Roma Eterna

A.U.C. 1203: Prologue

The historian Lentulus Aufidius, whose goal it was to write the definitive biography of the great Emperor Titus Gallius, was now in his third year of research in the Imperial archives at the Palatine Library. Every morning, six days a week, Aufidius would trudge up the hill from his lodgings near the Forum, present his identification card to the Keeper of the Archives, and set about his daily exploration of the great cabinets in which the scrolls pertaining to the reign of Titus Gallius were stored.

It was a formidable task. Titus Gallius, who had come to the throne upon the death of the madman Caracalla, had ruled over Roma from 970 to 994 and in that time had completely reorganized the government that his predecessor had left in such disheveled condition. Provinces had been merged, others had been broken up, the system of taxation had undergone reform, the army had been ripped apart and reconstructed from top to bottom to meet the growing menace of the northern barbarians, and so on and so on. Lentulus Aufidius suspected that he had two or three more years of study ahead of him before he could at last begin writing his text.

Today would be devoted, as each previous day of the past two weeks had been, to an inspection of Cabinet 42, which contained the documents concerning Titus Gallius’s religious policies. Titus Gallius had been much troubled by the way mystical Oriental cults—the worship of Mithras the bull-slayer, of the mother-goddess Cybele, of Osiris of Aegyptus, and many others—were spreading through the Empire. The Emperor feared that these alien religions, if allowed to become deeply established, would weaken the fabric of the state; and so he had done what he could to suppress them without at the same time losing the loyalty of the common folk who adhered to them. That was a delicate task, and it had been only partly accomplished in Titus Gallius’s time. It remained for Titus Gallius’s nephew and successor, the Emperor Gaius Martius, to finish the work by founding the cult of Jupiter Imperator, which was intended to replace all the foreign religions.

Someone else was already at work at Cabinet 42 when Aufidius reached it. After a moment he recognized the man as an old friend and colleague, Hermogenes Celer, a native of Tripolis in Phoenicia who was, perhaps, the Empire’s leading scholar of Eastern religions. Aufidius, though he had corresponded occasionally with Celer, had not seen him in many years, nor had he known that Celer was planning a visit to the capital. The two men embraced warmly and—to the annoyance of the librarians—began at once to discuss their current projects.

“Titus Gallius?” Celer said. “Ah, yes, a fascinating story.”

“And you?”

“The Hebrews of Aegyptus,” said Celer. “A remarkable group of people. Descendants of a nomadic desert tribe, they are.”

“I know next to nothing about them,” Aufidius said.

“Ah, you should, you should!” said Celer. “If things had gone differently for them, who can say what path our history would have taken?”

“Please, gentlemen, please,” one of the librarians said. “Scholars are at work in here. If you must have a conversation, there is a hall available outside.”

“We must talk later,” Aufidius said. And they agreed to meet for lunch.

Celer, as it turned out, was overflowing with tales of his Hebrews, and spoke of little else while they ate. In particular he told of their passionate belief in a single lofty god, remote and stern, who had decreed for them an intricate set of laws that controlled everything from how they should speak of him (it was forbidden to utter his name) to what foods they could eat on which days of the week.

Because they were such a stubborn and difficult tribe, he said, they were often in trouble with their neighbors. Having conquered a large portion of Syria Palaestina, these Hebrews—who also called themselves Israelites—founded a kingdom there, but eventually were subjugated by the Aegyptians and forced into slavery in the land of the Pharaohs. This period lasted hundreds of years. But Celer declared that he had identified a critical moment in Hebrew history, some seventeen centuries in the past, when a charismatic chieftain named Mosaeus—Moshe, in their language—had attempted to lead his people on a great exodus out of Aegyptus and back to their former homeland in Palaestina, which they believed had been promised to them as an eternal homeland by their god.

“And then what happened?” said Aufidius politely, although he found none of this very interesting.

“Well,” said Celer, “this grand exodus of theirs was a terrible failure. Mosaeus and most of the other leaders were killed and the surviving Hebrews wound up back in slavery in Aegyptus.”

“I fail to see—”

“Ah, but I do!” cried Celer, and his plump, pasty face lit up with scholarly fire. “Think of the possibilities, dear Aufidius! Let’s say the Hebrews do reach Syria Palaestina. They settle themselves permanently, this time, in that hotbed of mystical fertility and harvest cults. Then, many centuries later, someone combines the ferocious religious zeal of the Hebrews with some native Palaestinian belief in rebirth and resurrection derived from the old Aegyptian business about Osiris, and a new religion under an invincible new prophet is born, not in distant Aegyptus but in a province of the Roman Empire much more closely connected with the center of things. And, precisely because Syria Palaestina by this time is a province of the Roman Empire and Roman citizens move freely about from district to district, this cult spreads to Roma itself, as other Eastern cults have done.”

“And?” said Aufidius, mystified.

“And it conquers everything, as Cybele and Mithras and Osiris have never been able to do. Its prophets preach a message of universal love, and universal sharing of all wealth—especially the sharing of wealth. All property is to be held in common. The poor people of the Empire flock to the churches of this cult in huge droves. Everything is turned upside down. The Emperor himself is forced to recognize it—to convert to it himself, perhaps, for political reasons—this religion comes to dominate everything, and the basic structure of Roman society is weakened by superstition, until the Empire, consumed by the new philosophy, is toppled by the barbarians who forever lurk at its borders—”

“The very thing that Titus Gallius fought to prevent.”

“Yes. Therefore in my new book I have postulated a world in which this Hebrew exodus did happen, in which this new religion eventually was born, in which it spread uncontrollably throughout the Empire—”

“Well,” said Aufidius, suppressing a yawn, “all that is sheer fantasy, you know. None of that happened, after all. And—admit it, Celer—it never could have happened.”

“Perhaps yes, perhaps no. I find speculating about such possibilities very stimulating.”

“Yes,” Aufidius said. “I have no doubt that you do. But as for me, I prefer to deal with matters as they really are. No such cult ever infiltrated our beloved Roma, and the Empire is sturdy and sound, and for that, Celer, let us give thanks to nonexistent Jupiter, or to whichever other deity you pretend to believe in. And now, if you will, I’d like to share with you a few discoveries of my own concerning the tax reforms of the Emperor Titus Gallius—”