Commodus

by Simon Turney

  ‘I mourn the loss of my son, Agrippina. I mourn darkly and I mourn hard. I do not sleep. I cry often.’

  It was such a sudden change that it took us all by surprise, even my mother, whose shell of silence cracked.

  ‘No parent should have to bury a son, Majesty.’

  There was another silence, a pause filled only by the gurgling of the wine fountain.

  ‘Agreed,’ he said finally. ‘Unfortunately, I am not to be given the luxury of grief. Rome demands. She always demands. She is ever hungry and I can never give her the peace that I would have from her. My advisors and those in the senate with the more insistent voices remind me constantly of the succession. I believe they fear that I am on the point of death, simply because I am no longer a young man. We have had half a century of internal peace in the empire since my illustrious forebear wrestled control of the empire from that dog Marcus Antonius and founded a dynasty.’

  I caught the hardening of my brother’s jaw as his fingers rested on the hilt of his knife. Caesar’s great friend Antonius was, after all, another of our great-grandfathers, and the comment was almost an open insult.

  ‘And my dynastic progression died with my son,’ the emperor said in a cold, flat voice. ‘So the succession hangs in the balance and the blabbering old senators fear a new civil war if it cannot be put right.’

  ‘The senators are astute, Majesty,’ Mother said quietly. ‘The succession is of prime importance.’

  ‘I am not on the verge of death!’ snapped Tiberius with anger that seemed to turn into smoke and drift about the room. He sighed again and slumped. ‘I have made my decision, Agrippina. Despite the differences between you and I, your husband was my nephew and I loved my brother – his father – above all men. And since Germanicus’ tragic end I would not see your line fade. You are of the house of the divine Caesar, after all. I have already logged my intentions with the senate. Your eldest boys – Nero and Drusus – will be appointed as my heirs in my son’s place, and before you ask why, I will explain something to you, Agrippina. I know that you do not like me and do not trust me. And I mirror your dislike to some lesser extent. But you have ever made your views known to me, and despite our enmity you still treat me as your emperor and a distant family member. In four years in the city you have never plotted against me or involved yourself with my enemies, and neither have your children. I have those in my court –’ his sweeping arm took in the nameless lackeys in the room ‘– who profess to be my closest friends and greatest supporters and who have made moves against me that they do not think I am aware of.’

  I was startled by a sudden gurgling noise and my gaze – along with that of all others – snapped in the direction of the sound. A young man in a rich toga was suddenly jerking and spasming as crimson began to soak the white folds of his attire. Above him, Sejanus, the Praetorian commander, withdrew his blade from the man’s neck, wiped it carefully on a rag and sheathed it as the body of the unfortunate courtier collapsed, slicking blood, to the floor.

  I felt nauseated with the shock of it. The tang of the blood filled the air with its cloying scent even amid the stink of his voided bowel. But it was neither the smell nor the sight that sickened me as much as the realisation that a life had been snuffed out before my very eyes. Ended viciously and coldly. I think I threw up a little.

  It was the first time I had ever seen someone die. It was to be far from the last.

  Beside me, Caligula’s attention was, oddly, not on the blood-soaked body, but on the dark killer behind him. I felt certain my brother had committed to memory every tiny facet of the prefect’s being.

  Then the emperor was talking again as though nothing had happened, and my mother instantly returned her attention to Tiberius.

  ‘So you see,’ the emperor said diffidently, ‘I would rather place my trust in a reliable enemy than an unreliable friend. Nero will be my heir apparent, with Drusus as his second.’

  ‘In case one dies,’ my mother said in a flat tone. Heirs died for many reasons, and I think Mother did not relish the idea of the increased danger in which such an appointment put her boys.

  ‘I have been caught unprepared once, Agrippina. Do not contest me over this. Think only of the honour I do your children. The deed is done, anyway. I am seeking neither your permission nor your approval. I am informing you of what has been decided.’

  Nero and Drusus were staring wide-eyed at the emperor. Can you imagine what it must be like to be told that you have been plucked from among so many with equal or better claim and made heir to the whole world? All I could think, though, was how my youngest brother must feel.

  As the emperor continued his conversation with Mother, I turned to Caligula, catching with distaste the sight of Sejanus clicking his fingers and slaves dragging away the body, leaving a gleaming trail of blood across the marble.

  ‘Why them and not you?’ I whispered.

  My brother, his fingers no longer on his knife, turned a quizzical look on me. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Why Nero and Drusus and not you? If it is safer for the emperor to have two heirs than one, would it not be even safer with three?’

  Caligula frowned for a moment, and then fixed me with an easy smile. ‘Drusus and Nero are men, Livilla. Sixteen and seventeen years old. They are about to be made tribunes in the army. They are ready-made successors. I am but eleven, remember, and not yet a man in the eyes of state.’

  I couldn’t see how he was so calmly accepting of it, though, and I drove on. ‘Doesn’t it annoy you?’

  ‘Far from it, little sister,’ he replied, lowering his tone to a barely audible level as we pulled away from any unwanted ear. ‘Do not fret, for I envy neither Nero or Drusus their unsought windfall. In fact, I would quite hate to be in their position. The court is a dangerous place, as you must by now have noticed. Nero and Drusus will have to be vigilant. Their every word and gesture will be the subject of scrutiny and they will have to navigate the tides and currents of the emperor’s court with great care.’

  My eyes drifted first to Nero and Drusus who had hungrily involved themselves in conversation with the emperor – were they capable of the caution Caligula was advocating? – and then to the bloody streak across the floor, which was all that remained of a Roman nobleman. In the deep shadow beyond, the prefect Sejanus stood with his arms folded, surveying the room.

  ‘And watch that one,’ Caligula whispered at my side. ‘He will not stop advancing until he outranks Jove himself.’ I watched Sejanus for a moment longer, then flicked a quick glance at my brother, but he was already deep in conversation with Drusilla. I turned instead to ’Pina at my other side, but she was busy listening in to the conversation of state as though it might provide as useful information as her intelligence-gathering at the villa. I was effectively alone, and all I could do was look at the emperor, the ageing ruler who had just named my brothers as his heirs, and at Sejanus, who seemed so comfortable in the gloom that he might have been made of shadow.

  And I started to shiver all over again.

  The following seasons passed surprisingly swiftly, despite the ever-present, lurking fear of interference from the emperor or the Praetorian prefect. Once the old emperor had named my brothers as his heirs, Mother called in favours to secure Nero and Drusus their tribunates as quickly as possible. It would have been obvious even to those unversed in our family’s ways that she was attempting to keep her sons as far from the perils of court as possible. It had not escaped my notice, though, that if our father had been poisoned on the orders of the emperor, he had been serving in Syria at the time, and so clearly distance was no real protection. Tiberius had been distinctly unimpressed that, within a month of his announcement, his two new heirs had left the city for military posts, but he could hardly complain about a young Roman following the traditional steps on the cursus honorum.

  And so Nero had taken up his posting as a tribune with the Third Aug
usta at Theveste, his brother Drusus accepting a place with the Third Cyrenaica in Aegyptus. The whole of Africa was in turmoil at the time with the rebellion of the barbarous King Tacfarinas, and Nero at least would become involved in the war, if not Drusus as well, yet Mother was not as worried as I expected. Not only were tribunes hardly expected to fight in battle, but also, in her opinion, a desert full of Berber tribesmen posed less of a threat to the family than one Praetorian with a knife.

  I had watched my brothers pass through several stages of reaction to the emperor’s pronouncement. Disbelief merged quickly into a certain smug satisfaction, unintentionally aimed often at Caligula and Lepidus. Then, as the shine wore off and the reality of what the succession truly meant, and the dangers it would bring, sank in, they moved to a nervous, jumpy acceptance. By the time their tribunates were secured and they left Rome, I think both were pleased to go. Drusilla and I watched them leave with sadness, Caligula with a calculated understanding, and Agrippina with disappointment. I think she had been expecting that their rise in status would positively affect her somehow. It had not, and with their departure it seemed likely nothing would come of it at all.

  Despite four of us remaining at the villa with Mother, the absence of our two older brothers left a sizeable hole in our lives, and things seemed unnaturally quiet. We went on as always, if with less enthusiasm, playing with friends and learning what would be required of us when we were older.

  I suspect that Mother despaired of me in that regard. Agrippina was a good student, absorbing everything she could, storing it away to retrieve when she needed it, calculating girl that she was. We all knew that she would excel at marriage in the way she excelled at anything, because she was so single-minded and manipulative. To some extent I pitied her future husband, since I could hardly see her settling meekly into the background in any marriage. The man who took Agrippina to wife would certainly have his hands full. Drusilla, conversely, would make the perfect Roman wife, damn her. She learned every bit as well as our oldest sister, but she was learning in order to be good at the role, rather than to see how the role could be made to serve her, as Agrippina so clearly did.

  Me? I wasn’t sure I would ever marry. I had managed to convince myself that Mother would be sick of the whole process by the time she had arranged everything for Agrippina and Drusilla and got around to me. I was headstrong and liked my freedom. I would be a less-than-perfect wife, and I knew it. My family was more important, and it always would be. I listened half-heartedly as I was told what would be required of me and was taught how to do the myriad things a wife needed to do to keep her husband’s house in order. Frankly, I was more interested in the things Caligula was learning: oratory, history, mathematics, even a little practice with a sword when Mother was feeling generous.

  To lighten the mood after our daily studies, our friends would visit. The games were different these days, of course. Caligula was thirteen now, and expecting to take on the man’s toga soon. We girls ranged between ten and seven, with myself always struggling along as the youngest. Our games became more elaborate and less childish. Our friends Callavia and Tullius were starting to lose interest in the things that entertained me, one with an eye for boys and the other with a desire only to pick up a practice sword and test his strength, and Lepidus seemed to have no time for anything but standing and staring moon-eyed at Drusilla. For her part, she did nothing to discourage him, and I think that even then the attention she paid to her lessons was simply in preparation for netting our handsome young companion. Lepidus and Caligula remained firm friends, often taking afternoons out riding or at the races with some of the more trustworthy staff from the villa.

  Two years of this, from that day we had left the emperor’s room in astonishment with brothers in the imperial succession. It was not a bad time, but it lacked some of the youthful exuberance of the previous years, and the absence of our brothers affected us in subtle ways.

  The world changed slowly as I drifted along in my family life, largely unaware of the vast implications of what was happening beyond our walls. The winter of that year rolled on into the spring of the next, and after a long hot summer of no news from our brothers in the south, finally the war in Africa ended. Mother almost collapsed in relief at the knowledge that her sons would no longer be racing across Mauretania chasing down rebels, but then spent months waiting impatiently each day for the riders of the cursus publicus who might bear news that one son or the other had fallen in the last days of the war. Again, when letters arrived in consecutive weeks from both Nero and Drusus, Mother sagged with relief.

  Closer to home, the snake Sejanus began to move more into the light. The prefect had long been involved in an affair with the emperor’s niece, Claudia Livia Julia, though I had paid scant attention to such talk at the time as unimportant. Now, with a respectable period of a year having passed since the death of her husband, Sejanus petitioned the emperor to marry her. The importance of this move still passed me by until I found Mother and Caligula both fretting over it and asked my brother why it should matter to us. Caligula told me in the most grave tone: such a marriage would make Sejanus a member of the House of the Julii and place him in the line of succession, probably above my brothers. Personally I saw that as a good thing, since it might make them less of a target, but it seemed I was wrong. Sejanus would then, my brother confided, attempt to remove all other claimants until he was the only heir.

  The panic came to naught in the end as the emperor denied Sejanus his marriage. I can only imagine how the prefect had taken the news. Quietly respectful, I imagine, bowing to the emperor and making obeisance until he returned to his own house, where I can picture him tearing down the drapes and smashing the furniture in his rage at being denied a place in the succession.

  Now aware of the importance of the prefect’s attempted matrimony, I paid more attention over the following seasons, and began to understand a little of how my brother saw the world. Every tiny piece of news fitted into a web, and when you understood the positions in that web held by you and your enemies, you could begin to prepare against eventualities. Over the following winter we watched the prefect slowly but surely undermining the emperor’s authority, securing allies in useful stations, increasing his list of clients and appointing his lackeys to positions of power. At the same time he began to pour honeyed words into the ear of Tiberius, feeding the old man’s mourning misery and his increasing mania, persuading him ever more to step back from the direct running of the empire.

  Every month saw more power in the hands of Sejanus and Tiberius a little more removed from his empire. I was horrified. Though I had no love for the old emperor, the thought of Sejanus on the throne was shudder-inducing; more than once I asked Caligula why no one did anything.

  ‘What can anyone do?’ he replied bleakly one time. ‘Anyone who speaks out against the prefect disappears or is arrested on fabricated charges. And the emperor still trusts Sejanus, enough to more or less let the man run the empire for him. The best anyone can do is to hope and pray.’

  So I hoped. And I prayed. And all I received was silence.

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