by Ian Ross
The chorus of shouts was growing, building into a chant, but Castus could not make out what the men were saying. The crowd seethed and surged.
‘Brothers,’ the eunuch went on, stirring the air with his palms, ‘although this is a solemn day, it is also a joyous day, for now that our emperor stands beside the thrones of the gods, we can revere him as we revere the gods!’
With a shock, Castus made out what the crowd were chanting.
‘Constantine! Constantine! Constantine!’
‘…for his sublime virtues, his glorious victories against our savage enemies,’ the eunuch went on, ‘his tireless service to the state, and his piety toward the gods…’
‘Constantine! Constantine! Constantine!’ The chant was a pulse in the air, something almost physical. Castus saw scuffles breaking out, men knocked down and pummelled, other men raising their fists to the sky. He looked up at Valens, and saw his friend’s face glowing with wild fervour.
‘Constantine Augustus!’ Valens cried, and the men nearby cheered. Castus remembered seeing him leaving the tent of the notary Nigrinus. How many others had the notary spoken to? How many had he bribed? He touched the golden torque he wore around his neck. For valour, he thought. For loyalty.
Now the chant was joined by a stamp, a regular crashing beat of hobnailed boots on paving stones. From the far side of the courtyard a solid wedge of men was pushing through the crowd.
‘Soldiers! Noble soldiers!’ the eunuch cried, fanning the air with downward motions. ‘This is not right! Remember your oath! The new Augustus must be Flavius Severus – it is imperial protocol! Soldiers: do not besmirch your victories with dishonour!’
Fierce shouts from below, a volley of wooden cups and broken tiles flung up at the eunuch. Even a javelin, rattling off the basilica wall. Who was Flavius Severus? For a moment Castus could not remember. Then it came to him: Severus Caesar, the junior emperor appointed by Diocletian the year before, as deputy and successor to Constantius. But Severus Caesar was far away in Italia, and Constantine was here, surrounded by his father’s loyal troops...
The fat man retreated inside. Now Castus could see that the men pushing their way through the crowd were Germanic warriors of the Alamanni, with their king Hrocus at their head. Many of them carried shields, shoving the crowd aside as they came. Hrocus climbed onto the shoulders of his men, his beard flaming red in the torchlight.
‘Constantine!’ he cried out. ‘Give us Constantine!’
With his back to the pillar and his hand on the hilt of his sword, Castus craned upwards and stared in through the door of the basilica. The wall of Praetorians was moving too now, driving the crowd back with their shields and spearshafts. Castus leaped up onto a pillar base beside Valens. Within the block of Praetorians he could make out the lone figure with a cloak pulled over his head.
Rufinius, Prefect of the Sixth Legion, was up in the arch of the basilica now, yelling at the riotous crowd.
‘Men! Respect the wishes of the emperors! This is mutiny!’
‘No! Get down!’ the crowd cried in response. The tight mass of Alamanni had halted, and now the Praetorians were driving out from the basilica doors with Constantine between them. As the man passed, Castus saw his ruddy face and firm jutting jaw, his cheeks wet with tears. But was he smiling too? Castus blinked, and Constantine had moved on.
Out in the courtyard there was chaos, a milling riot of men pushing forward and back, screams, angry faces raised in the torchlight. Rufinius had given up trying to calm them. Now the Praetorians were leading a white horse from under the portico – where had that come from? – and helping Constantine to mount. The horse, terrified by the noise, champed and shied, rolling its eyes. All around there was struggle and confusion. Castus saw a body of men from the Rhine legions trying to forge their way through the cordon of guardsmen.
‘Are they trying to murder him?’ Diogenes called from behind the pillar. ‘Should we… go and protect him?’
Castus shook his head. He was watching Constantine carefully: he was gesturing to the crowd, trying to wave them back, mopping his face with his free hand as if he were wiping away tears. Was this real, or theatre? Castus could not tell. But the violence in the courtyard was real enough. Soon there would be bloodshed.
‘Constantine, we pray to you!’ the Alamannic king bawled out in his bad Latin. ‘You must be our leader! You must be our Augustus! The army lusts for your rule! The world awaits you!’
And now Constantine was down off the horse, a tumult of bodies all around him. A moment later and he appeared again, raised on the locked and levelled shields of Hrocus’s warriors. Cheers rolled down from the men on the high porticos, and the courtyard echoed with shouts of acclamation. Even the Praetorians were cheering now, raising their palms in salute.
Swaying on the shields, Constantine struggled to stand upright, raising his face to the light. Hrocus, lifted on the shoulders of his men, seized a purple robe from the hands of a Praetorian and cast it around Constantine’s shoulders; one of the Protectores raised a golden circlet on the tip of a spear, and another placed it on Constantine’s head.
‘Augustus!’ the soldiers shouted, banging their weapons and stamping their feet. ‘Invincible Augustus Constantine! The gods preserve you – your rule is our salvation!’
And still the chant went on.
‘CONSTANTINE! CONSTANTINE! CONSTANTINE!’
‘And that,’ Valens said, leaning closer, his eyes alight with joy, ‘is how we make emperors at the edge of the world!’
‘Oh, no,’ Diogenes called from behind the pillar. ‘That is how we make gods.’
But Castus was still staring at the man raised on the shields. Constantine stood proudly now, the purple swathing his shoulders, his hawklike nose and firm chin shining in the torchlight. He raised an open palm, accepting the acclamation of the soldiers, and as he did so he turned and stared straight across the heads of the crowd to where Castus was standing.
Pushing himself away from the pillar, Castus threw up his hand, shouting into the roar of the crowd.
‘Constantine Augustus! Invincible Emperor!’
23
The sun was low and the breeze freshening as they approached the gates of the fortress. Castus could smell autumn in the air. Behind him on the road, the line of soldiers increased their pace with the promise of home.
‘Close up,’ Castus called over his shoulder, smacking his staff into his palm. ‘Military step!’
A muffled grumble, but the men did as he ordered. All of them were tired and filthy from a day mending roads, but they were soldiers and not labourers. Castus heard the regular crunch of boots on gravel. Woodsmoke was rising from the furnaces of the bath-house inside the walls.
Two months had passed since the great imperial entourage had departed Eboracum, bearing their new-made emperor off to Gaul. The fortress had soon fallen back into those same slow regular routines that Castus had found when he had first arrived there, two years before. But he was glad of the routines now, happy to pass his days in simple duty. He was centurion of a frontier legion, even if he still wore the fine gold torque of valour around his neck. How long, he wondered, would he remain so content?
The Blue House had been rebuilt on its old foundations, down by the river. Afrodisia was there, and Castus had already paid her several visits. Perhaps he would go there again this evening, with Valens… He smiled at the thought, and felt a warmth in his limbs. For a moment he pictured himself in ten or fifteen years, retiring with honour from the legion, a fat purse of gold in his fist and a grant of land to farm, married to Afrodisia with a crowd of children already growing up around him. The thought pleased him.
No, he thought. Not me. He remembered Marcellina, the envoy’s daughter; he often thought of her, and wondered what had happened to her. Married now, in some distant city. That was the way of civilians, after all: they wanted homes, families, security. But Castus was not a civilian, neither would he ever be.
He recalled
the funeral ceremony for Constantius, Eboracum’s last taste of imperial glory. The towering pyre built in the centre of the parade ground, three storeys high and taller than a house, the wood painted to look like marble, decked with garlands and hung with laurel wreaths. The linen-wrapped body of the old emperor had been placed at the top, under a canopy made to look like a temple pediment, and all the units of the army had marched around the pyre with reversed weapons.
Constantine had lit the pyre, of course. When the flames had risen to the top, an eagle had flown from the temple canopy, fluttering for a moment in the light and heat of the fire, the showering sparks, before vanishing into the night sky. The spirit of Constantius, so the orators said, released from his mortal flesh. Rain turned to steam in the heat of the burning pyre, and the massed soldiers had cried out their praises to the old emperor and the new.
Arma virumque cano… Castus thought. Arms and the man I sing… That was by Virgil – the greatest poet of Rome, so Diogenes claimed. Castus saw in his mind the word-symbols scratched onto his wax tablet: the writing exercises that the former schoolteacher made him perform during their secret tuition sessions. Just the simple stuff, Castus had told him. After all, even quite stupid people could read and write, so why should he not? He only needed enough skill to read a strength report or a watchword tablet, but the teacher insisted on starting with Virgil. Perhaps by spring, he had suggested, Castus would have mastered enough of reading and writing to get through the whole poem. Castus himself doubted that.
And by the spring, things could be different anyway. Already there were rumours, carried by the traders from Gaul, of new wars on the continent. The Franks had crossed the Rhine on plundering raids, and there was displeasure among the other emperors at Constantine’s assumption of the imperial purple. The soldiers had made Constantine – would Constantine need his soldiers again? The tide of history and great events had rolled over Castus and then receded, but still he knew the fierce joy of battle, the longing for action.
But then he thought of that other woman: Cunomagla. The memory of her stirred his blood. He pictured her riding from the fallen fort with her spear in her hand, crying defiance to the soldiers. Rome had harried the north, but not conquered it, and Constantine had not been the only victor of the campaign. If Cunomagla survived, and he was certain that she had, then she would be the ruler, in her son’s name, of whatever still remained of the nations of the Picts. As he marched in under the huge pitted arches of the gatehouse, Castus grinned to himself, though none of his men could see it. It would be a hard kind of ruling, but a noble one. In his heart he saluted her: a queen among her people, at the furthest edge of the world.
~
War at the Edge of the World is the first book in the Twilight of Empire series.
We hope you enjoyed it!
The next gripping instalment in the series will be released in Summer 2015
For more information, click one of the links below:
Author’s Note
~
Ian Ross
www.twilight-of-empire.com
An invitation from the publisher
Author’s Note
Compared to the glories of the high empire, the days of Caesar and Augustus, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, the later Roman world can seem a dark and mysterious place, lit only by the flames of violence and the passions of competing religions. But the early fourth century was an age of great drama, of towering personalities and warfare spanning the known world, a time of revolution when, in the space of a few short decades, the old certainties of the classical era were swept away as Constantine, and his adopted religion of Christianity, reshaped the empire and gave a new definition to much of the future of Europe.
There is a statue of the emperor in York today, outside the minster. A modern piece, it depicts Constantine seated rather pensively, gazing at a broken sword, but it marks the approximate position of the ancient principia, the headquarters building of the legionary fortress where he was first acclaimed by the army on 25 July AD 306. No source records Constantine being raised on a shield, but the practice was apparently established by the time his half-nephew Julian was similarly acclaimed just over half a century later; it was perhaps originally a Germanic custom, and as at least one Germanic king was present in York that day, I have chosen to imagine that the shield ritual began with Constantine himself.
Modern York is a medieval city, on Roman foundations. In this novel I have preferred the Roman name Eboracum, just as I have used the ancient rather than the modern names for other places. I have not been entirely consistent with this: Rome remains Rome, not Roma, and the Rhine and Danube rivers retain their familiar names. My intention was to use the term that best evokes the ancient past, with the fewest modern associations.
Our literary sources for this period are scarce, sometimes contradictory and often partisan: the churchmen Eusebius and Lactantius, eager to glorify their hero Constantine, together with later historians such as Zosimus, Eutropius and Aurelius Victor. Among the few contemporary writings are the series of panegyrics, speeches given in honour of the emperors themselves, and often in their presence, today known as the Panegyrici Latini. These are works of imperial propaganda, highly rhetorical and elaborate, but they preserve many details of the era otherwise lost to history.
One of these, Panegyric VIII, contains the first recorded mention of the people known as the Picts. Another (Panegyric VI) makes one of the few slight references to the campaign conducted in the north of Britain by Constantius, Constantine’s father, shortly before his death in AD 306. Constantius did not, the orator claims, ‘seek out British trophies, as commonly believed’; for this to need refuting in public, it must have been a rumour widely known. It would not be the first time, after all, and certainly not the last, that a war has been concocted to satisfy the desire for military glory; from that seed this story takes its root.
The Roman army of the early fourth century was in a period of transition. At its core was still the traditional legion of heavy infantry, officially about five to six thousand men strong, divided into ten cohorts, each cohort subdivided into six centuries. But most legions had been split up into several smaller detachments, and those that remained intact were much reduced in strength. The old century, commanded by a centurion and numbering around eighty men, may have shrunk to as little as half that number by the era of Diocletian.
Not only the size of the old legion had changed; the legionaries of the early fourth century also looked quite different from their forefathers. Gone were the familiar segmented iron body armour, short stabbing sword and rectangular shield of the age of Trajan. The tetrarchic soldier wore mail or scale armour, carried an oval shield and a long sword, and wore a long-sleeved tunic, boots and breeches, an appearance perhaps more suggestive of the medieval than the classical world.
Within two or three decades, this ancient military system would be overhauled once more, and a newly structured army rise from its ruins. Much about this process is still unclear, but I have preferred to assign the changes to the reforming Constantine rather than the traditionalist Diocletian.
If the Roman world of this era appears often misty, the lands that lay outside the imperial borders are almost entirely lost in fog. In particular, the north British people known to the Romans as the Picts have long been mysterious, their culture and society, their language, even their existence the subject of much academic and popular debate and controversy. My portrayal of the Picts and their culture in this novel is necessarily speculative, an imaginary hybrid of earlier Roman accounts of the northern Britons and descriptions from the early Middle Ages. I make no claims to veracity; while I have based my fiction on the fragments of fact wherever possible, my intention has been to try and show a society and a people that might plausibly have existed. No historian, I believe, could do more than that.
For a contextualising overview of the period, the relevant chapters of David S. Potter’s The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180–395 (2004) are
both erudite and very readable. Bill Leadbetter’s Galerius and the Will of Diocletian (2009), while often contentious, covers the complex period between the abdication of Diocletian and the rise of Constantine in considerable detail. In Praise of Later Roman Emperors (1994), edited by C. E. V. Nixon and Barbara S. Rodgers, is an invaluable compilation of the full texts and translations of the Panegyrici Latini, while Michael H. Dodgeon and Samuel N. C. Lieu’s The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars, AD 226–363 (1991) contains the surviving documentary texts on the eastern campaign of AD 298 and the battle of Oxsa (often mistakenly referred to as the battle of Satala in modern works).
The later Roman military has received increasing study in recent decades. Pat Southern and Karen Dixon’s The Late Roman Army (1996), and more academic monographs by Martinus J. Nicasie and Hugh Elton, have been joined by A. D. Lee’s comprehensive War in Late Antiquity: A Social History (2007). Ross Cowan’s forthcoming Roman Legionary: AD 284–337, part of the Osprey military history series, will doubtless offer a concise and accessible popular alternative, backed up by the latest research in the field.
Historical works on the Picts are rather more scarce. Nick Aitchison’s The Picts and the Scots at War (2003) gathers a wealth of information from a wide range of sources, while James E. Fraser, in From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to 795 (2009), gives one interpretation of the possible genesis and development of this elusive people.
Assembling the historical background for this story has taken nearly a decade of research, but without certain people this effort would not have borne fruit. My particular thanks go to my agent, Will Francis at Janklow & Nesbit, for his immediate and effective championing of the novel, and to Rosie de Courcy at Head of Zeus for being so enthusiastic about Castus and his adventures. I am also very grateful to David Breckon, who first read the manuscript, for his insightful and encouraging comments, and to the members of the Roman Army Talk online forum, whose collective knowledge has been a guide and an inspiration to me for many years as I picked my way across the dark terrain of the late Roman world.