Praetorian: The Great Game

by S. J. A. Turney

  Silent and bleak, Commodus had stood with his family watching, apparently impassively, as his father passed from the world of men and grey-clad mourners with their tragic masks swayed around the square, wailing and sobbing. The watching crowd added their moans and cries of anguish, the whole cacophony brought to horrendous climax by the ear-rupturing addition of the legions’ musicians, blaring out the funeral dirge.

  Commodus was the first to take one of the blazing pitch-soaked torches and touch it to the pyre, watching as the flames ripped through the incendiary wadding between the timbers. Lucilla was close behind, followed by her husband, the Syrian Pompeianus, then Commodus’ wife Bruttia - stunning even in her plain funeral garb. Paternus and Perennis added their flames, and then others: many more, one after the other, until the pyre became a great orange inferno, the features of the former emperor lost to the ravages of the fire.

  As the pyre collapsed in on itself, taking with it the charring remains of Marcus Aurelius, the crowd’s moaning slowly turned from wails of despair to hollow calls of respectful loss and finally someone in the crowd had shouted ‘Hail Aurelius… Hail Caesar!’ to the burning morass.

  The rites and ceremonies over, Commodus had made a speech to the grieving populace, reminding them that the great man was not simply dead, but had been transformed and now watched over them in a far more powerful manner, from among the Gods. He had reminded the people that, despite the sadness of the day, there was still reason for them to celebrate, as the ever-present threat of the barbarians at their door had been broken. He had promised to rule as wisely as his father and to always hold the people of Vindobona and the province of Pannonia dear to his heart as the foundation of his tenure as emperor.

  The army had ‘hailed Caesar’ for his largess when he had announced their return to Rome, but Rufinus suspected no one would have cheered as loud as the defeated tribes. Commodus had brokered a deal with the captive leaders that was, in retrospect, marvellous for all concerned. Marcomannia was a poor, unproductive land and so, instead of Roman settlers trying to eke out a living in this barren land, trying to turn a profit and send their goods to Rome, the barbarians would retain their own lands, using them to supply Rome with grain, goods, gold and men. Rome would benefit, replenishing some of the finances lost in the wars, while the barbarian leaders showered the emperor with praise, gratitude and personal gifts, not only for their sudden and unexpected freedom, but for the right to retain control over their former lands.

  Hail Caesar!

  Here: a new salute; a first salute to a new leader; a man with youth, strength, vision and intelligence. The peasants and freedmen along the sides of the Via Flaminia bellowed their chant again and again, just like that cold day back in Vindobona. There had been two such cries that day, and for very different reasons.

  Suddenly the column crested the hill and Rome came into view.

  Rufinus drew in an astonished breath.

  In Hispania he had lived near Tarraco, an Imperial provincial capital, replete with all the great public works one would expect; a seething, busy mass of endless crowds and deafening noise. He had visited the ports at Barcino and Ampurias as well as Saguntum and Dianium, and even travelled south once to visit the great sprawl of Carthago Nova, the city of Hannibal. He had, on his way to join the Tenth Gemina, passed through the ancient ports of Narbo and Massilia.

  None of them were fit to play shadow to this: the centre of the world.

  What initially surprised Rufinus was the sheer scale of the sprawl, which extended from the base of the hill they had just crested and off into the distance over humps and bumps and dips, off along the silvered snake of the Tiber and far enough that the edge between it and the countryside beyond blurred in the heat.

  More surprising was his second realisation: that the city walls were as useless to Rome as a scroll to a blind man or, as his uncle Publius habitually said ‘useless as a woman to a Greek’. In the tales he’d heard of Rome, the walls and gates had figured impressively. The invading Gauls, so many centuries ago, had gained entrance to Rome through stealth and treachery, despite the great defences. Every merchant told of having his wares checked on occasion as he passed through this gate or that. What none of them had ever seen fit to mention was that the great, thick stone walls, in reddish stone blocks of enormous size and punctuated with heavy gates, guarded by thick, squat towers, were now somewhere in the depths of the city, poking out impotently above rooftops. The mass of the great urban sprawl had so outgrown the walls that by the time an enemy came to be stalled by them, he could have looted and burned more than half the city’s structures.

  Rome had become too big for its own defences and, in Rufinus’ opinion, that might easily be the city’s downfall someday. A slave girl, scraping the carbonised detritus from the curve of a large, bronze cooking pot, looked up and gave a half-hearted cheer, glancing nervously along the wall to where her master stood crying out his best wishes.

  He was reminded momentarily of the morning after the funeral, when Lucilla had departed Vindobona, climbing into her carriage for the long journey back to Rome. As the emperor’s sister had placed her foot on the first step and allowed herself to be helped into the vehicle, the young slave girl whose very presence sent tingles down Rufinus’ spine appeared, wrapped in a plain wool blanket that would have cost less than the leather tie that held her mistress’ robe fastened.

  Standing in line with his fellow Praetorians and trying not to catch the eye of the deranged bully Scopius who stood opposite, Rufinus had watched with a combination of excitement and sadness as the breath-taking and fascinating young woman paused before climbing aboard.

  In that moment she had flashed a smile at him.

  Directly at him!

  He had been startled, and pleased, but the greater surprise was to follow: Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus, the Syrian husband of Lucilla, exited the building last of the entourage and Rufinus had to double-take. His eyes had not deceived him! The man was wearing his toga as usual, but the young soldier’s eyes were drawn instead to the small coronet on the Syrian’s head. A silver circlet rested on his brow, decorated with innumerable criss-crossed spines, not unlike a very regular thorn bush, or the defences formed around a marching camp using sudis stakes. It was a relatively plain and tasteful decoration, not like the gaudy, bejewelled trinkets worn by most nobles.

  But it wasn’t the form the coronet took that had made Rufinus draw breath sharply. It was what it meant! The ‘grass crown’ was the highest military award a general in the field could achieve. Great men who had paraded through the streets of Rome with their legions to triumphal acclaim would have readily given up all such pomp for the right to wear the grass crown. Bestowed upon a general for breaking a blockade and saving an army, the award was the only one given to a commander by the general consent of the forces.

  In one blinding moment, Rufinus’ opinion of the oily Syrian flipped on its back. The man had clearly served a term in military command and during that time had pulled off a victory which had earned him an acclaim given to only a handful of men in the history of Rome, including the great Scipio and divine Augustus himself!

  Suddenly he’d realised that the continual look of bored irritation on the man’s face was no expression of vapid lack of wit, but rather the look of a caged lion, bound in marriage to a woman who hated him and yet wielded vastly superior power.

  Someone ahead in the column shouted something about the Fontinalis gate that went unheard this far back, and the atmosphere among the men shifted subtly in a wave along the ordered lines. Despite the distance yet to go to the barracks, the feeling that the journey was finally over and that they had arrived in Rome hit every last man. The relief was almost tangible.

  Ahead, the carriages rumbled on, picking up pace only slightly in the drivers’ eagerness to reach their destination. As Rufinus scanned the vehicles, wondering what it was like travelling in such luxury and musing on whether his grandfather had owned such a vehicle in his days a
s a senator, the curtains in the rear carriage billowed.

  A head of short black hair emerged, leaning dangerously far out to view the road ahead. The Praetorian riding alongside carefully stepped his horse left to stay out of the observer’s way. The head turned slowly and examined the route they had just travelled. The tight black locks and bushy black eyebrows above a dark, shadowed chin belonged to Saoterus, one of the cadre of young ‘advisors’ that seemed to flock around Commodus since the death of his father.

  Something hit Rufinus softly in the face, drawing his attention back to the present. He blinked. It was a rose petal. Handfuls of them, red, white, pink and yellow, were being cast onto the column by the people.

  They were in Rome proper, marching between the crude housing of the poor at the edge of the city, packed along the roadsides, heedless of the ancient tombs that stood between them. The gate towers loomed ever closer, almost beckoning, now, beyond them structures looming from unknown heights.

  Clearly, despite Commodus’ fears for the early security of his throne and the five months he had been forced to tarry beyond the Alpes while everything was settled, nothing untoward had happened in the city and the people loved and welcomed their emperor, his guard and entourage with joy.

  The noise in the outskirts of Rome, the area that had once been the sacred Campus Martius, continued to boom and wash over the column as they approached the heavy gate. The city had expanded so thoroughly beyond the ancient walls that many houses had been built directly up against them, using the heavy, cyclopean blocks as one side of the structure. But here at the gate a space had been left outside, which Rufinus could imagine was usually filled with beggars, stallholders, thieves and the ranting lunatics that occupied every city.

  Not today, though. With the people of Rome held at bay by private forces of barely-controlled thugs, this open space was filled by a throng of figures in togas, mostly with broad purple stripes.

  Rufinus gawped.

  The senators of Rome had come out to welcome their new emperor.

  VII – The wonders of Rome

  THE din of the extramural crowd and the intonations of loyalty by the nervous senators in the square outside the Porta Fontinalis died away, muffled by the walls. Passing beneath the once-great defences, it had become apparent just how useless they were from a protective angle. The parapet was gone from much of the visible circuit; hardly a stretch of wall visible due to its reuse as the structural faces of modern housing. In places the walkway along the top had fallen away, leaving dangerous sections teetering over houses that stood blissfully unaware beneath.

  The gate itself was nothing more than a large, slightly misshapen hole in the wall with no portals to close, graffiti covering the stonework extolling the virtues of one prostitute or another, casting aspersions on the masculinity of certain youths, or simply defacing the stone for the love of writing filth.

  His first impressions of Rome had been informed simply by the press and busyness of the outskirts. He commanded a rough geography of the city, passed down from his father on wintry nights when the seemingly uncrossable gulf between them had been narrowed by the same unwatered wine that loosened the old man’s tongue and made him maudlin about the days of his youth. From what he remembered of his father’s words, the Campus Martius was home to some of the great monuments of the city: reminders of great men. The Baths of Agrippa, the Pantheon of Hadrianus, the Mausoleum of Augustus, the stadium of Domitianus; wonders too many to recount.

  And he’d seen nothing of such symbols of imperial majesty. All he’d been able to lay eyes on outside the gate had been endless housing and shops, high insulae and narrow streets. And the dilapidated state of the once grand gate had done nothing to improve his impression.

  Then the column had passed from under the dark arch, the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves echoing deafeningly, into the bright sunlight of the heart of Rome. The route they had taken had brought them through the gate that stood closest to the centre of imperial power and they entered the city already at its core.

  He gaped, his head turning this way and that. The men around him seemed merely relieved or bored, but then they had been stationed here before. None of this was new to them.

  A street ran left, jumbled housing separating it from the wall. At the far end, a great curved structure stretched left to right, cutting through the city walls where. A massive carved column rose beyond, a gleaming bronze statue atop that could only be the great Traianus.

  To the right, ramshackle brick insulae crowded the street, small stairways running up between them granting access to another row that stood above the first on the slope of the Capitoline, more beyond that, and more, towering over him until, at the top, rocky cliffs gave way to buttressed substructures of the grand, columned temple of Juno. Even the rear view of that most sacred place was breathtaking, framed in painted marble against the cloudless blue sky. Rufinus checked his horse, which was drifting left with his lack of attention.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the Argentarius!’ hissed Mercator.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The road, you prat.’

  Flushing slightly, Rufinus watched Rome unfold in splendid glory. The road they followed, worn flags uneven from centuries of use, followed the curve of the Capitoline hill, grand structures springing up to left and right. His father had verbally mapped the city many times, but his lectures were now mere words lost in the mists of memory. Marvels lay everywhere.

  To the left, myriad stores in the arches of an arcade sold everything imaginable in a welter of colours and smells, from expensive Arabian frankincense to pungent German beer in heavy kegs; silks traded across the mountains of Parthia from the farthest reaches of the world, to jars of fish sauce imported from Hispania. Every arch had its merchant bellowing his wares, most pausing to cheer or stare as the imperial cavalcade passed by, before raising their voice to promote their goods once more.

  To the right, the hillside veered away, staircases climbing between temples that rose halfway to the sky, bright and richly painted, on a scale that made the great provincial forum of Tarraco look like a barbarian village. The Clivus Argentarius opened out into a great square surrounded by public buildings, each one more magnificent than the last. Despite his noble roots from this very city, Rufinus had never felt more like a country bumpkin.

  Across the forum with its soaring columns supporting gilded statues of generals, emperors and heroes of Rome, the cavalcade rumbled, passing on along a wide thoroughfare full of people who hurried to the shelter of the surrounding buildings as they passed. A circular temple bore all the hallmarks of a Vestal shrine, the smoke of the eternal flame twirling from the centre of the roof into the cerulean blue. Behind it: a massive, palatial structure that could only be the residence of the Vestal priestesses.

  It was hard not to ogle like an idiot. A few moments further and the column turned right at a crossroads, marked by a grand triumphal arch, and up a long slope. Here, the crowds thinned out and the column ascended slowly, wagons slowing the pace due to the gradient. Gradually, the emperor and his escort reached the crest of the great hill and came to a halt in an open space surrounded by buildings every bit as high and impressive as the temples and basilicas of the forum.

  As the column assembled and the men sat stiff, straight and formal, horses whinnying and snorting, sweating and shuffling, Rufinus became aware of a number of Praetorians on duty at doorways and gates. Given the grandeur of the great portal ahead, there was no doubt in Rufinus’ mind that this was the palace that had been home to Marcus Aurelius during his brief sojourns in the city and would now be the residence of Commodus.

  Seeing the vast magnificence of it all in the centre of a city of marvels filled with a million people, it seemed absurd that he had walked, talked and even bathed alongside the man who would now live here.

  Almost as if summoned by the thought, the door of the main carriage swung open and Commodus stepped out and down the rungs to land lightly on the paving, a spring
in his step. The young emperor looked around and his smile of sheer pleasure at being back in Rome was unmistakable.

  Others clambered down from the carriages, looking more relieved than anything. Pompeianus was the last to exit and, while the rest of the nobles made for the great palace’s main portal on the heels of their master, the Syrian bowed to his brother-in law, the emperor, and turned, striding away into the city without an escort.

  Men of the Fourth Praetorian cohort who stood on guard opened a large gate to one side of the main structure and slaves ran out, taking the reins of the beasts that hauled the carriages and leading them into ancillary areas.

  Rufinus sat with the others, sweating in the heat as his horse swatted bothersome flies with its tail. Time passed as the column, now a simple cohort of mounted men in white with no passengers of import, awaited further instructions. Finally Prefect Perennis, having followed the emperor to the palace, returned, climbed onto his horse and flashed his grim face at the column before gesturing onward. Buccinae sounded and the unit moved off.

  Wheeling in that great square before the imperial palace, the cohort trotted off back down the slope toward the triumphal arch at the base again. A right turn took them between a sprawling bath complex and a massive temple bigger than any he had seen. Just as he felt he was settling in, becoming inured to the constant barrage of glory that made him feel so provincial, his eyes fell upon the great Flavian arena and he marvelled anew.

  The main amphitheatre of Rome curved away with delicate row upon row of arches. Rufinus was no newcomer to the games; he had seen some of the best slaves Hispania had to offer face one another and, on occasion, savage beasts in the arena at home. But the Tarraco amphitheatre, carved into the hillside and hanging above the blue waters of the Mare Nostrum, could hold sixteen thousand when full to bursting. The huge edifice before him now must hold four times that number; a truly mind-numbing prospect.