Roma Eterna

by Robert Silverberg

  “Perhaps, in an ideal world—” he began.

  Germanicus laughed again, this time a harsh cackle. “An ideal world, yes! Very good, Antipater! Very good! But we happen to live in the real one, is that not so? And in the real world there was no way that an empire the size of the one we once had could have been maintained intact, so it had to be divided. But once the first Constantinus divided it, Antipater, war between the two halves was inevitable. The wonder of it is that it took so long to happen.”

  A discourse on history from the Emperor’s drunken dissolute brother, here in Justinianus’s serene temple. How strange, Antipater thought. And was there any truth in the point Germanicus was making, Antipater wondered? The war between East and West—inevitable?

  He doubted that Constantinus the Great, who had split the unwieldy Roman world in half by setting up a second capital far to the east of Roma at Byzantium on the Bosporus, ever had thought so. Beyond question Constantinus had supposed that his sons would share power peacefully, one reigning over the eastern provinces from the new capital of Constantinopolis, one in Italia and the Danubian provinces, a third in Britannia and Gallia and Hispania. Hardly was Constantinus in his grave, though, than the divided Empire was embroiled in war, with one of the sons attacking another and seizing his realm; and for sixty years after that all was in flux, until the great Emperor Theodosius had brought about the final administrative division of the Roman world, separating its Greek-speaking territories from the Latin-speaking ones.

  But Theodosius hadn’t accepted the inevitability of East-West war either. By his decree the two Emperors, the Eastern one and the Western one, were supposed to consider themselves colleagues, joint rulers of the entire realm, consulting each other on all high matters of state, each even having the power to name a successor for an Imperial colleague that died. It hadn’t worked out that way, of course. The two nations had drifted apart, though some measure of cooperation did continue for hundreds of years. And now—the friction of the past half century, culminating in the present slowly escalating war of East against West—the foolish, needless, ghastly war that was about to burst in all its fury upon this greatest of all cities—

  “Look at this stuff!” Germanicus cried. He had left Antipater’s side to go roaming about in the deserted temple, peering at the paintings and mosaics with which Justinianus’s Byzantine craftsmen had bedecked the sides of the building. “I hate the Greek style, don’t you? Flat and stiff and creaky—you’d think they didn’t understand a damned thing about perspective. If I had been Heraclius, I’d have covered the walls over with plaster the moment Justinianus’s people were out of town. Too late for all that now, though.” Germanicus had reached the far side, and peered up for a moment at the vast regal portrait of solemn scowling Justinianus, done in gleaming golden tile, that loomed out from the belly of the dome like Jupiter himself glowering down. Then he whirled to face Antipater. “But what am I saying?” he bellowed through the echoing dimness. “You’re a Greek yourself! You love this kind of art!”

  “I am a Roman citizen born, sir,” said Antipater quietly.

  “Yes. Yes, of course. That’s why you speak Greek so well, and why you look the way you do. And that hot little dark-eyed lady you spend your nights with—she’s Roman, too, right? Where are you from, anyway, Antipater? Alexandria? Cyprus?”

  “I was born in Salona in Dalmatia, sir. It was Roman territory at the time.”

  “Salona. Yes. The palace of Diocletianus is there, isn’t it? And nobody would say that Diocletianus wasn’t a Roman. Why do you look so damnably Greek, though? Come over here, Antipater. Let me look at you. Antipater. What a fine Roman name that is!”

  “My family was Greek originally. We were from Antioch, but that was many hundreds of years ago. If I am Greek, then Romans are Trojans, because Aeneas came from Troia to found the settlement that became Roma. And where is Troia today, if not in the territory of the Greek Emperor?”

  “Oh-ho! Oh-ho! A wise man! A sophist!” Briskly Germanicus returned to Antipater’s side and grasped at the front of his robe, clutching it into a tight bunch. Antipater expected a stinging slap. He lifted one hand to protect his face. “Don’t cower like that,” the prince said. “I won’t hit you. But you’re a traitor, aren’t you? A Greek and a traitor. Who consorts nightly with the enemy. I’m speaking of that Greek wench of yours, the little bosomy spy. When the Basileus comes in triumph to Roma, you’ll go rushing to his side and tell him you were loyal to him all along.”

  “No, sir. By your leave, sir, none of that is true, sir.”

  “Not a traitor?”

  “No, sir,” said Antipater desperately. “Nor is Justina a spy. We are Romans of Roma, faithful to the West. I serve your royal brother the Caesar Maximilianus Augustus and no one else.”

  That appeared to be effective. “Ah. Good. Good. I’ll accept that. You seem sincere.” Germanicus winked and released him with a light shove, and spun away to stand with his back toward Antipater. In a much less manic tone, sounding almost subdued, he said, “You stayed at the meeting after the rest of us left. Did Caesar have anything interesting to say to you?”

  “Why—why—he merely—”

  Antipater faltered. What kind of loyalty to Caesar would it be to betray his private conversations to another, even Caesar’s own brother?

  “He said nothing of significance, sir. Just a bit of recapitulation of the meeting, was all.”

  “Just a bit of recapitulation.”

  “Yes, sir. Nothing more.”

  “I wonder. You’re very thick with him, Antipater. He trusts you, you know, shifty little Greek that you are. Emperors always trust their secretaries more than they do anybody else. It doesn’t matter to him that you’re a Greek. He tells you things that he doesn’t tell others.” Germanicus swung round again. The sea-green eyes drilled with sudden ferocity into Antipater’s. “I wonder,” he said once more. “Was he speaking the truth, when he said that we don’t need to do anything about this fleet off Sardinia? Does he actually and truly believe that?”

  Antipater felt his cheeks growing hot. He was grateful for the faintness of the light in here, and for his own swarthy skin, that would hide his embarrassment from the prince. It seemed odd to him that the famously idle Germanicus, who had never to Antipater’s knowledge demonstrated a shred of interest in public affairs, should be so concerned now with his Imperial brother’s military intentions. But perhaps the imminence of a Greek invasion of the capital had aroused even this roguish, lackadaisical, irresponsible lordling to some alarm. Or, perhaps, all this was just some passing whim of his. No matter which, Antipater could not evade a reply this time.

  Carefully he said, “I would not presume to tell anyone what I imagined the Emperor was thinking, sir. My understanding of his position, though, is that he sees that there’s very little we can really do against the Basileus—that we are hemmed in on two sides already and that we are unable to protect ourselves against an attack on some new front.”

  “He’s absolutely right,” said Germanicus. “Our goose, as the Britannians say, is cooked. The question is what kind of sauce will go on the dish, eh? Eh, Antipater?” And then, abruptly, Antipater found himself being seized once again and swept forward into a hard, crushing embrace. Germanicus’s bristly cheek rubbed across his with stinging force. The reek of the young prince brought a new surge of dizziness to him. He is crazy, Antipater thought. Crazy. “Ah, Antipater, Antipater, you know I mean you no harm! I do love you, man, for your devotion to my brother. Poor Maximilianus! What a burden it must be to him to be Emperor at a time like this!” Letting go of Antipater once more, he stepped back and said, in yet another new tone of voice, somber now and oddly earnest, “You will not speak a word of this meeting to my brother, will you, eh? I think I’ve disturbed your tranquility, and I wouldn’t want him thinking ill of me for that. He’s terribly fond of you. He relies on you so very much.—Come, Antipater, will you let me take you home, now? That hot little Greek of yours
very likely has a sizzling noontime surprise for you, and it would be rude to keep her waiting.”

  He said nothing to Justina of his strange encounter with the Emperor’s brother. But the episode stayed in his mind.

  Beyond much doubt the prince was mad. And yet, yet, there had seemed to be some undertone of seriousness in his discourse—a side of Germanicus Caesar that Antipater had never seen before, nor, perhaps, anyone else either.

  Germanicus’s belief that the original Empire, the one that had spanned the world from Britannia to the borders of India, had been too large to govern from a single capital—well, yes, nobody would dispute that issue. Even in Diocletianus’s time the job had been so big that several Emperors reigning jointly had been needed to handle it, not that that had worked particularly well; and a generation later the great Constantinus had found governing the entire thing impossible even for him. And so had come the formal division of the realm, which under Theodosius had become permanent.

  But what about the other point, the inevitability of war between East and West?

  Antipater had no love for that line of thinking. Yet he knew that the historical record provided strong support for it. Even in the era of supposed East-West concord, that time when Justinianus reigned in Constantinopolis and his nephew Heraclius in Roma, great trade rivalries had sprung up, each Empire trying to outflank the other, Latin Romans reaching out around Byzantium toward remote India and even more remote Khitai and Cipangu where the yellow-faced men live, and Greek Romans seeking influence to the south in black Africa and to the far frozen northern territories that lay behind the homeland of the half-savage Goths.

  That had all been sorted out by treaty; perhaps, thought Antipater, Justinianus’s temple in Roma had been erected in commemoration of some such agreement. But the frictions had continued, the jockeying for prime position in the world’s commerce.

  And then, beginning eighty or ninety years ago, the West’s big mistake, the colossally foolish expedition to the New World—what a calamity that had been! Certainly it was exciting to discover that two great continents lay beyond the Ocean Sea, and that mighty nations—Mexico, Peru—existed there, strange lands rich in gold and silver and precious stones, inhabited by multitudes of copper-skinned people ruled by lordly monarchs who lived in pomp and opulence worthy of Caesar himself. But what lunacy had possessed the megalomaniac Emperor Saturninus to try to conquer those nations, instead of simply to enter into trade relations with them? Decades of futile overseas expeditions—millions of sesterces wasted, whole legions sent out by that obstinate and perhaps insane Emperor to die under the searing sun of the inhospitable continents that Saturninus had optimistically named Nova Roma—the pride of the Western Empire’s military destroyed by the spears and arrows of unstoppable torrents of demonic wild-eyed warriors with painted faces, or swept away by the overwhelming force of great tropical storms—hundreds of ships lost in those perilous alien waters—the spirit of the Empire broken by the unfamiliar experience of defeat after defeat, and the ultimate grim capitulation and evacuation of the final batch of shattered Roman troops—

  That ill-advised adventure had, as Antipater and everyone else recognized now, drained the economic resources of the Western Empire in a terrible way, and, perhaps, weakened its military power beyond repair. Two entire generations of the most gifted generals and admirals had perished on the shores of Nova Roma. And then, the idiotically arrogant Emperor Julianus IV compounding the error by evicting a Greek mercantile mission from the island of Melita, a trifling dot in the sea between Sicilia and the African coast that both Empires long had laid claim to. To which Leo IX of Byzantium had retaliated not only by landing troops on Melita and taking control of it, but by unilaterally redrawing the ancient dividing line of the two empires that ran through the province of Illyricum, so that the Dalmatian coast, with its valuable ports on the Adriatic Sea, now came under Byzantine rule.

  That was the beginning of the end. The Western Empire, already badly overextended by its doomed project in the New World, could not resist the takeover with any real force. Which had encouraged Leo and his successors in the East, first Constantinus XI and then Andronicus, to reach deeper and deeper into Western territory, until by now the capital itself was in jeopardy and the West seemed certain to fall into Byzantine control for the first time in history.

  Still, Antipater wondered whether it all had been, as Germanicus maintained, inevitable from the start.

  Rivalry, yes. Friction and occasional outright conflict, yes. But the conquest of one Empire by the other? There was nothing in the divided-Empire schemes of Constantinus and Theodosius that had made it obligatory for the West to undertake a stupid and ruinous overseas campaign, one that no Caesar would abandon until the Empire had crippled itself. Nor anything requiring the crippled Empire to have wantonly given its eastern rival provocation for attacking it, on top of the previous folly. Under wiser Emperors, Roma would have remained Roma for all eternity. But now—

  “You brood too much,” Justina told him.

  “There’s much to brood about.”

  “The war? I tell you again, Antipater: we need to flee before it gets here.”

  “And I answer you again: go where?”

  “Some place where no fighting is going to happen. Some place far to the east, where the sun is always bright and the weather is warm. Syria or Aegyptus. Cyprus, maybe.”

  “Greek places, all of them. I’m a Roman. They’ll say I’m a spy.”

  Justina laughed indelicately. “We don’t fit in anywhere, is what you say! The Romans think you’re a Greek. Now you don’t want to fly to the East because they’ll say you’re a Roman. How will they be able to tell, anyway? You look and sound as Greek as I do.”

  Antipater stared at her gloomily. “The truth is, Justina, we don’t fit in anywhere. Not really. But the main point, completely aside from whatever I may look and sound like, is that I’m an official of the Western Imperial court. I’ve signed my name to endless pieces of diplomatic correspondence that are on file in Constantinopolis.”

  “Who’s to know? Who would care? The Western Empire is a dead thing. We escape to Cyprus; we raise sheep, we grow some grapes; you earn some money, perhaps, by working as a Latin translator. You tell people you lived for a time in the West, if anybody wonders where you came from. What of it? Nobody will accuse you of being a spy for the Western Empire when the Western Empire doesn’t exist any more.”

  “But it still does exist,” he said.

  “Only for the time being,” said Justina.

  He had to admit that the idea was tempting. He was being overly apprehensive, perhaps, in thinking that anyone would hold his service under Maximilianus Caesar against him if he ran away to the East. No one would care a fig for that, back there in the sunny, sleepy, sea-girt lands of the Greek world. He and Justina could start new lives together.

  But still—still—

  He didn’t see how he could desert his post while the government of Maximilianus was still intact. That seemed a vile deed to him. Unmanly. Treacherous. Greek. He was a Roman; he would stay at his post until the end came. And then—

  Well, who knew what would happen then?

  “I can’t leave,” he told Justina. “Not now.”

  The days passed. The bright skies of early autumn gave way to gray, dreary ones that betokened the oncoming rainy season. Justina said little to him about the political situation, now. She said little about anything. The Roman winter was a difficult time for her. She had lived nearly all her life in the Western Empire, yes, but she was Greek to the core, a child of the south, of the sun. A life down in Neapolis or, even better, Sicilia, might have been warm and bright enough for her, but not Roma, where the winters were wet and chilly. Antipater often wondered, as he made his way homeward from his duties at the palace under the darkening skies, whether he would discover, some afternoon, that she had packed up and vanished. Already it was possible to detect signs that a small abandonment of the capital
might be getting under way: the crowds in the streets seemed more sparse, and every day he noticed another shop or two closed and boarded up. But Justina remained by his side.

  His palace duties became more pointless day by day. No more ultimatums went forth to the Basileus Andronicus. What was the use? The end was in sight. Antipater’s work consisted now mainly in translating the reports that came in from the spies that Caesar still had posted all around the perimeter of the Greek world. Troop movements in Dalmatia—reinforcements of the already huge Greek army sitting up there opposite the northeastern end of the peninsula within striking distance of the Roman outpost at Venetia. Another Greek army on the march down in Africa, heading westward along the shore from Aegyptus toward Carthago and the other ports of the Numidian coast: backup forces, no doubt, for the troops already in Sicilia. And still other shufflings about of the apparently infinite Byzantine military power were going on to the north: a legion of Turks supposedly being sent up into Sarmatia, along the German border, presumably for the purpose of stretching the already thin Roman lines of defense even further.

  Punctiliously Antipater read all these dispatches to the Emperor, but Maximilianus only occasionally seemed to pay attention. The Emperor was moody, remote, distracted. One day Antipater entered the Emerald Office and found him poring over a huge book of history, open to the page that bore the long list of past Caesars. He was running his finger down the list from the beginning, Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and onward through Hadrianus, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Titus Gallius, into the time of the division of the realm, and beyond that to medieval times and the modern era. The list, just the Western Emperors now, stretched on and on beyond his pointing finger, scores of names great and small, Clodianus, Claudius Titianus, Maximilianus the Great, all the Heracliuses, all the Constantinuses, all the Marcianuses.

  Antipater watched as Maximilianus drew his quivering fingertip down into recent time: Trajan VI, Julianus IV, Philippus V, and Maximilianus’s own father, Maximilianus V. There the list had originally stopped. It had been compiled before the commencement of the present reign. But someone had written in at the bottom, in a different hand, the name of Maximilianus VI. Maximilianus’s finger, tracing its way downward, halted there. His own name. He began slowly to shake his head from side to side. Antipater understood at once what was passing through the Emperor’s mind. Staring at that great list, encompassing it from top to bottom, he was recapitulating all the long flow of the river of Roman time, from the Empire’s grand inauguration under the immortal Augustus to…its end…its end…under the inconsequential, insignificant Maximilianus VI.