WITHIN a month she did far worse. She perpetrated, in fact, a deed with the fame of which not only the city, but the Empire rang; made herself notorious everywhere.
It was on the occasion of her introductory visit to the Colosseum when, for the first time, she was a spectator at an exhibition of fighting gladiators. She was in a high-strung state of elation and anticipation. Going to the Amphitheatre, in itself, was a soul-stirring experience. Meffia, to Brinnaria’s joy, had been on duty that day, along with Numisia. This alone was enough to put Brinnaria in a good humor. Meffia’s presence spoiled for her any sort of pleasure. Then, besides, they drove to the Colosseum, not in their light carriages, but two by two in their gorgeous state coaches, huge vehicles, of which the woodwork was elaborately carved and heavily gilded and whose cushions and curtains were all of that splendid official color, the imperial purple. The name conveys to us a false impression, for the hue known then as imperial purple was not what we should call a purple, but a deep, dark crimson, like the tint of claret in a goblet. Against a background of this magnificent color, the Vestals, habited all in white, showed conspicuously. Their stately progress through the streets, gazed at and pointed at by the admiring crowds, was conducive to high spirits. Still more so was it to be ushered obsequiously through cool corridors and up carpeted stairs to the Vestals’ private loge, a roomy space immediately to the right of the imperial pavilion. To be inside the Colosseum at last set her eyes dancing and her heart thumping; the anticipation of actually viewing the countless fights of many hundreds of gladiators increased her excitement; to be seated in front seats, with nothing but the carved stone coping between her and the arena was most exhilarating of all. She was delighted with her great, carved arm-chair, deeply cushioned and so heavy that it was as firm on its solid oak legs as if bolted to the stone floor. She settled herself in it luxuriously, gazed across the smooth yellow sand, glanced up at the gay, parti-colored awning, and then conned the vast audience, line after line of rose-crowned heads rising tier above tier all about her.
She scanned the faces in the front row to left and right as far as she could make them out clearly. She peered across the open space of the arena, puckering her eyes to see better. When she caught sight of what she was looking for she turned timidly, leaned past Manlia and asked Causidiena:
“May I wave my hand to mother?”
“Certainly, my child,” Causidiena assured her.
Brinnaria waved her little hand and was seen, and felt the thrill of a general family handwaving in reply.
Suddenly she experienced a qualm of bashfulness, as if every one in the enormous gathering were looking at her, watching her. She cast down her eyes, wrapped her white robe close about her, hiding her hands under it, and shrank into her arm-chair. For a while, for a long while, she fanned herself nervously, very slowly, and striving to appear calm. Gradually she became calm and laughed to herself at her own folly, realizing that nobody was noticing her.
Nobody noticed her. Many spectators noticed the Vestals, but no one noticed her individually. This she realized acutely before the day was over.
At about the time when she began to feel herself at ease the entrance of the Emperor and his suite distracted her attention from herself. When the trumpet blew, announcing the approach of the Imperial party, a hush fell on the vast audience and all eyes turned towards the grand pavilion. When the trumpet blew the second time, just before the Emperor came in sight, the hush deepened and the spectators watched intently. When his head appeared as he mounted the stairs the audience burst into the short, sharply staccato song of welcome, something like a tuneful, sing-song college yell, with which Roman crowds greeted their master. This vocal salute, a mere tag of eight or nine syllables, each with its distinctive note, was repeated over and over until the Emperor was seated.
Then the audience settled themselves into their seats. Brinnaria had instinctively started to rise when she caught sight of the Emperor. Manlia had put out a restraining hand. The Vestals, alone of all Romans, remained seated in the presence of the Emperor, not even rising when he appeared.
Marcus Aurelius was a tall, spare man of over forty years of age, with abundant hair curling in long ringlets over his chest and shoulders, and a full beard mingling with the carefully disposed curls. He was a serious-faced man, careworn and solemn.
Brinnaria regarded him with interest. She had never seen him so close and she felt a sudden fellow-feeling for him from the sense of semi-equality with him that flooded through her at having remained seated. She recalled vividly the half-dozen times she had watched from balconies the passage of processions in which the Emperor took part, how her mother had made her stand up the moment he came in sight and had kept her standing until he was far away. Her sudden exaltation in social position was borne in upon her with startling emphasis. Not even her carriage rides had impressed her so tellingly with the sensation of her own importance in the great world of Imperial Rome.
“How does he look to you?” Manlia asked. They were seated in the order of their seniority, Causidiena on the right, then Gargilia, Manlia next Brinnaria.
“He looks crushed under his responsibilities and anxieties,” Brinnaria replied. “He looks depressed, even sad.”
“He is all that, poor man,” her neighbor agreed, “and no wonder in these days. The Parthians are at us on the east, the Germans in the north, and there have been more than twelve deaths in the palace each day for twenty consecutive days now. This pestilence is enough to make anybody sad.”
“More than that,” Brinnaria countered. “He looks irritated and bored. Everybody else is alert and keyed up with anticipation. His eyes are dull and he looks as if he wished that the show was over and he could go home.”
“You have read him right,” Manlia told her. “He detests all kinds of spectacles, takes no interest in races and hates beast-fights. Most of all he loathes gladiatorial combats. Father has told me about it more than once and Causidiena says the same thing. I can’t understand it. I never get tired of sword-fighting, myself. What I like about it is its endless variety. I never saw any two fights exactly alike, never saw two closely alike. Each fight is a spectacle by itself, entirely different from any other. I don’t mean the difference between the fighters in respect to their equipment and appearance, though that contributes to the variety also; I mean the difference in posture, method of defense and attack, style of lunge and parry, and all that; and the countless variations in form in the men, the subtle differences of character which makes them face similar situations so very differently. You’ll get the feeling for it in a half a dozen shows and be as keen on it as the rest of us.
“But the Emperor is different. Perhaps it’s because he is such a booky man and spends so much time in reading and study. But I think not. There never was anybody more of a bookworm than Numisia and she is as wild over the shows as any street-boy in Rome. Anyhow, whatever the cause is, that is the way he is. He was more than surfeited with shows before he was Emperor. While he was nothing but a boy, soon after he was adopted and made Caesar, he often had to preside in the Circus or here, when Hadrian was away travelling and Antonius and Verus were on the frontiers. He used to bring his tutors with him and have two of them sit on each side of him a little behind him. Then, after the shows had started, he would put a tablet on his knee and write a theme or work out a problem in geometry and when he had finished it, would pass it to one of his tutors for comment, or he would have them make out sets of questions on history or something else and he would write out the answers the best he could. Sometimes he would read. All this he did as calmly as if he were alone in a closed room with nothing to call off his attention. Yet he was most careful to seem to watch the shows and would look up every little while and gaze about the arena. But nothing ever distracted him from his lessons. That is the kind he is. He simply never cared for this sort of thing. He says that what oppresses him is the maddening monotony of gladiatorial shows. Fancy anybody thinking sword-fighting monotonous! But he does. He says every combat is just like every other. All he sees in a fight is two men facing each other and one being killed. He gets no thrills from the uncertainties of the outcome, no pleasure from the dexterity and skill of the fighters. To him it’s just butchery, and the same kind of butchery over and over. He says he might get some enjoyment out of a show if something novel would happen, something he never saw before, something unexpected. But nothing ever does.”
Brinnaria regarded curiously this grave, earnest man, who derived so little pleasure from the most coveted position on earth. She continued to watch him until everybody turned to the procession around the arena of all who were to fight that day, the invariable preliminary of a gladiatorial show and always a splendid spectacle. When the fights began Brinnaria felt at first an unexpected tightening of the chest, as if a band were being drawn tight just under her armpits. Her breath came short and hard and her heart thumped her ribs.
The first sight of blood made her feel faint and the horrible contortions just below her of a dying man, who writhed in strong convulsions like a fish out of water, made her qualmish and sick. But all that soon passed off. She was a Roman and the Romans were professional killers, had been professional killers for a thousand years. Success in hand to hand combat with any individual foe was every male Roman’s ideal of the crowning glory of human life; the thought of it was in every Roman’s mind from early childhood, every act of life was a preparation for it. Their wives and sisters shared their enthusiasm for fighting and their daughters inherited the instinct. Combat on the field of battle was felt as the chief business of a man, to which all other activities merely led up. By reflected light, as it were, every kind of combat acquired a glamour in the thoughts of a Roman. The idea of men killing men, of men being killed by men, was familiar to all Romans, of whatever sex or age. Brinnaria was not affected as a modern girl would be by the sight of blood or of death. The novelty revolted her at first, but only briefly. Soon she was absorbed in the interest of the fighting.
Almost at once her eye was caught by a young and handsome fighter who reminded her strongly of Almo.
His adversary was that kind of gladiator known technically as a secutor, a burly ruffian in complete armor, with huge shin-guards like jack-boots, a kilt of broad leather straps hanging in two overlapping rows, the upper set plated with bronze scales, a bronze corselet, and, fitting closely to his shoulders, covering head and neck together, a great, heavy helmet. He carried a large shield, squarish in shape, but curving to fit him as if he were hiding behind a section of the outer bark of a big tree. He was armed with a keen, straight bladed Spanish sword.
Facing this portentous tower of metal was a gladiator of the sort known as a retiarius, equipped solely with a long-handled, slender-shafted trident, like a fisherman’s eel-spear, and a voluminous, wide-meshed net of thin cord. His only clothing was a scanty body-piece of bright blue. His feet were small with high-arched insteps. Brinnaria particularly noticed his perfectly shaped toes. His bare legs, body and arms were in every proportion the perfection of form, the supple muscles rippling exquisitely under his warm tanned skin. His face was almost beautiful, with a round chin, thin curled lips, a straight nose, and a wide brow. Its expression was lively, even merry, almost roguish, his lips parted in an alert smile, his blue eyes sparkling. He seemed to enjoy the game in which he was engaged, to be brimming over with self-confidence, to anticipate success, to relish his foretaste of combat with a sort of impish delight.
Roman children heard as much talk of gladiators as modern children hear of baseball or cricket. Brinnaria knew perfectly well that the betting on a set-to between such a pair was customarily five to three against the secutor and on the retiarius. Yet she felt the sensation usual with onlookers in such a case, the sensation purposed by the device of pairing men so differently equipped, the sensation that the mailed secutor was invincible and the naked retiarius helpless against him. She was keyed up with interest.
In fact the combat was interesting. The secutor, of course, could have disposed of his antagonist in a trice, if he had only been able to reach him. But a clumsy, heavy secutor never could reach a nimble, agile retiarius. The one Brinnaria was watching was more than usually light-footed and skipped about his adversary in a taunting, teasing way. Again and again he cast his net intentionally too short, merely to show how easily he could recover it and escape his opponent’s onset. He danced, capered, pretended to be lame and that he could not avoid being overtaken, led his pursuer on, out-manoeuvred him, derided him; twice he lunged through the flapping straps of his kilt and grazed his thigh. The secutor was barely scratched, but his blood trickled down his shin-guard and he was limping.
Then, all in a flash, the retiarius pirouetted too rashly, slipped on ton the sand, fell sprawling, failed to rise in time, and was slashed deeply all down one calf. He rolled over in a last effort to escape, but the secutor kicked him in the ribs and, before he could recover, sent the trident spinning with a second kick and set his foot upon his victim’s neck. So standing he rolled his eyes over that part of the audience nearest him to discover whether it was the pleasure of the lookers-on that the defeated man should be killed or spared.
Now it so happened that nearly all the spectators in that part of the audience were watching a far more exciting contest farther out in the arena, where two Indian elephants, each manned by a crew of five picked men, were clashing in a terrific struggle No one, except Brinnaria, had any eyes for the plight of the young retiarius below them The secutor beheld indifferent faces gazing over his head The few thumbs he could see pointed outward. Brinnaria, to be sure, was holding out her right arm, thumb flat, and doing her best to attract the secutor’s attention. She failed. He glanced, indeed, at the Vestals, but as three of them sat impassive he missed Brinnaria’s imperious gesture. He prepared to put his foe to death. First, however, he looked further along the front rows to make sure that he had the permission of the general audience, since the occupants of the Imperial box and of the Vestals loge seemed to ignore him.
Brinnaria perceived that he would probably not look again in her direction; that as soon as his roving eyes came back from their unhurried survey of the audience, he would deliver the fatal blow. She quickly knotted the corner of her robe to the arm of her chair, squirmed out of it, and threw it over the parapet. The robe of a Roman lady was sleeveless and seamless, rather like a very long pair of very thin blankets, all in one piece. Tied, as she had tied it, by one corner, it made a sort of rope as it hung. She had acted so quickly that no one noticed her, not even Manlia, who sat next her, staring fascinatedly at the spectacle of the wrestling elephants and their warring crews.
Grasping her robe firmly with both hands, escaping by a hair’s-breadth the despairing clutch of the horrified Manlia, Brinnaria half vaulted, half rolled over the parapet, swung sailor-fashion to the rope her robe formed, went down it, hand over hand, raced across the sand and faced the victorious secutor.
He, although a foreigner and a savage, had been long enough in Rome to know perfectly what a Vestal was and he recoiled from her in a panic no less than he would have felt had the goddess Vesta herself come down from the sky to balk him of his prey.
The next instant no one was regarding the death-struggle of the elephants, nor any other of the scores of fights ended, ending, under way or just begun. Every human being in the audience was staring at the amazing spectacle of a Vestal virgin, clad only in her thin, clinging tunic, standing over a fallen retiarius and facing an appalled and dumbfounded secutor.
The place fell very still. So still that the shrill voice of a street-gamin, a boy from the Via Sacra, was audible throughout the vast enclosure from gallery to gallery. He yelled in his cutting falsetto: “Good for you, Sis!”
But his neighbors silenced him at once and not even any other ragamuffin lifted his voice. The audience were startled mute. They were quite ready to applaud the girl’s daring, but the shocking impropriety of her breach of decorum struck them dumb.
The Emperor, roused from his meditations by the sudden hush, looked about him for the cause of it and saw the situation. He leaned forward, arm out, thumb flat against the extended fingers. The secutor sheathed his sword.
Manlia, with great presence of mind, untied the dangling robe and dropped it over the parapet. One of the arena attendants carried it to Brinnaria and she put it on. But she would not stir and stood straddling the fallen lad until one of the Emperor’s aides came out of one of the low doors in the arena-wall, crossed to her and assured her that the defeated retiarius would be spared and cared for. Then she suffered herself to be led back to her seat, by way of the door in the wall and passages and stairs never meant for any Vestal to tread.
Not until they saw Brinnaria move off in charge of the staff-officer did the audience let loose their pent-up feelings. The place pulsated with a roar like that of a great waterfall in a deep gorge, salvo after salvo of cheers swelling and merging. The deep boom of their applause pursued Brinnaria and made her cower. The people would never forget her now. They were in ecstasy. She was their darling.
ON the drive homeward from that unforgettable gladiatorial exhibition Manlia and Gargilia shared the second state coach: in the first sat Brinnaria by Causidiena.
“My child,” Causidiena queried, “what ever made you do it?”
“I don’t know,” Brinnaria replied. “I did it before I thought.”
“Well!” said her elder philosophically. “It is done now and cannot be helped. But please try to remember that a Vestal is expected to control herself at all times, never to act without forethought, to reflect long before she acts, to do nothing unusual, to be very sure in each instance that what she is about to do is wholly becoming to a Vestal.”
“I’ll keep on trying,” Brinnaria replied mutinously, “but I was not constructed to be a Vestal. I always knew it; I know it now and I am afraid I’ll continue my blundering through the conventions. I’m built that way.”
She had to endure a second long lecture from Faltonius Bambilio. She listened submissively enough, but vouchsafed not one word of self-defence, rejoinder or comment; and, when urged to speak, she was obstinately silent.
“My daughter,” Faltonius droned at her, “remember that, since your entrance into the order of Vestals, I stand to you in the relation of parent to his own child. You should confide in me as in your spiritual father.”
“I should do nothing of the kind,” Brinnaria refuted him. “I know the statutes of the order better than that. Up to the days of the Divine Augustus, the Pontifex Maximus inhabited the house next to the house of the Vestals and stood in the closest relation of fatherhood towards them. But since he went to live on the Palatine and made us a present of his house we have occupied all this Atrium which was built in the place of the two houses. Since then no one has been in the same intimate relation of control over us. The Emperors have always held the office of Pontifex Maximus and as such each Emperor has been the spiritual father of the Vestals. The Emperor is my spiritual father and you are not.”
“Your self-opinionated talk does you little credit,” Faltonius retorted. “Since you know so much you must know also that for many years each Emperor has designated some priest as Pontifex of Vesta to be his deputy and to stand in the closest relation of parental oversight towards the members of your consecrated order; I am that deputy.”
“I have no desire to confide in a deputy,” Brinnaria told him, “or to consider the deputy as my real spiritual father. If I feel inclined to confide I’ll make my confidences to my genuine spiritual father, not to his understrapper.”
Bambilio was piqued and spoke sourly.
“The Emperor,” he said, “will be far from pleased with my report of you.”
“It will make no difference to me or to him what you report or whether you make any report or not,” spoke Brinnaria. “I’m going to have a talk with him myself.”
“Doubtless,” Bambilio meditated. “He has sent for you to rebuke you.”
“He has done nothing of the kind,” she retorted vigorously. “He has more sense. And if he had sent for me I should not have gone. I know my rights. If he wanted to talk to me, he’d have to come to me here. But as, in this case, I wanted to talk to him, I have asked for an audience and the day and the hour have been fixed. I am to have an audience to-morrow morning. And now, as I am to talk to him myself, I see no reason why I should spend more time being bored by his deputy. If you please, I should be obliged if you would terminate this interview.”
Astounded and dumb, Faltonius bowed himself out.
Causidiena suggested that she accompany Brinnaria on her visit to the Palace.
“It would be lovely to have you with me,” Brinnaria said, “and I am ever so grateful for your offer. You are a dear and I love you. I shall want you and wish for you all the way there, all the time I am there and all the way back. I shall be scared to death. But I must go alone. In the first place it is my right, if I were only six years old, to have audience with the Emperor alone whenever I ask for it and as often as I ask for it. I am not going to abate an iota of my rights merely for my own comfort. In the second place, I must go through this unhelped and unsupported all by myself. I know it; I must fight it out alone and come through alone. He’ll be sympathetic, if I deserve it. If I don’t deserve sympathy from him I don’t deserve it from you, nor your company and your countenance, either.”
Scared Brinnaria was, but even through her worst qualms of panic she was uplifted by an elating sense of her own importance. Not her encounter with Verus and his retinue, not her having remained seated when Aurelius entered the Colosseum had so poignantly made her realize how exalted was a Vestal. She drove to the Palace alone, not in her light carriage, but in her huge state coach, feeling very small in her white robes amid all that crimson upholstery, but also feeling herself a very great personage.
Her reception at the Palace made her feel even more so. The magnificence of the courtyard in which her coach came to a standstill, the ceremonial of turning out the guard in her honor, the formality with which she was conducted from corridor to corridor and from hail to hail, the immensity and gorgeousness of the vast audience hall in which she was finally left alone with the Emperor; all these did not so much overwhelm her as exalt her. She felt herself indeed a princess.
The Emperor greeted Brinnaria kindly, was as sympathetic as possible and put her at her ease at once. He soothed her, made her seat herself comfortably and said:
“Don’t worry about what you have done. You are certainly the most startling Vestal since Gegania, but you have really done nothing actually wrong. So do not agitate yourself about what cannot be altered. The question which concerns me is, what will you do next?”
“I think,” said Brinnaria, “that the next thing I shall do will be to procure a good strong rope and hang myself.”
“My child,” the shocked Emperor exclaimed, “you really should not speak so flippantly of so dreadful an idea!”
“I’m not a particle flippant this time,” Brinnaria declared. “I know I am often flippant, but not now, not a bit. I am just as serious as life and death. I have thought of nothing but suicide since Trebellius conducted me back to my seat. I can’t get the idea out of my head and that is why I have come to you.”
“Tell me all about it from the beginning,” the Emperor said, comfortingly. “What put the notion into your head?”
“In the beginning,” said Brinnaria, “you know that I didn’t want to be a Vestal.”
“Yes, I know,” he assured her.
“Well,” she went on, “now I am a Vestal and must serve out my thirty years, I’m really trying to do my best to be all I ought to be. I really am. I’ve tried hard to be sedate and grave and collected and reticent and slow-spoken, and all the rest of it. And I think I haven’t done badly most of the time. But after all, I’m myself and I can’t be changed. Every once in a while myself boils up in me under the scum of convention I’ve spread on top of the cauldron, so to speak. I don’t mean to let go and be natural and spontaneous. I’ve done the awful thing before I know I’m going to do it. I didn’t mean to pour the pork gravy over old Gubba’s head; but she looked so funny I just did it without knowing what I was going to do. I didn’t mean to throw Manlia’s pet monkey out of the window on to Moccilo’s head. But her shock of red curls looked to be just the place on which to drop little Dito, and I dropped Dito before I thought. It’s just the same way about all the other dreadful things I do. I don’t mean to do them, but I do do them.”
“Don’t worry,” the Emperor said, “you’ll outgrow all that.”
“I trust I may,” Brinnaria sighed, “but how about the harm I’m doing as I go along?”
“You haven’t done any harm, not any harm that matters,” the Emperor soothed her.
“Are you perfectly sure of that?” she persisted. “If you could make me perfectly sure of that, I should feel a great deal better. Are you sure?”
“I can’t see any real harm in your pranks,” the Emperor said. “I certainly should not encourage you to continue or repeat such conduct or to revert to it, but I see no real harm in it.”
“You think I have not unfitted myself for my duties?”
The Emperor meditated.
“To a certainty,” he said, “if your conduct was intentional, if you thought up these pranks of yours and perpetrated them, with deliberate consciousness of what you were about to do, I should hold you gravely unfitted for your position. But you are manifestly sincere in your efforts to be all you ought to be and are trying genuinely to overcome your tendencies and to outgrow your coltishness. I am of the opinion that, if you curb yourself from now on, you have done no harm.”
“Do you think,” Brinnaria insisted, “that if you called a meeting of all the colleges of pontiffs and put the question to them, that they would make the same answer you have made?”
“You amazing child!” Aurelius exclaimed. “Why should you assume the attitude of advocate against yourself? Why suggest a synod to discuss your conduct and express an official opinion on it? Is not my opinion enough? Even if I saw fit to call a synod and all the members of it held the same views and expressed them never so cogently, do you not realize that, if my views were contrary to theirs, it would be my view that would prevail; that it would not only be my privilege and my right but my imperative duty to override any opposition and to enforce my decision? Are you not satisfied with the opinions of the man who is at once Emperor and Chief Pontifex of Rome?”
“But,” Brinnaria persisted, “I am not at all sure that you are speaking as Emperor and Chief Pontifex. To me you seem to speak as a kindly husband and father very sympathetic towards another man’s little daughter who comes to you in deep trouble of spirit.”
“You amazing child!” the Emperor repeated. “You talk as if you were forty years old. Tell me precisely what is troubling you, for I must have failed to fathom it, and be sure I shall reply officially as Emperor and Pontifex.”
“What troubles me,” said Brinnaria, “is the dread that my wild and tomboyish behavior may be as displeasing to the Goddess as coquettishness or wantonness. I am in terror for fear my ministrations may be unpleasant to her, may be sacrilegious, may not only fail to win her blessing upon Rome but may draw down her curse upon all of us. I never thought of that until I stood there all alone out in the arena, astraddle of that beautiful boy whom I just had to save, feeling all of a sudden horribly naked in my one thin, clinging undergarment, with two hundred thousand eyes staring at me. It came over me with a rush that I was not only never going to be fit for a Vestal but that I wasn’t fit for a Vestal and I hadn’t been fit for a Vestal; that I not only was going to do harm, not only was doing harm, but had done harm. If the Parthians are devastating the frontier along the Euphrates and the Marcommani and the Quadi are storming the outposts along the Danube and the Rhine, perhaps that is because my presence in the Atrium is an offence in the eyes of Vesta, my prayers an affront to my Goddess, my care of her altar-fire an insult to her. I tremble to think of it. And I cannot get it out of my head. I wake up in the dark and think of it and it keeps me awake, sometimes, longer than I ever lay awake in the dark in my life. It scares me. I am a Vestal to bring prosperity and glory to the Empire, to pray prayers that will surely be answered. Suppose the Goddess is deaf to my prayers because I am unworthy to pray to her? Suppose that my prayers infuriate her because I am vile in her sight? Suppose I am causing disaster to the Empire? I keep thinking all that. Do you wonder that I think of suicide, of hanging myself, like the two Oculatas?”
“My child!” Aurelius cut in. “You have not done anything that justifies your comparing yourself to the Oculata sisters.”
“We’ll come back to that later,” Brinnaria replied. “Just now let us stick to the point. Do you think my fears justified or not?”
“Decidedly not,” the Emperor rejoined, without an instant’s hesitation, “and I speak not as a soft-hearted parent who sees the soul of his own daughter looking at him out of the eyes of every little girl whose heart troubles her, I speak as the guardian of the interests of the Empire, as the warder of the destinies of Rome.
“Your misbehavior has certainly been grave, I admit; and, if done maliciously, would entail all the harm you imagine. But the Goddess can see not only your actions but your thoughts. Your scruples do you high credit. I will not say you are as pleasing to the Goddess as would be a grave and sedate ministrant, but I do solemnly decide and declare that you need have no further dread of any past, present or future harm to the Empire or to Rome from your past behavior, if you honestly try to err no more. This is my official decision. Be at peace in your heart.”
Brinnaria drew a deep breath.
“You certainly comfort me,” she said, “but I just know I’ll boil over again and not once, but many times.”
“Vesta will comprehend,” he said, “if your derelictions are less and less frequent and less and less violent; if you succeed a little better from month to month and from year to year. She will not be pleased with your lapses, if you lapse again, but she will be pleased at your struggles with yourself and with your good intentions. She will smile upon your ministrations and hearken to your petitions. Be comforted.”
“I am,” said Brinnaria, “as far as that trifle goes, but now we come to my real and chief concern. Suppose I am as detestable in the sight of my Goddess as the Oculata sisters were, and for a similar reason; suppose I ought to hang myself as dead as they hanged themselves. Oughtn’t I, then, to hang myself?”
“You incredible creature!” Aurelius cried. “I’ve met women by the thousand, by the tens of thousands, but never a girl like you. What do you mean? What can you mean? You cannot mean what you seem to mean. Explain yourself. Be explicit. Tell me all about what is troubling you. I’ll understand and put your mind at ease.”
“I trust you may,” Brinnaria sighed, “but I dread that you cannot. I mean just what I seem to mean.”
“Impossible!” the Emperor cried, “a child of ten, but a few months out of her mother’s care and those few months in the care of Causidiena! And I wouldn’t believe it of you if you were twice your age.”
“Oh,” said Brinnaria, “I haven’t acted like Caparronia and the two Oculatas, and I shouldn’t if I were never so much left to myself. But you said yourself that Vesta can read my thoughts and I knew that without your telling me so. Suppose that my thoughts are as abominable in the sight of my Goddess as was the behavior of those three unfortunates? Oughtn’t I to hang myself and be done with myself?”
“Indubitably,” said the Emperor, “if the facts were as your words imply. But you are just frightening yourself to death with vapors like a child afraid of its own shadow. Be explicit, be definite, and I can put you at peace with yourself at once and permanently.”
Brinnaria drew a deep breath.
“To begin with,” she said, “you know that, before I was taken for a Vestal, I was plighted to Caius Segontius Almo.”
“Certainly, I knew that,” Aurelius replied. “All Rome knew of his ride from Falerii and of his arriving just too late.”
“You knew I was in love with him?”
“I assumed that,” the Emperor told her.
“Well,” she said, a pathetic break in her voice, “I can’t make myself stop loving Almo. I always have loved him, I always shall, I love him now.”
“I assumed that too,” the Emperor said. “All Rome knows of his resolve to remain unmarried, to wait thirty years for you, to marry you the very day you are free. I assumed that he would not be so constant unless he believed you equally constant. No harm in that! You have a right to marry at the end of your service and a right to look forward to it.”
“That is what troubles me,” Brinnaria said. “I cannot feel that I have a right to look forward to it.”
“Now listen to me,” said the Emperor. “Few Vestals have left the Atrium at the end of their thirty years. Not every one that has left has married, the third Terentia withdrew at the end of her term and did not marry, nor did the only Licinia who ever completed her service. But Appellasia married and so did Quetonia and Seppia. Others have married after their service, though it is thought unlucky. The right to leave the order implies the right to marry after leaving. The right to leave implies the right to mean to leave, to plan to leave, to look forward to leaving and marrying. You have that right, like any other Vestal. Does that satisfy you?”
“It does not,” Brinnaria asserted. “I know a Vestal has a right to leave and marry and to plan to leave and marry. But, after thirty years of service, or nearly thirty years of service, to plan to leave and marry and to look forward to it for a few days or months appear to me very different from looking forward to it from the first hour of my service, and knowing not only that I mean to marry, but just the man I mean to marry, and loving him all the time, and longing for him. I can’t help it; I feel that way, and I dread that I am not an acceptable ministrant and I tremble for fear of the consequences to you and to Rome. I think I ought to hang myself and be done with it. You haven’t comforted me a bit.”
The Emperor stood up.
“Sit still!” he commanded, sharply.
He paced up and down the huge audience hail; paced its full length three times each way.
Then he reseated himself.
“Do you sleep soundly?” he queried.
“Like a top, mostly,” said Brinnaria. “I go to sleep the instant I put my head on the pillow. Generally I sleep all night long until my maid wakes me up in the morning. Many nights, but not every night, nor most nights, I wake up with a dreadful start, as if I had had a nightmare, and lie there quaking for fear I am ruining Rome. But even then I generally go to sleep again pretty quick.”
“Do you think of Almo when you wake up in the dark?” he pursued.
“Mighty little,” she declared. “In the dark all I can think of is Rome and my duty. I often reflect how immediately and how greatly being taken for a Vestal changes a girl and alters, not only her outlook on life and her ways of thinking, but also her feelings. It has cooled and steadied me more than I could have believed. When Daddy quarrelled with Segontius and told me he would not let me marry Caius I used to feel as if I were going to suffocate, used to feel that way sometimes for hours at a time, used to suffer horribly, used to wake up in the dark and feel as if, if I could not get to Almo right then, at once, I should die, as if I should be choked to death by the thumping of my heart. I used to feel that way at dinner, when out visiting any time of day, for hours. I never feel that way now. And after Daddy and Segontius made up their quarrel and it was arranged that I was to marry Almo, I used to feel as if it would kill me to wait four years, I used to grit my teeth to think of it, of waiting four years for him; used to think of it an day long, no matter what I was doing. And I used to wake up in the dark and roll round in bed and bite the bed-clothes with rage at the thought of the long waiting ahead of me. I wanted Almo the way you want a drink, just before noon of a hot day, when you have been travelling since before sunrise and the carriage creaks and jolts and the road is all dusty and there is no wind and you feel as if you would rather die than go any longer without a drink. I used to want that way to be married to Almo.
“I never feel that way now. I want him and I want to be married to him, but I look forward to it as I look forward to the next race-day at the Circus or the next fight of gladiators at the Colosseum, as a desirable and delightful time sure to come but by no means to be hurried, as something I can very well do without until the time comes. The thought of Almo is always somewhere back in my mind ready to come forward when I have nothing else to think of. But I think of him placidly and calmly and never when on duty nor when at my lessons nor when at meals. And at night, never.”
“My daughter,” said Aurelius, smiling at her, “listen well to me. I speak as Chief Pontifex and as Emperor of Rome. I command you to forget your qualms and to banish your fears. Officially as Chief Pontifex I judge you a ministrant most acceptable to your Goddess, as a most fit and suitable Vestal. I judge that no girl naturally austere, frigid and self-contained could be half so pleasing to Vesta as a tempestuous child like you who curbs her temper and schools her outward behavior all she can in the effort to be all she ought to be; whose feelings even tame themselves without any effort of hers in the holy atmosphere of the Atrium.
“Manifestly you are telling the truth about your acts, your impulses and your thoughts, I judge you a pure-minded, clean-hearted Vestal, most suitable for her duties. Vesta understands and is glad of your good intentions and pleased with your struggles to master yourself. You are most acceptable to her. You will bring no curses on Rome, but your prayers will be heard and you will bring many blessings on the Empire. Be comforted!”
“I am,” said Brinnaria simply, “and I shall stay comforted.”
AFTER her audience with the Emperor, Brinnaria felt more at peace with herself, succeeded better in curbing her native wildness, incurred less and less disapprobation and won increasingly the respect and affection of her elders. Her outbursts were less frequent and less violent; she learned to hold her tongue, to appear calm, to stand with dignity, to move with deliberation. Her admiration for Causidiena and Numisia and of their statuesque attitudes and queenly movements helped her a great deal by both conscious and unconscious imitation. It helped her more to find that she was succeeding better than Meffia. At first Brinnaria had been notably more prone than Meffia to assume gawky or ungainly postures, and, as she was the bigger of the two, she was the more conspicuous.
Before long she began to improve in her bearing, but Meffia did not. Brinnaria held herself erect, head up and shoulders back. Meffia slouched and sagged along, a semi-boneless creature, her clothing hanging on her baggily and unbecomingly.
The difference was particularly noticeable at meals.
In the Roman world all well-to-do people lay down to meals luxuriously extended on broad sofas. Brinnaria had always had trouble about her meal-time attitudes, and her mild easy-going mother had often had to speak to her and bid her remember herself. In the Atrium she had found her legs kept up their old habits of getting into strange postures, her feet seemed distressingly in evidence, and her knees always in the wrong place.
Causidiena, tactful and sympathetic, solved the problem of how to influence her by getting her to watch Meffia and to contrast her with Manlia and Gargilia.
They were almost as statuesque as their two elders, who reclined at table in attitudes scarcely less majestic than those of the Fates on the Parthenon pediment. Meffia sprawled uncouthly and was forever spreading her knees apart, generally with one up in the air. Her postures were so disgusting that Brinnaria was hot all over with determination not to be like Meffia.
She succeeded.
Great was her exultation when she perceived that it was no longer Brinnaria and Meffia who gave cause for concern to Causidiena, but Meffia and Brinnaria, great her triumph when she made sure that Causidiena had ceased worrying about her, or worried only at long intervals, but was perpetually solicitous concerning Meffia.
Meffia was indeed a cause of solicitude. She was stupid, slow and idle about her lessons, tearful on the slightest provocation, inert at all times and generally ailing, though never actually ill. She never looked clean, no matter how faithfully her maid toiled over her; she could somehow reduce, in an amazingly short time, the neatest attire to the semblance of mussed and rumpled rags; she slouched and shambled rather than walked, she lolled rather than sat.
Her hands were feeble and ineffective, her writing remained a childish scrawl, no matter how much she was made to practice, she dropped things continually and frequently spilt her food at meal-time. Most of all was her awkwardness manifest in the temple.
The temple was circular, its roof supported by eighteen splendid marble columns, the intervals between which were walled up to the height of not much more than five feet, the space from the top of the low wall to the roof being filled in with magnificent lattices of heavy cast bronze; so that the temple was a pleasant, breezy place on warm days, but very draughty in chilly weather and bitterly cold in winter. It contained no statue, nor any other object of worship, except in the center of its floor the circular altar on which burned the sacred fire, solemnly extinguished and ceremonially rekindled on each first of March, the New Year’s day of the primitive Roman Calendar, but which must never at any other time be permitted to go out, upon whose continual burning depended the prosperity of Rome, according to the belief implicitly held by all Romans from the earliest days until Brinnaria’s time, and for centuries after. The extinction of the perpetual fire, whether by accident or by neglect, was looked upon as a presage of frightful disaster to the nation, as an omen of impending horrors, almost as the probable cause of national misfortunes. Without qualification or doubt the people of Brinnaria’s world believed that, as long as Vesta’s holy fire burned steadily and brightly, Rome was assured the favor and protection of her gods; that, should it die out, their wrath was certain to be manifested in terrible afflictions involving the entire population.
The care of the fire was the chief duty of Brinnaria and her five associates, as it had been of their predecessors for more than nine hundred years. As maple was the sacred wood in the Roman ritual, maple only was used for the holy fire. The size of the pieces used and their shape was also a matter of immemorial ordinance. Each piece was about a cubit long, about the length of the forearm of an average adult, measured from elbow to finger-tips. Each piece must be wedge-shaped, with the bark on the rounded side and the other two sides meeting at a sharp edge where had been the heart of the trunk or branch from which it had been cut. Each piece must have been clean cleft with a strong sweep of the axe. The pieces varied from sections of stout trunks to mere slivers from slender boughs. All were of dry, well-seasoned wood, carefully prepared.
The placing of these on the fire was a matter of ritual and might be done no otherwise than as prescribed. It was quite a delicate art to lay the necessary piece in just the right place and at just the right angle; it required more than a little good sense and discretion to know just when a piece was required, for the fire must not burn violently nor must it smoulder, it must be steady but not strong. This discretion, this good sense, Meffia was slow to acquire. The art of laying the wood properly she acquired very imperfectly. She did it well enough under direction; but, even with Causidiena watching her, she was likely to drop the piece of wood on the floor, or, what was worse, to drop it on the fire instead of laying it on. The scattering of ashes on the floor of the temple was held unseemly, that live coals should fall from the Altar was considered almost sacrilegious. Meffia, more than once, perpetrated such appalling blunders. Very tardily did she learn her duties; only after four years could she be trusted to take her regular turn in care of the fire and to stand her watch of half a night each time her turn came between sunset and sunrise.
During these four years she had grown into a not unpersonable young woman, for Roman girls were generally young women at fourteen years of age. She was never ruddy or robust, always pale, delicate-looking and fragile-seeming, never actually ill, but usually ailing, peevish, limp and querulous. Life in the Atrium largely consisted in the effort to keep Meffia well, to make sure that she was not overtired, to foresee and forestall opportunities for her to blunder, to repair the consequences of her mistakes, generally to protect and guide her.
In the same four years Brinnaria had developed into a muscular girl, tall, amply fleshed, robust, rosy, full of healthy vigor, lithe and strong. She was radiantly handsome, knew it, and was proud of it. Her duties she knew to the last, least detail, and Causidiena trusted her quite as much as Manlia or Gargilia.
One spring night it was Mafia’s watch until midnight, at which time Brinnaria was to relieve her. It was the custom that, at the end of her watch, the Vestal on duty made sure that the fire was burning properly and then left it and herself waked her relief, it being entirely inconceivable that, under roof and protected all round by bronze lattices, a properly burning fire could go out in the brief space of time required to leave the temple, enter the court-yard, cross it, ascend the stairs and for the relieving Vestal to reach the temple by the same path reversed.
Brinnaria was a sound sleeper. She woke in the pitch dark with the instant conviction that she had slept long past midnight, with a sudden qualm of apprehension, of boding, almost of terror.
She was a methodical creature for all her wildness, and very neat in her habits. By touch, almost without groping, she dressed in the dark. Silently she slipped out of her room, noiselessly she closed the door, softly she groped her way to the stairs, down the stairs out into the courtyard to the corner of the colonnade.
There, a pace or two beyond the pillars, under the open sky, she peered up.
The gray light of dawn was faintly hinted in the blackish canopy of cloud above her.
Swiftly she flitted the length of the court, whisking past the dimly-seen columns; swiftly she traversed the three small rooms at its eastern end, panting she plunged through the dark doorway into the dark temple.
There was no flicker of fire-light on the carved and gilded panels of the lofty ceiling; the ceiling, in fact, was invisible, unguessable in the gloom.
There was no glow upon the altar, not even a glimmer of redness through the ashes.
Brinnaria held her hand over the ashes. Nowhere could she discern more than the merest hint of warmth.
On the back of her hands, as on the back of her neck, she could feel the chill of the faintly stirring dawn wind that breathed through the bronze lattices and across the temple interior.
She felt among the wood piled ready, found a slender sliver of a cleft branchlet, and methodically ploughed the ashes across and across. She did bring to the surface a faint redness, but not even one coal which could have been blown into sufficient heat to start a flame on her splinter of dry maple.
A sound assailed her ears.
Meffia snoring!
Guided by the gurgling noise she found Meffia crumpled in a heap on the mosaic floor against the base of one of the pillars.
Brinnaria kicked her once viciously and shook her repeatedly.
Slowly, dazedly, Meffia half awoke, whining:
“Where am I?” she gasped.
“In the temple!” Brinnaria replied.
“Oh!” Meffia exclaimed, “what has happened?”
“You went to sleep, you little fool,” Brinnaria raged at her, “and the fire has gone out.”
“Oh! what shall we do?” wailed Meffia, “what shall we do?”
“Do?” snarled Brinnaria. “It’s plain enough what you have to do. Go to your room, go to bed and go’ to sleep, stay asleep, keep your mouth shut, say nothing, pretend you woke me at midnight, pretend you had nothing to do with the fire going out, pretend you know nothing about it, keep your face straight, keep mum, leave the rest to me!”
“But,” wailed Meffia, “if they think you let the fire go out you’ll be scourged for it.”
“Well,” snapped Brinnaria, “what’s that to you? Go to bed.”
“But,” Meffia insisted, “I let it go out. I ought to take the blame, not you. I ought to be scourged with you.”
“You insufferable little idiot,” Brinnaria hurled at her, “you never could stand a flogging, you’d die of it most likely. To a certainty you’d be ill, and have to be sent off to be nursed and kept away for a month or more to recover. I won’t have Causidiena worried with any such performances. And as sure as the fire is out, you’d behave like the poor creature you are. You’d scream and howl and faint and shame us all.
“No flogging of you if I can help it!
“Now, go to bed!”
“But,” protested Meffia, “why need either of us be flogged? I have tinder and flint and steel in my room. We could light the fire and no one ever know it.”
“You imbecile child! You silly baby! You wicked, horrible, sacrilegious girl!” Brinnaria stormed. “You irreligious, atheistical, blasphemous wretch! To save your hide you’d desecrate the temple, pollute the Altar, anger Vesta, make all our prayers in vain, bring down curses without count on Rome and all of us. Be silent! Don’t you dare to speak another word! Off to bed with you!”
“But,” Meffia trembled, “you hate me; why do you take my punishment?”
“I don’t hate you,” hissed Brinnaria. “I despise you! And I’ve told you why I’m going to take the licking. Off to bed with you!”
“But,” Meffia still persisted, “what will you do?”
“Do?” whispered Brinnaria. “Do? Why I’ll curl up where you’ve left a warm spot on the floor and go to sleep and sleep till some one finds me. I can sleep any time.”
“But think of the scourging!” Meffia insisted.
“I shan’t,” Brinnaria maintained. “I shan’t think of it a moment. I never did mind a licking. It’s bad enough while it lasts, but soon over. No licking will worry me. I’ll sleep like a top. Now to bed with you, or I’ll break every bone in your worthless body!” Meffia started to speak again; Brinnaria caught her gullet in one strong, young hand, clutched her neck with the other, and craftily pressed one thumb behind one of Meffia’s ears.
Meffia squeaked like a snared rabbit.
“There!” Brinnaria whispered fiercely. “Now you know how badly I can hurt you when I try. If you let on that it was you and not I that let the fire go out what I did to you then won’t amount to anything to what I’ll do to you. I’ll kill you. Promise you’ll keep mum.”
“I promise,” gasped Meffia.
“Go to bed!” Brinnaria hissed.
Meffia went.
Brinnaria, left alone, did all she could to make the ashes on the Altar look like the remains of a fire that had died out of itself, to efface all signs of her efforts to find live coals under the ashes. She judged that she had succeeded pretty well.
Then she composed herself on the floor and was asleep in ten breaths.
There Manlia found her when the daylight was already strong.
When wakened Brinnaria merely remarked:
“It can’t be helped. I always did sleep too sound.” That day was a gloomy day in Rome. The report was noised abroad that the holy fire had gone out and a chill of horror spread through all classes of the population, from the richest to the poorest.
The Romans were very far from being what they are represented to have been by unsympathetic modern writers on them. Practically all modern writers have been unsympathetic with the Romans, for the Romans were Pagans and all modern writers on them have been more or less Christians, chiefly interested in Pagans because most Pagans were in the later centuries converted to Christianity. With that fact in the foreground of their thoughts and with the utterances of Roman skeptics and dilettantes well in view, most modern writers assert what they sincerely believe, that the Romans had only the vaguest and most lukewarm religious faith, and no vivid devout convictions at all.
The facts were entirely the other way. There were agnostics among the cultured leisure classes, there were unbelievers of various degrees everywhere in the towns and cities. But the mass of the population, not only universally, all over the countryside, but collectively in the urban centers, believed in their gods as implicitly as they believed in heat and cold, birth and death, fire and water, pleasure and pain. Government, from the Roman point of view, was a partnership between the Roman people, as represented by their senate, and the gods. Under the Republic every election had appeared to the Romans who participated in it to be a rite for ascertaining what man would be most pleasing to the gods to fill the position in question. Under the Empire the selection of a new Emperor, whether a confirmation by the senate of the previous Emperor’s accredited heir, or an acclamation by the army of the soldiers’ favorite, appeared to the Romans as the determination of the gods’ preference for a particular individual as their chief partner.
The choice of war or peace, of battle or maneuvering for delay, seemed to the Romans the taking of the advice of the gods, who manifested their injunctions by various signs, by the appearance of the liver, heart, lungs and kidneys of the cattle and sheep sacrificed, by the flight of birds, by the shape of the flames of altar-fires, all regarded as definite answers to explicit questions; who also made suggestions or gave warnings by means of earthquakes, floods, conflagrations, pestilences, eclipses, by the aurora borealis, by any sort of strange happening.
The extinction of the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta was looked upon as a categorical warning that the behavior of the Romans or of some part of them or the conduct of the government was so displeasing to the gods that the Empire would come to a sudden end unless matters were at once corrected. All Romans believed that as implicitly as they believed that food would keep them alive or that steel could kill them.
Therefore the days after Meffia let the fire go out were gloomy days in Rome. The report of a great defeat for their army, with a terrible slaughter of their best soldiers would not have depressed the crowds more.
The people were as dazed, numb and silent as after the first news of a terrific disaster. Every kind of public amusement or diversion was postponed, merry-making ceased everywhere, the wildest and most reckless felt no inclination towards frivolity, even the games of children were checked and repressed, gravity and solemnity enveloped the entire city and its vast suburbs. The men talked soberly, as if at a funeral; while for women of every degree, but especially for the matrons of the upper classes, the three ensuing days were days of prayer and fasting.
For the Pontiffs they were anxious and busy days.
Both Emperors were away from Rome, Lucius Verus in Greece, on his way home from Antioch and the great victories of his three years’ campaign against the Parthians, Marcus Aurelius in Germany hastening from point to point along the headwaters of the Rhine and Danube, desperately resisting the pertinacious attacks of the Marcomanni. The Pontiffs were without their chief and acted under the leadership of Faltonius Bambilio, Pontifex of Vesta, the busiest and most anxious of them all. In consultation with the august College of Pontiffs, hastily assembled at the Regia, a splendid building occupying the site of Numa’s rustic palace, near the great Forum and close to the Temple of Vesta, he arranged for the necessary ceremonial of expiation and atonement.
Besides the fasting of the women all over the city, besides their day-long and night-long prayers, besides the sacrifices which each matron must personally offer in her own house, besides the sacrifices which must be offered for the matrons in the Temple of Castor and in the less popular women’s temples in every quarter of the city, there must he public sacrifices of cattle, sheep and swine, there must be solemn and gorgeous processions; every sort of ceremonial traditionally supposed to mitigate the wrath of the gods, to placate them, to win their favor, must be carried out with every detail of care, with the utmost magnificence.
Meanwhile, and above all, the negligent Vestal must be punished; and at once the sacred fire must be ritually rekindled.
The ritual rekindling worried and exhausted Bambilio not a little.
The procedure was traditional and rigidly prescribed in every detail. The sacred fire might not be rekindled by anything so modern as a flint and steel, far less by anything so much more modern as a burning glass.
The primitive fire drill must be used and the fresh fire produced by the friction of wood on wood.
The ritual prescribed that a plank of apple wood, about two inches thick, about two feet wide and about three feet long, should be placed on a firm support, upon which it would rest solidly without any tendency to joggle. At its middle was bored a small circular depression, about the size of a man’s thumb-nail and shallow. Into this was thrust the tapered end of a round rod of maple wood about as thick as a large man’s thumb. The upper end of the rod fitted freely into a socket in a ball of maple wood of suitable size to be held in the left hand and pressed down so as to press the lower end of the rod into the hole in the apple wood plank. Round the middle of the rod was looped a bow-string kept taut by a strong bow. By grasping the bow in his right hand and sawing it back and forth, the operator caused the rod to whirl round, first one way and then the other, with great velocity. The friction of its lower end soon heated up the hole in the apple-wood plank, and round that were piled chips of dry apple-wood, which, if the operator was strong and skilled, soon burst into flame.
Bambilio was fat and clumsy. Before he had succeeded he was dripping with perspiration, limp with weariness and ready to faint. But succeed he did. The quart or more of apple-wood chips burst into flame at last; Causidiena, standing ready with the prescribed copper sieve, caught the blazing chips as they were tilted off the plank, conveyed them to the Altar, placed maple splinters on them, and soon had the sacred fire burning properly.
The punishment of the guilty Vestal was even more a matter of concern, of trepidation. She must be scourged that very night, and, as in respect to the rekindling of the fire, every detail of what must be done was prescribed by immemorial tradition, long since committed to writing, among the statutes of the order.
The scourging must be done by the Pontiff himself.
The scourge must be one with a maple-wood handle and three thongs of leather made from the hide of a roan heifer. In each thong were knotted the tiny, horny half-hoofs of a newborn white lamb, eight to a thong, twenty-four in all. These bits of horny hoof tore and cut terribly the bare back of the victim. It was prescribed that the scourge must be laid on vigorously, not lightly.
The Vestal scourged must be entirely nude. As it would have been sacrilege unspeakable for a man to see the ankle or shoulder of a Vestal, let alone her entire body, it was enjoined that the scourging take place at midnight, in a shut room, and that a woolen curtain should hang between the Pontifex and his victim.
Bambilio was terribly wrought up at the prospect of the perplexing and delicate duty before him. He was fat and short-winded and would suffer from the effort of laying on the blows. He was as pious as possible and quaked inwardly with the dread that, in spite of the dark room and the curtain, he might catch a glimpse of his victim and bring down the wrath of the gods on himself and on Rome. And, apart from all else, he was shame-faced and hot and cold at the idea of being in the same room, even in a darkened room screened by a curtain, with a naked Vestal. He blushed and shuddered. To be sure, it was prescribed that one other Vestal was to be in the room, on the same side of the curtain as the victim, to say when the scourging had continued long enough and the negligent Vestal had been sufficiently punished. But this comforted Bambilio very little.
He wished the ordeal over.
At midnight he stood in the dark, close to the curtain. The darkness was not as dark as he should have liked. Some ghost of a glimmer of starshine filtered into the room and he could make out the shape of the curtain. He waited, scourge in hand.
Presently Numisia spoke, told him that Brinnaria was prepared for her beating, took his left hand and guided it in the dark. He felt the curtain’s edge against his wrist, felt a warm soft elbow, grasped it, and at once gained a notion of the direction in which he was to lay on his blows.
He struck round the other side of the curtain and felt that the scourge met its mark, but slantingly and draggingly. He tried again and seemed to do better.
For the third blow he made the scourge whistle through the air.
“Hit harder, you old fool,” spoke Brinnaria, “you’re barely tapping me!” That made him angry and Brinnaria experienced as severe a scourging as any fat old gentleman could have compassed.
She did not shriek, sob or whimper: not a sound escaped her. She suffered, suffered acutely, particularly when one of the lamb hoofs struck a second time on a bleeding gash in her back or on a swollen weal. But her physical pain was drowned in a rising tide of anger and wrath. She felt the long repressed, half-forgotten tomboy, hoyden Brinnaria surging up in her and gaining mastery. She fairly boiled with rage, she blazed and flamed inwardly with a conflagration of resentment. It was all she could do not to tear down the curtain, spring on Bambilio, wrench his scourge from his hand and lay it on him. She kept still and silent, but she felt her inward tornado of emotion gaining strength.