Read The Chiron Confession (Dominium Dei) for Free Online

his right hand to enjoy a venue at the palace? Besides, you heard what Maximus said about the Pompey. It has too many sinister associations for Domitian. Why would he want to celebrate your opus at the very place where Julius Caesar was assassinated backstage? It might give people ideas.”
    “Yes, well, we can’t have any of those running around on the loose.”
    He thought of his father again, and then of dear old Senator Maximus, who had become something of a surrogate father to him. The senator was a Hellenophile and early fan of his plays, navigating them through the government censors and political traps of Roman high society. Even so, the roar of the mob in the wind was a grim reminder to Athanasius that the fading art of his scripted comedies was no match for the so-called “reality” of the Games. They were as bad as religion. Indeed, they were the new religion of Rome. But he dare not speak it aloud, for who knew who was listening? But he thought it. And Rome had not invented a way to read minds yet. There was still free thought, if not expression.
    “You hear that?” he asked Helena, lifting a finger to the breeze as another cheer rang out in the distance. “You know what that is?”
    She shrugged. “The last of Flavius Clemens, I suppose.”
    “That’s right,” he lectured her. “First it was the Jews. Now it’s the Christians. Who’s next?”
    Helena smiled brightly. “You?”
    “Laugh all you want, Helena. You haven’t heard Juvenal’s jokes about Greeks in Rome.”
    “He flatters you by imitation, Athanasius, and everybody knows he is not half the wit you are.” Helena ran her soft finger down his cheek and gazed at him lovingly.
    “There is no pleasing you when you are in a mood, Athanasius, is there?”
    “No.”
    “Then relax yourself before tonight. Join your friends at Homer’s for lunch. Go to your favorite bath. Take a massage. Then enjoy the premiere of your greatest play ever.”
    “And then?”
    “Let your work do its work. Let your rival Ludlumus burn in jealousy at what you can do with words that he cannot do with a thousand Bengal tigers. Let Latinus and the rest of your actors take the credit. Let the world and even Caesar himself forget September 18th and the sword of Damocles that hangs over Rome. This is your night to be worshipped, to join the pantheon of the gods of art.”
    “And then?”
    “And then you get to go to bed tonight with the goddess of love and wake up tomorrow on top of the world.”
    She was heaven for him, it was true. “Well, you do have that effect on a man.”
    “A performance not to be missed,” she told him, and kissed him on the lips again, warm and wet, full of promise.
    Helena looked on with great affection as Athanasius walked away, but she felt a dark cloud of fear forming over her head and frowned. This bothered her even more because she knew frowning was not good for her. She may be the face of Aphrodite, but she didn’t wake up that way. It took eight girls—now waiting for her in the bathhouse—to fix her hair, paint her lips and buff her nails for her to reach perfection for this evening. And this wasn’t ancient Greece. It was modern Rome. Sculptors like Colonius were no idealists. The first tiny crease around her eyes would become a giant crack in marble and spell the end of her reign and the start of another’s.
    Not that Athanasius would care. He was the kind who, once smitten, would love her forever.
    And that was the problem.
    Athanasius seemed to think they had all the time in the world. Money and power meant nothing to him. Life was all about his works and the world’s recognition of his merit as a playwright. The fortunes that came his way passed through his hands like water from the aqueducts passed through the bathhouses and homes of Rome into the central sewer to the Tiber. And yet he’d be happy scribbling away on his plays from a cave, eating wild mushrooms and smoking his leaves for inspiration.
    She, however,