For a while, we discussed the arrangements for the following morning. We reviewed the progress of the day, and planned our course of further questioning.
‘Remember,’ said Lucius again, ‘you keep digging until the truth is exposed. We shall see what we unearth tomorrow.’
I said I’d get Martin to lay in a supply of papyrus for our notes.
We turned to other matters. I wanted to know more about Lucius, and I wanted to know something about Constantinople. ‘Tell me,’ I asked, struggling with the words – the drink was catching up fast on me – ‘about Constantinople. Is it really as grand as people say?’
Lucius put his cup down. ‘Compared with Rome,’ he said, ‘it always used to be decidedly second best. Constantine had the place built in a hurry when he needed a new capital in the East. For the next few hundred years, his buildings kept falling down. Nowadays, though, it has no competition. And it is pretty good, if you can put up with all those dreadful churches. The buildings are huge and still fresh. The place has at least a million people. The nobility is rich. The baths are crowded. The shops have everything you could ever want. It costs the earth to live there, of course. Oh yes, and the emperor’s a complete bastard.’
Lucius had my cup refilled, this time with unmixed wine. I asked him about Phocas. ‘The Church here in Rome liked him. Was he really that bad?’
‘Yes, he is that bad,’ Lucius insisted. He elaborated on what he’d said the other evening. Phocas was the most common emperor there had ever been. Lucius was as scandalised by this as by the man’s great personal ugliness. He’d been a lowly officer in the army on the Danube. The previous emperor, Maurice, had been unlucky in his wars on the frontier, and had put up taxes. The army had eventually revolted and put up Phocas as emperor. Maurice had found no support at home, and was soon put out of the way. This was the first successful revolution against a legitimate emperor in hundreds of years. The Christian ascendancy had until then stabilised the succession.
Phocas, though, had turned out to be a complete incompetent. The barbarians had overrun the Danube provinces, getting all the way to Athens. Then the Persians had put up an alleged son of Maurice as the legitimate emperor and invaded. For a while, they’d kept up the pretence of keeping an old agreement with Maurice. Now, they’d dropped that and were talking about a permanent conquest of the provinces west of the Euphrates.
As Lucius had said, all this left Phocas in serious trouble. There were no taxes coming in from the East. There was nothing to be got in Italy – not even though he’d restored Smaragdus as exarch, who’d previously been recalled for madness and oppression.
The exarch of Africa had effectively declared independence and was plotting an invasion. The whole Empire was collapsing around Phocas. He was too useless to lift a finger in defence of the Empire, but kept control in the capital with a reign of terror. That was how Lucius had lost his expectancy from his Eastern relative.
‘Put to death for plotting, the swine claimed,’ he said. ‘More like he just wanted the cash.’
I described my similar experiences with Ethelbert back home.
Lucius raised his cup. ‘So we have still more in common – both robbed of our birthright by tyrants adored by these slimy clerics in Rome. May they all rot in the underworld.’
He drained his cup. More was added.
‘But if the man is so dangerous, what could you have been thinking to go there?’ I asked.
‘Simple.’ Lucius gave one of his charming smiles. ‘I hoped I could charm the deformed pile of shit into giving me back some of the confiscated property. I got some inspired piece of flattery written in Greek and went out there to read it to him in person. You won’t believe how I sat in the ship practising the words until it sounded as if I really knew the language.
‘Then I got to Constantinople and found he could just about follow the prayers in Greek. His only fluency is in a kind of barbarised Latin. Still, I recited my poem, and it was interpreted a couplet at a time for him. I didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand it. But we both went through the motions. He grinned. He hugged me. He sent me off with a letter of commendation to Boniface and the promise of a consulship – just as soon as he could get round to reviving the office.
‘I suppose I should count myself lucky to leave his palace with the head still on my shoulders. There were more executions that day in the Circus. He even had the women and children put down. I was there to see it.’
We sat awhile in silence. For all the horrors Lucius was describing, and for all that were attending me even now, I was feeling oddly comfortable. I was no longer alone, and no longer frightened of being alone. I had a friend – a friend who would surely see me right with Maximin, and perhaps much else besides.
A slave fussed with one of the lamp wicks. Lucius sat up straight. ‘But I’m not much of a host. Let me show you the great domus Basilii. Parts of it are still worth a look.’
Parts of it were indeed worth a look. None of it had fallen down. The roofs were still sound. The living quarters were simply arranged now, the grander furniture having long since been sold off. But the pieces that remained were nicely matched. The floors were covered with rich mosaics of scenes from the ancient mythology. Though tatty in places and often faded, the plastered walls still had their original paintings – country scenes, hunts, and some very interesting scenes of city life from a Rome not yet fallen into decay.
There wasn’t much of a library. What books I saw were mostly full of nonsense – magical spells and the like – from the Old Religion. Possession of these, Lucius carefully explained, was treason in itself. His whole life, he added, was a gigantic and deliberate crime against the modern world. He looked into my face as I scanned one of the pages – it was an incantation against haemorrhoids. How could someone be so rational in some matters, yet so ridiculously superstitious in others?
‘Do you believe in anything?’ he asked, taking up the question he’d earlier dropped. ‘Better an atheist, I suppose, than a Christian. But while I’ve heard of them, I’ve never met an atheist. Tell me, Alaric, what are your beliefs?’
‘Until yesterday,’ I answered, ‘I didn’t know how a book was made. Do you blame me if I keep an open mind about how many gods, if any, there may be watching over us?’
Lucius had been honest with me. Why should I not be honest with him?
‘How old are you, Alaric?’ he asked.
‘Eighteen.’ I suddenly remembered: ‘I shall be nineteen come Sunday.’
‘Then we must celebrate. But so young and an atheist! I’m sure you get on well with Uncle Anicius. Don’t you have any sense of a higher power that directs the world? Even the God of the Galileans exists – though he isn’t the Supreme Being the priests say he is. There is a providence in our lives, you know. One day, you will have a sign, just as I did.’
He paused and began a new line of questioning. ‘Tell me again, my dearest and golden Alaric, do you believe that laws must always be obeyed?’
A year later, and I’d have stiffened and begun looking round for where spies might be hiding. But I’d grown up in a world where power, if often arbitrary, didn’t rely on informers. Besides, I had no reason to distrust Lucius.
‘The natural function of law,’ I said, trying not to slur my speech too much, ‘is to protect life and property. We are therefore obliged to obey the laws of any ruler – whoever he is and by whatever right he rules – that reasonably tend to this object. Any laws that go beyond this don’t bind in conscience. Perhaps they should be obeyed in public for the avoidance of scandal. But they should not stop us in private from doing whatever we please.’
Lucius asked if that included laws prompted by the teachings of the Church.
‘Yes,’ I said. I’d have gone on, but my head was beginning to spin from all the wine, and I could feel myself on the verge of incoherence.
I suppose, my Dear Reader, you will put my blasphemous rejection of what our Most Holy Faith enjoins on both rulers and ruled to my infatuation with Epicurus. Well, Epicurus does say all this and more. But I still hadn’t done more than guess that this was his position.
Oddly enough, I’d had all this drawn to my attention by a priest in Canterbury, who’d got me to read an attack on the old British heretic Pelagius. The ignorant churls we were trying to evangelise had never thought about Divine Grace and how to reconcile this with freedom of the will. They’d thought no more of that than they had about the Divine Nature of Christ. But there was a slight fear among the missionaries that the independent views of the Romanised Britons we’d displaced might somehow have infected my own people.
We moved out of the library, and now stood by a functioning bathhouse. The sudden chill did me good. I let the subject drop.
‘I can’t always justify the full thing,’ Lucius explained as he took me though the complex of steam rooms and
