‘We need to get you to safety, Majesty,’ said Ruricius Pompeianus, leaning on the low wall in front of the great bronze statue of Titus Seius, who looked down his nose at us from metallic horseback, as noble as a Roman could be, and clearly disapproving of what I’d done to his city.
From the vantage point of this parapet on the Capitol I had a good view of the whole forum spread out between the crowded Palatine and the various great edifices of my predecessors that kept the subura region at bay. The view was not a sight to bring relief.
It had begun at the start of the month as mumbled protests, but had taken only days to become angry voices. At first I had dismissed it, concentrating instead on the news from the East. Diocletian had died. The man who had designed the destiny of Rome with his Tetrarchy, who had been the scourge of the Christians, the undisputed master of the Roman world and at whose signal men had risen and fallen, had died. And what a death. They said that he simply stopped eating and slowly starved to cadaverous waste, sick in both body and mind, ravaged by the knowledge of what had become of his intended new world. I liked to think that perhaps some of what had driven him to his lingering suicide was guilt over the burning of his wife, but even at his death I could not imagine that. As the realisation of his passing sunk in, so we were led to face the problems that still faced us in the living world.
Rome can be fractious and argumentative, and I had seen protests and even riots in my time here, but it had always been something we could resolve one way or another. This, it seemed, was something different. To resolve the religious crisis in my lands I had healed the rift among the Christians with money from the treasury. That had solved that problem but left us short to pay what was now a vast army. Thus I had exchanged potential trouble with the Christians for potential trouble with unpaid soldiers. Well, while I wanted rid of the trouble with the Christians, no one wants trouble with the army, and so, flying in the face of the guidance of my closest advisors, I’d taxed the Roman people extra to pay the army.
Now, the Christians and the army were both content once more, but the ordinary folk were outraged. It seemed I was in the midst of a great puzzle with no solution. I had three mouths to feed and only two cakes, so I kept passing them around for each mouth to take a bite. I could find no way to ease the tax burdens of the people, but that had not set me on the edge of panic the way unpaid soldiers or warlike Christians had. After all, if you have to anger a group, the ordinary person is surely the safest? Well I had thought so, anyway.
Now I was coming to understand just how wrong I had been. I had over a hundred thousand soldiers in my empire that I had mollified. There were perhaps a similar number of Christians, at a guess, who had now stopped burning each other’s houses. But the ordinary people? There were over a million of them in the city alone, ten times that many across my domain. Disenfranchising young ‘Gaius Plebeius Nobody’ seemed safe enough, but several million ‘Gaius Plebeius Nobodies’ started to look like a threat.
Then, this afternoon, the threat had been made good. It was the end of the festival of Compitalia – the veneration of the crossroads, when honey cakes were given and statues and woollen figures adorned every door. A time of general goodwill and neighbourly spirits. As always, despite Volusianus’ warnings, I had come to the Capitol to give thanks at the temple of Ops, the god of abundance and plenty. It was one of my lesser and more relaxed religious duties. I had entered the small temple, which stood somewhat in awe of the great temple of Jove that overshadowed it, an hour earlier. I had presided over the rites therein, pausing only briefly at an increase in the background noise of the city outside.
Then, before I had even uncovered my head, Volusianus had entered, cursing in a most impious manner. He and Ruricius had apologised to the small knot of officials who had been with me, and all but dragged me out of the place. I had been incensed, blustering and arguing. The pair, surrounded by Praetorians, had taken me over to the parapet and then let go of me. I had shouted angrily at them, demanding to know what right they had to manhandle an emperor. My ranting, though, had trailed off into a horrified silence as the noise around me made itself known, filtering into my angry ears above my own voice. I’d torn my furious gaze from Volusianus and cast it across the forum.
We were at war. At war with our own people. Or at least, that was how it looked.
With the two officers and their men close to heel, I ran along the wall, past the doorway of the Porta Stercoraria, grateful that it was only opened once a year and right now remained resolutely locked, separating me from what was happening in the forum. I reached the wall at the far side of the gate where I had a much better view of the forum’s open spaces, and my heart rose into my mouth, threatening to make me gag.
‘We need to get you to safety, Majesty,’ said Ruricius Pompeianus.
Bronze, immutable, Titus Seius stared down at me.
‘Surely this is just a public nuisance that can be quelled as always?’ I murmured, watching the seething mass of humanity down below and not even remotely believing my own words.
‘Zenas has gone to try that. See towards the Flavian amphitheatre? And along the Vicus Iugarius?’
My eyes roved across the roiling mass of Roman citizenry to catch sight of two new groups moving onto the scene. The Urban Cohorts were approaching between the Temple of Rome and the Palatine. Good old Zenas had brought in his men to pacify the rioting crowds. I could see little more from this distance other than the fact that nearly a whole cohort of armoured men were moving in perfect unison. They formed a shield wall and began to push into the crowd. I couldn’t see for certain, but I knew they would not be wielding swords. Zenas’ men were usually armed with coshes. They would be laying into the people if need be, using examples to deter further resistance. It was not what I wanted to see for my people, but it could be worse. Zenas was ever a sensible man.
The second group, coming up the Vicus Iugarius from the river, was a unit bearing colours I didn’t know.
‘Who is that?’
‘Moesian auxiliary unit, Majesty. They’ve been based in the Castra Peregrina in the city for some time, as we didn’t really know what to do with them. They’ve been with us since your father turned the tide at Narnia, but with them being from an eastern province, no one feels safe putting them somewhere they might have to fight their countrymen. Zenas has been using them to supplement the Urban Cohorts for a few months.’
I nodded. May the gods bless these men from Licinius’ domain who were helping keep the peace in my city.
‘Are we safe here?’ I asked.
‘For now,’ Volusianus grunted. ‘I’ve got men on all the points of access who can at least give us warning and buy us time. But we’d be better off getting you to the Palatine, as Ruricius said.’
‘When I said “to safety”, I meant the Praetorian camp, not the Palatine,’ said the commander of the Imperial Horse.
‘Surely things are not that bad?’ I muttered.
‘We’ll know just how bad any time now, Domine. If this is going to be resolved without disaster it’ll happen under Zenas.’
I stood, tense, with my two officers, leaning on the low wall and watching my city tearing itself apart. Below, close by, I saw several horrifying incidents born simply of the ready presence of such anger. Six men kicking another to death for no obvious reason. A child weeping over a mother trampled by the crowd. A cut-purse being dealt rough justice by the mob. Zenas was moving closer, though his unit was slowed by the press of the ordinary citizens.
‘They’re not giving way to him,’ Volusianus noted. ‘He’s heading into trouble.’
The mob, pressed in by Zenas’ cohort, were bulging out into other places now, and angry shouts were directed towards the six centuries of Moesian soldiers who were advancing cautiously, their round shields held out like a wall. An officer gave a command and the unit spread out, blocking the street and bracing, whereupon the commander yelled an order in thickly accented Latin for the public to ‘cease this display and disperse’.
He was told to ‘fuck off’ in a hundred voices, and his anger at the lack of respect drove him to make the last mistake of his career. In response, he yelled at the crowd that he had ‘better things to do than herd stupid, shitty Italian sheep’ and that if they didn’t disperse he’d ‘put his boot up their arsehole to the tenth lace’.
Three men in the crowd jostled one another and exchanged heated words. Another man pushed forward and stepped out into the space between the crowd and the soldiers. Then another. Then half a dozen. And suddenly everyone was running, the mob of ordinary people hurtling along the Vicus Iugarius with violence in mind. I watched in disbelieving horror as the Moesian commander shouted for his men to hold as the tide of angry humanity ran at them, surging along the paving, crammed in by the high buildings to either side.
The Moesians were veterans. They were soldiers. They were armoured in steel and armed with coshes. But they were outnumbered by hundreds to one. I saw the crowd hit them like a wave crashing on the beach and within heartbeats they were lost from sight, submerged beneath the flow of rebellious plebs. Here and there I saw an auxiliary soldier struggling to raise his head above the surface and suck in air before he was battered and torn apart and vanished into the sea of bodies once more.
I stood in utter shock. Almost five hundred men who had fought in wars for the empire, loyal to me to the end, had been utterly obliterated in mere heartbeats by the very people they were raised to protect. Volusianus was right – Zenas was heading for trouble. We all were. But the horror of the Moesians was not over. I watched in appalled silence as struggling soldiers were dragged from the crowd, battered and broken yet still fighting for their life. Men had found ropes from somewhere, perhaps one of the shops or stalls along the street-side, and were forming makeshift nooses, looping them around the damaged soldiers’ necks and then throwing the ropes over any projection they could find on the building facades. The men were hauled, struggling, from the street where they dangled, kicking and thrashing, to howls of victory from the crowd. I was still astonished that this could happen in my city. I had seen civil disturbance before, but this was new. Horrible. Unbelievable.
The Moesians kicked and struggled until the life fled their eyes, and then hung there, as though staring up at me, dead and yet accusatory. What had I done? Was all this simply because I wanted to make the Christians happy again? Perhaps Diocletian and Galerius had been right? Were that troublesome sect poison to the state? Had they ruined Rome and led me to this?
No. Even through everything, there were Christians like Zenas and Miltiades, who had put the state and even my own welfare above theirs. Besides, Galerius had died badly, his fate decreed by Nemesis for his awful reign, and now Diocletian had rotted away, driven out of his mind by the ghosts of guilt and ruin. Such, apparently, was the fate of enemies of the Christians.
‘Gods, no!’
The shock and disbelief in Ruricius’ voice dragged me back from my thoughts and redirected my attention. I almost echoed his words. How could this be happening?
Smoke was rising in roiling columns from the temple of Saturn at the heart of the ancient forum, not sixty paces from where I stood. Had this crowd lost its mind entirely? To turn on the state and the emperor was an appalling thing. To turn on the army that protected you was unthinkable. But to turn on the gods themselves? Smoke was pouring from beneath the tiles of the roof, and boiling out of the open doorway between the columns. It took long moments for me to be able to think of anything but the incredible sacrilege of burning a temple, and when finally my mind latched on to something new, it was oddly: How do we stop this turning into a new Neronian fire and destroying Rome? The answer to that was simple, of course: the temple of Saturn stood apart in an area of brick and marble and wide pavements. There was a minimal risk of fire spreading from there, though if the mob would fire a temple, it was not hard to imagine them starting conflagrations in more dangerous and flammable areas. But the thought that finally cut through all this and galvanised me was the realisation that the temple of Saturn also held the state finances. In the vaults beneath that venerable structure were the strongboxes that held the Roman treasury. Admittedly there was little enough in there now to attract even the attention of the most adventurous thief, but the message sent by the burning of the imperial treasury was clear to me.
I watched with little hope as Zenas struggled to push into the forum, but failed to make an impression upon the crowd. His men’s clubs smacked into flesh and bone repeatedly, trying to stop the surging mob, but they were losing, and I was far from surprised when I saw them begin their orderly retreat from the fray. Bricks and tiles and anything else that came to hand were cast at them, and here and there men of the Urban Cohort were felled, being gathered up by their mates and dragged behind the protection of the shield wall as they pulled further and further back until they were lost to sight.
‘Give me your permission to deploy the Praetorians,’ Volusianus said in a quiet and oddly menacing tone.
‘What?’
The prefect grasped my wrist and turned me to face him.
‘Domine, Rome is poised on the brink of disaster. We need to regain control; to reinstall order, and we need to do it now. The crowd is just realising what it is capable of and what it has done. And when they understand that they have murdered a military unit and burned a temple with impunity, they will realise they can do it again, and might as well do, since they have already committed crime enough to damn themselves. Zenas’ men are good at policing the streets, and that Moesian unit might have been good deployed as part of a battle formation, but the Praetorians are the best. They are trained for combat. They’re used to it. Give me permission to bring Rome to order, before we lose the chance for good.’
I dithered still. The idea of deploying the Praetorians against people who were only revolting because I had taxed them too far was horrible. But my mind quickly filled with images of dangling soldiers and burning temples, and I was nodding before I’d even consciously made the decision. ‘But with coshes, Volusianus.’
‘Domine, that is the wrong decision.’
I blinked. Who was Volusianus to dictate to me? ‘Be careful, Prefect.’
‘Domine, look at how ineffective the Urban Cohorts and the Moesians were. A stronger deterrent is needed.’
I glared at him and waved him away irritably. Volusianus bowed and turned, marching away. Only when he had been gone for some time did I realise that I had not, in the end, actually said ‘no’.
‘Are we safe here still?’ I asked Ruricius.
‘Short of being on the Palatine or in the Castra Praetoria, it’s as safe as anywhere, Domine. Volusianus has left adequate numbers at each approach to the hill, and I have a unit of the Horse Guard stationed at the rear of the temple of Jove. If any move is made on the Capitol, we shall take you by horse down to the river. We are close to the Tiber Island. At the very worst we can hole up there for a time, with only two narrow bridges to guard.’
I nodded and watched the chaos below. Buildings were being looted. Plaques and statues were being smashed. Men were being killed. And it was spreading out from the forum along all the main thoroughfares. Soon someone would set fire to one of those rickety wooden insulae on the surrounding hills, and then Rome would burn.
I felt sick. This was my doing. Admittedly, I couldn’t see a way I could have done anything any better. Had I dealt with the matter a different way, it would now be Christians murdering and burning, or rampaging rebellious troops seeking payment. But that was little consolation as I watched my people tearing apart their own city.
I sagged when Volusianus reappeared perhaps half an hour later, dismounting from a sweating horse, looking tired and fraught. He had ridden hard for the Praetorian camp and then back, having given his orders. It was no use now reinforcing my decision to allow only coshes.
‘Domine, all will soon be under control. Watch.’
I did. For two hours, as the sun set over Rome – symbolism that did not escape my notice, either – I watched cohort after cohort of Praetorians emerge from one street or another, converging on the mass of folk in the forum. They were arrayed for war, blades out. I had known they would be, for all my orders. Volusianus had chosen to take my failure to say no in the end as tacit agreement, the damnable man. I watched as my own elite military marched on a crowd of angry, frightened civilians and began to butcher them like hogs on a feast day. No mercy was given, though I saw it sought often enough. My sickness only increased as time went on. At one point I actually vomited over the wall, down onto the roof of the Portico of the Olympian Gods. I felt numb. I wanted to give the order to stop it, but I couldn’t. I could hardly speak. What had I done? What had Volusianus done?
The Praetorians butchered their way through the people of Rome until they met their peers and took firm control of the forum. Perhaps half the crowd escaped that bloodbath, fleeing through narrow ways and hiding in nooks. But by the time the sun set on that dreadful day, the paving of the forum had gone, hidden beneath a sea of blood and a carpet of butchered bodies.
‘We have become monsters,’ I said at last, turning a hollow look on my prefect. For the first time in my life I was grateful that Romulus was already playing in the Elysian fields and not here to see what his father had done. He would have been ashamed. I know I was. I had taken the purple not out of self-aggrandisement, and not through desire to rule, and not even through jealousy at those promoted above me – or not solely through that, anyway. I had taken the purple to save Rome, and instead I was destroying it. Was this how so many of history’s damned emperors had begun? Well-meaning mistakes and impossible choices? Was this what had cursed the memory of Caligula? Of Domitian? Of Commodus? Of… Diocletian, perhaps?
‘We are not monsters, Domine,’ Volusianus said quietly. ‘We are men doing what must be done to keep the world working. And this is no time for weakness.’
‘Weakness? ’ I whispered, astonished. ‘You think expressing horror at all this is weakness? ’
‘Fortify yourself, Maxentius, Emperor of Rome. What you see down there is only the beginning of the horror. I know that you refuse to accept it, but the truth is that Constantine will come for you. He has to. He has cowed Licinius, but only with a united West can he hope to stand for long against the East. The Praetorians can control Rome…’
Yes. I could see that. At the tip of a sword .
‘…but it is time to look north. We garrison Aquileia and our border forts in the mountains and the flat lands to the east, but what we need is to fortify the Western Alpes now, before it is too late.’
I simply stared, shaking my head. What had we done? What had we become?
I learned the next day that over six thousand Roman souls had been dispatched by Praetorian blades that evening. Why should Rome tremble about the possibility that Constantine might come, when they had an emperor here already murdering his own people?
It was the last winter.
And it felt like it.