Dominus

by Steven Saylor

  As he did so, Titus recalled that this was a passage that had been heavily rewritten by Philostratus. As he finished reading, he scrolled ahead and saw that all the passages with a chi-rho beside them had been written or rewritten by Philostratus. He sighed. Could he legitimately claim authorship of a work that had been so heavily rewritten by the greatest of living writers?

  As it turned out, he had no need to worry on this score.

  “I am thinking that authorship should be credited to Quadratus alone,” said Philip. “Otherwise, the reader will be confused, don’t you think? A work of such stature should be seen to issue from a single author, no matter how many researchers or scribes or writers worked on it. Single authorship gives the reader confidence in the book’s integrity—rather like a chi-rho symbol. In the same way, the emperor must often take credit for the work of those under him, so that the citizens, and our enemies for that matter, will see the work of empire proceeding from a single source, a fountainhead if you will—just as the fount of all creation must originate from some single divine source, however multiplicitous it may seem to us mortals. We may even presume that the emperor, in his unique capacity, is himself the agent of that divine singularity, its manifestation on earth…”

  Titus was not listening. He was profoundly disappointed, but dared not show it. He was to be invisible to the readers of the book. He had hoped to see his name on every copy, not the name of a dead man. The Millennium was to have made him a famous author, a notable historian; but it was not to be. Philostratus had happily helped him with no expectation of credit, but Philostratus was celebrated all over the world and had no need for more fame. Titus had toiled in the expectation that the book would be the making of him.

  Then Philip mentioned the upcoming Millennial Celebration, and casually, as if in passing, asked if Titus would enjoy viewing the games in the Flavian Amphitheater from the senators’ section. It took a moment for the words to sink in. As a reward for his work—and his discretion—the emperor was going to grant Titus’s fondest wish.

  Titus Pinarius was to become a senator.

  * * *

  The date was the twenty-first of April. Rome was one thousand years old.

  Wearing the senatorial toga that had once been worn by his father, Titus looked down on the grand celebrations in the arena of the Flavian Amphitheater. Beside him sat his son. Gnaeus, now a man, was wearing his first toga, handed down to him from Titus.

  When they arrived, a few of the other senators had given them sidelong glances. The more conservative members were dismayed that any man could join their ranks merely for having written a book, especially a history book. History was something to be written after a man became a senator, perhaps in his retirement. Titus had overheard one of them say, “His father, you know, was also a senator—and a mere sculptor. Still, the Pinarii do come from patrician stock…”

  Titus was unfazed by such comments, delighted to be sitting where his father once sat, with his own son beside him. Gnaeus’s sixteenth birthday had been only a few days ago, marked by the family ritual of passing the fascinum from father to son. Hanging from a necklace around the young man’s neck, proudly worn outside his toga for this occasion, the golden amulet glimmered in the spring sunshine, brighter than the young man’s golden hair.

  Gnaeus’s mother and sister were elsewhere, in seats reserved for the wives and daughters of senators. Thinking of Pinaria, Titus frowned. The girl was fourteen already, and not yet married or even betrothed. Her mother had found several suitable matches for her—the girl was pretty, and the Pinarius name still carried a patrician gloss—but Pinaria had rejected all suitors. My fault, Titus thought, for allowing the girl to have any say whatsoever. Why was she so choosy? But perhaps it was for the best. Now that he was a senator, they might hope for a better match.

  Philip had not only elevated him to the Senate; for services rendered, Titus had been rewarded with the House of the Beaks and all its contents, including the library and its staff, and all the household slaves, thereby raising Titus’s personal wealth to the level required of a senator without having to pay him in coin. “Because, dear boy, he cannot afford to pay you,” Philostratus had told him, just before leaving for Athens. “With all his lavish expenditures on the games, there’s not a coin left in the treasury. And now the House of the Beaks will be one less expense in his ledgers, since you, not the state, must see to the upkeep.”

  To make it a true home, in the vestibule Titus had set up new shrines to Antinous and to Apollonius, finding venerable old statues of both.

  To feed the slaves and give his wife a household budget, Titus had sold his country properties. After all was said and done, he was not nearly as wealthy as his father had been before the catastrophe of the great fire, but he had made a start at restoring the family’s fortunes.

  All looked bright for the Pinarii, but their good fortune was tinged by sadness. Only days ago, a message had arrived from Athens: Philostratus was dead.

  As soon as Philip approved The Millennium, Philostratus had sailed for Athens with the Greek version of the book, charged by the emperor to employ his own scribes to make copies for distribution throughout the Greek-speaking provinces of the empire.

  “But you’ll miss the Millennial Games!” young Gnaeus had protested.

  Philostratus had answered, “My dear boy, I have neither need nor desire to witness yet more of the endless self-congratulations of Romans.”

  “You will miss Rome, surely,” Gnaeus had insisted.

  “Miss Rome? I think not. I look forward to the quiet and calm of Athens—and to the auditory delight of hearing Greek spoken everywhere, by everyone, from philosophers to fishermen. But I will miss you, dear boy, and your father, too.”

  Philostratus had written to them regularly, but in his last letter had complained of a sudden illness. That message had been followed by another, written by the scholar’s chief secretary, delivering the news that Philostratus was dead.

  Titus would never forget the help that Philostratus had given him, and the extraordinary friendship the great man had shared with four generations of Pinarii. As a man of letters, Titus would do all he could to keep the great man’s books alive, though a masterpiece like the biography of Apollonius of Tyana hardly needed his assistance. It would undoubtedly outlast The Millennium, he thought, and perhaps even the empire itself, and would be read not one but two thousands of years hence—if mortals in such a distant future still had need of wisdom, and still read books …

  Titus was drawn from his reverie by a blaring of trumpets, and he returned his attention to the pageant taking place in the arena. A troupe of dancers from the farthest reaches of the Nile, wearing bracelets and necklaces of bones and not much else, had formed a circle around a trained elephant, which blew its trunk like a trumpet and then appeared to sway the long appendage in time with the music. The crowd was greatly amused.

  The spectacle was magnificent, at least to living Romans. Would it have impressed their ancestors who lived under Domitian, or Trajan, or Hadrian? Or would it have struck them as a bit threadbare and makeshift?

  Philip had done his best, using every asset at his disposal. The one thousand gladiators and one thousand exotic animals from all corners of the empire—hippopotami, leopards, lions, giraffes, several types of apes, and a lone rhinoceros—had originally been collected and sent to Rome by the great organizer Timesitheus in anticipation of young Gordian’s triumph over the Persians. That spectacle was to have reintroduced Gordian to the citizens of Rome as the emperor who left for the Persian frontier a boy but came back a conqueror. Instead, only Gordian’s ashes had returned, and Philip had made use of the gladiators and animals for his own celebration.

  As a historian, Titus saw a sad and bitter irony in such a twist of fortune, and he looked on the games themselves as yet another example of the futility of human affairs, the endless cycle of violence and larceny attended by empty promises, half-truths, and outright lies. The crowd, on the other
hand, including his fellow senators, seemed merely to see the grand spectacle as it occurred in the moment. Had they not loved Gordian? Did they not miss him, and wonder about his fate? They seemed to have forgotten all about him, and now they loved Philip, as long as he entertained them with spectacles, stuffed them with feasts, and kept the barbarians far from Rome.

  Following the elephant dance, which left the spectators in high spirits, Philip made a speech from the imperial box. He announced that his little son, who stood beside him, was to be elevated from Caesar to Augustus, to rule as co-emperor along with him. The games were not just about the glorious past, he said, but a celebration of Rome’s bright future as well.

  The announcement came as a surprise to everyone. The crowd was delighted by such a grandiose display of paternal largesse. They cheered for Philip the Elder and Philip the Younger.

  But some of the senators were more cynical. “Our youngest emperor yet!” quipped a bald, gray-bearded senator in the row in front of Titus. “Are we eventually to be ruled by babes in the cradle?”

  A colleague answered, “We’ve already had a baby emperor—the one who still suckled his mother’s teats!”—a crude reference to the ill-fated Alexander and Mamaea.

  Another said, “At least the little Arab’s accent is somewhat less atrocious than his father’s. The child has a decent Latin tutor.”

  The bald senator shook his head. “If Philip the Younger has any sense, he’ll never set foot outside Rome. Young emperors who head for the frontier never come back—except as ashes.”

  The banter was grim, but so was the news from the frontiers. Both the Germans and the Persians appeared poised to attack, and ambitious Roman generals were plotting insurrection and civil war. The premature elevation of Philip’s son to Augustus was not a sign of strength, thought Titus, but of weakness. Making the boy Caesar, second-in-command and heir, had not been enough. If Philip had decided to push forward the succession and make his son Augustus and co-emperor, it was because he feared for his own safety. If Philip should die, his son would already be in power.

  The splendors of Philip’s games spoke of greatness, security, and continuity with all that had come before, but Philip’s announcement indicated that he was very uncertain of the future.

  In that uncertainty, Philip was not alone. During their research for The Millennium, Philostratus had pointed out to Titus the general unease among men and women from all walks of life and all religions, an anxiety that seemed to stem from the one thousandth anniversary of Rome—a fear of the Millennium itself. The number 1,000 exerted a mystical claim on men’s imaginations. Some predicted that with the Millennium Rome would reach its climax, and quickly come to an end. Some thought the earth itself was exhausted, and the end of all things was fast approaching. People looked for signs and portents of doom, and had no trouble finding them.

  Such eschatological thinking had been encouraged by cryptic oracles that circulated in secret. These strange verses claimed to be divinely inspired prophecies from long ago. Philostratus had shown some to Titus, scoffing at them, but Titus was not sure what to make of them. If indeed this world should end, what would come next? Would there be punishment for the wicked and rewards for the just? Would there be only a vast nothingness? Or would the world restart at its beginning, like the serpent that eats its own tail? Some, like the Christians, delighted in speculating about the end of the world, but most, like Titus, pondered the possibility with dread.

  The cheering for the emperor’s announcement finally died down, and the grand pageant in the arena recommenced.

  * * *

  Later that day, when the spectacles were over and the public feasting began, Titus took his son to the Senate House, just as his own father used to do when Titus himself was a boy. Before the Altar of Victory, like his father before him, he uttered prayers to the goddess and to Jupiter to watch over the emperor—or rather, emperors—and to keep them safe. “Let Philip reign for a long lifetime! Let his son have a long reign as well! Let there be peace within and without the empire, an end to this age of unceasing bloodshed and civil strife and the birth of a new and better millennium.”

  Reflexively he reached to touch the fascinum at his breast, but it was not there. Gnaeus was wearing it, of course, which was as it should be. Titus felt an urge to reach over and touch it where it hung from the necklace around his son’s neck, but he resisted. The protective power of the fascinum belonged now to Gnaeus, so that he might survive to pass it on when he had a son, and so on.

  His uneasiness subsided before a surge of pride. The republic and the empire of Rome were a thousand years old—but the history of the Pinarii was older still, centuries older, reaching back to the days when demigods and demons like Hercules openly walked the earth.

  The fascinum had protected his ancestors for over a thousand years. “May it protect my descendants for a thousand more!” he whispered.

  A.D. 260

  A dozen years after the Millennium, the world had turned upside-down. Rome, the thousand-year empire, was at its lowest ebb.

  At fifty, Titus Pinarius had become one of those gray-haired senators he had once admired and envied; he had become, in many ways, his father. Gnaeus reminded him of the eager, ambitious young man he himself had been at the age of twenty-eight. The two of them, accompanied by a small entourage of bodyguards and secretaries, hurried toward the Senate House, summoned there for an emergency session.

  Around them, as they traversed the city, all was panic and confusion. Women wept. Men shouted. Crowds flocked to the temples to beg the gods to save the city.

  Philip the Arab was dust now, along with his son, both killed away from Rome by the usurper Decius. Decius and his young son were murdered in their turn. Since then, the usurpers and pretenders had been so numerous, Titus could not keep them straight.

  How long ago the Millennium seemed! Those who predicted catastrophes and disasters had been prescient after all.

  A new plague was raging throughout the empire, having spread from Alexandria to Syria, then to Greece, and then to Africa and Rome. In many places, the newly dead outnumbered the living. Whole towns had been wiped out. Some thought the plague of Marcus had returned, but some of the symptoms were different, and this pestilence seemed to be even more contagious—so contagious it could be passed from one person to another not just by touch, but by sight. A man could die simply from looking at a sick person, or from being looked at!

  The plague first reached Rome at the end of Decius’s short reign, ten years ago, killing tens of thousands. In recent years it had abated somewhat, and appeared to follow a seasonal cycle, spiking in autumn and waning at high summer. But the dying never stopped.

  Barbarians, taking advantage of the weakened empire, had invaded from both north and east. The German tribes, so long held at bay, had come back in numbers greater than ever before. The Persians were now led by a vindictive and utterly ruthless ruler, Shapur.

  Shapur was the cause of the worst catastrophe of all, a humiliation that had never occurred in the whole history of the empire. The aged emperor Valerian, at the head of a plague-decimated Roman army, was defeated and taken captive by the Persians. It was assumed that he would be returned in due course, in exchange for some dreadful accommodation by the Romans. But no ransom message arrived. Diplomatic entreaties were sent. Shapur replied with a series of insulting letters, boasting that he had made the great Roman emperor into the very lowest of his slaves, stripping the old man of his imperial garments and dressing him in ass skins, then using him as a footstool to mount his horse. There were rumors that Shapur had ordered Valerian to be castrated—a Roman emperor made into a eunuch!

  Valerian’s son and co-emperor, Gallienus, had been ruling the western half of the empire when the disaster occurred. Now Gallienus was sole emperor, facing would-be usurpers on every side. In the east, the Roman vassal Odenathus of Palmyra had proven a bulwark against the Persians, but looked poised to become a king himself. In the west, every senat
or in command of a legion seemed to think himself destined to be Rome’s next ruler. There was a constant state of civil war.

  Now the truly unthinkable had happened, throwing the city into a mad panic.

  Titus and his entourage came to an abrupt halt as their way was blocked by an angry mob. Listening to the shouts and looking beyond the furious crowd, he realized the cause of their outrage. Some poor wretches had been rounded up and accused of being Christians.

  Many people had come to believe that the Christians were at the root of all the city’s ills. When Philip’s short-lived successor, Decius, already full of superstitious dread of the Millennium, received the first terrifying reports of the plague that had broken out in Alexandria, he had issued an emergency edict: all citizens throughout the empire were to publicly beseech the gods for their blessing with a ritual burning of incense. It was a matter of religious and civic duty, for the safety and perhaps the very survival of the empire. Anyone who refused, for whatever reason, would be committing a crime and be duly punished. Christians all over the empire had refused, igniting a firestorm of hatred against them. This hatred grew fiercer as Rome was beset not just by pestilence but by one military humiliation after another.

  When he rose to power, Valerian went a step further. He decided to target Christians not for any failure to act or for wrong action, but explicitly for being Christians—the first emperor to do so since Nero blamed them for the great fire and put as many as he could find to the torch. The penalties imposed by Valerian had been harsh: Christians could no longer hold meetings or enter their cemeteries, where they customarily gathered for worship. At the whim of local magistrates, they were subject to confiscation of their property and summary execution.