Emperor of Rome Read online

  Titus sniffed at the pile.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, they smell of coinage.’

  ‘And yet they come from piss.’

  Titus looked up and caught Vespasian’s eye twinkling. ‘When it comes to money you just don’t care, do you?’

  ‘On the contrary, Son, I care very much.’

  They both broke into laughter as the carriage passed through the gates of the city and out onto the Campus Martius.

  The fanfare echoed around the precincts of the Temple of Pompey as Vespasian and Titus appeared at the top of the steps, beneath the portico decorated with flowers and flags for the occasion; prayers had been offered and sacrifices made within and now it was the moment of Triumph. The roar of the crowd was mighty and they stood, bathing in the adulation for many beats of their hearts. Vespasian felt Caenis’ hand brush the back of his as she came out with Domitian and his new wife, Domitia Longina, to stand just behind the Triumphal pair.

  Vespasian cast his eyes around the Campus Martius, decorated and packed with people of all stations as the parade, which had been assembling since the early hours of the morning, prepared to set off. The leading musicians were already waiting at the Triumphal Gate, only ever opened on these occasions and for the lesser Ovation, in readiness to lead the procession through the city. Following them were the ragged bands of captives, all in chains and showing the lick of the whips that had been used on them to keep them docile. Behind them were many carts piled high with captured weaponry followed by wagons with tableaux of scenes from the war being played out by actors showing the two Triumphing generals in a very positive light, smiting Jews, storming towns and tearing down city walls with their bare hands. After these came the gold and silver; so much of it, from coinage and jewellery to the great seven-armed menorah of solid gold taken from the Holy of Holies when the Jewish god’s temple had been destroyed and he made homeless, a wandering wraith. Piles of gold and silver plates as well as bullion taken from the Temple treasury, the stored wealth of the Jewish people for the last hundred years since Pompey Magnus had cleared it out, formed the next part of the parade.

  Then would come the Senate but at this moment they waited within the pomerium, behind the Triumphal Gate so that they could accept the surrender of command of the returning generals. A form of words had been agreed to get over the slightly embarrassing fact that both Vespasian and Titus had been in the city for some time and had therefore already technically given up their commands; but no one was going to let such a small detail spoil the day.

  Vespasian descended the steps to one of the two four-horse chariots awaiting the party side by side; as he did so he caught Titus glancing over his shoulder at Domitia Longina and sharing a look with her; he hoped Domitian had failed to notice but knew that to be a small hope as Domitian noticed most things that affected him personally, and his older brother making eyes at his new wife would most certainly affect him personally.

  At the bottom of the steps, Vespasian’s and Titus’ lictors waited formed up in two columns, their fasces wreathed in laurel for this special day, so that the Triumphviri passed between them, heading for their vehicles. As Vespasian and Titus stepped into their chariots a public slave followed each of them in.

  Vespasian and Titus both picked up their reins in one hand and raised the fists of the other into the air and then brought them down in unison. A bucina rang out, crisp and clear, cutting through the cheering crowd; its call was taken up by another stationed further along the parade and then another until the signal reached the musicians at the front. It was with a crescendo of percussion that the band struck up and the Triumphal Gate swung open.

  The height of Vespasian’s career was about to be achieved and the crowd roared his and Titus’ names.

  In step the musicians marched, slow and with great dignity befitting the occasion, to the pounding of massed drums and the sonorous notes of many horns, filled out by intricate melodies plucked in unison by a century of harpists and then all rounded off by the deliberate, wheezed notes of many water-organs mounted on low carriages interspersed throughout the rest of the musicians.

  Gradually the column began to move forward as the slave-masters whipped their charges forward to be pelted with refuse by the crowd whose cheers turned to jeers as the wretched Jews came into view. Rank after ragged rank of the once-fanatical holy warriors were whipped into the city whose myriad of gods had combined to vanquish their mono-deity. And the people of Rome gave thanks that their many different ways of life were safe from the threat from the East that these religious fundamentalists had posed; they revelled in the misery of the captives, laughed at their humiliation and abused them all in any manner possible. There was no pity, for none had the Jews shown, either to their own kind or the legions that had been thrown against them.

  In they were herded, weighed down by chains and misery until at last the weapon-carts and tableaux could begin their journey. Mules and oxen were goaded into movement and wheels creaked on goose-fatted axles and the long line of loaded vehicles crept forward.

  And still Vespasian waited, his four horses stamping and snorting with impatience, their halters held by stable-lads. Domitian sat behind him on his mount with some of the senior officers of the legions who had partaken in the war, his face a picture of seething humiliation as he stared at his older brother in his moment of triumph. Behind the officers, before another large section of musicians, came the standards of the defeated enemy, mainly black flags with religious text embroidered onto them in white, promising destruction to the enemies of the one true god; accompanying them were two pure-white oxen, garland-decked and with gilded horns, an offering to Jupiter at the climax of the day.

  With joy, Vespasian watched the Triumphal parade enter the city through that historic gate until it came the time for him and Titus to urge their teams forward.

  ‘Remember you are but mortal,’ the public slave riding with him in the chariot whispered in his ear. And Vespasian did, for he had witnessed death just that morning and it did not need a public slave to remind him of mortality, and he knew that should he die now he would die happy and fulfilled.

  As he and Titus reached the Triumphal Gate, Lucius Flavius Fimbria, the suffect senior consul and, uncoincidentally, a kinsman, and Caius Atillius Barbarus, his junior colleague, waylaid Vespasian before he could enter.

  ‘Your command, Imperator,’ Fimbria demanded.

  Vespasian reached into the fold of his toga and brought out the symbolic baton of command that he had awarded himself that morning; Titus produced his, and again it was but a gesture to the formalities of a Triumph. With the command set down the Triumphing generals were free to cross the pomerium and enter the city, with the Senate leading them and their troops following behind, to the rapture of its citizens.

  Waving the colours of their racing factions, red, white, blue and green, they welcomed in their Emperor and his son as if they had not seen them for many a year. Fronds and flowers hurtled into the air to rain down on the chariots, filling the atmosphere with sweet smells that augmented the baking bread, roasting meats and wafts of perfumed incense.

  ‘Remember you are but mortal.’

  And how could Vespasian forget? A god does not feel the thrill of being worshipped as they consider it to be their due; but a man … yes, Vespasian felt his mortality as the city worshipped him and he revelled in it. They worshipped him for subduing the East, for pushing back the Sarmatians across the Danuvius, for crushing the Batavians and the burgeoning Gallic Empire in the north, for suppressing the Brigantian rebellion and many other smaller flashpoints that had coincided with the beginning of his reign; but mostly they worshipped him for being the last man standing after a civil war in which tens of thousands of Rome’s citizens had perished. And it was for this and the stability that he had returned to them that they roared themselves hoarse as he and Titus passed along the Triumphal Way towards the Circus Maximus, around that and then onto the Sacred Way in the afternoon, befor
e arriving in the Forum Romanum as the sun began to cool. Ten, twenty deep they crowded along the route and with thousands more mounted on statues or leaning out of windows, or perched in far more dangerous and precarious vantage-points, all wanted a glimpse of their new Emperor and his son coming to them in Triumph.

  As they approached the Capitoline the prisoners due for ritual execution by garrotte were led into the Tullianum to their fate by the gaoler and his hirsute companion who capered with excitement at the slow death he was about to administer to the deserving. The rest of the prisoners were whipped back out to their pens on the Campus Martius for distribution to whatever torment they had been allocated for the rest of their lives.

  With the Senate processing with great dignity, military crowns, Triumphal Ornaments and all the other baubles of rank being displayed to the full, Vespasian and Titus made their way up the Capitoline Hill to the partially rebuilt Temple of Jupiter. Parked before the temple were carts containing the most valuable portion of the booty: the contents of the Holy of Holies; the menorah, the shewtable, the beautifully crafted vessels as well as the priestly vestments and other gold and silver items that had been sacred to the Jewish god.

  To thunderous joy, the oxen were brought forth to climb the steps and disappear into the dim realm of Rome’s guardian god. Dismounting, Vespasian and Titus followed them up to an altar with a fire burning upon it. They turned and surveyed the crowd, not so many in the cramped confines of the Capitoline, but packing the Forum Romanum below and then on throughout the city. Again they raised their arms and again they were praised, with the Senate leading the chorus as they gathered around the cartloads of booty, glistering in the evening sun.

  Vespasian signalled for silence; it was soon manifest on the summit of the hill as the cheering continued throughout the city. ‘Conscript Fathers, this bounty has come to restore our city’s fortunes.’ He gestured to the plunder of untold wealth, the gold of the Temple. ‘This hoard will be the start of the refinancing of the Empire; my reign will be seen as the beginning of a time of peace and prosperity where the law is upheld, a man’s rights are secure and the currency is stable. That is the mark of a civilised society; that is what we shall strive for. This gold is the beginning of a new Rome.’ He pointed to the menorah and all the beautifully crafted Temple vessels. ‘Melt them down, all of them; they have caused enough trouble in this world and now it is time for them to do some good.’

  EPILOGUE

  AQUAE CUTILLAE, 22 JUNE AD 79

  TITUS FLAVIUS CAESAR Vespasianus closed his eyes as his father, the Emperor Vespasian, groaned in pain and shot out another stream of diarrhoea into the bed-pan held by Hormus. A sweet stench of decay filled the room off the courtyard garden of the farmhouse on the Flavian estate at Aquae Cutillae; a house that Titus, like his father, had known all his life.

  ‘Are you squeamish?’ Vespasian asked as the bout drew to a close.

  Titus opened his eyes and looked at his father, who had lost much weight since this sickness had come over him down in Campania, ten days previously. Vespasian had returned to Rome and then decided that he would rather begin his final journey on the estate he had loved all his life. And now the commencement of that journey seemed to be close. ‘I’m sorry, Father; I was just trying to preserve your dignity.’

  ‘Dignity? Ha! I lost that when I started pissing shit out of my arse uncontrollably. Where does it all come from? That’s what I’d like to know.’ He looked down at the slopping contents of the bed-pan. ‘Blood?’

  Hormus peered in, his nose wrinkling at the stench. ‘Yes, master, I think it is.’

  ‘Of course it is.’ Vespasian shook his head and lay back down, breathing in swallow gulps and sweating despite the cool temperature in the room. ‘Well, that’s it then; I’m nearly done.’

  ‘You’ll get better, Father.’

  Vespasian’s smile was weak. ‘No, I won’t; and nor would you want me to. Your time has come now, my son, and you’ll not want me hanging around to delay it.’

  Titus did not reply as he knew it to be the truth. His father had reigned for ten years; good years; years of peace and reconstruction and relative harmony between the Emperor and the Senate. Vespasian, the Emperor who taxed urine as he would be forever known, had been a just emperor, Titus could concede, and now his turn was coming and he would be judged by his father’s standards. They had shared a joint censorship in which they had completely reorganised the senatorial and equestrian classes, but that as well as the overseeing of the construction of the almost complete Flavian Amphitheatre and the first consulship of the year for eight out of the ten years of the reign, were the only endeavours they had shared. The rest of the time they had travelled on different paths: Vespasian as a benign emperor and Titus as a feared prefect of the Praetorian Guard, shielding his father from implication in the darker side of maintaining power. Vespasian was loved but only because Titus had made it so; now that was about to change.

  Vespasian, weakening with each breath, reached up and took his son’s hand. ‘For four years, since Caenis died, you have been my support and strength, Titus; not your brother, you. Where is Domitian? He’d rather stay in Rome and plot than be here at my death bed.’ He paused for a few laboured breaths.

  Titus squeezed his hand; it was clammy. He could hear the low murmur of the household slaves talking outside in the garden as they awaited news of their master; from beyond them came the shouted orders and lituus signals of the Praetorian cavalry escort ala drilling in the stable-yard. ‘Rest, Father.’

  ‘I’ll have plenty of time for that very soon; now listen to me. I have executed very few people, Helvidius Priscus and a few others, but you on the other hand, as prefect of the Praetorian Guard, have not been so restrained; and I know that I have cause to thank you for that. But, Titus, you are hated now as well as feared. Anyone who aroused your suspicions was executed or murdered. You even had Aulus Caecina invited to dinner and then stabbed in the triclinium as soon as he had eaten.’ Vespasian groaned. ‘I’ve soiled myself.’

  ‘Let me change your tunic and loincloth, master,’ Hormus said, coming forward.

  ‘No, Hormus, there’s nothing to do about it, it’ll just happen again; it’s just the final indignity that I shall have to bear.’ He looked back up at Titus, his eyes bloodshot, eyelids flickering. ‘You’re hated; you’re hated for pulling men from the theatre, the baths, their own homes, sometimes even as they were sharing a meal with their wives and children. I know you thought that it kept us safe, but you earned their hate whilst your high-handed actions kept me their love. But I am dying and you will inherit; and you will inherit as a hated man. So what of Domitian, what of him? He has too much pride and anger within him to allow that to happen. And he has done nothing to earn people’s hate; he would have their support if it came to it. So what will you do?’

  ‘I will not kill Domitian, Father; I will not have fratricide added to the accusations against me.’

  ‘But he would not fear that label.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And one of you must bear it; can’t you see that to be the truth?’

  ‘No, Father; I see that only to be a possibility. But I’m not stupid; I will be careful and I will watch Domitian. And I will be a different emperor to the prefect that I have been; I will re-engage their love. I will be generous to the Senate and extravagant to the people; the opening of our amphitheatre will be the greatest spectacle Rome has ever witnessed.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry to miss that.’ Another spasm wracked Vespasian’s body and the sound of spilling bowels rumbled on.

  Titus held onto his father’s hand as his face contorted with pain, his breath coming in short gasps. His eyes closed but his breathing continued, just. ‘He’s passed out, Hormus; wipe his brow.’

  Hormus did as he was asked, his tears now flowing.

  Titus waited, watching his father fade, feeling the weight of the approaching transition of power and resolving to be good to his word to his father; hi
s reign would be just and long and he would thwart all of his brother’s plots and still keep him alive, no matter what he tried.

  Another explosion from beneath the sheet brought Vespasian round; with a sudden jerk of his chest, his eyes flicked open. He looked around as if he knew not where he was and then, focusing on Titus’ face, pushed himself up. ‘Help me, Titus; an emperor should die on his feet.’

  On weakened legs, Vespasian struggled to stand, Titus supporting one arm and Hormus the other; his soiled tunic noisome but neither noticed.

  Titus looked at his father: his eyes were fixed into the distance as if he saw his destination far away.

  Vespasian slumped and a thin smile quivered on his lips. ‘I think I’m turning into a god.’ His head lolled and his knees gave way.

  With suppressed sobs Titus and Hormus lay his body back down on the bed. As the tears began to flow, Titus knelt down next to his father and kissed him on the mouth. He closed the sightless eyes and then stood looking down at the corpse of the New Man from the Sabine Hills who had become the ninth Emperor of Rome, his father, Titus Flavius Vespasianus.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This work of fiction is based, once again, on the works of Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio and Josephus.

  Tacitus gives a good account of the first Battle of Bedriacum and it is much as I have described; as is Otho’s suicide and Vitellius’ reaction to seeing so many dead citizens. Tacitus also tells us that Vitellius did believe Paulinus and Proculus’ protestations of treachery and cleared them of all suspicion of loyalty; I find it hard not to chuckle when I’m reading him.

  The elder Sabinus did take the Capitoline in Vespasian’s name but was forced out, very much as shown, and then captured and executed. The final conversation between him and Vitellius is my fiction as I wanted to complete what I had already set up, all those years ago, in Rome’s Executioner.