Extract:
A DARK-SKINNED man of medium height stood upon the palace terracing, gazing into the sunset. His pose, legs wide apart and hands on hips, was more suggestive of power than the imperial toga draped around his shoulders. Lucius Septimius Severus, twenty-first Emperor of Rome, cast his eyes beyond the Temple of Apollo and the great stadium of the Circus Maximus, past the more distant Temple of Diana on the Aventine Hill, beyond even the diminutive figures of men and horses tending the barges on the Tiber, waters ablaze in orange and gold, to the misty hills of Janiculum which formed the skyline. Nearly twelve years ago Severus had stood here, a middle-aged man, gazing out over his new empire, and wondered how long his dominion would last. A matter of months, a historical footnote like his short-lived predecessors, or the founder of a dynasty to follow in the footsteps of the first and mightiest of the Caesars? And now, twelve years, numberless deaths, intrigues, betrayals and cruelties later, still he did not know.
Further back yet he cast his mind, to the young Septimius Severus who had set out on his public career in Lepcis Magna, on the African coast, all those years ago. Ambitious, yes; eager for an illustrious military career, but if he had then set his sights on becoming emperor, he could not now remember it. Marcus Aurelius had been emperor then, and no sane man could have wished for any other. How things could change in forty years. And Commodus, son of the great emperor, had been the man to change them.
Ironic that a venomous weakling should succeed in effecting a change greater than any strong man ever had. To his son the Deified Marcus had bequeathed an empire which admittedly had had its problems, beset by plague, financial difficulties and the threat of invasion from the north. But an empire and a people who were united behind their emperor. Since Commodus none of that had been true any longer.
With every advantage, son of the most beloved ruler since Augustus, and the only emperor born in the purple, he had squandered them within a decade. Affairs of state and the responsibilities of power had been dealt with by the simple expedient of ignoring them, whilst he embarked upon a life of private debauchery unequalled since the days of Nero. A man renowned as a soldier, scholar and sage had produced as son a feeble-minded pervert. Since then Rome and the world had changed, not for the better, indeed utterly and irretrievably for the worse, but that they had changed none could deny.
It was an ill wind … and Severus had been the one it had blown some good. Recently it had occurred to him that for all the power, the fame and the glory, he might have been better off had he chosen to remain governor of Upper Pannonia, loyal to the latest man to have grabbed the imperial diadem. But even that would not have been safe. A general who backed the wrong side in a civil war was as badly off as his Caesar. Safest of all perhaps to have remained a local magnate, a distinguished man in Lepcis Magna, even in Africa, but virtually unknown in Rome. Safest, yes; but however safe, however admirable in a sense, that would not have been Lucius Septimius Severus. The gods had willed that his character and destiny be different.
To his lot it had fallen to govern a city of a million souls, and an empire of thirty times that number. The first from his country ever to be Emperor of Rome, with a broad, blunt, African face, not a subtle Italian one, and a provincial accent, not that of a cultivated Roman. Whilst his predecessors Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines had been of Spanish origin, all had been thoroughly Romanized, with some claim, however faded, to aristocratic descent. Severus well knew that he had none. But in Rome for many years wealth had been more important than ancestry, and naked power than the way a man spoke.
Of course there had only been one way to do it: the army way. In a sense that had been the way it had always been done. Certainly no Caesar would ever have survived without at least the tacit support of the legions and their commanders. But under Augustus and his immediate successors that fact had remained judiciously concealed behind a cloak of legality and lip-service paid to the senate. The same was true of the best emperors ever since. So long as everything was going well, the army stayed out of politics. But when there came a Caligula, a Nero or a Commodus, and the succession was thrown into dispute, it was the army’s candidate who invariably took over. And if the army provided more than one candidate, then the one backed by the strongest element in the army. So had it been with Vespasian a century and a half ago, and so, following the fall of Commodus, had it been with himself.
Severus was not an educated man, but neither was he ignorant of the history of Rome. And for all that he claimed to be the successor to the Antonines, Severus knew that of those who had gone before, it was Vespasian he resembled most: an unlovable soldier, of humble birth, whose only claim to the purple was that he was an improvement upon an imperial pervert and the chaos that had followed his overthrow. Like Severus, Vespasian had had two sons – both had succeeded him to the throne, in which as in much else Severus hoped to emulate him. And like Vespasian he had done it using the only possible weapon: the army.
The army of course meant trampling underfoot not only the theoretical rights of the citizens of Rome, but real people. Some executions had been inevitable. Others had probably been mistakes, but Severus regretted nothing. If a Caesar was to survive, it was better to err on the side of harshness than lenity. Marcus Aurelius had been able to do otherwise, but that was a generation ago, with three-quarters of a century’s stable rule preceding him. Had he come to power now, he would have had to do as Severus had done, or go to the wall.
Severus still nominally consulted the senate, though the pretence had long ceased to be plausible. Even the most naive now recognized the truth: that Rome was no longer a republic, or even a partnership between emperor and senate, but a crude military dictatorship. Nor, so far as he could see, could it ever retrace its steps to become anything else. Once more he cast his mind back to the young soldier who had been Septimius Severus half a century ago. He might not have set his sights upon the empire, but one thing he could remember wondering, like many young men: what it would be like to be old, and what it would be like to die. Many a time since, in the twin mirrors of past and future, he had cast his mind back to that young fellow, and forward to the day of his death. Whether that ultimate act would occur naturally or by an assassin’s knife, tomorrow or in the remote future, who knew but the gods? And yet one of the many things he knew now, which the young man he had been had not known – what it would feel like to be old. Severus could have told him now. It felt exactly the same.