CHAPTER XXIII
THE EMPEROR
The liberations of public slaves from ergastula in Turin, Milan, Placentia, Parma, Mutina, Bononia, Nuceria, Spolitum and Narnia resulted in the formation of eighteen tumultuary centuries, which, between Narnia and Ocriculum, during a long noon-halt, were formed into the semblance of three cohorts, thus we approached Rome as nine cohorts: three of the deputies from Britain; three more of the recruits from Gaul, presumably like the British legionaries, loyal patriots, bent on foiling Perennis, and saving their beloved Emperor; and three more composed of the contents of a dozen or more ergastula, opened as the whim took the veteran sergeants, and assumed to contain not pilferers, runaways or evil-doers, but innocent victims of the malignity of the understrappers of that unspeakable Perennis.
As we drew near Rome Agathemer and I discussed our situation and prospects with increasing alarm. After we left Narnia the watch on us was not so close and we might have escaped. But we had seen a score of attempts at escape, by various rascals, foiled and ending in the butchery of the would-be fugitives. While escape was possible the risk was very great. Also, Agathemer argued, we were too near to Rome to be safe if we got clear away. Between dread of death if caught and fear of we knew not what if we escaped, we stuck to our cookery. Mixed with our projects for bettering our prospects we talked much of our amazement at the treatment which the deputation and its associates had met in Italy. Manifestly the townsfolk and their officials were not only overawed, but helpless. If there had been no Rome, no Republic, no Praetorians, no Prefect of the Palace, no central authority whatever we could not have been more completely free from hindrance, coercion or question, Yet Agathemer and I could not but conjecture that the Senate, Perennis and Commodus had been promptly and minutely informed of all our doings, of our progress, of our approach; and had taken measures to deal with us and our instigators. We felt panicky.
Spouting long tirades about their loyalty to the Emperor, their hatred of Perennis and their eagerness to foil one and save the other, our irresponsible frontier centurions let their men and us loiter southward through Cisalpine Gaul and Umbria as they had loitered on the other side of the Alps, seldom marching more than ten miles a day. So that we left Ocriculum on the tenth day before the Kalends of August and stopped overnight at each change-station.
We had had fair weather all the way from Placentia, except a heavy rain at Ariminum and showers in the mountains between Forum Sempronii and Nuceria. When day dawned on us at Rostrata Villa, on the eighth day before the Kalends of August, it dawned cloudy, but not threatening. After the usual camp breakfast of porridge and wine, we fell in, by now fairly decent marchers, and set off for Rubrae. But before we had marched a mile, the low clouds soaked us with such a downpour as I had seldom seen of a July morning near Rome. So heavy and so unrelenting was the rain that we were glad to halt at the change-house at the twentieth mile-stone, where the road from Capena to Veii crosses the Flaminian Highway and where there is a prosperous village as large as many a small town. There we found quarters and food ready for us and were well entertained. Ad Vicesimum, as the place is called, is only four miles nearer Rome than Villa Rostrata.
It was about midway of that four-mile march in the pouring rain that I saw by the roadside three immobile horsemen, their forms swathed in horsemen's rain-cloaks, their faces hidden under broad-brimmed rain-hats, lined up with their horses' noses barely a horse-length from the roadway, watching from a little knoll our column as it passed. The middle horseman of the three looked familiar. I glanced back at him and met his eyes, intensely watching me from under his dripping hat brim, as I trudged on the edge of the trudging rabble. A hot qualm surged through me. It was, it certainly was, the very same man I had seen in the very same guise on the road below Villa Andivia as Tanno and I passed by on our way to our fatal brawl at Vediamnum; the very man who had peered in at me and Capito during his fatal conference with me in Nemestronia's water-garden, the man whom Tanno had asserted that he knew for an Imperial spy. I felt recognition in his gaze; felt that he knew me for my very self. And his nose was hooked.
At our halting place, when Agathemer and I were alone, I asked him in Greek if he had noticed the three stationary horsemen. He at once, without my mentioning my suspicions, declared that he also had recognized the middle horseman precisely as I had. What his presence there might forbode, what his apparent recognition of me might portend, we could not conjecture. We agreed that, although both of us had been on the lookout for Imperial emissaries all the way from Placentia, and alertly watching from Ariminum southwards, this was the first time we had set eyes on any man whom we could take for a secret-service man. That so much time had elapsed since the authorities must have been warned of our approach, that we should have advanced so near Rome and yet that this should be the first visible indication of espionage upon us, amazed both me and Agathemer.
Next day, a cloudy but rainless day, we marched only to Rubrae, the change-station nearest Rome. There, as at every previous halt, we found the authorities apprised of our approach and prepared to lodge and feed us. And, as always since we left Nuceria, we were comfortably sheltered in a camp all ready for our occupancy and lavishly provided with varied food and passable wine.
Next day, the sixth day before the Kalends of August, dawned exquisitely fair and bright, with a soft steady breeze; a perfect July day, mild but not too warm. Our elected sergeants, now quite habituated to their duties and authority as centurions, routed us up early and, after a leisurely camp-breakfast, we fell in and set off on the last stage of this amazing unopposed march of fifteen hundred insurgent mutineers for nineteen hundred miles, in making which they had so loitered that they had consumed on the road more than half a year and along which they had added to their company casual associates twice as numerous as themselves. We left Rubrae an excited horde, for the veterans were keyed up to a tense pitch of expectancy by their anticipation of they knew not what culmination to their insane adventure and their accidental recruits were aquiver with uneasiness and apprehension.
The Mulvian Bridge over the Tiber is not more than four miles from Rubrae along the winding Flaminian Highway and we were crossing it before the third hour of the day was past. Marching with the first of the three centuries formed at Placentia I had about five-sixths of our column ahead of me. So I did not see, did not even glimpse, did not, from far towards the rear, so much as guess what was happening. I knew only that, as I was more than half way across the Mulvian Bridge, a wave of cheers started far forward in our column and ran back to my century and all the way to the rearmost men. What had occurred we did not know, but we broke ranks and flowed out of the road to left and right, as did the men ahead of us, becoming almost a mob, despite the remonstrances and orders of our disgusted sergeants. They restrained us to some extent, but we were kept back more by the fact that the foremost men blocked the highway, the men who had been marching next them blocked the fields to right and left of the highway and the rest of us were checked behind them, like water above a dam.
As we stood there, packed together, with hardly a semblance of ranks kept anywhere, craning to see over the heads of the men in front of us and to try to see past and between the many big and tall tombs and mausoleums which flanked the road on either side, a period of tense silence or blurred murmurings was ended by a second great surge of cheers from front to rear. We all cheered till we were hoarse. Again we peered and listened and questioned each other, again came a roar of cheering like a sea billow. Again and again alternated the half silence and the uproar. Before we learned what was happening or had happened word came from mouth to mouth that we were going on. The press in front of us gradually melted away, we were able to sidle into the roadway, reform ranks and tramp on Romewards.
After a very brief march we turned aside to our right into a meadow on the west of the road and its flanking rows of tombs, between the Highway and the Tiber, about half way from Mulvian Bridge to the Flaminian Gate of Rome; that is, about half a mile from each. There we found a meticulously laid-out and perfectly appointed camp, precisely suited to the forty-five hundred of us and our requisitioned mules, wagons and what not. It contained some four hundred and fifty tents, set on clipped grass along rolled and gravelled streets as straight as bricklayers' guide-boards; all about a paved square of ample size, on the rear of which was set up a gorgeous commander's tent of the whitest canvas, striped with red almost as deep, rich and glowing as the Imperial crimson, and manifestly meant to imitate it as closely as such a dyestuff could. On either side of this Praetorium were a dozen tents, smaller indeed than the Praetorium, but much larger than tents set up for us, presumably for the commanders' aides. In front of the Praetorium, between it and the square, was a wide, broad and high platform of new brickwork, paved on top, railed with solid, low, carved railings set in short carved oak posts. The corner posts, and two others dividing the front and back of the platform equally, were tall and supported an awning of striped canvas like that of the commander's tent.
Goggling with curiosity we, as we deployed to our quarters, stared hard at the magnificent tent and sumptuous platform with its gorgeous awning. Once at our quarters, I and Agathemer, of course, must cook and serve food to our century. Only after all were fed did we, in common with all the middle and rear of our road-column, learn what had occurred.
While we ate, our sergeants, while they also ate somehow, held a centurions' council, at which those of the fifty-four who had not been far enough forward on the Highway to see and hear were informed, by those who had, of what had happened. When our sergeant returned from this council he told us, in a jumbled and mumbled attempt at an address.
From what he told me and from what I heard later I gather that, as the column debouched from the bridge, its head was met and checked by a body of mounted Praetorian Guards. Their tribune, in the name of the Emperor, ordered the column to halt and bade its centurions deploy their men right and left and mass them in a largish space free of big tombs. As they deployed the Praetorians also deployed to left and right of the Highway and the foremost mutineers descried on the roadway the splendid horses and gorgeous trappings of the Emperor's personal staff, among whom, from the statues, busts and painted panel-portraits of him which they had seen daily in their own quarters and countless times on their road to Rome, the more alert of them recognized their liege.
Then rose that unexpected wave of cheering which had first apprized us in the rear that something unusual was toward. Commodus, as I heard from Publius Cordatus himself, after our nap and before the Emperor's return, was mounted on a tall sorrel such as his father had always preferred on his frontier campaigns. Also he was garbed not only as his father had habitually been when on frontier expeditions, but seemingly, in one of his old outfits. For not only Cordatus, but a dozen more, declared that his helmet, corselet and the plates of his kilt-straps, were of ungilded, unchased, plain steel, not even bright with polishing, but tarnished, all but rusty, with exposure to rain, mist and sun; his plume and cloak rain- faded and sun-faded till their crimson showed almost brown; his scabbard plain, dingy leather; his saddle of similar cheap, durable leather, his saddle-cloth of a crimson faded as brown as his cloak and plume. This was precisely the Spartan simplicity which Aurelius, as more than half a Stoic, had always affected, partly from an innate tendency towards self- restraint and modesty, partly that his example might, at first, offset the sumptuosity of Verus and, after his death, might inculcate, by example, economy in his lavish and self-indulgent retinue.
Whatever the motive, by this semi-histrionic effort at self-effacement the Emperor made himself tenfold conspicuous among his staff-officers, whose plumes, cloaks, kilts, and saddle-cloths blazed with crimson, green and gold, blue and silver and even crimson and gold.
Commodus, in any gear, was not only a tall, well-knit, impressive figure of a man, but, in his most negligent moods, he had something about him dominating, masterful, princely and Imperial. The sight of him cowed all who could then see him. Steadily he eyed them as they finished their tumultuary deployment and pressed forward to see and hear. When they were packed as closely as possible till no more could get within earshot he spoke:
"Fellow soldiers, what does this mean?"
All were too awed at the sight of their venerated Caesar for any man to speak up at once and the Emperor repeated:
"Fellow-soldiers, what does this mean? Tell me, I am your fellow-soldier."
Then Sextius Baculus himself replied, choking and hesitating, quailing before his lord:
"We are your loyal soldiers from Britain; a deputation come afoot and afloat almost two thousand miles to warn you of what no man in Rome, for fear of you more than of your treacherous Prefect, dares to warn you. Perennis is no fit guardian of your safety; in fact he is of all men most unfit. For more than two years now he has been laying his plans to have you assassinated, and to make Emperor in your place his eldest son, the darling of the Illyrian legionaries. We have come to save you, foil him and see him and his dead."
"Fellow-soldiers," the Emperor spoke at once, loudly and clearly, "I acclaim your purpose and welcome your good intentions. But I mean to prove to you that I am in fact as well as in title Tribune and Prince of the Republic, Emperor of its armies, Augustus and Caesar. Your solicitude I applaud, but I feel better able to take care of myself than can any other man save myself. I fear no man and appoint no man I distrust. I distrust few men after appointment. You lodge a grave charge against a man I have trusted, appointed and then trusted. I condemn few men unheard. As your Imperator I command you to camp where my legates indicate, to eat a hearty noon meal, to sleep, or at least rest in your tents, two full hours. About the tenth hour of the day I shall return, my trusty guards about me and Perennis himself in my retinue. From the platform of your camp, as a chief commander should, I will harangue you, and from that platform, after he has heard from me your accusation, my Prefect of the Praetorium shall make to you his defense. After he has spoken you shall hear me deliver just and impartial judgment, a judgment no man of you can but accept as fair and righteous.
"And now farewell, until the tenth hour."
At which word he had reined up, wheeled and spurred his mettlesome mount and thereupon vanished with his staff in a cloud of dust, at full gallop.
According to the Emperor's behest we rested in our tents after the centurions had each harangued his men. But if any slept, it was a marvel. All were too excited to sleep and every tent, as far as I could learn, talked without cessation. By the tenth hour, when the sun was visibly declining and the warmth of the midday abating, we were all assembled in the camp-square, the men helmeted and with their swords at their sides, but without shields or spears.
It was perfectly in keeping with the inconsistency of the mutineers that the crowd of men in the camp-square, instead of being marshalled by centuries under their sergeants, was allowed to assemble mob-fashion as each man came and pushed. Thus Agathemer and I, who should have been preparing to cook our company's evening meal, were not only in the throng, but well forward among the men and, in fact, pressed legs and chests against the legs and backs of two veterans not far from the rearmost centurions of the gathering of sergeants, not sixty feet from the platform, and nearly opposite its middle, though a little to the left. Few veteran privates heard and saw better than we.
When the Imperial cortege arrived and the platform began to fill, we two, like the men around us and like, I feel sure, the entire gathering, were amazed to see among the men four women, and Agathemer and I were doubly amazed to recognize one as Marcia. Agathemer, who knew the former slaves and present freedwomen of the Palace far better than I, whispered that the others were the sister and wife of Perennis and the wife of Cleander, like him a former slave and pampered freedman, and for long his rival.
The platform, of course, was lined and partly filled with aides, lictors, equerries, pages, and other Imperial satellites before the Emperor rode up, dismounted and appeared among his retinue. He strode springily to the front and seated himself on the crimson cushion of the ivory curule seat which a lictor placed for him. Marcia, to my tenfold amazement, then seated herself on a not dissimilar maple folding-seat, spread for her by a page. She was placed at the very front of the platform, next him on his right. Next her was Cleander's wife, also, to my still greater amazement, similarly seated, as were the two almost as ornately clad ladies with Perennis, who sat on his left, he standing to the left of the Emperor, who was set only a short yard in advance of the row of officials and intimates who lined the front of the platform.
Until all who had a right to places on the platform had mounted it and each had stationed himself in his proper position, the Emperor sat quietly regarding the mob of men facing him, eyeing us keenly and steadily. An equerry leaned over and whispered to him and he stood up. I could feel the men thrill, even more positively than they had thrilled when he appeared from among his retinue. I conjectured, instantly, that he had felt, if not an actual dread of the mutineers, at least a doubt as to his ability to quell them and a need for all possible adventitious aids. Thus I explained to myself his having donned, that morning, trappings such as his father had worn on frontier campaigns, apparently with the purpose of eliciting the sympathies of the men.
He now wore a gilded helmet, elaborately chased, and its crest a carved Chimaera spouting golden flames, which golden spout of flames, with the Chimaera's wings, formed the support from which waved his crimson plume, all of brilliantly dyed ostrich feathers. His corselet was similarly gilded or, perhaps, like the helmet, even of pure gold hammered and chased, adorned with depictions of the battles of the gods and giants above, and below with Trajan's victories over the Parthians. His kilt- straps were of crimson leather, plated with gilt or gold overlapping scales. His cloak was of the newest and most brilliant Imperial crimson. The platform was so high that I could clearly see his shapely calves and the gold eagles embroidered on the sky-blue soft leather of his half- boots. In his hand, he held a short baton or truncheon, such as all field- commanders carry as an emblem of independent command, such as I had seen at Tegulata in the hand of Pescennius Niger. It was gilded or gold-plated and its ends were chased pine-cones. Manifestly every detail of his habiting had been meticulously considered and the total effect carefully calculated. Certainly he was not only handsome and winsome, but dignified and imposing, truly a princely and Imperial figure. Evidently he had calculatingly arrayed himself so as to appear at one and the same time as Emperor and as a field-commander. The effect on the men, if I could judge, was all he had wished, all he could have hoped for. He dominated the mob of men as he dominated the platform.
There was no need of his wave of the arm enjoining silence. The silence, from his first movement as he rose, was as complete as possible.
"Fellow-soldiers," he said, and he spoke as well as the most practiced orator, audibly to all, smoothly and charmingly, "you have come from Britain across the sea, across Gaul, across the Alps, and half the length of Italy, with the best intentions, with the sincerest hearts, to apprize me of danger to me in my own Palace, danger unsuspected by me, as you believe. Your loyalty, your good intentions, your sincerity I realize and rejoice over. But I find it hard to believe that any soldiers in distant frontier garrisons can be better informed than the Prince himself of what goes on in Italy, in Rome, in the very Palace. You have lodged the gravest accusations against one of my most important and most trusted officials. I shall now state your charges, that the accused man may hear them now for the first time from my own lips and may here and now make his defence to you and to me."
He paused. My eyes had been on Commodus and now shifted to Perennis. Perennis was a handsome man, but in spite of, rather than because of, his build and features. Even through the splendid trappings of Prefect of the Praetorium he appeared too tall and too thin, his neck was too long, his face too long, his ears too big, his long nose overhung his upper lip. He was impressive and capable looking but appeared too crafty, too foxy. I felt sure that he had not the least suspicion of what was coming. He looked all vanity, self-satisfaction and vainglorious self-sufficiency.
"Fellow-soldiers," the Emperor went on, "you charge that my Prefect of the Praetorium is not loyal, but is most treacherous; that he has been, for more than two years, plotting my death and the elevation to the Principiate of his eldest son, now Procurator of Illyricum. As he has now heard the charge, so you shall now hear the defense of my Prefect of the Praetorium."
I must say that Perennis, though manifestly thunderstruck, kept his senses, kept his self-command and, after a brief instant in which he paled, swayed and seemed utterly dazed, rose to the occasion. For that brief instant he appeared as overcome as his horrified wife and sister, who all but fainted on their seats; as his horrified sons, who stood, agape, dead-pale, one by his white-faced mother, and the other by his incredulous aunt.
Perennis, certainly, gathered himself together promptly, got himself under full control, had all his wits about him and made a perfectly conceived, finely delivered, coherent, logical, telling speech in his own defence. It was long, but nowhere diffuse, and it held the attention manifestly, not only of the mutineers, but of the Emperor himself, and of all his retinue, even the most vacuous of the mere courtiers. As he ended it, it was plain that Perennis believed he had cleared himself completely and had not only vindicated himself before his master, but had convinced the mutineers of his guiltlessness and loyalty. His expression of face, as he wound up his eloquent peroration, was that of a man who, unexpectedly to himself, transmounts insuperable difficulties and triumphs.
Confidently he turned to Commodus; smiling and at ease, he awaited his decision. The Emperor stood up, more dominating, if possible, than before.
"Fellow-soldiers," he said, "watch me closely and listen carefully. What I do shall be as significant as what I say. I have pondered your charges since you made them this morning. In my mind I have run over all that I knew of this man's doings and sayings since I made him the guardian of my personal safety. I have let him hear your charges from my own lips and, like you, I have listened patiently to his brilliant and able speech in his own defence. I am Prince of the Republic and Emperor of its armies, to favor no man, to do and speak impartial justice to all men alike.
"You know what happens to the shirker who sleeps on his post when on sentry-duty about a camp at night in the face of the enemy. If guilty of what you charge any Prefect of the Praetorium deserves not otherwise than such a traitor. I have heard all this man has to say. I did not believe you this morning. I do not disbelieve you now. I do not believe this man, I believe he has been treacherous and that in his dexterous defence just now he lied. Watch me! I turn him over to you."
And, with a really magnificent gesture, he stepped half a pace away from Perennis, stretched out his left arm, the golden baton in his hand, and, with that fatal truncheon, touched him on the shoulder.
The roar that rose was the roar of wild beasts ravening for their prey. The men, packed as they were, somehow surged forward. On the shoulders of their fellow-centurions, a sort of billow of the foremost sergeants rose like surf against a rock; like surf breaking against a rock a sort of foam of them overflowed the front of the platform. For the twinkling of an eye I beheld above this rising tide of executioners the imperious dignity of the Emperor, master of the scene, self-confident and certain that all men would approve of his decision, magnificent in his military trappings; the incredulous amazement of Perennis, his pale, watery blue eyes bleared in his lead-colored, bloodless face, as he stood dazed and numb; the horror of his bedizened wife and sister, both fleshy women, dark-skinned and normally red-cheeked, now gray with despair, like the two wretched lads beside them; the cruelly feminine relish, as upon the successful fruition of long and tortuous intrigues, blazoned on the faces of Marcia and of Cleander's wife, a very showy woman with golden hair, violet eyes and a delicately pink and white complexion: a similar expression of relished triumph on the broad, fat, ruddy face of her big husband, who looked just what he had been; a man who had started life as a slave; whose master had thought him likely to be most profitably employed as a street porter, in which capacity he had for years carried packs, crates, bales, chests, rafters and such like immensely heavy loads long distances and had thriven on his exertions; who, whatever brains he had since displayed, however much character and merit had contributed to his dazzling rise in life, had retained and still possessed a hearty appetite, a perfect digestion, mighty muscles, hard and solid, all over his hulking frame, and the vast strength of his early prime; all these chief actors framed against a background of gaudily caparisoned officers and courtiers.
In scarcely more than the twinkling of an eye Perennis. was seized by four brawny frontier sergeants and hurled down among the men, among whom he vanished like a lynx under a pack of dogs. I caught no afterglimpse of him nor of his frayed corpse; I descried only a sort of whirlpool of active men about the spot where he had, as it were, sunk into their vortex.
When the flailing arms ceased flailing and the panting executioners stood quiet, the Emperor stretched out his right hand for silence; the rumbling snarls and growls of the mob abated till silence reigned. Into it he spoke:
"You know the custom of our fathers since Numa. The family of a traitor is abolished with him."
There came a second roar of the ravening, ferocious men, a second surge of the foremost up the face of the platform, and, instantly, the sons, wife and sister of Perennis were pushed from it, cast down among the mob, and never reappeared. After the mob quieted a second time Commodus again raised his hand for silence. Quicker than before the men were still. He spoke loud and clear: "You have saved me from a treacherous Prefect of the Praetorium. I have meditated whom to appoint to his vacant post. I have considered well. I now present him to you; my faithful henchman, Cleander of Mazaca, who, by his own deserts, has won citizenship in the Republic, equestrian rank and my favor and gratitude."
The mob cheered.