The Last Stoic
Page 22
“He’s been granted a niche high and on the periphery,” Paulina continued, “It seemed lonely to me and I said as much. The senator said you’re never really alone on that hallowed ground. That the site has seen more people come and go than are alive today. Even before it was Roman. Cave-dwellers. The Villanovans. The Latins. The Sabines. The Etruscans. A thousand different tribes and clans. I just don’t know.”
“I thought grandfather would want to be buried at his villa at Verulamium. Did he not say before he died?”
Paulina looked away sadly.
“He didn’t…,” she paused, “and the villa is no longer ours.”
“What do you mean?”
“We had many expenses. The travel. Accommodations. We had to hire a number of physicians, the best in Rome.”
Paulina described the many contributions to different officials, senators and consuls, praefects and magistrates. There were fees just to speak to someone. They had to make sure this or that official received a discreet bag of coins so they would put pressure on some other official.
“We had to sell our stake in the farm and grandfather sold his villa. You know your father and I don’t need much, and don’t want much. He can still work on the farm. I can pick up some more work tutoring the local children with their music. Vincentius won’t miss his old villa.”
Marcus said nothing.
“We’d all have gladly traded the emperor’s palace to have you back. It’s a bargain.”
THIRTY FIVE
They brought Vincent’s ashes across the landscapes he’d called home and loved so dearly, scrambling furtively over the fences and through the hedgerows onto the ancestral homeland that was no longer theirs, interloping this last time for a final communion with the streams and trees, ponds and meadows. The place was now a summer property, a getaway for another family to escape the extreme heat of the southern climate for a more temperate vacation of fishing, boating, and water-skiing. Next to Vincent’s old cabin, space had been cleared and a foundation laid for a new chalet. The old barn, where Vincent had kept the horses and donkeys, had been pulled down and was a mess of rubbled cinder blocks and broken beams. They wandered across the meadow, dispersing the ashes, to the edge of the woods, and found many recently felled trees, cleared to enhance the view.
Among the toppled trees was the ancient yew, fallen like its neighbours. That is where they stopped.
The yew shouldn’t have looked like this: horizontal, inert, dismembered, and vanquished. It had seemed to Mark more permanent than the sun and the sky and the mountains. He felt like he’d stumbled across a crime scene. The massive concentric stump with its countless rings was misshapen and reddened from the many, repeated chainsaw cuts. The earth was redolent with mounds of fresh, soft pulp. Several feet away, stacked neatly, lay the hundreds of severed and trimmed limbs, reserved for future corn roast bonfires and a blazing hearth at Christmas. An attempt had been made to extricate the stump. The backhoe tracks were still visible. The roots were exposed. Some were gouged and hacked, but none completely sundered. Mark opened the urn containing his grandfather’s ashes and sprinkled half around the remains of the yew. He scattered them over the stacks of branches and along the drip line and over the circle of slender shoots that pushed up tentatively through the layered humus where the yew’s expansive boughs had, in its prime, touched the earth.
The others returned home, getting chilled by the late autumn gusts. Mark stayed longer, breathing the rich air emanating from the woods, hearing the chatter from the birds and squirrels making their winter preparations, savouring the moist, coolness coming in from the lake.
THIRTY SIX
April brought news of the emperor Caracallus’ assassination.
According to reports that had filtered up into the northern town, months after the event, Caracallus had journeyed to a temple of Lunus, the moon-god, at Carrhae twenty-five miles from the military camp at Edessa, where his legions were wintered, preparing for another incursion into Parthia. The guerrilla war with Parthia was going poorly, the Roman army was making little progress. Among other dubious tactics, Caracallus had resorted to letting wild beasts, lions and tigers, into the battle. He was determined that Parthicus be added to his imperial name.
The emperor was anxious for success, to send positive reports back to the Senate in Rome so they could prepare for an extravagant triumph in his honour. In his desperation, he left the camp for Carrhae, where he intended to show his devotion by making a sacrifice at the temple of Lunus, and to pray for victory. The emperor traveled with a small party of guardsmen, hand-picked by the praetorian praefect Macrinus. But Caracallus never made it back to the camp at Edessa. The expedition returned with an account that the emperor had been ambushed while relieving himself in the woods, set upon by one disgruntled guardsman, a wretch named Martialis. Martialis had been executed on the spot, by order of Macrinus. Upon returning to Rome, Macrinus, who as the praetorian praefect held the second most important post in the empire, was made emperor by a confused and divided Senate. By the time the news had reached Verulamium, the general consensus was that Macrinus, Caracallus’ most powerful and trusted advisor, had carefully planned and executed the emperor’s assassination.
Marcus decided now was the time to leave. Into his rucksack he packed the urn containing the last of his grandfather’s ashes.
“You’re really going back to Rome?” his brother Annaeus asked.
They had agreed that Vincentius, at least part of him, belonged in the columbarium after all, in the heart of the eternal city. In Rome, Marcus would meet with Senator Frontinus who had undertaken an investigation of Gus and his dealings with the road building firm. Marcus would look for Sura, to make sure she was healthy and well, and to deliver the news of her brother’s death.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
Mark pulled his grandfather’s copy of the emperor’s journal from his rucksack and he showed it to his brother.
“Every part of me will be reduced by change into some part of the universe,” he said, “and that again will change into another part of the universe, and so on forever. And by consequence of such a change I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on forever in the other direction. The universe is change, life is opinion.”
“We’ll miss you,” Annaeus said.
“Don’t worry, we’ll meet again.”
The two embraced, and parted, and Mark again set out to continue the journey that he had started several years previous, in a southerly direction, along the narrow path to the beaten trail, down the laneway, to the main street out of Verulamium, on to the provincial highway, following the progression of thoroughfares, each road gradually leading to a wider, busier road, joining a final, major artery, stopping only where all the roads meet.
Author’s Notes
In the spring of 2003, as the radio delivered report after breathless report of the second American invasion of Iraq, charting the progress of the Abrams tanks rolling into Baghdad, I was reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the first time. It had been on my “must read” list for years and I’d finally worked up the nerve.
Gibbon’s masterpiece lives up to its reputation: it is a rich and rewarding read. But what struck me most, in passages describing how the ancient “golden age” had passed from prosperity and relative peace to decay and continual war, is how closely the trajectory of the contemporary American empire mirrors that of the Roman empire.
From Gibbon I turned to Will Durant for a more general view. In his Caesar to Christ, the similarity between the two empires is made even more apparent. Read page 88 of that book for a remarkable, though unintentional, correspondence; Durant could have been writing about 21st century America.
Today, pundits often casually refer to the US as a reincarnation of the Roman empire. They talk of Pax Americana, imperial presidencies, and American exceptionalism. The founding fathers, steeped in the neo-classicism of the Enlightenment era, envisioned the United States
in Rome’s image. Of course, it was republican, not imperial, Rome they had in mind – it takes time for a nation to trace that downward arc. Commentators draw superficial parallels between the two empires. But in reading Gibbon and Durant I wondered how far one could go. I began work on The Last Stoic that summer.
Some of the characters and places in The Last Stoic are historical, others are fictional. Where they are historical, I have endeavoured to hew as closely as possible to the received facts as they have been handed down by the chroniclers. Of course, some sources are considered more reliable than others. The reliability of the Historia Augusta, for example, while accepted by historians like Gibbon, has lately been cast into doubt; some modern scholars wonder if it isn’t deliberate fiction or even satire. Thus, while The Last Stoic isn’t meant to be a piece of scholarly research, and many historical descriptions, if they are interesting, are taken at face value, I have tried to keep with the current, common consensus.
All quotations from The Meditations appearing in The Last Stoic are taken from the following translation: Aurelius, Marcus. The Meditations, transl. Maxwell Staniforth (London: Folio Society, Penguin Books, 2005).
Here are a few additional notes on some of the historical characters that appear in The Last Stoic.
Commodus
Commodus is emblematic of the fall of the Roman empire. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon describes the period of the Antonine emperors (138 C.E. – 193 C.E.) as the “golden age”. Marcus Aurelius, philosopher-king, was the last of these golden emperors who oversaw the Pax Romana. His son, Commodus, was “born into the purple,” the first emperor in many generations rising to the throne, not through merit, but bloodline. In most ways he was the opposite of his father and he has come to represent the degeneracy that rotted the empire from within. Marcia, his Christian concubine attempted to poison him. Narcissus, his wrestling partner, finished him off through strangulation.
Caracallus
The emperor Caracallus ruled Rome from 211 to 217 C.E.. Born Lucius Septimius Bassianus, and renamed Marcus Aurelius Antoninus when he was seven, he was popularly known as Caracalla, for the Germanic cloak he would often wear, though at least one historian (Cassius Dio) records that he was sometimes called "Karakallos" (Greek) or “Caracallus” (Latin). Though the nickname was originally meant to be an epithet, and was never used in the emperor's presence, some commentators suggest it was secretly relished by Caracallus because it lent him a patina of low savagery - perhaps an ancient version of "street cred."
(Thanks to Professor James Fraser, University of Edinburgh, for his clarifications.)
President of the United States (POTUS)
Presidential administrations consciously and unconsciously present themselves with an air of imperial Rome. And the parallels appear to go both ways. In chapters four and twenty-two, a good portion of Caracallus’ address to the troops is taken verbatim from similar addresses made by George W. Bush to the American military.
The Story of Sextus Condianus
Sextus Condianus was a real person, if we can believe Cassius Dio in his History of Rome. The story that the innkeeper relates to Marcus in Chapter Two about how Sextus escaped execution largely follows Dio’s own retelling.
Dio writes,
Sextus Condianus, the son of Maximus, who surpassed all others by reason both of his native ability and his training, when he heard that sentence of death had been pronounced against him, too, drank the blood of a hare (he was living in Syria at the time), after which he mounted a horse and purposely fell from it; then, as he vomited the blood, which was supposed to be his own, he was taken up, apparently on the point of death, and was carried to his room. He himself now disappeared, while a ram's body was placed in a coffin in his stead and burned. After this, constantly changing his appearance and clothing, he wandered about here and there. And when this story got out (for it is impossible that such matters should remain hidden very long), diligent search was made for him high and low.
Loeb Classical Library, 9 volumes, Greek texts and facing English translation: Harvard University Press, 1914 thru 1927. Translation by Earnest Cary.
Mithraism
At the time of The Last Stoic, Mithraism was Christianity’s chief rival. Like Christianity, it had its origins in the East. Though Mithraism is several thousand years older, the two religions share a similar mythology: Mithras was born on Dec. 25th, is identified with both the lion and the lamb, a divine light led to him gift-bearing shepherds, he worked miracles, etc. The cult was enormously popular with the soldiers, who took its rituals and customs all around the nations of the empire. Both Commodus and Caracallus were initiates. There were two major threats to its longevity, however; secrecy and exclusivity – only males could participate. When Constantine converted and made Christianity the state religion in the fourth century, Mithraism was suppressed and gradually withered into obscurity.
Barbarian Invasions of Rome
There is no evidence that the barbarian attack on the Emporium in Rome that occurs at the end of Chapter Sixteen actually took place. Neither am I aware of any evidence to the contrary. Invasions of Rome by the Vandals and Goths began to happen with regularity in the fifth century.
The Meditations
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, philosopher-emperor, the last of Gibbon’s “five good emperors,” wrote this volume near the end of his life while he was encamped on the banks of the Danube, in between campaigns against the tide of Quadi, Marcomanni, and Sarmati surging across the Germanic border. Maxwell Staniforth, in the introduction to his 1964 translation writes as follows: “there, among the misty swamps and reedy islands of that melancholy region, [Aurelius] consoled the hours of loneliness and exile by penning the volume of his Meditations.” Galen, the emperor’s physician, was perhaps his only companion as an infectious disease took hold and ended his life in 180 C.E..
It is believed that the emperor’s journal, entitled “To Myself,” was never meant for publication and wasn’t discovered by scholars until the fourth century. As distant heirs, we are fortunate that the parchment managed to survive the empire’s disintegration and the heedlessness of time. It is a conceit of The Last Stoic that an extant copy found its way from Galen’s steady hand to Commodus, to Narcissus, Commodus’ assassin, to the assassin’s kin, and then was sold, perhaps at a market or a bookseller, to Vincentius, Marcus’ grandfather, and finally to Marcus himself.
Please visit the website (http://www.laststoic.morganwade.ca) for more information on the history and background of the novel.
* * *
[1] Oh Thou, from whom the breath of life comes, who fills all realms of sound, light and vibration.
May Your light be experienced in my utmost holiest.
Your Heavenly Domain approaches.
Let Your will come true - in the universe just as on earth.
Give us wisdom for our daily need,
detach the fetters of faults that bind us, like we let go the guilt of others.
Let us not be lost in superficial things,
but let us be freed from that what keeps us off from our true purpose.
From You comes the all-working will, the lively strength to act, the song that beautifies all and renews itself from age to age.
Sealed in trust, faith and truth.