Julia signalled for Anthia, the maid attending her, to bring a drink. At least Julia was not one of those Roman women of the old Res Publica whose husbands only kissed them to smell if there was wine on their breath. And she was not one of those Greek women still to be found in some cities whose menfolk made them wear the veil in public and locked them in their rooms at night.
Anthia brought the drink, mixing the water and wine as the domina liked it. Julia thanked her and sent her away. Sipping the cool liquid, she reflected that it was still a man’s world. She would have to get her tutor to approve her purchases. Luckily, it was a formality. He was one of her many cousins, far away in Gaul and far more concerned with his fish ponds than anything else. She was lucky too in her husband. Ballista had never had much interest in their domestic arrangements. As soon as they were married, he had handed the household keys and the cura of their home to her.
Julia smiled to find herself playing with the iron ring on the third finger of her left hand. When Ballista had given it to her at their betrothal party, she had not loved him. Far from it. Her mother, may the earth lie lightly on her, had been opposed to the match, but her father had talked her round. Julia had dutifully done what her father wished. Although her family was still able to prove the senatorial property qualification, many of their ancestral estates had been confiscated more than half a century before by Septimius Severus, as a result of the family’s unwise support for his rival Albinus. Their influence had not recovered. Marcus Clodius Ballista may have been born a barbarian but, nine years ago, he had held equestrian status in Rome, and – her father’s winning argument – he had been a close amicus of the then reigning emperor Gallus.
If, as Epicurus taught, the ultimate aim of human life was freedom from disturbance, Julia wondered why people got married. Ataraxia and marriage did not seem obvious companions. It was not as if Ballista had many more faults than most husbands. To the usual insensitivity, stubbornness, drunkenness and outbursts of violent temper, he added only an ineradicable barbarian naivety. No, it was none of these that unsettled her freedom from disturbance. Since she had come to love him, it was his absences on campaign. One day, he would not return. Julia thought of their sons. Their beautiful, innocent sons. She would never, like the Spartan women of old, tell them to return with their shield or on it.
As Julia picked up her writing block, her new steward appeared. Before he could announce them, three shabby-looking men followed him out into the shade on the far side of the atrium. Julia had time for just a flash of annoyance before she recognized them. Dropping the writing things, she ran around the pool. Dignitas forgotten, she threw her arms around the neck of the ugly old man at the front.
‘Calgacus.’ She kissed him on both cheeks.
‘Steady, Domina. The servants will talk,’ said Maximus. She kissed him too, then turned and embraced Demetrius.
‘How did you get here? We had heard nothing.’
Their smiles faded. The three men looked embarrassed. ‘We travelled by night, avoiding people. A … a friend of Demetrius hid us for a time in Hierapolis. Before that, Castricius got us out of a problem in Zeugma.’ Calgacus stopped. He fiddled with the sling on his arm.
‘It was as if the underworld had swallowed you.’ Julia clapped her hands. ‘Now you are back – the gods be praised. Let me look at you. Calgacus, you are injured.’
‘It is nothing.’ The elderly Caledonian waved his good hand indecisively. ‘Domina, your husband …’ His voice trailed away.
Maximus also tried to speak and failed.
‘Domina’ – Demetrius took a deep breath and let the words out in a rush – ‘your husband is a prisoner of the Sassanids. He ordered us to leave him. There was nothing we could do. I am sorry.’
Julia tipped her head back and laughed. The three men exchanged looks. Women were fragile, their grip on reality weak. Had the news unhinged her?
Wiping her eyes, she shook her head. ‘The news has outrun you.’ She raised herself on tiptoe and kissed Demetrius on the forehead. ‘He is free, back with the Roman field army in Samosata. He has been appointed Prefect of Cavalry.’ She laughed again. ‘Not only is my husband free, Ballista is now officially a Vir Perfectissimus.’
PART TWO
Ubique Pax
(The West, Cisalpine Gaul, south of the city of Mediolanum, Summer AD260)
‘O Zeus, what pitiable suffering, what bloody trial approaches that drives you onward, man of sorrows?’
Euripides, Orestes, 332–3
The emperor Gallienus reined in his horse. Its trappings gleamed purple and gold. Well-schooled, it stood quietly, waiting for the ritual to start again.
This time, unexpectedly, a soldier called out from the ranks of the closest unit. ‘A coin for a shave, Dominus.’
Gallienus smiled and held his hand out to his a Memoria. Achilleus placed a coin in the emperor’s palm. Gallienus flicked it through the air. ‘Good luck.’
‘May the gods grant you victory, Dominus.’
Another soldier called out. ‘Me too, Imperator.’
Gallienus slowly studied the man. ‘After due consideration, commilitio, and with the best will in the world, a face like yours is better hidden by a beard.’ The soldier himself joined in the laughter as he caught the coin that was thrown in any case.
Gallienus unlaced his helmet and hung it on one of the rear horns of his saddle. He ran his hand through his sweat-dampened, dyed-blond hair. It was hot on the north Italian plain in the summer.
There could never be complete silence in any unit of the Roman army. There was always the clink of metal on metal, the creak of leather, the occasional cough. When it was as quiet as it was going to get, Gallienus raised himself by the front horns of the saddle and began to make his pre-battle speech yet again.
‘We have waited a long time and marched a long way for this day. Finally, we have these barbarians where we want them – on an open field, cut off from the mountains and any hope of safety. There are a lot of them.’ Not deigning to look, Gallienus languidly gestured over his shoulder to the south. ‘It will do them no good. They will merely get in each other’s way. They have no disciplina.’
The soldiers banged their spears on their shields.
‘These Germans call themselves the Alamanni. They think themselves All Man. We know better. They are all cinaedi. These hairy bum-boys reached Rome. The eternal city is unwalled. They ran from a rabble of plebs and slaves led by a few delicate old senators.’
Gallienus waited for the laughter to subside. ‘The quickest and bravest of them have already crossed the Alps. And you all know what happened to them on the other side. The acting governor of Raetia, with just a handful of regular troops and some local peasants, cut them to pieces.’
‘We know it. We know it,’ chanted the soldiers in their rough northern accents.
Gallienus raised his voice. ‘Today we will free Italy from the barbarians. Today we will free our fellow citizens whom they have cruelly enslaved. Today we will take back the Germans’ booty and share it among ourselves. By tonight there will not be a poor man in our army!’
As one, the soldiers roared their approval.
‘Are you ready for war?’
‘Ready!’
As the third repetition of the ritual response was still ringing out, Gallienus looked at Achilleus and his standard bearer. He winked at the two men and nodded forwards. Then, suddenly grabbing his helmet, he kicked his heels into the flanks of his horse. It leapt ahead, closely pursued by those of the other two.
Behind the emperor, his senatorial entourage was caught unawares. They milled in confusion, their horses bumping into each other as they hastened to follow. The soldiers loved it. As he sped away, Gallienus heard them mocking their social superiors before the unit battle cry boomed forth: ‘Io Cantab! Io Cantab!’
Gallienus turned into a gap between two of the units and galloped north towards where the reserve of Horse Guards and the rest of his entourage waited.
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br /> An emperor never travels alone. As they drew near, the emperor indicated his permission for his a Memoria Achilleus to draw off to one side, where the other heads of his imperial bureaucracy waited. He smiled at their incongruously civilian aspect. There was Quirinius, the a Rationibus, who oversaw his treasury; Palfurius Sura, the ab Epistulis, who handled his correspondence; and Hermianus, his ab Admissionibus. They were all powerful, important men. The imperium could not function without them. But far away from their desks in the imperial chancery, they looked lost.
Holding their horses’ heads under the Horse Guards’ flag – a red Pegasus on a white banner – the military high command were very different. Three stood out in front: Volusianus, the Italian former trooper, now Praetorian Prefect; Heraclian, once a Danubian peasant, now the commander of the Equites Singulares; and Aureolus, the one-time Getan shepherd promoted to Prefect of Cavalry. Behind them were the other protectores – part bodyguards, part staff officers: three more Danubians – Tacitus, Claudius and Aurelian; two more Italians of plebeian origin – Celer Venerianus and Domitianus; and finally, the Egyptian brothers Theodotus and Camsisoleus, and Memor the African. At the sight of these tough, loyal men, Gallienus’s heart lifted.
The emperor dismounted and called for his battle charger. As it was led forward, the senators came up all in a bunch. They radiated hurt dignity. These were the men of Gallienus’s father. The emperor Valerian trusted them. He had grown up with several among them; he was one of them. Men like old Felix, who had been consul no less than twenty-three years earlier. He was in his late sixties, but Valerian had trusted him with the defence of Byzantium from the Goths just three years ago. Then there was the yet more elderly and more polyonomous Gaius Julius Aquilius Aspasius Paternus, who had governed Africa in the year of Felix’s consulship and had himself held that office at some even more remote date.
For a moment, Gallienus thought he should not have wounded their dignitas to get an easy laugh from the soldiers. To be fair, the Goths had not taken Byzantium, and no harm had come to Africa. But the senators’ race was run. In the golden age, when the imperium was conquering all it surveyed – even in the silver age, when it was easily holding its own – its armies could be commanded by elderly landed amateurs, more at home designing an exotic fish-pond than sweating on the march. But this was a new age. A harsh age of iron and rust. It called for a hard, new sort of man. It called for Gallienus’s recently formed protectores.
Even in an age of iron and rust, the previous year had been a bad one. Late in the campaigning season, when the leaves in the north had already turned, the Alamanni had burst across the border between the headwaters of the Rhine and the Danube. The governor of Raetia had been cut down in battle, his army routed. The Alamanni had swarmed on and crossed the Alps. Unarmed Italy had been at their mercy. Gallienus had cut short his campaign in the far north near the ocean and desperately given chase, just getting over the mountains before the snow shut the passes. As soon as he and his field army had departed, another confederation of Germans, the Franks, had crossed the Rhine. There had not been enough Roman troops to oppose them, or even to chase them.
Thank Hercules, thought Gallienus, that his second son, the Caesar Saloninus, had been safe with Silvanus the Dux of the Rhine frontier behind the strong walls of Colonia Agrippinensis. Silvanus was a good man. He would see no harm came to the imperial prince. Gallienus pushed away the thought of his eldest son, the beautiful and dead Valerian the Younger. It had been just two years since the boy had died on the Danube. Foul rumours had sought to implicate Ingenuus the governor of Pannonia. But it could not be. Ingenuus was a sound man, loyal through and through to the imperial house. The gods had willed the darling boy die. It just had to be accepted. Take what comfort you could from philosophy, it just had to be accepted.
Gallienus had not caught up with the Alamanni last autumn. They had wintered in Italy, the Franks in Gaul. The barbarians had scoured the land around their quarters. It had been a cruel winter: iron and rust.
As the gods would have it, this year had started better for the Romans. First, in the spring, news had come to Gallienus at Aquileia that yet another northern barbarian invasion had been thwarted. Thousands of Sarmatian horsemen had crossed the Danube into Pannonia but had been resoundingly defeated by Ingenuus. Then had come messengers telling of the repulse from Rome of the Alamanni. In truth, most of the credit was due to Gallienus’s brother Licinius. But, for once, some of the senators had played their part. Men such as the Prefect of the City Saecularis and the Father of the Senate Arellius Fuscus. With a wince that almost hurt him physically, Gallienus recalled reading how, in order to keep morale high, his orders to send his youngest son Marinianus to safety in Sicily had been ignored. The infant prince had been paraded in front of the makeshift army. It was fortunate for Licinius that this news had come in a laurel-adorned letter of victory.
Events had continued to unfold well for the Romans. The Iuthungi and the Semnones, two of the tribes that made up the confederation of the Alamanni, had left the main body and set off early for home. As Gallienus had told the troops, the new acting governor of Raetia had massacred them on the far side of the Alps. Simplicinius Genialis had done well in Raetia. Now it remained for Gallienus to finish the rest of the Alamanni here on the plain before the walls of Mediolanum.
‘The barbarians are doing something else.’ The old senator Felix sounded personally offended.
Gallienus looked at the enemy. The high-priest of each of the three Alamannic tribes on the field – the Hermunduri, Mattiaci and Bucinobantes – had finished the rites to win the favour of Woden and Thor. The magnificent horses and the prisoners who had been selected lay in their blood, decapitated. As each sinistus melded back into the host, he was replaced by a greater number of large figures in wolfskins. Individually, slowly at first, the fur-clad men began to dance. Somewhere among them would be the leader of the expedition, the Alamannic war-leader the Romans called Crocus. Hroc – or Wolfhroc, as his own people knew him, would be dancing and howling, offering his sword to Woden, drawing down the savage, slathering power of the Allfather’s beast into his body.
To most Roman eyes, the foreign rites were incomprehensible barbarity; primitive, unchanging, irrational. Apart from those in the ranks with Germanic ancestry, only a few could interpret them. The emperor was one of these few. Gallienus knew he would have understood no more than the majority had it not been for the years in his youth that he was detained at the imperial court as a guarantee of the loyalty of his governor father. There he had been educated with a shy young barbarian hostage from the north. Ballista had opened his eyes to the peoples beyond the frontiers.
Gallienus did not condemn the bloodthirsty rites of the Alamanni. Different gods demanded different things. Only a fool failed to realize that a battlefield was a god-haunted place. How could it be otherwise? Imagine the tedium of immortality. How many years into eternity before one had drunk every wine, sampled every exotic food? Or was one shackled to an unchanging diet of ambrosia, nectar and the smoke of sacrifices? And sex? How many beautiful girls or boys before satiety set in, followed by perverse experimentation then disgust? Think of the boredom of rereading the same books again and again. Imagine the envy of the unattainable emotions of mortals – the sweaty thrill of the unknown, the gripping fear, the true courage in the face of death, the pain of loss. Nowhere were these more sharp than on the field of battle. No wonder the gods came close.
Gallienus could feel his patron god Hercules close by – a crackle in the air, the tightness in his skin, the god-given clarity in his mind. In his battle calm, he surveyed the scene.
The Alamanni were about five hundred paces away. Their infantry was massed in the centre, a solid block of maybe thirty thousand men straddling the Ticinum road. The cavalry, probably in the region of ten thousand horses, were more or less equally divided between each flank.
Gallienus had made his dispositions accordingly. He had about the same number of
cavalry. He had stationed four thousand on either wing and kept two thousand back as a reserve. His infantry in the centre were badly outnumbered: just fifteen thousand. But he had arranged a couple of things in their favour. And, above all, he had a plan.
Across the plain, the wolf-dancers had worked themselves into a frenzy. Their howls were being drowned by the start of the massed singing. The various tribes of the Alamanni sang the deeds of their forefathers. The battle would start soon.
Gallienus got into the saddle and turned to his staff. ‘Comites, it is time to take your posts.’
The emperor had exercised tact. Old Felix and Volusianus were to command the infantry; young Acilius Glabrio and Theodotus to take the cavalry on the left. There was to be one of the senatorial nobility and one protector at each division but, for the horsemen of the vital right wing, two protectores: Claudius and Aurelian. Gallienus would lead the reserve of Horse Guards himself.
The comites mounted up and saluted. ‘We will do what is ordered, and at every command we will be ready.’
Felix spoke up, his aged voice querulous. ‘Your plan – it is not Roman. It goes against our traditions and our nature. It is better suited to the guile of barbarians – Moors or Parthians.’
To hide his irritation, Gallienus settled his helmet on his head, laced it tight. ‘Then it is good we have four alae of Moors among our cavalry and one of Parthians.’ He paused, then spoke heavily. ‘The first tradition of the Romans under arms is obedience to orders.’
Wordlessly, Felix saluted again, and turned his horse’s head. The commanders of the divisions rode away.
Across the plain, the standards of the Alamanni were raised. As the barbarian advance began, the discordant songs died. They were replaced by the barritus. Low at first, like distant thunder, the German war chant rose from forty thousand throats. The warriors held their shields over their mouths to increase the reverberation. The barritus crescendoed to a harsh climax. It faded away then returned – harder, yet more menacing. Again and again, it rolled across the plain, intermittent, petrifying. Fear enters by the ears.
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