Emperor Page 3
But I was always terrified of burning.
Isn’t it ridiculous, then, that these letters now sear my heart?
Enough. I’m growing maudlin, and must end. By the way, a past friend sends you her respects; she’s my new companion, the Lady Politta. You knew her as Livilla Anulina. She’s as plump as a partridge now, and going on forty.
My regards to your Lucullus, and my love to you.
VI
Journal-Memoir of Constantine.
26 August
[In the hand of Synesius]
Morning: the last earthworks are dug. We hold Verona in a ring of steel and will in time suffocate her. The catapults have opened up all along our lines. So far the walls blister but do not crack. It seems they were built in eight months by the Emperor Gallienus. They are therefore quite modern, and are exceedingly strong.
Towards ten o’clock one of the southern gates showed unexpected signs of weakness, but it is defended by a deep ditch; this forces an oblique approach which exposes to the ramparts the men’s sword-arms instead of their shields. An ancient trick. Where is a left-handed legion?
Sapping continues against the northern walls. Mobile towers near completion. At eleven o’clock the Ulpia Victrix sent in battering-rams at two points by the river, hoping to breach the outworks. But the God judged otherwise. Our iron-plated screens failed us. A few casualties.
At noon I attended sacrifice to the Sun Invincible. Something tight and cold inside my chest all the time. The augurs reported that the heifer’s liver was half eaten away. They gave contradictory readings on this, none of them favourable. The practices of Maxentius never leave my mind. They say that all his life he has destroyed his rivals by consecrating them to the gods of the underworld.
Last night I had a vivid dream. A woman came, and stood beside my bed — a middle-aged woman weeping and protesting. This provoked a furious anger in me. I said: ‘It’s no time for tears’ and struck her. She immediately vanished.
I submitted this dream to the haruspices. Their interpretation was this: the woman is Rome, sad for the afflictions of the tyrant; I struck away her sorrow.
Afternoon: completed pontoon bridge at the ford; consulted maps with the praetorian prefect and staff. Plans for marching on Aquileia, on Modena. Verinus tells me a strange story. As an officer in Syria he was detailed to recover treasure pilfered from the temple of the Sun-Jupiter in Damascus. He found the robbers wandering in the desert, driven mad by sunstroke, their faces swollen like flowers. With such a guardian, how can we fail? It is insane to think that there is anything more potent than the symbol which the God has so manifestly set before us in the skies.
Now that Verona is encircled I have written to the Empress, who has left Turin against my orders, either to return there or to join us here at once. I believe it is safer here than in Milan.
[Constantine continues in his own hand.]
There is selfishness in this, I know, I want her by me. Perhaps I’ve come to rely too much on her. Or perhaps it is simply that I can be myself with her. No play-acting, no infallible Augustus there! I lay at her feet too long to pretend to be more than a man.
But sometimes the remembered sweetness of her puts me in a rage and I don’t understand what has happened to us. Just as in the first year of our marriage I saw a girl — a haughty, abstracted girl — so now, on the farther side of love, I see a woman, a totally self-sufficient woman.
But in between — did I dream it?
I recall the day, even the hour, when my eyes were opened — or closed. It was at a banquet in Treves. A very ordinary banquet. Fausta does not even remember it, except for the end. I must have held it as a celebration, because I had returned that same afternoon from a four-month tour of Upper Germany. The Empress, I heard, had been ill; but she would attend that evening. It was early winter. We’d had heating installed under the porphyry floors of the antiquated palace, and the dining-hall was suffocating, filled with smoke and the smell of saffron. I quite forget who else was present. Fausta reclined next to me in a dark dress. We’d seen little of each other since that political convenience which was our marriage. She had shared my bed perhaps a dozen times, and suffered a miscarriage. It seems inexplicable to me now that I could have been so indifferent and so incurious of her. While some palace orator read a eulogy, I remember closing my eyes (this is interpreted as ecstasy) and wondering how my men were faring on the Rhine — it had been snowing heavily for days.
The banquet dragged. Used for four months to the plain fare of military stations, the food disgusted me. A wild boar stuffed with roast dormice is vivid in my mind. And marinated song-birds sent from Cyprus. After a while I became aware of a faint, elusive scent. She told me later that it was sweet calamus, and I’ve never smelt it since without a pang. I opened my eyes and saw that she had leant closer to me. The orator had finished. She said: “You’re tired.”
For the first time since my return, I noticed her. She looked maturer than I remembered. I thought: she’s been sick. But her talk was animated and even seemed tender. She asked me how cold our march had been, how far a cohort could travel in deep snow. And was it true that one year the cavalry of the Bructeri had crossed the Rhine on solid ice with their heavy wagons, cattle and families all together?
As she questioned me, I realised that I did not know her at all, that I had never known her. I was reclining beside a stranger: a woman of twenty-one in whose pale face the bones were delicate and fine. The dark silk dress showed off arms and shoulders of almost translucent whiteness. Silvery nails completed the slenderness of her hands, and her forearms were clouded by a faint softness of hair, like the fur of an animal. Her body looked lithe, finely-strung: what the Persians call a watchful body. She had (and still has) the small, even teeth which so many of our Roman women lack. Why, I wondered, had I not admired her before? But even her hair looked different. It fell down in ringlets in the old Flavian way — a rich, brown, barbarian head of hair for which the women of Italy would have given their eyes. And once, when she leant forward, the neck of her dress hung fractionally loose and I glimpsed, with all the guilt of an adulterer, the gentle swell of breasts above her corslet.
As she talked I became aware of a strange lightness stirring under my ribs. She touched the new scar on my neck — she’d noticed it immediately — and inquired about an old one in my thigh. I thought: I only mentioned that old wound to her once, but she’s remembered.
Yes, it seems odd to me now, but I thought of her as tender. I noticed the way her lips tilted up at the corners; and above all her eyes, dark and arresting, wide-spaced. Her whole face was filled with animation, at once radiant, intense and slightly solemn. Looking back I can see that she was perfectly controlled whereas I, who had commanded armies, suddenly could not command my tongue or even the trembling of my hands.
Many courses of food came and went. I barely touched them. The wine I did not touch at all. Fausta ate artichoke-hearts with cat-like motions of her head. A lyre-player sang; I never heard him. An official toasted the Emperor and the army. I barely raised my eyes from my wife — I think I had forgotten who the Emperor was.
An hour later several of my generals were badly drunk. This is something I have always frowned upon at official banquets. I am considered puritan, I know, but the sight of middle-aged men, schooled in a hard discipline, vomiting and roaring and pawing their women is something I regret. This time, for a while, I ignored it. We were all recovering from a long starvation: from woman-hunger in particular. But the dry, salt desserts had done their worst, and the men began drinking to get drunk. Several were already snoring where they lay, the garlands askew across their throats. The air stifled. I remember how unreal the other women appeared to me that night with their high, tinkling laughs and the little taught gestures of their fingers. More like collections of jewellery they seemed, with faces gone dim between the embroidered necks of their dalmatics and the gold bands in their hair. The only living thing in the whole room was the vivid, ser
ious face of the woman by my side.
After a display of clowning by a troupe of Spanish acrobats I stood up and very abruptly (it was later intimated) dismissed the company. It used to be unheard-of for anybody to depart before the Emperor and Empress, but since I remained engrossed in talk with Fausta the palace slaves were eventually left with the strange sight of the rulers of northern Europe reclining alone amongst a litter of spittle and bones. Soon the slaves themselves retired confused, whispering. Our voices broke on silence. Fausta kept shifting her feline body on the couch and looking at me questioningly.
I forget with what stumbling words I told her I loved her. My own wife! But I remember the alarmed whisper with which she answered “Love?” Then she touched her hand against her forehead, peering at me from beneath it as if the angle of her arm were a shield. She was frightened and astonishingly beautiful. Her eyes had turned moist, so that I thought she was going to cry. They shone strangely. And a blush was moving along her cheekbones, high up in the pallor of the skin. She was like a newly discovered land, virgin, startled.
I ask myself now: why do I write this down? Perhaps the answer is this: words continue to contain what we have lost. I embalm her, like an Egyptian queen, thus.
[From the Commonplace Book of Synesius. . . . I sometimes feel the Augustus wants to possess for ever those times when (he believes) he touches on the divine — in achievement, in love, in experience of every kind. This stems, I think, from a deep void in him.
I find that I can admire and dislike a quality at the same time, Especially in Fausta. That aloofness, that self-containment. Compared to those fortifications the walls of Verona are toys! How I loved them, hate them.
Fausta.
Some madness lingers. I don’t see vices in you, but absences.
Last winter, while we walked in the palace peristyle, I took a handful of snow and pressed it against her cheek. I said: “That’s your love,” Cold. And she smiled (she actually smiled!) and said. “Yes.”
VII
Hosius, Bishop of Cordoba, to Victor or Ulia, Priest.
Verona, 27 August
Greetings, my dearest Victor, and to our brothers in Christ, my blessing.
You cannot imagine what a country God has created here. Never has a quartermaster had so easy a task feeding an army! The harvest is in. Every kind of cereal and vegetable is stored in the barns, and many fruits.
As to Verona, it is built half of pink marble, and sits in the elbow of a fine river. All around it our siege-works are truly terrifying. The men of this army are the tallest I have ever seen, and savage. I can barely understand what many of them say, for they are mostly Gauls, Germans and Britons. Their dialect sounds like stones grating together. The German auxiliaries have kept their own uniforms and standards. The Gepidae even wear trousers and ride their horses clutching little shields painted with barbaric devices. But I suppose these tribes to be safe recruits for our armies, since they hate each other more than they hate us.
It will not surprise you that Christians are few among such men. Their deities mean little more to them than charms. Of humility or penitence they understand nothing at all. I spent this morning at the bedside of a Gaulish centurion dying of an arrow wound. I spoke to him for a long time of the Holy Mysteries and he agreed at last to be baptised. Then he died, calling on Epona the horse-goddess. That is the kind of people these are.
But they have one object of veneration at least more worthy than demons — the noble Augustus. In the army the cult of emperor-worship, godless though it may be, is less stifling than in our native Spain. For here the object of their prayers is amongst them, and is a magnificent-looking man. Powerfully built he is, with a close-cropped auburn beard. Now thirty-two (an age when most men’s features begin to fill) he shows a strong-boned and intemperate face. When I talk to him I watch both his eyes and his hands. The first are grey and searching; they are not happy. The second start twisting together the moment he’s impatient.
Among the soldiers countless stories are told about him. They say he’s able to be in many places at once, and that he never sleeps — or rather that he sleeps on his feet, like a horse. The truth is that he’s a masterly organiser. He applies his mind fiercely to a problem until he has worried an answer out of it. Then he executes his will with astonishing vigour and speed.
Many people are frightened of him. They say he’s austere and ruthless. And certainly it is important to approach him with great diplomacy. He can be most tempestuous. But I myself have been treated kindly by him ever since I joined the court this spring. I spoke to him then of Constantius his father, whose goodwill to the Christians was alone unblemished among all the Caesars of his time. And as you can imagine, dear brother in Christ, I almost wept when I told him what I’d suffered in the great persecution, and how his father’s clemency alone ordered my release.
The Augustus is easily angered but quickly kind. He noticed my emotion and gave me a most gentle audience. During the persecution in the East I’d often praised the way he continued his father’s tolerance towards us, and now I boldly added that the Church had emerged innocent and victorious from its travails. His expression held no threat.
Several times since then we’ve spoken together, and I feel I am secured in his trust. By the grace of God those around him do not seem prejudiced against us, although even to this there is one perhaps comical exception — his personal servant Cecrops. This is an Illyrian veteran who has known the Augustus from childhood. He’s very old now, but still strong. His whole head is a cloud of white hair, and he curses even prefects and tribunes who visit the Augustus at inconvenient times. Yesterday he said to me (fingering my robes): “You bishops, you live off your flock like other shepherds. But what wolves do you scare?”
I imagine the Augustus is almost equally ignorant of our habits and doctrine. I have no way of telling. One may not approach him on such a subject. But he is, beneath his majesty, a rather uneducated man. Certainly he has no conception that the path to God is through humility.
This letter goes by my slave Dion, one of the faithful. May God preserve you, beloved brother.
VIII
The Empress Fausta to Constantine Augustus at Verona.
Milan, 28 August
Most Noble Husband,
You say that I am indispensable to you. How have I so reduced you? Besides, self-deceiving Gaius, reflect that you have dispensed with me for eight weeks and have since subdued half Cisalpine Gaul. I, meanwhile, have received the Spanish embassies and reorganised the palace at Aries. Separated, we achieve.
You ask that either I join you at Verona or return to the safety of Turin. I cannot be both wolf and chicken, you say. But you know well enough that I am wolf. Perhaps you’re right that Milan may not always be safe for me. And I shouldn’t care to fall into the hands of my brother. I might even be forced to say things. Maxi was always very good at getting people to say things. Even as a boy — and boys are all detestable — he was a remarkable torturer.
So I will leave for Verona in the morning. I will limit my household to the numbers you ask. Yes, I will be good. My retinue, in fact, is already much reduced. I have been dropping servants — ill or dead — all the way from Arles to here, and apart from my companion I have no more than a handful of slaves and eunuchs, with a single seamstress and hairdresser. My new companion, Livilla Politta, is unremarkable, except for silliness. I hope the tribunes of the court camp will not find her attractive. Her looks, I suspect, conform to military taste. But I must have her with me. I am not going to be the only woman (except for prostitutes) in the army of the Augustus.
Don’t fret about my journey. (Your letter sounded agitated.) Of course my guard will accompany me, although my protection has always been the terror of your name.
I am bringing you a present: boots of Ligurian leather, beautifully made.
IX
Journal-Memoir of Constantine.
30 August
I began today full of hope. The enemy sa
llied out in an effort I to destroy the catapults of the Primigenia — a sign of anxiety. They became entangled in their own ditches then retreated before reaching our breastworks, leaving their dead. An hour later a letter arrived by imperial courier from Milan to say that the Empress is coming.
That is the end of the day’s good fortune. A series of messages has reached me from the Master of the Offices. It is now certain that the enemy general Pompeianus slipped out of the city before our encirclement was complete, and is gathering forces around Aquileia. And the news from Rome horrifies. The tyrant’s practices shake the skies. He has ripped open pregnant women and offered up their unborn infants, inspecting the entrails for an augury. In one the intestines were found to be black or monstrously distended (the reports varied). This child’s body was marked with my name and that of Fausta, and was sewn back into the womb. That night it was buried under the Capitoline Hill, and so we were dedicated to the gods of the nether world.
These horrors threw me into the blackest state. The morning, I know, was bright and sunlit, yet it seemed as if a glaze had settled over the whole land. Was there something wrong with my eyes? The movements of men and horses looked senseless, like those of mice in cages. Shadows were more real than the objects which threw them. The very air threatened. I went to my rooms and had my face bathed and anointed. My head was throbbing. When I emerged again nothing had changed. The light fell full overhead, but the earth lay opaque. I must have groaned out loud because one of my staff tribunes asked: “Is my lord well?”
I said: “Who is unwell?” I summoned the prefects of the legions. My head cleared but my mind remained heavy. We prepared against the reinforcements of Pompeianus: plans for new earthworks facing outward. The labour and tedium of these precautions showed on every face. As for digging, the ground is still hard after the hot summer. It was then that the fate of the Emperor Probus flickered into my mind: murdered by his men after overworking them. I could not banish this abstruse thought. When I rode along the lines of the Minervia and the legionaries clambered onto the breastworks to cheer me, I felt a profound relief. This shows how overwrought I was. It must never happen again.