The Cryptoporticus—Palatine Hill

This poem is featured in Diana Arterian’s recent collection Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone, 2025).

A row of stunted arched hallways were once for storage, guards’s homes. The brick edges are now worn until they poke out like little red teeth. These were long and deep, once. Cool. A small sign explains their purpose and also Caligula’s assassination within a tunnel—perhaps even in this very gallery. A metal post with delicate links strung to another metal post keeps me from entering. Thinking of the dagger pushing in and the muscle clenching as it does for protection from bleeding, yet works for the blade, tearing more.

Caligula ordered executions by a thousand cuts at times, dayslong, parents of the doomed there and made to watch. And Caligula too, saying, Strike so that he may feel that he is dying. Who did the cuts, I wonder? What was their thought? Desperation? Glee? Boredom?

At a dinner near two consuls, the emperor begins to laugh. One consul asks the emperor for the humor. What do you suppose, except that a single nod and both of you could have your throats cut on the spot? Caligula claimed victory over the sea after sending soldiers to the English Channel. With no enemy there, he demanded shore shells for booty and displayed the shard spoils of Neptune upon their return. He sacrificed flamingos and peacocks.

Maybe this is all possible. I believe the bird sacrifice tidbit more than anything else. Caligula was the first emperor ever assassinated (Caesar was a dictator). His spirit was seen moving at the Palatine Hill for months after his death and hasty burial—until Agrippina moved his ashes to the Mausoleum of Augustus with her other family members’s ashes.

Soot brushes the ceiling of one of the archways. Archeological objects of various rectangles are shrouded in white canvas below, white-and-red-checked twine holding on in loops. A fern sprays green from a red wall. What looks like golden straw flecks the ground.