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 sepulchre 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 Amphitheatre, 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 forebearers, even the mysterious great-uncle who had been a Christian.
From the amphitheatre 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 honour 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 favourite 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.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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 AD 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 AD 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 favoured 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 inwards, 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.
It’s popular these days to compare Rome to the United States, but life in the Roman Empire was probably more like life in the repressive Soviet Union. The Soviet empire never found its Trajan or Hadrian, but it’s not hard to picture Stalin as Domitian.
Readers of Empire who wish to read the original sources can begin with Suetonius, who wrote biographies of the first twelve Caesars, from Julius to Domitian. Plutarch wrote biographies of Otho and Galba. Tacitus in his Annals and Histories wrote about the period from Tiberius to the Year of Four Emperors. We have no ancient biography of Nerva or Trajan, but the thread is picked up in a work called the Historia Augusta, which tells us about
