Текст книги "Empire"

Автор книги: Steven Saylor

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Текущая страница: 45 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

AD 141

The construction and decoration of the mausoleum of Hadrian was at last complete. On this day the late emperor’s remains were to be officially interred.

To reach the mausoleum, a new bridge had been built across the Tiber. The bridge offered an impressive view of the huge structure, and it was here that the emperor Antoninus and a host of dignitaries assembled for the ceremony. Along with Hadrian, the remains of the empress Sabina and of Hadrian’s onetime heir, Ceionius, would also be interred.

For Marcus Pinarius, dressed in his senatorial toga, the occasion marked the pinnacle of his long career; it also provided a rare moment to simply stop and catch his breath. Marcus had never been so busy in his life, not even during the hectic years of the Dacian campaigns, when he was Apollodorus’s assistant. He regularly attended meetings of the Senate in Roma. He made frequent trips to the villa at Tibur to oversee the worship of Antinous, and he made new images of the Divine Youth whenever the inspiration struck him. But most of his efforts in the last few years had been consumed by the design and construction of the massive statue atop Hadrian’s mausoleum. The images of Antinous were unquestionably the most beautiful of all the works Marcus had made, the closest he would ever come to creating perfection, but the quadriga statue with Hadrian was by far the grandest.

Constructing a work on such an immense scale had been one challenge; creating a sculpture of sufficient grandeur to properly honour Hadrian was another. As he stood on the new bridge, listening with only one ear to the endless speeches and invocations, Marcus gazed up at the gigantic sculptural group and felt tremendous satisfaction. Apollodorus would have said that the statue was much too big, its bulk reducing the mausoleum beneath to a mere pedestal, making the whole structure appear top-heavy. But Marcus had resisted the temptation to revise Hadrian’s model and had stayed true to the emperor’s wishes, though he had employed various tricks of perspective to give the figures a more pleasing proportion when seen from the ground. Over the last few days Marcus had ventured all over the Seven Hills and out on the roads that radiated from the city, seeing what the sculpture looked like from various viewpoints and distances. For sheer prominence, Hadrian in his quadriga rivalled the Temple of Jupiter atop the Capitoline, the Colossus of Sol, and even the Flavian Amphitheatre. Indeed, Marcus had chanced upon one vantage point, north of the city, from which nothing of Roma could be seen except the quadriga; the illusion of seeing a titanic figure riding a gigantic chariot across a landscape devoid of humanity had been complete. As an artist, Marcus had known no moment of greater satisfaction, not even when gazing upon his images of the Divine Youth.

Next to Marcus stood Apollodora. Her features were those of an aging Eastern beauty, but she displayed the inscrutable expression of a true Roman matron. Marcus had no idea what she was feeling. It had been a long time since she had expressed resentment or grief about her father’s death.

Next to her was Lucius, who had continued to grow until he was a head taller than his father. Lucius was wearing the fascinum, though the amulet was hidden under the folds of his toga. He saw his son exchange glances with young Verus – or Aurelius, as everyone now called him.

The emperor himself had recently acquired a new cognomen. He was Antoninus Pius now, so named by the Senate, ostensibly in recognition of his filial piety in discharging his duties to his adoptive father, including his insistence that the Senate vote divine honours to Hadrian; but many people thought the granting of the cognomen Pius was to thank Antonius for saving the lives of a number of senators whom Hadrian would otherwise have put to death in the last days of his reign. “I had rather save the life of one innocent citizen than take the lives of a thousand enemies,” Antoninus had remarked. He had none of Hadrian’s restlessness or brooding nature; he was known for a placid temperament and a gentle sense of humour. Under his benevolent rule, the bitterness that had marked the end of Hadrian’s reign had almost faded from memory.

At last the speeches and rituals were done. Antoninus Pius carried the urn containing the ashes of Hadrian across the bridge and entered the mausoleum. In the vestibule, a niche housed a statue of Hadrian. To the right, a passageway lined with marble sloped gently upwards as it followed a spiral course. The ramp made a full circle, ending in a chamber just above the entrance, and from this room another passage led to a circular chamber at the very center of the building. Niches had been carved in the wall to make room for the urns containing the ashes of Hadrian, Sabina, and Ceionius. The chamber was large enough to provide a resting place for many emperors to come. Thus, the mausoleum was both a monument to the past and an expression of faith in the future. Men died, but the empire of Roma would go on and on. Here was a place to house the remains of generations not yet born.

Marcus watched as Antoninus placed the urn in its niche. He felt the sense of sadness and release that comes with the ending of an era. Hadrian, the inveterate traveler, had reached the end of his final journey.

A banquet followed. Exhausted from standing all day, Marcus excused himself early. Apollodora left with him, but Lucius stayed behind, saying that he wanted to keep Aurelius company.

“How fortunate we are that those two have become such close friends,” Marcus said to Apollodora as the litter carried them home. “For that happy outcome, as for so much else, we have the Divine Hadrian to thank.”

Apollodora made no reply. She only nodded and closed her eyes, as if she was too tired to speak. When they arrived home, she went directly to bed.

Despite his weariness, Marcus felt restless. It was often so on days when he was called upon to take part in ceremonies and rituals; such events filled him with a nervous excitement that made it hard to sleep. He paced his garden for a while, then went to his library. Amyntas, knowing his master’s habits and anticipating his needs, had left a lamp burning for him.

Marcus surveyed the scrolls in their pigeonholes, identified by dangling tags, and on a whim pulled out a volume from the late Suetonius’s imperial biographies. Suetonius had recently come up in conversation with young Marcus Aurelius, who had expressed astonishment that Marcus had never read the man’s work. “Are you telling me that you possess one of the very first copies, given to you by Suetonius himself, and you’ve never read it? Unbelievable! Really, you must read them.”

Marcus located the other volumes and piled them on the table, then began to skim through the text. From the sternly moralistic Augustus, power had passed to the dour Tiberius, who had ended in utter debauchery and left the world at the mercy of the monstrous Caligula, whose bloody death had led to the reign of the hapless Claudius, cuckolded by one wife, Messalina, and probably murdered by another, Agrippina, who had put her son Nero on the throne and been rewarded with death. After Nero had come four emperors in quick succession: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and then Vespasian, the bland but competent general who had left the empire to his sons, first the popular Titus, then the suspicious and cruel Domitian. There Suetonius’s account ended, but Marcus needed no historian to tell him about the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian.

Marcus could see why the biographies were so popular. The stories told by Suetonius were brutal, funny, and shocking. The people he described were, for the most part, appalling. Had Caligula really given his horse Incitatus a stall of marble, a manger of ivory, purple blankets, and a collar of precious stones, all in preparation for making him a consul? Had Nero really tried to kill his mother by putting her on a collapsing boat? Had Domitian invited guests to a black room where he treated them like men already dead, and then released them, making a joke of their despair?

What amazing and terrible times Marcus’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather had lived through – and how very little Marcus knew about their lives!

As the first faint light of dawn began to emanate from the garden, Marcus realized that he had been reading all night. He went to bed, thinking that an hour of sleep would be better than none, and dreamed of mad emperors.

When he woke, despite having slept so briefly, Marcus felt strangely energetic. After a leisurely breakfast with his wife and son, he invited Lucius to take a walk with him.

“Put on your toga,” he said. “And wear the fascinum.”

“Is this a special occasion, father?”

“Any walk across the city of Roma is a special occasion.”

A litter carried them across the Field of Mars and deposited them at the new bridge that crossed the Tiber. Marcus wanted to gaze at the mausoleum without the distractions of a crowded ceremony. He had done so on many previous occasions, but that had been before Hadrian’s remains were placed inside. The building seemed different to him now, more complete. Hadrian had desired a monument for the ages. Marcus had no doubt that the emperor’s sepulchre would still be standing a thousand years hence.

Father and son walked to the Pantheon. They stepped inside to admire the statues of the gods and the extraordinary sense of light and space created by the lofty dome and the oculus that pierced it. Here, too, was a monument that would surely stand for all time, a worthy tribute to the gods and goddesses it celebrated.

Their stroll took them to the Flavian Amphitheatre, the greatest gathering place ever created, where all Roma came to see and be seen and to witness spectacles of life and death. Nearby stood the Colossus of Sol, once a statue of Nero, which was the closest Nero had come to being deified. Marcus remembered the ambition of Apollodorus to construct an equally colossal statue of Luna; that dream had died forever along with his father-in-law. Apollodorus was hardly ever talked about in their household, due to the circumstances of his death. It occurred to Marcus that Lucius knew very little about either of his grandfathers. Marcus decided that he must make a point of telling his son all he knew about their forebearers, even the mysterious great-uncle who had been a Christian.

From the amphitheatre it was only a short walk to the Temple of Venus and Roma. For years Marcus had labored to realize Hadrian’s novel conception of a two-fronted temple; the result was surely one of the most splendid buildings on earth. In the sanctuary of Roma, priests were performing a rite in honour of the city. In the sanctuary of Venus, a newly wedded couple burned incense at the altar, praying to the goddess to bless their union.

“Look how happy they are,” said Marcus. “You’re of an age to marry now, son. Should I expect that someday soon-”

“Perhaps, father.” The young man actually blushed. Thanks to his friendship with young Aurelius, chances were good that Lucius might join the house of Pinarius in marriage with one of the most prominent families in the city. Perhaps, once again, the Pinarii might serve as consuls and Vestals, as they had in the days of the kings and the first centuries of the Republic.

The steps of the temple took them down to the Sacred Way. They walked through the ancient Forum – found as bricks but left clad in marble by Augustus – and on to the much grander Forum of Trajan, where they ascended the spiral stairway to the top of Trajan’s Column. This was Marcus’s favourite view of the city. He remembered the day the statue of Trajan had been lowered into place, when disaster had very nearly struck. How young he had been then!

On the way back to their house on the Palatine, Marcus on a whim decided to drop by the Senate House, though there was no meeting that day. With Lucius beside him, he burned a bit of incense at the Altar of Victory and said a prayer. “Goddess, grant victory to Roma and defeat to her enemies. Watch over the empire which you delivered to Augustus. Protect Roma from all those who would cause her harm, whether from without or from within.”

Why had he asked Lucius to take this walk with him? Reading Suetonius had given him the idea. The details were all a jumble in his head, but Marcus had been left with a vague impression that the world had progressed since the days of Augustus. In the rush of daily life, one tended to forget what a special place Roma was. One tended to forget, too, how strange was the past, and how much better, in every way, was the world of the present moment. Thinking of the outlandish tales in Suetonius, remembering the stories his father had told him, and reflecting on his own memories of a life that had begun in slavery but delivered him into the company of emperors and the care of the Divine Youth, it seemed to Marcus that the world had passed through a series of terrible trials to arrive at something resembling a perfect state, or as perfect as mortals could make it. He had done his part to create the stable, contented, truly civilized world that would be inherited by his son’s generation. Time would pass, and the world of Hadrian would surely give way to the world of Marcus Aurelius – and then what?

Standing before the Altar of Victory with his son beside him, Senator Marcus Pinarius felt a rush of optimism. What did the future hold? Even the gods had no way of knowing.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Empire is a novel about life in the city of Rome from the reign of Augustus, the first emperor, to the height of the empire under Hadrian; it spans the years AD 14 to 141. In a previous novel, Roma, I followed the same family line from the origin of the city to the rise of Augustus and the end of the Roman Republic.

In some ways, the time span portrayed in Empire is one of the most accessible periods of history. The major historians, including Suetonius, Tacitus, and Plutarch, are widely available to readers around the world in the original Latin or Greek or in numerous translations, and even the most minor written sources (inscriptions, fragments of poems, etc.) can be tracked down by a determined reader. The archaeological evidence is very rich: the entire city of Pompeii was preserved when Vesuvius buried it in AD 79, some of the major buildings of the era are still standing (such as the Pantheon), and excavations in the city of Rome continue to yield fresh finds, like the chamber believed to be the Lupercale of Augustus, the discovery of which was announced in January 2007. More evidence comes from numismatics, and worldwide trade in Roman coins on the Internet has made large, sharp images of even the most obscure coins widely accessible. With all these sources to draw on, the period is much favoured by modern historians, who produce more books every year about the Roman Empire than any person could ever hope to read.

And yet, for the novelist, the period poses a special problem: the emperors. Or rather, emperor-centricism.

When I wrote Roma, I faced a very different challenge. The sources of information for the first thousand years of the city are far more limited, yet the narrative offered by those sources is almost unimaginably rich: legends of demigods and heroes, stories of social upheaval and violent class struggle, history as a pageant of powerful families, factions, and personalities all striving to fulfill their particular destinies. The challenge was somehow to find room for this teeming cast of characters in a single novel.

With the end of the Republic and the rise of autocratic rule, the storyline changes. Class conflict and individual heroes (and villains) recede. It’s all about the emperors: their personalities, their families, their sexual habits, their often flamboyant lives and their sometimes bloody deaths. The story of Rome becomes a sequence of biographies of the men who ruled the empire. Everything and everyone else is secondary to the autocrat.

That’s alright, if you want the emperors to be the focus of your fiction, as in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius or Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. But autocracies, where all power is concentrated in very few hands, where even the boldest generals serve at the whim of their master and even the best poets bend their talents to flatter the autocrat, do not produce the kind of larger-than-life heroes who populated Roma, like Coriolanus or Scipio Africanus. Instead, stripped of any hope of being able to affect the course of human events – or even their own lives – people seek diversion in spectacle and empowerment through magic, or they turn inwards, pursuing mental or spiritual enlightenment rather than military glory or political action. Such a milieu makes for a very different sort of story than the one told in Roma. Heroes and villains give way to survivors and seekers.

It’s popular these days to compare Rome to the United States, but life in the Roman Empire was probably more like life in the repressive Soviet Union. The Soviet empire never found its Trajan or Hadrian, but it’s not hard to picture Stalin as Domitian.

Readers of Empire who wish to read the original sources can begin with Suetonius, who wrote biographies of the first twelve Caesars, from Julius to Domitian. Plutarch wrote biographies of Otho and Galba. Tacitus in his Annals and Histories wrote about the period from Tiberius to the Year of Four Emperors. We have no ancient biography of Nerva or Trajan, but the thread is picked up in a work called the Historia Augusta, which tells us about Hadrian and his successors. Given the biases and methods of these ancient authors, there is reason to doubt the veracity of all these works. Making sense of their mixture of the true and not-true keeps modern historians busy.

Dio Cassius is another important source, though the books of his Roman History that cover the period after Claudius survive only in fragments and in abridged form. Josephus’s The Jewish War describes the bitter conflict between Rome and Jerusalem. Pliny’s Natural History is full of historical details, hopefully more accurate than his scientific observations. The letters written by his nephew, Pliny the Younger, give us a vivid portrait of his times, including the eruption of Vesuvius, the paranoid reign of Domitian, and Trajan’s “ask not, tell not” policy regarding the troublesome Christians. Our major source for the life of Apollonius of Tyana is a fanciful account by Philostratus, who lived a hundred years later; purportedly a biography, it might better be called a novel.

Poets and playwrights also provide many historical details and images of daily life. Under Augustus, we have Virgil, Horace, and Ovid; under Nero, Petronius, Seneca, and Lucan; under later emperors, Quintilian, Martial, and Juvenal.

The joke about two fifteen-year-olds versus one thirty-year-old comes from the oldest known joke book, a Greek text called the Philogelos (The Laughter-Lover). I first heard it from Mary Beard when she delivered the annual Sather Lecture series at the University of California at Berkeley in 2008. The joke as originally recorded does not mention Trajan, but it suits him. (A later emperor, Julian, made his own joke about Trajan in his satire The Caesars; when Trajan visits the Olympians, “Zeus had better look out, if he wants to keep Ganymede for himself!”)

The sophist Dio of Prusa, who appears in the novel, is better known as Dio Chrysostom (“Golden-Mouthed,” an epithet applied to him by later generations). It is Dio, in his Discourse 21, who tells us that Sporus had something to do with the death of Nero, who otherwise might have continued to reign. This is J. W. Cohoon’s translation, with italics added: “It was solely on account of this wantonness of his, however, that he [Nero] lost his life – I mean the way he treated the eunuch [Sporus]. For the latter in anger disclosed the Emperor’s designs to his retinue; and so they revolted from him and compelled him to make away with himself as best he could. Indeed the truth about this has not come out even yet; for so far as the rest of his subjects were concerned, there was nothing to prevent his continuing to be Emperor for all time, seeing that even now everybody wishes he were still alive.”

Where poems are quoted in the novel, the translations are my own. Tacitus (Annals, 15.70) tells us that Lucan spoke his own verse as his dying words; historians conjecture he quoted Pharsalia, 4:516-17. The poem by Statius casting Earinus as the cup-bearer of Domitian is Silvae, 3.4. Earinus’s song is from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things); a previous version appeared in my novel Arms of Nemesis. Martial’s poem celebrating the arrival of Trajan in Rome is Epigrams, 10.6. The lines by Virgil used to describe Ceionius are from the Aeneid, 6:869-70. The poem by Hadrian is known to us from his biography in the Historia Augusta.

Almost all the sources cited above can be found, in English translation and in searchable formats, on the Internet; one merely has to open a search engine and start looking. My own research led me almost daily to Bill Thayer’s site LacusCurtius, a remarkable fountainhead of information that includes the texts of Suetonius, Tacitus, Plutarch, the Historia Augusta, Dio Cassius, Dio Chrysostom, Samuel Ball Platner’s A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, William Smith’s A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiq uities, and much more, beautifully presented and intelligently annotated. The home page is here: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/ home. html.

Another site of special interest is Jona Lendering’s Livius (www.livius.org). His illustrated text of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius has become an old, dear friend. (I plan to post more links of interest to the readers of Empire at my own website, www.stevensaylor.com.)

In uncertain times, longtime relationships matter more than ever. Keith Kahla has been my editor since 1994, Alan Nevins my agent since 1995, and Rick Solomon my partner since 1976. Thank you all. And special thanks to my friend Gaylan DuBose, author of Farrago Latina, who kindly read and commented on the galleys.

Another old, dear friend – though we never met – is the late Michael Grant. When I was a boy growing up in Goldthwaite, Texas, Grant’s were the first serious books about the ancient world I encountered. As my interest grew, I discovered more of his works; wherever my curiosity led, it seemed there was a book by Michael Grant on the subject – from biographies of Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Nero, and Jesus to books about the Etruscans, gladiators, Roman coinage, and the ancient historians themselves. It was Grant’s translation and notes for Cicero’s Murder Trials (specifically the oration for Sextus Roscius) that inspired to me write my first novel, Roman Blood. Catilinas Riddle, The Venus Throw, and A Murder on the Appian Way (upon which Grant kindly commented) were inspired by his translations of Cicero in Selected Political Speeches. Deep into my research for Empire, I found myself without a compass in the brambles of the Roman thought-world, where astrology, Stoicism, the ancient gods, and the new cults all become tangled together; it was Grant who showed me a path with two brilliant books, The World of Rome and The Climax of Rome. With gratitude for all that Michael Grant has given me, and continues to give me, I dedicate this book to his memory.