Roma Eterna

by Robert Silverberg

  When he embarked on the War of Reunification Apollinaris had chosen the prince to be his second in command, sending him shuttling from one newly pacified province to another to see to it that the process of restoring full Imperial control went smoothly forward in each of them. Lately Laureolus had been in northern Gallia, where there had been some minor disturbances at a place called Bononia, on the coast along the channel that divided Gallia from Britannia. Thinking that this renewal of the troubles might spread across the channel to the previously unrebellious Britannia, he had repressed it rigorously. Now, with all resistance to the Imperial government at last wiped out, he had come to Tarraco to present Apollinaris with his final report on the state of the provinces.

  Apollinaris leafed quickly through it and set it aside. “All is well, I see. I need stay here no longer.”

  Laureolus said, “And when you return to the capital, sir, will you attempt to get Demetrius to restrain himself a little?”

  “I? Don’t be silly. I know better than to try to tell an Emperor what he ought to do. History is full of tales of the sad fates of those who tried it. Go back and reread your Suetonius, your Tacitus, your Ammianus Marcellinus. No, Laureolus, I’m going back to my estate in the country. Four Consulships is quite enough for me. Anyway, my fellow Consul Marcus Larcius has the responsibility for affairs in Urbs Roma.” He tapped Torquatus’s letter. “He tells me here that he’s going to take severe measures to clean things up. Good for him, if he can do it.”

  “Can he do it single-handedly?” Laureolus asked.

  “No. No, probably not.” He shot a glance at the prince. “How would you like to be Consul, Laureolus?”

  “Me, sir?” Laureolus’s eyes were wide with astonishment.

  “You, yes.” Then Apollinaris shook his head. “No, I suppose not. Demetrius would never allow it. You’re of royal blood, after all. He’d see it as the prelude to his own overthrow.” Smiling, he said, “Well, it was just a thought. You and Torquatus, between you, might just be able to do the job. But it’s probably safer for your health to stay out of the capital, anyway. You go back to your estate, too. We’ll get together once a week and have a good meal and discuss ancient history, and let Torquatus worry about the mess in Roma. Eh, Laureolus? We’ve worked hard out here in the provinces for five whole years. I think we deserve a rest, don’t you?”

  In his wood-paneled office at the top of the nine-story Consular building at the eastern end of the Forum the Consul Larcius Torquatus stacked and restacked the pile of documents on his desk, tidying their edges with a fastidiousness that one might not have expected in a man of so massive and heavy-set a build. Then he stared fiercely up at the two prefects of the Fiscus, who had delivered these papers an hour ago and now were sitting uneasily in front of him. “If I’ve read these correctly, and I think I have, then there’s no single department of the Imperial government that even came close to staying within its budget in the last fiscal year. That’s correct, isn’t it, Silanus?”

  The Prefect of the Fiscus Publicus nodded unhappily. His famously buoyant spirits were nowhere in evidence just now. “This is so, Consul.”

  “And you, Cestius,” Torquatus said, turning his glare in the direction of the Prefect of the Fiscus Imperialis. “You tell me here that the Emperor overdrew his personal funds last year by thirty-one million sesterces, and you made the deficit good by borrowing the money from Silanus?”

  “Yes, sir,” big round-bellied Cestius said in the smallest of voices.

  “How could you? Where’s your sense of responsibility to the nation, to the Senate, to your own conscience? The Emperor squanders thirty-one million on top of what he’s already got on hand for squandering, which must be immense, and you simply grab it out of the funds with which we’re supposed to be repairing the bridges and sweeping the dung out of the stables and paying Apollinaris’s soldiers? I ask you again: how could you?”

  A flicker of defiance glowed in Cestius’s eyes. “You’d do better to ask, how couldn’t I, Consul. Would you have me tell the Emperor to his face that he’s spending too much? How long, do you think, would it take him to find a new Prefect of the Fiscus Imperialis? And how long would it take me to find a new head?”

  Torquatus responded with a snort. “Your responsibility, Cestius, what about your responsibility? Even if it does cost you your head, it’s your job to prevent the Emperor from overspending. Otherwise why do we have a Prefect of the Fiscus at all?—And you, Silanus? By what right did you grant Cestius’s request for those thirty-one million? You weren’t being asked to confront the Emperor here, only to say no to Cestius. But you didn’t do it. Is saving your friend’s neck more important to you than the financial welfare of the Empire, which you are sworn to defend?”

  Silanus, shamefaced, offered no reply.

  Torquatus said, finally, “Shall I ask for your resignations?”

  “You can have mine at any time,” said Cestius.

  “And mine, sir,” Silanus said.

  “Yes. Yes. And then I replace you with—whom? You two are the only worthwhile men in the whole administration, and neither of you is worth very much at all. But at least you keep honest accounts.—You do keep honest accounts, don’t you? The deficit isn’t even bigger than these documents of yours claim it is?”

  “The accounts are accurate ones, sir,” said Silanus stiffly.

  “The gods be thanked for small mercies, then.—No, keep your jobs. But I want reports of a different sort from you both from now on. I want the names of the spenders. A detailed list: department heads, the ones who encourage the Emperor in his folly, those who sign the vouchers authorizing the payouts that you two are so ready to approve. And not just the department heads but anyone in the chain of command who is in a position to say no to spending requests and conspicuously fails to do so.”

  The two prefects were staring at him, horrified.

  “Names, sir?” Cestius asked. “Of all such people?”

  “Their names, yes.”

  “So that they can be reprimanded?”

  “So that they can be removed from office,” said the Consul. “The entire pack of them will go, the worst ones first, but every last one of them, eventually. Since the Emperor can’t be controlled, we’ll control the men who serve him. I want the first lists by tomorrow afternoon.” Torquatus waved them from the room. “No. Tomorrow morning,” he said, when they were at the door.

  But he did not intend to wait even that long to begin making a list of his own. He knew who the first victims of the purge would have to be: the entourage of the Emperor’s own household, the little cluster of parasitical lickspittles and sycophants and leeches who hovered about him day and night, egging foolish Demetrius on to ever greater triumphs of grotesque improvidence and lining their own pockets with the pieces of gold that went spilling away on all sides.

  He knew the names, most of them. The officials of the cubiculo, the Emperor’s intimate attendants, his grooms and pimps and butlers, many of them men of immense wealth in their own right, who went home from the royal palace every night to pleasant palaces of their own: there was Polybius, there was Hilarion—two Greeks, he thought, clamping his lips in displeasure—and the Hebrew, Judas Antonius Soranus, and the private secretary, Statius, and the royal cobbler, Claudius Nero, who made the fabulous jewel-encrusted shoes that Demetrius would never wear twice, and the court physician who prescribed such costly rarities as medicines for the monarch, taking his own percentage from the suppliers—what was his name, Mallo, Trallo, something like that?—and the architect, Tiberius Ulpius Draco, who as Minister of Public Works had built all those useless new palaces for the Emperor, and then had torn them down and built even grander ones on their sites—

  No, Draco had died a year or two ago, probably of shame over his own misdeeds, for as Torquatus remembered him he was fundamentally an honorable man. But there were plenty of others to go on the list. Gradually, over the next hour, Torquatus added name after name, until he had fifty or six
ty of them. A good beginning, that. His fury mounted as he contemplated their sins. A cold fury, it was, for he was by nature a frosty man.

  After twenty years it was time, and long past time, to put a stop to Demetrius’s imbecilic prodigality, before he brought the Empire down about him. Whatever the risks, Torquatus meant to place himself in the Emperor’s way. It was in his blood, his loyalty to the Empire. A Torquatus had been Consul in the time of Marcus Aurelius, and another in the reign of Diocletianus, and there had been other great Torquati along the way, and now he was the Torquatus of the era, the Consul Marcus Larcius Torquatus, adding distinction to his line. Those other Torquati looked down on him out of history. He knew he must save Roma for them.

  This Roma, he thought, this Empire, to which we have devoted so much loyalty, so great a part of our lives, for these two thousand years past—

  For a moment he supposed that the best tactic would be to round up five or six of the Emperor’s henchmen at a time, extracting them piecemeal from the Emperor’s proximity so that Demetrius might not notice what was going on, but then he saw that that was precisely the wrong approach. Get them all, right away, a single bold sweep, the way Apollinaris had handled things in the provinces. Out of the palace, into the prisons: bring the situation to immediate resolution. Yes. That was the way.

  He imagined the conversation with the Emperor that would follow.

  “Where are my beloved friends? Where is Statius? Where is Hilarion? What has become of Claudius Nero?”

  “All of them under arrest, your majesty. Crimes against the state. We have reached such a precarious position that we can no longer afford the luxury of having such people in your household.”

  “My doctor! My cobbler!”

  “Dangerous to the welfare of the nation, Caesar. Dangerous in the extreme. I have had spies out among the people in the taverns, and they are talking revolution. They are saying that the streets and bridges and public buildings are going unrepaired, that there is no money available for distribution to the populace, that the war in the provinces is likely to break out again at any moment—and that the Emperor must be removed before things get even worse.”

  “Removed? The Emperor? Me?”

  “They cry out for a return to the Republic.”

  Demetrius would laugh at that. “The Republic! People have been crying out for a return to the Republic for the last eighteen hundred years! They were saying it in Augustus’s time, ten minutes after he threw the Republic overboard. They don’t mean it. They know the Emperor is the father of the country, their beloved prince, the one essential figure who—”

  “No, your majesty, this time they mean it.” And Torquatus would sketch for the Emperor a vivid, terrifying picture of what a revolution would mean, laying it on as thickly as he knew how, the uprising in the streets, Senators hunted down, some of them slaughtered in their beds, and, above all, the massacre of the royal family, blood flowing, the Imperial museums looted, the burning of palaces and governmental buildings, the desecration of temples. The Emperor himself, Demetrius II Augustus Caesar, crucified in the Forum. Better yet: crucified head downward, hanging there dizzy with agony, while the jeering populace threw rocks or perhaps hurled spears—

  Yes. Ten minutes of that and he would have Demetrius cowering in his golden sandals, wetting his purple robe in fear. He would retreat into his palace and hide himself there among his toys and his mistresses and his tame lions and tigers. Meanwhile the trials would go forward, the miscreants would rapidly be found guilty of their embezzlements and malfeasances, sent into exile in the remote provinces of the realm—

  Exile?

  Exile might be too risky, Torquatus thought. Exiles sometimes find their way home—seek vengeance—

  Something more permanent than exile might be a wiser idea, he told himself.

  He scratched away with his stylus. The list grew and grew. Apollinaris would be proud of him. Constantly quoting ancient history at him, telling him how much better things had been under the Republic, when staunch stoic men like Cato the Elder and Furius Camillus and Aemilius Paulus set examples of self-denial and discipline for all the nation. “The Empire is in profound need of purification,” Apollinaris liked to say: Torquatus had heard him say it a thousand times. So it was. And by the time the Count got back from Gallia or Lusitania or wherever he was right now, he would discover that that profoundly needed purification was already under way.

  They will all die, he told himself: these parasites who surround the Emperor, these caterpillars who devour the commonwealth.

  That something strange was going on at Roma began to become apparent to Apollinaris in the first minutes after the merchant vessel that had brought him from Tarraco had reached the harbor at Ostia. The familiar ritual in which the customs officials of the port came aboard, received their bribes, and presented a perfunctory bill of duty payable did not take place. Instead there was an actual search, six men in the black-and-gold uniforms of the Imperial treasury poking through the ship’s hold and making a formal tally of the cargo, item by item.

  In theory all merchandise shipped into Italia from the provinces for resale was subject to customs duties. In practice, the customs inspectors, having paid stiff bribes to the secretariat of their department to get their jobs, skimmed off most of the customs revenue and allowed only a fraction of the legitimate amount to dribble through to the Imperial Treasury. Everyone knew it, but no one seemed to care. Apollinaris himself disliked the arrangement, even though he did not see why transfers of merchandise from one part of the Empire to another should be subject to customs charges in the first place. But the bribing of customs officials in lieu of paying duty was only one out of myriad practices of the Imperial regime that cried out for reform, and in any event the affairs of merchants and shippers had never been anything to which he had devoted much attention.

  Today’s process, though, caused unusual delays in disembarking. After a time he sent for the ship’s captain, a genial black-bearded Carthaginian, and asked what was going on.

  The captain, who was livid with dismay and indignation, wasn’t sure. New procedures, he said. Some sort of shakeup in the Department of Customs, that was all he knew.

  Apollinaris guessed at first that it might have something to do with the revenue shortfall about which Torquatus had written him: the Emperor, running low on cash, had instructed his officials to start increasing governmental revenues. Then he realized how little sense that notion made. Demetrius had never shown any awareness that there was a relationship between governmental income and Imperial expenditure. No, this must be the doing of Torquatus himself, Apollinaris decided: one of the “severe measures” that his co-Consul had said he would be taking in order to set things to rights.

  From Ostia, Apollinaris went straight to the suburban villa that he maintained along the Via Flaminia, just north of the city wall. It had been in the care of his younger brother, Romulus Claudius Apollinaris, during the five years of his absence, and Apollinaris was pleased to discover that Romulus Claudius, although he too had been absent from Roma most of that time and was living up in Umbria right now, had had the place kept up as though his brother might require its use at any moment.

  His homeward route took him through the heart of the city. It was good to be back in Roma, to see the ancient buildings again, two thousand years of history standing forth on every street, the marble walls of temples and government offices, some as old as Augustus and Tiberius, mellowed by time despite centuries of ongoing repair, and the medieval buildings, solid and a little coarse, their ornate façades throbbing in the hot sunlight, and then the new buildings of the Decadence, all strange parapets and soaring flying buttresses and sudden startling cantilevered wings, like those of some great beetle, leaping off into space. How glad he was to see it all! Even the heat stirred some gladness in him. It was the month of Julius, hot and humid, a time when the river ran very low, turbid, choked with yellow silt. The day’s heat held the city in its tight grip. Far
away, lightning sounded—a dry crack, lightning without rain, the sinister thunder of the absent-minded gods. There was a malarious stench in the air. He had forgotten how Roma stank in the summer, during all those years he had spent off in the lesser cities of the western provinces. Roma was the grandest city that ever was or would be, but there was no escaping the truth of its odor this time of year, the effluvia of a million people, their discarded rotting food, their wastes, the sweat of those million bodies. He was a fastidious man. He disliked the heat, the stench, the dirt. And yet, yet—this was Roma, and there was no city like it!

  When Apollinaris reached his villa he sent word to Torquatus that he had returned and would be pleased to meet with him as soon as possible, and at once a messenger came back from Torquatus inviting him to dine at his house that evening.

  That was a doubtful pleasure. Apollinaris, for all his scholarly interest in the stoic virtues of Republican Roma, was a civilized and cultivated man who appreciated fine wines and imaginative cooking. His colleague in the Consulship was of another kind entirely, very much an Old Roman in his distaste for comfort and luxury—a ponderous, wintry-souled sort who showed little interest in food or wine or literature or philosophy, indeed whose only pleasurable pursuit, so far as Apollinaris knew, was to hunt wild boar in the snow-choked forests of the northern provinces.