Gods and Legions

I

What a terrible thing, Brother, is a civil war. One week your dominion is at peace, the enemy on all borders has been subdued, the army is draining marshes for farmland and repairing fortifications, the Emperor is satisfied, and the Church is expanding; then with one fell blow, one ill-advised order from on high, all is a shambles. One's life is uprooted and overturned, the Empire is on the brink of schism, and death is all around. One week, within which one day was the turning point, though I would be hard-pressed to determine precisely which day that was, as all seem to run together in an evil blur; and within that day a critical hour, minute, and second. Before which point, if the fatal order had not been issued, all would have remained the same; after which infinitesimal lapse, all is lost, or gained, depending upon the side you are on, and on that side, depending upon whether you are a general who will be allowed to retire peacefully to an estate in Pannonia, or a mud-booted infantryman, in which case it hardly matters on which side you fight, for the end result will be the same either way, and the twenty years' service in exchange for retirement, a thick-armed barbarian wife, and two acres of bottomland for a garden are as impossible as Perseus' flight to the sun. A week is all it takes, Brother, for God to create the universe, for civil war to erupt, for a plot of beans to sprout in the summer. A day is all that is needed to watch the gladiator battles in the circus, for a baby to be born. An hour to attend a Communion service, or for that same baby to die. A minute to tell a joke, to say a prayer, to ask forgiveness, to utter a betrayal. A second for a wasp to sting, for an archer to loose an arrow, for a murderer — or an Emperor — to snuff out a life. Yet that insignificant period of time is impossible to predict in advance, or its inexorable progress to be stopped, and despite every good intent, that which God hath decreed is made manifest, and the wasp stings, and the war erupts.

Like the deified Julius four hundred years before, Julian had crossed his Rubicon, yet if the first Caesar had known what he was about when he took this fatal step, the same could not be immediately said of his successor. For though the Gauls praised and acclaimed him as the savior of their nation, and indeed of the Empire, this was because most of them had never been farther than twenty miles from Paris and could scarcely imagine an empire much bigger than their own country. There were very few rays of sun on the horizon; all of Julian's outlook was darkened by clouds. He could indeed boast of having raised and trained a crack army in the past five years, but so too had Constantius during his own reign, and his troops numbered four times as many as all that could be mustered in Gaul, and he had the treasure of Rome and Constantinople and all the mighty cities of the East to support him if any more were needed. If the Gallic people and troops could scarcely look beyond their own day-to-day existence, Julian and his advisers could; and our prospects were not promising.

For lack of a better strategy, he resolved to stall, to gain as much time as he could to solidify his local base, while softening Constantius, even dissuading him from his anger. He entered into direct negotiations with the Emperor, explaining to him in a respectful letter precisely how his acclamation of Augustus of equal rank to the Emperor's own had occurred, and stating his desire to come to an understanding. We spent days drafting and honing the wording of this missive, to convey a tone neither timid nor arrogant, continuing to recognize Constantius as senior ruler of the rest of the Empire, but requesting in return recognition of Julian as the Supreme Ruler in the West. In what I thought was an additional fine touch, he decided to have the letter personally delivered to the Emperor by old Eutherius, a man whom Constantius had long known, and one of the few men in Gaul whom he respected and trusted. He issued similar explanatory letters to the Senates of Rome and Athens, and in a characteristic anachronism, a nod to his desire to safeguard the ancient morals and customs, he sent copies to the Spartans and Corinthians as well, though it had been six centuries, at least, since their cities had carried any political weight in the world.

The gesture was wasted. Eutherius and his party were impeded and harassed every step of the way by hostile customs agents and other imperial authorities. After they finally crossed the Bosphorus and presented the letter to the Emperor, who was then visiting in Caesaria of Cappadocia, Constantius broke into a murderous rage, screaming at them and spitting from his flabby, unwieldy lips, sending his court diving for cover and causing even the stalwart old eunuch to fear for his life. Without even questioning Eutherius, denying him the right to explain the letter, the Emperor ordered him to leave, and Eutherius scuttled back to Gaul and advised Julian to prepare for war immediately.

The old adviser's haste, however, was not warranted, at least not yet. Shortly after the interview in Cappadocia, the Emperor came to his senses and determined that of the two threats arising on either side of him, the newly acclaimed Augustus in the West and the Persians in the East, the Persians were the more dangerous. Accordingly, he too adopted stalling tactics and engaged in his own exchange of letters, demanding that Julian immediately renounce his title of Augustus and retain only his early, subordinate authority in Gaul, and all would be forgiven, though no mention was made of the terms of service of the Gallic troops. This letter was delivered by a group of court officials, all of whom had been appointed by Constantius to various senior military and civil posts in Gaul, in an effort to deny Julian the right to fill these positions with men of his own choosing.

I shall make a long story short, Brother, for almost the whole of that year of Our Lord of 360, and half the next, was spent in these diplomatic skirmishes and thinly veiled insults. Constantius became bogged down with his diplomatic and military campaigns against the Great King Sapor, drawing new levies of troops to fill the gaps in his legions, increasing the numbers of cavalry, imposing heavy tax burdens on all classes without distinction, and drawing huge quantities of provisions, men, and treasure from Italy and all the other provinces under his control.

Julian, meanwhile, spent all his time strengthening his army, recruiting auxiliaries from both sides of the Rhine, tightening the collection of taxes to ensure that every copper due was paid, and assigning his troops to rigorous training and mock battles. The Gauls took this in good stride, indeed cheered him and encouraged him in these ventures, to the point of even volunteering for him large sums of silver and gold beyond what was due in tribute or taxation, which he initially refused, but eventually accepted when they practically forced him to take it.

Dozens of times, however, I urged him to caution. 'Julian,' I would say on a typical occasion, while reviewing correspondence from the garrisons with him, or studying our respective texts at night, 'with the military you would do well to be discreet. Every company you add to your legions is fodder for the Emperor's spies to report. He already suspects your intent. You are eliminating your options, making it all the more difficult to turn back.'

Normally he would nod in silence or simply ignore me. On the final occasion that I made such a warning, however, he slammed down the codex of laws he was reading and stood.

'Damn it, Caesarius, you underestimate me, just as General Marcellus and Sallustius and the others do!' His voice was controlled but tinged with anger. 'You and I — we have fought together, grieved together — you buried my own son! Do you know me so little? Have all my efforts to preserve Gaul, to glorify Rome, passed over your head? You still assume I nurture the option of turning back. You are wrong. There is only one direction, forward to the end, and only God knows whether I will be Emperor or a dead man. But I will not rule jointly with Constantius. I cannot apply philosophy to a man who has none. There can be no more cohabitation with the man who killed my son.'

'But, Julian,' I protested, 'the letters you have written him… the embassies you have sent. Surely something-'

'Surely nothing,' he interrupted hoarsely, in a voice barely contained. 'Don't mistake my delays for hesitation. I am building my strength, Caesarius. Time favors me, and I will not be rushed on this enterprise.'

At this I was silent, merely staring at him as I pondered the implications. He breathed slowly and deeply for a few moments, his eyes locked on mine the whole time, and again I noticed their strange light, the fanatical gleam that had so disturbed me the first time I saw it, at Strasbourg, when he was contemplating the execution of the Beast. Finally looking away, he gathered his composure, lowered himself slowly back to his seat, and bent his head to the codex he had been reading before I had spoken. I sat thunderstruck at the transformation I had witnessed, from calm strategist a few moments before, to a man consumed by a furious hatred, and back again to studious analyst. I rose to leave, but before I made my way to the door, he had one more point.

'Caesarius.' His voice was soft but penetrating, his gaze piercing.

I turned warily. He was my friend, but, yes, I feared. 'Julian?'

'When you underestimate me, you underestimate Rome itself.'

The following summer, Julian was told by his scouts that Illyricum, the province above Italy and just to the east of Gaul, had been practically depleted of legions by the call-ups to the East, and that there remained only small garrisons to defend the major cities and military facilities. With his negotiations with Constantius at a dead end, and with the Emperor's forces on the verge of routing King Sapor in Persia, Julian felt that now was the time to act, before his rival was again able to return his full attention to the problem of Gaul. He made his move.

He resolved boldly, and his advisers said foolishly, to take all of Illyricum in a single pass, which would then give him a powerful springboard to control Italy to the south and even take Constantinople itself while the rival Emperor was still absent. Like a stage magician, his task was to pull vast amounts of material out of a seemingly empty sleeve, and I do not exaggerate when I claim his sleeves were empty: after subtracting the troops needed to be left behind to garrison the border towns along the Rhine against the Alemanni, his total forces amounted to scarcely over twenty-three thousand men — a laughable army compared with the resources at Constantius' command, and frightening to consider that with it he intended to conquer all the territories from Gaul to Constantinople and then swipe the most powerful city on earth from under the Emperor's nose.

In an attempt to give the illusion of a wide-ranging, sweeping attack across Europe by a crushing force, he divided his troops into three commands. Two each were of ten thousand men under his generals Nevitta and Jovinus. The third, a mere three thousand troops, the cream of his cavalry, the swiftest horse the Gallic forces could muster, he kept for himself. The three armies he assigned to three principal routes: Nevitta was to cross through Raetia and Noricum and descend along the course of the Danube into Pannonia. Jovinus' troops were to storm across northern Italy and then up to meet with Nevitta at the Danube. Julian himself would strike out across still barely charted territory, on the longest and most difficult trek of the three, through the heart of the Black Forest, which concealed the source of the Danube and in its northern reaches still harbored Germanic tribes hostile to Roman rule.

Of the three routes into which the army was split, not only was Julian's the most challenging, it was also the most frightening, for the Black Forest was a region into which Roman armies rarely ventured. It is said that there is no one who has even reached to the extremity of that forest, though men have journeyed through for weeks, to the point of madness, and in fact it is uncertain where the forest even begins. By so dispersing his forces, Julian was emulating a strategy employed to great effect by Alexander the Great, giving the impression of vast numbers of troops and spreading terror everywhere. The three armies were to meet at Sirmium, the capital of Lower Pannonia, a rustic, provincial city on a small tributary of the Danube.

It was determined, with much discussion and considerable regret on my part, that I would not accompany him in his attack through the Black Forest. There would be no occasion for medical treatment on his lightning thrust through Germany, he said — if wounded, he would either ignore the injury or die of it. Rather, it was decided that because of my own administrative and strategic skills, I would be attached to Nevitta's unit as a senior adviser. My role was to maintain the courier contacts and communications with the home base in Gaul, and coordinate the three armies' joint arrival in Sirmium, which we had scheduled for the ides of October.

Before departing, I took the time to visit fat Oribasius, whom I had not seen for several weeks. Though we were as unalike in as many ways as two men can be — of different generations, different schools of professional practice, different religions — still, I had always found his company enjoyable and his conversation stimulating, and I wished to bid him farewell. With the exception of the days leading up to the acclamation, when Julian had summoned Oribasius for a series of private consultations, I had almost completely supplanted my colleague in his physician's services to the Caesar. This was ostensibly because I was more fit to travel on the forced marches, though Julian had often told me privately that he also mistrusted Oribasius' skills because of his antiquated theories, and that he kept him in his court merely for the sake of old friendship. Still, Oribasius seemed not to mind the diminishment of his duties in the least, and always had a friendly word for me.

Knocking on the door of the field hut he maintained as a small camp clinic for treating the garrison once or twice a week, I poked my head in.

'Oribasius? I understand you're remaining in Paris. I came to wish you well. I leave today.'

He stood up, red-faced and startled, from the table at which he was sitting, which was stacked high with dozens of sheets of identical large-lettered texts. These he was systematically folding one by one and laying in the roaring fire he had built in the small fireplace. The room was heated to a stifling temperature. He limped over to me, his pink, fat face perspiring, but wreathed in smiles.

'Good for you, Caesarius!' he said. 'The adventure is only beginning. Would that I myself could complete what I started!'

What he had started? I paused in puzzlement and looked over to the table where he had been sitting, with the piles of broadsheets, all upside down to me so I could not read them from where I stood. It occurred to me that I had never actually seen Oribasius read or write anything — in fact, I had often wondered if he was illiterate, and his talk of compiling a vast medical encyclopedia merely a sham. The stacks of sheets were strange to find in the camp hut, and it was even stranger to find him burning valuable parchment, but a light was slowly dawning.

'Oribasius,' I said, pointing to the stacks of texts on his table, 'what have you been burning in here so diligently?'

He smiled mysteriously, but shifted his considerable bulk slightly so as to hide my view of the texts. Though upside down, their letters, I saw, were large and crudely written, and it would be easy for me to make them out if I could just stand a little closer…

'Nothing important,' he chuckled, attempting to disguise the slight wince of alarm as he saw where my attention was directed. 'A few medical texts of your misguided Hippocratics,' he joked.

I shouldered past him, attempting to mask my sudden suspicion with a lame joke of my own: 'Oribasius, I didn't even know you could write! And here you are practicing your ABC's.'

Moving to the side of the table I stopped short as I saw the top sheet on the stack, and the crude Latin words instantly jumped out at my eyes: We are to be driven to the ends of the earth like common criminals, and our dear families, whom we have set free from their earlier bondage only through murderous fighting, will once again become the slaves of the Alemanni…

'Oribasius!' I hissed, barely containing the fury in my voice at finally identifying the author of the anonymous missive that had caused such an uproar. 'You didn't… This is your work?'

His cunning smile never faltered, even as he shrugged his shoulders self-deprecatingly.

'My work — yes. And Julian's as well, of course.' He sighed dramatically. 'Though truth be told, the original idea was certainly mine. And the text of the broadsheet as well. Ah well — the secret would be out sooner or later. The crudity of the Latin was a nice touch, though, don't you think?'

'Do you realize this may be the death of Julian and of all of us?' I shouted.

Oribasius shook his head, his smile fading as his small, piggish eyes took on a look of dead seriousness. 'Do not cross me, Caesarius,' he intoned, though his voice was not threatening but rather that of a father scolding a dense son, 'for by crossing me in this, you cross Julian himself, and through Julian your destiny is made. You are young, and your adventure is just beginning. I am fat and lame, I have now completed my duty to the Emperor, and I expect nothing from my actions, except…'

He paused.

'Except what, you fool?' I pressed angrily, seeing his focus wander off as if he were deep in thought. He looked back at me.

'Just this,' he said, 'and you are the only man to whom I have told it: the fact is, I take great satisfaction in knowing that it was not the crowds, not the generals, not even the gods themselves, but rather fat, jolly Oribasius with his clever pen and ambitious mind — I, Oribasius — who made Julian Emperor. Oh, Julian knew of my actions, of course, for I proposed them shortly after the arrival of that buffoon Decentius — but the execution was all mine. History may forget me as a physician, Caesarius, it may even deride me as an encyclopedist; but as a king-maker, I rank among the best.'