by Simon Turney
The Vestals were escorted into the palace by Praetorians and the battle against the deadly blaze before us continued. I realised just how perilous things were as the night wore on, and began to wonder whether the Praetorian prefect had been right. The breeze remained a slight, yet steady southerly, and the flames continued to advance on the Palatine.
The teams of men dealing with the fire began to concentrate on the lowest slopes of the Palatine, dousing the roof of the Vestals’ house, hurling endless buckets of water into the shops on the Via Nova, buildings whose very bones were built into the foundations of the palaces above. Despite the many men working there, they were still losing. Some enterprising soul at the Tiberian palace had set up another three bucket chains fed by the fountains and ponds in the palace gardens, which were soaking the northern edge of the palace constantly, preventing the flames that licked all around it from taking hold. There were no such easy sources of water where we were or on that part of the palace closer to the amphitheatre, though, and the fire was making inroads there despite the best efforts of all concerned.
Finally, as the pre-dawn light began to show beyond the Caelian Hill, barely visible beneath the cloud of choking black, we had to move. The fire was advancing across the Palatine. Due to a happy combination of wind direction and those three bucket chains, it neatly avoided the Tiberian palace and the atrium of Caligula, but the recently reconstructed Temple of Jupiter Palatinus and the various civil structures on these slopes were at great risk.
At the emperor’s command, the remaining men set out to save the temple, abandoning the Via Nova and what remained of the Vestals’ house to the conflagration. A thousand men worked tirelessly, fetching water and throwing it endlessly at the endangered northern side of the temple complex. Even then, the portico caught and was already badly damaged before the vigiles, supplemented by every Praetorian who could be spared and a number of civically motivated citizens, managed to get it under control and save the temple itself.
The sad fact was that in saving the Tiberian palace and the Temple of Jove, there were not enough men and resources to protect what lay between them. Even with reinforcements arriving now from Veii and Ostia, hurrying to help fight the blaze, the fire roared between those two soaked bulwarks, leaping from building to building like some athletic Minoan dancer, leaving charring infernos in its wake as it advanced on the main palace. We who had been observing, including the emperor himself, were steadily forced back by the blaze and before long we were in our palace once more, watching as hellfires gnawed at the edge of it.
Given the direction of the prevailing breeze and the general advance of the blaze, we acquiesced to the Praetorian prefect’s next request and abandoned much of the palace, leaving it to the firefighters. We exited the palace and moved up past the Temple of Apollo and those houses that had once accommodated the very first emperor and empress, to the heights of the Temple of the Magna Mater on the highest corner of the Palatine hill, where we had gathered years ago for our masquerade festival on the day of Maternus’ attack, Commodus dressed as Hercules and me a gladiatrix. Now I was dressed as an empress and he, though attired as a prince, was the god he had once impersonated.
From the heights of that ancient place we watched our palace consumed by flames. Here alone of all the southern edge of the Palatine was a ready escape route in the form of the staircase that led down to the Forum Boarium. Down, strangely, past the old bathhouse and the squat two-storey residence and workshop of an imperial seamstress where I had grown up. My eyes strayed down those steps uncomfortably. I had not once trodden those stairs since I was a girl, first arriving in the palace, and I had no wish to descend them now. Somehow it felt as though to do so would be final. An end to my time in the imperial household. Had we now half the water I had run away from on that day, we could have stopped the blaze in its tracks. Despite my own faith, I felt a frisson ripple across my flesh at the thought of the fire reaching this place and consuming the Temple of Apollo, in a horrible echo of that wartime disaster that was said to have brought us the plague.
Some enterprising soul had given the order to clear parts of the palace complex of their most prized contents, carrying them to the Capitol or down past the circus to the Aventine where they would be safer. I watched as a huge line of men carried priceless, irreplaceable documents from the library of Augustus even as the flames from the neighbouring palace began to lick at it. I learned later, to my dismay, that they failed to evacuate the entire building and at least a quarter of the knowledge it held was lost when it burned.
The sun was rising now on a new day, still oppressed by that huge cloud of boiling smoke which announced to the world that Rome burned. We stayed there like refugees, watching our world char for the better part of a day.
In the event, it was nature herself who saved Rome. Mother would have said it was God, though I doubt he had much to do with it on this occasion. Most of those present put it down to the million prayers that had been cast up to Jupiter over the night. Commodus believed that mighty Jove himself had deigned to save Rome because of the effort the emperor had bent to saving that lofty temple from the fire. Piety begat divine intervention in the minds of Rome. I usually find in my own faith that all piety begets is guilt.
Whatever the cause, be it divine or natural, Rome experienced a rainstorm of the sort it does get in summer, though only on very rare occasions. One might even label the timing miraculous since, without that sudden unexpected rain, likely the whole city would have burned to ash.
In the end we lost several temples and warehouses, a huge swathe of shops and stores, some ancillary palace structures and maybe a quarter of the palace complex itself, mainly comprising the public spaces from the aula regia to the libraries above the circus. The damage was appalling, but it did not take a lot of imagination to realise how much worse it could have been. And in the end the majority of the damage was to public buildings or the imperial complex, with surprisingly little impact on the ordinary folk of Rome. Had the wind blown north or east that night, a third of the city would have gone in hours, and much of it would have been commercial or residential.
That evening, as the sun slid slowly into the west and the fine sprinkling of rain continued, we stood where we had spent much of the night, amid the charred bones of the Palatine, inspecting the blackened world around us. Commodus and I, Eclectus and the Praetorian prefect, Laetus, as well as various men of the Roman administration and other officers of the Guard, vigiles and urban cohorts. We pondered on what had happened and, with some relief, on what could have happened had not luck or divine providence been with us.
‘It is time,’ Commodus said, suddenly.
We all turned to him in surprise. He was suddenly oddly divine in the way he stood there, simply dressed, a man who had stayed amid the burning of Rome and helped plan its defence. Hercules incarnate. My Hercules, if only he would come back to me.
‘Time, Majesty?’ Eclectus prompted quietly, and for the first time that night and day, Commodus turned and looked directly into my eyes.
‘Time to change. The gods have swept away old, foul, corrupt, pestilential Rome. Now is the time for the golden age. Now is the time to expunge old Rome and to build anew. To build Colonia Commodiana.’
I shivered. I nodded with the others, of course, for he was right. It was time. And the plan had been as much my idea as his, if not more so. But there was something that troubled me about it, and it was not until I was lying awake once more, unable to sleep, quite apart from the ever-present stench of smoke, that I realised what it was.
Once, long ago, another emperor had watched the city burn and had leapt to the aid of its people. That emperor had, just the same, planned to build anew on the carbonised bones of Rome. And he might not have planned a golden age for his people so much as a golden house for himself, but history carries warnings, and Commodus was becoming a living echo of Nero at that moment.
Sleep eva
ded me entirely with that thought.
XXIII
DEMOLISHING MY DEFENCES
Rome, spring ad 192
We continued as Rome’s glassy-eyed emperor and empress throughout the autumn and winter that followed that dreadful fire. It took until the cold winds and frost came just to clear away the debris and shore up the buildings that could be at least partially saved. True work on the rebuilding would start with the spring thaw. In the meantime, the imperial brickworks at Pollinarium worked long days throughout the inclement weather, turning out stack after stack of materials for the rebuilding the following year.
True to his word, Commodus set about the refounding of the city in his image even before the structures could be repaired. In the forum, the great Fasti calendar was replaced with Commodus’ new months. I wondered what the great Caesar and his heir would think about the loss of Iulius and Augustus in the summer months. Indeed, how would the pagan gods feel about the loss of their own months? Confusion reigned in the markets and preparation for festivals as people tried to remember the sequence of the new month names: Lucius, Aelius, Aurelius, Commodus, Augustus, Herculeus, Romanus, Exsuperatorius, Amazonius, Invictus, Felix, Pius. Of course, though I cannot say for certain, I can only imagine that most of the public went about privately using the traditional month names. The populace took that change in good enough humour, though it baffled people all that winter, and a number of folk missed celebrating the first day of Saturnalia through date confusion.
The order also went out to append the honorific ‘Commodiana’ to each legion’s name. This, at least, was a simple change and a welcome one. Every military unit liked to be honoured by their emperor, of course, and even if that honour was shared across the entire army, it was still an honour.
All this happened on the Ides of Aelius, which had once been Februarius. The day was labelled the Dies Commodianus, for clear reasons. The day of the refounding of Rome as Colonia Lucia Aurelia Nova Commodiana. The day of the dawning of the Saeculum Aureum Commodianum – the golden age of Commodus.
The people revelled in the changes. Their emperor was stamping his mark on the world and each transformation helped herald a new world that was dawning. For the people, there seemed to be divine validation for the emperor’s new world, too. The fire that could have utterly destroyed the city in fact burned away some of the more notable symbols of the old Rome and previous regimes, the Flavian temple and the palace of Domitian. It burned with a strangely sweet and spicy smell from the eastern warehouses, and almost miraculously barely touched the world of the common man before it was extinguished seemingly by divine intervention. Far from seeing the fire as a bad sign, it seemed to be the gods clearing the way for Commodus’ new age. Perhaps most miraculous of all, the plague abated that winter. As if the fire had burned through the strain of disease in the city, cases of the pestilence dried up seemingly overnight. It truly was remarkable. By late autumn there were no longer carts in the street. By early winter the burial pits that had been used for over a decade, constantly extended and replaced, were sealed over and planted with grass. Physicians returned to their ordinary practices in confusion, given that the plague had been the main focus of their work for decades.
Even I, as a Christian, found it hard to deny the evidence of some sort of divine strategy at work. Perhaps God’s plan had a place for Commodus even if he was not one of us. After all, he had been the first emperor in all of Roman history to save Christians from persecution.
If only that strange wall between us would crumble and fall. There was still a distance that I could not overcome, and when I tried to discuss it, Commodus would have none of it, refusing to acknowledge the subject or, occasionally, storming off in a mood.
The senate disapproved of all this, of course, because disapproval is the standard expression of a senator. Lord, but they had something in common with Christian priests. And yet for all their disapproval, they too fell readily into line with the new regime. Despite dissenting voices in that great body, namely Sosius Falco, Cassius Dio, Marius Maximus and their ilk, the bulk of the senators, in the most revoltingly obsequious manner, voted to rename the senate the ‘Commodian Fortunate Senate’. Their sycophancy knows no bounds. Even Commodus snorted at the news.
As well as the changes in name that the empire adopted, the new age was heralded by a veritable explosion in Herculean imagery. Statues and busts appeared everywhere. New coins were issued with Commodus in his lion pelt, the Roman Hercules. Some appeared with my image on, which took me somewhat by surprise, though to my distaste I was depicted variously as Minerva or an Amazon or some other pagan symbol. I wondered what the Bishop of Rome thought of his wayward sheep when he handled coins of her as a goddess.
One statue that caused something of a fuss appeared outside the senate house that winter. Hercules, clearly Commodus in the guise, with an iron bow, pulling back the string, an arrow nocked and aimed. The target? The doorway of the senate house. It was clearly a statement and could be saying any one of several things, though none of them were good for the Commodian Fortunate Senate. Several leading lights had already petitioned the palace to have the statue moved, voices led by that same Falco who had argued against the renaming of the senate, but thus far their entreaties had not made it through the palace doors.
The breaking point for me came not even with my Minervian coinage, but when I emerged from my room one morning, with Commodus already long gone about his day’s business, to find two new busts in the corridor outside, staring at me. An ornate marble head of Commodus with that ubiquitous lion skin over head and shoulders, paws knotted across his naked chest, great club held casually over one shoulder and a hand raised, containing the apples of the Hesperides. His expression was one of benign superiority and, while there is always a little variation in marble representation from artist to artist, clearly the men responsible for the carving and painting of this particular work had done so from a live model. It was him in perfect painted marble, right down to his eye colour and the golden shimmer of his hair. I was used to seeing such statues now, of course. They appeared wherever a statement needed to be made or where the easily influenced public would be most prevalent. To find one outside my room watching me was new and unsettling.
Possibly worse, beside him, I saw myself. Equally, that painted marble likeness of me had been fashioned by men who had seen me, known me even. It was me in perfect reflection. The sculptor had left my hair down in the manner I used when I could not be bothered to fashion it up in high Roman style. Somehow that seemed to suit the fact that I was clearly an Amazon again. I will admit that I was far from the most attentive and pious of Christians, but with every new vision of myself in pagan glory it began to worry and annoy me more.
I knew why it was happening, of course. The memory of his deceased wife had to be swept away entirely. Her busts had gone with her exile, but it is harder to remove a memory than a physical reminder. Thus I was being used as counterpoint to his Hercules to add legitimacy to the new regime. A god needed a suitable consort. That was why we still walked as though we were man and wife despite the chasm between us. Something would have to give soon. Things could not go on like this, with the gulf in our relationship unexplained and not discussed. Either he would have to discard me, which I felt sure the senators would have liked, or heal that rift and take me to wife so that I could truly be part of his new world. This strange half-life was killing me inside.
Dressed and ready for the world, I emerged from my apartments and found the pair of Praetorians on duty by the door.
‘Where is the emperor?’
One of the soldiers turned a strange, almost apologetic look on me. ‘He left early for the colossus, Domina.’
I nodded. He had been there several times over the past few days. I gathered my servants and a few of the Guard, collected my litter and bearers and began the journey to the colossus. We passed through the bones of the burned public palace whe
re once, as a child, I had watched the emperor’s twin almost drown in a pool, and across the Palatine towards the forum valley.
At the eastern end of the forum, when Nero’s Golden House was torn down, the Flavian emperors had constructed their great amphitheatre, watched over by the Temple of Venus and Rome. But while the greater part of Nero’s lavish palace was destroyed or reused as foundations, one part remained in glory. That narcissistic young despot had had a colossal statue of himself fashioned in bronze. Over a hundred feet tall, it had stood upon a time in the atrium of his great house. After his death, and not wanting to waste such a grand monument, the thing was moved to a position between the temple and the amphitheatre, the identifying features of Nero struck from it and refashioned as the image of the god Sol Invictus. Thus it had stood for so long beside that grand amphitheatre that the plebs had even started to call the place the Colosseum.
The colossus had been Nero for not quite five years. It had been Sol for over a century. Soon it would change again. I saw the great bronze god even before we emerged into the open space nearby. The paved area between the conical fountain, the temple, the arena and the colossus was devoid of citizens, for the Praetorians had created a security cordon around their emperor and his companions. They let me past, of course, and I alighted from my litter below the steps of the temple.
Commodus was in conversation with men who were likely engineers and architects, he in his now common Greek chiton garb, his lictors standing nearby with their bundles of rods and their Herculean accoutrements on a cushion. Of the small gathering of officials, clerks and other functionaries, one figure broke away and hurried over to me.
I smiled at Eclectus, one of my oldest friends.
