The Four Emperors

by David Blixt

  It was wretched. Yes, the mechanics were fascinating to think about, but the results were far less impressive. While there had been water-organs for four hundred years, this new innovation of Nero's made the whole idea seem untenable. The air-flow varied at all times, and thus so did the quality of the notes produced. The Greek system of perfect pitch seemed drastically off, the chromatic scale not blending at all with the diatonic one.

  Worse, Nero himself seemed to know it, which only made him more determined. He played harder, which was counter-productive, as the levers worked best with only a light touch. To compensate further, he started to sing, warbling out a weak voice honed through years of breathing and stomach exercises into a high, false whine. When he saw grown men weeping, he seemed happier. That they were weeping at either the torture or absurdity of it all, he did not know. He imagined they were moved.

  After the second hour of the concert, Old Sabinus was restless. They all were, but most men were doing their best to hide it. Not the head of the Flavians! He was folding and unfolding his arms, tapping his leg to some internal tune, and huffing out sighs every second minute.

  “Will you stop it?” asked Sabinus in his ear. “That's the third time he's looked at you.”

  Old Sabinus pulled a face. “Let him look. If I offend him, I'll remove the offense by removing the offender.”

  “Father, you can't be thinking of leaving.”

  “Runs in the family. Little brother falls asleep at a concert, he gets a war. If I stand up and leave I may be made governor of Germania.” He gathered his toga about him.

  Sabinus shot out a hand into the folds of the wool, grasping his father's arm. “You can't leave!”

  The old scoundrel grinned his toothless smile. “Watch me.” Throwing out his left hand and clutching his chest with his right, Old Sabinus rose shakily to his feet, mouth agape. Then he began shuddering, convulsing in a most convincing way, before twirling around and falling backwards over the senators seated on the next row forward.

  “He's dead! The concert's killed him!”

  Men were beside themselves trying to help carry Old Sabinus from the theatre, even as Nero continued to play. Sabinus was concerned for a moment that his father had faked his way into a real heart attack. But a check of his throat saw his pulse beating firmly away, even as he lay there as if struck with a sacrificial axe.

  Shaking and wanting to laugh all at once, Sabinus gestured for his sons and cousin to take the old man up and carry him from the amphitheatre. He darted a glance at Nero, who gave a perceptible nod with his head. As a relieved Sabinus followed the prone figure of his father from the concert, he heard Nero invent some extemporary verses about a man so moved by music that he died. They were dreadful.

  Old Sabinus continued to play dead until they were well away, over half-way home. Finally he said, “Let me down now. If I'd been thinking ahead, I'd have ordered a litter today. Ah well.” Grinning like a mischievous child caught filching sticky buns, he patted Clemens on the back. “All thanks to you, young man. I'd never have thought of it.”

  Sabinus pulled a face. “So, do we hold a funeral? Shall I hire gladiators and some professional mourners? Don my toga pulla and cover my head? Shall we hire an actor to put on a wax mask of your face and march through the streets? Or would you prefer we cremate you in public?”

  “Not quite that far,” said Old Sabinus. “A miraculous recovery. If I have to feign illness for the next month, that's a small price to pay for getting us all out of that insult to ears, heart, and art. Don't you agree?”

  Sabinus had to confess that he did.

  Later they heard that Nero had ended his concert with a performance of Oedipus in Exile, closing with the final lines of the song: 'They drive me to my death: wife, mother, father.'

  The evil omens were piling higher for Nero. Was it worse that they were self-inflicted? Or was it the divine part within Nero that drove him ever closer to his own end?

  * * *

  CAESAREA, JUDEA

  The gods seemed bent on toying with the Flavians, too. When he later heard the tale of his brother's mock death, Vespasian counted backwards and found that it was just about that same day when he had encountered his own fake corpse. For, having returned from reducing towns along the Dead Sea, Vespasian arrived at his camp at the same time as a very strange offering from Jerusalem – a coffin.

  “It has your name on it, general,” observed young Trajanus curiously.

  Thumbs prickling, Vespasian summoned both Josephus and Nicanor, his tame Hebrews, as well as several soldiers. Well armed and well back, he had the nails removed by armoured engineers.

  But inside the coffin there was no threat. None at all. Just an elderly man with a long grey beard, breathing shallowly. As the sand and grit fell into the coffin, he began to hack and wheeze. Had the desperate Hebrews sent a man with an illness to infect them? Vespasian had heard tales of Jews and plagues before.

  Yet, upon seeing the false corpse's wizened face, both Nicanor and Josephus leapt to assist him. “Rabban!”

  “Who is this?” demanded Vespasian, his perpetual frown firmly in place.

  “Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai,” explained Josephus, easing the gasping old man upright. “He was our teacher in the Temple for many years – he studied with Rabban Hillel himself!” As if that meant anything to a Roman.

  All at once Nicanor started. “Master, you're hurt!”

  The bearded scholar had moved his hand to reveal a gash in his side. But the elderly teacher waved his former pupil off. Raising his bloodied right hand to Vespasian, he cried, “Vive Dominus Imperator! Vive Caesar!”

  Face white as an election-starched toga, Vespasian quickly explained to the old man that he was not Caesar. In the current political climate, if news of this reached back to Rome, Nero would have Vespasian instantly killed.

  Still, he ordered the old man to be made comfortable, his wound tended. Then he departed, leaving Josephus and Nicanor to get the story. He had more pressing matters – including a letter from Caenis.

  Sitting under guard with his pupils, the rabban explained his escape. “Jerusalem is terrified. The Avengers of Israel are not allowing anyone to leave the city. It's utter chaos. My students decided to smuggle me out for my own safety. Since only the bodies of the dead are being permitted exit, they contrived to put me in a coffin. One zealous soldier, deciding to test if I was truly dead, rammed his knife through the coffin's side. But the Lord stole my voice, so I would not betray myself, and they let me pass.”

  “Are things truly that bad within Jerusalem?” asked Nicanor.

  The rabban pressed his pale lips together. “Worse.”

  “That will please the general,” observed Josephus, failing to hide his own satisfaction. Anything bad for Jerusalem bolstered his own choice to change sides. “But what of you, Rabban? Do you have anywhere to go?”

  “I hear the Romans are allowing the refugees from Jerusalem to stay in Yavneh. I shall go there. But I have a favour to ask of Vespasian, and I would ask you who know him how best to make it honey in his ear. I wish to set up a rabbinic school among the refugees. That way, whatever befalls Jerusalem, our teachings shall continue.”

  “Let Josephus ask him,” suggested Nicanor. “You don't know it, Rabban, but your prophecy has given our friend here a new prestige in the general's eyes.”

  “Prophecy? What prophecy?”

  “You called Vespasian Caesar.”

  The old teacher blinked. “Did I? I don't recall that. It must have been the heat, and the wound. I went half-mad in that coffin. In that state, I would have called any Roman Caesar.”

  Josephus and Nicanor shared a look. “As long as you don't tell the general that, you'll get your school.”

  * * *

  ROMA, ITALIA

  23 APRIL 68 AD

  The next meeting of the Senate, called in late April, was very different from the previous month's dissertation on music-making. Nero appeared before them shorn of beard, and
without his habitual make-up – no stibium around his eyes, no oil in his hair, which was pulled back tight like a gladiator's. He looked surprisingly masculine. He was also bruised about the face, a condition Sabinus later learned stemmed from falling forward in a dead faint when he received the news he was about to relate.

  Without preamble, without posturing, without that affected musicality that Nero used when he spoke to large groups, he opened his mouth and blurted out, “Galba has joined Vindex. His troops have hailed him imperator. And Caesar.”

  The assembled senators turned as white as their togas. The revolt was suddenly real. Vindex was a nobody, but Servius Sulpicius Galba could trace his patrician ancestry back nearly a thousand years. He had the blood to be a king. He had significant ancestors on both his maternal and paternal side who had fought against Caesar, both politically and in person. On his mother's side, he was descended from Catulus Capitolinus, who had rebuilt the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus after it burned. Old Catulus had been a firm believer in the old ways, opposing Gaius Julius Caesar at every political turn.

  On his paternal side, Galba's namesake had been one of Caesar's generals in the Gallic wars, but then turned against him on the Ides of March and drove in his dagger with Brutus, Cassius, and the rest. Thus both political opposition and tyrannicide ran in his blue-blooded veins.

  But of even greater note, he was seventy-three years old. A mark against him at any other time, this was now the key point whispered among the men gathered in Jupiter Stator. Hadn't Nero been crowing about not fearing anything until he was faced with the number seventy-three? Was this not just the kind of jest the gods loved to play? Clearly Nero thought so. Just look at him!

  Naturally the Senate went into a frenzy, screaming protests, heaping foulness upon both Vindex and Galba. It was all more a display of loyalty than genuine feeling, for there was not one senator present who did not pause to imagine Galba sitting in the ivory chair, and see in his age a stern wisdom that would guide Rome better than Nero's art.

  “Can this be true?” demanded Publius Petronius Turpilianus, the former general now in command of Rome's aqueducts.

  “Quite true,” said Publius Galerius Trachalus, this year's senior consul. “We have confirmed reports from Hispania, and we caught his freedman Icelus sneaking about the city with three talents of gold. He denies everything, of course, but his presence here is damning enough.”

  “Galba is calling himself Caesar?” cried Old Sabinus, having 'recovered' enough to return to the Senate. “Imperator, Princeps, Augustus even – those titles I understand. But how can they call him Caesar? He's not a Julian, or a Claudian! And they cannot be reverting to the word's original meaning – Galba is bald as an egg!” Like most early Roman names, the cognomen Caesar referred to a physical characteristic – in this case, a thick head of hair.

  “More to the point,” countered Quintus Junius Arulenus Rusticus, whose wife Tertius now knew intimately well, “what authority does a provincial army have to declare any man our master?” In the murder of Caligula, the last successful attempt to overthrow a Caesar, it had been a consortium of senators and Praetorians who had done the deed. That an army could declare any man to be Caesar was a frightening thought – if any man could be Caesar, then no man could be trusted with command. It was a return to the bad old days before Augustus, when generals like Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar himself used their legally-appointed armies to impose their political will on Rome.

  When he could be heard, Sabinus rose to address Nero. “What do you mean to do, Caesar?”

  A misty veil hung before Nero's eyes. “I will go to Gaul,” he said simply.

  The senators cheered. It was the only answer, of course. Raise an army and squash Vindex, then march into Hispania and force old Galba to submit.

  Blinking away heartfelt tears that sprang from their approval, Nero continued. “I will go stand before Vindex's army, unarmed, and weep my spirit from my eyes, as I have been weeping all this day, as I weep now. This shall move them to pity me, and join my cause.”

  Hands froze in the act of clapping. No one spoke, or even moved. Was he serious? Yes, he clearly was.

  The junior consul, Silius Italicus, cleared his throat. “Caesar, if I may – in this case, inaction may be safer than action.”

  “No!” cried Nero Caesar, beating his chest. “I must do this! I must move them to love me again!”

  The meeting soon broke up without even a vote to name Galba and Vindex enemies of the state. From the realm of the impossible, Galba's accession now seemed inevitable.

  This feeling was strengthened when Nero's most devoted follower and pander, the Praetorian Prefect Tigellinus, vanished. True, he had been looking ill for months. But it soon came to light that he had run off with a girl called Vinia. In itself, nothing – except that Vinia was the daughter of Titus Vinius, currently chief legate in Hispania under Galba. Thus Tigellinus had possession of the daughter of the head of Galba's legions. Was it a bargaining chip, or a favour? Certainly the rest of Galba's adherents had fled the city, lest they suffer the fate of Galba's freedman Icelus, who Nero had thrown in chains to the bottom of the Tullianum.

  Oddly, Nero showed little reaction to Tigellinus' betrayal. He opined only that his friend must truly be in love. “It's like something from Ovid. Star-crossed lovers. I wish them well.”

  Urged by his friends, Nero called for volunteers for an army. No one came forward. He ended in conscripting a few thousand marines to form a new legion, the First Adiutrix. But rather than train and equip them, he spent his time assembling the trappings for a colossal theatrical display – if he was to move Vindex's soldiers to pity him, he would require a large supporting cast: music to mollify them, acrobats to amuse them, and at the height of the show, Caesar Imperator to win their hearts. He even gathered all the professional whores of the city and outfitted them with expensive silver armour, styling them as his personal Amazonian guard.

  Nero being Nero, his interest waned as the details became more mundane. How to move so large a force? How to feed them? He did not care, left that to other men. Instead he forced Silius Italicus to write verses for him to recite, and had the senior consul read the junior consul's lines aloud, that Nero could imitate Trachalus' natural musicality. He rehearsed his whores, oversaw the building of massive floating stages, and tried to teach his new legion to sing.

  Yet Nero never set a date to leave the city. And slowly everyone understood he didn't mean to.

  Instead it was whispered he was considering other plans. One rumour said he'd called for his tame poisoner Lucusta to craft a sweet-tasting venom to murder the entire Senate. Another claimed he was considering releasing all the wild beasts used for gladiatorial sport into the streets to ravage the citizenry. And on, and on. In another man, it would have been ludicrous gossip. With Nero, who could say?

  From the height of amused approval upon his return from Greece, Nero's popularity plummeted. Rome was already feeling the pinch of pricy grain – Nero himself had abolished the free-grain dole after the Great Fire, an act of public frugality entirely at odds with his own spending. When the first ship from Africa finally reached Ostia, the price of grain did not drop, for it was found to carry only sand. Nero had delayed the grain in order to import fine African sand for his wrestling matches.

  These preparations lasted throughout the month of May. When news arrived that Vindex's Gaulish mob had been defeated (how could they not be?) and Vindex himself killed (how could he not be?), it did little to calm Nero Caesar. If anything, it made him more feckless. He now had nowhere to go, nothing to plan, no grand enterprise to embark upon. His floating stages went unused, his legion stopped singing, and his whores returned to whoring.

  Moreover, to fund both his theatrical ambitions and the moving of his nearest loyal armies, Nero had imposed a massive income tax upon every free Roman male, and forced all renters to pay one year's worth of their rents, on top of what they already owed their landlords, directly to h
im. Discontent swirled, filled the air with a thick miasma fully as dangerous as the pest that visited swampy Rome every summer.

  This was not chaos. Not yet. But just as the sea changes color before a storm, so too the fortunes of the last Julio-Claudian had turned wine-dark.

  * * *

  ROMA, ITALIA

  8 JUNE 68 AD

  Dressed in full armour, bated sword in hand, Clemens faced his cousin Domitian, stabbing and grunting. All around them the future leaders of Rome practiced the arts of war. Officially, the Campus Martius was open to all who wished to learn the cut and thrust of war. In reality, though, the Field of Mars was used only by families of senatorial or equestrian rank. This afternoon there would be a mock battle between all the young noblemen, generaled by retired centurions, and every young man wanted to be prepared. Hence the practice.

  Domitian was not a natural swordsman – he was much more skilled with a bow. But Roman boys were raised with swords from the time they could walk, and young Roman men practiced with blades the way musicians did their instruments. Like all his other ills, Domitian's real problem with warfare lay in the summer he had spent with Nero. How often had he watched the soldiers of the sawdust, the gladiators, plying their trade, teaching the wrong lessons.

  After circling a moment, Domitian stamped his foot and lunged. Clemens moved to parry, but the lunge was a feint – Domitian spun and tried to bring his unsharpened blade up into his cousin's ribs. Clemens beat the stroke aside and laid his own blade across Domitian's exposed neck. “Too showy, cos. You're supposed to be a solider, not a gladiator.”

  Grunting, Domitian shook off Clemens' weapon. “What is war, if not gladiatorial battle for the gods?”

  “That's actually rather apt. You should write it down.”

  Pleased, Domitian set his feet and raised his shield. “Again.”