Solar Wind. Book one. Oleg Krasin

and quickly cut off the hand of the attacker with the bloody knife. The man wheezed in pain, fell on the pavement right at the feet of the consul, and a large crowd a minute ago raging around them, bawling, threatening with assault, vanished into the city streets in no time. As if the waves of a violent ocean suddenly dissipated after a storm, calmed by the mighty Poseidon.

      Again, there was a peaceful city bustle around, as if nothing had happened, as if the streets of Rome had been gripped by an obsession, sent down by the evil gods, and then destroyed by them.

      Meanwhile, Ceionius crouched down with the bleeding killer. His dark skin had already turned pale, he could hardly breathe. A large pool of blood ran down near the stump of his right hand. Marcus came closer, trying not to step into it or get dirty.

      “Who sent you?” Ceionius demanded an answer. Now he no longer looked like a lazy, slack, carefree reveler, an epicurean, accidentally caught in the chair of the highest magistrate. He was a collected, imperious man, a real Roman, brought up in harsh Roman traditions. “Tell me who sent it, and then I will not order your corpse be thrown to hungry dogs! It will be burned on a funeral pyre, and ashes will be scattered over the sea.”

      “This,” the killer licked his dried lips, “is what Fuscus paid me.”

      “Fuscus?” Ceionius asked. “One Fuscus. No one else?”

      “He's alone,” muttered the mercenary, who was losing consciousness.

      There could be no doubt, the ambitious grandson of Senator Servianus, who had studied emperor Hadrian's horoscope so well, removed obstacles in his way, in this case Commodus. In Rome the inexplicable favor of Hadrian to Ceionius had long been wondered about. It was rumored about that Caesar would make Ceionius his heir, pushing away from power Servianus and his grandson Fuscus.

      They stepped aside.

      “Throw this scoundrel off the Tarpeian Rock!” Ceionius, whose face has smoothed and again taken on a serene look, ordered. “Let's continue our journey, dear Marcus. I'll think about Fuscus and his business at my leisure, and in the meantime, we'll talk about the poet Martial.”

      In the house of Ceionius they were met by a cool silence, the murmur of a fountain in peristyle, unspoken, embroidered slaves. Ceionius mentioned that it was the merit of his wife Avidia. It was she who held the whole house in her hands, for which he, Ceionius, was very grateful to her.

      As expected, Marcus did not meet his fiancée Fabia. But the consul and a future relative introduced him to the stoic philosopher Apollonius from Chalcis. This man, being tenacious and short-grown, at first glance was completely nondescript, but in fact, he had exorbitant ambitions and huge conceit. However, Marcus had the impression that these traits could be found in all little-known philosophers.

      They were situated in the tablinum.54

      Like all Greeks, Apollonius wore a beard, long and ungroomed. He was also wearing a dirty tunic of dilapidated matter. It smelled bad, but the philosopher did not change clothes. Noticing that Marcus tries not to approach him, Apollonius smiled sarcastically and drew the attention of the young patrician to the fact that the external properties of things do not always make their essence. For example, the smell was a temporary phenomenon, and it disappeared once the tunic was washed.

      “However,” Marcus retorted, “Seneca wrote that philosophy requires moderation, but moderation should not be untidy.”

      “That's right!” Apollonius agreed. He had a thin, squealing voice. “And Seneca said that a person who uses pottery as silver is as great as one who uses silver as earthenware. In my case, someone who wears a dirty tunic is as worthy of respect as someone who wears a clean one. But I wanted to tell you something completely different examining my tunic, I wanted to say that anything should be considered not as a whole, but only those parts on which it breaks up.”

      Marcus looked curiously at the stoic with his lively eyes. He'd never met such a person before. Diognetus? Yes, in some ways they seemed similar, these Greek philosophers. They both annoyed equally; Diognetus was over-groomed, and Apollonius was deliberately untidy and thereby aroused a burning interest.

      Probably, they show me one of the philosophical tricks, decided Marcus, if you want to get someone else's attention, you have to be different, stand out from the crowd anything. Even if it will be due to a vile smell.

      “There is a constant stoic exercise,” Apollonius continued, “it is to decompose things into pieces and then the essence becomes clear. Take, for example, a piece of pork. You think it's a great meal, but it's just an animal's corpse. Or the toga that's on your body right now. If you look at what it's made of, you'll see that it's actually the hair of the sheep that made the yarn. Good wine, delighting our taste, came from grape slurry. Or what many men aspire to—I'm talking about owning a woman. This is just the friction of the insides with the release of mucus. And it is accompanied by convulsions, the cause of which is unclear to us. So, we can conclude that behind the external brilliance is always hidden plainness, unsightly nudity.”

      Marcus curiously listened to the reasoning of the stoic.

      Indeed, the mind easily, effortlessly comprehended what was on the surface. But what lurked in the depths? Apollonius gave the key to comprehension by decomposing phenomena into components, studying them separately, and then coming closer to a true understanding of the essence of things.

      The only thing that was hard to break down into particles was space. It was, as the Stoics were taught, the elementary fire, the source of the world's mind, and the mind was indivisible. The abyss of space. The Logos. Perhaps he could be interested in it, but Marcus was much more interested in studying man, because man hides in his soul something dark and unexplored, beastly. And it seemed to Marcus that the abyss itself was not a cosmos, it was separated from it, for the cosmos did not include a bottomless emptiness, because it was filled with reason. The abyss was a man with his hidden passions and vices, which led to madness.