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Updated: May 20, 2025
"To begin with," he said, "I want you to understand that I like you, that I haven't forgotten that you rescued the retiarius, whopped Bambilio and behaved like a trump when Father tested you. I'm for you. Your colts are the cream of Italian stud-farms. You are a wonderful woman, all round. But, as a Vestal, you have your weak points.
I was about to reply tartly, but I remembered how my irritation with Capito had affected me and recalled Galen's injunction that I must avoid all causes of excitement and emotion. I held my peace. Bambilio, as if he had been an intimate and had been specially invited, lolled comfortably on the bench and gazed approvingly about. "Fine garden, Andivius," he said.
I became almost gay, I was enjoying myself. The enjoyment, toward the close of the banquet, was marred by Bambilio, who, inevitably, had told Falco of his capture by brigands on the Flaminian Highway and, after his tale was told at great length, insisted on Vedia telling hers. He could wrestle with leopards; perhaps even his ghost might be able to control wild beasts."
But her physical pain was drowned in a rising tide of anger and wrath. She felt the long repressed, half-forgotten tomboy, hoyden Brinnaria surging up in her and gaining mastery. She fairly boiled with rage, she blazed and flamed inwardly with a conflagration of resentment. It was all she could do not to tear down the curtain, spring on Bambilio, wrench his scourge from his hand and lay it on him.
The self-importance he assumes, the pomposity with which he performs his duties, would be too great even for an Emperor. He irritates all of us. All of us have wished, secretly or openly, many, many times, that Bambilio would be soundly thrashed. He has been. You did it. The story was too good to keep. It has not, of course, been allowed to leak out, and become common property.
His son, also named Faltonius Bambilio, had taken up a political rather than a priestly life and was not to be thought of as his successor. In his place Aurelius, on his way to Syria, had nominated Lutorius Rusco, a man who impressed everyone at first sight, and more and more the better anyone knew him, as the paragon of a Pontifex.
Of course, I was quaking with dread for fear some lifelong acquaintance would recognize me, even in my coarse attire. But none did: in fact I set eyes on no one I knew, except Faltonius Bambilio, who was pompously lecturing ten victims in the Ulpian Basilica.
Meanwhile, and above all, the negligent Vestal must be punished; and at once the sacred fire must be ritually rekindled. The ritual rekindling worried and exhausted Bambilio not a little. The procedure was traditional and rigidly prescribed in every detail.
Numisia tried to stop me and somehow fell on the floor and was stunned. She came to after I was done with Bambilio, but she fainted again. I beat him till he is just a lump of raw meat, eleven-twelfths dead, wallowing in his blood like a sausage in a plate of gravy." "My child!" Causidiena cried, "this is sacrilege!" "Not a bit of it!"
If you don't like it I don't care a shred of bran." "Come! come!" fussed Bambilio, "answer the interrogatories properly." "I have and I shall," Brinnaria maintained mutinously. "Are you fit in mind and in faculties to be a Vestal?" he continued. "Fit to be Flaminica or Empress," Brinnaria responded. "Are you pure?" came the next query. "As when I was born," said Brinnaria emphatically.
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