Empire (92 page)

At last the speeches and rituals were done. Antoninus Pius carried the urn containing the ashes of Hadrian across the bridge and entered the mausoleum. In the vestibule, a niche housed a statue of Hadrian. To the right, a passageway lined with marble sloped gently upward as it followed a spiral course. The ramp made a full circle, ending in a chamber just above the entrance, and from this room another passage led to a circular chamber at the very center of the building. Niches had been carved in the wall to make room for the urns containing the ashes of Hadrian, Sabina, and Ceionius. The chamber was large enough to provide a resting place for many emperors to come. Thus, the mausoleum was both a monument to the past and an expression of faith in the future. Men died, but the empire of Roma would go on and on. Here was a place to house the remains of generations not yet born.

Marcus watched as Antoninus placed the urn in its niche. He felt the sense of sadness and release that comes with the ending of an era. Hadrian, the inveterate traveler, had reached the end of his final journey.

A banquet followed. Exhausted from standing all day, Marcus excused himself early. Apollodora left with him, but Lucius stayed behind, saying that he wanted to keep Aurelius company.

“How fortunate we are that those two have become such close friends,” Marcus said to Apollodora as the litter carried them home. “For that happy outcome, as for so much else, we have the Divine Hadrian to thank.”

Apollodora made no reply. She only nodded and closed her eyes, as if
she was too tired to speak. When they arrived home, she went directly to bed.

Despite his weariness, Marcus felt restless. It was often so on days when he was called upon to take part in ceremonies and rituals; such events filled him with a nervous excitement that made it hard to sleep. He paced his garden for a while, then went to his library. Amyntas, knowing his master’s habits and anticipating his needs, had left a lamp burning for him.

Marcus surveyed the scrolls in their pigeonholes, identified by dangling tags, and on a whim pulled out a volume from the late Suetonius’s imperial biographies. Suetonius had recently come up in conversation with young Marcus Aurelius, who had expressed astonishment that Marcus had never read the man’s work. “Are you telling me that you possess one of the very first copies, given to you by Suetonius himself, and you’ve never read it? Unbelievable! Really, you must read them.”

Marcus located the other volumes and piled them on the table, then began to skim through the text. From the sternly moralistic Augustus, power had passed to the dour Tiberius, who had ended in utter debauchery and left the world at the mercy of the monstrous Caligula, whose bloody death had led to the reign of the hapless Claudius, cuckolded by one wife, Messalina, and probably murdered by another, Agrippina, who had put her son Nero on the throne and been rewarded with death. After Nero had come four emperors in quick succession: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and then Vespasian, the bland but competent general who had left the empire to his sons, first the popular Titus, then the suspicious and cruel Domitian. There Suetonius’s account ended, but Marcus needed no historian to tell him about the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian.

Marcus could see why the biographies were so popular. The stories told by Suetonius were brutal, funny, and shocking. The people he described were, for the most part, appalling. Had Caligula really given his horse Incitatus a stall of marble, a manger of ivory, purple blankets, and a collar of precious stones, all in preparation for making him a consul? Had Nero really tried to kill his mother by putting her on a collapsing boat? Had Domitian invited guests to a black room where he treated them like men already dead, and then released them, making a joke of their despair?
What amazing and terrible times Marcus’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather had lived through—and how very little Marcus knew about their lives!

As the first faint light of dawn began to emanate from the garden, Marcus realized that he had been reading all night. He went to bed, thinking that an hour of sleep would be better than none, and dreamed of mad emperors.

When he woke, despite having slept so briefly, Marcus felt strangely energetic. After a leisurely breakfast with his wife and son, he invited Lucius to take a walk with him.

“Put on your toga,” he said. “And wear the fascinum.”

“Is this a special occasion, father?”

“Any walk across the city of Roma is a special occasion.”

A litter carried them across the Field of Mars and deposited them at the new bridge that crossed the Tiber. Marcus wanted to gaze at the mausoleum without the distractions of a crowded ceremony. He had done so on many previous occasions, but that had been before Hadrian’s remains were placed inside. The building seemed different to him now, more complete. Hadrian had desired a monument for the ages. Marcus had no doubt that the emperor’s sepulcher would still be standing a thousand years hence.

Father and son walked to the Pantheon. They stepped inside to admire the statues of the gods and the extraordinary sense of light and space created by the lofty dome and the oculus that pierced it. Here, too, was a monument that would surely stand for all time, a worthy tribute to the gods and goddesses it celebrated.

Their stroll took them to the Flavian Amphitheater, the greatest gathering place ever created, where all Roma came to see and be seen and to witness spectacles of life and death. Nearby stood the Colossus of Sol, once a statue of Nero, which was the closest Nero had come to being deified. Marcus remembered the ambition of Apollodorus to construct an equally colossal statue of Luna; that dream had died forever along with his father-in-law. Apollodorus was hardly ever talked about in their household, due to the circumstances of his death. It occurred to Marcus that Lucius knew very
little about either of his grandfathers. Marcus decided that he must make a point of telling his son all he knew about their forbearers, even the mysterious great-uncle who had been a Christian.

From the amphitheater it was only a short walk to the Temple of Venus and Roma. For years Marcus had labored to realize Hadrian’s novel conception of a two-fronted temple; the result was surely one of the most splendid buildings on earth. In the sanctuary of Roma, priests were performing a rite in honor of the city. In the sanctuary of Venus, a newly wedded couple burned incense at the altar, praying to the goddess to bless their union.

“Look how happy they are,” said Marcus. “You’re of an age to marry now, son. Should I expect that someday soon—”

“Perhaps, father.” The young man actually blushed. Thanks to his friendship with young Aurelius, chances were good that Lucius might join the house of Pinarius in marriage with one of the most prominent families in the city. Perhaps, once again, the Pinarii might serve as consuls and Vestals, as they had in the days of the kings and the first centuries of the Republic.

The steps of the temple took them down to the Sacred Way. They walked through the ancient Forum—found as bricks but left clad in marble by Augustus—and on to the much grander Forum of Trajan, where they ascended the spiral stairway to the top of Trajan’s Column. This was Marcus’s favorite view of the city. He remembered the day the statue of Trajan had been lowered into place, when disaster had very nearly struck. How young he had been then!

On the way back to their house on the Palatine, Marcus on a whim decided to drop by the Senate House, though there was no meeting that day. With Lucius beside him, he burned a bit of incense at the Altar of Victory and said a prayer. “Goddess, grant victory to Roma and defeat to her enemies. Watch over the empire which you delivered to Augustus. Protect Roma from all those who would cause her harm, whether from without or from within.”

Why had he asked Lucius to take this walk with him? Reading Suetonius had given him the idea. The details were all a jumble in his head, but Marcus had been left with a vague impression that the world had progressed since the days of Augustus. In the rush of daily life, one tended to
forget what a special place Roma was. One tended to forget, too, how strange was the past, and how much better, in every way, was the world of the present moment. Thinking of the outlandish tales in Suetonius, remembering the stories his father had told him, and reflecting on his own memories of a life that had begun in slavery but delivered him into the company of emperors and the care of the Divine Youth, it seemed to Marcus that the world had passed through a series of terrible trials to arrive at something resembling a perfect state, or as perfect as mortals could make it. He had done his part to create the stable, contented, truly civilized world that would be inherited by his son’s generation. Time would pass, and the world of Hadrian would surely give way to the world of Marcus Aurelius—and then what?

Standing before the Altar of Victory with his son beside him, Senator Marcus Pinarius felt a rush of optimism. What did the future hold? Even the gods had no way of knowing.

Empire is a novel about life in the city of Rome from the reign of Augustus, the first emperor, to the height of the empire under Hadrian; it spans the years
A.D.
14 to 141. In a previous novel,
Roma,
I followed the same family line from the origin of the city to the rise of Augustus and the end of the Roman Republic.

In some ways, the time span portrayed in
Empire
is one of the most accessible periods of history. The major historians, including Suetonius, Tacitus, and Plutarch, are widely available to readers around the world in the original Latin or Greek or in numerous translations, and even the most minor written sources (inscriptions, fragments of poems, etc.) can be tracked down by a determined reader. The archaeological evidence is very rich: the entire city of Pompeii was preserved when Vesuvius buried it in
A.D.
79, some of the major buildings of the era are still standing (such as the Pantheon), and excavations in the city of Rome continue to yield fresh finds, like the chamber believed to be the Lupercale of Augustus, the discovery of which was announced in January 2007. More evidence comes from numismatics, and worldwide trade in Roman coins on the Internet has made large, sharp images of even the most obscure coins widely accessible. With all these sources to draw on, the period is much favored by modern historians, who produce more books every year about the Roman Empire than any person could ever hope to read.

And yet, for the novelist, the period poses a special problem: the emperors. Or rather, emperor-centricism.

When I wrote
Roma,
I faced a very different challenge. The sources of information for the first thousand years of the city are far more limited, yet the narrative offered by those sources is almost unimaginably rich: legends of demigods and heroes, stories of social upheaval and violent class struggle, history as a pageant of powerful families, factions, and personalities all striving to fulfill their particular destinies. The challenge was somehow to find room for this teeming cast of characters in a single novel.

With the end of the Republic and the rise of autocratic rule, the storyline changes. Class conflict and individual heroes (and villains) recede. It’s all about the emperors: their personalities, their families, their sexual habits, their often flamboyant lives and their sometimes bloody deaths. The story of Rome becomes a sequence of biographies of the men who ruled the empire. Everything and everyone else is secondary to the autocrat.

That’s alright, if you want the emperors to be the focus of your fiction, as in Robert Graves’s
I, Claudius
or Marguerite Yourcenar’s
Memoirs of Hadrian
. But autocracies, where all power is concentrated in very few hands, where even the boldest generals serve at the whim of their master and even the best poets bend their talents to flatter the autocrat, do not produce the kind of larger-than-life heroes who populated
Roma,
like Coriolanus or Scipio Africanus. Instead, stripped of any hope of being able to affect the course of human events—or even their own lives—people seek diversion in spectacle and empowerment through magic, or they turn inward, pursuing mental or spiritual enlightenment rather than military glory or political action. Such a milieu makes for a very different sort of story than the one told in
Roma
. Heroes and villains give way to survivors and seekers.