Roma Eterna by Robert Silverberg Page A

whorehouses are kept so busy,” added Faustus, “when for three brass coins anyone can have the woman of his dreams?”
    â€œOr the man,” said Menandros. “For this charm will work both ways, so he tells us.”
    â€œOr on a donkey,” put in Danielus bar-Heap, and they laughed and passed onward.
    Nearby, a spell of invisibility was for sale, at a price of two silver denarii. “It is the simplest thing,” insisted the barker, a small lean man tight as a coiled spring, whose swarthy sharp-chinned face was marked by the scars of some ancient knife fight. “Take a night-owl’s eye and aball of the dung of the beetles of Aegyptus and the oil of an unripe olive and grind them all together until smooth, and smear your whole body with it, and then go to the nearest shrine of the lord Apollo by dawn’s first light and utter the prayer that this parchment will give you. And you will be invisible to all eyes until sunset and can go unnoticed among the ladies at their baths, or slip into the palace of the Emperor and help yourself to delicacies from his table, or fill your purse with gold from the moneychangers’ tables. Two silver denarii, only!”
    â€œQuite reasonable, for a day’s invisibility,” Menandros said. “I’ll have it, for my master’s delight.” And reached for his purse; but the Caesar, catching him by the wrist, warned him never to accept the quoted first price in a place like this. Menandros shrugged, as though to point out that the price asked was only a trifle, after all. But to the Caesar Maximilianus there was an issue of principle here. He invoked the aid of bar-Heap, who quickly bargained the fee down to four copper dupondii, and, since Menandros did not have coins as small as that in his purse, it was Faustus who handed over the price.
    â€œYou have done well,” the barker said, giving the Greek his bit of parchment. Menandros, turning away, opened it. “The letters are Greek,” he said.
    Maximilianus nodded. “Yes. Most of this trash is set out in Greek. It is the language of magic, here.”
    â€œThe letters are Greek,” said Menandros, “but not the words. Listen.” And he read out in a rolling resonant tone: “‘BORKE PHOIOUR IO ZIZIA APARXEOUCH THYTHE LAILAM AAAAAA IIII OOOO IEO IEO IEO.’” Then he looked up from the scroll. “And there are three more lines, of much the same sort. What do you make of that, my friends?”
    â€œI think it is well that you didn’t read any more of it,” said Faustus, “or you might have disappeared right before our noses.”
    â€œNot without employing the beetle dung and the owl’seye and the rest,” bar-Heap observed. “Nor is that dawn’s first light coming down that shaft, even if you would pretend that this is Apollo’s temple.”
    â€œâ€˜IO IO O PHRIXRIZO EOA,’” Menandros read, and giggled in pleasure, and rolled the scroll and put it in his purse.
    It did not appear likely to Faustus that the Greek was a believer in this nonsense, as his earlier eagerness to visit this marketplace had led him to suspect. Yet he was an enthusiastic buyer. Doubtless he was merely looking for quaint souvenirs to bring back to his Emperor in Constantinopolis—entertaining examples of modern-day Roman gullibility. For Menandros must surely have noticed by this time an important truth about this room, which was that nearly all the sorcerers and their salesmen were citizens of the Eastern half of the Empire, which had a reputation for magic going back to the distant days of the Pharaohs and the kings of Babylon, while the customers—and there were plenty of them—all were Romans of the West. Surely spells of this sort would be widely available in the other Empire. This stuff would be nothing new to Easterners. It was an oily place, the Eastern Empire. All the mercantile skills had been