Nero's Heirs (32 page)

'If I was you, sir,' she said, 'I'd get rid of that bloody sword.'

Perhaps her advice was good. I did not take it.

Instead I remained, gazing in horror at burning Jupiter Supremely Good and Great, founded by our earliest fathers as the seat of Empire. The Capitol, unviolated even by the Gauls centuries before in the days of the Republic, was now destroyed by the madness of the struggle for Empire
in
a battle fought on behalf of a creature who had had the purple forced on him by the legions, and who had given only one proof of sound judgement in his life: his understanding that he was not fit for the office he was not permitted to relinquish.

I sheathed my sword and, assuming such an air of unconcern as was possible, made my way by a route which took me past the temple that Augustus had raised in memory of his beloved nephew Marcellus towards the river, and across it to my mother's house. I was surprised to find, half a mile from the scene of battle, citizens going about their lives as if it was a time of peace.

No harm had come to my mother or to Domatilla. I advised them to keep the house, notwithstanding the lack of tumult in the streets that side of the river.

'It may be,' I said, 'that Domitian will come here himself. I don't know where he is now.'

'But he's alive, he's all right?' Domatilla said.

'I've no reason to think otherwise. I'm going in search of him now. If he comes here, don't let him leave. He might be as safe here as anywhere. It'll only be a matter of days before your father's army is in the city. But these days will be dangerous.'

'And my uncle?'

'I don't know. I don't know whether he escaped, whether he was killed, whether he was taken captive. Everything over there is in indescribable confusion.'

"We could see the flames,' my mother said. 'To burn the Capitol. It's worse than Nero. It's a judgement.'

'Perhaps,' I said.

When I left, my mother refrained from any expression of anxiety. She did not tell me to avoid danger, for she knew that in Rome that day danger and duty were joined as in marriage. But before I departed, she took my sword and cleaned it of the dried blood.

I was surprised to discover it was not yet noon.

XXXVII

Tacitus will know, without my telling him, how Flavius Sabinus and the Consul elect Atticus surrendered and were led
in
chains before Vitellius. He may deem their surrender inglorious, believing that a soldier should die sword in hand. That is often the view of men who have studied war at a distance and have little experience of battle themselves. In any case I believe that Flavius Sabinus yielded when he saw that the few troops that remained with him were sentenced to death if he did not do so. It is said that Vitellius would have spared his life, if he had been brave enough to do so. But the mob, composed partly of legionaries, partly of auxiliaries, partly of citizens - Senators among them - and partly of the most degraded rabble, howled for more blood; and Vitellius dared not deny them. So died a man for whom I had great respect, a man who had served Rome in more than thirty campaigns, and who throughout this terrible year had alone among men of distinction sought peace, preferring diplomacy and negotiation to war. Had he succeeded, Rome would not have suffered the disgrace of seeing the Capitol in flames, and the lives of many men, some worthy, would have been spared.

Domitian did not share my regard for his uncle. In later years I have heard him say that if his advice had been followed Vitellius would never have gone free after signing his act of abdication; and that the battle on the Capitol, from which he had by his own account escaped only with difficulty, meeting great danger with audacity and ingenuity, was the consequence of his uncle's cowardice and unpardonable folly. Actually Domitian's escape, unlike my own, was ignominious. Yet, though I had fought my way out, and might be judged to have had nothing with which to reproach myself, I experienced shame, like a stabbing knife, when I learned of what had befallen Flavius Sabinus. I felt like a deserter.

And indeed for three days following, I skulked like a deserter in Sybilla's bed while, as in nightmare, I heard the mob surging through the city, seeking out those they judged disloyal to Vitellius, and slaying them indiscriminately. There was no reason in their madness. Had they been capable of reflection they must have judged that Vitellius could not remain Emperor above a week. It was as if with the burning of the Temple of Jupiter, Rome was deprived of reason, virtue, and whatever separates civilised man from barbarism. The she-wolfs children had made themselves into wolves.

On the third day, my mother, disdaining to keep the house as I had instructed her, was assaulted by a German auxiliary, dragged to the river-bank, and raped. Domitian had not dared to leave the house to act as her guard. She returned to the apartment, said nothing either to him or to his sister, retired to her chamber, wrote with unwavering hand a letter informing me of what had happened, and cut her wrists. Domatilla found her lying on blood-soaked sheets, her face calm as the Goddess Minerva to whom Domitian pretended such devotion.

I can say nothing of this to Tacitus.

Nor to the boy Balthus, though I have formed the habit of reading the chapters I send to Tacitus to him. He hears them as one might hear stories from the Underworld.

'I am no longer surprised, master,' he said to me yesterday, 'that you choose now to live so far from Rome. However desolate you find these regions, they must seem as paradise compared to the inferno of that accursed city. Do you Romans not know the meaning of peace?'

'Peace?' I said. 'My dear boy, we make a desert, and that is peace. It is all the peace we ever achieve. Yet there were afternoons, by the seaside . . .' I paused, and shook my head.

'Come,' I said, 'let us take the hounds and hunt hares in the hill pastures.'

XXXVIII

You will know, Tacitus, that in a last desperate effort to save himself Vitellius sent envoys to the commander of the Flavian forces, Antonius Primus, seeking terms, or at least a truce. But it was too late; fighting had already broken out in the suburbs, among gardens, farmyards and twisting alleys or lanes. Even so, Vitellius seemed not to abandon hope, which, as is often the case, survived the departure of his sense of reality. The virgin priestesses of Vesta were now recruited to obtain for him a few more hours of life and mimic Empire. They approached Antonius and urged him to grant a single day of truce, in which time all might be peacefully arranged. By that it was presumed they intended that a means of transferring power without further bloodshed might be secured. It was all in vain. Antonius, properly, replied that with the assault on the Capitol, all the normal courtesies of war had been broken off; and no man could trust Vitellius' word.

All this I learned later from Antonius himself.

Then he prepared the assault on the city. He advanced in three divisions, one directly along the Via Flaminia, the second following the bank of the Tiber, while the third made for the Colline Gate by the Via Salaria.

Vitellius' troops, outnumbered, gave way at every point.

By noon I had ventured on to the roof of Hippolyta's apartment block, hoping to be able to follow the progress of the battle, and so choose the moment when I could best join myself to my friends. But I could catch only glimpses. They were enough to persuade me that the Vitellianists were yielding ground, but that, desperate, and with no possibility of escape, they were caught in that dance of death which extremity provokes. And so, embracing Sybilla and thanking Hippolyta, who was not displeased to see me make ready to depart, I took my leave, assuring them that, whatever the outcome of the day, I would see them safe and prosperous. And I am glad to say that I kept that promise.

Tacitus: I never wish to see again such degradation as met my eyes that day. It was macabre. Bands of soldiers engaged in hand to hand battle through the narrow streets. There was neither order nor command, for in street-fighting it becomes a matter of every man for himself. Yet the mass of the citizens were as spectators. You would see a handful of men standing by a tavern door, with mugs of wine clutched in their fists, while, within a few feet of them, soldiers panted, sweated, shrieked, and stabbed. When a maul forced its way, by no act of will, into one of the city squares, citizens hung from their windows, shouting out encouragement or curses, as if they were fans in the Circus, and the legionaries gladiators doomed to death. Such, indeed, was the theatre of the encounter that the strangest and most degraded cries, such as 'Long live Death!', were heard, and odds were shouted as to the outcome of individual contests. In one alley I saw a small child, not above three years old, stagger from a doorway, dressed only in a vest, its bum bare and mud-streaked, and then totter, with unconcerned appearance, between two soldiers swinging and stabbing at each other. The child put its arm round the brawny leg of one of the warriors, and clung to it, while blood trickled from a thigh-wound and mingled in its curly hair. The soldier, either unable to shake the child off or even unaware of its presence, swung at his adversary and, over-balancing, exposed his throat to a riposte. He crumpled to the ground, the child tumbling over him and, suddenly affrighted, yelling for its mother. The victor advanced over the body of his victim, disregarding the infant and, beginning to run, sought out new enemies, and disappeared round the corner at the end of the lane. Only then did the child's mother - or perhaps some other woman - emerge from the house, pick up the infant, dust it down, and seek to quieten it.

The battle was fiercest
in
the Campus Martius. I attached myself to a legionary cohort, or what remained of it. The senior centurion, blood dripping from a gash over his eye, recognised me; he had fought bravely for Otho a few months before.

'They're fighting to the last man,' he said. 'The gods alone know why.'

'Bet they don't,' muttered a soldier.

'It'll be worse at the Praetorian camp,' the centurion said. Then, lifting his bloody sword, he cried out, 'Come on, lads, one more charge.'

For a moment it was like a regular battle. Space appeared between the opposing forces. Men were howled or hauled into line. Order was made out of chaos. Then we advanced, first at a steady march, and then, on the orders of the old centurion, the line broke into a trot. It cannot have lasted more than ten or a dozen paces, but it gave us a momentum. Swords clashed against shield. I drove mine to the right, the shield followed the probing blade, and with a turn of the wrist, I passed the shield on the body side, and drove the point into the neck just above the breastplate. My opponent sagged at the knees, blood gushed from his mouth, and I wrenched the blade free as he slumped to the paving-stones.

The enemy line broke, several of them - they were German auxiliaries - throwing their weapons away to free themselves for faster flight. The old centurion yelled to us to halt. Most obeyed. Some on the flanks, who may not have heard his call, continued to give chase, fast enough to kill a few more of our now defeated enemy.

Then we advanced again in some sort of order, some semblance that was testimony to the professionalism of the men and the command of the centurion, beyond the Campus Martius, which was now ours, towards the Capitol.

Everywhere there were bodies. Every gutter ran with blood. Three men had fallen by the entrance to a brothel. I saw a wretch pick his way delicately over the corpses as he responded to the invitation of a Nubian whore.

Do I need, Tacitus, to weary you, and disgust myself, with a further account of this terrible day? Darkness was falling on the city, and still the slaughter did not cease; nor did the degraded part of the populace show any readiness to desist from their greedy viewing of the continuing carnage. They were, it struck me even then, like men who take their pleasure from watching the sexual couplings of others.

I can leave it to your imagination - your so literary imagination -to conjure up a more vivid picture than I can supply; and I can trust you to loose the searing contempt of a man certain of his own virtue on the horrors displayed wherever one turned one's gaze. On the one hand were all the debaucheries of a city given over to luxury and a pleasure all the more greedily taken on account of the disasters that had befallen Rome
in
the past months, and of those still worse that were yet imminent, and on the other were all the cruelties and misery of a city sacked by men who had forgotten all that separates civilised man from the barbarians.

Yes, I can leave it to you to make much of this.

But there are certain scenes which oppress my memory, which come to me still, so many years later, in the blank hours of nights when, deprived of sleep, I play over and over again the nightmare of my life. There was, for instance, the legionary I saw - a squat bald-bearded man, with flabby buttocks - tear his sword from the body of a fellow-citizen, spit on the contorted face that looked up on him, then seize a little girl, no more than ten years of age, who was standing in the doorway of a tenement, her thumb in her mouth. He swung her off the ground and, holding the struggling and now screaming child under his arm, ran along a noisome lane. Then he threw her down on a porter's trolley that stood there, abandoned, and tearing at her shift, exposed her genitals. He was in the act of mounting her when I came up, and thrust my sword into his fat arse. I can still hear his scream and smell his shit. As he fell away and, in disgust, I kicked at his head and wiped my filthy sword across his cheeks, the little girl twisted herself off the trolley and took to her heels. I wonder if she got home. I wonder if she lived.