I didn't send all that last chapter to Tacitus; an edited version merely. I am even puzzled as to why I wrote it in such detail. At first I thought it was because it showed me in a good light, and therefore demonstrated Domitian's ingratitude. But that isn't really so. I even doubt now whether Vitellius would have put Domitian to death had I not intervened to save him. It would have been foolish, given Vitellius' own uncertainties, and the negotiations he still maintained with Flavius Sabinus. To have killed Vespasian's son would have been to destroy any chance of extricating himself from his own terrifying position. For that is the truth, I've no doubt: Vitellius was living in a nightmare, and fully conscious of the likely consequences of his unthinking weakness which had compelled him to give way to the demands of Caecina and Valens. Yet there were also moments when he believed in himself as Emperor.
Aulus Pettius kept Domitian safe. He was never forgiven. Within a few weeks of becoming Emperor Domitian ordered him to remove from Rome. I suppose he was fortunate Domitian acted so early in his reign, while the balance of his mind was not completely overthrown. I last heard of Aulus Pettius living in misanthropic retirement in the wild country of Boeotia. He used to write to me occasionally. I was his only correspondent. Later, that was to be one of the charges brought against me: that I had maintained a treasonable correspondence with an exile. Certainly our letters, which were intercepted and copied, could not fail to have displeased Domitian. We wrote of him with disdain. But I have run ahead of myself. I find it hard now to keep my thoughts in order. This enterprise on which I embarked so reluctantly has come to exert a strange fascination over me.
Was it to recall the girl Sybilla that I wrote that last chapter in such detail?
She was Sicilian. At first I took her for a prostitute and the moon-faced woman, whose name was Hippolyta, for her pimp or madam. The relationship was different and more complicated. Hippolyta had indeed found her on the streets, fallen (as Sybilla told me) in love with her, and bought her from the man who ran her. That was extraordinary enough. What was more extraordinary was that Hippolyta tolerated Sybilla's desire for men, though, as the girl told me, 'only one at a time'. She kept her mostly a sort of prisoner in the apartment, and Sybilla did not object. 'What is there out there,' she said, 'except the opportunity now and then to pick up a man? Now that I have you, for the time being, I've no need to go out.'
She was an inventive and delightful lover, all the more delightful because she despised and forbade any expression of emotion. I did with her all that I had longed to do to Domatilla. Sometimes, as I lay panting in her arms, damp skin against hot damp skin, her thick black hair over my face, I would see through the tresses the moon face of Hippolyta watching us. She never said anything, just looked, then turned away.
How strange that those two weeks of intense political excitement when the fate of Rome hung in the balance, my life perhaps with it, and the smell of blood hovered in the air, should have been for me days, too, of an equally intense eroticism. The other day, passing a stall where a merchant was selling spices, I found myself trembling. All at once I was a young man again, and did not know why, till, breathing in, I smelled Sybilla's body, which she never washed but sponged with an infusion of spices. That was real, as my other memories of her are not. What do they amount to? I can't even picture her face: only a little mole to the side of her mouth, just above a rather thick upper lip. And what else? The feel of her strong thick thighs as she wrapped her legs round me. I see Hippolyta's moon face more clearly than I see Sybilla's, though my lips and tongue ran over every inch of it.
Balthus lies among the hounds again. These memories of Sybilla revive my desire for him. It is as if by forcing myself on the boy I could regain what I found in congress with her – an absurd fancy.
1 shall write nothing of Sybilla to Tacitus, but she dominated my life in the days that followed.
One day I said to myself: does it matter who is Emperor so long as I have this?
Another day, Domatilla, in my mother's house, said to me, 'Is something wrong? You don't look at me as you used to.'