help from the Urbans, whom Rutilius commanded. The three Urban Cohorts were barracked with the Praetorians, though as the City Prefect was always a senator, and so a civilian, he never lived at the Camp. The Praetorian Prefects were quartered there, but a fine tradition of Camp life was that after lunch they were unavailable.
Deputising in his routine relaxed manner was the cornicularius, who found the lictor, wandering lost. Given the Praetorians’ traditional rivalry with the Urbans, he decided the Guards must hijack the query. ‘I don’t think we want some cack-handed Urban twerp making a mess of this… Sounds like a situation where we might be helpful, Clodianus?’
‘Happy to volunteer, sir.’ Even pie-eyed, Gaius knew what to say to an officer.
‘Going on what the lictor says, we’ll keep this very quiet. Use initiative.’
With as much of that commodity as a man with a headache, slurred speech and his feet falling over themselves could muster, Gaius took one Guard to help, choosing a large one. His other equipment included a thin- bladed stylus knife, a large military nail, eyebrow tweezers (one of the centurions had a bisexual servant) and a toothpick (his own). Anyone who had been in the vigiles could open locks, and since discretion was called for, he hoped to avoid having to smash down the door.
Rome had a problem. Rutilius Gallicus, the City Prefect, had locked himself in his office. He was having a nervous breakdown in there.
22
Quintus Julius Cordinus Gaius Rutilius Gallicus had locked the office door himself. He was a man on the defensive, which to him seemed the only acceptable condition nowadays. Either the daily dirge of his office or simply the pathos of life in general had become too much for him. He could no longer cope. He found it unaccountably difficult to carry out the most mundane daily tasks; dressing, going to the baths, dining were all beyond him. Without slaves to attend to him physically, he would be curled up in a corner at home, naked and filthy. Everything had to stop. Since he could not do anything, there was no point in people coming in to make demands of him. So he locked the door to keep them out.
Having six names was not a sign of hereditary grandeur. Six names meant you had been adopted by somebody with status, because your original birthline was not flashy. Coming from Augusta Taurinorum was no help either. It was pretty well over the acceptable border and into the Alpine provinces. Senators from outside Italy had a hard grind to find acceptability. Julius Agricola had come from Gaul, and suffered for it. Ulpius Traianus came from Spain and didn’t give a damn, but that was the Baeticans all over. A man from a province at least had a province behind him. A man from a north Italian city had to scrabble up every inch of the cursus honorum, schmoozing snobbish freedmen, squeezing posts from emperors’ pockets, entirely on his own with it. You could get bloody fed up with looking solidly reliable. In Rome you could get sick of having to defend a home city that lay on the rim of the Alps. You could become exhausted by your wife always nagging to go north to see her family.
Rutilius was weary. He could not sleep, yet he was dead tired. He was tired with the heavy weight of the mentally sick, and he knew no way to extricate himself.
He was sixty. Sixty this year. Nobody of sixty thinks they are old; they know they are at the height of their experience, able to show upcoming young idiots a thing or two. Nevertheless, the start of the body’s wearing out makes itself known. Hair goes. Heart and kidneys struggle. Energy hiccups. Dexterity falters. Sexual intercourse, if called for, becomes touch and go. At the same time, the demands of high office become greater. There is too much to do; the physical frame struggles to hold up. The mind may be overwhelmed by its burden of responsibility.
Rutilius was a Flavian stalwart. In his early career in the army, he even served under Corbulo, the Empress’s father. Luck fell on him, moreover. On Nero’s death, he had stepped into Nero’s shoes for one useful honour: the prestigious role of priest of the Augustan cult, nurturing emperors who were declared gods. A cynic would say, bloody good training for dealing with Domitian. Later, Vespasian had made him governor of Germany just at the right moment to pop over the Rhine and safely capture Veleda, a German prophetess who hated and tried to destroy Rome. Rutilius never thought enough was made of that exploit. Perhaps by then Veleda’s star had faded. When he captured her and brought her to Rome, now in middle age, she seemed neither mad enough herself nor representative of a sufficiently thrilling danger. As a bogeywoman Veleda was a disappointment.
The watchword was conciliation now. A new German prophetess, Ganna, had just visited Domitian along with the king of the Semnones; she was well received and sent back to her forest with gifts. If wild women were merely allies these days, the man who once captured Ganna’s predecessor lost cachet.
Domitian did honour him. Rutilius was governor of Asia, a plum post, one of Domitian’s first appointees. Then came the City position. Who in his right mind would be grateful for a job where the last incumbent had just been executed on a charge of treason? Arrecinus Clemens, a man known for his gentleness. Too close to Titus though. One of the in-laws who had brought up Julia. Too close to her as well, therefore. Even Julia’s influence on Domitian could not save her uncle.
A typical story was told about the end of Arrecinus Clemens: Domitian, who often craftily pretended affection for those he was about to murder, took him for a carriage ride. Passing the sleazeball who was informing on him, as Arrecinus must have been aware, the Emperor murmured, ‘Let’s not talk to that slave until tomorrow.’ It added to the cruelty. Arrecinus was doomed and knew it; he just had to live out an extra day of suspense while Domitian gloated.
City Prefect was a post where you had to work with the Emperor on a daily basis. When he was in Rome the workload was intolerable, the pace pitiless, the stress ghastly. You could not give in to it. Plus there was the tricky stuff: never knowing what Domitian really wanted, never sure he didn’t want you dead.
When Domitian was away, the burden for a conscientious man increased. Rutilius was his de facto deputy. Who could deputise for the divine?
To be left in charge of the city was immensely important. If anything had happened to Domitian when he went after Saturninus, or afterwards on the Danube, it would have fallen to Rutilius to close Rome’s gates and secure the heart of the Empire. He might have been called upon for delicate diplomatic negotiations or, if it all went wrong, he could have died, as Flavius Sabinus died twenty years ago, torn apart on the Capitol by the Vitellian mob. He was unafraid of death, yet the anxiety subtly damaged him.
He worked too hard. He devoted himself to curating Rome, from dawn when good senators arose from their beds to dark hours by lamplight when scrolls became a strain to read.
The Secular Games had been a long trial. Rutilius had to organise them. They were the worst, because they were held only every hundred years, in theory when nobody who had been alive the last time would be still on earth to attend. Domitian altered the prescribed dates; Rutilius had to help fudge that. Then came months of nitpicking detail, dealing with temperamental poets and singers, athletes, equestrians and charioteers, priests, not to mention theatre-sweepers and ticket office staff who by definition chose times like that to threaten to walk out unless they were given a pay increase. There were constantly shifting programme details. New buildings to be finished on time. Then the sheer bloody logistics of bringing everyone into the city and moving them out afterwards through monumental traffic jams, housing and feeding hundreds of thousands, stabling their damned donkeys, finding extra lockups for the influx of festival pickpockets. And, even though it all happened just the same as every other Games, nobody ever remembered just how much extra shit and pee would be washed into the sewers from the public latrines at a time when the public slaves who cleaned those sewers were hoping for six days of public holiday.
That was just one worry.
He was too close to Domitian. He saw the mistakes as they were being made. For a loyal, hard-working state servant it was too depressing to watch a man twenty years his junior wrecking all that Rutilius and his generation had attempted to build and stabilise after the nightmare of Nero. By sixty, you were losing enough friends and colleagues to illness, without watching more sent to their deaths prematurely.
He was going mad. He had stopped functioning altogether. He was sitting now, with unattempted work mounded all around him. Mighty trays of scrolls and tablets. So much work that he placed the surplus in piles on the floor like the short masonry columns that supported the heated floor in a hypocaust. Work arrived every hour of every day; he could not look at it.
He was sitting very still. He had been in a stupor for a long time, days maybe. A dagger was lying close upon his desk, though his lassitude was so severe it prevented him even killing himself. Did he want to commit suicide?
