The night of Malleus’s party was cold and windy, but the streets were choked as usual with food sellers and barbers, men hawking pots and every other kind of street merchant, hoping for one more sale before darkness forced them all indoors. As Gaius’s litter bearers forced their way towards the Aventine, it occurred to him that he had almost become used to the noise, as he had grown accustomed to the clatter of iron-shod cartwheels on cobblestones that made the night almost as noisy as the day.
But as they turned on to the main avenue he heard a new sound. The litter stopped, and he stuck his head through the curtains to see. A religious procession was making its way along the road; he glimpsed shaven-headed priests in white robes and women in veils. The women were wailing, their lamentations punctuated by the sibilance of shaking sistrums and the deep boom of a drum.
Despite the warmth of his toga Gaius found himself shivering, for the mourning touched something that deeply disturbed his urbane persona, and even the easy competence of the man he was at home.
Even without understanding its cause, he felt that anguish as his own. It was like the mourning in the Mithraeum when the bull is killed. Another group of priests went by, and then more women, their gliding gait reminding him of the priestesses at home, and then a litter on which he could see the black-veiled statue of a golden cow. For a few moments longer the drumming pounded in his ears; then the procession passed.
When Gaius finally got to it, the dinner party proved to be a gathering of the kind that he had come to feel represented the best in Roman society. The food was simple but well prepared, the company urbane and well informed. Gaius felt outclassed, but these were men from whom he could learn.
The topic that had been proposed was “pieta——s,” the wine mixed half and half with water so that everyone remained focused enough to discuss it seriously.
“I suppose one question is whether there is more than one true religion,” Gaius said when his turn to speak arrived. “Of course each people has its faith and should be allowed to keep it, but here in Rome you seem to worship more gods than I ever knew existed. Just tonight, for instance, I saw some kind of procession that sounded oriental, but most of those following it looked Roman.”
“That must have been the Isia,” observed Herennius Senecio, one of the more important of the guests. “The followers of Isis celebrate her search for the dismembered body of Osiris at this time of year. When she has gathered the pieces she reanimates his body and conceives the sun-child Horus anew.”
“Do not the British tribes have a festival at this time also?” asked Tacitus. “I seem to remember processions around the countryside with masks and bones.”
“True,” replied Gaius. “At Samaine the white mare goes around with her followers and the people invite the souls of their ancestors to reincarnate in the wombs of the women of the tribe.”
“Perhaps that is the answer then,” said Malleus. “Though we all have different names for the gods, they are all in essence the same, and therefore to worship any of them is piety.”
“For instance, the god whom we call Jupiter is known by his oak tree and his thunderbolt,” said Tacitus. “The Germans worship him as Donar, and the British as Tanarus or Taranis.”
Gaius was not so sure. It was hard to imagine any Celtic deity being worshipped in a great temple like the one dedicated to Jupiter in the Forum. At one party he had met a woman they said was a Vestal and he had observed her with curiosity, but although the woman was marked by a certain dignity and certainly more decorum than most of the Roman women he had seen, there was none of the nobility he associated with the women of the Forest House. Curiously, it was easier to identify the Egyptian Isis, whose procession he had just seen, with the Great Goddess Eilan served.
“I think that our British friend has put his finger on a real problem,” said Malleus. “Surely that is why our fathers fought so hard to keep foreign cults like that of Cybele and Dionysos from taking root in Rome. Even the temple of Isis was burned.”