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The translator on a stone in Rome with a mistake on it, and on the woman it names twice, once below somebody and once above.
ERASE THE TABLET is a novel by P.B. Mills, read in full. It is presented as the letter-book and late dictation of Antonia Caenis, freedwoman and secretary, who really lived, who really was kept by the emperor Vespasian in the place of an almost lawful wife, and whose freedman really did set up a stone to her. The documents do not exist. Everything else here is invention.
Nineteen episodes, read by two voices. The second book of the sequence that began with AUGUSTA: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina. The novel is free to read at pbmills.com.
I. Best of Patrons
Translator: Erase the Tablet. The Letter-Book of Antonia Caenis. Episode one. Best of Patrons.
A Note on the Two Books.
The Woman Who Was Best of Patrons.
There is a piece of stone in Rome with a mistake on it.
It is not a famous stone. It is a funerary inscription, catalogued as number twelve thousand and thirty-seven in the sixth volume of the great corpus, which is where Rome keeps the dead who were not important enough to argue about. Six lines. It reads, in the ordinary abbreviations:
To the spirits of the dead. Of Antonia Caenis, freedwoman of Antonia Augusta, best of patrons. Aglaus, her freedman, with Aglaus and Glene and Aglais, his children.
I had been looking at it for a week before I saw what those six lines are doing, which is that they give the same woman two opposite positions in the same breath and do not remark on either.
Line two puts her below somebody. Freedwoman of Antonia Augusta: that is her status in law, it is the first thing a stranger is told about her, and it stays true after the woman named in it has been dead forty years.
Line four puts her above somebody. Patrona. Best of patrons. It is the standard formula, it is on thousands of stones, and it means one thing only: the person who freed you, to whom you owe duties for the rest of your life, and who owes you protection for the rest of theirs. It is not a compliment. It is the most precisely specified relation in Roman private law.
So the stone says she was owned and the stone says she owned. Both are correct. What it does not say, and what nobody standing in front of it in the year eighty would have needed telling, is that the first of those two relations had no living person on the other end of it.
What is known about Antonia Caenis is four things, and all four are strange.
Suetonius says she was the freedwoman and secretary of Antonia, the mother of the emperor Claudius. He says that Vespasian, long before he was anything, took up with her, and that when he became emperor he took her back into his house and kept her, in the phrase Suetonius uses, in the place of an almost lawful wife. The word is paene. Almost. He is writing about the most powerful man in the world and the word he reaches for is a hedge.
Dio says she sold things. Offices, procuratorships, commands, priesthoods, and, he says, decisions of the emperor himself, and that she made from this an enormous fortune. He does not say she was punished for it. He does not say Vespasian minded.
Suetonius says one more thing, and it is four lines long and it is in the life of Domitian, not in hers. Caenis came back from Histria, where she had property, and offered the emperor's younger son a kiss as she had always been accustomed to do, and he gave her his hand instead.
And there is the stone.
Those are the facts. Everything else about her is silence of the ordinary kind, and I would have left it there, except for the third line.
Here is the difficulty.
Suetonius says she was the freedwoman of Antonia. Antonia died in the year thirty-seven. If Caenis was freed in Antonia's lifetime, then Antonia was her patron, and when Antonia died the patronage passed to Antonia's heirs, and Caenis owed duties to a living family for the next forty years, and Aglaus's stone, which calls Caenis a patron, is calling her something she would have held in the second degree, under other people.
But there is a second possibility, and it is the one the lawyers had a name for.
If a Roman was freed by a will, and the person who made the will was dead when it was opened, which they always were, then that freedman had no living patron and never acquired one. The law called such a person a libertus orcinus. A freedman of the dead. There is nobody above you. There is nobody to owe. There is also nobody to protect you, and no house behind you, and no name that anybody is obliged to answer for, and you are, in the exact sense that mattered in that city, alone.
I cannot prove Caenis was freed by Antonia's will. Nobody can. What I can say is that the stone makes better sense if she was, because a woman in that position has one patronage in her life, and it is the one that runs out of her and not into her, and at the end of her life it was pointing at a man called Aglaus and at nothing else at all.
That is a small thing to build on. I built on it.
The book you are about to hear is in three layers and they do not agree with each other.
The first is a letter-book. That is a real kind of object and every house of business kept one: copies of what came in and what went out, made at the time by the hand who made them, with short notes at the foot about the paper, the ink, the fold, the seal, and the carriage. Such notes are the dullest writing that survives from the ancient world. They are also the only writing that was never meant to persuade anybody of anything, which is why I trust them.
The second is a dictation. In the last two years of her life she sat down thirty-one afternoons with a man of her household and gave an account of herself, and the account is not tidy, and she gave some things twice, and she gave one thing three times.
The third is Aglaus.
He is in this book more than he is in any sentence he wrote. He takes the dictation, he keeps the letter-book, he writes the notes that tell you what you are looking at, and he almost never says anything in his own person about anything except the work. He is the reason there is a book at all, because at some point after the autumn of the year seventy-four a freedman with no instructions stood in a room with two documents and decided what was going to survive.
He was about thirty-two. He had three children. We know their names because he cut them into the stone under hers, which is not what a man does with an employer.
One word about the other book.
I have spent four years with the commentaries of Julia Agrippina and I did not expect to find her anywhere near this. The two women were in Rome at the same time. They were, so far as I can establish, never in the same room. They had one acquaintance in common, and that acquaintance is a woman nobody has ever heard of, and the connection between the two books is not a person, a house, a secret, or a plot.
It is a technical detail about how to make ink.
I am not going to explain that here. It is in the seventeenth chapter and it is eleven minutes long and neither woman ever knew what she had done.
A last thing about the title.
Erase the tablet is an instruction. It is the first thing anybody says in this book, and it is given by a woman of sixty-six to a woman of twenty-three at the second hour of a night in October, and it is obeyed. What happens next is the whole of it, and I am not going to describe it, except to say that everything Antonia Caenis owned at the end of her life came out of the minute after that instruction was given, and that she never once claimed otherwise.
That was episode one, Best of Patrons. Next episode is two, Erase the Tablet. Erase the Tablet is a translation of The Letter-Book of Antonia Caenis.