marriage was passionate, even romantic; he and Arruntia could hardly keep their hands off one another. Gaius also enjoyed extricating himself from his male and female relatives’ supervision.
Then the dream ended. Arruntia was horrified to learn he intended to join the legions; she could not believe he would leave home indefinitely, leave her, and do it voluntarily. Somebody warned her that legionary service was twenty years, plus more in the reserves — then another so-called friend pointed out that soldiers were not allowed to marry so she was in effect divorced. She felt utterly rejected. Coming from such a military family, the blase Vinius had taken his future for granted. He had not intended to deceive Arruntia; he was a lad, and just never thought about it.
He did not know, when he departed for Britain, that he was leaving his wife pregnant.
When Vinius then came home out of the blue, expecting to pick up their previous life, he fell over the cradle as he entered their rented room, and was severely knocked back. His wife’s angry mood over his career choice was also outside his experience; worse, she no longer had much interest in sexual relations. Had pregnancy and labour been frightening? Was she overwhelmed by domestic responsibility? Although she devoted herself to the child she now had, perhaps she did not want another baby. Perhaps, Vinius darkly suspected, she no longer wanted him. As far as he could tell (and he brooded on this continually) there had been no other man.
He knew for sure his damaged appearance horrified Arruntia. She shrieked and burst into tears when she first saw him; even their tiny daughter took the apparition more quietly.
He had no idea how to deal with an infant. Arruntia biffed him away when he tried. On rare occasions when he found himself alone with the baby, he picked her up gingerly but felt as guilty as if he had taken a secret lover. Once, the tiny child fell asleep clinging onto his tunic and Vinius found himself weeping, he did not know why.
Older now, and shaken by his army experience, he dimly recognised that Arruntia must have felt desperate when he left, though this understanding did not improve his subsequent behaviour. No teenaged girl would enjoy being shackled to a man she might not see again for twenty years; when she unexpectedly got him back, he was hideous, plagued with night terrors and moody with it. He made no real move to discuss this situation; he matured in his working life with the vigiles, but barely adjusted at home. He felt alienated and disappointed. Marriage, he discovered, was one thing he would never be good at.
So, joining the Praetorians who were barracked in an enormous camp outside the city relieved him of some stress by letting him escape arguments. For a man this was ideal. For Arruntia it was just another downhill lurch in their deteriorating life together.
But even Vinius himself was depressed; his transfer seemed a sixteen-year prison sentence (sixteen years was the Praetorian term of service, though he was appalled to hear that many Guards were so keen they stayed longer). His short stint in the army had instilled in him a loathing for this special corps; it rankled with regular legionaries that the Guards not only received pay-and-a-half but wallowed in a life of ease at home. Now Vinius suspected that there was no guarantee of the supposed easy life; the Praetorians were the emperor’s bodyguard, his personal regiment. If your august leader developed military ambitions, you went on campaign. Vinius, who had thought his fighting days were over, faced the unwelcome possibility of more overseas travel and more active service. Should Titus fancy roughing up barbarians, there would be no getting out of it.
Duty in Rome was a mix of luxury and tedium, he soon found. One cohort at a time, carrying weapons but in civilian dress, accompanied their emperor wherever he went. Since Vespasian, Praetorian cohorts had each been bumped up to close on a thousand men. At every change of the guard, they marched down from the Viminal Gate through the Fifth and Third Regions, crossed the Forum and stomped up the Palatine Hill; reverberations shook flagons from shelves in wine bars and made wet sheets slither off washing lines. Standing guard at a palace or a villa, a cohort of Guards filled up a lot of corridor.
Eight other cohorts would be left to hang around the camp. There, a tiresome amount of unnecessary drill occurred, plus occasional homosexuality and much undercover gambling. Sick leave was high. Vinius informed his wife that staying in the camp was rigidly enforced, though Arruntia could hardly miss the fact that off-duty Praetorians ran rife through the city like rats in a granary.
Vinius had a hard time fitting in at first. Nobody wanted him. He was too young. His service record was too short. He arrived with mysterious patronage, which gave no protection because if he had been favoured by Domitian Caesar that counted against him with Titus’ men. He did his best to survive. With what he had learned from his father, he managed to dodge various raucous clubs that had unpleasant initiation rituals. Many Praetorians wore beards; he grew one, found it disgusting and had it shaved off, which at least gave him impressive scabs temporarily. He followed his father in using only two of his three names, dropping ‘Clodianus’ and saying two had been good enough for Mark Antony, always the soldiers’ hero. Otherwise he lay low. Keeping to himself in such a fraternal environment marked him as antisocial, which to Praetorians meant plain disloyal. Loners cannot hope to be popular.
Joining in the reign of Titus, his first major exercise was the opening of the Flavian Amphitheatre. This helped his colleagues forget their antagonism. The Guards now had too much to do to waste energy on bullying him. Vinius was too busy perfecting new skills to worry about them.
The Praetorians were supposed to look friendly to the public, but their role was to scrutinise faces. While everyone else was staring at the Emperor, they would pack around their charge looking outwards, searching for signs of trouble. Soon it came as second nature. Vinius knew to the inch where Titus was sitting or standing, but he never glanced that way. Instead, his one good eye was constantly moving, raking the crowds. With forty or fifty thousand seats in the elegant new amphitheatre, this was a damned large crowd.
‘Still, we’re all having fun, aren’t we?’ was the sarcastic comment each centurion barked. For them, the inauguration was a nightmare. They wanted their man back in his easily patrolled throne room.
There were a hundred days of celebration, with Titus attending all the shows and constantly needing the ultimate security. Often his brother and other relatives came with him, so extra bodyguards were detailed. The imperial box, with its private access corridor, gave protection, but once on show the gregarious Titus liked to throw himself into the occasion. He was never the sort of Games president who just dropped the white scarf to signal the start, then sat like an automaton. Titus was always bobbing up to throw balls labelled with lottery prizes into the crowd, or enjoying arguments with them about contestants’ merits, especially Thracian gladiators who were his favourites. Whenever he leapt to his feet, decorative ranks of Praetorians in celebration uniforms cheered nearby; their breastplates flashed in the sunlight and their tall helmet plumes bristled. But a small, almost invisible cadre of duty Guards in civilian dress were closest to Titus, watching for any suspicious movements that could threaten him, grim faced and with hands on their sword pommels.
The Prefect was twitchy. All the cohort tribunes were jerky in reaction, so the centurions found it hard to relax and they took it out on the men. This made it easier for newcomers to bond, as everyone suffered. At least, on duty or off, they regularly got the best seats.
The order of play was similar on most days: animal entertainments in the morning; at midday criminals were executed in various inventive ways, at which point the Emperor and fastidious audience members slipped away for lunch; on their return in the afternoon there were races or gladiatorial displays. Sometimes the arena was flooded for mock sea battles. These were conducted briskly, before the waves leaked out; subsequent performers had a soggy time of it until the arena floor dried.
Anyone had to marvel at the building’s beauty and efficiency. But its greatest achievement was imperial propaganda. Nero had offended people by commandeering the Forum to build his Golden House, turning the whole centre of the city into one man’s private home and grounds. In giving back the stolen site for public use Vespasian had imposed benign rulership in place of maniacal despotism. When Vespasian returned the Forum to the people, he restored Rome to itself. The massive crowds who assembled in the marble-clad arena, including groups from faraway parts of the world with their colourful robes and outlandish turbans and hairstyles, were staring at the ultimate in statement architecture. Here, sport was pursued not as mystic religion in the way of the Greeks, but as part of the pragmatic politics of Rome.
The programme made available that August was one nobody present would ever forget. Wild animals had been gathered from all over the Empire for the hunting scenes and beast contests. Elephants, lions, leopards, panthers and tigers; boars and bears from the north; desert ostriches, camels and crocodiles; even cranes and rabbits -
Rabbits?
Oh killer bunnies pack a mean thump, Gaius Vinius.
Don’t even try to tell me how!
