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 as 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.