The Philosopher Prince

by Paul Waters

  There was, of course, no answer.

  Marcellus and I drank a good deal of wine that night. Later, as we lay in the darkness of our bedroom, Marcellus, who had been a long time silent, whispered, ‘You know, Drusus, I am glad Eutherius told his story tonight. I think I was meant to hear it. I was letting myself forget that there is misfortune everywhere. No man can escape it; it is how he faces it that matters.’

  After that day I sensed a change in him. Often I would find them together, he and Eutherius, walking slowly about the paved gardens among the box hedges, or along the colonnaded walkways, deep in talk, Marcellus, straight-backed and handsome, his muscular, well-shaped hands moving as he made some point; and Eutherius, tall and large and gentle, ambling beside him like a silk-clad bear. Had he, I wondered to myself, seen further than I, and given Marcellus what he needed? I could almost have been jealous.

  But if Marcellus warmed to Eutherius, he soon came to detest the newly arrived prefect, whose name was Florentius.

  Florentius was the kind of man who has never for an instant doubted his own merit. He was of middle age, with a lean, haughty face, and a tight-knit nest of chestnut hair, an effect he achieved by having his slaves curl it for him each day with hot irons. He also had a fine-tuned sense of his own dignity, and was entirely devoid of humour.

  Both Marcellus and I disliked him from the start, and I daresay we should scarcely have crossed his path – which would have suited us well – but that he got into his head that all eunuchs were a centre of intrigue. And so, determined not to miss anything that might concern him, he forced himself into Eutherius’s company.

  Though Florentius was sensitive to the smallest perceived slight to himself, he was capable of the grossest rudeness. He would keep those he had summoned waiting outside his office half a day; he would cut people short; he interrupted; he made remarks that caused those with him to blush with impotent fury. For though, as prefect, he lacked military powers, he was not a man it was wise to clash with. The emperor Constantius himself had appointed him, and any decision he made would be given unquestioned approval at court. He could punish and demote at will within his extensive bureaucratic domain, and his subordinates lived in terror.

  Eutherius never let on what he thought of him – he was too much the diplomat for that. But Marcellus loathed him, and when he was with him Marcellus retreated behind a wall of distant civility.

  A better-bred man than Florentius, sensing this, would have let it pass. But Florentius responded by needlessly disputing with Marcellus, seeking his opinion only to dismiss it, forcing him into barbed conversation only to put him down. Mostly I do not think he was even aware of it himself; but he had grown used to flatterers, and his sensitive nose had sniffed out that Marcellus was not one.

  Just then, what irked the prefect more than anything was the career of the new Caesar Julian.

  Julian had been studying at the university in Athens when his cousin, the emperor, had summoned him to the court in Milan, there appointing him Caesar, and sending him to Gaul. At the time no one had expected much to come of it, for, as Eutherius explained, everyone knew that Julian was more concerned with books than war, and had never fought in battle, let alone commanded an army.

  But he had surprised them all. He had marched into Alsace, fought back the barbarians and restored the fortresses that guarded the undefended plains beside the Rhine. The German chieftains, outraged at being thwarted after years of raiding at will, had massed their armies to extinguish this presumptuous Roman. Having assembled a horde of thirty thousand men, they advanced on Strasburg, led by their high-king Chnodomar. They had assumed their victory was sure. But in the battle that followed, the German armies were routed and Chnodomar was taken. Six thousand barbarians died in the fighting, or were trampled in the rout, or drowned in the Rhine as they tried to swim to safety. Out of thirteen thousand men, Julian lost only two hundred.

  When news of this victory arrived in Paris there had been joy. Everyone praised the young Caesar, who had so unexpectedly shown himself to be a great general – everyone, that is, but Florentius. He had risen by careful stages, never taking risks, never crossing his superiors. He had plodded through his career like an ass at a waterwheel, and to him Julian’s sudden rise was a personal affront. So amid the general happiness he observed sourly that Julian’s success was no more than beginner’s luck.

  We soon learned that there were other men, too, for whom Julian’s victory was unwelcome. That winter, Eutherius received a letter from Julian, saying he had been delayed. He had clashed with his Master of Infantry, a man by the name of Barbatio, who instead of supporting him, had thwarted his efforts all through the year’s campaigning. Now Julian had dismissed him; and Barbatio, wishing to forestall criticism at court, had hurried to Constantius complaining of Julian’s conduct, saying he was exceeding his authority.

  ‘So Julian has asked me to travel to court and put his case to the emperor,’ explained Eutherius. ‘No one else will speak up for him; the intriguers and backbiters are already doing their work.’

  ‘But does Constantius not trust even his own cousin, whom he appointed?’ I asked.

  Eutherius smiled, as a mother smiles at a charming, naive child. ‘Constantius grew up with courtiers. He trusts no one. Remember that, my dear Drusus, and you will understand him.’

  The court, which moves from city to city, following Constantius, was at that time at Sirmium in Illyricum, a journey of some weeks. ‘Pity me,’ Eutherius went on, ‘for it will be a wretched trip – snow; mountain roads; miserable inn-food – and I do not travel well. But I hope you will stay while I am gone. Julian still plans to be here – though he cannot tell quite when.’

  So we promised to wait; and next day walked with Eutherius’s litter and small entourage to where his carriage and baggage-train were waiting at the limit of the city, and there we saw him off.

  And when he was gone, Florentius made his move.

  It was early one morning, a few days later. A clerk came rapping at the door and curtly announced that the prefect’s secretary required us at once in his offices. When we appeared before him he looked up with an expression of assumed boredom and said, ‘Ah yes; the Caesar Julian will be wintering at Paris, as no doubt you have heard. Therefore there is no longer space to accommodate you. You will have to make other arrangements.’ He gave a strained smile, and then with a languid gesture of dismissal returned to his papers. It was the revenge of a bureaucrat.

  Eutherius, in his kindness, had left us a little money. His dark-eyed servant-boy Agatho had brought it in a calf-skin purse tied with leather cord, on the day after he had departed. The money was enough for our needs if we had remained in the citadel; but it was no great sum otherwise. We discussed it. We did not intend to be driven off by Florentius. So now, finding ourselves suddenly homeless, we searched around and asked at the usual places in the forum, and in the end found lodging at a rundown farm close to town.

  The farmer owned an orchard and a few fields, and needed help, offering in return two draughty bare-wood rooms in an outhouse, with hens clucking in the yard and a view out to the apple trees of the orchard beyond. His wife, he told us as he showed us this, had died some years before, leaving him with a daughter to raise alone. Now she was eighteen, and was more trouble to him than the farm. She stood at the porch on the day we moved in, hand on hip, regarding us with wide insolent eyes. Her name was Clodia, and she was to prove a trouble to me too, in a way I had not guessed at.

  We moved to our simple quarters and set to work, clearing ditches, repairing dry-stone walls, and cutting back the neglected vines on the low slopes. Like all of northern Gaul, the place was pitifully neglected. Many of the farmer’s labourers had fled, or had been conscripted during one of the barbarian invasions and had not returned. But worse even than the lack of men’s labour was the flight of knowledge itself. We saw it everywhere, in every botched and half-done thing. The ancient skills were slipping away. They had not been passed from f
ather to son, because the father had died too soon, or the son had seen no use in them, thinking a shoddy job would do just as well. While I worked – sweating in the cold fields, hammering planks, clearing bramble from the watercourses, or pruning the overgrown orchard – Marcellus brought something of far greater value: he brought ideas and schemes he had learned on his grandfather’s estate in Britain, where the long thread of land-knowledge had not been broken. It is knowledge hard learned, till it dwells in the bones. But knowledge does not outlive the knower.

  There was a peace in such simple work. The days passed one into the next, and each night I slept deeply. As for the farmer, he was glad to find he had taken on more than a pair of strong young men. Then, one grey, windless afternoon, while I was stacking bales in the barn, I heard shouting from across the fields, and when I asked the hands what it was they called up that it was the Caesar’s army, come at last.

  That day, Marcellus had gone to market with Clodia and her father. I jumped down from the stack of hay and hurried out, clambering up with the others onto the water cistern to see. Already, on the sloping grassland beyond the river, the horsemen of the cavalry, dressed in their scarlet cloaks, were rounding the camp wall. Behind them came the infantry cohorts, with their dragon-headed shields, painted gold on red. They wheeled and divided as they prepared to march through the gateway of the fort. Now and then, carried on the still, winter air, came the sound of their marching song, full of strength and pride. ‘And why not?’ I thought, feeling my heart stir with it. They had defeated the German barbarians, who supposed they could raid across the Rhine at will; they had given them a bloody nose, and sent them back to their endless forest to think again. So why not be proud? They had earned it. And if this young scholar Julian had restored their pride to them, winning victory against such odds, then it seemed to me he was not such a fool as the prefect Florentius made out.

  All of us strained to see, hoping to glimpse this new young Caesar. But from so far off, each rider looked the same as the other, with none singled out in gold or white or purple. Perhaps, after all, he was not with them, for the army moved in stages as it divided itself for winter quarters.

  But afterwards, returning to my work on the bale-stack, I felt a new impatience with my lot. I wanted to be with those men at the camp on the hill, working at what counted; not clipping vines and shifting stones on another man’s land. Then, for the first time in a long while, I thought of my father, and was glad he could not see what my life had become.

  I confess too that there was another thing preying on my mind just then, though it shames me to tell of it. For now I come to speak of love, and of my own failings.

  It had not taken me long to realize Clodia did not like me. She was slim and brown-eyed and, I suppose, pretty, except for a certain hardness about the mouth, which settled on her when she thought no one was looking. I have always hated slyness. I began to notice how she affected a laughing, careless manner when Marcellus was around her, which ceased as abruptly as a slammed door as soon as he was gone. She did not trouble to put it on for me.

  Even so, I was always careful to be civil; but perhaps, with a hunter’s intuition, she had read something of my secret heart. As for Marcellus, what he saw in her I never quite understood. Certainly her physicality and rude manners were unlike the cooped-up, high-born brides-to-be he had known in London, whom his mother had tried to force on him. Besides, she put on a good act, or so it seemed to me, and I thought it mean and small of mind to tell him what I saw.

  Whenever he ran errands to town for her father, or took the mule-cart to the fields, she found a reason to accompany him. And I, seeing it all and feeling ashamed that I even noticed, found reasons to occupy myself elsewhere. Her advances were gauche and heavy-handed: a lingering touch, a thrusting accidental glimpse of her breast, a too-long smile that died on her lips if I happened to catch her eye. I found myself wondering if they did anything. If so, Marcellus did not mention it, and I did not ask.

  So, from before the time of the army’s arrival in the citadel, and after it, I began to find excuses to go out alone, walking the field tracks, or wandering without purpose about the city, as I once had done when I was still a boy at my uncle’s house in London. I fell to brooding. I did not understand myself – or chose not to.

  And so it was that I came, one late winter afternoon during my wanderings, to the spot overlooking the river where the temple of Jupiter stands, on its high ashlar base overlooking the river.

  Already the light was fading into leaden dusk. For a while I sat on the ledge, my elbows on my knees, idly watching the swirls and eddies on the surface of the water. I do not know how long I remained, lost in my own turbulent thoughts. Eventually, across the river, I saw glimmerings of light as the first lamps were kindled.

  I stood, and made my way back to the steps. Under the porch at the temple’s front I saw that the tall bronze double-doors stood ajar, which earlier had been closed. I hesitated, and peered inside. The dusk was deeper within. There seemed nothing to keep me. But, being in no hurry to return to the farmstead, I decided to go inside and look around, just to see. I edged between the gap in the doors and entered.

  The air inside was cold and still. It smelled of damp stone and old incense. I stepped forward, watching where I set my feet, for the floor about me was scattered with a covering of dead leaves and pieces of broken stonework. I paused, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. And then, against the far wall, seated upon a throne of carved red granite, I discerned the god. He sat as tall as four men, bearded and mighty. The powerful face had been hacked, and one great marble hand had been axed off. It lay among the wind-gathered leaves at the foot of the plinth. The frieze too, which ran around the statue’s base, had been chiselled and scarred, and daubed with Christian signs.

  I had not set foot inside a city temple since London, when I was attacked and almost killed. I recalled Marcellus’s words to me: it was madness to go to such places alone, now that the Christians took it upon themselves to kill a man rather than leave him to his gods. But now, once again, I felt the pull of something old and timeless. I knew I needed to be here, on this day, at this hour; though I could not tell why.

  Advancing, I turned my palms upwards and spoke the words of a prayer, using the ancient formulas I had once heard Marcellus’s grandfather speak, fine old Latin, like sculpted stone. And afterwards I knelt down and brushed the leaves from the broken marble hand, and raised it up. It took all my strength to lift it. With difficulty I set it on the plinth, at the god’s feet. It was an offering of sorts.

  My efforts had disturbed the silence. Now, as it returned, I had a sudden feeling that someone was watching me, though I had seen no one. I stilled my breathing and listened, and felt my hair prickle on the back of my neck.

  There was a tiny sound, no more than a stirring, like a shift of leaves. I swung round. Twenty paces away, silhouetted in the twilight in front of the high door, a man stood regarding me.

  ‘Who are you?’ I shouted angrily.

  The man took a step towards me, and as he moved I saw he was sturdy and broad shouldered, with the gait of a legionary or a peasant. Instinctively, like any man with a soldier’s training, I felt at my belt. I had no sword; but I had found an old hunting knife at the farm, and had cleaned it up. My fingers settled on its old birch-wood handle.

  ‘Forgive me,’ the man replied, pausing in the place where he was, ‘I did not mean to startle you.’ His voice was friendly; his Latin had the lilting accent of the East. He turned, and said something quickly in Greek. There was a movement, and from the shadows another man, thinner and fine-boned, stepped out into the shaft of grey light.

  I watched them warily, preparing to move. The one who had spoken lifted his hands to show he had no weapon. ‘We mean no harm,’ he said.

  ‘Then what do you want?’ I said back at him.

  They stepped forward and looked up at the tall statue of Jupiter enthroned. I could see, now he was closer, the shadow
of day-old stubble on the man’s jaw. His hair was carelessly, unevenly cut. A common soldier, then; yet somehow he did not have a common soldier’s coarseness, and his delicate-looking friend did not look like a soldier at all. He peered at the base of the statue, frowning at the scribbled alphas and crude daubed crosses. ‘You see, Oribasius?’ he said, gesturing. Then, turning back to me, ‘We were here when you came; you startled us or we should have spoken out.’ He paused, and when I did not speak he went on, ‘Did you come with the army, friend?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Then you are from Paris?’

  ‘No again.’ My answers were cold and wary. I was in no mood for small-talk. I was angry that they had secretly watched me, when all the time I had supposed I was alone. Besides, there was a covert air about them, as if they were keeping something from me, or playing with me.

  Sharply, with a stab of my thumb at the broken frieze, I asked, ‘Are you Christians?’ And I thought to myself, ‘If they came looking for a fight, then I will give them one.’

  ‘I did not do this,’ he said carefully, keeping his eyes on me. ‘I would never do such a thing. It is sacrilege.’ He paused. ‘But tell me, if you are not with the army, then with whom?’

  To shut him up I answered, ‘If you must know, I am a guest of a certain Eutherius, who is friend to Julian the Caesar. I daresay you have heard of him.’

  His brows went up at this, and I saw the two of them exchange a private look. ‘Indeed we have,’ he replied. And the other, the one called Oribasius, said, ‘Truly we mean no offence. But what is your name? It may be that we have heard of you.’

  I answered that I doubted it; but seeing no harm in telling them, I said, ‘I am Drusus.’ And at this, to my surprise, Oribasius asked, ‘Then do you have a friend called Marcellus?’