I had told the slave the truth. Ostia had always been very religious. There were temples absolutely everywhere, some spanking new, some that harked back to when the town was just a cluster of salt workers" huts in a marsh. If the Ostians had space for any sort of dedicated enclosure, they whipped a wall around three sides and put up a podium in a pillared shrine. Their motto was. why build one when there is room for four? A cluster of altars was better than a solo. When they ran out of gods, they threw honours at allegorical concepts; near our apartment stood a row of four little temples, dedicated to Venus and Ceres, plus Hope and Fortune too. I for my part had no time for love, and with two very young children under my feet in a small apartment I was dead set against any further fertility. As I failed to track down Diocles, I was soon cursing my bad fortune and running out of hope. On my return, the quest for the scribe's aunt took me all over town. I reckoned I could omit the giant temples to Jupiter and to Rome and Augustus which dominated the Forum; anyone who lived there would describe their house as near the Forum. Pompous types might call it the Capitolium. Vague ones would say they lived in the middle of town. Otherwise, I had to visit the lot. I became adept at scenting out smoke from sacrificial offerings. I also became a real nymphaeum bore. The Ostians liked gracing wayside walls with water-troughs, and though some were plain drinking points for beasts of burden, many were set up as decorative shrines to water gods. Helena had to listen to me counting up each day's haul as temples became my obsessive collecting fad, worse than the time I tried to explore all the Seven Hills of Rome when I was only eight years old and not supposed to leave the Aventine by myself. Now I would be death at a party. I kept note tablets jotted with details of temples I had spotted, like some ghastly tourist's diary. At the slightest encouragement I showed people my sketch map with shrines marked in red. My mother, who was staying with Maia, became very excited when she thought Helena had begun sacrifices to the Good Goddess. [I was absolved from taking part; men are too Bad] Bona Dea was for a while our favoured divinity in the conundrum, as her neat sea-view temple lay outside the Marine Gate. We did wonder if Diocles had chosen lodgings in an area he knew, though if his auntie was in that vicinity we could not explain why he went into lodgings… We failed to track down Vestina near the Bona Dea, so my search moved back to the centre of town. Top deity here was Vulcan. A straightforward anvil god with a fetching limp. Helena and I spent a pleasant day at his ancient complex; we took Albia and the children, making it an excuse for a picnic, which was just as well because as a work exercise our trip was pointless. We could only associate Vulcan with water via a long winded link involving the vigiles dousing fires. Tenuous. For reasons nobody knew any more, the fire god's high priest was the most important man in Ostia, lording it over the cult's own praetors and aediles; it was a lifetime appointment of ancient derivation which carried, as far as I could see, no advantage nowadays except being grovelled to by sycophantic town councillors, all hoping that the current pontifex of Vulcan would quickly drop dead so they could jostle for his post. That night Helena Justina sat up suddenly in bed with a shriek of
Cybele!" This did not enthral me. Eastern gods are generally deplorable and I really wince at the Great Mother with her self castrating sidekick, Attis. No man with a love life can think calmly of a consort who cut off his genitalia. Anyway, I had done the Eastern cults already. I had examined houses all around the Temple of Isis. Seemed a good bet. Isis equals Nile god equals very important water if you live in Egypt. Isis is also a sea goddess, and protects sea voyagers. Her temple was in the west end of town, on the riverbank. To match the slave's description, this was about as likely as anywhere could be, so I scoured the neighbourhood thoroughly. Always uncomfortable with the sistrum-shaking priests, the dubious priestesses in their topless, see-through pleated linen and the unnerving portraits of dog-headed fellows with their arms folded, I was glad to escape. I had had no luck searching around the Isis enclosure for waterfront houses where a scribe's aunt might live. To cheer myself up, I bought a good hanging lamp in the form of a ship, and only noticed when I got it home that it had three little shrines of Isis, Anubis and Serapis. Ours was not a household that liked statuettes of gods. We did not even own our own Lares. [Thinking of that, I went back out and checked around the Forum shrine of the town Lares]
No, it's Cybele we want," Helena insisted that night. The cult statue was brought from the East to Rome by sea when Claudius decided to legitimise worship. There's that story of the young woman with the soiled reputation." I perked up. Oh, my kind of girl!"
Think again, Falco. The ship got stuck in the estuary. Whatever her-name-was went and claimed that if her chastity remained intact she would touch the ship with her girdle."
She did the girdle trick. the ship moved off up the Tiber. Now can I go to sleep again?"
You can go to the Temple of Cybele tomorrow, Marcus." I did; I found nothing. Cybele had a huge enclosure by the Laurentine Gate where she was attended by various associate gods in their own little shrines but, as far as I could discover, no aunts. Helena allowed me to resume my dogged search elsewhere. I investigated temples of Castor and Pollux, Mars, Diana, Neptune, Liber Pater, round and rectangular temples of divinities whose names were not even obvious, Pater Tiberina, and the Genius of the Colony. The craft guilds had their own temples, prominently the Temple of the Ship Builders and a temple in the Forum of the Wine Growers [I enjoyed that morning. I was running out of podiums. At this point, my dedicated religious trek must have caught the eye of some soft-hearted Olympus deity. I had been poking around backstreets on the west side of the Forum, where somebody had suggested there might be a shrine with ships on it. I never found them. Despondent, I headed back to a road that would take me to the Decumanus. It had a couple of small temples which I had already dismissed. Squashed in on the same site was one major temple. to Hercules Invictus. Empathising with any other hero afflicted with hard labours, I paid it more attention than previously and walked right up the steps. There were nine. On a hot day it was a steep climb, which was why I had omitted this last time. I entered the sanctum. There I had my breakthrough. In the interior, a set of friezes depicted how the cult statue had been discovered years before. Hercules had been dredged up from the sea by some fishermen. Probably some ship carrying works of art had foundered in the shoals off Ostia, taking the statue down, club, bearskin, beard and all. I tipped my forelock to the hero's smooth, handsome torso.
Thank you, delectable demi-god. And by the way, nice arse!" I began a fast search of the neighbouring area. Parts appeared to be in the process of redevelopment; there were cleared spaces and a couple of elderly atrium houses standing empty. In a side street, I finally found the place where Diocles used to stay. I learned that his Auntie Vestina, a freedwoman of the imperial house, had lived for many years right beside the Temple of Hercules Invictus. The aunt's house had burned down about this time last year. The first woman I spoke to had not seen the aunt since. That would have been bad enough, but if Vestina had escaped and relocated I might have tracked her down eventually. Sadly, I found another neighbour who knew the whole story. The fire had started at night. Help took a long time coming. Vestina had been crippled with arthritis and she was asthmatic. She could not struggle out of her burning house quickly enough, and was killed by the smoke before she could be rescued.