Roma Eterna

by Robert Silverberg

  “A new Brutus among us?” Apollinaris said. “No, I don’t think so. Not Papinio.” He glanced through the papers once more. “The day after tomorrow. Well, that gives us a little time.”

  With Torquatus locked away, the task of dealing with this was entirely his. He ordered Papinio arrested and interrogated. The interrogation was swift and efficient: at the first touch of the torturer’s tongs Papinio provided a full confession, naming twelve co-conspirators. The trial was held that evening and the executions took place at dawn. So much for the new incarnation of Junius Lucius Brutus.

  There were great ironies here, Apollinaris knew. He had put Torquatus away in the hope of halting the torrent of killings, and now he had ordered a whole new series of executions himself. But he knew he had had no choice. Papinio’s plot would surely have brought the whole Imperial system down if the man had managed to live another two days.

  With that out of the way, he took up the matter of the increasing troubles in the slum districts. The rioters were breaking statues, looting shops. Troops had been sent in and hundreds of plebeians had been killed, yet each day brought new violence.

  Apollinaris’s agents brought him pamphlets that the agitators in the Subura were passing out in the streets. Like the late Julius Papinio, these men were calling for the overthrow of the government and the restoration of the Republic of olden times.

  The return of the Republic, Apollinaris thought, might actually not be such a bad thing. The Imperial system had produced some great rulers, yes, but it had also brought the Neros and Saturninuses and Demetriuses to the throne. Sometimes it seemed to him that Roma had endured this long despite most of its Emperors, rather than because of them. Reverting now to the way things had been in antiquity, the Senate choosing two highly qualified men to serve as Consuls, supreme magistrates ruling in consultation with the Senate, holding office not for life but only for brief terms that they would voluntarily relinquish when the time came—there was more than a little merit in that idea.

  But what he feared was that if the monarchy were overthrown Roma would pass instantly through the stage of a republic to that of a democracy—the rule of the mob, is what that meant, giving the government over to the man who promised the greatest benefits to the least worthy segments of society, buying the support of the crowd by stripping the assets of the productive citizens. That was not to be tolerated: democracy in Roma would bring madness even worse than that of Demetrius. Something had to be done to prevent that. Apollinaris ordered his men to seek out and arrest the ringleaders of the Subura anarchy.

  Meanwhile Torquatus himself, safely tucked away in the Imperial dungeons, lay under sentence of death. The Senate, with Lactantius Rufus presiding over the trial, had been quick to indict him and find him guilty. But Apollinaris had not been able to bring himself, thus far, to sign the death warrant. He knew that he would have to deal with it sooner or later, of course. Torquatus, once imprisoned, could never be freed, not if Apollinaris intended to remain alive himself. But still—actually to send the man to the block—

  Apollinaris left the matter unresolved for the moment and returned to the issue of the new co-Consul.

  He went through the list of Senators but found no one who might be acceptable. They were all tainted in one way or another by ambition, by corruption, by laziness, by foolishness, by any of a dozen sins and flaws. But then the name of Laureolus Caesar came to mind.

  Of royal blood. Intelligent. Youthful. Presentable. A student of history, familiar with the errors of Roma’s turbulent past. And a man without enemies, because he had wisely kept himself far from the capital during the most deplorable years of Demetrius’s reign. They would work well together as Consular colleagues, Apollinaris was sure.

  Apollinaris had sounded Laureolus out about the Consulship once already, back in Tarraco. But he had withdrawn the suggestion as soon as he had made it, realizing that the Emperor would probably see young Laureolus as a potential rival for the throne and reject the nomination. That problem was no longer a factor.

  Well, then. Summon Laureolus from his country retreat, let him know that Torquatus had been removed from office, tell him that his duty as a Roman required him to accept the Consulship in Torquatus’s place. Yes. Yes.

  But before Apollinaris could call Tiberius Charax in to dictate the message to him Charax came running into his office unbidden, flushed, wild-eyed. Apollinaris had never seen the little Greek so flustered-looking before.

  “Sir—sir—”

  “Easy, man! Catch your breath! What’s happened?”

  “The—Emperor—” Charax could barely get the words out. He must have sprinted all the way across the Forum and up the eight flights of stairs. “Has bribed—his way—out of his confinement. Is—back in the palace. Is under—the protection—of the former Praetorian Prefect, Leo Severinus.” He paused to collect himself. “And has named a completely new set of governmental ministers. Many of whom are dead, but he doesn’t know that yet.”

  Apollinaris muttered a curse. “What is he saying about the Consuls?”

  “He has sent a letter to the Senate, sir. Commanding that yourself and Torquatus be dismissed.”

  “Well, at least I’ve taken care of the second part of that for him already, eh, Charax?” Apollinaris gave the aide-de-camp a grim smile. This was a maddening development, but he had no time for anger now. Action, quick and decisive, was the only remedy. “Get me the same dozen men you used when you arrested Torquatus. And half a dozen more of the same quality. I want them assembled outside this building ten minutes from now. I’m going to have to pay a little visit to the Praetorians.—Oh, and send word to Prince Laureolus that I want him here in Roma as soon as he can get here. Tomorrow, at the latest. No: tonight.”

  The headquarters of the Praetorian Guard had been located since the time of Tiberius in the eastern part of the city. By now, nearly eighteen centuries later, the Praetorians, the Emperor’s elite personal military force, had come to occupy a huge forbidding block there, a dark, ugly building that was meant to frighten, and did. Apollinaris understood the risks he was running by presenting himself at that menacing garrison. The little squad of armed men accompanying him had purely a symbolic value: if the Praetorians chose to attack, there would be no withstanding their much greater numbers. But there were no options here. If Demetrius had really regained control, Apollinaris was a dead man already, unless he succeeded in winning the Praetorians over.

  Luck was with him, though. The mystique of the Consular emblem, the twelve bundles of birchwood rods with the axe-heads jutting through, opened the gates of the building for him. And both of the Praetorian Prefects were on the premises, the Emperor’s man Leo Severinus and the replacement whom Torquatus had appointed, Atilius Rullianus. That was a good stroke, finding them both. He had expected to find Rullianus; but Severinus was the key player at the moment, and it had been more likely that he would be at the palace.

  They might have been stamped from the same mold: two big pockmarked men, greasy-skinned, hard-eyed. The Praetorians had certain expectations about what their commanders were supposed to be like, and it was good policy to see that those expectations were met, which almost always was the case.

  Severinus, the former and present prefect, had served under Apollinaris as a young officer in the Sicilian campaign. Apollinaris was counting on the vestiges of Severinus’s loyalty to him to help him now.

  And indeed Severinus looked bewildered, here in the presence not only of his rival for command of the Guard but also of his own onetime superior officer. He stood gaping. “What are you doing here?” Apollinaris asked him immediately. “Shouldn’t you be with your Emperor?”

  “I—sir—that is—”

  “We needed to confer,” Rullianus offered. “To work out which one of us is really in charge.”

  “So you asked him to come, and he was madman enough to do it?” Apollinaris laughed harshly. “I think you’ve spent too much time around the Emperor, Severinus. The lunacy m
ust be contagious.”

  “In fact it was my idea to come,” said Severinus stolidly. “The situation—the two of us holding the same post, Rullianus and I—”

  “Yes,” Apollinaris said. “One of you appointed by an Emperor who has lost his mind, and the other one appointed by a Consul who has lost his job.—You do know that Torquatus is in the dungeons, don’t you, Rullianus?”

  “Of course, sir.” It was hardly more than a whisper.

  “And you, Severinus. Surely you understand that the Emperor is insane.”

  “It is very bad, yes. He was foaming at the mouth, sir, when I left him an hour ago. Nevertheless—His Majesty ordered me—”

  “Give me no neverthelesses,” Apollinaris snapped. “Orders coming from a crazy man have no value. Demetrius is unfit to rule. His years on the throne have brought the Empire to the point of collapse, and you two are the men who can save it, if you act quickly and courageously.” They stood before him as though frozen, so profoundly awed they did not seem even to be breathing. “I have tasks for you both, which I want you to carry out this very morning. You will have the gratitude of the Empire as your reward. And also the gratitude of the new Emperor, and of his Consuls.” He transfixed them, each in his turn, with an implacable stare. “Do I make myself clear? The men who make Emperors reap great benefit from their deeds. This is your moment in history.”

  They understood him. There was no doubt about that.

  He gave them their instructions and returned to the Consular building to await results.

  It would be a long and difficult day, Apollinaris knew. He barricaded himself within his office, with his little group of guardsmen stationed in front of his door, and passed the hours reading here and there in Lentulus Aufidius’s account of the reign of Titus Gallius, in the Histories of Sextus Asinius, in Antipater’s great work on the fall of Roma to the Byzantines, and other chronicles of troubled times. In particular he lingered over Sextus Asinius’s account of Cassius Chaerea, the colonel of the Guards who had slain the mad Emperor Caligula, even though it meant his own doom when Claudius followed his nephew Caligula to the throne. Cassius Chaerea had known what needed to be done, aware that it might cost him his life, and he had done it, and it had. Apollinaris read Asinius’s account of Chaerea twice through and gave it much thought.

  Late afternoon brought a great crack of thunder and a flash of lightning that seemed to split the skies, and then torrential rainfall, the first rain the city had had in the many weeks of this ferociously hot summer. Apollinaris took it as an omen, a signal from the gods in whom he did not believe that the miasma of the hour was about to be swept away.

  Rullianus was admitted to his presence only minutes afterward, drenched by the sudden downpour. The execution of the former Consul Marcus Larcius Torquatus, Rullianus reported, had been duly carried out, secretly, in the dungeons, as ordered. Virtually on his heels came Severinus, with the news that in accordance with Count Apollinaris’s instructions the late Emperor Demetrius had been smothered in his own pillows, the body weighted with rocks, thrown into the Tiber at the place where such things usually were done.

  “You’ll return to your barracks immediately and say nothing about this to anyone,” Apollinaris told them both, and they gave him brisk, enthusiastic salutes and left.

  To Charax he said, “Follow them and have them taken into custody. Here are the orders for their arrests.”

  “Very good, sir. The prince Laureolus is outside, sir.”

  “And still almost an hour before nightfall. He must have borrowed the wings of Mercurius to get here this fast!”

  But the prince’s appearance showed not the least sign that he had hurried unduly to the capital. He looked as cool as ever, calm, self-possessed, an aristocrat to the core, his chilly blue eyes betraying no trace of concern at the disarray that was apparent all over the city.

  “I regret to tell you,” Apollinaris began at once, in his most exaggeratedly solemn tone, “that this is a day of great sorrow for the Empire. His Majesty Demetrius Augustus is dead.”

  “A terrible loss indeed,” said Laureolus, in that same tone of mock solemnity. But then—clearly his quick mind needed only a fraction of an instant to leap to the right conclusion—a look of something close to horror came into his eyes. “And his successor is to be—”

  Apollinaris smiled. “Hail, Laureolus Caesar Augustus, Emperor of Roma!”

  Laureolus held his hands up before his face. “No. No.”

  “You must. You are the savior of the Empire.”

  Only this morning—it seemed years ago—Apollinaris had thought to invite Laureolus to join him in the Consulship. But Demetrius’s unexpected brief escape from his confinement in the royal guest-house had ended all that. Apollinaris knew that he could make Charax Consul now, or Sulpicius Silanus, the thrifty Prefect of the Fiscus Publicus, or anyone else he pleased. It would not matter. The role that needed filling this day was that of Emperor. And, very quickly, Laureolus had seen that, too.

  Color had come to his face. His eyes were bright with anger and shock.

  “My quiet life of retirement, Apollinaris—my work as a scholar—”

  “You can read and write just as well in the palace. The Imperial library, I assure you, is the finest in the world. Refusing is not an option. Would you have Roma tumble into anarchy? You are the only possible Emperor.”

  “What about yourself?”

  “I was bred to be a military man. An administrator. Not an Emperor.—No, there’s no one else but you, Caesar. No one.”

  “Stop calling me ‘Caesar’!”

  “I must. And you must. I’ll be beside you, your senior Consul. I had thought to retire also, you know, but that too will have to wait. Roma demands this of us. We have had madness upon madness in this city, first the madness of Demetrius, then the different sort of madness that Torquatus brought. And there are men in the Subura threatening yet another kind of madness. Now all that must end, and you and I are the only ones who can end it. So I say it once again: ‘Hail, Laureolus Caesar Augustus!’ We will present you to the Senate tomorrow, and the day after that to the people of the city.”

  “Damn you, Apollinaris! Damn you!”

  “For shame! What way is that, Caesar, to speak to the man who has placed you on the throne of the great Augustus?”

  Lactantius Rufus himself, as the presiding magistrate of the Senate, presented the motion that awarded Laureolus the titles of Princeps, Imperator, Pontifex Maximus, Tribune of the People, and all the rest that went with being First Citizen, Emperor of Roma, and, as the Senators got quickly to their feet to shout their approval, lost no time in declaring that the vote was unanimous. The Count Valerian Apollinaris was confirmed immediately afterward as Consul once again, and the eighty-three-year-old Clarissimus Blossius, the eldest member of the Senate, won quick confirmation also as Apollinaris’s new colleague in the Consulship.

  “And now,” said Apollinaris that night at the palace, “we must begin the task of restoring the tranquility of the realm.”

  It was a good glib phrase, but converting it from rhetoric into reality posed a greater challenge than even Apollinaris had realized. Charax had built a network of agents who traversed the city day and night to detect unrest and subversion, and they reported, to a man, that the poison of democratic ideas had spread everywhere in the capital. The people, the plebeians, those without rank or property of any kind, had not been in any way distressed to see mass executions of Imperial courtiers in the plaza of Marcus Anastasius, nor did it trouble them when the Consuls were sending packs of Senators to the scaffold, nor when they learned of the virtually simultaneous deaths of the Consul Torquatus and the Emperor Demetrius. So far as they were concerned it would be just as well to arrest the entire class of men who were qualified to wear the toga of free-born citizenship, and their wives and children as well, and send them off for execution, and divide their property among the common folk for the welfare of all.

  Apollinaris de
creed the formation of a Council of Internal Security to investigate and control the spread of such dangerous ideas in the capital. He was its chairman. Charax and Lactantius Rufus were the only other members. When Laureolus protested being omitted from the group, Apollinaris named him to it also, but saw to it that its meetings always were held when the new Emperor was otherwise occupied. Many unpleasant things needed to be done just now, and Laureolus was, Apollinaris thought, too proper and civilized a cavalier to approve of some of the bloody tasks ahead.

  So am I, Apollinaris thought, a proper and civilized cavalier, and yet these weeks past I have waded through rivers of blood for the sake of sparing our Empire from even greater calamity. And I have come too far now for turning back. I must go onward, on to the other shore.

  The ringleader of the rioting in the Subura had now been identified: a certain Greek named Timoleon, a former slave. Charax brought Apollinaris a pamphlet in which Timoleon urged the elimination of the patrician class, the abolition of all the existing political structures of the Empire, and the establishment of what he called the Tribunal of the People: a governing body of a thousand men, twenty from each of the fifty districts of the capital city, chosen by popular vote of all residents. They would serve for two years and then would have to step down so that a new election could be held, and no one could hold membership in the Tribunal twice in the same decade. Men of the old Senatorial and knightly ranks would not be permitted to put themselves forth as candidates.

  “Arrest this Timoleon and two or three dozen of his noisiest followers,” Apollinaris ordered. “Put them on trial and see to it that justice is swift.”

  Shortly Charax returned with the news that Timoleon had disappeared into the endless caverns of the Underworld, the ancient city beneath the city, and was constantly moving about down there, keeping well ahead of the agents of the Council of Internal Security.

  “Find him,” Apollinaris said.