PROLOGUE
ROME, 24TH JANUARY AD 41
THE RIGID, WIDE-EYED grin of a gaudily painted, comicactor’s mask leered out at the audience; its wearer skipped a short jig, the back of his left hand pressed to his chin and his right arm outstretched. ‘The wicked deed that causes youall this distresswas my doing; I confess it.’
The audience roared with laughter at this well-delivered, purposely ambiguous line, slapping their knees and clapping their hands. The actor, playing the young lover, inclined his mask-obscured head in acknowledgement of the appreciation before turning to his partner on the stage, who wore the more grotesque, gurning mask of the villain of the piece.
Before the players could continue the scene, Caligula jumped to his feet. ‘Wait!’
The ten thousand-strong audience in the temporary theatre clinging to the northern slope of the Palatine Hill turned towards the imperial box, jutting out on supporting wooden columns at the exact centre of the new construction.
Caligula copied the actor’s pose. ‘Plautus would have wanted the line delivered like this.’ He skipped the jig perfectly whilst imitating the mask’s broad grin, opening his sunken eyes wide so that the whites contrasted markedly with the dark, insomniac’s bags beneath them. ‘The wicked deed that causesyou all this distress wasmy doing;I confess it.’ As he finished the last syllable he brought his left hand up from his chin to rest on his forehead and melodramatically threw back his head.
The audience’s mirth was even more vigorous than at the first rendition, loud and raucous – but forced. The two actors held their bellies and doubled up in unrestrained hilarity. Caligula came out of the pose, a sneer on his face, and, throwing his arms wide, turned slowly to the left, then to the right to encompass the whole audience in the semi-circular construction, bathing in their adulation.
Standing at the very rear of the theatre, within the shade of one of the many awnings rigged over the precipitous seating, Titus Flavius Sabinus looked down at his Emperor with disgust from beneath a deep hood.
Caligula swept up an arm, palm towards the audience; they quietened almost instantaneously. He sat down. ‘Continue!’
As the actors obeyed his command a middle-aged man wearing a senatorial toga, seated at Caligula’s feet, began to shower kisses on the young Emperor’s red slippers, caressing them as if they were the most beautiful objects that he had ever seen.
Sabinus turned to his companion, a pale, thin-faced, auburnhaired man in his thirties. ‘Who’s the unashamed sycophant, Clemens?’
‘That, my dear brother-in-law, is Quintus Pomponius Secundus, this year’s Senior Consul, and that’s as close as he’ll come to expressing an independent opinion whilst he’s in office.’
Sabinus spat and gripped the hilt of his sword, concealed beneath his cloak. The palm of his hand felt clammy. ‘This hasn’t come a moment too soon.’
‘On the contrary, this is long overdue. My sister has been living with the shame of being raped by Caligula for over two years now; far longer than honour dictates.’
Down on the stage a hearty kick by the young lover up the backside of his newly arrived slave
