Pagan Voyager

By Simon Finch

Vesuvio is the golden Voyager, destined to journey through every cavern of depravity in the ancient world. It is a time when Rome was at its most decadent and throbbing with the muscle of slavery, the First Century A.D., an age of sensual adventure and unbridled sexuality. Pagan Voyager, the second part of the Voyager trilogy and sizzling sequel to Golden Voyager, follows Vesuvio, the virile young aristocrat, as he searches for his slave-girl lover, Miranda, in a bloody adventure of wild sensuality. Vesuvio follows Miranda across the Mediterranean to the Egyptian city of Alexandria where he falls into the clutches of the robber Charon. Subject to humiliating physical and mental depravities, Vesuvio is sold to a Jewish merchant in the ancient city of Antioch where he becomes the merchant's charioteer. Only with victory in a death-defying race can Vesuvio return to Rome, where he is forced to serve in the Villa Orgiasta, a notorious pleasure house. When he finally finds Miranda Vesuvio must plot her safe return to Italy, as well as finding a way to regain his own freedom. Rich in historical background and pulsing with unchained passions and erotic conquest, Pagan Voyager is a compelling adventure of forbidden love and cruel sacrifice amid the majesty and power of Rome for anyone who has enjoyed movies such as Spartacus or Gladiator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Souvenir Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780285642096

Book preview

BOOK ONE

THE BATHS OF NERO

1

Vesuvio kicked off his canvas slippers, dropped the muslin bath sheet from his perspiration-soaked body, and sat down by the edge of the large blue mosaic pool in the Baths of Nero called the tepidarium. He hoped to find more peace here than he had been able to enjoy in the steam rooms and, again, he wished that he were not visiting this dissolute city – Rome.

Dangling his bare legs in the pool, Vesuvio was still rankled about the sexual approaches which had been made to him in the steam rooms. He asked himself if a man could not go anywhere in the city of Rome – Rome the urbs – without being propositioned like a whore or approached by slobbering panderers.

The year was 863 according to Roman calculations; 110 A.D. by the Christians’ calendar. Nine emperors had ruled since the establishment of the Empire – four since Nero – and each emperor had built a bath to be used by Rome’s populace. But the baths which Nero had built on Campus Martius were still the best equipped Imperial thermae in the city.

The Baths of Nero were also the most lascivious. Nevertheless, they were located nearby the bureaus where Vesuvio had business to attend to later today and he had mistakingly thought that he could relax for a few hours in the baths before resuming the work which had brought him to the city. He now regretted that he had not gone to sit in a wine shop until the official bureaus reopened.

A few moments earlier, Vesuvio had been pacing back and forth through banks of mist, working up a fine perspiration on his arms and chest and legs in the steamy calidarium as he mulled over his problems. Young men began to emerge like phantoms from the vaporous shadows, persistently following him through the clouds of steam, darting their tongues rapidly in and out of their mouths, making lewd proposals with their hands and buttocks, reaching to grope the linen cincture knotted around his groin.

An obese man had rushed from a far corner of the steam room to chase away the young men with the edges of his bath sheet as if they were a flock of bothersome geese. But then the fat man also began to shuffle around Vesuvio, jangling a leather pouch of coins and whispering that – for a small percentage – he could find bedwork for Vesuvio with love-starved ladies who lived nearby on the Capitoline Hill.

Reminding himself that today was not the first time that he had been mistaken for a burly soldier or athlete who gladly sold himself to catamites and unfaithful wives for a few sesterces, Vesuvio leaned back on his arms by the edge of the bathing pool and gazed at the naked and semi-naked people cavorting in the water.

Males were not required to wear clothing in the pools at the Baths of Nero. Females were now also refraining from covering their bodies. And the women who did wear clothing donned only diaphanous scarves which clung to their nipples with the water and moulded over the dark patches between their legs.

Vesuvio sat on the pool’s edge and looked at a bare-breasted woman standing nearby in the water, hearing her strident laughter echo across the hall as a man dived between her legs and nibbled at her groin like a fish.

Looking to the far end of the pool, Vesuvio noticed an old man with oyster-white skin grope a pimply faced boy. He watched two females embrace and kiss like lovers. He saw groups of nude bathers bunched together in threes and fours, rubbing, touching, fondling one another in the pool.

Nero had built these baths forty-five years ago. Trajan reigned as Emperor now and Vesuvio had heard that he was commissioning a larger, more magnificent edifice than the Baths of Nero, that Trajan was erecting a monument to himself on the Equiline befitting the emperor who had pushed the boundaries of the Roman Empire to their greatest extent in history.

Stories were spreading, though, that mixed bathing would be prohibited at the new Baths of Trajan – or, as people gossiped, that was the wish of Trajan’s priggish wife, the Empress Plotina.

Gazing overhead at the sunlight filtering onto the pool through squares of mica set into the domed ceiling like transparent jewels, Vesuvio thought about the Empress Plotina, sexual abandonment, and the reasons why he personally felt uncomfortable in the city of Rome.

Vesuvio’s parents were dead but they too had not enjoyed leaving their home in southern Italy to visit the capital city. He wondered if he had inherited more from them than the ancient family name of Macrinus, a light Etruscan colouring, and the rich estate in Campania – Had he been bequeathed his parents’ strict Republican attitudes? A conservative way of life now rapidly disappearing in the Empire.

Am I a misfit amongst my own countrymen? he thought as he sat by the pool and half-listened to the loud squeals and prurient calls reverberating around him in the marble columned hall. I am not yet thirty years old but I conduct myself like a much older man. I do not go wenching. Boys hold no interest for me. I do not enjoy bragging in taverns about cuckolding husbands.

Love. Vesuvio wondered how much love had altered his life in the last two years. But then he had not been promiscuous before he had fallen in love with Miranda. He had been raised from boyhood both to honour and anticipate the responsibilities of being a paterfamilias.

The only fact which differed from Vesuvio’s preparations for becoming a father and the present reality of his adult years was that the mother of his son did not come from his own class. Miranda was a slave girl. Also, he had not yet married her.

* * *

Vesuvio had ridden north three days ago on the Ostian Road from his home in Campania, coming to the capital to conclude the final proceedings by which he would legally adopt his ten-month-old son and finalise the purchase of the child’s mother. Roman law allowed a citizen of Rome to marry a slave only when he owned her.

Miranda was still the property of the Athenian physician, Menecrates, who had trained her from childhood in the healing sciences and leased her to Vesuvio two years ago to attend the aged and infirmed slaves on his estate.

Menecrates had only recently agreed to sell Miranda to Vesuvio but, according to information which Vesuvio had learned today at the Tabularium, the physician had not yet signed the final agreement of sale and sent it from Athens to be officially recorded.

Foreseeing no trouble arising from this matter, Vesuvio nevertheless feared that he might have to spend a longer amount of time in the city than he had intended. That he might again have to postpone his marriage for legal reasons. He disliked city life and was growing to hate the Roman slave system more and more with every single document he had to file to prove that Miranda – by law – was worthy to marry a citizen of Rome.

Cursing all the demeaning aspects of slavery, thinking how he would have married Miranda long ago if it had not been more difficult for men of the senatorial class than males from lower orders to marry slave girls, Vesuvio took a deep sigh and began to wipe the beads of perspiration from his body and to comb his fingers through the tangle of his blond hair.

Running the flat of his hand over the ripples of his stomach muscles and around the definition of his chest, Vesuvio considered the possibility of taking Miranda as his bride by an ancient form of marriage long-ago abandoned, the law called usus which bound a man and woman together who had been living for a year as a man and wife.

Suddenly, Vesuvio’s thoughts were disturbed by a cascade of water from the pool. He jolted upright and saw that the person who had splashed him was a young girl. She was standing shoulder-deep in the pool and smiling at him.

‘Why are you looking so glum?’ she called.

‘I’m not glum,’ he answered, relaxing back onto his arms. ‘Only thinking.’

‘Thinking? About your sweetheart? Is she here today with you?’

Vesuvio shook his head and studied the olive-skinned girl moving toward him from the depths of the pool. He guessed that she could be no more than seventeen or eighteen years old. As she began fanning her hands across the sparkling blue water, he noticed that she wore costly gold bracelets around her wrists and upper arms, twin bands on each arm connected by thin gold chains. He doubted if a daughter of a senatorial family would bedeck herself in gold at a public baths – if a high-born girl would even come to the Baths of Nero. He suspected that the girl belonged to the Equestrian class, a Patrician rank lower than the Senatorial orders but citizens who were gaining in wealth and power in the fastly changing Empire.

Not wanting to talk about Miranda to a stranger, especially unwilling to answer questions about his beloved to someone whom he suspected would scoff at the idea of an aristocratic landowner being in love with a slave, he asked, ‘What is your name?’

‘Livia,’ she answered as she waded closer to him. She was unashamed that she wore no bandulum, that her breasts bobbed like two small melons in the water.

Vesuvio wondered if he might have been wrong about the girl, that in fact she might be a prostitute. He knew that many such women came here from the Street of The Lanterns in Subura to ply their trade in the afternoons.

‘Why do you cover yourself with a cincture?’ she asked, falling back into the water and gently fluttering her arms to keep afloat. ‘Are you embarrassed by being built small? Or don’t you like to … boast?’

Vesuvio could not resist grinning at the outrageous question as he looked at the girl thrusting her furry patch upwards in the blueness of the pool. She floated so close to him – so unabashedly – that he could see the hairs turned into the cleft of her feminine mound.

Standing, planting her feet on the tiled floor of the pool, she called, ‘You think I’m bold, don’t you?’

Vesuvio slowly nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Where do you live? You’re not from the city.’

‘I live in Campania.’

‘Campania! Ah, if you live in Campania then you must go often to Baiae! I love the beaches at Baiae. I meet so many people in the summer there. So many Praetorian guards go to Baiae. And the parties they have! Ah!’ She held out her arms, twisting her wrists like an Egyptian dancer, and laughed.

Vesuvio decided that his first instinct had been correct. The girl did belong to the Equestrian class. Baiae was a resort in the Bay of Naples which was popular with the Equestrian families from Rome who brought their corrupt ways south in the summer – along with their wide-brimmed straw hats, filigree ivory fans, and thin clothing made from Cosian weave.

‘I do not go to Baiae,’ Vesuvio answered.

The girl looked aghast. ‘You live in Campania and never go to Baiae?’

He did not want to sound arrogant but neither did he want to lie. He said flatly, ‘I do not enjoy the life there.’

Tilting her head to one side, she looked at him quizzically and said, ‘I can tell by your accent that you are educated. That you are more than a free man. I would say that you are what my Papa calls a Republican. Papa says that the citizens who live in the country are all Republicans. That Republicans spend their time reading the poets, singing Homer, and counting their … debts!’

Vesuvio reached for his bath sheet. Romans were obsessed with social castes and he did not want to tell his life story – or listen to abuse about Republicans – from a spoiled rich girl.

Seeing that he was abandoning her, the girl named Livia waved both hands and shrilled, ‘No! No! Do not leave the pool! Not yet! Not without me! Let us go upstairs to the shade terrace. I will recite poetry to you. We can argue about the philosophers. And then if you still think that I’m too bold, too crass for your musty old Republican ways, you can always move yourself to a bench by the railing and watch the procession on Via Neronis.’

Again tilting her head to one side, Livia asked, ‘You do know that the funny old priestess from the Temple of Vesta is passing through the Martian Gates today, don’t you? The priestess and her ridiculous band of jangling virgins? They should interest you very much if you find me boring!’

Vesuvio stood by the edge of the pool and wrapped the bath sheet around him. He tried to muster all his civility. ‘Thank you for the invitation, Livia, but, no, I won’t join you. And if you go to the shade terrace yourself, let me give you a little … brotherly advice. Try to speak with more respect for the high priestess of Vesta. I know that Eastern gods are fashionable these days in Rome. But you must not forget that Vesta is our country’s most important diety. That the high priestess has Imperial protection. That you can be arrested for the slightest blasphemy against her. Take that as a friendly word of advice.’ He turned to walk away.

‘Wait!’ she called. ‘You haven’t even told me your name.’

Vesuvio kept walking.

‘If you are going to chastise me, at least tell me your name!’

Having as little time for spoiled rich girls as he had for perfumed catamites, Vesuvio continued toward the archway which opened onto an arcade.

‘I’m sorry I made fun of Vesta and the Republicans,’ Livia shouted. ‘I am even willing to take the chance that you are built … small!’

Vesuvio exited from the tepidarium.

* * *

The Baths of Nero sprawled over an area larger than even the Circus Maximus, the largest amphitheatre in Rome; it was a pleasure centre composed of vaulted halls, marble colonnades, and a seemingly endless variety of health baths, swimming pools, and decorative fountains. Vesuvio’s canvas bath sandals slap, slap, slapped against the tessalated marble floor of a wide arcade which connected the tepidarium to the recreation halls. He glanced disinterestedly at the small shops in the arcade selling fruit, perfumes, and religious amulets. He passed through the wafting scents of cinnamon, civet, and myrrh. He saw piles of oranges, osier baskets spilling yellow grapes, large oriental palm trees suspended from the ceiling by brass chains, their drooping fronds lit by the sunlight shining through the translucent domes.

Ignoring a vendor’s call to inspect a monkey skull from India, brushing off the hand of another salesman who tugged at his bath sheet and whispered that he had recently received a shipment of an aphrodisiac from Leptis Magna concocted from ground rhinocerous tusks, Vesuvio continued walking down the long arcade of shops and tented stalls.

Not only had he forgotten how sexually oriented the Baths of Nero were but he also had not remembered them being this commercial, that a visitor could virtually buy anything here on any day of the week.

More than a place to cleanse your body, the Baths of Nero were a marketplace, a melting pot, a spot where the poor people from the insulae – the city’s tenement blocks – could mingle with privileged citizens who came here attended by retinues of slaves. The price of admission to the baths was the coin of the lowest domination – one quadran.

Passing from the hubbub of the commercial arcade, Vesuvio proceeded to the more quiet wing of the recreation halls. He slowed by a walled garden planted with dwarf palms and heard a poet reading his work to a small group of attentive listeners. He continued walking and saw the library, a pillared room where ivory-rolled scrolls set stacked in tall mahogany recepticles built along the gleaming white marble walls. Then he glanced into a small games field opened to the sky where men and boys knelt in circles tossing dice and knucklebones onto the sand.

Vesuvio kept scuffing along this second arcade until he reached two Doric columns. He stopped again to look. He saw a large group of men gathered in one of the many gymnasiums here called a palestra.

Remembering how his father had taken him as a boy to see wrestling matches in a bath-house, Vesuvio slowly edged his way through the crowd.

As Vesuvio drew closer to the sand pit, though, he could only see one wrestler inside the circle of men. He also noticed that the athlete was wearing a loosely fitting tunic, a garment too fulsome for a wrestler normally to wear. Vesuvio next saw the man raise a wooden gladus in one hand – the type of blunt sword given to gladiators in training schools.

Still not seeing the athlete’s opponent, Vesuvio noticed the wrestler’s arms tensing with muscle, that he was struggling with something, someone whom Vesuvio could not yet see.

Then, as the wrestler turned, Vesuvio realised that the man was not fighting another man but was grappling with a python which coiled to attack him, a long and thick snake which … yes, the butt of the snake was somehow attached between the wrestler’s legs!

Trying to grip the twisting python with one hand, the wrestler used the other hand to stab his wooden sword at the snake to keep it from wrapping around his neck.

Vesuvio asked the man standing alongside him, ‘What kind of match is this?’

‘He is supposed to be Priapus.’ the man answered, keeping his eyes on the struggle. ‘You know, the god Priapus with the big prick. Now he’s fighting his prick like a gladiator!’

Priapus? But Priapus was the deity of the garden, Vesuvio thought. Priapus was an ancient symbol of fertility always depicted with outsize genitals whom many Romans planted in their gardens for good luck. Farmers often put a straw replica of Priapus in the fields to protect their crops from crows. Never before had Vesuvio seen the god Priapus depicted in this way, fighting his own fabled phallus!

Watching the wrestler strain against the reptile coiling up from his groin, Vesuvio now understood why the man wore such a loosely fitting tunic. He caught sight of a leather girdle which had been strapped between his legs to encase the serpent’s base. The python’s slickness – as it arched up from the wrestler’s groin – did look like a grotesque rendition of a curving, bending, uncontrollable phallus.

Both impressed by the ingenuity with which this public entertainment had been devised, and repelled by the vulgarity with which the Romans were beginning to treat their familiar gods, Vesuvio soon realised what complete thoroughness had gone into this bout to give a new interpretation of Priapus.

By legend, Priapus not only had enormous genitals but he also was an extremely ugly god. And this ‘Priapus’ fighting his ‘phallus’ had a severely pocked face. One eye was missing. His hairline grew down to his bushy black eyebrows. Vesuvio had never seen such an unfortunate looking man.

But the wrestler’s physical imperfections only added to the audience’s amusement. Some of the crowd cheered for ‘Priapus’ to conquer the python whilst others called instead to the ‘phallus’.

‘Go on, get him, you big prick!’ one man shouted.

‘Wrap yourself across that ugly face!’ another urged.

‘The throat! The throat! Drive down the throat and suck yourself, Priapus! Suck yourself!’

Feeling someone tap him on the shoulder, Vesuvio thought that another observer had come to the palestra and wanted to know the details of this sham athletic contest as he had done.

Turning to explain about Priapus battling his own penis, Vesuvio saw a man with a shaved head and a notched ear facing him. He recognised him as a slave, the same bath attendant with whom he had left his clothes in the dressing-room.

The slave asked ‘Domine, excuse me but are you addressed as Aurelius Macrinus?’

Vesuvio nodded. People rarely called him by his formal family name. He wondered if someone had come from the Tabularium with news of Miranda’s manumission.

The slave explained, ‘There is a traveller from Campania asking to see you, domine. He is waiting upstairs on the shade terrace.’

‘Campania?’ Vesuvio asked, puzzled. ‘Did he give his name?’

Holding his head loftily, the bath slave answered with the smugness used by most city dwellers – regardless of their class – when they referred to people from the country. He said, ‘The traveller is only a farmer, domine. If you wish, I can easily send him away. He claims his news is grave but he’s probably drunk. You know those peasants from Campania. They stink so much from animal manure you cannot smell the wine!’

Turning away from the sandpit, Vesuvio said, ‘Lead me to the man. I come from Campania, too.’

2

Awarm afternoon breeze gently blew across the shade terrace of the Baths of Nero, a flat-topped roof covered with a saffron awning and lined by a marble balustrade on which set potted tropical ferns alternating with busts of Nero. Vesuvio preceded the bath attendant up the stone steps to the terrace, anxiously looking for a familiar face from home amongst the people gathered here with their body slaves soberly bearing fringed sun umbrellas and dipping ostrich fans attached to bamboo handles.

Having racked his brain for any trouble which would bring a messenger this great distance, Vesuvio remembered the recent problem between his bailiff, Galba, and the man’s adulterous wife. He wondered if the situation had become more delicate in his absence, if the time had come for punishment to be delivered to the promiscuous woman and her Sicilian lover.

But would someone travel all the way from Campania to tell me that? Vesuvio asked himself. To report that adulterous lovers have become so blatant that they finally must be caned or whipped? He next thought about sickness, about the malaria rumoured to be spreading in southern Italy. Had it crept toward Villa Vesuvio?

The bath attendant moved alongside Vesuvio and pointed to a stooped figure cowering in a far corner of the terrace. He said, ‘That is the man there, domine.’

Although not recognising the person, Vesuvio pressed a quadran into the attendant’s hand and pushed his way through the crowd of people drinking wine from silver goblets and nibbling sausages, nuts, and sweet seeds from plates and wicker baskets.

He asked, ‘Are you the man wishing to see Aurelius Macrinus?’

The farmer nervously gripped a pointed peperino cap in his hands and eyed the sophisticated city people standing around him on the shade terrace. He began to explain in murmurs, ‘My name is Tuto, domine. I live near Stabaie with my wife and children. I was returning home last evening and came across a man lying by the side of the public road.’

‘Was the man from my estate?’ Vesuvio asked.

Shaking his head, the farmer explained, ‘The man had little breath left in his body, domine. He whispered your name to me. He begged me to ride to Rome. To look for you in the building here called the Tabul.…’ The farmer faltered, struggling to pronounce the name correctly in his coarse dialect.

‘The Tabularium,’ Vesuvio said anxiously.

Nodding, the farmer continued, ‘I rode here but, reaching the gates called Porta Capena, I was not allowed to bring