Nero's Heirs

by Allan Massie

  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-balancing, 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.

  Then we advanced again in some sort of order, some semblance that was testimony to the professionalism of the men and the command of the centurion, beyond the Campus Martius, which was now ours, towards the Capitol.

  Everywhere there were bodies. Every gutter ran with blood. Three men had fallen by the entrance to a brothel. I saw a wretch pick his way delicately over the corpses as he responded to the invitation of a Nubian whore.

  Do I need, Tacitus, to weary you, and disgust myself, with a further account of this terrible day? Darkness was falling on the city, and still the slaughter did not cease; nor did the degraded part of the populace show any readiness to desist from their greedy viewing of the continuing carnage. They were, it struck me even then, like men who take their pleasure from watching the sexual couplings of others.

  I can leave it to your imagination - your so literary imagination -to conjure up a more vivid picture than I can supply; and I can trust you to loose the searing contempt of a man certain of his own virtue on the horrors displayed wherever one turned one's gaze. On the one hand were all the debaucheries of a city given over to luxury and a pleasure all the more greedily taken on account of the disasters
that had befallen Rome in the past months, and of those still worse that were yet imminent, and on the other were all the cruelties and misery of a city sacked by men who had forgotten all that separates civilised man from the barbarians.

  Yes, I can leave it to you to make much of this.

  But there are certain scenes which oppress my memory, which come to me still, so many years later, in the blank hours of nights when, deprived of sleep, I play over and over again the nightmare of my life. There was, for instance, the legionary I saw - a squat bald-bearded man, with flabby buttocks - tear his sword from the body of a fellow-citizen, spit on the contorted face that looked up on him, then seize a little girl, no more than ten years of age, who was standing in the doorway of a tenement, her thumb in her mouth. He swung her off the ground and, holding the struggling and now screaming child under his arm, ran along a noisome lane. Then he threw her down on a porter's trolley that stood there, abandoned, and tearing at her shift, exposed her genitals. He was in the act of mounting her when I came up, and thrust my sword into his fat arse. I can still hear his scream and smell his shit. As he fell away and, in disgust, I kicked at his head and wiped my filthy sword across his cheeks, the little girl twisted herself off the trolley and took to her heels. I wonder if she got home. I wonder if she lived.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the old centurion's.

  'He was one of ours,' he said, 'the dirty brute.'

  'Was this what you joined the army for?' I said.

  His blue eyes were bloodshot.

  That's not a question I would care to put to myself.'

  A young soldier ran up and, to my amazement, saluted the centurion.

  Word is, sir,' he said, 'they've surrendered at the Praetorian camp.' 'Word may be so,' the centurion said. 'But I wouldn't wager on it if I was you, laddie.' He turned to me.

  You'll know the palace, sir,' he said, 'seeing as you were on Otho's staff. Poor bugger, this sort of day was what he killed himself to prevent. But, knowing the palace as you do, what say we go there in search of that bastard Vitellius? It wouldn't do us any harm to be the ones to arrest him.'

  As a child, and into adolescence, I had a recurrent dream. I found myself abandoned in a great house. The first room was full of beautiful objects and fine statues which nevertheless alarmed me, for they seemed to move whenever my eyes turned away from them. Then I was led, by some force I did not recognise but was powerless to resist, through a succession of rooms, each one more meanly furnished than the one I had just left. And, as I moved, I heard heavy footsteps, as if of walking stones, behind me. At last, I passed through a long chamber where dust lay thick on the floor and cobwebs hung from the cornices. At the end of the chamber was a heavy metal-studded door which would not yield to me. The iron key, big as a man's hand, would not turn, and I pressed against the door as the footsteps approached ever nearer, and mocking laughter filled the empty air.

  Now the dream was made real. The imperial palace, thronged with soldiers, officials, secretaries, clients, freedmen, slaves, only a few days previously, now stood deserted, silent as the grave, but for the distant murmur from the city below. We passed through the rooms, silently, as if in awe. We were not the first comers. Other soldiers had been here before us. There were signs of looting - chests overturned or ransacked, hangings torn from the walls, plinths that no longer supported busts, broken pottery, empty wine-flasks. In one room, where perhaps the men had expressed their contempt for the broken Emperor, there was an acrid stench of urine. In another a slave lay with his throat cut. Perhaps he had returned, or lingered, in search of loot, and his prize had been torn from his hands by the soldiers who had discovered him.

  The Emperor's personal apartments had suffered most. There was not a piece of furniture that stood undamaged. Chests had been ransacked; those contents which were not prized were scattered over the floor. The wall-paintings were defaced. A pile of shit stood in one corner of his bedchamber.

  We're too late,' the old centurion said. The other buggers have got him.'

  'I think not,' I replied, 'it's impossible we shouldn't have encountered them, or at least have heard the cries of the mob that must accompany Vitellius' appearance. He may not be here. He may not even have been here lately. But he hasn't been taken here, I'm sure of that.'

  A couple of soldiers now came up to us, dragging a thin whimpering boy between them.

  'Found him in the kitchens, sir. Says he's a pastry-cook.'

  He thrust his sword-point under the boy's chin.

  Tell the officer what you told me.'

  The story, emerging in frightened gasps, amidst pleas for mercy, was simple. Vitellius had indeed left the palace, being carried in a litter to his father-in-law's house on the Aventine. That had been the intention. But he had come back, the boy didn't know why. That was when he had concealed himself, because he'd nowhere else to go. He was a slave, without family. Where was there a refuge for the likes of him? So he'd hidden in the meat-press in the kitchen. The last he'd seen of the Emperor was the litter returning up the hill to the palace.

  'Let him go,' the centurion said. 'He's harmless.'

  The boy threw a wild look, and scurried out of sight.

  A dog howled, somewhere in the recesses of the back quarters.

  It howled again.

  We went in the direction of the sound. We followed the twists of the corridors in the gloom of advancing night. It would be quite dark in a few minutes and we had no torches. Then, at the end of a long corridor, we saw the dog. It sat on its haunches and howled again at the sight of us. As we approached it leapt towards us, but was checked by the chain attached to its collar. The chain was fastened to the handle of the door facing us. A soldier unhooked it, led the dog away. It bounced beside him, happy to be released. We tried to open the door. It wouldn't move. There was an obstacle on the other side. The centurion ordered three soldiers to force it open. Still it didn't move. The dog was quiet now, and for a moment there was silence. Then one of the legionaries, a big Illyrian, pushed the others aside, took three paces back, and charged the door with his shoulder. There was a crack of breaking wood and the door yielded. Now it was easy to force it open. Someone had placed a bedstead and table against it. It gave on a little room, used for storage of unwanted articles. There was no one to be seen. Then the sound as of a man catching breath came from the corner, where rugs and coverings were piled. It was followed by a sneeze. I advanced, stood over the pile of rugs, was able to make out a figure, lowered my hand and, taking him by the arm, pulled Vitellius to his feet.

  You will hear different versions of his capture, I've no doubt of that. But believe me, Tacitus, mine is the truth. You can believe me because I take no pride in what followed. Indeed the memory fills me with shame.

  It was my intention to put him under formal arrest and keep him in safe captivity till order was restored in the city, and the leaders of our party - indeed Vespasian himself - could determine what should be done with him, whether he should be formally tried, or despatched by imperial command. That would have been the proper way to behave. So I greeted him with the respect due to a man who had been acclaimed Emperor, though I had never recognised his title myself. You will agree that this was correct.

  At first, I'm sorry to say, he tried to deny himself. No, he babbled, he wasn't Vitellius, how could we suppose he was? This protestation called forth mockery and insults from the soldiers, who had fought men that day ready to die for this creature, and themselves endured much to arrive at this moment. Then Vitellius changed his tune, after I had reminded him of who I was and of how recently I had been in his presence as an emissary of Flavius Sabinus, 'whose death you were too feeble to prevent', I added. When he heard these words, he fell to the ground and locked his arms round my legs, beseeching me to spare his life.

  'I have something of value to say concerning the welfare of Vespasian,' he moaned. Take me to a place of safe custody, it will be to your advantage, I assure you of that, indeed I do.'
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br />   The centurion said, 'Shall I stick him in the gizzard, sir? He's disgusting, and the sooner we are finished with this bag of ordure, the better for all of us. He's worse than Nero. To think that men put this in the place of the Divine Augustus and Tiberius, it fair turns my stomach.'

  'No,' I said, 'I know how you feel, believe me, I do. Nevertheless we'll do as he begs. It's for the Emperor Vespasian himself to decide this wretch's fate.'

  There was a murmur of disagreement from the soldiers, a hint of mutiny, but the centurion was a man of honour. He said, 'As you command, sir,' sheathed his sword, and ordered the soldiers to fall in. Two of them were deputed to support Vitellius who seemed scarce able to walk of his own accord; on account of weakness of will, rather than of body.

  So with some appearance of order and dignity, we emerged from the palace. At that moment we were intercepted by a troop led by the tribune Julius Placidus.

  'Here's trouble,' the centurion muttered.

  I presented myself to the tribune, who knew my name, but was more immediately conscious of his own seniority. He congratulated me, perfunctorily, and announced that he was now assuming command. He ordered that Vitellius' hands be bound behind his back, to demonstrate that he was a prisoner. I told him of my intention, adding, as was my duty, that Vitellius claimed to have something of importance to say concerning the welfare of Vespasian. The tribune said, 'And you believed him?'

  'Not necessarily but, in any case, that's irrelevant. He's a prisoner of the State.'

  'As you say. I'll take charge of him.'

  What could I do? It would have been unseemly to pursue my appeal further. I was outranked. Indeed, having no official position, I was outranked even by the centurion, who had deferred to me only on account of my birth and breeding, perhaps manner also. I could only trail in the rear, a helpless witness of a degrading spectacle, made more guilty by the look, full of despair and reproach, which the wretched Vitellius directed at me.