B007IIXYQY EBOK (35 page)

The Governor attempted to resign his post in Germania in order to watch his son more closely. But as always Nero’s council of military advisors would not allow it while the tribal coalitions led by Baldemar still harried the border. In addition, Nero detested Julianus the Elder and did not want him about, imagining old Julianus reproached him in silence for his abandoned life, as Seneca had.

When the time came for the military service so necessary for a senatorial career—it was customary for the sons of senatorial families to serve two years as an army tribune to learn the routines of military life—the younger Marcus requested to be stationed in Egypt.
Of course,
his father thought. He will see no fighting in peaceful Egypt. Julianus the Elder could almost hear the lecture on the evils of war.
“There is not a difference,”
Diocles once warned him that Marcus had written in a school essay,
“between the seizure of a neighboring country and the seizure of your neighbor’s house.”

So the Governor responded by promptly arranging for his rebellious son to be posted in the North African province of Numidia, a desolate border of the Empire where the fighting with fierce nomadic tribes was almost continuous. For all his loathing of war, Marcus did remarkably well, old Julianus thought—he came home with high praise both from his commander and the men, and was credited with helping to save the entire garrison of one of the desert forts through his quick action during a surprise attack by moonlight in which he was engaged in hand-to-hand fighting. But the young man returned to civilian life with his heretical beliefs intact. Julianus did not cease worrying over his son’s “lust for the impractical and the invisible” until the day he learned from his sister Arria that Marcus had been voted into the lowest office of the Senate, an almost unprecedented honor for a man not yet thirty—though admittedly over the noisy opposition of a small clique on the floor who claimed Marcus was not his father’s son at all but Endymion in fact, a spirited urchin of no parentage whom the old man had taken in, cleaned, dressed, and educated.

The Governor wrote back from the fortress at Mogontiacum, “I am overjoyed you at last decided to live a responsible life. A man should live
by
philosophy, not for it.”

But his relief was not to last.

On one day early in the month of
Maius
—in
the same year that the auxiliary forces of Julianus the Elder, led by Wido, were defeated by Baldemar—Marcus Julianus stood on the steps of the Temple of Minerva with old Lycas, living on still despite a half-dozen afflictions; they listened to one of Isodorus’ harangues on the wretched state of the city.

Isodorus spoke before a knot of several hundred or so curious students, idlers, merchants and worshipers bearing gifts to the temple. In the street below flower-vendors’ carts overflowed with joyous color; ruddy afternoon sunlight softly ignited the bronze statuary of the roofs of the temples and government buildings all about, melting them to liquid gold. Isodorus’ strident shouts rose over the hum of priestesses intoning a dark hymn within the temple and the cries of fishmongers in the street below.

Lycas leaned heavily on a knotted stick, squinting, wheezing and shivering with palsy. He himself had no love of philosophers, but as age shortened his sight and hobbled memory, he closely followed Marcus everywhere, as though all that was familiar and safe resided in him. As for Marcus the Younger, he was now wholly grown into the intricately ordered world of the aristocracy. He had a comeliness that did not seize the eye at once like some master’s image of Apollo; it was apparent slowly and came as much from the soul within as from the fine lines of that haunted face. A linen tunic and gray mantle fell gracefully on a tautly muscled frame; the years in the desert had left him well conditioned. He wore but one ring—the plain gold one given him upon his entry into the Senate. None observing him would guess he had ever lived anywhere but among great libraries and quiet colonnades. But Endymion was visible still in those eyes; as ever, they were ardent and dark, ready to flash to brilliance at the sight of injustice.

Marcus shielded his eyes from the sun—and then he saw it—a glint of steel just visible through the smoke of sacrifice, within the gloom beyond the vast bronze door of the Temple of Minerva, fifty steps or so above Isodorus. He tensed as if for battle.

No one goes armed into a temple. Not unless ordered there by one who counts himself higher than the gods.

“Lycas,” Marcus said in a covered voice, “there are Praetorian Guards stationed within the doors.”

Quiet terror seized Lycas; he hugged Marcus’ side more closely, seeing nothing, while fretfully brushing back the forelock of silver hair that fell into his eyes.

Isodorus was thundering forth like a dramatic actor in the final scene of a tragedy. “These then are the diseases of cities! Look at the lives of those about you! He who does not languish in a torpid idleness that would shame an oyster in its bed, indulges in excesses of frenzied, unnatural work—dictating during meals, fearing even to sleep at night lest he do less than his neighbor! Look about and you will see ambitions above the gods’. You will see greed that disgraces humanity. A tenement collapses, killing all its inhabitants. It is built again at once, in the same fashion…and it kills again!”

“Lycas,” Marcus said with urgency, “they’ve moved into sight. They’ve come to arrest Isodorus. He must be warned. Stay here…if I can pull him into the mob, perhaps they’ll lose sight of him.”

“What?
No! You are mad!”

But Marcus had already begun a smooth, stealthy progress forward, working his way through the crowd.

“Do not leave me!” Lycas said with childish fearfulness, snatching at Marcus’ arm to pull him back.

Marcus dragged him up a few steps, then turned and seized his shoulders. “Lycas, stay here.
It is little matter if I am arrested, not so for you.” Lycas, as a freedman, could be subjected to brutal punishments from which the law exempted one of the senatorial class.

When Marcus continued to climb the temple’s steps, Lycas hesitated but a moment. Then with a brisk hobbling walk he once again set out in Marcus’s wake, using his walking stick alternately to gain the next step and push people off.

“…where, in the Circus, dogs are trained to walk like a man,” Isodorus was crying out, “and in the Palace, humans are made to crawl…where a rich man is followed by a retinue of one hundred, all choking the streets so none can pass, and their only purpose is to applaud his words!” Isodorus had a small, simian face, bright close-set eyes, a voice as soothing as a rope burn. As Marcus climbed closer, ten Praetorians began moving stiffly, purposefully down the steps, red cloaks whipping in the wind, armor glinting evilly. Most in the crowd were too rapt to notice.

“…where we keep close track of every hour—all time is to be filled!—and at the end of the day the result is tallied up—did I do more today than yesterday?—as if doing more would bring peace,” Isodorus went on, swaying slightly in a sort of grim ecstasy. “Never do we eat grains we harvested ourselves.
How many bodies, how many walls, stand between us and pure, vigorous nature?
And might this not be the cause of cancers like Nero and of the desperate unhappiness on every hand?”

I wonder, Marcus thought, if a Cynic does not
need
a
Nero as much as he despises him. But Isodorus speaks his own thoughts, and a man should be able to speak them without losing his head.

“Marcus, no!” Lycas called out. The Guards were too close.

When Marcus was one step below Isodorus, he called up to him, “My good man, look behind! They come for you. Save your life!”

Isodorus looked briefly at Marcus, then that mist returned to his eyes—Marcus knew the philosopher saw him no more.

“And must some be above, and others below?” Isodorus went on, his voice hushed as if he crept up to something very holy. “But, you say, it has always
been so. Some must rule. But in the time of Saturn it was
not
so. In those times all ate at one board. Why have we fallen from this? There are yet, in remote places of the earth such as the wastes beyond the North Wind, people who live in Saturn’s state, keeping only what they reap, speaking an honest tongue that has no word for ‘slave’ or ‘king,’ and loving the law of moon and stars—”

These were the last public words Isodorus was ever to speak. Marcus leapt up beside him, seized his arm and pulled him down. In the same instant the crowd saw the Praetorians and began to bolt. At ten paces the Guards drew their swords. Marcus tried to drag both Lycas and the philosopher deeper into the crowd, but the Praetorians swiftly caught up to them.

One seized Isodorus and pinned his arms behind his back; a second raised his sword to strike Lycas’ head with the flat of the blade. Marcus whipped about, snatched the walking stick away from the old man and brought it up hard against the blade, snapping the walking stick in two, but managing to deflect the blow, giving Lycas just enough time to drop to the steps and evade it. A second Guard kicked Lycas in the stomach while Marcus struck blow after blow on the Guard’s steel-armored back, then tried to strike at his eyes with the broken half of the stick, amazing the Praetorians who did not expect such spirited resistance from an unarmed man in the street. A third Guard came from behind and gave Marcus a blow to the face with a length of chain; he sank dazed to the steps. Distantly he was aware that old Lycas was being kicked to his knees and swiftly trussed with cord.

By force of will Marcus fought his way to his feet. He thrust his body between Lycas and the Guard who held him.

“Are you mad?” Marcus called out breathlessly. “This man has naught to do with this! He is here only because I am here. Release him!”

They had had enough of this troublemaker. The first Guard calmly raised his sword, meaning to strike the young interloper on the back of the neck with the flat of the blade.

“Stay your hand!” the second called out with alarm. “Mind who that is!”

The first Guard slowly lowered his sword.
Old Julianus’ son.
He grunted a cautious obscenity, momentarily horrified his exercise of summary justice nearly got him charged with assaulting a powerful Senator’s son.
Why does the young fool always go about so poorly dressed?

Marcus in his fury scarcely knew he had been recognized; he knew only the blind horror of one who watches someone loved borne off by wolves.

The Guards contented themselves with pushing him off with great force; Marcus fell hard to the steps and lay there bleeding, looking after them while they swarmed about Lycas, Isodorus, and five or six ragged bystanders who hadn’t been quick enough to get away, prodding them with javelin butts, herding them like swine.

“Cowards!”
Marcus cried out in a voice so harsh and compelling it caused the Guards a moment of unease. “Leave these old men! Arrest me!”

“Your day will come!” one of the Praetorians jovially called back to him.

Lycas, I have murdered you.
You will never survive their stinking prison. Bestial world, traitorous Fortuna, why did you let him follow me?

After he made his way home, he spent the rest of the day sending swift messages to the Petitions Office, the Praetors, various imperial secretaries and a dozen influential members of the Senate who were his father’s friends, even the Emperor himself, begging Lycas’ release. He knew well there was little he could do for Isodorus, who had long flirted with the limits of imperial tolerance; doubtless Nero meant to make an example of him. Only old Antoninus Saturninus, his father’s close friend and one of the three most influential members of the Senate, sent a reply: “Give it up—they are dead men. All are intended to perish in Nero’s Olympic Celebration Games.”

In his desperation he even sought the aid of a fellow student from his school of rhetoric, a young man of obscure family and unlimited ambition named Domitian, whom normally he avoided in grave matters because Domitian took too few matters seriously for Marcus’ taste. But he was part of Nero’s inner circle of friends.

“It is a joke,” Domitian explained. “Cynic means
dog
so Nero decided: Dogs to the dogs. And they are desperately short of victims—Nero wanted an even hundred, and in a whole month they only flushed out twenty Cynics. You know what that means. No reprieves, no bothering with petty annoyances like guilt or innocence. They say your Lycas struck a Guard. That’s guilt enough.”

“Help me to petition him in person then!”

“You’ve not a chance, nor have I. He sees no one—he must pamper the Divine Voice. As we speak, he’s resting in his dark chamber with lead plates on his chest while they feed him leek broth till he vomits. Have you forgotten tonight’s the first night of his new tragic play? He’s the
cantator,
you know.”

“He causes a far greater tragedy than any he ever conceived for the stage,” Marcus replied, “and he has no more notion of it than an ass would.”

The Olympic Celebration Games were to be held in the Field of Mars, where a makeshift wooden arena had been constructed for a week of contests between men and beasts. The execution of Isodorus and his followers was to be part of the morning show, to whet the crowd’s appetite for the bloodier combats to come in the afternoon. After midnight Marcus set out by torchlight for the Field of Mars. A bribe to a guard got him into the rude holding pens where the next day’s victims were kept.