Emperor Read online

  Colin Thubron

  ———

  Emperor

  A Novel

  Penguin Books

  For Monica Mason

  The conversion to Christianity of the Emperor Constantine is a watershed in Western history. But this book is not a historical inquiry. Of Constantine too little is known to ascertain so ambiguous a character as I have indicated. Of the Empress Fausta almost nothing is known at all.

  Rather I have attempted to explore regions on which history is silent. I have been anxious only not to trespass beyond the bounds of the possible.

  Colin Thubron

  Melitius, lately Master of Studies to the Augustus Constantine. To Celsus, professor of rhetoric.

  Constantinople, 30 May [A.D. 338]

  I am sending you these papers by my personal messenger. You I will understand why, after you have read them. What I have to tell you is in strictest secrecy.

  A year ago I dined with the Augustus Constantine and several of his close ministers. It was not a formal evening, but the kind of relaxation in which he indulged towards the end of his life. I think the wine must have emboldened me, but since Constantine had several times patted my shoulder almost affectionately, I dared to mention the vision which had converted him to Christianity more than quarter of a century ago. My father, said, had been present.

  I must have been mad to mention it. The expression on His Eternity’s face changed dramatically. You remember how he could stare at one, tautening his lips? He must also have turned whiter, because the rouge on his cheeks was suddenly very obvious. He said angrily: “The matter has been recorded by the Sacred Historian.”

  As you may imagine, I did not know where to look. 1 stammered an apology. But later I noticed that the Augustus was frowning to himself and kept shifting his position on the couch. Suddenly he leant towards me again, and with an odd perplexity in those intemperate eyes he asked: “What did your father say occurred?”

  Yes, he was asking me what had happened!

  I replied: “My father never spoke of it, Eternity.” (This was true; at the mention of Constantine’s vision my father was always silent.)

  The Augustus checked himself at once, as if remembering who I was (or who he was). He never alluded to the matter again.

  It occurred to me then how we learn to evade our past if it is not creditable to us, and to believe our own lies. As for an emperor, the truth is contorted before his eyes. He is surrounded by men who will banish his every mistake into an oblivion of flattery.

  Is this what happened to Constantine? I don’t know. It only seems to me that for 25 years the Church has been evolving more and more extravagant accounts of his conversion, and that already these are becoming the official truth.

  This was the last time I spoke to the Emperor. A month later he was dead.

  It was then, while I was still Master of Studies, that I started my investigations. My father Synesius, as you know, was the Emperor’s private secretary throughout the early years, and after his death I found the cubicula of his house on the Quirinal filled with papers locked in chests. These included the Augustus’ journal, kept over the months of his invasion of Italy, much of it written in his own hand. I also took advantage of my custodianship of the Imperial Archives to copy down those documents relevant to the period. I transcribed letters gathered by the secret police after the execution of the Empress Fausta; even the letters of her lady companion, a certain Livilla Politta; together with copies of correspondence from the Bishop of Cordoba. (Oh yes, the secret police then were quite as efficient as they are now.)

  The result of my findings has not the clarity of state propaganda. But it has, I think, the complexity of truth.

  Do you think that posterity would condemn me for bringing these things to the light? Or is the truth better lost for ever? Should we be blind and happy, or honest and disillusioned? An old debate.

  I cannot send you everything I have. But I’ve copied the documents most relevant to that least explicable happening of our era: the conquest of a Roman emperor by a Galilean prophet. That period seems now as remote as Romulus, I know. But it made us what we are — a Christian Empire — and will shape the world to come for as long as any of us can predict.

  I enjoin on you again the need for secrecy. I await your advice.

  Celsus to Melitius.

  Constantinople, 2 June

  I will not read them. We live in a Christian world now, whatever you or I may feel. What do you think to gain by these disclosures? To spread the truth by gossip? If I did not know you better, I would think you had lost your senses.

  You are right when you indicate that the present shapes the past. Now it is not only shaped, but fleshed and firm and credible. It cannot be changed; and I am too old to try, and to die for nothing.

  So I return the papers to you, their seals unbroken, and with this advice: Forget.

  The Papers

  In A.D. 306 Gaius Flavius Constantine, the son of an uneducated but talented Illyrian soldier, succeeded his father as Augustus of Britain and Gaul by the acclamation of his legions in York. During the next few years the Roman Empire was split by civil war, and in the summer of 312 Constantine marched over the Alps against his rival Maxentius in Rome, and laid siege to Verona. He was still a pagan. And he had been married five years to Maxentius’ own sister, Fausta.

  Part One

  Verona

  I

  Geta, Tribune and Master of the Offices, to the Augustus Constantine.

  Before Verona, 23 August A.D. 312

  Ninth report of this month from Rome:

  Population continues restless. On 7 August, after thefts by Sicilian troops, there was a three-hour riot among shopkeepers near Trajan’s Forum; they openly vilified the tyrant Maxentius. There are rumours of another senator’s estate confiscated, and of his daughters given to army officers. Senators are starting to withhold gifts to the tyrant, in the evident hope that his days are few.

  Ill omens increase. It is said that on the Capitoline Hill the statues of the gods are sweating blood. A cat by the Temple of Uranus was heard to speak. Many people attest this.

  August 8: two thousand Moorish light cavalry landed in Ostia as reinforcements to Carthaginian auxiliaries; horses very sick, some dead.

  May the Augustus live for ever.

  II

  From the Commonplace Book of Synesius, Master of the Sacred Memory and private secretary to Constantine.

  [The diary of the pagan Secretary is incomplete. He appears to have written it for some posterity, but later, because of the unfavourable times, to have suppressed it.]

  Verona, 24 August

  I would not have believed, a year ago, that I could survive among the siege-works of an army. Yet now I sit at a table in a broken apartment house not two stadia from the walls of Verona, and does this old hand shake? No. Curious what tricks life plays on us. As a young man, when I was quite muscular, I spent my time gossiping like a woman in the corridors of the Sacred Consistory. Now, when I am — as my grandchildren tell me — all dried up like a dead spider, I find myself campaigning in the field.

  Last night, while I watched the fording of the Adige river, I even felt a pang of — dare I say it? — youthful excitement This disgusts me. It’s thirty years since anything, even a woman, turned these withered senses to fire. And now I find myself excited by what? — a few thousand men with torches wading across a river to kill people on the other side. When Constantine noticed me among his staff he asked: “Do you want to cross over, Secretary?”

  I suppose I turned pale, poor old Synesius.

  “Your interests exclude military tactics?” he continued, “or are you reluctant to die for science, as Pliny did?” After that he passed across with his commanders, leaving me on the safer
side. I did not know he had even heard of Pliny. I waited by the river with the rest of the secretariat — a pitiful bunch we were in the wet dawn — watching the baggage wagons cross over and Frankish auxiliaries staking out earthworks to defend the ford. After a while the bodies of men and horses began floating past us, and we went back to the main lines.

  Sometimes I feel it is best to experience as little as possible. I have become so accustomed to the sight of blood that this afternoon I witnessed the execution of two soldiers for cowardice. All that occurred to me was that their severed heads went rolling about just like dice. This only goes to show what I have always held: that horrors do not sharpen but blunt the senses. An old friend once set above his vestibule door the blood-soaked cuirass in which his father was killed. He put it there, he said, as a perpetual reminder of the horror of violence. And was he reminded? The first time he passed the vestibule, yes. The second time, maybe. The third time not at all, and thereafter he grew used to it, and was later killed in an amphitheatre riot with his fingers on another man’s throat.

  As for myself, in a single month I seem to have experienced all the miseries of soldiering. I’ve been frozen in the Cottian. Alps, bored at Milan, terrified at the Battle of Brescia. And now the mosquitoes of the Po valley are marching against us and are mangling me in this detestable little room.

  All the same, it is good to be still at last, before my thighs are rubbed away by my abominable mule. Here we have a change from army millet and salted pork. Mutton is plentiful, and the quartermaster has brought in Rhaetian wine. A real wine at last! This one tastes like a young wife might. Pleasantly firm, with a sweet, full body (and the only companionship I may expect at my time of life.) But it’s not for the men. Off duty they get drunk on a brew of fermented vegetables, and these last days the officers have kept a strict watch.

  Walking behind the lines this evening, I saw the soldiers sitting between the earth ramparts and their tents. Some of them were hardening the tips of stakes in the camp-fire flames. Others were singing; while the Germans, of course, gambled. Such lean, harsh giants, these Gaulish and German legionaries! It disturbs me to look at them. Barely one among them has known the soft shores of our Mediterranean. Their heads are covered in manes of brown or yellow hair, which the weight of their helmets has compressed into moist sheaths. I confess they amaze me. They camp here, a thousand miles from home, and are paid a pittance to attack an emperor they have never seen. They march thirty miles a day and are forbidden to plunder. Yet for every obscene song about the Augustus there are ten in praise of him.

  What touches the heart of such men? They are inured to every pain, their own and others’, They are quarrelsome and ruddy-faced, their lips thin and their eyes blue like a cold sky. The wind does not burnish them, as it does our southern men, but nibbles away the pores to leave great pitted cheeks and the expressions of starved wolves. Their gods are numberless and confused. So far away from home, I think, they lose their hold. The men worship what they can remember in a fierce doggerel before battle; or take to Mithras or Jupiter.

  How much they know or understand of anything is impossible to say. But listening to their army Latin, which is half nonsense to me, it seems they regard Italy as a kind of paradise. I don’t suppose it occurs to any of them what will happen if we are defeated here. It is said that with this force — only forty thousand, with eight thousand horse — we are outnumbered by three to one. Yet whenever I look at these arrogant men, veterans of the Rhine, I can imagine no army to face them.

  All along our lines the enemy walls are easily visible, with the tops of temples and apartment buildings, three or four storeys high, showing above them. Once, in the arcades above a double gate, I saw the silhouettes of archers. The Adige flows wide and greenish in a great curve northwards, cradling the city. I sat among the wagons here and paid a soldier to find me some biscuits. A flock of gulls was moving by the shore. I don’t believe in omens, but I watched them. They rose and settled on the river like scraps of linen, and drifted down opposite the enemy walls. Then they lifted all together from the surface, and flew back to us. They did this again and again. It was oddly desolate.

  When I returned to our headquarters — if this fetid block can be called that — I saw the Augustus standing alone on the rooftop, unmistakable for his great height, and gazing at the west. He had dismissed his staff for the night, even the evening secretaries. These whims alarm me. More than ever, perhaps, Constantine is decisive and alert. But there is a new truculence about him. I sometimes think he’s afraid to be still. Admittedly all his life has been spent moving — on the Rhine, in Syria, Egypt, Persia, fighting or travelling with the court of Diocletian. But ever since he entered Italy, he’s changed.

  By day his brain is dagger-sharp and he is a furnace of work. He has the whole army, every cohort and outwork, cut into his mind. He foresees everything. At such times people say that the great Sun God is upon him, and I believe that he feels this himself. The legions adore him, but his own staff hold him in fear. The very way be moves creates tension — that rapid, threatening stride. Whatever troubles him — whether an individual or an object — on that he concentrates as if he would drag out its blackest secrets. But the rest of the world he may glance over, not seeing, with a look of abstract superiority. The world flatters him and for that, I think, he despises it. The only person I have never seen him treat like this is his wife Fausta. To her, I notice, he gives his gaze absolutely.

  Yet every one of his close retinue has known his kindness. Last February, after one of his orderlies fell into a trembling fit, the Augustus wrapped him in his own purple cloak. When the orderly recovered he almost died of fright. He thought he would be executed for wearing the purple, and indeed there can be no incident like it in all the annals of our Empire. Because the Augustus is quite like a child. His warmth and generosity are explosive and total, his sense of humour barbarian. One remembers then that he is almost untutored.

  But by night something happens. A dark mood comes over him — you can see it approaching like a dream over his face. He dismisses his staff — sometimes all together as tonight. After a light meal he sits me down like a common amanuensis and starts dictating quickly: field orders for the morning, messages to the prefects of the legions or the quartermaster. And all the time, at the end of a day which would have poleaxed other men, he paces the room as if still trying to hold back some immense, unhappy energy. Frequently he clenches his hands at his sides, and has a way of jabbing downwards with his forefinger to enforce a point. He will do this again and again. When the messages are exhausted he sometimes picks a roll of papyrus from a shelf and drops it on the table in front of me. Then he dictates his journal: but only military records. The rest he keeps private, and writes in his own hand. Then, I suspect, it becomes no longer a journal, but a groping inside himself. At this hour I can see that his mind is racing. It is late and he doesn’t want me to go. But he will stop and pat my shoulder in his sudden child-like way and say: “But you’re tired.”

  I leave him, I confess, with relief. As I do so I have the impression that I am abandoning him to some black turmoil. My departure is always a betrayal. My bedroom adjoins his chambers, and I hear him tramping back and forth, hour after hour. I had only just got used to the trumpets of the watch, and now this endless noise of his feet keeps me awake, so that yesterday I had the rushes on the floor changed for hay. Sometimes the noise stops and I hear the nervous scraping of an ivory comb on the papyrus, then the scratching of his reed. Some afterthought to the praetorian prefect, perhaps. Or the journal again. What is he saying? I think words to him resemble magic (he is still a peasant at heart). They are a talisman against his own chaos.

  But what madness for human beings to inquire into themselves! What can they find? No god, certainly, but a dismembered mess, a kind of colourless nothing.

  This evening, yes, I found the Augustus alone on the rooftop watching the sun go down. His father’s family worshipped the Sun as the symbol
of the Great God; he himself abandoned other gods for this Sun Invincible. He was gazing at it through a ruby, and did not turn round when he heard my footsteps, but pointed to it and said in a half bullying voice: “What is happening there?”

  I am far from a religious man. Even my unbelief is not a religion to me. But as a child I was brought up in the credo of Epicurus: fear in man is induced by two fallacies — that the heavenly bodies are divine, and that death is the prelude to pain. Now the Augustus was staring down at me in that quietly formidable way which stops the tongue dead in the mouth. I could find no hint of what way I should answer. So I said: “It is caused, Eternity, by the imposition of the earth in the sun’s way. The sun has gone down behind the edge of the earth.”

  What did he want me to say?

  III

  Geta, Master of the Offices, to the Augustus Constantine.

  24 August

  Tenth report of this month from Rome:

  Unconfirmed reports of disaffection among Numidian troops. Details will follow.

  It is now common knowledge in the city that more than thirty court sorcerers attend the tyrant — Egyptian and Samaritan for the most part — and that in night-long ceremonies the infernal demons have been invoked against you, my Lord (may the Great God deflect!). Leaden tablets, inscribed with the name of your Eternity and pierced with nails, have been buried under the Palatine Hill.

  May the Augustus live for ever.

  IV

  From the Journal-Memoir of Constantine Augustus,

  Verona, 24 August

  This morning: inspected the enemy walls again. Impossible to envisage a better defended city. The river wraps it on three sides and is swollen with early rains. Two bridges connect with a fortified hill on the north bank, expensive to assail. All the walls are heavy, and so well bonded that from a distance they look like cliffs.