‘Right,’ murmured Clodianus, feeling depressed. ‘A few details would have helped with planning. Date and time would have been perfect.’
‘Of course. But possessing the Emperor’s horoscope, that would be treason.’
‘Understood! If anybody told us, we would all have to be executed.’
‘Bloody ridiculous,’ agreed the Prefect.
He had been in post a good nine years. He thought he knew everything. He and Clodianus had worked together for long enough to develop an easygoing relationship. Although Aelianus saw his chief-of-staff as slightly maverick, he also thought he saw a steel backbone there.
According to the rule of thumb Clodianus used, after nine years, the Prefect was well past his best. In the Clodianus system, you spent the first year fumbling through everything, the second getting most things right, and the third absolutely tiptop efficient. From then on, you — and even perhaps your superiors — believed you were perfect, but you stopped trying. He himself was at that point. A sad moment to be noticed by some loopy freedman…
The caustic Clodianus had remembered Abascantus now. Way back, when he used to be on imperial escort duty, before he went to Dacia, he had been present one day when Domitian announced that freedman’s promotion to chief secretary. Abascantus had a pushy wife, Priscilla. She had thrown herself to the marble mosaic in front of Domitian, exuding gratitude for their princely master’s honour to her husband.
Sickening, Clodianus thought. Then he corrected himself. Flattery was only one way to proceed: you lied. You lied and praised him until your teeth hurt, in case Domitian’s mood changed abruptly.
‘We want trusted men to work on this.’
‘Absolutely, sir!’
‘Abascantus is setting up the committee to put the Emperor’s mind at rest. Domitian should now feel reassured, because you are out there, looking for the people who intend to fulfil that wicked prophecy. He has convinced himself there are enemies who hate him; he suspects a conspiracy.’
‘The idea is, I will infiltrate any desperados and observe…?’
The Prefect looked embarrassed again. ‘Assuming they exist.’
Which we are assuming they do not, sir? This is all a fantasy.
Too right. Just keep the stylus-pushers happy. ‘So — are you up for it?’
‘I suppose so, sir. Let me go along and give the wise ones my investigative expertise.’
‘Good man! That’s all anyone is asking.’
No formal minutes were taken for the Prefect — or not that Clodianus could see — but he felt convinced that whatever he had replied would go on his record. He was doomed if he did this and doomed if he turned it down. A wrong answer might look positively black. He was a Praetorian, whose job was protecting the Emperor. Any hint that he was lukewarm in respect of this committee would be the end of him.
He felt secret meetings were a stupid way to go about it. Still, he felt that about most things.
He had accepted a place on a body that he guessed would mutter away for years, calling for ineffectual papers, reviewing false evidence and vacuous submissions, making lists of action-points that no one subsequently reckoned were their responsibility, generally losing sight of its original mandate. Its mandate was in its title: the Committee to Preserve the Emperor.
‘Sheer bloody madness!’ complained the Prefect. ‘Chasing bloody shadows.’
Encouraged, Gaius suggested, ‘If there’s no real evidence, I could hire a few dodgy characters to look like activists, get them to behave suspiciously; then we could watch them at it and report back.’ Enjoying himself, he grew more inventive. ‘Dress them up in hooded cloaks, buy them all drinks in a seedy bar on the waterside…’
‘You are being frivolous!’ grinned the Prefect, glad of any light-heartedness to ease his constant burden of facing up to his emperor’s resolute anxiety. He knew the cornicularius was whimsical only to stay sane in Rome’s deadly drowning-pool where they all desperately dog-paddled. He would do the job. ‘I hardly need remind you how important this is, Clodianus. It is the highest grade of top secret.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Don’t mention this to anybody — not even your wife.’
‘No need to worry, sir. I am a soldier,’ Clodianus assured him gravely. ‘I cannot have a wife.’
He went straight home and told Lucilla all about it. Lucilla said, ‘Look on the bright side, love. If you cannot be told the hour when the old horoscope says our Master and God is doomed to die — then no plotters will know when to arrive with daggers either.’
‘What a woman!’ exclaimed Gaius. ‘What a mind! Jupiter, I love you, girl. Let’s go to bed.’
Gaius was perfectly right. There was no conspiracy to investigate.
Well, not then.
PART 6
Few tyrants die in their beds
30
A bascantus, freedman of the Augustus, ab epistolis — receiver of correspondence — chirruped from the top of the tree.
Titus Flavius Abascantus — important to distinguish, because there were many Abascanti and they worked for more than one emperor. Imperial freedmen, dedicated members of the palace familia, kept their old slave name. They unabashedly used it as their third, personal name while their first two signified the Emperor who had liberated them. So, in the great tribe of imperial servants, Tiberius Claudius Abascantus had once flourished under the Julio- Claudians, as secretary of finance. He was still alive and would survive to ninety-seven. That put him well above the worn-out slaves who worked on country estates in toiling battalions, let alone the grey-faced workers who were sent to die of hard labour and metal poisoning in Rome’s great silver and gold mines.
Being the emperor’s slave was no penalty. Living the good life, moving in high circles, gaining influence and property. The long-surviving Tiberius Claudius Abascantus had had a son with the same name who held the same important position under Nero, but predeceased his father. Yet even that son lasted longer than most grocers before earning an expensive terracotta memorial, with two fine winged gryphons to guard his tomb eternally: Tiberius Claudius Abascantus, freedman of Augustus, finance secretary, lived forty-five years, Claudia Epicharis, his wife, to her well-deserving husband.
Wasn’t there some trouble with Epicharis?
She killed herself.
The Piso affair?
Don’t ask.
Titus Flavius Abascantus, today’s man, had different parentage. It was unlikely his slave name was a gesture to either past finance secretary, and once scandal attached to them, as it had done, he shunned any connection. He worked in a separate branch of bureaucracy, correspondence. He liked to suggest he honoured a different code of loyalty. Perhaps that was true.
He had gained his high position at a very early age. He was called ‘this young man’ approvingly by the poet Statius. Abascantus was claimed as a friend by Statius, yet Flavia Lucilla, who knew the poet, his wife and also the chief secretary’s wife, reckoned any ‘friendship’ with Abascantus was one-way. Poets fluttered around the most
