Render Unto Caesar Read Online Free PDF Page B

walk, Crispus. I had intended to come all the way by carriage, but…” He shrugged, gave a deprecating smile. “I did not know that carriages are not allowed into Rome.”
    â€œCall me Titus,” offered Crispus. “That’s right, this is your first visit, isn’t it? I’m pleased that I can finally offer you some hospitality in exchange for all the kindness you and your father have shown to me.” There was a pause, and then he added solemnly, “I was very sorry to hear of your father’s fate. I pray the earth is light upon him.”
    Hermogenes bowed his head. The first time anyone had prayed that the earth was light on his father’s grave, he had shouted furiously, “How could it be? He drowned at sea!” The grief then had been raw, savage, and unwieldy. It had seemed impossible that the father who had shaped his own life so entirely, could so suddenly and absolutely vanish from it. Sometimes he had woken up convinced that it had been a mistake, that his father’s ship had not sunk but merely been driven off course, and his father would soon be home. It had been more than half a year now, though, and he knew that Philemon was never going to return from the deep salt water. He had learned to hide his pain, to wear a polite mask over his smoldering rage. He had even learned to accept condolences gracefully.
    â€œAnd you are his sole heir?” Crispus continued. “It must have been some comfort to him to know that he left his affairs in capable hands.”
    Hermogenes took another sip of wine and murmured that it was kind of Crispus to say so.
    â€œOh, I don’t say it from kindness!” the Roman protested. “It would be a comfort to me, I promise you, if I had an able son instead of a worthless nephew to inherit all my hard work.” He took a swallow of wine and went on, “Of course, these days a man’s made to feel like a traitor to the state if he’s a bachelor. We’ve all been told that it’s our duty to marry and breed Romans. You’ve heard about the Julian laws?”
    Hermogenes had indeed heard of the new laws to encourage marriage and punish adultery. “You’re thinking of getting married because of them?” he asked, amused. He remembered, vividly, how Crispus had once told him that marriage was a trap to enslave men, and that any man of spirit should thank the gods if he escaped it. The speech had been intended to comfort him for the death in childbirth of his own wife, and it hadn’t seemed funny at the time.
    Crispus sighed deeply and gazed into his wine. “I think about it. Then I think again. How could I live without boys—or with the grief a wife would give me over keeping them? What about you? Have you remarried yet?”
    Hermogenes suppressed the grimace of disgust. He heard far more than he wanted on the subject of remarriage from all his father’s associates. At least Crispus didn’t have a daughter. “Not yet,” he said mildly.
    â€œYou ought to. Get yourself a son and heir. Your first wife didn’t give you any children, did she?”
    â€œShe gave me a daughter.”
    Crispus dismissed female offspring with a negligent wave, then straightened with a look of mock alarm. “Gods and goddesses, I’d forgotten that! Shouldn’t have mentioned that I was thinking of marriage myself, should I? Any man with a daughter is looking to buy her a rich husband.”
    Hermogenes thought of his daughter, who had informed him that she intended to be an acrobat when she grew up (“With a costume all made out of red leather with gold on!”), who was always in trouble at school for dirtying her clothes, whose luminous grin could persuade her respectable father to such feats as climbing the garden wall and sneaking into a neighbor’s shed to see a nest of young kittens. He looked at the fat man sweating on his red-upholstered couch and thought