Render Unto Caesar by Gillian Bradshaw Page A

There were probably many other northerners who were wearing Roman dress, for there were far more blond and red heads among the crowd than he had ever seen in Alexandria. A pair of women from one of the caravan cities of the East stood together at a cloth merchant’s, dressed in long dark cloaks from head to foot, their necks and veils hung about with gold; a Phrygian eunuch priest sat begging in a public square, chanting the praises of the Great Mother in a reedy voice and occasionally striking a tambourine; a stout man in the stitched shirt and trousers of a Parthian, his beard dyed blue, pushed frowning through the crowd. The commonest sort of foreigner, however, was certainly the Greeks. The himation—the rectilinear cloak of the Greek East—was almost as common on the street as the curved Roman toga, and on every other corner he heard the accents of Athens or Antioch, Ephesus or his own Alexandria.
    Down the Via Tusculana they went, and down the Sacra Via, past the temple of the Deified Julius and into the Roman forum. The crowds were even thicker here, and there were far more togas. Hermogenes commented on it, and Hyakinthos hesitated.
    â€œYou can say in Latin,” Hermogenes told him gently.
    â€œOh,” said the boy, blushing. “Yes. Well, Romans are supposed to wear the toga if they have business in the forum. Otherwise they mostly don’t bother.”
    Hermogenes was taken aback. “Should I wear a toga, then?” He had no idea how one did wear the garment: the drape did not look easy.
    â€œYou’re not a real Roman,” Hyakinthos told him immediately. “I don’t think anyone will mind. As a matter of fact, they’d—” He stopped.
    â€œWhat?”
    When the boy said nothing, Hermogenes asked in amusement, “The officials I must approach would sneer at a Greek in a badly draped toga?”
    Hyakinthos seemed surprised that he had guessed this. “Yes, sir, they would!” He looked at Hermogenes appreciatively and added, “That’s a very nice cloak. They’ll be more impressed by that than by a toga. You have to be rich to have a cloak like that, but every citizen has a toga.”
    â€œThen let us proceed to the record office—but I would like to visit a barber’s first, if I can.”
    There were no barbershops in the forum. They walked the length of it, past the temples, the law courts, the statues, the towering-columned public buildings, right to the far end, where a particularly tall and plain building frowned down upon the marketplace. Hyakinthos led them up a stairway into an arcade of shops. “This is the Tabularium,” he explained. “The record office you want. The front faces the other way, though, into the Campus Martius. We have to go through—but there may be a barber’s in here.”
    There was. Hermogenes sent Menestor and the boy off to buy something to eat for breakfast while he himself submitted to the razor. They returned just as the barber was finishing, Menestor with a double-handful of fried sesame cakes wrapped in vine leaves, Hyakinthos with both hands and his mouth full.
    â€œMenestor said you wouldn’t mind if I had some too, sir,” he said in a muffled voice.
    â€œNor do I,” agreed Hermogenes, “but leave some for me!”
    They walked into the Tabularium eating sesame cakes. Undignified, Hermogenes thought resignedly, but they were good cakes, and he was hungry.
    Depositing the documents proved to be quicker and easier than he’d anticipated. While the archives had been built for official papers, the public slaves who ran it had established a profitable sideline in providing safe storage for private papers, for a fee. The face of the young clerk in the entrance hall sharpened with interest at the sight of Hermogenes’s cloak, and he smiled with satisfaction when he heard what was wanted. He took the box of documents, then fished out a bronze coin,