I remember a private audience he had with the emperor. I silently took notes, in my role as Chief Clerk-in-Consistory.
Pytheas hesitated and then said, ‘My Lord, it is my heavy duty to bring you further distressing, but surely untrue, reports from the Danube frontier.’
‘Go on,’ said the emperor, poring over a manuscript on his wooden lectern.
Pytheas sighed theatrically. ‘At Viminacium… My Lord, I fain would not believe it is true’
‘ Go on,’ said Theodosius.
Pytheas glanced aside at me but he did not register me.
‘At Viminacium,’ he said, speaking with exaggerated care, ‘it appears that alongside the Huns were fighting – were seen fighting – men with covered shields. But shields were evidently lost in the battle. And when the Hunnish hordes passed on southwards, some of our own men managed to retrieve them.’
I found this doubtful in the extreme. ‘There were none of our own men left alive,’ I objected.
Pytheas’ look could have turned a Gorgon to stone. ‘Remember you are but a scribe, Priscus of far-famed Panium,’ he said sarcastically, ‘however elevated a scribe. So scribble, and be silent.’
The emperor hardly registered this argument.
Pytheas continued, with a sigh and a leaden heart on his sleeve. ‘The recovered shields were painted red, with a gold rim, and a large black eagle in the centre.’
Now at last Theodosius raised his small, short-sighted eyes from his manuscript and looked around, puzzled.
Pytheas nodded. ‘Yes, my Lord. The insignia of the Legio Herculiani.’
The Herculian Legion. One of the very finest. A Western Legion, under the direct command of Master-General Aetius.
Theodosius still looked baffled. And then Pytheas, the consummate actor, produced his theatrical masterstroke. He called out, and a slave entered the room, walking backwards so that he might not gaze upon the countenance of the Divine Majesty. He laid two objects at the chamberlain’s feet, and then hurried away. Pytheas picked them up. One was a big round wooden shield with a bronze boss and gold-painted rim, decorated just as he had said with the black eagle insignia of the Herculians. The other was a long spear, with dyed feathers twined in behind the spearhead, and the shaft crudely decorated with shamanic runes of power. A Hun spear. He raised them up and held them side by side. Fighting together, thus.
The visual impact was tremendous.
The emperor staggered forward, his wooden lectern crashing to the floor. ‘No!’
‘My Lord,’ said Pytheas, ‘it is my sincerest hope that this is a terrible misunderstanding.’
But the image of Western Legionary and Hun spear-man fighting side by side was indelibly imprinted upon the vivid, vulnerable imagination of the emperor.
‘Indeed,’ said Pytheas, ‘it may even be that this is some malign plan of Attila’s, to drive a wedge between east and west.’
Oh cunning chamberlain! Not the first to realise that, by stating the truth so candidly, you can drive it away.
‘No!’ cried the emperor. ‘I have heard enough. First I was refused aid, then General Aetius wished to bring his army direct to our capital, without alarming us. Now I see why! My cousin Valentinian has said before that he always suspected Aetius’ ultimate aim was to make himself emperor, with help from the Hunnish hordes if necessary. Now I see that it is true. This will not be the first time the West has turned against the East. Remember Mursa, one hundred years ago. That was a calamitous battle.’
It pained me, Priscus, to hear that name. The list of military catastrophes in the last century was long: against the Goths at Adrianople; against the Persians, and Shapur, King of Kings, at the Night Battle of Singara. Yet Mursa was the greatest wound of all, and self-inflicted, the ruinous feat of Constantine the Great’s squabbling sons, and the usurper Magnentius; an empire rending itself to pieces, at the cost of sixty thousand casualties in a single day.
But now my beloved pupil Aetius was master-general in the West. Rome would live to fight again, and better. I prayed for it. Yet day by day, through the brilliant machinations and insinuations of Attila and his network of spies and accomplices, information continued to trickle through to baffle the scholarly, naive, gullible, well-meaning Emperor Theodosius, too unskilled by far in the ways of men. So far from doing evil himself that he suspected none, or he suspected the wrong men – unerringly erring in every judgement he made.
After Pytheas’ departure, I made so bold as offer advice to my lord the emperor. He had appointed no good advisers: the greatest failing of all for a ruler of men.
The first casualty in war is truth, I told him sententiously. He did not appear to listen, but he did not silence me, either.
‘It is not in Aetius’ nature to deceive,’ I said. ‘Remember, my lord, I was his tutor for a brief while.’
Theodosius looked up, brow furrowed. ‘That’s right,’ he said softly. ‘So you were. I had forgotten.’
‘He was not the best of students,’ I murmured, with a fond smile of remembrance. Then, with more attack, ‘But Attila is the Great Deceiver. He will try every trick.’
He seemed in an agony of indecision. I saw the man beneath the stiff golden robes, his very spirit writhing. How he hated to be emperor. It was nothing but a burden to him. Not for the first time, I was grateful I was not a ruler or a politician, whose lives are a long, thankless, much-scorned series of choices between lesser and greater evils. Politicians, unlike poets, do not live in the world of the Good and the Beautiful.
Then he waved me wearily away.
I slept poorly that night. Sometime towards dawn I stood out on my little balcony overlooking the still waters of the Golden Horn. Moonlight coming towards me in a silvered pathway; wisteria and judas trees, night-scented jasmine, nightingales in the pines; two night fishermen out on the water, drawing fish into their nets with lanterns on hooped sticks. By the moonlight I could see the ancient symbol of the stylised eye painted on the prow, white and blue, to ward off evil. Behind me, the city’s golden domes and cupolas would be shining beneath the round-faced moon, unimaginably beautiful. The great statue of Constantine aloft on its pillar, only a little lower than God. Would all this fall? All the strange wonders of this magical city, caught between east and west (wonders which I, Priscus of Panium, had written up with modest scholarship, in a little guide-book regarded with no small admiration among certain literary circles in the city)? The strange triple-headed brass serpent on its pillar in the forum, taken by Constantine the Great himself from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, made to celebrate Greek victory over the Persians at Plataea, 479 years before the birth of Christ. Or the towering column of Pharaoh Thutmose III, unimaginably ancient, the polished hieroglyphs in the polished granite, as clear as when they were cut there by slaves in ancient Egypt millennia ago, in a kingdom long since vanished. So even the greatest empires fall into night. The iron law of change applies to everything. All is metamorphosis. Yes, one day, sooner or later, even all this would change and fall.
The Ancients said hope was merely a sign of foolishness. We Christians now do not have their pessimistic strength.