Dominus

by Steven Saylor

  Constantine smiled. He slapped Gnaeus on the shoulder, hard enough to make him wince. “Really, old man, you must keep up with the times! ‘Pagan’ is what we call believers in the old religions, the kind of people who wear magic amulets and worship genitalia with wings.” Constantine’s brothers and his son Crispus laughed, as did the city prefect. “One is either a Christian … or a pagan. And you, Senator Pinarius—are you … a pagan?” He said the word with contempt.

  Gnaeus made no reply. He was furious at being insulted—at seeing religion itself insulted!—but he also felt like a foolish old man. What had he been thinking, to verbally spar with the emperor, the man whose slightest whim could decide the fortunes of his son and grandson and all the Pinarii yet to be born? His face turned hot, but he felt a cold pain in his chest. He felt lightheaded and took a step back. He clutched the fascinum.

  Constantine interpreted this retreat as an acknowledgment of defeat, and shook his head at the old pagan’s faith in a foolish amulet. He would have liked to rip it from the old man’s neck, but to do so would be unworthy of his dignity.

  Another senator, the youngest of the Messius Extricatus line, pushed Gnaeus aside. “We bid you welcome, Dominus, to the home of the Roman Senate. Please enter. We have arranged a small welcoming ceremony before the Altar of Victory.”

  Constantine nodded. “Ah, winged Victory. I thought I saw her once, at a shrine in Gaul. But I was mistaken. It was an angel who visited me that day. No, I shall not enter. I thank the Roman Senate for the invitation, but I have no business in the Senate House today.”

  The senators were dumbstruck. Even Messius Extricatus could produce only a sputter of disbelief.

  Constantine turned to the city prefect. “What is next on the agenda, Severus?”

  Taking this as a cue to deliver a speech he had carefully rehearsed, Acilius Severus stepped to the front of the porch and raised his hands to silence the crowd below. After making a long and very formal welcome to the emperor and his family, Severus announced what he called “the capstone of the day’s events—an open-air festival atop the Capitoline Hill, where all the senators and citizens of Rome and the spirits of all our ancestors will celebrate the emperor’s return to his capital. There shall be much joy and feasting!”

  The crowd cheered. People begin to move toward the Capitoline Hill, smiling and laughing.

  Looking very pleased with himself, Severus turned back to Constantine, who gave him a sour look. “When I asked what was next, Prefect, I expected a word in my ear, not a public announcement!”

  Severus turned pale.

  “The Capitoline, I know, is thought by most Romans to be the most sacred precinct in the whole city,” said Constantine, “being the site of the Temple of Jupiter, whom pagans worship as the highest and most powerful of all their gods. Can you promise me, Severus, that at this festival there will be no invocation to the demon Jupiter?”

  Severus looked blank for a moment, then nodded. “I understand, Dominus. I am a Christian myself. I promise you, there will be no mention whatsoever of Jupiter.” His tone was slightly tenuous, as if he were unsure of the facts, but determined to make everything work in the end.

  As Constantine descended the steps of the Senate House, his entourage following, Zenobius whispered to Kaeso, “You stay here, son, with your grandfather. I don’t like the way he looks.” The old man’s confrontation with Constantine had been unexpected, and might prove disastrous, but Zenobius nonetheless felt rather proud of his father for standing up to the emperor.

  While Kaeso stayed behind, Zenobius followed the imperial entourage as it moved toward the Capitoline. Constantine’s bodyguards cleared a way through the crowd. They made swift progress for a while, but then the way narrowed as it began to ascend, and the crowd grew thicker.

  Constantine scowled. He came to a stop and raised his hand. “No. I will not attend this festival. It has been a long day. I shall withdraw to my private chambers and spend what remains of the day with my family.”

  Severus was flummoxed. “But, Dominus … the people expect you. What of the ancestors?”

  “I shall commune with my own ancestors.”

  As the imperial party turned back, word of Constantine’s decision quickly spread. There was an abrupt and dramatic shift in the mood of the crowd. Those who had cheered began to grumble. Some dared to jeer. Protected by the anonymity of the crowd, more and more people begin to hiss and boo. Some even shouted ridicule at the emperor’s appearance, targeting his prominent nose.

  “Bigger than what’s between his legs, I’ll bet!” cried someone.

  “I hear his giant statue in the New Basilica doesn’t even have a penis!” cried another.

  “No—just a very long nose!”

  Constantine turned ashen. Zenobius was close enough to overhear when his half brother Hannibalianus growled in the emperor’s ear, “Set the bodyguards on them! Teach them a lesson!” The big man clutched the handle of his sword. “I’ll lop off a few heads myself!”

  Zenobius felt a thrill of panic, imagining the bloodbath about to take place.

  Constantine’s other half brother, Julius, spoke in his other ear. “Take no notice of them, Dominus! These lowly pagans are dust beneath your feet. Pretend they don’t exist. In all the ways that matter, they don’t.”

  After a long, tense moment, Constantine raised a hand to silence Hannibalianus. He gripped Julius’s shoulder. “You speak wisely, brother. From time to time, all rulers must put up with a bit of … skittishness … from the people.”

  They walked some distance, with the sullen crowd parting before them. There was a loud, clanging noise ahead.

  “But this! This cannot be allowed!” cried Julius. Ahead of them stood a row of statues on pillars, including a life-size bronze of Constantine. Boys were pelting it with stones.

  As the imperial retinue and its bodyguards drew closer, the crowd gathered at the statues scattered with screams of panic. The boys ran off, giggling and making rude noises.

  “Those little demon-lovers should be rounded up and burned alive!” said Julius.

  “Brother!” Constantine shook his head and clucked his tongue. “So peaceable when words were hurled, but now so bellicose when a few rocks are thrown against metal.”

  “But Dominus,” Julius protested, “this is injury, not insult. Look at the face! The dent in the nose! That ugly scratch across the cheek!”

  With a quizzical expression, Constantine touched his own forehead, nose, and chin. “I am quite unable to perceive any wound inflicted on my face. Nor has my diadem been knocked the slightest bit askew.”

  “But Dominus—”

  “The statue cannot turn the other cheek, as Our Savior prescribes—but I can. No, brothers, it will not do to slaughter Roman citizens in the Forum. Not today. We will show mercy. And a sense of humor! The emperor must allow the people to have a joke or two at his expense. Why, look at these other fellows here, on their pedestals.” He gestured to the statues to either side of his own. “What good company I keep. Here we have a selection of the greatest emperors of all time, don’t you agree? And yet … consider that fellow there, Augustus. Not one of his statues ever looked a day over thirty—even though the man lived to seventy-five! I call him ‘Fortune’s Chess Piece’—a king who was never more than a pawn of history.”

  Zenobius thought this was a stupid comment, but everyone else in the entourage laughed.

  “And that one there, Hadrian—a third-rate artist, but a great emperor. Or … was it the other way around? One imagines him as a human paintbrush—fuzzy-headed and rather stiff.”

  Constantine’s wit evoked more laughter. Zenobius tried to crack a smile.

  “And here we see Trajan. He chiseled his own name on so many monuments—taking credit for the work of other men—that I call him ‘Creeping Ivy.’

  “And that fellow there, looking so dour. You may call him Marcus Aurelius. I call him … a buffoon.”

  Crispus was laughing so hard th
at he could barely speak. “Oh, no, Father! Not a buffoon!”

  Constantine kept a straight face. Only the barest hint of a smile showed that he had regained his good humor.

  Not so Zenobius, whose forced smile went flat. “The Divine Marcus,” he whispered to himself, “a buffoon? Thank all the gods my father isn’t hearing this!”

  Constantine was not finished. “Marcus was a meditating mess. An ass. A laughingstock.”

  “Because he was a cuckold!” said Crispus, joining in. “While Marcus was thinking deep thoughts, his shallow wife … was taking it deep … from thrusting gladiators! Another reason to ban them, eh? Wasn’t her name Fausta … too?” His grin vanished and his voice trailed off as he realized what he said. Amid such ribald talk, to link his stepmother to Marcus’s wife went too far.

  Constantine frowned. “Marcus’s wife was named Faustina, not Fausta. If Commodus was the child of a gladiator, and Marcus a cuckold, what should he have done about it?” He stared at Crispus as if awaiting an answer, but no one spoke. There was no more laughter.

  Constantine turned and scanned the entourage. “You, Senator Pinarius! See to it this statue is repaired. Immediately!”

  “Yes, Dominus.”

  Zenobius was glad to stay behind as the retinue moved on. The long day of putting on a proper face had exhausted him. The practical challenge of fixing the statue was much more to his liking. He gazed up at it, pondering how best to repair the scratched cheek and the dented nose.

  “Dominus!”

  He turned to see one of his slaves approaching, a young messenger. The boy’s arrival seemed a godsend. Zenobius could use him to summon artisans and scaffold-builders.

  Then Zenobius saw the look on the boy’s face. He felt a lump in his throat.

  “Is this about my father?”

  The boy nodded and burst into tears.

  * * *

  “I’ll never forget the moment he died, right in front of me, there on the porch of the Senate House,” said Kaeso. “To make a last stand, no place would have pleased him more. He died speaking up for what he believed in. When I think of how it happened…” He shook his head. “Taunting him like that, the emperor as good as killed him!”

  Kaeso was dressed all in black, as was everyone in the House of the Beaks that day, after holding the funeral and placing the ashes of Gnaeus Pinarius alongside those of his ancestors in the family monument outside the city. From within the house could be heard the sound of weeping.

  He and his father were alone on one of the balconies, where no outsider could possibly overhear them, but Zenobius reflexively waved his hand, cautioning his son not to speak such a thought out loud.

  Kaeso was quiet for a moment, then spoke again. “If we were Christians, we’d be praying right now for Grandfather’s arrival in the everlasting hereafter.”

  “What in Hades put that thought in your mind?”

  “Hades, indeed. Roman religion tells us exactly how to bury the dead, how to mourn them, how to remember them. But it doesn’t have much to say about what exactly happens to the dead.”

  Zenobius nodded. “Down in Egypt, people have always believed in an afterlife—but there’s a catch. What happens to you in the next world is closely linked to the ongoing condition of your body back in this world. People who can afford a perfectly preserved mummy, and can pay for its perpetual upkeep, do rather well in the afterlife, but the poor who can afford only to be soaked in a vat of natron must continue as they did on earth, in want and misery.”

  “Pity Alexander the Great!” Kaeso smiled. “You know the old story: Augustus was so amazed at the preservation of Alexander’s mummy that he felt compelled to touch it—and snapped off the nose. Do the Egyptians think Alexander is now noseless in the afterlife?”

  Zenobius laughed softly. “It seems to me that mandatory upkeep of the mummy is just a scheme to enrich the industry that prepares and stores the mummies. Since the mummies are regularly brought out of storage, to join the family on holidays, the remains do need to look presentable. But we Romans—we definitely have no use for the corpse. We burn it. For what happens next, the educated Roman nowadays looks not to priests for answers, but to the followers of Plato. Philosophers ponder such questions all day long.”

  “Yes, Father, and the various philosophers have come up with all sort of schemes, and they all claim to make perfect sense, but what man of ordinary intellect can follow their arguments? All those long Greek words, and long-winded suppositions. They can’t seem to explain in any intelligible way what existence is—much less nonexistence. The Christians, on the other hand, claim to have it all figured out. In life you behave a certain way, and in death you receive your reward—or punishment. Heaven for the good. And for the bad, Hell—a place far worse than the Hades described by Homer.”

  “Yes and these so-called wicked who will be perpetually punished invariably include those of us who don’t agree with the Christians,” observed Zenobius. “As I understand it, even other Christians, unless they believe in precisely the ‘correct’ dogma, are doomed to be punished forever. To be sure, among Romans there has long been a school of thought that the spirits of the dead end up in this place or that. The greatest of the great, demi-gods like Hercules and the best of the emperors, are deified and get to live with the gods in Olympus. Heroes and others who were great on earth—even athletes, if you believe the Greeks—end up in a leafy, sun-dappled place called Elysium, which they leave on occasion to help us mortals back here on earth. But most of us end up in Hades, which according to the poets is rather chilly and dimly lit, and very, very boring. Thus the dead remember their days on earth with nostalgia, and envy the living.”

  Kaeso was not really listening. He was still thinking about the Christians. “One’s admission to the Christian Heaven is not entirely contingent on belief. There’s at least one prerequisite, called baptism. A priest administers magical water, and it washes away all the grubby sins accrued from day-to-day living. As I understand it, this cleansing is absolutely mandatory. No matter how good you might have been, you can’t get into Heaven without first being baptized here on earth. Nor can anyone truly be called a Christian until he or she has received this baptism. That’s why some wishful thinkers cling to the hope that Constantine isn’t really a Christian, because he’s never yet submitted to baptism.”

  “But he has a perfectly logical reason for waiting,” said Zenobius. “I overheard Constantine himself explain it to a bishop in Nicaea—Eusebius, I think—when a group of us were going over some plans for the new city at Byzantium. Baptism washes away sin and gives one a fresh start. Morally, one becomes an infant again, a blank slate, sinless. But there is always the possibility of relapse! Commit enough fresh sin and you’re right back where you started. And I don’t think you can be baptized a second time. Constantine said, ‘I am an emperor and a warrior, not a bishop or a martyr. A ruler by necessity must continue to sin until the very last day of his life.’ Eusebius tried to object, but Constantine silenced him. He said, ‘I have much to do in this life before I am ready to put sinning behind me.’”

  Kaeso nodded. “So any reasonable man would want to postpone baptism as long as possible—but not too long. If you arranged to be baptized on your deathbed, but the magical water arrived a moment too late, then you’d be headed straight for Hell—on a technicality. You’d never stop kicking yourself.”

  “And that would be your everlasting punishment!” Zenobius chuckled. It was good to be cheered up, however slightly, on such a sad day. “But it’s all a bunch of made-up nonsense anyway.”

  Kaeso looked thoughtful, but made no reply.

  * * *

  The Circus Maximus was filled to capacity, with children piled on laps and latecomers jamming the aisles. All of Rome, and visitors from every corner of the empire, were present for a special day of races to celebrate the Vicennalia.

  The teams and their most avid supporters wore one of four colors: blue, green, red, or white. Partisans waved c
olored pennants, and each team had its own chants, usually built around the name of a favorite charioteer. The pennants rippled and waved on the warm breeze, and the cheering and chants echoed constantly around the Circus Maximus.

  Constantine and Fausta, all in purple and gold, sat in the imperial box, along with their five children and Constantine’s half brothers. Missing was the emperor’s mother. Helena was not feeling well.

  Also absent was Crispus. Rumor had it that he had left Rome hurriedly, rushing off to deal with some urgent military matter on the other side of the Adriatic Sea. Crispus had proved himself a reliable general in the war with Licinius, and an able strategist on land or at sea. People said it was a fine thing (“a blessing,” as the Christians put it) that the emperor had a grown son of such talent upon whom he could rely with complete confidence.

  In the section reserved for senators and their families, Zenobius rose to his feet, as did thousands of other spectators, as one of the races came to a thrilling end, with all four chariots in a virtual tie. He hardly noticed when Kaeso returned from a visit to the latrina. Then he caught a glimpse of the very odd expression on his son’s face.

  “Kaeso, is something wrong?”

  Kaeso leaned close and spoke in a low voice. “I just heard the strangest bit of gossip from an old acquaintance I happened to see outside the latrina. Others were talking about it, too. They say Crispus is dead.”

  “What? But how?” Crispus was so robust and full of life, Zenobius could only imagine him felled by some terrible accident.

  “That’s the oddest part. They say he was strangled to death. This was in Pola, on the Dalmatian coast.”

  “Murdered?” The idea was outrageous. “By some assassin?”

  “Not exactly. He wasn’t murdered—that’s not the right word. He was executed. Put to death, so the man told me, on his father’s orders. Crispus wasn’t in Pola because Constantine sent him there. He was running away from Rome, and that’s as far as he got.”