“You must be strong, daughter,” my father said to me gently. “Death comes when it is time for it to come. To everything its season. Let us not wish for figs in winter.”
But I did wish for figs. As our ship sailed slowly upriver into Britain, the loneliest and bleakest province of the Empire, I longed – more than I longed for anything except to hear my mother’s voice again – for sweet, juicy fresh figs: a taste of my home that was so far away.
I glance over at you as we ride down the hill. You’re only seven. Too young for this sad story, perhaps. Your face is serious.
“I don’t understand. Why did you even come to Britain?” you say. “Why not stay in Rome, where you were born?”
“I was not born in Rome!” I say. “Don’t you know that? I was born in Leptis Magna.”
“Leptis Magna?” You shrug. “Where’s that?”
That’s it, then. I have no choice but to tell you the whole story. Sad and scary as it may be, you have to know where you come from. So I go on. But I choose my words carefully, as if I’m hopping over rocks at the beach, avoiding the slippery dangerous bits.
207 AD
3.
A City of Gold
I wasn’t born in Rome. I was born in the city of Leptis Magna, part of the province of Libya. My father’s family were from Rome, but my mother’s family had lived in Leptis Magna since long before the Romans ruled it. We spoke Punic at home, but we read Latin and Greek – and I dreamed in a mixture of all three.
Leptis Magna perches on the north shore of Africa. It is one of a chain of merchant cities, like Berenice and Apollonia, that got rich on buying and selling. Its gods are Hercules and Dionysus. It’s a city of gold: golden sunlight, golden sandstone and golden coins changing hands in the marketplace.
I was born in the Year of the Five Emperors, and all my life, things had been good in Leptis Magna. The fifth and final emperor – Septimius Severus – who had come to power after the civil wars, had been born in Leptis Magna and he had poured wealth into the city. We had a new triumphal arch, a new basilica, a new forum, new public baths. Tourists came to admire the city that had produced a man brave and clever and ruthless enough to win at the game of power. My father’s greatest boast – and he had plenty of boasts – was that he played marbles with the Emperor when they were boys. He said that even then, Septimius loved winning. It was no surprise when he went off to glory and conquests and my father turned his mind to philosophy and the science of medicine and the arts of Asclepius.
Once, my father took me to see the Emperor’s triumphal arch. I was his only living child, and he was quite old, so he treated me more like a boy than he might have done otherwise.
The arch that Septimius Severus had had built to celebrate his victories over the Parthians had taken most of my lifetime to complete. It was enormous – you could see it looming over the city from a long way away, blinding white marble against the cloudless blue sky. It had four entries, and sat over the crossroads, so that people coming from all sides of the city saw it.
“This arch is the heart of the city,” my father announced proudly. “Every distance from Leptis Magna is measured from this point. When we say it is one hundred miles to Leptis Magna, we mean it is one hundred miles to this spot.”
Awed, I craned back to try and see it all. Up the sides of the arch, the sculptor had carved coiling grapevines, the symbol of Dionysus who protected our city. There were barbarians, too, on the pillars, with strange clothes and long hair, looking sad and noble and strong.
The Emperor Septimius Severus was right in the centre of the highest panel. He was in a chariot, flanked by his two sons, Bassianus – who was always called Caracalla – and Geta. As I looked at the sculpture I could almost hear the roaring cheers of the crowd as they drove through Rome. It looked as if they were driving the chariot right out from the arch, trampling over the heads of everyone below them. Winged spirits of victory soared over their heads, dropping crowns of sacred palm leaves onto them.
“He looks like one of us,” my father said with pride. And he did. He was curly-haired, with a dark face like a fighter, scarred like a dry riverbed by the sun. You could see men just like him setting out to fish from the port of Leptis Magna, or striding down to the baths in the afternoon. Of course, now that he was emperor, everyone tried to look like him even if they did not, but even so, he was clearly a son of Libya. I looked up at the next panel. Dignified and calm, the Emperor grasped the hands of his sons, Caracalla and Geta, who stood beside him. The folds of their togas made them look as solid and safe as three tall stone pillars.
“It is a great thing that the Emperor has sons to rule after him,” remarked my father.
“Why?”
“Well, no one wants to go back to the days of the Year of the Five Emperors,” he said. “You were born in that year, you would not know, but the Empire was torn apart by generals fighting for power.”
I could not imagine it. I had known peace all my life.
“Caracalla and
