The Emperor's Knives: Empire VII (Empire 7)

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The Emperor's Knives: Empire VII (Empire 7) Page 39

by Riches, Anthony


  The other man smiled wryly.

  ‘Oh no, I have something rather better suited to your particular collective skill set in mind.’ He held out a hand to his secretary for a pair of scrolls. ‘Here.’

  Scaurus took them, opening the first and staring at it for a moment before looking up in genuine amazement.

  ‘Legatus?’

  Cleander smirked at him.

  ‘It’s a strange feeling, I’d imagine, to have your life’s impossible ambition offered to you as an alternative to execution, and by a man for whom you feel nothing better than contempt? And the other scroll?’ He waited while Scaurus opened and read the second order, grinning at the look that the tribune shot him after a moment’s perusal of the contents. ‘And I think your young colleague’s somewhat charmed life as a fugitive from his father’s crimes should be put on a slightly more regular footing. I’ve therefore decided to appoint him to the tribunate, under your command of course, Legatus Scaurus, and by doing so to confirm that Marcus Tribulus Corvus is a trusted servant of the throne. Or rather, of mine. His previous life shall be our little secret, and shall remain so just as long as you both provide the emperor, and more importantly myself, with the appropriate combination of loyalty and effective service. He will be formally elevated to the Equestrian order, and thereby enabled to act as a military tribune under your command. As long as the pair of you perform effectively, you will be under my personal protection. Fail to do so, or display even the slightest sign of biting the hand that has chosen to protect you, and your falls from grace will be spectacular.’

  ‘What …’

  ‘You? Lost for words, Legatus?’

  Scaurus shook his head.

  ‘No, Chamberlain. I’ve long since passed the point of amazement, I was simply gathering my thoughts. What is it that you want from us?’

  ‘There is a legion, Rutilius Scaurus, in a distant and rather warm part of the empire, that needs a firm grip on its collective neck. You are to relieve the current legatus, take command, and act as you see fit to restore Roman authority to that legion’s operational area without delay. Our frontier is being disregarded, Legatus, and I want those men who find it entertaining to display their contempt for us stamped flat, as an example for their kindred that won’t be forgotten for the next fifty years.’

  Legatus and tribune stared back at him for a moment before Marcus found his voice.

  ‘And my family?’

  ‘Your family, Tribune Corvus, will stay here in Rome under my personal protection. And in any case, I wouldn’t have thought you’d want them with you, not where you’re going.’ Cleander stood, smoothing his toga out with his hands. ‘As to your men, Legatus, you can decide what to do with your Tungrian cohorts. Send them home, take them with you, it makes no odds to me, although I think having some friendly faces at your back might be a sensible idea, given the depth of venality to which your new command has succumbed of late. Who knows what form their resistance to your assumption of command will take? And now, gentlemen, you’ll have to excuse me. The emperor does so hate it when I’m late for our meetings. I’ll be sure to stress to him just how pleased I am to have delegated this small matter to such consummate professionals.’ He nodded to the leader of his freshly assembled group of assassins. ‘Escort the legatus from the palace.’

  Scaurus and Marcus were led back through the palace’s maze, finding themselves on the steps of the Palatine Hill once more. Both men stared out over the Great Circus’s grandstands with mutual bemusement for a moment before Scaurus spoke, his voice flat and emotionless.

  ‘Legatus.’

  Marcus looked at him, seeing the disgust in his face.

  ‘You do have a choice.’

  The older man laughed, his amusement hollow.

  ‘Do I? Think about it for a moment, and you’ll come to another conclusion. If I refuse this honour, this pinnacle of a military man’s career, this impossible honour for a man of my class, then I make hostages to fortune of every man under my command. You will be executed, be under no illusions about that. Your family …’ He shook his head, unwilling to speak the words. ‘And the fifteen hundred men we brought here? I can imagine numerous ways to make every last one of them wish he’d never volunteered, and none of them will ever see their homeland again. Nor can I leave them here, at the mercy of every officer with a gap to fill in his ranks. There’s no choice for either of us, Tribulus Corvus. I must accept this position, and smile at the taste of ashes it will leave in my mouth, and you must accept the reality that you may never again use your family name in public.’

  Marcus nodded, looking up at the sky above them.

  ‘In which case, Legatus, I suggest we go and break the good news to my brother officers. What was it that Cleander said? “Distant, and rather warm?”’

  AFTERWORD

  Gladiators. Even now, with the apparently elevated moral perspective of modern society, the word still carries a resonance far beyond that which might reasonably be expected for a concept as barbaric as the gladiatorial arts as exercised under the Romans. The iconography of this archaic blood sport is as vital now as it was then, and a constant flow of books, television and even films attest to its enduring popularity, although few of us would find the Flavian amphitheatre’s entertainment (we call it the Colosseum these days, named after a huge statue that used to stand alongside its walls) an easy spectacle to watch, were we given the opportunity to view such contests in their full bloody pomp.

  The Romans seem to have borrowed the concept, as was so often the case with their ideas, weapons, tactics and ways of life, from their defeated neighbours. The first mention of gladiatorial combat, by Livy in 264 BC, seems to have been exceptional, but the dominant powers in Italy before Rome, the Etruscans and Samnites, seem to have constructed purpose-built arenas long before that. Etruscan sacrifices to their gods seem to have involved an element of combat, and when Rome and its Samnite neighbours squared up for domination of the Italian peninsula between 343 and 290 BC it is likely that prisoners of war on both sides would have been forced to fight to the death. But if the Romans were late to adopt gladiatorial combat as a form of public spectacle, they were as quick and morally uninhibited as ever to take that concept and develop it to its ultimate expression.

  The first Roman gladiatorial fights on record were a relatively small affair, with three pairs of men chosen from among twenty-two prisoners of war to fight in a Roman cattle market to honour the memory of the consul Decimus Junius Brutus Pera, human sacrifices to appease the gods to the dead man’s arrival with that extra thrill of men fighting to the death. Sacrifices at funerals were always likely for exactly this reason, but the idea of making the men who were doomed to die fight each other was, from the Roman perspective, inspired. At first the games were restricted to funeral rites, although there was a steady escalation in the number of men involved, and therefore the prestige of the man hosting the event, until in 216 BC the death of a man called Aemilius Lepidus was celebrated by twenty-two pairs of fighters. The number of fighters at an aristocratic funeral had become a mark of prestige, and nobody who considered himself to be a prominent member of Roman society could afford to be seen to skimp on such an event. It was Scipio Africanus, the famous republican general and politician, who started the move to disassociate the games from death rites when he held such a munus – the term means ‘obligation of honour’ – for his father and uncle several years after their deaths. An ambitious aedile by the name of Julius Caesar took the practice to a new level by holding a games for his dead father twenty years after his death, unashamedly presenting the public with no fewer than 320 pairs of gladiators in single combat in a move that paid him back with success at the next elections. The munus had been translated from a show of devotion to a departed relative to something far more cynical and calculated, the expenditure of large sums of gold, frequently borrowed by the politician in question, to buy public favour as the would-be office holder’s ‘duty’ to his constituents. The immedia
te result was that the hosting of games was banned for anyone seeking office within the two years of the event, and limiting the number of armed fighters to remove the risk presented to the republic by what were effectively highly skilled private armies.

  As the popularity of the games spread, schools were established to train gladiators for the spectacles, which proved handy when the empire was under pressure and needed military training in a hurry (but troubling when an escaped gladiator called Spartacus ran amok at the head of an army of freed slaves for two years). As the republic became increasingly unstable, it became normal for the aristocracy, especially those with political ambitions, to be escorted around the city by teams of gladiators who were paid to protect them from the potential intimidation of their rivals. In short, with purpose-built arenas – amphitheatres, from the Latin word ‘amphi’ (oval) – starting to spring up, and with Caesar hosting the first state-sponsored games in 42 BC, the gladiatorial munus had become an established feature of Roman society.

  For men who exercised such a strong influence on Rome’s society, the life of the average gladiator wasn’t all that enjoyable for the great majority of men lacking in the skills and single-minded brutality to fight their way through to the rudis, the wooden sword that released a man from his contract. The gladiator, for all that many respectable married women seem to have been drawn to their presence – and brutal ‘bad boy’ sexuality – like moths to a flame, were nevertheless (and quite possibly in partial consequence), considered to be the lowest strata of Roman society, openly despised by even the empire’s slaves even while the latter were all but worshipping the best-known fighters. Not that every man who fought in the arena will have had very much choice in the matter. Criminals, if they were lucky enough not to find themselves condemned to participate in the gory lunchtime shows by being ripped to pieces by hungry animals – damnatio ad bestias – could simply be condemned to the games – damnatio ad ludos – a form of punishment from which a determined, skilful and above all lucky man might still win his freedom. Worse than this was to be condemned to the sword – damnatio ad gladium – a genuine death sentence, whether in the condemned man’s first fight or his thirty-first. Inevitably, however, reasonable numbers of both suitably skilled and quite unsuited men volunteered to fight in the arena in return for financial reward. Whether to pay off a particularly unpleasant debtor – who would quite likely be using gladiators as the means of collecting what he was owed – to impress a girl, or simply to make his fortune, men voluntarily sold their bodies into the ludi, the gladiatorial schools. In doing so, and quite apart from lowering their status to that of infamis, the scum of society, unable to vote, hold public office or even buy a burial plot, and shunned by all and sundry for fear their status might be communicable, they submitted to an oath which put their lives utterly at the mercy of a lanista, the man who owned them until they were killed, invalided or freed. The great majority of them would eventually leave the arena with either a life-threatening or fatal wound, in which latter case their skulls would have been stoved in by a man with a large hammer, dressed in the costume of an ancient Etruscan god and whose job it was to ensure that a man who looked dead really had nothing more calculated on his mind.

  One last class of men fought in the arena, the auctorati: men who came to exercise their need for danger. These days thrill seekers jump out of aircraft or climb mountains to get their kicks, but in ancient Rome the lure of the games seems to have exerted a powerful pull on those men (and perhaps the occasional woman) determined to demonstrate their virtus causa, their skill at arms. This was barely acceptable, as long as the man was careful to preserve some degree of anonymity behind a faceless helmet and spare his family and friends the shame of his degradation, although the emperor Commodus shattered that social convention by appearing in what were presumably carefully rigged contests late in his ill-starred reign.

  Over a dozen different types of gladiator fought and died in the empire’s arenas over several centuries, one class of fighters who were effectively heavy infantrymen taking on another group of nimble small shield fighters, who depended on their speed and skill to defeat slower and better protected opponents. The classic combination was that of the retarius – the net man – who sought to snare his opponent the secutor – the chaser – with a net, keeping him at arm’s length with a trident, while the secutor pursued him with every intention of battering and hacking him to death.

  Speciality acts also abounded, like the andabatae – two fighters blinded by helmets covering their faces – and the dimachaerus, fighting without a shield but using two swords to mount a constant assault on his would-be victim. Chariot fighters were popular while Rome’s conquests over the barbarian tribes of the north – Gauls, Germans and Britons – provided a ready supply of suitably trained captives. Indeed the arenas thrived on prisoners, Rome’s wars providing a constant flow of raw material from around the empire’s periphery, men unsuitable to be sold into domestic slavery due to their aggressive natures or simple lack of any saleable skill being used instead to provide the population with bloody entertainment. After his huge victory in the war with Dacia, the emperor Trajan hosted 123 days of games in which over 5,000 pairs of gladiators, many of them captured Dacian warriors, fought to the death. It was no coincidence that two of the four gladiatorial schools were named after the styles of fighting that these men brought with them, the Ludus Gallicus (Gaulish School) which produced heavy fighters like the secutor and the murmillo (fish man, after his crested helmet, usually armed much like a legionary) and the Ludus Dacius (Dacian School) which turned out the more nimble retarius and thracian (a highly mobile fighter whose best hope was to stab his lumbering enemy in the back with his curved blade).

  And, by the same token, it was no coincidence that as the empire slid into the chaos of the third century, the games became less grand, due both to financial crises and a lack of the previously abundant prisoners of war. But for all of the reduction in expenditure on the games, and the empire’s vaunted conversion to the more apparently ethical Christian religion, the popularity of the gladiatorial ludi was largely unchanged. Despite the higher moral standards espoused by the state, the games proved remarkably stubborn in their continuing popularity, although theatrical shows and chariot races gradually rose to prominence, not least, one suspects, because they were quite simply cheaper to stage and therefore held more frequently. The end seems to have come with the death of an Egyptian monk by the name of Telemachus, martyred while protesting at the games held to celebrate defeat over the Goths during the reign of the emperor Honorius, his death proving the catalyst for the emperor to outlaw the games – although it still took more than one imperial decree to put a conclusive end to the munera. The last fight was held on the first day of January in the year AD 404.

  I hope The Emperor’s Knives will provide the reader with some feeling for the glory and terror that accompanied the many thousands of gladiators who endured their new status of infamis in order to fight for money, for their freedom or simply to see another sunrise.

  THE ROMAN ARMY IN 182 AD

  By the late second century, the point at which the Empire series begins, the Imperial Roman Army had long since evolved into a stable organisation with a stable modus operandi. Thirty or so legions (there’s still some debate about the Ninth Legion’s fate), each with an official strength of 5,500 legionaries, formed the army’s 165,000-man heavy infantry backbone, while 360 or so auxiliary cohorts (each of them the equivalent of a 600-man infantry battalion) provided another 217,000 soldiers for the empire’s defence.

  Positioned mainly in the empire’s border provinces, these forces performed two main tasks. Whilst ostensibly providing a strong means of defence against external attack, their role was just as much about maintaining Roman rule in the most challenging of the empire’s subject territories. It was no coincidence that the troublesome provinces of Britain and Dacia were deemed to require 60 and 44 auxiliary cohorts respectively, almost a quarter of the tot
al available. It should be noted, however, that whilst their overall strategic task was the same, the terms under the two halves of the army served were quite different.

  The legions, the primary Roman military unit for conducting warfare at the operational or theatre level, had been in existence since early in the republic, hundreds of years before. They were composed mainly of close-order heavy infantry, well-drilled and highly motivated, recruited on a professional basis and, critically to an understanding of their place in Roman society, manned by soldiers who were Roman citizens. The jobless poor were thus provided with a route to both citizenship and a valuable trade, since service with the legions was as much about construction – fortresses, roads and even major defensive works such as Hadrian’s Wall – as destruction. Vitally for the maintenance of the empire’s borders, this attractiveness of service made a large standing field army a possibility, and allowed for both the control and defence of the conquered territories.

  By this point in Britannia’s history three legions were positioned to control the restive peoples both beyond and behind the province’s borders. These were the 2nd, based in South Wales, the 20th, watching North Wales, and the 6th, positioned to the east of the Pennine range and ready to respond to any trouble on the northern frontier. Each of these legions was commanded by a legatus, an experienced man of senatorial rank deemed worthy of the responsibility and appointed by the emperor. The command structure beneath the legatus was a delicate balance, combining the requirement for training and advancing Rome’s young aristocrats for their future roles with the necessity for the legion to be led into battle by experienced and hardened officers.

  Directly beneath the legatus were a half-dozen or so military tribunes, one of them a young man of the senatorial class called the broad stripe tribune after the broad senatorial stripe on his tunic. This relatively inexperienced man – it would have been his first official position – acted as the legion’s second-in-command, despite being a relatively tender age when compared with the men around him. The remainder of the military tribunes were narrow stripes, men of the equestrian class who usually already had some command experience under their belts from leading an auxiliary cohort. Intriguingly, since the more experienced narrow-stripe tribunes effectively reported to the broad stripe, such a reversal of the usual military conventions around fitness for command must have made for some interesting man-management situations. The legion’s third in command was the camp prefect, an older and more experienced soldier, usually a former centurion deemed worthy of one last role in the legion’s service before retirement, usually for one year. He would by necessity have been a steady hand, operating as the voice of experience in advising the legion’s senior officers as to the realities of warfare and the management of the legion’s soldiers.

 

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