Two-Copper Fortunes Beneath the Circus Maximus

Marcus Valerius

Listen, if you follow me down past the Aventine as the shadows stretch, just where the Great Track, the Circus Maximus, looms up into the dusk, you, you will smell the smoke before you even hear the crowd. Not the roar of sixty thousand citizens shouting for the Greens or the Reds, mind you. No, at this hour the horses are stabled. The track is quiet. But the outer arcades, the long brick porticoes under the cheap seats, that is where the real city comes out to eat and trade and lie.

Marcus Valerius

The poet Juvenal calls it the fallax Circus, the deceitful Circus, and Jupiter knows he is not wrong. You walk beneath these giant stone arches, and it is a complete wall of noise and steam. You have food vendors shouting over pots of boiling lard, sausage sellers carving up greasy mutton, fruit sellers hawking dried figs and shriveled grapes from wicker baskets, and cheap wine taps dripping sour red vintage into clay cups for a single copper quadrans.

Marcus Valerius

But if you step back out of the main torchlight, right down into the darker nooks beneath the timber bleachers, that is where the real business happens. That is where Rome comes to buy a look at tomorrow. Poor women from the nearby insulae, laborers with grease on their tunic sleeves, missing slaves, they all crowd down around the street diviners and fortune tellers who set up shop in rented wooden stalls.

Marcus Valerius

I, I actually stopped just now by a booth tucked right between a salted fish merchant and a cobbler. There operates a fellow who calls himself Sextus the Syrian. A glorious fraud, really. He sits there crouched over a low stool with a wooden star chart that looks like it was carved with a blunt kitchen knife and smeared with black lamp soot to make the constellations look ancient. For two copper asses, two small coins, he will scratch out your destiny on a greasy scrap of recycled papyrus.

Marcus Valerius

I watched him work for five minutes. He sits there squinting at the soot, waving his hands, humming some strange gibberish that sounds vaguely like Greek mixed with bad Aramaic, and then, then he dips a cracked reed pen into soot ink and hands you a grand prediction. It is marvelous entertainment if you have two coppers to burn.

Marcus Valerius

And he is far from the only one down here. The variety of street prophets under these bleachers is staggering. Just ten paces down, you see the local women practice koskinomanteia. That is where they hang a heavy brass sieve from a pair of iron shears, hold it up with two fingers, and chant names over it until the sieve twitches, pointing out which thief in the tenement stole your good wool cloak. Further down, you have the incantatores sitting over wooden bowls filled with vinegar, dropping in whole barley seeds and watching how the grains float or sink to tell you if your cousin's merchant ship cleared the port at Ostia.

Marcus Valerius

Now, you might wonder why the city praetor allows hundreds of these makeshift prophets to set up shop right against the outer walls of the greatest racecourse in the world. Well, there is a very sharp, very quiet political line drawn in the dirt down here. Our Emperor Trajan, may the gods preserve him, keeps a very strict set of imperial edicts on the books. Predicting the death of the emperor, or his family, or even top state officials and senators, that is high treason, punishable by execution or a long walk into the mines.

Marcus Valerius

So these street astrologi know their place. They leave the grand affairs of state to the official augurs up on the Capitol. Down here by the racecourse, their whole trade is strictly limited to small, desperate human troubles. Will my runaway slave be caught at the docks? Did my husband lose his purse at the bathhouse or did he spend it on dice? Which chariot team should I put my final silver denarius on tomorrow morning, the Blues or the Greens?

Marcus Valerius

It is easy to laugh at the absurdity of it, but then, er, then you see someone like the woman I saw just a moment ago. A young laundress from a third floor tenement room over in the Subura, her clothes still damp with lye water, her hands red and raw. She stood before a dusty old diviner, her shoulders trembling, and she handed over her very last copper quadrans, every bit of money she had left for the day.

Marcus Valerius

She did not care about the stars or the emperors. She just wanted to know if her little boy, who was burning with a terrible fever up in their crowded room, was going to survive the week. And the old fraud took her coin, looked into his vinegar bowl, looked her in the eye, and told her with complete confidence that the signs were good, that the fever would break before dawn. Was it a lie? Probably. But as she walked away, her shoulders straightened, her breathing slowed, and for one night at least, she could walk back up those dark wooden stairs with a shred of hope in her heart. For the poor in Rome, these cheap two copper fortunes are not grand mysticism. They are the only comfort they can afford.

Marcus Valerius

Anyway, the night air is turning crisp, and my stomach is reminding me that watching people buy fortunes does not fill a man's belly. I just bought myself a steaming hot terracotta bowl of fried chickpeas and salted leeks from a vendor near the south arch. I am eating them right now, dusting the salt off my fingers, stepping out into the dark street toward home.

Marcus Valerius

Oh, and that Syrian astrologer, Sextus? I gave him his two copper asses before I left. I have his handwritten papyrus tucked right here in my tunic pocket. It says, in very smudged ink, that I am destined to come into unimaginable bronze before the Nones of the month. Well, considering I just spent my last copper on these chickpeas, I think Jupiter will have to drop a bronze statue on my head for that fortune to come true. Until tomorrow, my friends. Mind the steps in the dark, and watch your purse when you walk past the arcades.