“The opposite view, and perhaps the reason that Romans in particular, like Marcus, judge them so harshly, would be that of the Christians,” said Galen. “If I understand correctly, they think that this world is of no importance whatsoever, that this is merely a sort of staging area for some other, far better existence, a place of perfect bliss, which can be known to mortals only after death, and then only to those mortals who accept a certain very specific and very narrow set of beliefs. And about the exact nature of these beliefs, the Christians squabble among themselves endlessly, engaging in mock-philosophical debates that would make any true philosopher cringe, since what they argue about is merely smoke and mirrors.”
Gaius nodded. “And the further east one goes from Rome, the more elaborate and intricate, and even preposterous, become the native religions. Uncle Kaeso once related to me the details of some eastern religion he had encountered, supposedly revealed in a blinding flash to a self-proclaimed prophet who then wrote down in exquisite detail all the dozens of levels of existence, all of which intersected with each other in very complicated ways, rather like a house of many stories with countless chutes and ladders and trapdoors—none of which can be proven, or even in any way observed, of course. Reason means nothing when the worshippers are completely reliant on the revelations of the prophet.”
He glanced down at his son, who had abandoned the caterpillar, expecting to see the boy looking bored or distracted, but instead Aulus was watching them intently, listening to every word.
“All I really know is that once my father lived, and now he does not. Once he was here among us, and now he is not.” Gaius returned his gaze to the monuments. So it was, too, with his uncle Kaeso, the brave warrior, the tireless defender of all that was Roman, a man who helped to bring about so much change in the city, but who did not profit from it in the end …
* * *
With Commodus dead, the situation at first looked promising. Pertinax, innocent of the murder plot, was pressed by senators to take the throne. He could hardly be called a second Marcus Aurelius—who could be?—but he had been a part of Marcus’s inner circle, and at the age of sixty-six was far more experienced, reasonable, and mature than Commodus had been. His assumption of imperial power marked an immediate return to sane and sober leadership, and many Romans breathed a sigh of relief.
Though widely disbelieved, the official version of events maintained that Commodus had died of natural causes, so no one was punished. But not everyone was glad to see Commodus dead. Palace courtiers and the Praetorian Guards who had received Commodus’s special favor bitterly resented his sudden death and suspected foul play.
The Senate issued a long decree denouncing all the follies and crimes of Commodus, calling him “more savage than Domitian, more foul than Nero.” There was an immediate and thorough elimination of Commodus’s images all over the city, beginning with the archer aiming his bow at the Senate House, which was pulled down and smashed with hammers that very day. Gaius had been heartsick to see so many splendid works by the Pinarii shattered or melted down. At least his father had been spared from witnessing the destruction.
Most spectacular was the beheading of the Colossus. In the rush, no special planning took place. A team of slaves with tools was dispatched to climb up and crudely cut off the head of Commodus-as-Hercules. With a wrenching scream of broken metal, the giant head plummeted a hundred feet to the ground, where it burst into jagged shards that badly wounded several spectators and killed one of them on the spot, beheading the poor man, ironically enough. The Senate decreed that a head of Sol with a crown of sunbeams should be restored to the Colossus. For that task, Pertinax turned to Gaius, following the logic that those who had altered the Colossus once might be trusted with the complicated job of changing it back. The project was tedious and more than a little daunting, especially without his father’s guidance, but at least it was keeping Gaius busy.
If his father had been spared from seeing the demolition of so many of the Pinarii’s creations, he had also missed the joy of seeing the Column of Marcus Aurelius formally dedicated at last. Never mind that the towering monument depicted so much horrendous suffering and bloodshed, or that it had been commissioned by Commodus; Pertinax saw the column’s dedication as an opportunity to look back on the reign of the stalwart Marcus, and to look forward to his own tenure, informed by the same values. From such a perspective, the reign of the unwarlike Commodus could be seen as a depraved but temporary aberration.
There had been a public auction of Commodus’s private goods, not only to raise much-needed money for the treasury, but to expose the full decadence of his lifestyle, including his sumptuous clothing and jewelry and, of course, his fabulous collection of carriages. Bidding had been fierce to acquire items of his personal gladiator gear, especially his gem-encrusted armor and golden helmets. Less popular, despite their costly materials of gold, silver, and precious stones, had been the emperor’s collection of phallic-shaped goblets reputed to represent exact likenesses of Commodus and his circle of favorites, including the slave Commodus had nicknamed Onos, Greek for “donkey.”
A new day had dawned in Rome, a return to the sound government of the past.
But early on, Pertinax alienated the Praetorian Guards by trying to rein in their wild behavior. Under Commodus, the Praetorians had become undisciplined and arrogant and often abusive of citizens, blatantly engaging in rape and theft without fear of punishment. Determined to put a stop to such lawlessness, Pertinax disciplined a few disobedient Praetorians with harsh corporal punishments and heavy fines. Hardly three months into his reign, some disaffected Praetorians decided to murder Pertinax.
The assassins stormed into the palace. Messengers alerted Pertinax. The new emperor did not flee, or even send his own bodyguards to confront them. Instead, he calmly strode out to meet them, found an elevated place to stand, and began to orate, as if they were misbehaving schoolboys who simply needed to be shown the error of their ways. The soldiers were infuriated by his condescension. They not only murdered Pertinax, but also beheaded him—the first time such an atrocity had been committed against a Roman emperor since the loathsome Vitellius.
The Praetorians rampaged through the palace, killing a great many imperial courtiers, including Eclectus, Commodus’s treacherous chamberlain, who had been allowed to keep his post under Pertinax. Eclectus was the first of the assassins of Commodus to die—but not the last.
There followed perhaps the most shameful moment thus far in the history of Rome. Having done away with Pertinax, the Praetorians decided that they, not the Senate, would choose the next emperor, and not by merit or rank or blood, but by auction. They contacted the two men most eager to succeed Pertinax and told them that whichever of them offered the largest payment to each soldier would become emperor. The winner of this auction was Didius Julianus, a political enemy of the dead Pertinax, who told the soldiers they could call him Commodus, to their delight.
What had the empire of Marcus Aurelius come to?
The short reign of Julianus was chaotic from the start. At the horse races to celebrate his ascension, a mob of citizens rushed the stands of the Circus Maximus and claimed the seats reserved for senators, then hurled insults at Julianus in the imperial box. The Praetorians were ready to slaughter every citizen on the spot, but Julianus kept them in check, not wanting to begin his reign with a bloodbath. He acted as if nothing was amiss. The races proceeded without the attendance of the outraged senators. Having no places to sit, they stalked out in disgust.
The people despised Julianus and the Praetorians. The Praetorians despised the people. The Senate despised everyone else, especially Julianus, and everyone despised the Senate in return. Julianus’s hold on power became even more tenuous when word arrived that two rivals, each commanding an army, were heading toward the city from different directions. In his slightly more than two months as emperor, Julianus’s only accomplishment was a declaration of what everyone already suspected, that Commodus had die
d not of natural causes but by murder, and the apprehension and summary execution of two of the leading participants in the plot, Commodus’s lover, Marcia, and the city prefect, Laetus.
Gaius’s uncle Kaeso somehow escaped Julianus’s net, as did Narcissus, the hulking young athlete who strangled Commodus while Gaius watched. So did Galen—if in fact Galen played a part in the poison plot. About this, Gaius had never directly questioned Galen, and Galen had never offered any information. Gaius nonetheless had come to suspect that Galen supplied poison to Kaeso, who then supplied it to Marcia and Eclectus. What an irony, that a poison provided by the world’s foremost physician proved useless! In the end, brute force had been the solution. The participation of Galen, if indeed he played a part, had been ineffective and unnecessary.
And now, the one man who could have told Gaius the truth about Galen—his uncle Kaeso—had been silenced forever, the last of the conspirators to be punished, not by the short-lived Julianus but by the man who succeeded him …
* * *
When Pertinax accepted the throne, a relieved Kaeso had shown his nephew the short list of men whom the plotters had considered as possible successors to Commodus. Among them (along with Pertinax and Kaeso himself) was the prominent general Septimius Severus, who had risen steadily through the ranks of the various magistracies, proving his political skills, and had shown himself equally adept as a commander on the battlefield.
Counting against Severus was his exotic origin. He had been born in the province of Africa with Punic as his first language, and he still spoke Latin with a distinctly African accent of the sort often played for laughs by stage comedians. It was hard not to smile when the man pronounced his own name as “Sheptimiush Sherverush.” His wife was even more exotic, a Syrian from the city of Emesa, where the males of her family held the hereditary priesthood of the sun god Elagabalus, whom the Emesenes believed to be greater than all other gods.
Gaius, betraying his patrician roots, had scoffed at the idea that such an uncouth outsider could ever become First Man in Rome, the successor of titans like Augustus and Marcus Aurelius. But when Severus arrived at Rome with his army, declaring himself the avenger and successor of Pertinax, Didius Julianus was quickly murdered and a shaken Senate declared Severus emperor.
After the very short reigns of Pertinax and Julianus, and with yet more military claimants to power looming on the horizon, many thought the reign of Severus might be equally short-lived. But Severus was bold and confident from the start. With his own troops to back him, he dismissed the unruly and arrogant Praetorian Guards, the source of so much trouble for emperors and citizens alike, and replaced them with his own loyal soldiers. He not only deified Pertinax, but declared that Commodus, too, had been a god. He also claimed that Commodus had been his brother, because Severus, too, was a son of Marcus Aurelius, and thus was his legitimate successor. Everyone in Rome knew that this was a metaphor at best, but in state records and inscriptions all over the empire, Severus’s descent from Marcus became a legal fact, which made him no longer an African upstart but the heir of a long and illustrious line of rulers.
Like Marcus at the outset of his reign, Severus promised that no senator would ever be put to death without a fair and open trial. But as brother of Commodus and friend of the murdered Pertinax, he could not let their deaths go unavenged. Severus first tracked down Narcissus, the athlete who had strangled Commodus, and threw him to lions in the arena, where he was eaten alive for the amusement of the audience. This was the punishment that Hadrian had decreed for parricides, and wasn’t any man who murdered his emperor a father-killer?
But Severus did not stop with Narcissus. He proceeded to arrest and put to death a number of men, including senators, on the grounds that they had played a part in the murder of Commodus or Pertinax or both.
Among those men—and guilty as charged, as Gaius knew—was Kaeso Pinarius.
Offered the honorable option of suicide, Kaeso had ended his life at home in a hot bath with his wrists cut, attended only by his wife. Kaeso had forbidden Gaius and even his own children to be present, wanting to limit, as much as possible, any taint of guilt by association. His funeral had been a quiet affair. His plain monument was so fresh from the Pinarius workshop that little drifts of marble dust still nestled in the recesses of the chiseled letters.
Gaius stood before the monument, still shaken by Kaeso’s death, his nerves frayed by the constant violence and wrenching uncertainty of recent months. He had been in suspense every day since the murder of Commodus, fearful that his long connection to Commodus would put him in peril, or fearful for the opposite reason, that his uncle’s part in the plot would bring down all the Pinarii. Both friends and foes of Commodus might yet see fit to eliminate him.
For one thing he was thankful: his presence in the room when Commodus was strangled had never been made public. Even in rumors, he was never mentioned. This miracle Gaius could only ascribe to the return of the fascinum, which never left his person, firmly attached to a chain around his neck.
Now Septimius Severus was away from Rome, headed east to deal with a rival claimant to the throne. With the emperor gone, Gaius had thought himself safe at last. But very early that morning, an imperial messenger had arrived at his home.
Gaius held the rolled message, which was tied with a purple ribbon and sealed with wax impressed with the imperial emblem. Gaius had not yet dared to open it, waiting until he could stand in the presence of his father’s shrine, with his son present and with Galen to advise him.
“Are you ready now to read it?” asked Galen quietly.
Gaius took a deep breath, then managed a crooked smile. “Perhaps it’s about the Colossus. That could be it, don’t you think? Since the day Pertinax hired me to restore it, no one in the palace has said a word to me. There’s a rumor among the work crew that Severus, being such an outspoken admirer of his so-called brother, will sooner or later make us stop what we’re doing and restore the statue as it was before—with a head of Commodus as Hercules!”
“I hardly think that’s likely,” said Galen.
“No, I suppose not.” Gaius broke the seal. He unrolled the message and read aloud, forcing himself to speak the words slowly and steadily, occasionally frowning or drawing a sharp breath.
“‘We have been reviewing the plans you submitted (to our predecessor the Deified Pertinax) for the restoration of Sol. It occurs to us that the sunbeams emanating from the god’s brow are much too short. They should be twice as long. We realize that this change may pose an engineering challenge, but we are assured by those familiar with your work that you are competent to solve any problems that may arise. Also, we wish to receive from you an estimate of the increased amount of gold necessary to gild these larger sunbeams, so that we may calculate the cost thereof. You will come to us at the palace this afternoon.’”
Gaius stared at the message. “So it is about the Colossus.” He heaved a long sigh of relief. “But I don’t understand. Severus is gone from Rome. Who dictated this message? Whom am I to meet?”
Galen raised an eyebrow. “It’s she who summons you, of course. Domna, the empress. She’s in charge of the city while Severus is off to war. Did you not know? Have you not met her yet?”
“No. Have you?”
“Certainly. I’ve met the whole household. Domna wanted the services of the best physician in Rome, and that of course is myself. But she’s a very busy woman. It’s taken a while for her to turn her gaze to you. But why so crestfallen, Gaius? You should welcome the summons. Domna knows and cares about your work and intends for you to continue. Good news, my boy!”
Gaius smiled. At the age of thirty-three, he was hardly still a boy, but Galen would probably always think of him that way. “But … to make the sunrays so much longer at this stage is impossible—”
“Domna says otherwise.”
“What does she know about it?”
“Lower your voice,” whispered Galen, though the closest people were travelers
on the road some distance away. “As a matter of fact, Domna knows quite a bit about the sun god, Sol—or Elagabalus, as the Emesenes call him.”
Little Aulus spoke up. “The Emesenes worship a rock, don’t they?” He cocked his head to one side and looked dubious.
“Why, yes,” said Galen. “In the sanctum of the Temple of Elagabalus at Emesa there is a very large black stone said to have fallen straight from the sun to the earth, many hundreds of years ago. It was still smoldering when it was retrieved by the awestruck locals who decided to worship it, and who thus became the first priests of Elagabalus—the ancestors of Domna. So goes the legend. Elagabalus is not the only example of stone-worship, which has a long tradition in the East. In Greek we call such a sacred stone a baetyl.”
“Baetyl,” Aulus repeated, enjoying the exotic sound of the word.
“Greek and Roman images of the sun god are quite different from those of the Emesenes,” Galen continued, “but it’s not surprising that the daughter of the high priest of Elagabalus in Emesa should have an opinion about the Colossus of Sol here in Rome. Whatever its form, it depicts the deity she worships above all other.”
“But seriously—they worship a black stone?” said Aulus, still skeptical.
“We have such a sacred stone right here in Rome,” said Galen, “installed in the Temple of Magna Mater, brought from Pessinus in the days when Rome was in a life-or-death struggle with Carthage. Some think it was the installation of that stone that tipped the scales in Rome’s favor.”
“Like this Elagabalus, Magna Mater is a deity of distinctly foreign origin,” noted Gaius, “and with a very strange priesthood—fanatic worshippers who literally castrate themselves.”
“What is ‘castrate’?” asked Aulus, frowning.
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