Roma Eterna (23 page)

“What's the matter with you?” Germanicus demanded. “Drunk?”

“The heat—the crowds—”

“Yes. That could make anybody sick. What are you doing walking around by yourself here, anyway?” Germanicus leaned forward. His breath, stinking of wine and overripe anchovies, was like a blast out of Hades. Nodding toward his litter, he said, “My chair's big enough for two. Come on: I'll give you a ride home.”

That was the last thing Antipater wanted, to be cooped up with this foul-smelling lascivious prince inside a covered litter, even for the quarter of an hour it would take to cross the Forum to the Palatine. He shook his head. “No—no—”

“Well, get out of the sun, at least. Let's go into the temple. I want to talk to you, anyway.”

“You do?”

Helplessly Antipater allowed himself to be tugged to his feet and herded up the dozen or more steps of Justinianus's temple. Within, behind the great bronze door, all was cool and dark. The place was deserted, no priests, no worshipers. A brilliant shaft of light descending from an opening high overhead in the dome illuminated a marble slab above the altar that proclaimed, in fiery letters of gold, the Emperor Justinianus's eternal love for his kinsman and royal counterpart of the West, His Imperial Roman Majesty Heraclius II Augustus.

Germanicus laughed softly. “Those two should only know what's going on now! Could it ever have worked, d'ye think—dividing the Empire and expecting the two halves to live together peacefully forever after?”

Antipater, still dizzied and faint, felt little wish to discuss history with Prince Germanicus just now.

“Perhaps, in an ideal world—” he began.

Germanicus laughed again, this time a harsh cackle. “An ideal world, yes! Very good, Antipater! Very good! But we happen to live in the real one, is that not so? And in the real world there was no way that an empire the size of the one we once had could have been maintained intact, so it had to be divided. But once the first Constantinus divided it, Antipater, war between the two halves was inevitable. The wonder of it is that it took so long to happen.”

A discourse on history from the Emperor's drunken dissolute brother, here in Justinianus's serene temple. How strange, Antipater thought. And was there any truth in the point Germanicus was making, Antipater wondered? The war between East and West—inevitable?

He doubted that Constantinus the Great, who had split the unwieldy Roman world in half by setting up a second capital far to the east of Roma at Byzantium on the Bosporus, ever had thought so. Beyond question Constantinus had supposed that his sons would share power peacefully, one reigning over the eastern provinces from the new capital of Constantinopolis, one in Italia and the Danubian provinces, a third in Britannia and Gallia and Hispania. Hardly was Constantinus in his grave, though, than the divided Empire was embroiled in war, with one of the sons attacking another and seizing his realm; and for sixty years after that all was in flux, until the great Emperor Theodosius had brought about the final administrative division of the Roman world, separating its Greek-speaking territories from the Latin-speaking ones.

But Theodosius hadn't accepted the inevitability of East-West war either. By his decree the two Emperors, the Eastern one and the Western one, were supposed to consider themselves colleagues, joint rulers of the entire realm, consulting each other on all high matters of state, each even having the power to name a successor for an Imperial colleague that died. It hadn't worked out that way, of course. The two nations had drifted apart, though some
measure of cooperation did continue for hundreds of years. And now—the friction of the past half century, culminating in the present slowly escalating war of East against West—the foolish, needless, ghastly war that was about to burst in all its fury upon this greatest of all cities—

“Look at this stuff!” Germanicus cried. He had left Antipater's side to go roaming about in the deserted temple, peering at the paintings and mosaics with which Justinianus's Byzantine craftsmen had bedecked the sides of the building. “I hate the Greek style, don't you? Flat and stiff and creaky—you'd think they didn't understand a damned thing about perspective. If I had been Heraclius, I'd have covered the walls over with plaster the moment Justinianus's people were out of town. Too late for all that now, though.” Germanicus had reached the far side, and peered up for a moment at the vast regal portrait of solemn scowling Justinianus, done in gleaming golden tile, that loomed out from the belly of the dome like Jupiter himself glowering down. Then he whirled to face Antipater. “But what am I saying?” he bellowed through the echoing dimness. “You're a Greek yourself! You love this kind of art!”

“I am a Roman citizen born, sir,” said Antipater quietly.

“Yes. Yes, of course. That's why you speak Greek so well, and why you look the way you do. And that hot little dark-eyed lady you spend your nights with—she's Roman, too, right? Where are you from, anyway, Antipater? Alexandria? Cyprus?”

“I was born in Salona in Dalmatia, sir. It was Roman territory at the time.”

“Salona. Yes. The palace of Diocletianus is there, isn't it? And nobody would say that Diocletianus wasn't a Roman. Why do you look so damnably Greek, though? Come over here, Antipater. Let me look at you.
Antipater.
What a fine Roman name that is!”

“My family was Greek originally. We were from Antioch, but that was many hundreds of years ago. If I am
Greek, then Romans are Trojans, because Aeneas came from Troia to found the settlement that became Roma. And where is Troia today, if not in the territory of the Greek Emperor?”

“Oh-ho! Oh-ho! A wise man! A sophist!” Briskly Germanicus returned to Antipater's side and grasped at the front of his robe, clutching it into a tight bunch. Antipater expected a stinging slap. He lifted one hand to protect his face. “Don't cower like that,” the prince said. “I won't hit you. But you're a traitor, aren't you? A Greek and a traitor. Who consorts nightly with the enemy. I'm speaking of that Greek wench of yours, the little bosomy spy. When the Basileus comes in triumph to Roma, you'll go rushing to his side and tell him you were loyal to him all along.”

“No, sir. By your leave, sir, none of that is true, sir.”

“Not a traitor?”

“No, sir,” said Antipater desperately. “Nor is Justina a spy. We are Romans of Roma, faithful to the West. I serve your royal brother the Caesar Maximilianus Augustus and no one else.”

That appeared to be effective. “Ah. Good. Good. I'll accept that. You seem sincere.” Germanicus winked and released him with a light shove, and spun away to stand with his back toward Antipater. In a much less manic tone, sounding almost subdued, he said, “You stayed at the meeting after the rest of us left. Did Caesar have anything interesting to say to you?”

“Why—why—he merely—”

Antipater faltered. What kind of loyalty to Caesar would it be to betray his private conversations to another, even Caesar's own brother?

“He said nothing of significance, sir. Just a bit of recapitulation of the meeting, was all.”

“Just a bit of recapitulation.”

“Yes, sir. Nothing more.”

“I wonder. You're very thick with him, Antipater. He trusts you, you know, shifty little Greek that you are. Em
perors always trust their secretaries more than they do anybody else. It doesn't matter to him that you're a Greek. He tells you things that he doesn't tell others.” Germanicus swung round again. The sea-green eyes drilled with sudden ferocity into Antipater's. “I wonder,” he said once more. “Was he speaking the truth, when he said that we don't need to do anything about this fleet off Sardinia? Does he actually and truly believe that?”

Antipater felt his cheeks growing hot. He was grateful for the faintness of the light in here, and for his own swarthy skin, that would hide his embarrassment from the prince. It seemed odd to him that the famously idle Germanicus, who had never to Antipater's knowledge demonstrated a shred of interest in public affairs, should be so concerned now with his Imperial brother's military intentions. But perhaps the imminence of a Greek invasion of the capital had aroused even this roguish, lackadaisical, irresponsible lordling to some alarm. Or, perhaps, all this was just some passing whim of his. No matter which, Antipater could not evade a reply this time.

Carefully he said, “I would not presume to tell anyone what I imagined the Emperor was thinking, sir. My understanding of his position, though, is that he sees that there's very little we can really do against the Basileus—that we are hemmed in on two sides already and that we are unable to protect ourselves against an attack on some new front.”

“He's absolutely right,” said Germanicus. “Our goose, as the Britannians say, is cooked. The question is what kind of sauce will go on the dish, eh? Eh, Antipater?” And then, abruptly, Antipater found himself being seized once again and swept forward into a hard, crushing embrace. Germanicus's bristly cheek rubbed across his with stinging force. The reek of the young prince brought a new surge of dizziness to him. He is crazy, Antipater thought.
Crazy.
“Ah, Antipater, Antipater, you know I mean you no harm! I do love you, man, for your devotion to my brother. Poor Maximilianus! What a burden it must be to him to be
Emperor at a time like this!” Letting go of Antipater once more, he stepped back and said, in yet another new tone of voice, somber now and oddly earnest, “You will not speak a word of this meeting to my brother, will you, eh? I think I've disturbed your tranquility, and I wouldn't want him thinking ill of me for that. He's terribly fond of you. He relies on you so very much.—Come, Antipater, will you let me take you home, now? That hot little Greek of yours very likely has a sizzling noontime surprise for you, and it would be rude to keep her waiting.”

 

He said nothing to Justina of his strange encounter with the Emperor's brother. But the episode stayed in his mind.

Beyond much doubt the prince was mad. And yet, yet, there had seemed to be some undertone of seriousness in his discourse—a side of Germanicus Caesar that Antipater had never seen before, nor, perhaps, anyone else either.

Germanicus's belief that the original Empire, the one that had spanned the world from Britannia to the borders of India, had been too large to govern from a single capital—well, yes, nobody would dispute that issue. Even in Diocletianus's time the job had been so big that several Emperors reigning jointly had been needed to handle it, not that that had worked particularly well; and a generation later the great Constantinus had found governing the entire thing impossible even for him. And so had come the formal division of the realm, which under Theodosius had become permanent.

But what about the other point, the inevitability of war between East and West?

Antipater had no love for that line of thinking. Yet he knew that the historical record provided strong support for it. Even in the era of supposed East-West concord, that time when Justinianus reigned in Constantinopolis and his nephew Heraclius in Roma, great trade rivalries had sprung up, each Empire trying to outflank the other, Latin Romans reaching out around Byzantium toward remote
India and even more remote Khitai and Cipangu where the yellow-faced men live, and Greek Romans seeking influence to the south in black Africa and to the far frozen northern territories that lay behind the homeland of the half-savage Goths.

That had all been sorted out by treaty; perhaps, thought Antipater, Justinianus's temple in Roma had been erected in commemoration of some such agreement. But the frictions had continued, the jockeying for prime position in the world's commerce.

And then, beginning eighty or ninety years ago, the West's big mistake, the colossally foolish expedition to the New World—what a calamity that had been! Certainly it was exciting to discover that two great continents lay beyond the Ocean Sea, and that mighty nations—Mexico, Peru—existed there, strange lands rich in gold and silver and precious stones, inhabited by multitudes of copper-skinned people ruled by lordly monarchs who lived in pomp and opulence worthy of Caesar himself. But what lunacy had possessed the megalomaniac Emperor Saturninus to try to
conquer
those nations, instead of simply to enter into trade relations with them? Decades of futile overseas expeditions—millions of sesterces wasted, whole legions sent out by that obstinate and perhaps insane Emperor to die under the searing sun of the inhospitable continents that Saturninus had optimistically named Nova Roma—the pride of the Western Empire's military destroyed by the spears and arrows of unstoppable torrents of demonic wild-eyed warriors with painted faces, or swept away by the overwhelming force of great tropical storms—hundreds of ships lost in those perilous alien waters—the spirit of the Empire broken by the unfamiliar experience of defeat after defeat, and the ultimate grim capitulation and evacuation of the final batch of shattered Roman troops—

That ill-advised adventure had, as Antipater and everyone else recognized now, drained the economic resources
of the Western Empire in a terrible way, and, perhaps, weakened its military power beyond repair. Two entire generations of the most gifted generals and admirals had perished on the shores of Nova Roma. And then, the idiotically arrogant Emperor Julianus IV compounding the error by evicting a Greek mercantile mission from the island of Melita, a trifling dot in the sea between Sicilia and the African coast that both Empires long had laid claim to. To which Leo IX of Byzantium had retaliated not only by landing troops on Melita and taking control of it, but by unilaterally redrawing the ancient dividing line of the two empires that ran through the province of Illyricum, so that the Dalmatian coast, with its valuable ports on the Adriatic Sea, now came under Byzantine rule.

That was the beginning of the end. The Western Empire, already badly overextended by its doomed project in the New World, could not resist the takeover with any real force. Which had encouraged Leo and his successors in the East, first Constantinus XI and then Andronicus, to reach deeper and deeper into Western territory, until by now the capital itself was in jeopardy and the West seemed certain to fall into Byzantine control for the first time in history.