips to shush you before you can expel another tortured gush of air. The final twist and wrench of your time travel ends as abruptly as it happened, and you are standing in the main basilica of the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri (Saint Mary of the Angels and of the Martyrs). It is quiet in the church, except for the rush of traffic outside, made distant by the massive walls of the ancient frigidarium, still with those huge arches over head. The air is scented with burning incense, and a choir of children chirps innocently in the shadows while a Mass is in progress at the main altar. The priest and his acolytes go through the commemorative steps of the ancient Passover meal mingled with elements of bloody sacrificial rites that seem incomprehensible to the average modern person, and must be constantly re-explained in terms of their theological construction.
Somewhere in time, Darwin, or Tarquin, threw his rock in the river. The waters closed around it. If he wrote anything, you’ll never know. What you can figure out is from archaic Roman mythologies--fact jumbled with imagination in the mixer of time. From a city called Tarquinii (Modern Tarquinia) on the coast north of Rome, came an adventurer and a strong woman. She was a prophetess in the mold of Sibyls, whose name was Tanaquil. He was a strong, handsome, and brilliant man named Lucumo (perhaps as in Luke Uomo, or Luke the Man--who knows what Darwin told the Etruscans as he settled among them). Tanaquil was ambitious, and she helped the footloose but brilliant visitor become a strong man in town. Then, perhaps run out of town because their ambitions upset the existing ruler (every town had its own king), the couple fled down the coast. They probably trod the path that would one day become the Via Flaminia entering the city from the north. Along the way, she changed her name to Gaia Caecilia. He changed his name to Lucius Tarquinius, or just plain Tarquin. Together, they managed to grab power, so that Tarquin became the fifth king of Rome around 616 B.C. He ruled for 38 years with the former Tanaquil at his side. She became renowned as a model of wifely devotion, in the image of Ulysses' wife Penelope. Like Penelope, she was known for her skill at spinning and weaving. Tarquin, first of a dynasty that would rule Rome, was murdered in 578 B.C. The former Tanaquil then conspired to have her son-in-law, Servius Tullius become king and continue the Tarquin lineage. He caused many great works to be made, including the Servian Wall that would define the Royal and later the Republican city with its Seven Hills. The last of the Tarquins (Tarquin IX the Proud) would be expelled from Rome in 519 B.C. as the Romans proclaimed their independence from the Etruscans and founded the Republic. The Republic would last until 46 B.C., when Julius Caesar declared himself dictator, and not many years later around 27 B.C. his adopted nephew Octavian would convince the Senate to declare him Imperator, thus initiating a 500 year empire. Until the Gothic invasions, in a crumbling old temple dedicated to a Sabine god named Semo Sancus in the northern Alta Semita district of the city, priests would maintain as relics of Tanaquil her distaff and spindle. Like so much from across those vast and gloomy shoals of time, these would vanish--as did whatever Darwin/Tarquin might or might not have left for the future to find.
The empty travertine box from Ulpian’s garden is a shattered, fire-blackened object packaged away in the bowels of a Roman museum for eventual examination. It is empty and will elicit little more than a shrug, if anyone finds time to look at it. Perhaps it was shattered and burned during the barbarian invasions; or maybe Time struck it with a bolt of lightning. That’s exactly what happened to the dangerous Sibylline tablets from Cumae, which foretold the future of Rome. Lightning struck the Capitoline in 83 B.C., and precisely destroyed the wooden cabinet in which the scrolls had been kept for centuries. Perhaps Darwin was right--perhaps there was another set, kept in a tomato-colored jar made of porphyry, and stolen over the centuries until Ulpian inherited it containing only a nest of spiders and one slip of paper that answered the riddle of Carinus' undoing at the very moment of his victory. It is a slip of paper, probably dictated by Gaia Caecilia, written down by Tarquin, and left in the urn sometime early in Carinus' reign to prophecy the ascendancy of Diocles and the saving of Rome yet one more time from disintegration under its mad emperors.
It doesn’t matter, therefore, what went on in that house on that quiet little shady street where you first met Darwin and Amalthea. If you were to dig in the basement, you might find some old rusty things, or a marble head or two, which is common enough in Rome. You might be lucky and get your name on a little brass plaque on a bench in a museum. The waters of Time close around the rocks we throw in the river. What matters is not the rock, but the ripples it makes in the sunshine, which blend with a million other glittering moments on their way into the vast and wine-dark sea. Have faith like small children, and don’t worry much about the details. Above all, be kind to each other and the rest will fall into place.
You are glad to emerge in the sunshine outside in the Piazza Della Repubblica (‘Plaza of the Republic’). "You’re home!" Amalthea says brightly. She lets go of your hand, and you stand in a daze inhaling the fumes of passing diesel and gasoline burners as well as the vapors of new technologies. What a lovely day! Flags snap in a crisp breeze under a clear blue sky whose sun has a silvery-golden sheen without being oppressively hot. It is that perfect weather in which it does not matter whether you wear a sweater or not. "We are finished," Amalthea says, giving you a brief hug. She leaves a lingering kiss on your cheek, and you smell the faint essence of a light citrus perfume tinged with deep, rich accents like heavy curtains in a sunlit room.
You raise a hand to wish for one more moment of her time. There are so many questions you want to ask, that remain unanswered, but already the swirl of forgetfulness rises up around you like the Rumo. Traffic roars around Rutulli’s 1901 Fountain of the Naiads with its statues of nude bathers sitting in the cooling spray that reaches high into the air and then falls down again in twirling drops that capture winks of sunlight. The roar of trucks and buses mingles with the constant drone of interweaving motor scooters and the gunned engines of passenger cars. You catch one last glimpse--the last you will ever see--of Amalthea as she steps into a dark car that briefly stops at the curb. You catch a glimpse of the man at the wheel--a handsome airline pilot, who is a dead ringer for Petasus. You catch one last flash of her sunglasses, one last glitter of that white smile in a perfect face whose skin color is like that of beeswax suffused with honeyed sunlight, one last moment of a long bare leg visible under the skirt of an airline attendant. Then the door closes and the car merges, quickly disappearing, into Rome traffic, into the traffic of a thousand cities around the world, never to be seen again. You stand dazed, holding in your hand the airline ticket that will take you home, and a wealth of memories, most of which are little more than feelings or emotions that you won’t be able to see in your mind by day, but whose richness will forever fill your dreams at night.
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