Demetrius, of course, was an unending problem. The craziest Emperor of a largely crazy dynasty, he had held the throne for more than twenty years of ever-increasing madness, and it was small wonder that the Empire seemed to be spinning centrifugally apart. Only the devoted work, behind the scenes, of a small group of staunchly disciplined men like Apollinaris and his Consular counterpart back in Roma, Marcus Larcius Torquatus, had kept the regime from collapsing entirely.
There had been difficulties in the outlying provinces for nearly a century. Some of that was inherent in the Imperial system: the Empire was really too big to be governed from a central authority. That much had been understood from earliest Imperial times, which was why no serious attempt had ever been made to bring such far-off places as India and the lands that lay beyond it under direct Roman administration. Even a one-capital system had proven unworkable, and so Constantinopolis had been founded in the East and the Empire had been divided.
But then, after Saturninus—another of the crazy Emperors—had practically bankrupted the Western Empire in his hopeless attempt to conquer the New World, and set it drifting off into the pathetic era later to be called the Great Decadence, the Eastern realm had taken advantage of the West’s weakness to invade it and then had come the two hundred years of Eastern rule, until the invincible Flavius Romulus restored the Western Empire’s independence. Determined never to allow the East to regain the upper hand, Flavius Romulus had stripped Constantinopolis of its status as a capital city and reunited the severed halves of the Empire a thousand years after their first separation.
But it would take a Flavius Romulus to govern so great a stretch of territory single-handedly, and very few of his successors had been up to the mark. Within a century after his death the throne was in the possession of Demetrius of Vindonissa, a wealthy provincial patrician who just happened to have a streak of hereditary insanity in his family. Both Demetrius’s son Valens Aquila and his grandson Marius Antoninus were notably eccentric Emperors; Marius’s son Lodovicus had been reasonably stable, but he had blithely handed the throne on to his son, the present Emperor Demetrius, who by easy stages had come to make the citizens of Roma believe that they were being ruled once again by Caligula, or Commodus, or Caracalla.
Demetrius II was, at least, not murderous, as those three had been. But his reign, which by now had gone on longer than any of theirs, had been marked by a similar wildness of inspiration. Though he had not, like Caligula, tried to declare himself a god or appoint his horse to the Senate, he had given banquets at which six hundred ostriches were slaughtered at a time, and ordered the sinking of fully laden merchant ships in the harbor at Ostia to demonstrate the Empire’s prodigious wealth. Unlike Commodus he had not amused himself by posing as a surgeon and operating on hapless subjects, but he did, now and then, set tame lions and leopards loose in the guest rooms of the palace to terrify his sleeping friends. He did not, like Caracalla, have his brother and other members of his own family murdered, but he did stage lotteries that all members of his court were required to enter at great expense, in which one man might win ten pounds of gold and another ten dead dogs or a dozen spoiled cabbages.
In the days of the indifferent Valens Aquila and the witless Marius Antoninus such far-off provinces as Syria and Persia began running themselves with very small regard for the decrees of the central government. That in itself caused little alarm in Roma, so long as the exotic goods that those lands exported to the capital continued to arrive. But then, in Lodovicus’s reign, the two provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia, just east of the Italian heartland of the Empire, also tried to break free, and had to be reined in by force. And then, soon after Demetrius II came to power, Sicilia, always a troublesome island of malcontents, chose to cease paying taxes to the Imperial tax collectors. When Demetrius took no action, the movement spread to Belgica and Gallia and Hispania and declarations of independence quickly followed. That, of course, could not be tolerated, even by the likes of Demetrius.
Apollinaris was Consul then, his third time in the office, sharing the Consulship with the feckless drunkard Duilius Eurupianus. Since the time of Maximilianus the Great, at least, the Consulship had been a basically meaningless post, a mere honorific, with nothing like the virtually royal powers it had had in the ancient days of the Republic. As Epictetus had said long ago, the Consulship under the Emperors, having lost nearly all its functions, had degenerated into a post that allowed you nothing more than the privilege of underwriting the games of the Circus and giving free dinners to a lot of undeserving flatterers.
But a crisis now was at hand. Firm action was required. Apollinaris, resigning his Consulship, called upon Eurupianus to do the same, making it clear to him that if he chose to remain in office it would have adverse effects on his health. Then Apollinaris prevailed upon the Emperor, who was preoccupied at the time with forming a collection of venomous serpents from the farthest reaches of the realm, to reappoint him to the Consulship in collaboration with an equally public-spirited citizen, the dour and austere Larcius Torquatus. At Apollinaris’s urgent behest the Emperor agreed that he and Torquatus would be granted emergency powers far beyond any that the Consuls had had for hundreds of years, and would remain in office indefinitely, instead of serving one-year terms at the pleasure of the Emperor. Torquatus would attempt to restore some sanity on the home front; Apollinaris, an experienced soldier, would march through the rebellious provinces, bringing them one after another to heel.
Which had been achieved. Here in Tarraco, Apollinaris was packing up, getting ready to go home.
Tiberius Charax, his aide-de-camp, a slender, narrow-eyed Greek from Ionia who had served at his side for many years, entered and said, “A letter for you from Roma, from the Consul Larcius Torquatus, Count Valerian. Also Prince Laureolus has arrived and is waiting outside to see you.”
Taking the letter from Charax, Apollinaris said, “Send him in.”
He broke the seal and quickly glanced over the text. His fellow Consul, concise as ever, had written, “I have told the Emperor of your successes in the field, and he responds with the usual childishness. As for affairs here at Roma, the problems grow worse all the time. If his spending continues at the present pace the treasury will soon be down to its last denarius. I am planning to take severe measures.” And, with an elaborate flourish, the signature, nearly the size of the text itself: M. Larcius Torquatus, Consul.
Looking up, Apollinaris became aware that Prince Laureolus was in the room.
“Bad news, sir?” the prince asked.
“Infuriating news,” said Apollinaris. He made no effort to hide his smoldering anger. “A letter from Torquatus. The Emperor is running the treasury dry. What did he pay, I wonder, for that mountain of snow he had them set up in his garden last summer? Or for that tunic of plates of gold, studded with diamonds and pearls? And what little expenses are coming next? I fear to guess.”
“The Emperor,” Laureolus said quietly, and a derisive flicker appeared for a moment at one corner of the younger man’s mouth. “Ah! The Emperor, yes.” He needed to say no more.
Apollinaris had come to like the prince a great deal. They were men built to the same general design, short, compact, muscular, though there was little else in the way of physical resemblance, Apollinaris being a man of dark, almost swarthy complexion with a broad triangular nose, a generous mouth, and deep-set coal-black eyes beneath a dense, shaggy brow, while Laureolus was pale, with chilly aristocratic features, a long, narrow high-bridged nose, a thin-lipped mouth, ice-cold eyes of the palest blue. He came from ancient Imperial lineage, tracing his ancestry in some fashion to the Emperor Publius Clemens, who had reigned a hundred years or so before the Byzantine conquest of the Western Empire. Disgusted with the profligate ways of Demetrius II, he had withdrawn five years back to his family’s property in the country to occupy himself with the study of early Roman history and literature. That was how Apollinaris, whose own country home was nearby and who shared Laureolus’s antiquarian interests, had come to meet him. He saw quickly that Laureolus, who was ten years his junior, had the same nostalgia for the strict ethical rigor of the long-vanished Roman Republic that he himself had, and Larcius Torquatus, and virtually no one else in modern Roma.