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I search for the point where the enemy thinks himself weak, and a network of ditches is conspicuous before the city’s southwestern gate. This gate appears older than the ramparts round it, and is half walled up. It is surmounted by a double arcade, at present manned by slingers. I direct the heavy catapults of the Primigenia Legion against it.
To the east the angle of the walls is buttressed by the amphitheatre, and the defences run too close to the river. Dangerous and constricted for attackers. At midday I crossed the ford and inspected its fortifications. The Frankish auxiliaries have made a poor affair of the far-side camp. I order the engineers of the Ulpia Victrix legion to overhaul. This creates bad feeling. I lose my temper.
Afternoon: consulted with the commanders. We view the enemy hill-citadel, but the approach to it is steep on all sides, and the ascent encumbered by felled trees.
The bulk of our men now on the north bank, and the encirclement of the city almost complete. I impress on the commanders the need to menace four or five points at once. Enemy ditches must be systematically filled in. Engineer units of the legions will be responsible for building two mobile towers each.
The generals dislike siege-work and are not used to it. They quarrel and grumble behind my back. The commander of cavalry, Sacrovir, ventures the remark that the enemy general Pompeianus is no more than a perfumed wool-merchant from Milan, and afraid to fight. I laugh at him, something he hates. He will consequently remember what I said: that Pompeianus is the most experienced soldier in Italy.
Now, sitting at this table in an emptied room (and midnight already), I should like to occupy that general’s brain. Is he also awake over there? From the upper windows I can see lights, very small and pale, travelling along the ramparts. Our own lines are in darkness except where the Franks still sit about their campfires. They gamble for the armour they will strip from the enemy dead: a good sign. Their unmentionable songs float up to these chambers.
It’s as well they cannot read. The citizens of Verona have scrawled graffiti on every building outside the walls. Many of these are aimed at me, and the same word appears over and over. ‘Matricide.’
I had these erased. I have never seen Rome in my life. So how can I, a Dardanian soldier, look on her as my mother?
Yet strangely it is so. For years now the emperors have abandoned Rome for other cities, but her ghost continues to bestride the world. We have grown on what she gave us; she is our mother and we cannot escape her. But matricide? No! Divinity is no more in Rome than in York. This Matricide is merely a boorish slogan. I am cleansing Rome of a monster, and if her spirit should come to me I’ll say: I am your saviour. Twenty years ago in the days of the Emperor Diocletian, the administration of the Empire could be split between several men — and the old magician dominated them all. I myself remember the days when four Augusti and Caesars ruled in brief concord from different capitals. But such edifices can stand only on the prestige of one man. With Diocletian gone, the building fell, and in our time, as in most times, civil war is inevitable. I do not need to ask myself if I am ambitious, because ambition is forced on me. It is the will of the God. Europe is divided between myself and Maxentius, and I must fight until I am alone, or dead.
Even to the secrecy of this journal I can say that this war was not prepared by me, but by him. His statues, as God can see, still stand with honour in the forums of Gaul, while mine were overturned in all his provinces of Italy and Africa. I struck an arm already raised against me. And the people of Rome petitioned me for help, pleading to be saved from a tyranny. If the people are with me, would the gods be against? What gods? Rome is not gods. She is flesh and stones.
I will reverence Rome but not her rulers, who have bled Italy. This is one of the richest provinces of the Empire, but the fields are turning fallow and the irrigation channels falling in. It was Diocletian, I recall, who tied the peasant to his fields by law. It has not worked. The farmers are taxed to their deaths, and sell their children into slavery rather than let them starve. Probably nobody told the old emperor about it. And he thought he was restoring the golden time!
It is an extraordinary fact that a ruler may realise less than his meanest subject. The emperor moves about on vapours of flattery. He knows nobody. Nobody knows him. I spent half my life in the sacred retinue of Diocletian, and addressed him in nothing but formulas. How perfectly I remember that protocol! A step to the right. A bow to the left. Prostration on admittance to the sacred presence, genuflection on leaving it. How was I to know that up on that incense-clouded throne, surrounded by state eunuchs and palatine ministers, the powdered face concealed a man?
Resolution: when I am emperor in Rome I will not powder or rouge my face. I will let people see what I am, even if it is disgusting.
But will I? Already I interpose a false person between myself and my flatterers. This person inspires their fright. Nowadays it takes something sad or weak or humorous to break him down. Then another man emerges, impulsive and rather kind. I call him me.
But at all other times I can feel the mask of the emperor eroding my features: the same mask which set the face of Diocletian at last in that mould of stoney sadness. We are caught in a trap. The emperor is divine. Divinity is beyond feelings and mistakes. We play at gods (I wear a gold-embossed cuirass under my purple cloak) and our subjects play at worshippers. Thus we create each other’s dishonesty. I can share a certitude with everyone, because the Augustus is always certain. But my doubts must stay in darkness, and so my own reality becomes elusive to me.
This morning, as I studied the enemy’s southern walls, the prefects of the legions posted opposite shuffled about me like slaves. Yes, these men, some of the best and fiercest fighters in the world, had momentarily become slaves. After a while I grew irritated. I decided to test them. I selected the strongest part of the defences: that corner where the amphitheatre looms like a self-contained fort above a whole network of Punic ditches which turn the approach to a foot-soldier’s grave.
“We’ll attack there,” I said.
“Yes, Eternity,” replied the prefect of the Primigenia. Only a knotting between the eyes, the slightest squint, betrayed that the man thought I’d gone mad. The other faces were blank.
“That’s the easiest salient to attack?” I continued.
“Yes, Augustus.”
“Then prepare the men.”
But the farce was ended by Gallus Verinus, prefect of the Minervia. That boyish face, aflame with amazement, showed up like a burst of fire in a black wood. Old comrade Verinus, I thank my God for you. He clapped his hand on my shoulder. — the sacred shoulder! — and blurted at me: “You’d be mad to try it, Constantine. We’d be cut in pieces!”
The other prefects watched us aghast, as if I’d call down a thunderbolt. But I was starting to enjoy myself. “Prepare your men, Prefect Verinus,” I said. “The First Legion Minervia will lead the assault at noon.”
It is on such men as Verinus that the Empire was built. He is absolutely fearless. But now, his face crimson with frustration, he dashed his helmet on the ground and bellowed: “I will not lead my men or my Emperor on such a lunacy! Execute me!” Never before had an officer spoken to me like that. I embraced him warmly, to his astonishment. If there is any man I love, it is him.
I first met Verinus when we were boys. His father was an official in the palace at Sirmium and mine was the district governor. I don’t recall much about Sirmium, except for huge corridors which shone with torches, miles of them, even by day. I was glad of these. I had a fear of the dark which has never left me.
My mother must have been the first to tell me about the Sun. I recall her holding up a leaf to the light (although I can’t remember where or when). “Look at that, Gaius. Look how its veins run! That’s the Sun’s blood. That’s life.” Since then I must have sacrificed a thousand times to this Sun Invincible. But to me the great temples seem much like one another, and it’s my parents’ sacrifices in Illyria that I remember. They worshipped many gods. My
father, indeed, was drawn to Syrian and Jewish sects, like the Christians. But only this temple to the Sun-Apollo is sharp in my memory. I think it was in the Dardanian hills, and it was very small, almost rustic. I always felt very proud when we went there. The priests were nervous of my father, who was already prefect of a district. A faint, sweet smell of incense pervaded the place, and because the shrine was in a valley the altar smoke lifted unblown in an immense spiral of blue. But what I remember best is the Sun Himself, shining through the smoke. He hung there rayless like a molten coin, suspended and watching us without benevolence or anger, simply gazing, a god without properties, a god for all time.
That remoteness awed me. I affected to despise my mother’s minor deities, because she chattered to them like friends. Their images, with fat bellies and spikey breasts, cluttered the porch of the villa where I was born.
Yet now, confession: I should like to feel the God’s hand firm on me. I should like to close my eyes, as my mother did, and sense the closeness of divinity, and my power at one with it. Sometimes in the day this is so. But even then, not always. And at night, never.
Two years ago Apollo granted me a vision in Gaul. I was marching through the country of the Leuci, where his great temple stands. I had just suppressed the rebellion of my own father-in-law, but his blood was not on my hands. He had hanged himself in his own chamber, his face turned black with its tongue sticking out: a bad omen. This temple of Apollo was very grand, as I remember it. The day was hot and the Sun blazed on its walls. I entered the inner court alone. It was built of new stone and dazzled the eyes. Everything quivered and moved. My feet made a strange echo on the pavements. And as I looked up at the face of the god, my stomach emptied. I saw myself looking back at me. His features were my own. He was riding a horse and holding out a laurel. My own divinity was offering a laurel to me. He seemed to smile.
But all my life has been governed by terrible impulses and passions, and when I look back my reason mocks them. So I am unsure now of the man who stood in Apollo’s sanctuary then. Did the god really smile?
The trumpets have just sounded the second watch.
Philosophers tell us that we live in a fading cycle and that the virtue is going out of men and of the earth. Others declare that the gods are abandoning us. Perhaps that is why I sometimes feel a gulf open at my feet. I look up at the sky and see the order and invincibility of the Sun. The Sun is pure, absolute. I too, I say, want to be pure: my life, my love, my death. But suddenly, for no reason that I can apprehend, I feel that He is indifferent to me. Not that He has forgotten, but that He never knew. I look around me and all at once I do not see where God is. Then I have a terror that the divine has slipped away and that I am alone. I am His regent, but my mission goes unseen by Him. I fight for unity and order — for what was once ‘the immense majesty of the Roman peace’ — but the God does not support me.
I begin to be afraid of what I write.
If all this should be for nothing, this march, these deaths . . . ? Today I ordered the execution of two decurions for cowardice. They had followed me through three campaigns on the Rhine. One of them lost his left ear fighting the Bructeri. It saw their expressions as I condemned them.
And here at night, when the skies are empty and the God is sleeping, there is nothing between a man and the cold silence of Infinity. Then I ask myself: does this darkness extend for ever? Will it in the end outlast the Sun? And I find myself trembling. My old tutor used to say that Divinity was light. But one day I found an essay he was reading: the work of some Neoplatonist who wrote that the whole world, and all men, were a dream being dreamt by God. No, my tutor had written beneath it. God is the dream of man.
I am told the magicians of Maxentius have consecrated me to darkness.
Where is the Sun now? Where is He now?
This is childish, terrible.
V
The Empress Fausta at Milan, to her cousin Marina at Nice.
25 August
You cannot imagine, dearest Marina, how tiresome it is to be the wife of an emperor and yet to have no uses at all. All day the notables of Milan come to me with petitions, fawning as if we were long acquaintances. Some of us are. One person wishes to hear if he will keep his office, another to know if he will receive it. The latest arrival was a man wanting a monopoly for selling pigs to the army. I ask you: Pigs. These people do not hesitate to remind me of occasions when my father was alive and we lived in the imperial palace here. It is astonishing suddenly to hear what a dear little girl I was. I listen with as much patience as I have (not much, as you know) then I politely have to remind them that my husband is busy, a little as if he was an overworked banker. They depart with ingratitude.
I suppose I should feel relief to be settled again and living in one place for longer than a day. Our journey over the Alps was quick and very beautiful, but the road was so bad I felt sick much of the time and my companion Prisca caught fever. All through western Cisalpina the wreck of the armies defeated by my husband went trudging past our carriage: a most pitiful sight.
But here at Milan everything is orderly. The court camp has just pushed on and joined Gaius at Verona. You’ve never known such bores. Most of the praetorian tribunes and notaries are ingratiating and silly, and the camp commandant turned out to be a Vandal who barely spoke Latin. In fact the only conversation to be had was that of my husband’s Secretary. This is an elderly Greek called Synesius, who wears his beard long in the old-fashioned way. The whole camp laughs when they see him walk, because he’s stiff as a log after twelve hours’ mule-riding a day; but there’s more brain in that bald head than in a legion of tribunes. No wonder he is rather paternal, as if he thought the rest of us children.
And oh, I nearly forgot Hosius. This is a toad dressed up as a bishop. From Spain, I think. He is all unction and benediction, and his mule is bent under him like a cradle, poor brute, because it carries the only fat man in the army. I believe he has attached himself to Gaius as ambassador for the Christians of the northern Empire.
After all this, Mari, you will be surprised to hear that I’d rather be with these people at Verona than sitting in Milan. For one thing I am in a strange position here. Nobody is sure if I support my husband or my brother Maxentius. I can read that question on all their faces. For another thing I hate being absent from the point where issues are decided. You will understand this, you who have known me since we were children. I’m not in the least afraid that Gaius will be killed. Isn’t that strange? The death of some people is unimaginable, and my husband is one.
Oh Mari, I do want to be there. Did you ever dream, when we played ‘mouse’ by Lake Verbanus all those years ago, that you were hiding from the future empress of the world? I’m convinced that we receive from childhood the most distorted images. I remember Verbanus always in sunlight, I remember leaves falling like great brown birds from the maple trees. How can I? We were only there in spring.
But one thing I remember true, and so will you. The boy playing with us. The stocky, sneering one you used to call the Dog. My brother Maxentius. Nobody was quite like Maxi even then. How I loathed and adored him!
Childhood is a wretched time.
As people in Gaul first heard what he was doing in Rome — the numbers of men killed and women raped — they were all incredulous. All, that is, except me. I knew that it was true. When I was seven I had a kitten and it disappeared. I’ve never told anybody this. I searched everywhere for it. At last I went to the back of the palace baths, and there I found it, nailed to the ground through its eyes. Around it ten or fifteen other small animals lay strangled or impaled. That was Maxi’s garden.
I think my values cruelly unpredictable. Since then, in Rome, my brother has murdered three of my friends. Each crime has outraged me, then I have forgotten it. But the kitten’s murder went unforgiven for ever.
Dear Marina, I have only you left in whom to confide. I do this freely because I am sure of your trust, but please destroy this letter after reading
it, as you have destroyed the others. Anyway, reading old letters is a melancholy pastime. All the way over the Alps in my closed carriage to Turin I had for companion only sick Prisca and a casket of old papers from which I dare not be parted. So I dosed Prisca and read the papers.
What should I find but the bundle of letters written me by Gaius when he was away on campaign! Did I ever tell you that he fell in love with me in the second year of our marriage? I unrolled them and started to read, I felt my throat turning dry, and blushed redder than Prisca for all her fever. Listen: ‘Secret of my life, little dove, great miracle — how I long for you! My impatience to return is driving a whole army like a flail. Yes, it’s a terrible weapon, this army driven by you! Oh Fausta beloved, how I ache to take that radiant face to my lips! Can I kiss you through a letter? I kiss you, I kiss you. Open those dark eyes. I kiss them too. Yes, sitting in this empty tent I touch you. I run my fingers over your shoulders, the little blue veins of them. . . . (Don’t mock me.) And don’t forget, Faustina, that beauty in this world is the shadow of an upper glory, that when we gaze on one another we gaze through each to heaven, that when I kiss your lips (sweet lips!) I am kissing the Eternal. For “the Eternal and the Beautiful are One” [he quotes Plotinus]. Through Eros we are one, my dove, my beautiful. Perfect, Always, One.’
How insane it is! (I order you to burn this letter.) I remember him returning too, looking as he does now: very tall and — yes — handsome, with that intense face of powerful bones. If there was such a thing as a golden time, I suppose that year was ours. I almost persuaded myself that I was capable of love. (You long ago guessed that his passion made me afraid.) But in our lighter times of laughter, of teasing, I could think: I love him, this is love. That was the year of those receptions in the palace at Treves, when you and Lucullus came. I make no secret to you (you know it anyway): I am terribly vain. Sitting beside him in that gold-embroidered dress you so much envied, I felt myself on Olympus. Of course you thought me conceited. So I was. So I am. I’m married to the Sun.