The Last Hour: Relentless, brutal, brilliant. 24 hours in Ancient Rome

by Harry Sidebottom

  Sempronius prepared to sacrifice. He pulled the folds of his toga over his head. The flute player struck up, and those assembled placed their right hands on their chests.

  Only one aspect of his plans troubled Sempronius. Were all the officers named by Cecropius really part of the conspiracy? The Dalmatian had been careful to refer to those in Rome only by their epithets – the peasant, mouse, and ferret – even though Sempronius was well aware of their identity, had indeed met them all. But Cecropius had bandied openly the names of supposed fellow plotters who were away or with the army. Did they actually have any involvement with the plot?

  Sempronius had instructed Acilius Glabrio to take whatever measures were necessary to secure the allegiance of the army. Acilius Glabrio was not a man given to reflection. He had won the Battle of Circesium by leading a direct charge into the heart of the Persian enemy. Acilius Glabrio would act decisively. Sempronius would not lie to himself. He had signed the death warrant of Heraclian and Aurelian, most likely Tacitus as well. All three of whom might be innocent.

  The attendant handed Sempronius a plate containing scraps of food. Anything that fell to the floor in the dining room should be offered to the lares.

  As Sempronius gave the morsels to the flames on the altar, an awful idea swam up into his thoughts, like a monster rising from the depths. What if there was no plot at all? Last year Postumus had tried to suborn one of the protectores. The officer had remained loyal. The agent of Postumus had been caught. At the hands of the imperial torturers, he had revealed all that he knew. Gallienus had used the information to induce treachery among the high command of Postumus.

  For all that he might choose to dress as a woman, defile his person with acts best left unnamed, Gallienus had sat the throne for more than a decade. He had survived numerous plots, had learned how to negotiate the currents of treachery. What if this conspiracy was nothing of the sort? What if Gallienus had manufactured the entire thing? Could it be designed to bring his domestic enemies into the open, to have them removed before he took the field against the forces of Postumus? The protectores who had approached Sempronius owed everything to Gallienus. The cellars of the Palace – the rack and the claws – made Sempronius shudder. Before it came to that, like most senators, Sempronius wore a ring containing poison. Before he betrayed his friends, before he betrayed himself, he would take his life like a Roman of old.

  Like a Roman of old. Cato, Thrasea Paetus, Seneca; the annals of the senate were replete with men of courage who had taken the only road to freedom open in the face of imperial tyranny.

  Like a Roman of old, Sempronius put aside his fears. Intoning a prayer, he took a saucer of wine, and gave it to the gods of his household. Gallienus was a drunk, a spendthrift. The protectores had enough reasons to want the emperor dead. Keep his nerve, and by nightfall, Sempronius would wear the purple.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Roman Forum

  The Hours of Light

  T

  HE SUN WAS ABOUT TO RISE. The Pythagorean stood stock still in the middle of the street. The crowd gave him a wide berth. Some stopped to watch. Long-bearded, with hair to his shoulders, the Pythagorean began to hum, attuning himself to the coming day. His white linen tunic almost seemed to glow in the gloom, and somehow it might be easy to believe that the otherworldly figure was communing with the gods.

  The first rays of sunlight caught the gilded roof of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus high on the Capitoline.

  The Pythagorean raised his arms in prayer.

  ‘Gods, may justice prevail.’ His voice was strong, and carried well. The Attic Greek in which he spoke indicated education, and a wealthy background.

  ‘May the laws not be broken.’ This was no hedgerow philosopher, no ranting Cynic, railing against the established order. ‘Gods, grant me what I deserve. If you count me among the worthy, send me blessings. If you rank me among the wicked, send the opposite. I shall not blame the gods, if, because of my own demerit, I am judged deserving of evil.’

  The Pythagorean, and those who ringed him, were an island of stillness in the flow of people going down to the Forum.

  ‘The gods, as they are beneficent, if they find anyone unscarred by vice, they crown him, not with gold, but blessings. They give him happiness and a sound mind. But if they find a man branded and foul with sin, they will expose him, and hand him over to the direst of punishments in this world and the next.’

  Several of those who had paused to watch put their fingertips to their lips, and blew a kiss to this man touched with divinity.

  ‘Gods, bestow on me whatever I deserve.’

  The man standing next to Ballista at the side of the street snorted. ‘He is the one that lives in the portico of the Temple of Saturn. Always begging.’

  Ballista said nothing.

  The man – a butcher by his stained apron – was not discouraged. ‘Claims we shouldn’t eat meat or touch a drop of wine.’

  Ballista still did not respond.

  ‘Charlatan!’ The man shouted at the Pythagorean. ‘What you deserve is flogging.’

  Some of those around the Pythagorean looked over balefully. The last thing Ballista wanted was for this to escalate into a public disturbance.

  ‘Do an honest day’s work, and the gods might reward you.’ The critic was not to be silenced. ‘The gods themselves partake of the sacrifices, the bones and the fat. Set yourself up above the gods, do you?’

  Some of the audience put their thumbs between their fingers to avert evil.

  Ballista edged away.

  ‘I will pray for you,’ the Pythagorean said, with a tone of insufferable sanctity.

  ‘Fuck you!’ the butcher shouted. ‘Trying to do a man out of his livelihood.’

  The crowd was thickening, as passers-by inevitably were drawn to the prospect of an entertaining fight, but Ballista had got clear.

  The Via Fornicata was the main thoroughfare out of the subura towards the Forum. It was narrow, and hedged with buildings of all kinds – all except fornices, the very arches that its name implied. Already the tradesmen – cobblers, barbers, cloak makers, and wool workers – were opening their shutters. Some were spreading their wares on the pavement, further constricting the passage. Ballista let himself be jostled along. He was tired. He had slept for a time, but badly. In his dreams he had been led out to the cross for execution. He had tried to demand the headsman’s block, the death of a Roman citizen. The soldiers – rough, unshaven, like the men at the Mausoleum – had laughed. He might hang there for days, they had said, like his ancestor. As the nails were hammered through flesh and sinew, the pain had jerked him awake. The dream signified nothing. What else was to be expected if you slept under the roof of Christians?

  Their talk may have disturbed his brief rest, but the followers of Chrestus had done well by him. In the still-time, they had washed him – the elder himself on his knees, bathing Ballista’s grimy feet – and dressed his various wounds. They had trimmed his hair into something less wild, and given him a clean white tunic. When Ballista had told them where he was going, although with no mention of why, they had produced a spotless, if threadbare, toga. Ballista had buckled on his belt with his money under the toga, but left the knife behind. At the door, the elder had pressed his own staff into his hand. Despite Ballista’s insistence, they had refused any payment.

  There was much to admire about these Christians. Above all there was their alms giving and charity. They gave to those outside their own number, to pagans and Jews, to men who under other circumstances would revile them, perhaps call for their execution. Although it provoked the suspicion of the Roman authorities, they welcomed all into their gathering. They had no set prejudice against those of barbarian birth. All were equal in the sight of their god. The Christian afterlife gave hope of a better world to come to those offered little or nothing by this one. It was easy to see the comfort given to slaves and the poor, to women constrained and often brutalised by husbands or the world at larg
e.

  Yet there was the terrible arrogance of the followers of Chrestus. How could anyone believe that only his god existed, that those worshipped since time immemorial by thousands of others were no more than inanimate marble, or, much worse, were evil daemons? It defied all logic that a beneficent and all powerful deity would not have foreseen the problem of salvation for those born before his epiphany, before the birth of Chrestus. And there was their juvenile idealism. Thou shalt not kill was a workable creed for an obscure sect with no temporal power, but could never be maintained by those who sat on the throne of the Caesars. Not, Ballista thought, that any Caesar would ever take to worshipping the crucified god.

  The subura left behind, Ballista walked passed the Temple of Minerva, and down the street known as the Potters’ Quarter to come into the Forum by the Senate House. He moved slowly; to do otherwise clad in a toga would look odd. He wished he had a hat or hood, but, again, no one ever wore headgear with a toga.

  The Forum was even more crowded than usual. The courts would not open for a couple of hours, but already many litigants and orators and jurors were about. They were shaking hands, talking, seeking influence or bribes, or just diversion. Gaggles of sightseers from the provinces meandered through the throng, gawping and exclaiming at the monuments. Local guides, self-styled experts on antiquity, hung about them offering their services. To those visitors foolish enough to hand over some coins, they told an exotic mixture of half-remembered stories and anything they thought would entertain or shock. Flocks of the less enterprising indigenous inhabitants were settling in the various porticos to idle away the day with games of dice and aimless gossip. It was the Kalends and, in addition to the regular denizens of the Forum, the moneylenders were out in force. The interest on loans was due on the first day of the month, and by nightfall the Column of Maenius, over by the Arch of Septimius Severus, would be thick with notices posted denouncing defaulters.

  Ballista turned left, and went up the steps to the Portico of the Aemilian Basilica. He leant against a column. From there he could see out across the Forum. Once this had been the political heart of the free republic. In the Senate House, the Conscript Fathers had debated war and peace. There in the hallowed Curia, Cato had thundered that Carthage must be destroyed. Outside, from the rostra, magistrates had faced the assemblies of the people, had employed all the wiles of rhetoric to sway the voters to their way of thinking, to induce them to pass or reject legislation. From that speakers’ platform, studded with the rams of captured warships that gave it its name, Cicero had denounced Mark Antony as an enemy of the republic.

  The republic had been the perfect constitution, so had argued the historian Polybius. All the elements held in balance – the consuls embodying the monarchic, the senate the aristocratic, and the assemblies the democratic – it was unchanging, and would never fall, not until the gods sent fire and flood from heaven, and destroyed the world. Polybius had been wrong. The republic had contained the seeds of its own downfall from the start. Driven ever outwards by the desire of senators for military glory, the empire had become too vast to be governed by the institutions of a city state. Huge wars demanded not annual magistrates, but generals holding power for years on end over sweeping territories. The gap between the winners and the losers of the senatorial competition opened so wide as to destroy all pretences of equality. Ultimately, in a welter of civil war and proscription, a sole victor emerged. The bloodstained dynast Octavian reinvented himself as Augustus, the paternal and benign emperor, and power migrated from the Forum up to the Palatine.

  ‘And over there,’ the voice of a guide interrupted Ballista’s thoughts, ‘that stain is the very blood of the Emperor Heliogabalus, hacked to pieces by the mob. You all remember his foul vices . . .’

  As far as Ballista could recall, the perverse youth had met his end in the Praetorian Camp at the hands of the guard.

  ‘You see the column by the arch, the one with no statue? When his house was demolished the senator Maenius insisted one column be left, so that his descendants could view the games held in the Forum from the top.’

  Ballista stopped listening to the nonsense, and looked across the Forum up to the Palatine. Since Romulus built his hut there, the hill had been the preserve of the homes of the good and the great. Now it was reserved solely for the imperial Palace. There were three main approaches: the bridge from the Capitoline, the ramp that started just outside the Forum by the Pool of Juturna, and the walkway which began further along the Via Sacra by the Arch of Titus. There were other entrances, but they were private, and closely guarded. Ballista considered his options. All three of the public ways would be thronged with men heading up to pay their respects to the emperor at his morning salutation. Perhaps the busiest would be the path from the Arch of Titus. Of course there would be praetorians there as elsewhere, searching everyone for concealed weapons, but they would be near overwhelmed by the numbers. Respectable in a toga, with no blade to catch their attention, Ballista might slip through.

  Ballista left the shelter of the portico, angled across to the Arch of Augustus, and out of the Forum. Rubbing shoulders with Sarmatians and Arabs, Jews and Aethiopians, as well as Romans, he walked down the Via Sacra.

  He had passed the House of the Vestals and was by the Markets of Vespasian when he saw the helmets of the City Watch over the heads of the multitude. A squad of eight were heading towards him. They were scanning the crowd, but did not seem to have seen him so far. Hunching his shoulders, leaning forward to conceal his height, he went into the next opening of the markets.

  The long, dark corridor smelt of spices and papyri and leather.

  Behind him, he heard the distinctive hobnailed tread of the soldiers following into the market.

  ‘Tell your future from your dreams?’

  Ballista stopped. The dream diviner must have a good clientele. Most of his sort practised their art on street corners or on the pavements of marketplaces. This one could afford a small cubicle with a curtain.

  The City Watch had not spotted him yet, but they were getting closer.

  ‘The gods give us all foreknowledge in our sleep, but only a skilled practitioner can unravel their true meaning.’

  Ballista almost bundled him into the cell, and drew the curtain behind them.

  Unruffled by the eagerness of this client, the dream diviner announced his tariff. Ballista did not bargain, but fished out some coins from under his toga.

  ‘Sit, and tell me your dream.’

  There was no other way out. Ballista was unarmed, except for a staff. There were eight of them. If the City Watch pulled back the curtain, it was the end.

  ‘Do not be reticent. A man cannot be blamed for his dreams.’

  The clatter of military accoutrements was getting louder.

  ‘I have heard all manner of things: men who dream of having sex with their mothers, with their sons and daughters, with animals and statues.’

  Distracted, Ballista told the dream of the cross and the soldiers. He spoke in Greek, somehow imagining the City Watch would expect him to talk in Latin.

  ‘Are you rich?’

  They were right outside.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you a wealthy man?’

  ‘No.’

  They had stopped.

  ‘That is good. Crucifixion signifies harm for rich men, since the crucified are stripped naked, and lose their flesh.’

  The soldiers were not moving.

  ‘But for a poor man it is auspicious. A crucified man is raised high, and substance is sufficient to feed many birds.’

  The soldiers were talking outside the curtain. Ballista could not make out the words over the voice of the dream diviner.

  ‘Such dreams signify honour and wealth. Are you a seafarer?’

  ‘No.’

  At last – Ballista hardly dared believe the evidence of his ears – they were leaving.

  ‘A pity. For the cross, like a ship, is made of wood, and a mast resembles a cross
.’

  The sounds were receding. They were heading deeper into the markets.

  ‘Where was the cross?’

  ‘I do not remember.’

  ‘The location can be important. In Greece a man dreamt that he was crucified in front of the Temple of Zeus . . .’

  Ballista got up.

  ‘For a bachelor, the dream means marriage, for the connection between the victim and the cross is a bond, but it will not be an easy one.’

  Ballista peeped out of the curtain.

  ‘ . . . a cross prevents a man from setting his feet on the ground.’

  The City Watch turned a corner, and were lost to sight.

  ‘There is much more I can tell you.’

  Ballista tossed him another coin. ‘Forget you ever saw me.’

  *

  A steady stream of petitioners trudged up from the Arch of Titus towards the Palace. Sure enough, where the path narrowed at the Arch of Domitian ahead, Praetorians were taking their names, patting them down, confiscating fruit knives and styluses. Ballista stepped off the concourse into the portico of the temple on his left. It would be best to wait for a dense throng to come up from the Via Sacra.

  Inconsequentially, it struck Ballista that he did not know to which deity the temple was dedicated. The huge edifice had been ordered by Heliogabalus for the black stone that he worshipped. When Heliogabalus was killed, his god had been evicted. The perverted youth was haunting Ballista today. Heliogabalus had been the very worst of emperors – degenerate, profligate and effeminate. Obsessed with his oriental god, after the civil war that won him the throne, he had never gone near the army. It was the weakness of the empire that anyone could become emperor. A vote by the senate and the new man or boy – no matter how unfitted for the position, no matter that he had murdered his way to power, or been clad in the purple by the schemes of devious courtiers – was as legitimate as his predecessor. It would never happen among Ballista’s people. The ruler of the Angles had to be of the blood of the Himlings. He had to be a warrior of proven worth, a leader of men.