Nero_s Heirs

by Allan Massie

  'The Emperor? I'm not sure he knows whether he's that or not, poor dear man. You've a message for him? You want to see him? Well, much good may it do you, ducky.'

  Cornelius Martialis drew his sword and jabbed it under the creature's jaw. A little gout of blood stood out on his neck. 'Take us to him, or I'll ram this through your throat.' Asiaticus put up his hand and pushed the blade aside.

  'Not very diplomatic, are you, ducks. 'Course I'll take you to the poor man. Just don't expect too much.'

  Vitellius was in his dressing-gown. Asiaticus greeted him with a repulsive familiarity, which brought a smile to the pseudo-emperor's flabby lips. Cornelius presented him with Flavius Sabinus' letter. He read it, or rather let his eyes wander over it, and then tossed it aside.

  'Have you no answer?' the centurion demanded. 'Am I to tell the general you received his letter with contempt?'

  'The question is, sir,' I said, 'whether you intend to stand by the agreement that you made, an agreement that ensures your own safety and well-being as nothing else can, or whether you have torn it up, and choose to trust to the fortunes of a war you cannot win, which will bring ruin on all your family.'

  Vitellius dabbed his eyes with a towel, blew his nose, and gestured to Asiaticus who, knowing his master's habits, at once put a mug of wine in the outstretched hand. Vitellius, in the manner of drunkards, drained it at one swallow, and then said, 'This is all foolishness. Whatever I say now doesn't matter. I know that. Tell your general that I would abide by our compact if I could. I had every intent, every intention, of doing so. But the soldiers would not let me, and I could not resist them. They chose me as Emperor, they have chosen that I cannot abandon the title, though I'm aware that everything is now futility. Tell your general that, and that you have seen a deeply unhappy man, whom the world has treated harshly.'

  Then he dismissed us, telling Asiaticus to lead us out of the palace by a secret passage, which would enable us to avoid the soldiers, for, he said, 'I've no wish to have your blood too on my hands.'

  'You see, sir, he's finished, and he knows it,' Asiaticus said. 'You'll be safe now. Perhaps you will remember that I have done you a service.'

  'Oh,' I said, 'I doubt if that will be necessary. You're the type who will survive anything, and I can't imagine you haven't already made your preparations. Indeed, I'm only surprised to find you still here.' He laid his hand, his fawning hand, on my sleeve.

  You're so certain a chap like me can't have any decent feelings, aren't you, any sense of duty, or any affection? Well, you're young, ducky, you can't be expected to know much. But that poor dear man has been my only benefactor, and now I'm the only person he can be himself with. It wouldn't be right if I was to run out on him. But I can't expect you to believe that.'

  He made me ashamed. I remembered Sporus and how he had spoken of Nero.

  Martialis said, 'Take your hand off my officer, you bugger. Shall I run him through the guts, sir? The earth would be a cleaner place.'

  'No,' I said, 'there'll be enough killing today. No need to start so early in the morning – with a non-combatant too.' I lifted Asiaticus' flabby paw from my sleeve. ‘It'd be a kindness to everyone,' I said to him, 'if you could persuade your master to die as a Roman should.' When we reported the failure of our mission, Flavius Sabinus thanked us gravely for the attempt we had made and the dangers we had run. His manner was perfect. No one could have guessed the depth of his disappointment. Then he gave orders that the defences were to be looked to, offered up a prayer to the gods, and drew me aside.

  'Have a care for my nephew,' he said, 'and prevent him from exposing himself rashly.'

  Vitellius has no wish for battle,' I said. 'He would have been happy to keep the agreement he made with you. I felt sorry for him.'

  'Be that as it may, Vitellius counts for nothing. He's like a cork bobbing on a sea of blood.' For a little we waited. The snow had stopped falling, and a thin sun was breaking through the clouds. Obedient to the command I had been given, I looked for Domitian. That is why I was not at first aware that battle was now upon us. It was only when I heard cries coming from the flank of the hill on the side overlooking the Forum that I knew it. Meanwhile I could not find Domitian. This distracted me. I knew that Flavius Sabinus was anxious to secure his nephew's safety, not on account of any affection he had for him – though this was not indeed lacking – but principally because it was necessary for his own self-esteem, his sense of his own virtue, that no harm should come to his brother's son. But Domitian, at the first intimation of the attack, had concealed himself in the house of a servant of the Temple of Jupiter. There he assumed the linen vestment of an acolyte, a serviceable disguise. All this I learned later. Meanwhile, searching ever more desperately for him, I did not arrive at the scene of the encounter till the Capitol was ablaze.

  The Vitellianists were now swarming up the hill, while our men were distracted by the flames. The fire has been caused by the assailants who had hurled burning brands on to the roof of a colonnade and had then, when the defenders were driven back choking in the smoke, burst through the gate that was now undefended. Meanwhile others had rushed the hill to the west of the Tarpeian Rock, from which side our men had been drawn by the first attack. In short, all was confusion; and this was caused by the inadequacy of our troops, who were too few to guard every possible route by which the hill might be mounted. Despairing of finding Domitian, I drew my sword and ran towards the Tarpeian flank. Here there was fierce hand-to-hand fighting. We had the advantage of the ground, but they had the advantage of numbers. The fire in our rear also alarmed our men, some of whom even before battle was fully joined, were more eager to find a means of escape than of resistance. I found myself at the side of Cornelius Martialis, already wounded in the shoulder by the thrust of a javelin. Blood ran down his sword-arm as he tried to parry the attacks of three German auxiliaries. I thrust at one under his shield, and he fell. But even as he did so another ran up against me, swinging his long sword. Without a shield, for I had had no time to arm myself properly, I could not parry the blow, and so ducked under it. My foot slipped on the bloody stone and I tumbled over the body of the man I had just killed. It may be that my fall saved my life, for, thanks to the steep declivity of the hill, I found myself rolling over and over, till I came to rest in the middle of an oleander bush some twenty feet or more below. For a moment I lay there, catching what I might have thought to have been my last breath. I say 'might have thought' for, in truth, I remember no thought. When I screwed my head round, expecting to see my assailant bearing down upon me, it was instead to discover that he had turned his attention on the centurion, who was again faced with three of the enemy. As I struggled to free myself from the bush, I heard that most terrible of battle-cries, 'It's every man for himself, run, lads, run.' I looked up and saw Cornelius Martialis fall. Then, shaking myself like a dog emerging from water, I took to my heels, down the hill, out of the battle. I have no pride in this, no pride either in the slashing blows I delivered at two soldiers who tried to bar my way. One of them fell, his face laid open by my sword, the other stumbled and, like me, a moment earlier, slipped, and lay unharmed but panting. I had no time to deal with him, but careered down the hill. When I reached level ground and looked back, all the buildings of the Capitol were ablaze. An old woman looked at me. 'If I was you, sir,' she said, 'I'd get rid of that bloody sword.' Perhaps her advice was good. I did not take it.

  Instead I remained, gazing in horror at burning Jupiter Supremely Good and Great, founded by our earliest fathers as the seat of Empire. The Capitol, unviolated even by the Gauls centuries before in the days of the Republic, was now destroyed by the madness of the struggle for Empire in a battle fought on behalf of a creature who had had the purple forced on him by the legions, and who had given only one proof of sound judgement in his life: his understanding that he was not fit for the office he was not permitted to relinquish. I sheathed my sword and, assuming such an air of unconcern as was possible, made my way by a
route which took me past the temple that Augustus had raised in memory of his beloved nephew Marcellus towards the river, and across it to my mother's house. I was surprised to find, half a mile from the scene of battle, citizens going about their lives as if it was a time of peace.

  No harm had come to my mother or to Domatilla. I advised them to keep the house, notwithstanding the lack of tumult in the streets that side of the river.

  'It may be,' I said, 'that Domitian will come here himself. I don't know where he is now.' 'But he's alive, he's all right?' Domatilla said.

  'I've no reason to think otherwise. I'm going in search of him now. If he comes here, don't let him leave. He might be as safe here as anywhere. It'll only be a matter of days before your father's army is in the city. But these days will be dangerous.' 'And my uncle?'

  'I don't know. I don't know whether he escaped, whether he was killed, whether he was taken captive. Everything over there is in indescribable confusion.'

  "We could see the flames,' my mother said. 'To burn the Capitol. It's worse than Nero. It's a judgement.' 'Perhaps,' I said.

  When I left, my mother refrained from any expression of anxiety. She did not tell me to avoid danger, for she knew that in Rome that day danger and duty were joined as in marriage. But before I departed, she took my sword and cleaned it of the dried blood. I was surprised to discover it was not yet noon.

  XXXVII

  Tacitus will know, without my telling him, how Flavius Sabinus and the Consul elect Atticus surrendered and were led in chains before Vitellius. He may deem their surrender inglorious, believing that a soldier should die sword in hand. That is often the view of men who have studied war at a distance and have little experience of battle themselves. In any case I believe that Flavius Sabinus yielded when he saw that the few troops that remained with him were sentenced to death if he did not do so. It is said that Vitellius would have spared his life, if he had been brave enough to do so. But the mob, composed partly of legionaries, partly of auxiliaries, partly of citizens – Senators among them – and partly of the most degraded rabble, howled for more blood; and Vitellius dared not deny them. So died a man for whom I had great respect, a man who had served Rome in more than thirty campaigns, and who throughout this terrible year had alone among men of distinction sought peace, preferring diplomacy and negotiation to war. Had he succeeded, Rome would not have suffered the disgrace of seeing the Capitol in flames, and the lives of many men, some worthy, would have been spared.

  Domitian did not share my regard for his uncle. In later years I have heard him say that if his advice had been followed Vitellius would never have gone free after signing his act of abdication; and that the battle on the Capitol, from which he had by his own account escaped only with difficulty, meeting great danger with audacity and ingenuity, was the consequence of his uncle's cowardice and unpardonable folly. Actually Domitian's escape, unlike my own, was ignominious. Yet, though I had fought my way out, and might be judged to have had nothing with which to reproach myself, I experienced shame, like a stabbing knife, when I learned of what had befallen Flavius Sabinus. I felt like a deserter.

  And indeed for three days following, I skulked like a deserter in Sybilla's bed while, as in nightmare, I heard the mob surging through the city, seeking out those they judged disloyal to Vitellius, and slaying them indiscriminately. There was no reason in their madness. Had they been capable of reflection they must have judged that Vitellius could not remain Emperor above a week. It was as if with the burning of the Temple of Jupiter, Rome was deprived of reason, virtue, and whatever separates civilised man from barbarism. The she-wolfs children had made themselves into wolves.

  On the third day, my mother, disdaining to keep the house as I had instructed her, was assaulted by a German auxiliary, dragged to the river-bank, and raped. Domitian had not dared to leave the house to act as her guard. She returned to the apartment, said nothing either to him or to his sister, retired to her chamber, wrote with unwavering hand a letter informing me of what had happened, and cut her wrists. Domatilla found her lying on blood-soaked sheets, her face calm as the Goddess Minerva to whom Domitian pretended such devotion. I can say nothing of this to Tacitus.

  Nor to the boy Balthus, though I have formed the habit of reading the chapters I send to Tacitus to him. He hears them as one might hear stories from the Underworld.

  'I am no longer surprised, master,' he said to me yesterday, 'that you choose now to live so far from Rome. However desolate you find these regions, they must seem as paradise compared to the inferno of that accursed city. Do you Romans not know the meaning of peace?'

  'Peace?' I said. 'My dear boy, we make a desert, and that is peace. It is all the peace we ever achieve. Yet there were afternoons, by the seaside…' I paused, and shook my head.

  'Come,' I said, 'let us take the hounds and hunt hares in the hill pastures.'

  XXXVIII

  You will know, Tacitus, that in a last desperate effort to save himself Vitellius sent envoys to the commander of the Flavian forces, Antonius Primus, seeking terms, or at least a truce. But it was too late; fighting had already broken out in the suburbs, among gardens, farmyards and twisting alleys or lanes. Even so, Vitellius seemed not to abandon hope, which, as is often the case, survived the departure of his sense of reality. The virgin priestesses of Vesta were now recruited to obtain for him a few more hours of life and mimic Empire. They approached Antonius and urged him to grant a single day of truce, in which time all might be peacefully arranged. By that it was presumed they intended that a means of transferring power without further bloodshed might be secured. It was all in vain. Antonius, properly, replied that with the assault on the Capitol, all the normal courtesies of war had been broken off; and no man could trust Vitellius' word. All this I learned later from Antonius himself.

  Then he prepared the assault on the city. He advanced in three divisions, one directly along the Via Flaminia, the second following the bank of the Tiber, while the third made for the Colline Gate by the Via Salaria. Vitellius' troops, outnumbered, gave way at every point.

  By noon I had ventured on to the roof of Hippolyta's apartment block, hoping to be able to follow the progress of the battle, and so choose the moment when I could best join myself to my friends. But I could catch only glimpses. They were enough to persuade me that the Vitellianists were yielding ground, but that, desperate, and with no possibility of escape, they were caught in that dance of death which extremity provokes. And so, embracing Sybilla and thanking Hippolyta, who was not displeased to see me make ready to depart, I took my leave, assuring them that, whatever the outcome of the day, I would see them safe and prosperous. And I am glad to say that I kept that promise. Tacitus: I never wish to see again such degradation as met my eyes that day. It was macabre. Bands of soldiers engaged in hand to hand battle through the narrow streets. There was neither order nor command, for in street-fighting it becomes a matter of every man for himself. Yet the mass of the citizens were as spectators. You would see a handful of men standing by a tavern door, with mugs of wine clutched in their fists, while, within a few feet of them, soldiers panted, sweated, shrieked, and stabbed. When a maul forced its way, by no act of will, into one of the city squares, citizens hung from their windows, shouting out encouragement or curses, as if they were fans in the Circus, and the legionaries gladiators doomed to death. Such, indeed, was the theatre of the encounter that the strangest and most degraded cries, such as 'Long live Death!', were heard, and odds were shouted as to the outcome of individual contests. In one alley I saw a small child, not above three years old, stagger from a doorway, dressed only in a vest, its bum bare and mud-streaked, and then totter, with unconcerned appearance, between two soldiers swinging and stabbing at each other. The child put its arm round the brawny leg of one of the warriors, and clung to it, while blood trickled from a thigh-wound and mingled in its curly hair. The soldier, either unable to shake the child off or even unaware of its presence, swung at his adversary and, over-bal
ancing, exposed his throat to a riposte. He crumpled to the ground, the child tumbling over him and, suddenly affrighted, yelling for its mother. The victor advanced over the body of his victim, disregarding the infant and, beginning to run, sought out new enemies, and disappeared round the corner at the end of the lane. Only then did the child's mother – or perhaps some other woman – emerge from the house, pick up the infant, dust it down, and seek to quieten it.

  The battle was fiercest in the Campus Martius. I attached myself to a legionary cohort, or what remained of it. The senior centurion, blood dripping from a gash over his eye, recognised me; he had fought bravely for Otho a few months before. 'They're fighting to the last man,' he said. 'The gods alone know why.' 'Bet they don't,' muttered a soldier.

  'It'll be worse at the Praetorian camp,' the centurion said. Then, lifting his bloody sword, he cried out, 'Come on, lads, one more charge.'

  For a moment it was like a regular battle. Space appeared between the opposing forces. Men were howled or hauled into line. Order was made out of chaos. Then we advanced, first at a steady march, and then, on the orders of the old centurion, the line broke into a trot. It cannot have lasted more than ten or a dozen paces, but it gave us a momentum. Swords clashed against shield. I drove mine to the right, the shield followed the probing blade, and with a turn of the wrist, I passed the shield on the body side, and drove the point into the neck just above the breastplate. My opponent sagged at the knees, blood gushed from his mouth, and I wrenched the blade free as he slumped to the paving-stones.

  The enemy line broke, several of them – they were German auxiliaries – throwing their weapons away to free themselves for faster flight. The old centurion yelled to us to halt. Most obeyed. Some on the flanks, who may not have heard his call, continued to give chase, fast enough to kill a few more of our now defeated enemy.