Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1

by M C Scott

  Josephus tells us nothing of Judas’ death but he does tell us that his grandson, Menahem, raided an armoury to arm his men and that he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey proclaiming himself the messiah, from which we might infer that nobody thought there was only one messiah or that he had been and gone – and that he was probably following a family tradition.

  For me, the clinching argument that Judas’ death was taken and usurped by men who had never met him is that they twisted his name. He was Judas, leader of the Sicarioi. By stroking a T across the last letter and inverting the first two, we have Judas Iscariot – a surname not known in Hebrew histories to that point. If you wanted to hide the origins of your sect, if you wanted to make it as pro-Roman as you could, while removing all stain of an anti-Roman past, what better way than to hide the name of the man who had founded it, than in the name of his own worst enemy?

  I don’t think Paul did this – he was using the moniker ‘Christ Jesus’ which means ‘saviour saviour’ in Greek, and then the Greek version of the Hebrew Yeshua. Another example is ‘Thomas Didymus’, which means ‘twin twin’ in the same two languages – clearly there was a habit at the time of saying the same thing twice. That said, I think that, like ‘Boudica’ which means ‘victory’ and was a name acquired after the fact, this was a name given by Paul to highlight the role of the man whose death he had usurped. It became current only after the fall of Jerusalem and the utter destruction of the Fourth Philosophy.

  By then, if we follow Joseph Atwill’s theories in Caesar’s Messiah, Paul was gone from the scene, but Titus Vespasian and Josephus together saw the value in continuing what he had begun and it was they who put together the mix of fact and fiction that became the gospels. In creating a religion that could be acceptable under Roman rule, it was in their interests to paint it as pro-Roman and anti-Semitic as they could, while distancing it as far as possible from the insurrection that had been at its heart. They changed a lot of names, but turning the name of the hero Judas of the Sicarioi into a traitor was the greatest act of spin, and the most successful.

  Judas had at least three sons and a number of grandsons, the last of whom was crucified at around ninety years of age. His daughters are not recorded, but then Josephus doesn’t ever tell us much about women unless it’s to point out how flaky they were, so I have allowed myself to assume that he had at least one daughter. Hannah was always going to take a central role in my novel – although I didn’t know until I was writing her story which of the possible men in her life would climb the wall into the goose-keeper’s garden and become the father of her child.

  Of the other characters taken from history, Shimon is Simon, also known as Simon Peter, Cephas and, latterly, St Peter. It seems to me that, next to Judas the Galilean, Shimon’s memory has been most traduced by those who came after him. In The Emperor’s Spy, St Peter is restored to his original character as Shimon the zealot, referred to by Josephus as Sadduc/Zadok, the Galilean’s lieutenant and a senior figure in the Sicari zealots, a man who devoted his life to expelling Rome from his country and restoring a theocracy based on Hebrew texts.

  As with all good books, the era has drawn me deeper than I had ever imagined, which means there are at least three more books in plan that will see Pantera, the Leopard, pursue Paul into Jerusalem and out again and then across the empire in his quest for fulfilment and peace.

  1 See ‘Sources’ for a list of the relevant letters.

  SOURCES

  My sources are too numerous to list individually, but the primary texts are as follows:

  • Tacitus, who provides most of the detail of the fire. In fact, as with the burning of Colchester and London in the Boudican revolt, without his account we would barely know it happened. I have based my timeline of the conflagration itself on his account.

  • The writings of Josephus, both ‘Antiquities’ and ‘War’, particularly those parts of ‘Antiquities’ that deal with the rise of what he terms the ‘Fourth Philosophy’ of Judaism, also known as the ‘Assembly of the Poor’ or ‘the Way’.

  • Acts, particularly the so-called ‘we’ document beginning at Chapter 16 which is narrated in the first person plural and which contains details of St Paul’s actions until the early 60s, concluding with his excommunication from the Assembly headed by James, and his flight from Jerusalem.

  • The epistles of Paul which are generally considered to be authentic, these being: 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Romans 15/16. I am assuming that the insertion into 1 Corinthians 14 v 34–36 regarding the role and actions of women is a later addition. Apparently this is absent from the earliest manuscripts of this text, is added as a marginal note later, and is inserted into a number of other places before settling in its current position. The text reads perfectly acceptably without it, in fact, it makes a great deal more sense. It also clears Paul of the charge of misogyny, which otherwise doesn’t stick.

  Other early sources have provided insight into the times, particularly Suetonius and Philo.

  The works of Joseph Atwill (Caesar’s Messiah), Bart D. Ehrman (various, particularly Lost Christianities), Robert Eisenman (James, the Brother of Christ and The New Testament Code), Hyam Maccoby (The Mythmaker) and Daniel T. Unterbrink (Judas the Galilean: the Flesh and Blood Jesus) were key to my reconstruction of events at the time.

  I don’t agree in their entirety with any of them, but an amalgamation of the concepts outlined by Eisenman, Unterbrink and Atwill in particular have enabled me to envisage a time frame and event cycle that makes sense of what is otherwise a historical morass. Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King were also immensely instructive and Paul Cresswell very kindly sent me the chapter concerning St Paul from his then unpublished work Jesus the Terrorist (now in press and due for publication in early 2010).

  I am persuaded by Bart Ehrman that the earliest existing versions of Luke contain no reference to the Eucharist. (http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/extras/ehrman-pres.html)

  Given that Luke post-dates Paul’s letters, it may be that Paul was not its progenitor and that the instructions on its practice given in 1 Corinthians 17 are a later addition, but Paul still seems to me the most likely progenitor – only a committed anti-Semite would both annihilate the Hebrews’ covenant to their God and incorporate into his newly minted religion a rite that, while normal among the Greeks in their worship of Dionysus, was an abomination to the Hebrews.

  For the rest, I am indebted to Justin Pollard and Howard Reid for their magnificent text on Alexandria, and particularly for the revelation that the Romans had all the technology to create a hydraulic engine, or even a steam locomotive, but that slave power was cheaper than wood and so they never took it forward.

  The Oracle under the Serapeum at Alexandria is a fiction, but it is based on the one recently excavated at Baia near Naples, which replicates almost exactly the details of Virgil’s trip to Hades. The Serapeum itself was a dominant feature of Alexandria, but was destroyed by a Christian bishop some centuries later.

  Quadrigas were of course driven four abreast rather than four in-hand, but the latter fitted the story better, so I have re-arranged the driving style.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  In the early part of 2010, I was asked to write a short story for a ‘What if …’ compilation: what if various turning points in history had turned the other way. Mine, of course, was ‘What if the Boudica’s armies had won?’ I spend half of my life talking to people at literary festivals or in reading groups about the Boudica: Dreaming books, and about Pantera’s ‘Rome’ series, and we often end up discussing how life might have been had the Romans not kept their foothold in Britain, so I jumped at the chance of writing about it.

  The short story went on to be published by the BBC History Magazine as their first item of fiction, but we include it here as something for those of you who knew Ajax when he was Cunomar, and Valerius when he was Bán, and who watched the Boudica’s daughter, Graine, from her birth, through the tr
auma of her rape, to her part in the final battle. It is here, too, for those of you who have only known Ajax as he is here, who have come to know only a fraction of Valerius, and Graine barely at all. For you, this is my vision of how Pantera might have been had he remained in Britain, part of a victorious army, and chosen to remain – but as a Briton, not a Roman.

  I wrote this in a short gap between sections of Rome: The Coming of the King, and completed the editing after the first draft was done. For me, it’s a breath of freedom, to return to Britain, to return to people I know better than most of those I come across in real life, and to return to a world where the gods and the dreaming hold true. It is, in fact, sheer, glorious self-indulgence. I offer it for your entertainment.

  Manda Scott, Shropshire, mid-summer 2010

  THE LAST ROMAN IN BRITAIN

  The girl was not a ghost; she only looked like one. Wreathed in mist, she stepped out of the storm, and crouched at his side. ‘Are you Hywell of the white scar?’

  ‘I am.’ Her eyes were grey and seemed too grave to be the eyes of a child. Unsettled, Hywell said, ‘How did you know my name?’

  ‘They said you were controlling the fighting. Who else could it be?’ She pointed down the slope into the bowl of flat land where the remaining men of the Second Legion fought to their late, swift deaths. They died for nothing, not even to defend their standard: they had not brought the Eagle with them on either of the last two sallies from the fort.

  ‘I am to tell you that the Boudica’s army is within reach. If you need more warriors, they will come.’ She had a light, grave voice, that put him in mind of winter breezes, and starlight at dusk.

  ‘Thank you.’ He looked at her more closely. She was small and slight and would have been blonde if the rain had not plastered her hair darkly to her head. Her face was oval, with high cheeks, her eyes the grey of a sky after rain. He imagined her adult, and knew then, who she was.

  He wiped rain from his eyes. ‘Do you think we’ll need your mother’s warriors?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Her cloak was of oiled wool. The water ran off it in fat drops. She settled it around her shoulders and stared down onto the battlefield, assessing it much as he had done.

  The Roman legionaries were clustered in a ring with their shields locked tight and their gladii stabbing out between. The pride of the Dumnonii, Hywell’s tribe, stood about them in a wider circle, unshielded for the most part, without helmets, without any of the stolen mail they had worn earlier in the day when there had still been a chance they might lose the battle. Now they were naked in the fray, men and women equally, that their children might tell of this in their dotage; how their mothers and fathers slew the last century of the last legion armed only with the blades of their ancestors, and claimed the land back for their own.

  They fought under a storm-sky, on bloody earth, and behind them, in the west, the fortress of the Second Legion was a black void haloed with scarlet; the fires that had been lit in the early morning were feeding on whole oak limbs now, and the summer storm had not the power to extinguish them.

  Such a simple thing to end a siege; if he had known all it would take was a good, hot fire, Hywell would have lit it far sooner. But then he was inclined to think that if he had lit it sooner, the men inside would have had the wit to reach buckets down into the southern sea below the cliffs that held their backs, and empty them onto the flames, leaving the wood to smoke in useless ruin.

  It had taken this long; four months of warriors camped around the fort, just out of missile range, so that the defending legion had to rely on their well water, and their reducing rations to eat and drink. It had taken the steady flow of message birds flying into the high lofts on the fort’s roof, telling of the defeat of the Ninth legion, the fall of Camulodunum and then Lugdunum, of Suetonius Paulinus’ failure to take the stronghold of Mona, sacred to the gods, of his decision to turn back and confront the Boudica’s warriors; of his long, slow drawn-out defeat as those warriors had harried and hunted his legions so that they could not march from one night camp to the next without losing men.

  Later, reading the smokes of camp fires and hearing the skull drums and the victory horns of night encampments in the forests beyond their fort, they had learned of his final defeat.

  When they killed and ate their cavalry horses, when the flow of deserters grew from a trickle to a river, and each one ready to tell him of the humiliation, the desperation, the waning discipline, of the few who held out for Nero to send reinforcements, of the greater mass who knew they had been abandoned – then Hwyell had known they were ripe for the picking.

  And when the Boudica’s brother had sent down the Eagles of the Ninth, the Fourteenth and the Twentieth legions for him to set about the fort as proof that they were alone on this foreign soil, the last legion in Britain, then he had known the time was perfect.

  He had ordered that the biggest of logs not be used for the fire, but dragged out onto the flat plain at the dark of the moon. The remnants of the Second legion had sallied out through the main gates at dawn, when the ground was still dry and they could hold their ranks in good order. Under the morning light, the great, hewn trunks lay in a haphazard pattern across the battlefield, giving cover to the waiting warriors.

  Under Hywell’s watching gaze, the first three centuries had marched forward in good order, aiming for the oaks. The leading ranks only discovered the ditches that had been dug ahead of the logs by falling into them, losing men to the stakes and loose boulders set beneath the latticework of willow and turf.

  The centurions were seasoned men, used to acting in adversity. They pulled their troops back and sent them forward again in narrow columns, testing the ground, in the course of which, they discovered that there was method in the chaotic patterns of the logs. Thus they advanced in a long, winding snake – not line abreast, which was their strength.

  Hywell’s warriors had waited and waited, and only when he had set the bull horn to his lips and sounded the note had the first hundred risen from behind the felled trees.

  The battle had not been fast or clean; the legionaries of the Second legion had fought with the ferocity of men with nothing to lose, slashing out like cornered stags, calling on Jupiter, Mars and Mithras to help them to die with honour, and to kill as many as they might while doing it, but they were against warriors who had nursed their hatred for twenty years, who cared not if their lives were the cost of victory.

  The men and women of the Dumnonii fought for the future of their children and the land under their feet. They fought for their gods and their ancestors and their language. They fought for their roundhouses and the chance once again to bear weapons in the open. They fought with their hounds at their sides and their children at their backs and they were winning with such ease now because they had worked through the night to drag forward the trees on Hywell’s orders, for he had the best understanding of Rome and its legions.

  Which was why he was lying here on the warm, wet earth with the stench of blood and entrails rolling over him in steaming waves. And why the Boudica’s daughter had come to find him.

  She turned to him now. Her grey eyes rested on his face. ‘Your warriors need no help,’ she said, ‘The Romans will all be dead by dusk.’

  A shadow crossed his soul, stirred from a darkness he had not explored in all his time with the Dumnonii.

  Her eyes saw all of him. ‘You’re Gunovar’s father?’ she asked. ‘Aerthen is her mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘And yes.’ Aerthen, love of his life, was on the battlefield. The hardest part of his morning had been their parting. He carried her scent in his nostrils, flavoured with sweet apple smoke from the first fire. Gunovar was safe, away from the carnage. His daughter was three years younger in her body and a thousand years younger in her soul than this child who had come to find him.

  He said, ‘You are Graine, the dreamer.’ He did not say, You are Graine, the Boudica’s youngest daughter who was raped by an entire century of men and nearly died. Yo
u are Graine, who held her mother as she died on the battlefield, leading the charge that broke the shield wall when the last three centuries of the Twentieth finally turned at bay. It did not help to speak such things aloud, but she read them anyway, in his face.

  ‘I am both of those,’ she said, nodding. ‘My brother and my uncle are here now, waiting at the forest’s far edge. They wish to speak with you.’

  He made himself smile for this small, terrifying child. ‘They wish to ask how best to find the lost Eagle of the Second?’

  She smiled back, teasing, and raised a brow. ‘Mostly.’

  The storm ended as Hywell stepped out of the forest and into the Eceni camp. The clouds cleared on the back of a freshening wind. The stench of battle swept eastwards, leaving rain-cleaned air and the mellow autumn scents of forest, horse and hound.

  It was not the whole of the Boudica’s army; most of them had gone now, to bring in a late harvest. But a few hundred had gathered, bringing with them wagons of corn and hunting hounds, and had dug their own fire pits and latrines as if they were a Roman unit on scouting duty. The Boudica’s brother, Valerius, had fought for twenty years for the legions before he came back to his people: his hand showed in everything.

  Hywell counted the numbers of horses, of standards, planted in the earth, of men and women mending harness or hammering swords and it crossed his mind that if ever they wanted to assault Rome itself, this was the time to do it.

  Two men waited among the tethered horses on the camp’s margins. The younger was blond and naked to the waist, with the marks of the bear-warriors on his back and arms. His right ear was missing and his hair had been shaved back on both sides to show it.

  Hywell did not kneel, but only because such things were not done here.