The Mystery Megapack

isn’t even on our Roman calendar. It was something purely local, a gaudy affair with naked youths and maidens strewing flowers along the way, followed by musicians thundering on drums and blasting with trumpets and rattling cymbals; then came a mass of garlanded priestesses, and, finally a great, gilded car pulled by white oxen, in which rode the goddess herself in the form of an enormous marble image, far taller than a man, in the most barbarous aspect imaginable: a face like a harsh mask, with wide, blank eyes, but the body covered with hundreds of breasts, like udders, and the arms outstretched, as if to bestow blessings or (so it occurred to me) to throttle somebody.
    “Love in Claudiopolis must be a very peculiar business,” said Pudens as the thing passed.
    “Keep your voice down,” snapped Arpocras, “lest someone hear you blaspheme.”
    Pudens put his hand to his ear and shouted, “What?” Indeed it was hard to hear anything over the noise of the crowd, which was quite worked into a frenzy at this point. But if a riot were about to break out, it was clearly prevented by the presence of my troop of soldiers, and by the city watch and city officials, who came to meet us once the procession had passed.
    Eventually we found ourselves at the house of L. Licinius Aper, a leading citizen of the town, who had intrigued against several rivals (so I gathered later) for the privilege of hosting us.
    I braced myself for what was to follow. It is a ritual that recurs every place I visit, some rich person like this Aper pushing himself to the forefront to introduce himself, shower me with every flattery, boast about his own importance, protest his loyalty to Rome, etc. etc.
    They always do this because they want something. Somehow it is always the rich and powerful who are never satisfied.
    I of course must be impartial, and deal with local persons of importance, keeping my impressions (at least initially) to myself, but I must admit that I took an almost immediate dislike to L. Licinius Aper. He was a red-faced, balding man a little younger than me, about fifty perhaps, but if anyone resembled the fabled walrus it was he, having grown so fat with indulgence that, quite unlike Servilius Pudens, he could hardly bear his own weight. A quartet of burly slaves hauled him about in a chair most of the time.
    Nevertheless he was animated, sputtering, a ceaseless fount of information about the town and its people and their affairs. It is not actually a proverb, but should be, that a man who cannot stop talking may eventually say something useful.
    When he tried to dismiss Arpocras with a wave of his hand, the Greek stood firm, and so did I, and Licinius Aper, realizing his blunder, graciously invited the three of us to bathe and dine with him.
    He gave us a tour of the house, making sure that we noticed the images of all the deified emperors among his household gods, and that his statues of the gods and goddesses were of the conventional sort. No thousand-breasted Venuses here.
    “I hear they have something like that down in Ephesus,” said Servilius Pudens, “Only they call it Diana.”
    “That is exactly my point, my dear fellow,” said Licinius Aper, placing his had on Pudens’s shoulder with an audible thump and perhaps too much familiarity, though, to be fair, he was actually walking then and may have needed to lean on Pudens for support.
    “It is?”
    “Yes. The natives apply the names of our divinities to theirs, absurd as they might be, and that raises the question of whether they can really be considered divine at all, or just the fevered imaginings of barbarians.”
    Arpocras coughed, as if to say he did not like where this conversation was going, but Pudens merely said, “Oh really? My friend and I were discussing something very similar this afternoon.”
    “Indeed?” said Licinius Aper. “Tell me about it.”
    Tell him he did, and the loquacious Aper dragged on this discussion for hours, through our bath, well into the dinner that followed, only interrupted by vulgar displays of lewd dancers and mimes and acrobats. There was no doubt that our host was going all out to impress, though I couldn’t help but think of the ridiculous freedman in the Satyricon of Petronius, written in the time of Nero yet as applicable to the present circumstances. But Licinius Aper was a Roman, a true son of the Tiber and the Seven Hills, as he had not failed to impress upon us, as he continued to impress … and if I