Roma Eterna (34 page)

It was as though those plans had never been. “You will sit among my high ministers, Draco,” the new Emperor told me. “I will make you Consul, I think, in my first year. I will have the other Consulship myself. And you will also have the portfolio of the Ministry of Public Works; for the capital beyond all doubt is in need of beautification. I have a design for a new palace for myself in mind, and then perhaps we can do something about improving the shabby old Capitol, and there are some interesting foreign gods, I think, who would appreciate having temples erected in their honor, and then—”

If I had been Trajan Draco, I would perhaps have assassinated our crazy Demetrius in that moment and taken the throne for myself, both for the Empire's sake and my own. But I am only Tiberius Ulpius Draco, not Trajan of the same cognomen, and Demetrius has become Emperor and you know the rest.

And as for my book on Trajan the Dragon: well, per
haps I will complete it some day, when the Emperor has run short of projects for me to design. But I doubt that he ever will, and even if he does, I am not sure that it is a book I still want to give to the public, now that I have read Trajan's journal of the circumnavigation. If I were to tell the story of my ancestor's towering achievement, would I dare to tell the whole of it? I think not. And so I feel only relief at allowing my incomplete draft of the book to gather dust in its box. It was my aim, in this research of mine, to discover the inner nature of my great royal kinsman the Dragon; but I delved too deeply, it seems, and came to know him a little too well.

T
he Emperor,” said Quintus Cestius, “dined last night on fish and mushrooms sprinkled with powdered pearls, on lentils with onyx, on turnips with amber. He has the stomach of an ox and the mind of a madman.”

“Ah, do you think he's mad, then?” Sulpicius Silanus asked. A mischievous twinkle came into his eyes. “I don't. I think he's merely playful.”

“Playful,” Cestius said somberly. “Yes. Feeds his dogs on goose liver. Sleeps on couches of solid silver, with mattresses stuffed with rabbit fur or partridge feathers. Covers his furniture with cloth of gold. Yes, very playful indeed.”

“Has buckets of saffron dumped into the palace swimming pool before he'll dip a toe in,” Silanus said.

“Cooking-pots of silver.”

“Wine flavored with poppy juice.”

“All his food tinted blue one night, green the next, scarlet the night after that.”

“Drove a chariot pulled by four elephants down the concourse in front of the Vatican Palace.”

“And one drawn by four camels, the week before. It'll
be dogs next week, I suppose, and lions the week after that.”

“A madman,” said Cestius.

“Merely very playful,” Silanus said. And they both laughed, though each of them knew only too well that the Emperor Demetrius II's mounting extravagance was not any laughing matter; for Cestius was the Prefect of the Fiscus Imperialis, the Emperor's private purse, and Silanus, his counterpart on the other side of the Roman treasury, was Prefect of the Fiscus Publicus, out of which all governmental expenditures came. In some reigns, those two great pots of money had been kept rigidly segregated. In others, the Emperors had been not unwilling to dip into their private funds to pay for such popular things as the rebuilding of aqueducts and bridges, the underwriting of gladiatorial games, and the construction of grand new public buildings. But the Emperor Demetrius had never seemed to see any distinction at all between Fiscus Imperialis and Fiscus Publicus. He spent as he pleased, and left it up to Silanus and Cestius to find the money in one department of the treasury or the other. And in the last few years the problem had been growing steadily worse.

It was the first day of the new month, when the two treasurers customarily lunched together in the dining room that was provided for high governmental officials in the Senatorial office building just in back of the Senate House. They made a curious couple: the perpetually gloomy Quintus Cestius was round as a barrel, a big, fleshy-cheeked man of florid complexion, and the ever-exuberant Sulpicius Silanus was small and lean and spare, a taut little hatchet of a man who could easily have been tucked in a stray fold of Cestius's vast toga. The lunches that they favored were always the same, a plate of raw vegetables and apples for Cestius, and a gluttonous procession of soups, porridges, stewed meats, and aromatic cheeses soaked in honey for little Silanus. Cestius, plump from childhood though he had never had much of a fondness for food, of
ten wondered where Silanus managed to store all that he was capable of consuming at a single sitting.

As he worked on a great haunch of boar Silanus said, without looking up, “I have had a letter from my brother in Hispania. He tells me the Count Valerian Apollinaris has finished the reconquest there and will be returning to the capital soon.”

“Wonderful,” said Cestius darkly. “A great triumphal feast will be in order, then. A million and a half sesterces scattered at a single throw to pay for it: flamingo brains, mullets baked on a bed of hyacinths shipped up from Sicilia, venison of the giant stag of the far northlands, wines a hundred years old, and all the rest. All of it wasted on Apollinaris, who will disapprove of the expense, and who will sit there stiff as one of those stone gods from Aegyptus, merely nibbling at this dish and that one. But I'll have to find the money for it all the same. Or you will, I suppose.”

“My brother says,” Silanus continued, as though Cestius had not spoken at all, “that the thrifty Count Valerian Apollinaris is deeply disturbed by the shortfall in military funds that made his work of reconquest so much more complicated than it needed to be, and intends to speak vigorously with His Majesty concerning a tighter domestic budget.”

“The Count would be well advised not to try.”

“Would anyone, even the Emperor, dare to lay a finger on the Count Valerian Apollinaris, the hero of the War of Reunification?”

“I don't mean that he'd be in any danger,” said Cestius. “Only that the Emperor will pay no attention. Just the other day the equally thrifty Larcius Torquatus took the very same matter up with the Emperor at the palace. I wasn't there, but I heard. If anything, Torquatus has become more ferocious on the subject of the Emperor's wastefulness than Apollinaris ever was, now that he's part of the government himself. So there they were, the Consul and the Emperor, the Consul ranting and shouting, the Emperor laughing and laughing.”

“And he would laugh at us as well. You and I are the only two officials in the entire government who care at all about his level of expenditures. Other than Apollinaris and Torquatus, of course.”

“Yes. All the rest are fools or weaklings, or else just as mad as the Emperor himself.”

“And you and I are the ones who have to find the funds to pay the bills, somehow. We are the ones who bear the burden of the Emperor's lunacy,” said Silanus.

“Indeed.”

“And has the Emperor dismissed Torquatus, then, for shouting at him?”

“Oh, no, not at all. As ever, the Emperor is untroubled about such things. After Torquatus left the palace, I'm told, Demetrius sent him a little gift as a peace offering: the beautiful harlot Eumenia, stark naked and covered all over with gold dust, sitting in a jeweled carriage drawn by the black horses of Arabia that cost a hundred thousand sesterces apiece. They say that Torquatus nearly had a stroke when he saw it arrive.”

“Well, then,” said Silanus, “you'd better start putting money aside for a present for Apollinaris.”

 

The Count Valerian Apollinaris, just then, was hundreds of miles away in the great Hispanian city of Tarraco, the final stopping point on his whirlwind military tour of the Empire's rebellious western provinces. One by one he had subjugated them with a minimal expenditure of force and bloodshed: first Sicilia, where all the trouble had begun back in 2563, then Belgica and Gallia, and finally Hispania. His technique had been the same in each place, arriving with a small hand-picked army of tough, grim legionaries, demanding of the local governors an immediate renewal of the oath of allegiance to the Emperor, and then the swift seizure and public execution of eight or ten insurrectionist leaders as an example to the others. The idea was to remind the provincials that Roma was still
Roma, that the Imperial army was as efficient and ruthless now as it had been in the days of Trajan and Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius seventeen centuries before, and that he, Count Valerian Apollinaris, was the living embodiment of all the ancient Roman virtues that had made the Empire the immortal globe-spanning entity that it was.

And it had worked. In a series of quick, bloody strokes, Apollinaris had put an end—for all time, he hoped—to the slow, steady process of crumbling that had afflicted the Empire for nearly a century, during this era of foolishness and wanton waste that was beginning to be known as the Second Decadence.

Now, coming to the end of his fourth term of office as Consul, he was ready to return to Roma and enter into private life once more. Power for its own sake had never interested him, nor great wealth, or enormous luxury. Wealth was something he had been born to, and he took it for granted; power had accrued to him almost by default from his early manhood on, and because he had never hungered for it he never abused it; and as for enormous luxury, he left that to those who craved it, such as that hapless idiot, the Emperor Demetrius II.

Demetrius, of course, was an unending problem. The craziest Emperor of a largely crazy dynasty, he had held the throne for more than twenty years of ever-increasing madness, and it was small wonder that the Empire seemed to be spinning centrifugally apart. Only the devoted work, behind the scenes, of a small group of staunchly disciplined men like Apollinaris and his Consular counterpart back in Roma, Marcus Larcius Torquatus, had kept the regime from collapsing entirely.

There had been difficulties in the outlying provinces for nearly a century. Some of that was inherent in the Imperial system: the Empire was really too big to be governed from a central authority. That much had been understood from earliest Imperial times, which was why no serious attempt had ever been made to bring such far-off places as India
and the lands that lay beyond it under direct Roman administration. Even a one-capital system had proven unworkable, and so Constantinopolis had been founded in the East and the Empire had been divided.

But then, after Saturninus—another of the crazy Emperors—had practically bankrupted the Western Empire in his hopeless attempt to conquer the New World, and set it drifting off into the pathetic era later to be called the Great Decadence, the Eastern realm had taken advantage of the West's weakness to invade it and then had come the two hundred years of Eastern rule, until the invincible Flavius Romulus restored the Western Empire's independence. Determined never to allow the East to regain the upper hand, Flavius Romulus had stripped Constantinopolis of its status as a capital city and reunited the severed halves of the Empire a thousand years after their first separation.

But it would take a Flavius Romulus to govern so great a stretch of territory single-handedly, and very few of his successors had been up to the mark. Within a century after his death the throne was in the possession of Demetrius of Vindonissa, a wealthy provincial patrician who just happened to have a streak of hereditary insanity in his family. Both Demetrius's son Valens Aquila and his grandson Marius Antoninus were notably eccentric Emperors; Marius's son Lodovicus had been reasonably stable, but he had blithely handed the throne on to
his
son, the present Emperor Demetrius, who by easy stages had come to make the citizens of Roma believe that they were being ruled once again by Caligula, or Commodus, or Caracalla.

Demetrius II was, at least, not murderous, as those three had been. But his reign, which by now had gone on longer than any of theirs, had been marked by a similar wildness of inspiration. Though he had not, like Caligula, tried to declare himself a god or appoint his horse to the Senate, he had given banquets at which six hundred ostriches were slaughtered at a time, and ordered the sinking of fully laden merchant ships in the harbor at Ostia to
demonstrate the Empire's prodigious wealth. Unlike Commodus he had not amused himself by posing as a surgeon and operating on hapless subjects, but he did, now and then, set tame lions and leopards loose in the guest rooms of the palace to terrify his sleeping friends. He did not, like Caracalla, have his brother and other members of his own family murdered, but he did stage lotteries that all members of his court were required to enter at great expense, in which one man might win ten pounds of gold and another ten dead dogs or a dozen spoiled cabbages.

In the days of the indifferent Valens Aquila and the witless Marius Antoninus such far-off provinces as Syria and Persia began running themselves with very small regard for the decrees of the central government. That in itself caused little alarm in Roma, so long as the exotic goods that those lands exported to the capital continued to arrive. But then, in Lodovicus's reign, the two provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia, just east of the Italian heartland of the Empire, also tried to break free, and had to be reined in by force. And then, soon after Demetrius II came to power, Sicilia, always a troublesome island of malcontents, chose to cease paying taxes to the Imperial tax collectors. When Demetrius took no action, the movement spread to Belgica and Gallia and Hispania and declarations of independence quickly followed. That, of course, could not be tolerated, even by the likes of Demetrius.

Apollinaris was Consul then, his third time in the office, sharing the Consulship with the feckless drunkard Duilius Eurupianus. Since the time of Maximilianus the Great, at least, the Consulship had been a basically meaningless post, a mere honorific, with nothing like the virtually royal powers it had had in the ancient days of the Republic. As Epictetus had said long ago, the Consulship under the Emperors, having lost nearly all its functions, had degenerated into a post that allowed you nothing more than the privilege of underwriting the games of the Circus and giving free dinners to a lot of undeserving flatterers.

But a crisis now was at hand. Firm action was required. Apollinaris, resigning his Consulship, called upon Eurupianus to do the same, making it clear to him that if he chose to remain in office it would have adverse effects on his health. Then Apollinaris prevailed upon the Emperor, who was preoccupied at the time with forming a collection of venomous serpents from the farthest reaches of the realm, to reappoint him to the Consulship in collaboration with an equally public-spirited citizen, the dour and austere Larcius Torquatus. At Apollinaris's urgent behest the Emperor agreed that he and Torquatus would be granted emergency powers far beyond any that the Consuls had had for hundreds of years, and would remain in office indefinitely, instead of serving one-year terms at the pleasure of the Emperor. Torquatus would attempt to restore some sanity on the home front; Apollinaris, an experienced soldier, would march through the rebellious provinces, bringing them one after another to heel.

Which had been achieved. Here in Tarraco, Apollinaris was packing up, getting ready to go home.

Tiberius Charax, his aide-de-camp, a slender, narrow-eyed Greek from Ionia who had served at his side for many years, entered and said, “A letter for you from Roma, from the Consul Larcius Torquatus, Count Valerian. Also Prince Laureolus has arrived and is waiting outside to see you.”