Cowards! Traitors! Carthaginian catamites!
‘Silence in the ranks!’ Gordian tried to take in all that was happening. Everything was confusion, going too fast.
The legionaries had not charged home into the two thousand of his regulars who remained. The legionaries stood in a ragged, panting line a few paces away.
Behind Gordian on both wings the mob were throwing down their shields and weapons, the better to run. He could not see what had happened to the 15th Cohort on the far right, but to the left the standards of the 1st Gordiana still flew over the villa. If only he still had the horse. He needed an unobscured view to make sense of the chaos. If the discipline of Capelianus’ auxiliaries broke, and they chased after the routing levies, the issue here in the centre might still be balanced.
Uniformed men off to the left, slashing at the backs of the fleeing plebs. Dozens of them, hundreds. The atavistic urge to slaughter the defenceless had overcome all the auxiliaries’ years of training. It was the same on the right. There was still hope. Two thousand against two thousand here at the heart of the battle.
‘Imperator.’ Vocula was pointing.
The standards of Suillius’ Cohort of the 3rd were dipping.
Maximinus Imperator. The shout was loud. Maximinus Imperator.
They were reversing their swords. The treacherous bastards were going over. They would not fight their fellow legionaries. They would rather serve a barbarian tyrant than Emperors born in Rome. Beyond them the standards of the 1st Flavian Cohort were going down as well.
Who was left? The Praetorians, on their right, the 13th Urban Cohort stood firm. One thousand men.
They would withdraw. Keep their faces to the enemy, fight their way back to the city. The aqueduct and the tombs would break up the formation of their enemies, negate their superior numbers.
But as he looked towards Carthage, hope died. Already the gates were choked with a throng of men. They were stationary, wedged together, fighting among themselves, as Capelianus’ auxiliaries bore down, killing the laggards among the tombs.
Face your fate with courage. Not with the complainings and entreaties of a coward. Death is nothing.
A voice was shouting.
‘Lay down your arms, fellow-soldiers. Your fight is done and over.’
It was Capelianus, sitting a horse behind his men. Just four ranks away. He was still shouting.
‘Your pretend Emperor has fled. Those who led you astray have fled. No mounted officers remain under your standards. Return to your sacramentum. You were misled. The clemency of Maximinus is boundless. I am merciful. There will be no retribution.’
Gordian tugged off his helmet, cast it aside, so he could be seen. ‘I am here. Praetorians, we will stand together to the end.’
He shouldered his way to the front, drawing his sword. ‘The coward Capelianus has put himself at our mercy. Some god has blinded him. Kill the cuckold, and the day is yet ours. With me, brothers.’
He could see the surprise and indecision on the face of Capelianus.
Just four ranks of soldiers. Let me not die without a struggle, inglorious, but do some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it.
‘With me!’ Vocula was beside him. ‘Are you ready for war?’
Ready! All the men around him were bellowing, caught up in the intoxication of the sanguinary drama.
‘Are you ready for war?’
Ready!
On the third response, Gordian charged forward.
At a run, he crashed shield to shield into the legionary opposite. The man staggered back, collided with the man behind. Gordian took a blow from the left on his shield, smashed the boss into a bearded face. He caught a sword thrust from the right on his own blade, rolled his wrist, and punched. His knuckles hit the face guard. He felt them break. But the man reeled away, impeding his fellows.
They were in the midst of their lines.
Gordian dropped to one knee, thrust under his shield into the thigh of the legionary in front. Before the man could fall, Vocula had finished him. Another Praetorian was on his other shoulder.
Three ranks to go. His own men around him. The clamour of the fighting stunned the senses.
Gordian hacked and thrust. No room or time for thought. He chopped down a man to his right with a backhand slash. Felt his shoulder-guard buckle as a blade caught him. Ignoring it, he cut down the next man in his way. His shield was splintered, jagged. His right hand throbbed.
Two ranks. He could see Capelianus turning the head of his horse. If he rode off, the morale of his men would collapse. If he stayed, Gordian would kill him.
Too fast to react, Gordian was hit on the side of the head. For a moment, his vision blurred. He struck out blindly. The point of his sword glanced off metal. Blood was running hot down his neck. He thrust again, met resistance.
Now there was only one legionary between him and Capelianus. But out of the corner of his eye he saw Vocula fall. There was no one else with him. He was alone. Steel all around him.
Something jabbed between his shoulder blades. The armour broke. A surge of pain, the breath driven out of him. A legionary aimed a swing at his head. He went to bring his shield up, but he was slow. The sword cut into his jaw, snapped his head sideways.
He brought up his sword. But it was heavy, so very heavy. The iron taste of blood filling his mouth, flooding down his throat.
He was on his knees. Men were shouting, but they were far away, as if he were at the bottom of a well.
A blow to the back of his head knocked him forward on all fours. All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals. No, that was wrong. Death was nothing.
He felt the next blow, but not the ones after that.
Death was nothing.
Chapter 47
Africa
Carthage,
Ten days after the Ides of March, AD238
The sea was calm. The galley was waiting off the commercial harbour. He could still escape.
He would have to be quick. Capelianus’ auxiliaries and the Moorish tribesmen had almost finished hacking down the throng that clogged the gates. Soon they would be inside the walls. When the raping and massacre began in the city, the more intelligent, the more avaricious, would make for the Palace.
For a time, he had hoped his son was alive, somehow had escaped death. If only he would ride up, defeated, but bloody and glorious. It had been the hope of a fool, of a young man. Marcus Antonius Gordianus Sempronianus, recently, to his cost, hailed Romanus and Africanus and Augustus as well, was over eighty, and, whatever some may have called him in his long life, he had never considered himself a fool.
His son lay dead on the battlefield, on that dreadful plain where all their hopes had died. Gordian had watched from the battlements; the trap that failed, the cowardice of the levies – when had the Africans ever shown anything more? – the desertion of the legionaries, and that final doomed charge. He had watched until that last knot of men had been butchered. No one, not even his son, could have survived.
As the carriage had brought him back to the Palace, the plebs had shouted insults, blamed him for their plight. They did not see it was the other way about, and all the imprecations in the world would not save them. Anyway, the plebs were ever fickle, not worth considering.
There was still time to get down to the port. But there was no point. His son was dead. Some might say that he should think of Maecia Faustina and his grandson. But if he reached Rome, there would be nothing he could do to defend them. They would be in less danger without his presence. He had never cared for his daughter, and the child was a stranger. All the love he possessed had gone to his son. Perhaps love is a finite quality. Some might squander it on acquaintances, he had given it all to his son. And his son was dead.
He should not fear suicide. He was old. Many old men had taken their lives. If it was done, not in despair, but with self-control, after rational consideration, it was a praiseworthy end. In Pliny’s Letters, Corellius Rufus had starv
ed himself to death in the face of gathering pain and debility. Pliny had held him up as an example.
In the stern mos maiorum, a defeated general should seek death at the hands of the enemy, or turn his blade upon himself. His son had done the former – could he really be dead? – now it remained for Gordian to take the latter path. Even Varus, when his foolishness had led three legions to their deaths in the forests of Germania, had won a measure of posthumous redemption, when he fell on his sword.
Gordian had never shared his son’s certainty that there was no afterlife. There could be no delight greater than walking in the Elysian Fields, reunited with his son. But would the gods admit one who had denied their existence? And he was far from sure his own limited virtues would earn him entrance to those flower-jewelled meadows. His youth had been marked by arrogance, vanity, ambition, and lust. None but the last had been tempered by age. Yet there were no greater vices against his name, and his life had been untainted by any terrible act of cruelty or impiety. He doubted he deserved eternal torment. If he went, as most did, to Hades, he could drink the waters of Lethe, and all would be forgotten. If his son was right, they would both sleep peacefully for ever.
If he took his life now, perhaps his daughter and her son would be spared, perhaps the house of the Gordiani would continue. It might be his descendants would still look on the fine paintings of the Domus Rostrata, walk the marble halls of the villa on the Via Praenestina. Given the nature of Maximinus, it seemed unlikely.
With hindsight, he should have devoted himself to death before the battle. Long ago, the Decii, father and son, had made a compact with the gods. They had offered their lives in return for the victory of their armies. But that had been long ago, when the world was young, when the gods were closer. At his age, an old man tottering towards the enemy might have invited not divine admiration, but scorn.
From his point of vantage, a terrace high in the Palace, he could see the Hadrumetum Gate. The Moors were inside. He could see their white tunics, the bright tips of their jave-lins, as they stabbed down from their ponies, into the heads and shoulders of the panic-stricken and unresisting. Time was getting short.
He should try for a good death. Socrates had taken hemlock, a gradual numbness had spread from his feet up through his body. Many Senators wore a ring containing poison. Gordian was not one of them. It would have to be a blade, the Roman way. What was it young Menophilus often said? What is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body. There was no time for the hot bath and the leisurely and uplifting discussion of the immortality of the soul. No time to die like Seneca or Thrasea Paetus.
‘Brennus!’
Gordian called again. His bodyguard did not come.
The terrace was deserted.
‘Brennus!’
Gordian walked inside. The first room was empty, so was the long corridor. His footsteps echoed.
There was no one in the Delphix. Four years as Proconsul of Africa, twenty days since the Senate had acclaimed him Emperor, so many dinner parties in this elegant room. Now someone had stolen the cups and plates and big wine cooler.
He sat on a couch. In the further reaches of the Palace he could hear men moving, like mice behind a wainscot.
‘Emperor.’
It was Valens, his a Cubiculo.
The last person to desert him would be the steward of the bedchamber.
‘Emperor, four loyal slaves wait with the carriage. If we do not delay, we can still get you to the ship.’
A momentary surge of relief, of joy, like a servant spared a beating. No, to prolong his life was cowardice. His arrival in Rome would seal the death sentence on his daughter and grandson.
‘Valens, take this ring. Go to the ship, go to Rome. Tell Menophilus and Valerian, our other friends, to look to their safety. Tell my daughter …’
Tell her what? Since her mother had died, their minds had been closed to each other.
‘Tell her we died well.’
‘Emperor …’
‘Now go. Obey my final command.’
When Valens had gone, Gordian went to his bedchamber. It was undisturbed. He had a sharp sword, long since prepared. It should have been wielded by Brennus. But Brennus had gone.
He tested the edge with his thumb. A bright spot of blood. Razor sharp. The ivory hilt looked incongruous in his age-spotted hands.
All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals. He had a sudden urge to rush after Valens. Ridiculous, the a Cubiculo would be long gone. He would not suffer the fate of Galba or Vitellius; an old man, a deposed Emperor, dragged through the streets, stripped naked, tortured. He hefted the sword.
When the friends of Cato had bound up his wounds, urged him to live, the philosopher had ripped open the stitches, torn out his entrails with his bare hands. Cato had died slowly, in agony. Gordian threw away the sword. He could not face the steel.
He took off his belt, looked around. Nothing of use. He went back into the dining room. Taking one of the upright chairs on which the women and children sat, he dragged it under a beam. The belt was too short.
He stood uncertain, panic rising. Men were shouting somewhere in the Palace.
The curtains were held back by a long rope, ornamental, but thick. He looped it over the beam, tied one end to a pillar. He clambered up onto the chair. He fashioned a noose, put it over his head, checked and tightened the knot.
There would be no one to catch his last breath, close his eyes, call his name. It did not matter.
Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious, but do some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it. Time would tell.
He thought of his son. Saw him as a child sleeping, the tousled fair hair, the perfection of the line of his jaw, of his mouth, the beauty of his eyes as they opened and gazed into his own. He kicked away the chair.
HISTORICAL AFTERWORD
A Note on Chronology
All the events in this novel take place between 6–25 March AD238. An ancient Roman would have numbered the days after the Ides of March (the 15th of the month) as X days before the Kalends of the next month (1 April). For the ease of the modern reader, to keep things in the ‘right’ month for us, the chapter headings reckon them as Y days after the Ides.
Another source of potential confusion is the Roman habit of counting days inclusively. For us 15 March is fourteen days after 1 March. For most Romans it would have been fifteen days later.
The precise chronology of the revolt of the Gordiani is uncertain. For an insightful modern discussion see Karen Haegemans, Imperial Authority and Dissent: The Roman Empire in AD235–238 (Leuven, Paris and Walpole, MA, 2010), with a tabulation of the evidence at 257–8.
ANCIENT SOURCES – THE AUGUSTAN HISTORY
One of the most fascinating texts to survive from Classical Antiquity is a series of Latin biographies of Roman Emperors which is known as the Augustan History (often referred to as the Historia Augusta, sometimes in older scholarship the Scriptores Historiae Augustae). They run from Hadrian (reigned AD117–38) to Carinus (AD283–5). There is a gap in the manuscript. Missing are the reigns from Philip (AD244–9) to near the end of the life of Valerian (AD253–60).
The biographies claim to be written by six authors, working around the year AD300. In reality they are the work of one man, writing about a century later. Why an unknown author about AD400 set out to compose this lengthy and elaborate fraud is unknown. Sir Ronald Syme suggested the author was a schoolteacher getting his own back on a world that undervalued him, and motivated by a lifetime of his pupils’ mocking laughter.
Scholars tend to divide the biographies into two groups. The ‘Major Lives’ of the more important emperors from Hadrian to Caracalla appear to be based on good sources, with the addition of some fiction. In the ‘Minor Lives’ – imperial princes and pretenders before Caracalla, and all biographies subsequent to that ruler – invention predomi-nates. The turning point falls about halfway through the life of Heliogabalus (a name that the author may well
have invented from that Emperor’s favoured god, Elagabalus). All the biographies covering AD235–8 are ‘Minor Lives’. Given the paucity of other literary evidence, they remain of the utmost importance for historians of the period. They are an inexhaustible inspiration for Throne of the Caesars.
A. R. Birley provides a lucid introduction in his Lives of the Later Caesars (Harmondsworth, 1976), 7–22, before translating the biographies from Hadrian to Heliogabalus. There is a complete translation, with the Latin on the facing page, in three Loeb volumes by D. Magie (Cambidge, Mass., 1921–32). Emperors and Biography: Studies in the Historia Augusta (Oxford, 1971) by R. Syme, is a classic of modern scholarship.
SENATORIAL CAREERS
In theory the career of a Senator followed an ordered progression up the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’. After military service as a tribune with a legion, and a minor post, such as serving on the board of the Tresviri Monetales, the first major magistracy was to be a Quaestor, election to which gave admission to the Senate. All except patricians should then serve as either Aedile or Tribune of the Plebs. The next rank was to be a Praetor, and the final step to be a Consul. Each office was to be held for no more than one year, there were prescribed age limits, and under the Emperors no one was expected to seek any office more than once, except that of Consul. Imperial patronage and the exigencies of politics often complicated the pattern.
The cursus honorum under the principate is set out with clarity and precision by A. R. Birley, The Fasti of Roman Britain (Oxford, 1981), 4–35.
To avoid complication, in Throne of the Caesars some characters remain in a magistracy for several years. Menophilus is a Quaestor in AD235 in Iron & Rust, and he is still in that office in AD238 in Blood & Steel. Similarly, the same three young men are Tresviri Monetales in both novels.
EPICUREANISM
There is no ancient evidence that Gordian II was an epicurean, but it fits well with the portrait of him in the Augustan History. In Blood & Steel Gordian does not have a profound understanding of the philosophical system, but there again nor does his creator. What little I have learnt has been drawn from B. Inwood, and L. P. Gerson, The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (Indianapolis, and Cambridge, 1994); and J. Warren (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (Cambridge, 2009).
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