Rome Burning

by Sophia McDougall

  ‘Please don’t. It’s only another couple of hours,’ said Marcus, who had no sense at all of what he’d been watching all this time. It might have been a blank screen.

  ‘I cannot face another hour of watching this. And everyone has already had their fill of watching us. It will be all right, say I don’t feel well. It’s quite true.’

  Marcus let her go. Makaria leant towards him quizzically as Noriko slipped past, but then the lights rose again.

  Dama looked up once at the band of screens as he reached the Colosseum. Some kind of high, dome-like steel frame had been erected in the arena and two teams of fighters were dancing and swinging their way, acrobat-like, over and through it. A glimpse of the Imperial box showed him Noriko was gone and his body clenched in a spasm of panic that his chance was passing. Perhaps five minutes had elapsed since Una first saw him. He was racing against her message to the vigiles, in another moment the signal would come to evacuate the Imperial box, clear the Colosseum.

  What was he thinking? He didn’t wish the Princess any harm.

  The Games were free, there were many still trying to push their way in. Bags like the one Dama carried should be checked, but the guards were stretched, trying to keep the crowding within the Colosseum from growing dangerous. Dama took a deep breath and made for one high arch manned by a harassed pair of guards, trying to fend away a drunken and argumentative scrum of people. Dama moved quietly, through the group, and knew a moment would come when the nearer guard, remonstrating with a noisy ringleader of a small belligerent gang within the larger mob, would be too preoccupied to stop a smaller, less obtrusive man from slipping past.

  And the moment came. The guard even saw that he was inside, turning in exasperation as if to try and catch him back. Dama gave him a cocky, disarming smile that seemed to cost him a great sum of strength from the very core of his bones, and confidently plunged deeper into the crowd.

  The lower levels were for the aristocracy and the rich, and were more firmly cordoned off and more closely guarded than the outer arches. The invading surplus audience surged up the steps towards the upper terraces, gathered in the arches that led down into the aisles. Dama ran in quickly at one of these, looking over the spectators’ shoulders, fixing the position of the Imperial box in his mind.

  Then he ran on upwards. No one was watching him; they were watching the Games. The Colosseum boomed with a great cry of excitement that swilled and spiralled round the huge bowl of space within its walls. Dama dragged open a door and fled out onto the maintenance level of the retractable roof, the upper rim of the Colosseum. And suddenly he was alone again, out in the open air.

  He threw back his hood. The wet wind pulled at his hair. Rome seemed to press near to him through the rain. The Palace, the temple of Saturn, the Circus Maximus were so close he felt he might have touched them.

  Dama climbed out onto the panels of wet glass. It was faintly warm from the lights below, and his hands looked black against it. He pulled himself along by a great hinged steel strut that reached out over the arena, a little spider on a huge web. Beneath him, though another great rumble of sound quivered the glass on which he moved, the illuminated ranks of surging people seemed as distant as a drowned city, under a frozen sea. At last, right above the Imperial box, he felt calm, clean again, acting methodically, no longer so frantic and pursued, not thinking of Una. He packed the putty against the strut, and connected the detonator.

  *

  Una lifted her head. Her body was a sick, trembling weight that had nothing to do with her, would not obey her. Lights scattered and wobbled across her murky sight. She must move. She managed to steer one drifting hand to the back of her skull, felt the blood there, located the centre of the pain. A little focus came back. She pulled herself up against the wet wall, and began again, staggering, to run.

  Drusus was bored to death. The Games were bland and insipid, as he had known was inevitable given his uncle’s delicate state of health and his cousin’s prejudices. Faustus at least seemed to be enjoying himself. Drusus watched with his face set into a look of tolerant mildness, and knew that Marcus, sitting as far from him as possible within the box, was using the same faintly smiling Novian mask to hide his own lack of enjoyment, but Drusus avoided looking at him.

  Instead, because Noriko had reminded him of Tulliola, he began to think discontentedly about his slave girl, Amaryllis. Trapped and wretched in Canaria, he needed her too often, and his hopelessness and fury increased every time he finished with her. He’d left her rather bruised and torn, the last time. Now, he found himself weighing up the old idea that he should purge himself of her, let her go. And today he went so far as to picture himself doing it, imagining signing the papers, smiling down at her as he put a present of money into her hands. He would watch her as she left his house, a freedwoman, with a name to show for it: Noviana.

  Drusus, his eyes still fixed on the arena, jerked back in his chair as if in shocked reaction to a gladiator’s fall. The imagined name had struck through him like a piece of shrapnel from a bomb.

  He had long given up any faith in the Sibyl’s prophecy. If any flicker of belief ever came back to him it was to think bitterly that she must simply have been telling them that he might have a chance to be Emperor if Marcus did not ruin it – and Marcus had.

  But now, in his mind, he repeated her words as exactly as he could.

  She had promised him the Empire, and she had warned him of someone who could bring him down. The Novian stem. Of course, he had thought of a family tree, the newest branch being the youngest member of his family, Marcus. But if she had only meant the Novian name?

  He had never heard Una or Sulien called by any longer, more Roman name, they had never been slaves of his family. But they were free, and it was a Novian who had freed them. Beyond doubt they must carry a form of his name. Noviana, Novianus.

  In that stark, frightened shock of understanding, he felt as if he too were an oracle, as if a thread of fate were trying to pull itself into human sight, through him. When Salvius had taken him out of prison he had gone to his uncle with a warning he’d pretended came from the Sibyl, about Una, a woman like a sibyl or a witch, growing to terrible power, threatening the dynasty. It seemed to him now that he had been very close to telling the truth, that there was a second prophecy, about Una and Sulien, hidden within the first, and he had almost uncovered it then. No Novian but one: Noviana Una – not a true Novian, Una. It had been a play on her name. But it was not only her. No Novian but another. Drusus had missed out her brother when he’d told Faustus what he’d thought was a lie.

  What would the Sibyl have said to them, if they’d ever been to Delphi? Drusus felt now that he knew. She would have told them about him, and that they were made to resist and ruin him. Their very natures, their witch-like powers were the sign of it.

  For a second he forgot how powerless he was, that his every move was watched. Bright, vengeful certainty exhilarated him, burnt itself instantly into a passionate resolve that no obstacle would stop him, and nothing could protect them from him now.

  Then he remembered. They had already won, he thought, lapsing back into the familiar bitterness. He was not Emperor. This had come too late to make any difference.

  But then a Praetorian came rushing from the passageway, shouting a warning, and the guards around the Novians rose, reached to bundle them to safety. Words floated strangely in Drusus’ mind: ‘There’s glass on the ground …’

  Fire punched open the roof of the Colosseum, and steel and glass rained in.

  The blast flung Dama over, throwing him across the plates and struts of the roof. Something ripped through his shoulder, slashed at his face. A spray of small glass blades broke over him, scattering him with cuts. The noise seemed to plough up the sky.

  Then it died. Dama lay still for a moment on the darkened panels. Ahead of him the crater opened and spread. A column of screaming rose through it like hot smoke.

  He was not too badly hurt to move. If he
had sent someone else to do this, Dama would have told him to get off the roof now, to go and try and lose himself in the panicked crowd. They would be coming for him now, too late – the vigiles or the Praetorians. But this did not seem very pressing to Dama. He felt as if he had infinite time. And so he pulled himself closer to the gulf, as the cracks and splits stretched to meet him.

  He looked down into the broken arena. He was too high up to tell what had happened to the people in the Imperial box, but he did not even think of looking. He stared sick, bewildered, at the mass of horrified people that heaved and writhed within the walls to escape. The turmoil was too vast to comprehend. Second broke from second, so that each moment of his life that had brought him here, each sight before him now, seemed utterly separate and unfathomable. He crouched on the creaking glass, and if nothing else, he understood that he would never know what it was he had done.

  He heard the vigiles come, rushing up onto the wounded rim. As he understood the sound it did not seem worth turning his head to look.

  A slab of glass and metal broke away underneath him. A black thrill of recognition caught him as it dropped, twisted, as he was kicked into space. But there had been something he meant to whisper, in his mind, before his life was struck away, and there was no time, it was not as he had thought it would be—

  END

  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

  933 AUC TO THE PRESENT (180 AD – 2004 AD)

  ‘To heal, as far as it was possible, the wounds inflicted by the hand of tyranny, was the pleasing, but melancholy task of Pertinax’

  Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

  AD AUC

  180 933 Death of Marucs Aurelius. His son Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus succeeds as Emperor.

  192 945 Commodus’ bloody and extravagant reign leaves Rome impoverished and riddled with corruption. He is murdered by a group of conspirators including his chamberlain, concubine and Laetus, the head of the Praetorian Guard (the urban army whose formal function was to protect the Emperor). The conspirators claim that Commodus died of apoplexy, and install as Emperor 66 -year-old Publius Helvius Pertinax, the son of a freedman who had risen through merit to become a General, a Senator and minister of justice.

  HELVIAN IMPERIAL DYNASTY

  192 –204 945 – 957 Early in Pertinax’s reign, Laetus, disgruntled by Pertinax’s independence, encourages a plot by the Praetorian Guard to assassinate him. The plot is discovered,* and Laetus banished.

  Pertinax disbands almost all of the Praetorian Guard, hand-picking the remainder for loyalty. At the same time he increases the powers and numbers of the Vigiles to create a counterweight police force, reasoning that any future conspiracy against the Emperor in one body will be detected and exposed by the other.

  Pertinax remits Commodus’ oppressive taxes. He halves the expenses of the Imperial household, grants tax-breaks to farmers and lifts restrictions on commerce.

  He taxes the urban aristocracy more heavily, but the cities benefit from the wealth generated by the farms, and restores to the Senate some of the authority it had lost.

  204 957 Death of Pertinax. After the disastrous succession of Commodus, Pertinax was reluctant to name his young son Publius Helvius Pertinax II, ‘Venedicus ’, as Caesar and heir to the Empire until just before his death. The Senate approves the succession.

  204 –220 957 –973 Pertinax II continues his father’s economic reforms, gradually rebuilding the Empire’s finances.

  When the economy permits it he restructures the army, detaching the legions from the frontier garrisons to create a mobile force. He ties pay to the rate of inflation, stabilising the income of the soldiers and rendering them less susceptible to bribery, whilst attracting a higher standard of recruit.

  225 978 Ardashir, the Persian king, kills the last king of Parthia and creates the Sassanian Persian Empire, with Zoroastrianism as its state religion.

  238 991 Renewed attacks from Germanic tribes along the Rhine and Danube. The revitalised army resists and pushes the barbarians back. To deal more fully with the threat, and despite protests from Roman Britons, Pertinax II pulls the legions out of Britain and leads a massive force into Germany and Sarmatia.

  230 – 240 983 – 993 Ardashir invades India, and Roman territory in Syria. In 240 his son Shapur succeeds to the Persian throne.

  238 – 242 973 – 978 Pertinax II completes the conquest of Germany and Venedia, pushing up into Fennia and Gothia.

  242 – 256 978 – 992 Skirmishes with Persia over Armenia. Roman recapture of Syria.

  256 992 Death of Pertinax II, accession of Lucius Helvius Pertinax Sarmaticus Rome’s victories over the Eastern European tribes continue into Sarmatia and Alania.

  260 – 265 996 – 1009 Still feeling the elation of their German victory, Roman troops, augmented by huge numbers of German barbarians and with support from Palmyra, attack and conquer Shapur’s Persian Empire.

  265 – 291 1009 – 1044 Occasional Persian uprisings and fluctuating borders in Roman Persia, but Rome’s grip remains generally firm.

  291 – 313 1044 – 1066 Under Sarmaticus’ adopted son Gaius Flavius Sulpicianus Rome loses Persia and Mesopotamia.

  313 – 345 1066 – 1098 Marcus Flavius Sulpicianus Cruentus reconquers Persia and Mesopotamia. Slaughter and enslavement of thousands of Persians.

  Persecution of Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews throughout Empire.

  Invasion and conquest of Arabia. Cruentus exports the Roman religion, or a Roman interpretation of local deities, to the enlarged Eastern Empire.

  347 – 447 1100 – 1200 From here on it will be convenient to summarise the major gains, losses and technological advances of each century.

  SECOND FLAVIAN DYNASTY 1066 – 1234 AUC

  Reconquest of Britain, with Hibernia and Caledonia. There has been a revival of Celtic culture, but a sustained British nostalgia for Roman rule makes victory fairly easy. Sporadic incursions by Huns, but they are either repelled or absorbed by Rome, resulting in gradual, unsystematic Roman expansion into Scythia.

  447 – 547 1200 – 1300 ACILIAN DYNASTY 1234 – 1618 AUC

  Continued conquests of territory in Scythia.

  Expansion through Persian territory into India.

  Lengthy wars to secure it.

  Romanisation of Indian Gods.

  547 – 647 1300 – 1400 Quelling more uprisings and rebellions in India and resulting instability in the region keep the military fully occupied – no expansion.

  647 – 747 1400 – 1500 Attempted expansion into Sina (China) unsuccessful, and there are continuing problems in Syria, Persia and India.

  747 – 847 1500 – 1600 Border disputes with Sina. India and Persia subside into uneasy peace, but tensions will flare up at any sign of weakness in the Empire for centuries to come.

  By this time the once-significant Christian sect has more or less died out of existence.

  Active persecution of Jews and Zoroastrians has ceased, although they are still denied full citizenship.

  847 – 947 1600 – 1700 CORDIAN DYNASTY 1618 – 1836 AUC

  Libya and other Roman states in North Africa attempt to devolve peacefully from the Empire, but Africa is essential to feeding the Roman world. Heightened military presence there.

  947 – 1047 1700 – 1800 Song Dynasty unifies and stabilises Sina. Rome is initially concerned about Sina’s growing power, but the Emperor feels that Rome is now unassailable, re-attempted conquest of Sina would be costly and futile, and that therefore there is no need to jeopardise profitable trade with Sina. Relations remain cordial – especially since Sina supports Roman rule in India.

  1047 – 1147 1800 – 1900 BLANDIAN DYNASTY 1836 – 2176 AUC

  The Romans defend the Song against the Jurchen uprising.

  Rome introduces various Sinoan innovations, such as paper money, banking, Romanised versions of certain fashions in clothing – and gunpowder.

  1147 – 1247 1900 – 2000 Quicker to see the military applic
ation of the new discovery than its Sinoan inventors, Rome sides with Sina against the Mongols, saving the Song Dynasty.

  First Roman contact with Nionia (Japan), and Rome welcomes the new source of coveted oriental goods, but has little political interest as yet in the chain of islands, which is riven with internal divisions and wars.

  1247 – 1347 2000 – 2100 Armed with cannons, Rome invades Ethiopia in Africa. Sina watches this new phase of expansion with concern. The Nionian Emperor Go-Diago visits Rome, learns about Roman exploration and conquest, and brings the secret of gunpowder back to Nionia.

  1347 – 1447 2100 – 2200 Go-Diago leads the Kemmu Restoration, using firearms against the powerful Hojo regency. The new firepower helps him to see off opposition from his erstwhile ally, Ashikaga Takauji. He restores the powers of the Emperor and unites Nionia.

  Continued exploration/conquest of interior Africa runs into difficulty when Roman African states unexpectedly turn against Rome. Roman explorers return from an attempt to circumnavigate the globe with news of a brief landing on a huge landmass in the West. They call it Terra Nova, but this is no time for a military adventure there.

  Plague in Europe and in parts of Sina. The Emperor Blandius Postumus dies suddenly and there is a struggle for power unprecedented in over a thousand years.

  1447 – 1547 2200 – 2300 The first electrostatic machine. After a succession of short-lived Emperors, the Senate votes Sextus Vincius Sacerdos into power.

  VINCIAN DYNASTY 2204 – 2509 AUC

  Sacerdos is still trying to secure his position when Nionia invades Corea and attacks Sinoan territory. Sina appeals to Rome for help, but the call comes at exactly the wrong time. Rome is struggling to survive in the face of its internal rifts, African entanglements, renewed Indo-Persian problems and the decimating effects of plague. The Empire is in no position to assist.