Roma Eterna (25 page)

But Maximilianus was still speaking, and suddenly Antipater realized that there was another, and deeper, purpose to this document.

“‘I have grown old in office'”—not true; he was hardly more than fifty—“‘and the burden of power wearies me, and I seek only now to live a quiet life of reading and meditation in some corner of Your Imperial Majesty's immense domain. I cite the precedent of the Caesar Diocletianus of old, who, after having reigned exactly twenty years, as I have, voluntarily yielded up his tremendous powers and took up residence in the province of Dalmatia, in the city of Salona, where the palace of his retirement stands to this day. It is the humble request of Maximilianus Caesar, my lord, that I be permitted to follow the path of Diocletianus, and, in fact, if it should be pleasing to you, that I even be allowed to occupy the palace at Salona, where I spent a number of nights during the years of my reign, and which is to me an agreeable residence to which I could gladly retire now—'”

Antipater knew the palace at Salona well. He had grown up virtually in its shadow. It was quite a decent sort of palace, practically a small town in itself, right on the sea, with enormous fortified walls and, no doubt, the most luxurious accommodations within. Many a Caesar had used it as a guest house while visiting the lovely Dalmatian coast. Perhaps Andronicus had stayed in it himself, inasmuch as Dalmatia had been under Byzantine control the past couple of decades.

And here was Maximilianus asking for it—no,
begging
for it, the fallen Emperor making a “humble request,” addressing Andronicus suddenly as “my lord,” using a phrase like “if it should be pleasing to you.” Turning over legal title to the Empire to Andronicus on a silver platter, asking nothing more in return than to be allowed to go off and hide himself behind the gigantic walls of Diocletianus's retirement home for the rest of his life.

Dishonorable. Disgraceful. Disgusting.

Antipater looked hastily away. He did not dare let Caesar see the blaze of contempt that had come into his eyes.

The Emperor was still speaking. Antipater had missed a few words, but what did that matter? He could always fill in with something appropriate.

“‘—I remain, I assure you, dear cousin Andronicus, yours in the deepest gratitude, offering herewith the highest regard for your wisdom and benevolence and my heart-felt felicitations on all the glorious achievements of your reign—cordially, Maximilianus Julianus Philippus Romanus Caesar Augustus, Imperator and Grand Pontifex, et cetera, et cetera—'”

 

“Well,” Justina said, when Antipater summarized the abdication document for her the next evening after he had spent much of yet another rainy day copying it out prettily on a parchment scroll, “Andronicus doesn't have to give Maximilianus anything, does he? He can simply cut his head off, if he likes.”

“He won't do that. This is the year 1951. The Byzantines are civilized folk. Andronicus doesn't want to look like a barbarian. Besides, it's bad politics. Why make a martyr out of Maximilianus, and set him up as a hero for whatever anti-Greek resistance movement is likely to come into being in the rougher provinces of the West, when he can simply give him a kiss on the cheek and pack him off to Salona? The whole Western Empire's his, re
gardless. He might just as well make a peaceful start to his reign here.”

“So Andronicus will accept the deal, do you think?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, of course. If he has any sense at all.”

“And then?”

“Then?”

“Us,” said Justina. “What of us?”

“Oh. Yes. Yes. The Emperor had a few things to say about that, too.”

Justina drew her breath in sharply. “He did?”

Uneasily Antipater said, “When he was finished dictating the letter, he turned to me and asked me if I would come with him to Salona, or wherever else Andronicus allowed him to go. ‘I'll still need a secretary, even in retirement,' he said. ‘Especially if I wind up in the Greek-speaking part of the Empire, and that's surely where Andronicus will want to put me, so that he can keep me under his thumb. Marry your little Greek and come along with me, Antipater.' That's exactly what he said. ‘Marry your little Greek. Come along with me.'”

Instantly Justina's eyes were glowing. Her face was flushed, her breasts were rising and falling quickly. “Oh, Antipater! How wonderful! You accepted, naturally!”

In fact he had not, not exactly. Not at all, as a matter of fact. Nor had he refused, exactly, either. Not at all. He had given Caesar no real answer of any sort.

In some discomfort he said, “You know that I'd be delighted to marry you, Justina.”

She looked perplexed. “And the part about following Caesar to Dalmatia?”

“Well—” he said. “I suppose—”

“You
suppose
? What other choice do we have?”

Antipater hesitated, fumbling in the air with his out-spread hands. “How can I say this, Justina? But let me try. What Caesar is asking is, well—cowardly. Shameful. Un-Roman.”

“Perhaps so. And if it is, so what? Better to stay here and die like a Roman, do you think?”

“I've already told you, Andronicus would never put him to death.”

“I'm talking about us.”

“Why would anyone harm
us
, Justina?”

“We've been through all this. As you yourself pointed out last week, you're an official of the court. I'm a Greek citizen who's been consorting with Romans. Surely there'd be a purge of the old bureaucracy. You wouldn't be executed, I guess, but you'd certainly be given a hard time. So would I. A worse time than you, I'd think. You'd be reassigned to some grubby menial job, maybe. But they'd find some very nasty uses for someone like me. Conquering soldiers always do.”

It was hard for him to meet the implacable fury of her eyes.

All yesterday afternoon since he'd taken his leave of Caesar in the Indigo Office, and most of today as well, his head had been swirling with ringing heroic phrases—
in the end, one must comport oneself as a Roman must, or be seen to be nothing at all—our great heroic traditions demand—history will never forgive—a time comes when a man must proclaim himself to be a man, or else he is nothing more than—how shameful, how unutterably and eternally shameful, it would be to affiliate myself with the court of so despicable a coward, an Emperor who
—and much more in the same vein, all leading up to his grand repudiation of the invitation to accompany Maximilianus into a cozy Dalmatian retirement. But now he saw only too clearly that all that was so much nonsense.

Our great heroic traditions demand, do they? Perhaps so. But Maximilianus Caesar was no hero, and neither was Lucius Aelius Antipater. And if the Emperor himself could not bring himself to behave like a Roman, why should his Master of Greek Letters? A man who was no sort of warrior, only a clerk, a man of books, and not all that much of
a Roman, either, not so that Cicero or Seneca or Cato the Censor would have believed. They would have laughed at his pretensions. You, a Roman? You with your oily Greek hair and your little snub nose and your ballet-dancer way of walking? Anybody can call himself a Roman, but only a Roman can
be
a Roman.

The time of Seneca and Cato and Cicero was long over, anyway. Things were different today. The enemy was at the gates of Roma, and what was the Emperor doing? Serenely falling on his sword? Calmly slitting his wrists? No. No. Why, the Emperor was busy composing a letter that pleaded abjectly for a soft safe withdrawal to a big palace on the Dalmatian coast. Was the Master of Greek Letters supposed to stand at the bridge facing the foe with a blade in each hand like some indomitable hero of old, while the Emperor he served was blithely running out of town the back way?

“Look,” Justina said. She had gone to the window. “Bonfires out there. A big one on the Capitoline Hill, I think.”

“We can't see the Capitoline from that window.”

“Well, some other hill, then. Three, four, five bonfires on the hills out there. And look down there, in the Forum. Torches all along the Sacra Via. The whole city's lit up.—I think they're here, Antipater.”

He peered out. The rain had stopped, and torches and bonfires indeed were blazing everywhere. He heard distant shouts in the night, but was unable to make out any words. Everything was vague, blurry, mysterious.

“Well?” Justina asked.

He let his tongue slide back and forth across his upper lip a couple of times. “I think they're here, yes.”

“And now? It's too late for us to run, isn't it? So we stand our ground and await our fates, you and I and the Emperor Maximilianus, like the stoic Romans that we are. Isn't that so, Antipater?”

“Andronicus won't harm the Emperor. No harm will come to you or me, either.”

“We'll find that out soon enough, won't we?” said Justina.

 

The next day was a day like none before it in the long history of Roma. The Greeks had come in the night before just as darkness was falling, thousands of them, entering through four of the city's gates at once; and they had met with no opposition whatever. Evidently the Emperor had sent out word to the commanders of the home guard that no attempts at resistance were to be made, for they surely would be futile and would only lead to great loss of life and widespread destruction within the city. The war was lost, said the Emperor; let the Greeks come in without prolonging the agony. Which was either a wise and realistic attitude, thought Antipater, or else a despicably faint-hearted one, and he knew what he believed. But he kept his opinions to himself.

The rain, which had halted for most of the night on the evening of the conquest, returned in the morning, just as the Basileus Andronicus was making his triumphal entrance into the city from the north, along the Via Flaminia. The scene was almost as Antipater had seen it in his dream, except that the weather was bad, and there were no flower petals being thrown, and the people lining the road looked stunned rather than jubilant and no one hailed the new Emperor in Greek. But Andronicus did ride a huge white horse and looked rather splendid, even in the rain with his great mass of golden hair pasted together in strings and his beard a soggy mop. He went not to the Forum, as Antipater had dreamed he would, but straight to the Imperial palace, where, the conqueror had been told, he would be presented with the document of abdication that the Emperor had dictated to Antipater the previous day.

The entire Great Council was present at the ceremony. It took place in the glittering Hall of the Hunting Mosaics, built by one of the later Heracliuses, where the Emperor usually received delegations from distant lands under
showy depictions in glowing red and green and purple tiles of the spearing of lions and elephants by valiant men in ancient Roman costume. Today, though, instead of seating himself on the throne, Maximilianus stood meekly at the left side of it, facing the Byzantine monarch, who stood just opposite him at a distance of some eight or ten paces. Behind Maximilianus were arrayed the members of the Council; behind Andronicus, half a dozen Greek officials who had traveled with him in the parade down the Via Flaminia.

The contrast between the two monarchs was instructive. The Emperor seemed dwarfed beside Andronicus, a giant of a man, by far the tallest and burliest in the room, who had thick heavy features and the coarse unruly yellow hair of a Celt or a Briton tumbling far down his back. Everything about him, his broad shoulders, his massive chest, his long drooping mustaches, his jutting jaw and vast beard, radiated a sense of bull-like, almost brutish, strength. But there was a look of cold intelligence in his small piercing gray-violet eyes.

Antipater, standing at Maximilianus's side, served as interpreter. At a nod from the Emperor he handed the scroll to some high magistrate of Andronicus's court, a man with a tonsured head and a richly brocaded robe inset with what looked like real rubies and emeralds; and the magistrate, giving it only the merest glance, solemnly rolled it up and passed it on to the Basileus. Andronicus unrolled it, quickly ran his eyes along the first two or three lines in a nonchalantly cursory way, and let it roll closed again. He handed it back to the tonsured magistrate.

“What does this thing say?” he asked Antipater brusquely.

Antipater found himself wondering whether the King of the Romans could be unable to read. With some astonishment he heard himself reply, “It is a document of abdication, your majesty.”

“Give it here again,” said Andronicus. His voice was
deep and hard and rough-edged, and his Greek was not in the least mellifluous: more a soldier's kind of Greek, or even a farmer's kind of Greek, than a king's. An affectation, most likely. Andronicus came from one of the great old Byzantine families. You would never know it, though.

With a grandiose gesture the tonsured magistrate returned the scroll to the Basileus, who once more made a show of unrolling it, and again seemingly reading a little, another line or two, and then closing it a second time and casually tucking it under his arm.

The room was very quiet.

Antipater, uncomfortably conscious of his place much too close to the center of the scene, glanced about him at the two Consuls, the assembled Ministers and Secretaries, the great generals and admirals, the Praetorian Prefect, the Keeper of the Imperial Treasury. Unlike the Emperor Maximilianus, who bore himself now with no sign whatever of self-importance, a small man who knew he was about to be diminished even further, they were all holding themselves bolt upright, standing with ferocious military rigidity. Did any of them realize what was in the letter? Probably not. Not the Salona part, anyway. Antipater's eye met that of Crown Prince Germanicus, who looked remarkably fresh for the occasion, newly bathed and spotless in a brilliant white robe edged with purple. Germanicus too had adopted today's general posture of martial erectness, which seemed notably inappropriate on him. But he seemed almost to be smiling. What, Antipater wondered, could there be to smile about on this terrible day?