moon, according to Suetonius. Diana the goddess, Hubert explained, was adept at adding years to the life of a man—she had done so with her lover Hippolytus. She bore a child to the madly enamoured Emperor, added years to the infant’s life so that he became instantly adult, and it was this young man, and not a Roman hireling, whom Caligula sent to supplant the reigning King of the Wood, the priest of Diana.
Hubert descended, then, from the Emperor, the goddess, and from her woodland priest; in reality this was nothing more than his synthesis of a persistent, yet far more vague, little story fostered by a couple of dotty aunts enamoured of the author-image of Sir James Frazer and misled by one of those quack genealogists who flourished in late Victorian times and around the turn of the century, and who still, when they take up the trade, never fail to flourish.
Modern Nemi, at the end of the last century, as more recently when Hubert Mallindaine settled there, appeared to Frazer to be curiously an image of Italy in the olden times; ‘when the land was still sparsely peopled with tribes of savage hunters or wandering herdsmen’. Diana’s temple had been feared by the Church. The long wall of high arched niches, once part of the temple-life, have perfectly survived antiquity, and these, at a later time, had been named ‘the Devil’s Grottoes’. Hubert, beating his way through the undergrowth along the rows of remaining cliff-chapels, would come upon the relics of traditional disrespect and of outcast life. There was a rubbish dump, incredibly rubbishy with the backs of yellow plastic chairs, petrol tins, muddy boots and cast-off rags piled up in those enormous Roman votive alcoves which soared above their desecration with stony dignity. And from this view the plateau was beautiful; it contained the rectangular site of the sanctuary itself, now filled up with earth and cultivated with a chrysanthemum crop.
Very few people now visited this spot as a temple. Hubert had seen reported in a recent article that it was ‘still lost as far as the ordinary tourist is concerned’. ‘No local folk,’ complained the author of the article, ‘seem to know where it is.’ Which, of course, was instinctively the way with local people. Chrysanthemums enjoyed a commercial popularity in Italy on one day of the year, the Day of the Dead; otherwise they were considered unlucky.
The site of the rectangular sanctuary was marked unobtrusively by a withered tree in one corner. A rim of the temple wall still protruded a few inches from the ground on three of its sides. The reason the peasants had cultivated the soil once more over the late dig was that ‘the money for the excavations had stopped’, as one of them explained to Hubert.
One spring, when he was supervising the building of the house then destined by Maggie to be his, Hubert had walked down the cliff-path and talked to a man who was pruning a pear tree on the site of Diana’s temple. The man was about forty-two. He remembered the excavations, he said, when he was a boy. Very beautiful. Red brick paving. A fireplace. Yes, said Hubert, that was for the vestal virgins; it was an everlasting flame. The man went on with his pruning. My ancestress, Diana, was worshipped here, Hubert said. The man continued his work, no doubt thinking Hubert’s Italian was at fault.
Again, standing one winter day alone among the bare soughing branches of those thick woodlands, looking down at the furrowed rectangle where the goddess was worshipped long ago, he shouted aloud with great enthusiasm, ‘It’s mine! I am the King of Nemi! It is my divine right! I am Hubert Mallindaine the descendant of the Emperor of Rome and the Benevolent-Malign Diana of the Woods.…’ And whether he was sincere or not; or whether, indeed, he was or was not connected so far back as the divinity-crazed Caligula and if he was descended from any gods of mythology, purely on statistical grounds who is not?—at any
Hubert descended, then, from the Emperor, the goddess, and from her woodland priest; in reality this was nothing more than his synthesis of a persistent, yet far more vague, little story fostered by a couple of dotty aunts enamoured of the author-image of Sir James Frazer and misled by one of those quack genealogists who flourished in late Victorian times and around the turn of the century, and who still, when they take up the trade, never fail to flourish.
Modern Nemi, at the end of the last century, as more recently when Hubert Mallindaine settled there, appeared to Frazer to be curiously an image of Italy in the olden times; ‘when the land was still sparsely peopled with tribes of savage hunters or wandering herdsmen’. Diana’s temple had been feared by the Church. The long wall of high arched niches, once part of the temple-life, have perfectly survived antiquity, and these, at a later time, had been named ‘the Devil’s Grottoes’. Hubert, beating his way through the undergrowth along the rows of remaining cliff-chapels, would come upon the relics of traditional disrespect and of outcast life. There was a rubbish dump, incredibly rubbishy with the backs of yellow plastic chairs, petrol tins, muddy boots and cast-off rags piled up in those enormous Roman votive alcoves which soared above their desecration with stony dignity. And from this view the plateau was beautiful; it contained the rectangular site of the sanctuary itself, now filled up with earth and cultivated with a chrysanthemum crop.
Very few people now visited this spot as a temple. Hubert had seen reported in a recent article that it was ‘still lost as far as the ordinary tourist is concerned’. ‘No local folk,’ complained the author of the article, ‘seem to know where it is.’ Which, of course, was instinctively the way with local people. Chrysanthemums enjoyed a commercial popularity in Italy on one day of the year, the Day of the Dead; otherwise they were considered unlucky.
The site of the rectangular sanctuary was marked unobtrusively by a withered tree in one corner. A rim of the temple wall still protruded a few inches from the ground on three of its sides. The reason the peasants had cultivated the soil once more over the late dig was that ‘the money for the excavations had stopped’, as one of them explained to Hubert.
One spring, when he was supervising the building of the house then destined by Maggie to be his, Hubert had walked down the cliff-path and talked to a man who was pruning a pear tree on the site of Diana’s temple. The man was about forty-two. He remembered the excavations, he said, when he was a boy. Very beautiful. Red brick paving. A fireplace. Yes, said Hubert, that was for the vestal virgins; it was an everlasting flame. The man went on with his pruning. My ancestress, Diana, was worshipped here, Hubert said. The man continued his work, no doubt thinking Hubert’s Italian was at fault.
Again, standing one winter day alone among the bare soughing branches of those thick woodlands, looking down at the furrowed rectangle where the goddess was worshipped long ago, he shouted aloud with great enthusiasm, ‘It’s mine! I am the King of Nemi! It is my divine right! I am Hubert Mallindaine the descendant of the Emperor of Rome and the Benevolent-Malign Diana of the Woods.…’ And whether he was sincere or not; or whether, indeed, he was or was not connected so far back as the divinity-crazed Caligula and if he was descended from any gods of mythology, purely on statistical grounds who is not?—at any
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