False God of Rome

CHAPTER XXIII

A short chorus of bucinae echoed around the Forum Romanum, followed by the mass barking of centurions bringing five cohorts of the Praetorian Guard to simultaneous attention with a single crack of hobnails on stone. Along the crowd-lined Via Sacra trotted two alae of Praetorian cavalry, keeping pace with the star of the spectacle, Caligula, fifty feet above them and a hundred paces to their left, as he traversed his bridge from the Palatine to the Capitoline Hill riding Incitatus and dressed as Vulcan: a single-shouldered tunic, a pileus and brandishing a smith’s hammer in one hand and a large clamshell in the other. Behind him followed ten naked women painted gold, representing the slave girls whom Vulcan had forged out of the precious metal to serve him.

All around the vicinity of the Forum bonfires burned into which people threw live fish or small animals — rats, mice, puppies and kittens — as a sacrifice to the god of fire in the hope that he would spare the city from burning during the hot, dry summer. In their capacity as the city’s fire fighters the Vigiles kept a close eye on every bonfire.

From the steps of the Curia, Vespasian and the rest of the Senate watched Caligula progress onto the Capitoline, dismount and then descend the Gemonian Stairs past the Temple of Concordia and stop before the Volcanal, the sacred precinct to Vulcan, and one of the oldest shrines in Rome. Here, before the altar, shaded by a cypress tree, there waited a red calf and a red boar ready to be sacrificed to the god whose festival it was that day.

‘Having made his peace with Neptune I suppose that our Emperor is now ensuring that Vulcan doesn’t burn the city down in his absence,’ Vespasian observed as the sacrificial knife flashed in Caligula’s hand despatching the calf.

‘Or send fire out from his smithy under Vesuvius to burn his bridge,’ Sabinus muttered.

‘Wrong mountain, dear boy,’ Gaius corrected him as the boar collapsed spurting blood. ‘Vulcan lives under Etna in Sicilia. Anyway, he only does that every time his wife, Venus, is unfaithful to him, so if we wanted to avoid an eruption in Sicilia perhaps it’s her that we should be sacrificing to, in order to ensure her good behaviour.’

Vespasian grinned at his uncle and brother. ‘I should certainly offer a sacrifice of thanks to her after Flavia’s behaviour this morning.’

‘You should indeed,’ Gaius agreed.

Sabinus looked confused. ‘Who’s Flavia?’

‘She, dear boy, is the woman whom your brother intends to marry. The same woman who, when Vespasian turned up soon after dawn, having spent the night with Caenis, gave him a kiss and asked if he’d had a pleasant evening before calmly finishing her breakfast and then, having packed, left for her father’s house, with my letter opening the marriage negotiations, and with no more than a warning to your younger brother that he should ensure that he has something left for their wedding night next month.’

Sabinus stared in disbelief at Vespasian who shrugged innocently. ‘She must be a very stupid woman if she didn’t realise that he’d spent the night with someone else.’

‘Oh, she knew all right; in fact, she even met Caenis yesterday evening and explained to her the rules.’

Vespasian was alarmed. ‘The rules, Uncle?’

‘Yes, dear boy, the rules.’

‘What are the rules?’

‘The rules are simple: Flavia has first call on you if she is entertaining, wanting a holiday, needing to discipline children, wishing to take a walk around the city or trying to get pregnant. At any other time Caenis is welcome to have you but not for more than four nights in a row, going down to three once the first child is two and more in need of a regular paternal figure, and then two once it is seven.’

Sabinus guffawed, much to the outrage of the senators nearby; he quickly controlled his face into one more befitting a religious ceremony. ‘It sounds like they’ve parcelled him up very neatly.’

‘Oh, they both knew very well what they wanted. They were icily polite to each other, complementing one another’s hair and trinkets and suchlike, but they came to a peaceful understanding despite their obvious mutual loathing; it was a wonder to behold and confirmed to me the wisdom of my lifestyle.’

Vespasian was indignant. ‘And you let them negotiate about me as if I were a gladiator that they’d both taken a fancy to.’

‘I didn’t let them do anything, dear boy,’ Gaius replied, shrugging his shoulders, ‘it’s nothing to do with me; I just observed. You’re the one who’s insisting on having a complicated domestic arrangement. I just hope that you don’t have to pay too high a price for it, both emotionally and financially.’

A roar from the crowds brought their attention back to the day’s proceedings; the auspices having evidently been declared favourable, Caligula had mounted a quadriga, with Incitatus now installed in his place on the left of the team, and was leaving the Forum followed by the cavalry alae. Cohort by cohort, the Praetorians began to march out after them to the cheers of the crowds.

‘I think that their enthusiasm is less for the spectacle and more for the fact that once Caligula’s driven over his bridge the ships can be used to bring some much needed food to their bellies,’ Gaius observed as they and the rest of the Senate began to follow. ‘Let’s hope that we can get this sorry affair over with quickly.’

Two miles outside the Porta Capena, in a field alongside the Via Appia, the senators’ carriages waited with their wives already installed and being fussed over by slaves in the ever growing heat. The chaos of reuniting over five hundred men with their vehicles lasted for more than an hour and was not helped by Caligula riding his chariot, followed by a turma of grinning Praetorian troopers, up and down the rows of carriages and lashing out with his whip in an effort to speed up the process. Many a mule team bolted, dragging their burdens, with their screaming passengers, over the rough ground to an inevitably calamitous conclusion.

‘I’m over here, sirs,’ Magnus’ voice eventually shouted over the din.

Vespasian, Sabinus and Gaius followed the voice and were relieved to see Magnus in the driving seat of a covered carriage drawn by four sturdy-looking mules; next to him sat Aenor and another young German slave boy. A horse each for Vespasian and Sabinus were tethered to the carriage’s rear.

‘Magnus, gods be praised,’ Gaius shouted back, breaking into a fast waddle, as the two slave boys dismounted to see to their master’s needs. ‘I didn’t think we’d ever find you in this madness.’

As they reached the safety of their carriage Caligula appeared in his chariot, lashing at a group of elderly and bewildered senators running alongside him. ‘Why do the old always slow down the young?’ he bellowed at them, giving the rearmost of his quarry a furious beating on the back, sending him tumbling to the ground with a scream to disappear beneath the hoofs of the following turma. ‘Useless old shit,’ he called out with a grin as he caught sight of Vespasian and Sabinus and brought his chariot to a skilful halt, letting the rest of the senators run on. ‘His family have probably only been in the Senate for a generation or two; no breeding, you see, dulls the memory. He probably couldn’t even remember where his arsehole was; it’s no wonder that he was having such trouble finding his carriage.’

‘I’m sure that you’re right, Divine Gaius,’ Vespasian agreed, not wishing to point out that he too was only a second-generation senator.

Caligula beamed at him. ‘At least you all managed to be ready on time; you’ll join me at the front of the procession as we near the bay. I’m looking forward to seeing the wonder on your faces when you first see my bridge.’ His eyes opened even wider with pleasure. ‘And you Sabinus, I’m especially looking forward to seeing yours; I’ve got a lovely surprise for you.’ With a crack of his whip over his teams’ withers he accelerated away with the turma following, leaving the crumpled and bloody body of the old senator for his family to reclaim.

Gaius shook with suppressed fury. ‘This is going too far; riding down senators and leaving them in the dirt as if they were fleeing savages rather than men who have served Rome all their lives. It’s an outrage!’

‘Uncle,’ Vespasian said, putting a calming hand on his shoulder, ‘remember your own good advice to me.’

Gaius took a breath and got himself back under control. ‘You’re right, dear boy: stay alive and don’t let your sense of honour overrule your judgement. Let it be someone else that he pushes over the edge; with behaviour like that it won’t take long.’

‘At least with behaviour like that you can see it coming,’ Magnus pointed out. ‘You know what to expect, and can accept it before it even happens; it makes it easier to control yourself. It’s when things take you by surprise that you lose your judgement.’ He stared darkly at Sabinus who was looking pleased with himself, having been singled out for favour so conspicuously by the Emperor. ‘And if there’s one thing I wouldn’t like it would be Caligula preparing a surprise for me, if you take my meaning?’

The procession south along the Via Appia, however, was far from surprising: it was long, hot and very uncomfortable. Caligula had impetuously decided to start out the day after Vespasian had brought him the breastplate. There had been no time to consider the complex logistical problems of moving so many people through a region already suffering from the privations caused by Caligula’s impounding of every ship entering Italian waters. By the fifth day the Praetorian Guardsmen’s marching rations had run out and any food that the senatorial party had brought along was either finished or had gone off in the baking heat of high summer.

By the sixth day the progress had not even reached the halfway point due to Caligula taking a sudden interest in the civic doings of every town they passed. He would halt the mile-long column as his litter passed through the Forum, and from beneath the shade of his swan-down canopy dispense justice — as he saw it — and decree new civic laws while his quartermasters stripped the community bare not only of their new harvest but also of their livestock and winter stores. The column would then move on an hour or so later, leaving a handful of decapitated, crucified or maimed criminals, new laws concerning the sacrifice of peacocks or suchlike to their emperor deity, and a community unable to feed itself for the coming months, but in possession of an imperial promissory note for such an eye-watering amount of money that the civic fathers knew it would never be honoured.

In the evenings Caligula would order the Praetorians to build a full marching camp with ditch and palisade as if they were on campaign in hostile territory — which indeed, after his activities during the day and the felling of trees for miles around, they generally were. Unless they were one of the few to have had the foresight to bring their own tent, the senators and their wives were obliged to sleep in their sweltering carriages parked tightly together in one corner of the camp with no hope of any seclusion. The one consolation of this arrangement for the women was being able to take advantage of the limited privacy of the latrines built especially for them. Their husbands, who had generally all served under the eagles, had, like any soldier, no problems relieving themselves in the open during a rest halt. For the women, however, this was an ignominy too hideous to bear, and consequently their pained expressions and very short tempers by the end of each day were the product of more than just being jolted around in their carriages for the past few hours.

Vespasian and his companions tried to remain unobtrusive, anxious to have as little to do with Caligula’s entertainments as possible. Those senators who suffered the misfortune of being summoned to his huge pavilion in the evenings inevitably came back with tales of mutilation, sodomy and rape, as well as other excesses that they and their mostly hysterical wives refused to — or were simply unable to — find words for.

Their success in avoiding Caligula’s notice and invitations, perversely, gave rise to another worry: why had he not invited them? The Emperor counted Vespasian and Sabinus among his closest friends and, by the time they were just one day away from their destination, not to have been asked to share one of his lavish dinners, however distasteful the entertainment, had started to play on Sabinus’ mind.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it, dear boy,’ Gaius boomed from the relative comfort of his cushion-infested carriage, ‘he seemed pleased enough with you the last time you saw him outside Rome.’

‘But that’s just it, Uncle,’ Sabinus replied, riding alongside. ‘He knows that we’re here, he’s under the unfortunate misapprehension that we’re his friends and yet he’s ignored us for fifteen days now; what have we done to offend him?’

‘You’ll get a summons to join him for the final day later this evening, as he promised.’

‘But why has he waited this long?’

‘Perhaps he doesn’t want to ruin the surprise that he has waiting for you,’ Vespasian ventured, enjoying a gust of cooling wind blowing in off the calm Tyrrhenian Sea just a hundred paces to their right.

‘Very funny, you little shit.’

‘I thought so,’ Magnus agreed.

Sabinus scowled at him and then turned back to his brother. ‘The point is: I would rather have the dubious security of knowing that I’m in Caligula’s favour rather than worrying that I’ve done something to displease him and live in fear of being executed at any moment.’

Vespasian grinned. ‘At least that might get me a dinner invitation.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Clemens told me that a couple of months ago Caligula ordered a father to attend his son’s execution; the father naturally tried to get out of it by claiming ill-health so he sent a litter for him. Afterwards he invited the poor man to dinner and spent the evening trying to cheer him up by telling jokes. Perhaps he’ll extend the same courtesy to a brother.’

‘If he does, I’m sure that you’d have no problems laughing at his jokes having watched my blood flow.’

A long rumble of Praetorian cornu signalled the end of the penultimate day’s march, the column halted and the business of making camp commenced. As the Flavian party waited in the shade of their carriage a horseman made his way down the crowded road towards them. In just a tunic and wearing the wide-brimmed floppy sunhat that the cavalry auxiliaries had favoured in Cyrenaica he was evidently not a Praetorian. As he passed he glanced in the brothers’ direction and suddenly pulled his horse around.

‘Sabinus, the Emperor sent me to find you,’ the rider announced, taking off his hat. ‘He wishes for you and your party to present yourselves to him in the morning.’

Vespasian stared at the rider in shocked recognition.

‘Thank you, Corvinus,’ Sabinus replied, stepping forward to grasp the proffered forearm. ‘We’ll be there at dawn. I haven’t seen you on the progress, where have you been hiding?’

‘I’ve only just caught up with it; I had some business to attend to.’

Sabinus turned and indicated to Vespasian. ‘Do you know my brother, Titus Flavius Vespasianus?’

Corvinus’ eyes narrowed fractionally. ‘Oh yes, we’ve met. Until tomorrow, then.’ He turned his horse and sped away.

Vespasian looked at his brother in apprehension. ‘How do you know him?’

‘Corvinus? We live on the same street on the Aventine and have often found ourselves walking home together from the Senate since I got back. We’ve become quite friendly in a short time. But I’m surprised that he’s never mentioned knowing you; he’s asked about the family and I mentioned your name.’

‘What else have you told him?’

‘Oh, nothing that I wouldn’t mention to any senator who makes a polite enquiry: where we come from, who our parents are, who my wife’s family are; that sort of thing.’

‘Did you tell him about Caenis?’

‘I don’t think so; why?’

‘He has no cause to like me; in fact, he’s threatened me.’

‘Why would that be, dear boy?’ Gaius asked, looking concernedly in Corvinus’ direction.

‘He was a cavalry prefect while I was in Cyrenaica, I made a couple of decisions that he didn’t like — and perhaps he was right. Do you know him?’

‘Marcus Valerius Messala Corvinus? Of course I know of him. It would seem that you’ve made yourself an enemy who has the potential to be rather influential. Provided his future brother-in-law manages to stay alive, his sister could well end up as empress.’

‘How could-’ Vespasian stopped suddenly and sucked in his breath as he remembered a pair of dark eyes glaring at him as he laughed at one of Caligula’s jokes.

Gaius nodded gravely. ‘Yes, dear boy, his sister is Claudius’ future wife: Valeria Messalina.’

It was with a certain amount of trepidation that the brothers approached Caligula’s pavilion the following morning in the pale dawn. All around them the business of dismantling the camp was progressing apace and smoke and steam from freshly doused cooking fires swirled on the warm sea breeze.

Caligula’s close entourage were already gathering to greet him and stood around the entrance murmuring in small groups.

The brothers dismounted and handed their horses to a couple of slaves; from over by the pavilion entrance they saw a familiar face detaching himself from a group consisting of Claudius, Asiaticus, Pallas and, much to Vespasian’s unease, Narcissus.

‘I wondered if I would see you two here,’ Corbulo said, walking over to them.

‘Corbulo, you’re well, I trust,’ Vespasian replied, grasping his forearm.

‘As well as can be expected for a man who has had to build a three-and-a-half mile-extension of the Via Appia over more than two thousand ships in less than two months.’ He gripped Sabinus’ arm. ‘That’s the last time that I make a speech in the Senate complaining about the state of the roads.’

Vespasian had to suppress a grin. ‘Is that why he gave you the task?’

Corbulo’s long, aristocratic face looked downcast. ‘Yes, he said if I didn’t like the roads as they were then I could build him a nice new one. Now my family will be associated with the biggest waste of money ever, and to compound our dishonour my whore of a half-sister has been disgracing herself by cavorting in public with the Emperor at any and every opportunity; she’s even got herself pregnant by him, or at least she claims it’s by him.’

‘We hadn’t heard,’ Sabinus said sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry for your shame.’

‘Well, you’ve both been away and I’d rather that you heard it from me. Anyway, she’s been down here for the last few days. Caligula sent her to me to ensure that she rests during the pregnancy because if it goes its full term he plans to marry her. Although judging by the tired looks of the turma of Praetorian cavalry that escorted her here I don’t think that she had much rest on the way down.’

‘So is the road ready?’ Vespasian asked, anxious to change the subject before the grin managed to overcome his self-control.

‘Of course it’s ready,’ Corbulo snapped, ‘I’m a Domitius, we complete our tasks, however ludicrous.’

‘Yes of course, that’s why the Emperor chose you.’

‘I can’t say that it was made any easier by being forced to work with that jumped-up freedman, Narcissus. The man’s intolerably addicted to power; he even tried to give me an order once, can you imagine it?’

‘I’m sure Caligula will reward you well for your pains.’

Corbulo puffed up with pride. ‘He’s nominating me as his colleague in the consulship next year; that will go some way to restoring the family’s honour.’

Vespasian thought it best not to tell Corbulo that Caligula was also thinking of nominating his horse. ‘He’s nominated me a praetor.’

Corbulo looked down his highborn nose at Vespasian. ‘It’s most unusual for a New Man to be given that honour in the first year that he’s eligible for it. What have you done to deserve that?’

‘Oh, the same sort of ludicrous things as you; just obeying Caligula’s will.’

The crowd around the pavilion suddenly went silent as Clemens appeared from within. ‘Senators and People of Rome,’ he called out, ‘I give you your Emperor, the Divine Gaius, Lord of land and sea.’

‘Hail Divine Gaius, Lord of land and sea!’ the crowd began to obediently chant.

After a few choruses the pavilion flaps opened and Caligula appeared wearing Alexander’s breastplate over which a cloak-like chlamys of purple silk, pinned on the right shoulder, fluttered in the breeze; his head was adorned with a crown of oak leaves and he held a gilded sword and a shield of the argyraspides with the sixteen-pointed star of Macedon inlaid upon it. At the sight of him the intensity of the chant grew for he did indeed look like a young god.

Caligula raised his sword and shield to the heavens and held his head back soaking up the laudatory chant. ‘Today,’ he called out eventually, ‘I complete my greatest achievement so far. I will ride my chariot across the water in fellowship with my brother Neptune; our feud is at an end!’

Despite being uncertain as to the nature of the feud the crowd cheered in relief.

‘Once this day is completed we will return to Rome to prepare for a year of conquest to start next spring. To show the world that I am the true Lord of land and sea I will lead our armies into Germania and exorcise the shame that still sullies Roman honour by retrieving the one remaining lost eagle from the Teutoburg Forest disaster: that of the Seventeenth Legion. When that is done we shall proceed north to the edge of the known world and, in concert with my brother Neptune, I will lead our armies across the sea and conquer, for me and for Rome, Britannia.’

Even Vespasian found himself getting carried away by the magnitude of the idea along with the rest of the crowd: here at last was an enterprise that would not be a vast exercise in squandering money, it would be for the greater glory and profit of Rome. Perhaps, just perhaps, the young Emperor had found a way to satisfy at the same time his desire for the grandiose statement — no matter what the cost in lives and coin — and his subjects’ desire for conquest and renown.

‘Follow me, my friends,’ Caligula shouted, ‘follow me to the bridge and we shall ride across to the victory and the glory that awaits us on the other side.’

For the first time in many years Vespasian followed Caligula willingly.