The Caspian Gates

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The emperor was in bed with his cinaedus when the rain came. Gallienus lay on his back listening to the first individual drops thumping into the garden outside the open window. Instantly, the air was full of the invigorating smell of clean earth.

Gallienus had been looking forward to reaching Serdica. The comitatus had ridden hard across Thrace from Bergoule; thirty miles a day or more. He had announced there would be a break of three days to rest the men and horses, to let the stragglers catch up. Serdica was a town on the rise; full of confidence, new buildings going up, even a palatium. Although the imperial palace was unfinished, it was a fine place to relax. There had been no time on the journey east, so Gallienus had decided it would be pleasant to spend a day inspecting the nearby battlefield where, the year before, his general Aureolus had defeated the Macriani.

All Gallienus’s feelings of ease had been vitiated by the news that had come as he approached the walls of Serdica. A messenger, grimed by tough travel along the cursus publicus, announced that Gothic pirates had sacked Ephesus eight days previously.

Gallienus had done what he could. There was no question of turning back. The situation in the west demanded the presence of the emperor. He had to tour the provinces of the Pannonias and Noricum, ensure their loyalty, and reach Italy and Mediolanum as soon as possible, before the campaigning season was well under way. Gallienus had written to Odenathus of Palmyra; as corrector of the east, the Lion of the Sun should take whatever measures were possible. The fleets in the east were in such poor condition there was little to be hoped from them. Gallienus had also sent one of his protectores, the Italian Celer Venerianus, post haste ahead to Ravenna. The fleet there was in better shape. Venerianus had a reputation as an admiral. He was to assemble a squadron and proceed with all speed to the Aegean. Of course, by the time Venerianus got there, the Goths would be long gone, back to the Black Sea with their booty. But something had to be seen to be done. The eastern provincials had to be reassured, had to be shown imperial solicitude, or they might think of taking things into their own hands. And, sure as night followed day, that would mean yet another pretender clad in the purple; yet another civil war, to further weaken the imperium.

As often when perturbed, Gallienus had turned not to the consolations of philosophy, as a man of culture should, but to sex. In itself, that weakness in his character sometimes irritated him. He wished his German mistress Pippa, his sweet Pippara, were with him. A Marcomannic upbringing had filled her with nothing but contempt for philosophy and its sanctimonious adherents. But she had been left in Mediolanum. The journey had been too hard for a woman. At least he had Demetrius.

The Greek youth was still asleep. It was the half-light just before dawn. Gallienus turned and gently brushed a stray tendril of hair from Demetrius’s face. The boy was beautiful and cultured as well as skilled in the ways of pleasure.

Gallienus watched him sleep. The physiognomists were wrong. In bed, Demetrius might enjoy playing the role of a girl, but there was nothing effeminate about him. His eyes were not weak. Walking, neither did he mince nor did his knees knock like a woman’s. Gallienus had never seen him tilt his head to the right or adjust his hair with one finger. No palms-up, open-handed gestures. In the act of love, he did not ‘snort’.

The physiognomists might be wrong but Gallienus wondered what made a fine youth such as Demetrius find his pleasures like a woman and run the risk of every man’s contempt. Astrologers would put it down to the conjunction of the stars at birth; if Taurus was rising, rear end first among the Pleiades – that sort of thing. Magicians might claim to have caused it. Scratch a drawing of a castrated man gazing at his own genitals on a piece of obsidian, put it in a gold box with the stone of a cinaedus-fish, trick the victim into carrying it – or, much more efficacious, into eating it – and a soul was deformed.

Any number of men, charlatans or otherwise, might have any number of theories. How did you trick someone into eating a stone, in a gilded box or not? Gallienus suspended his judgement. He suspected that Demetrius’s predilection was innate. Whether it was or not, for years, the boy had had no choice about the physical aspect. Demetrius said he had been born into slavery. Although very vague about his early life, once he had become an intimate of the imperial bedchamber he had spoken about the succession of brutal masters through whose hands he had passed. Gallienus had been moved to tears. The youth’s degradation ended when he was purchased to be secretary to Ballista.

Ballista had treated Demetrius well. In the end, he had granted him his freedom and, although Demetrius did not realize that Gallienus knew, he had given the boy a share of the loot from the camp of the Persian King of Kings. Ballista had never taken the youth to his bed. In a Greek or a Roman, that would argue for strict self-control, but in a northern barbarian probably it was something else altogether.

Gallienus gazed at Demetrius. The emperor had never shunned Aphrodite. The gifts of the goddess of love should be honoured. There was nothing of the priggish and boorish virgin Hippolytus about Gallienus. Rather, he knew, there was a gadfly in his eyes. No sooner had it alighted on a beauty – boy or girl – than it wanted to fly again. His pleasure in Demetrius would not last. Beside anything else, the youth was shaving, using depilatories. Demetrius was getting too old.

Slowly, Gallienus pulled back the cover. Demetrius stirred, but did not wake. The boy was still beautiful. The well-formed back, the delicate moulding of the buttocks; neither too thin nor too fleshy. The straight thighs. The ringlets of dark, hyacinth hair.

Ballista had been a fool, misguided by his barbarian upbringing. The northerner was quite wrong: there was nothing unmanly about loving a boy. Gallienus had little time for the specious and hypocritical posturings of Platonic love. The noble duty of a philosophic spirit is to worship but not to touch: what nonsense. Nothing but a regime for frustration or guilt, or an unhealthy combination of the two.

No, there was nothing to be frowned at in physical pleasure for the erastes with his eromenos, as long as the older lover did not continue when the beloved became a man, bearded and tough. The very briefness of the time, from the first down to the full beard, added poignancy.

Hercules, Gallienus’s particular divine companion, had not been less manly for loving Hylas. Hercules had also loved many, many women. Indeed, it had been a woman, Omphale, who had for a time enslaved him; love of a woman that had briefly unmanned him.

Demetrius woke, opened dark eyes. His cheeks shone like amber or Sidonian crystal. The boy smiled. ‘You remember your promise?’ he murmured.

Gallienus kissed his lips. ‘I remember.’ For a moment he felt a pang of jealousy. Then it was overcome by affection. The boy was nothing if not loyal. Gallienus would keep the promise Demetrius had requested. Gallienus would not execute Ballista. Something must be done, but not that.