be destroyed. A swingeing fine and the execution of the ringleaders should suffice. These two men, Cleodamus and Athenaeus, had led the defence. They should die. The deaths of these two rich, honourable and potent men would cow the others. Their estates would enrich the imperial fiscus.
Gallienus looked at them steadily. One word, and they were dead. He felt the intoxicating rush of power. One word, and all the members of the Boule were dead; one word, and life was ended for any he chose of his own comites. Such god-like power was dangerous. Of course, every slave owner had the power of life and death. But that was over instruments with voices, of little more significance than drowning a cat. These were free men. His was the power of an Olympian. It was not to be used without consideration. Even Hercules, Gallienus’s particular divine companion, had often been too hasty. The sack of sacred Delphi, the killing of his guest Iphitus: in both, Hercules had been too hasty. Gallienus would learn from the errors of his immortal friend: nothing hasty, nothing ill judged.
Shifting his attention beyond Cleodamus and Athenaeus, Gallienus considered the other councillors. All were rich and honourable, but lacking the drive and initiative to head the defence of their own city; followers not leaders. When the bad times came, as they would when the tribes from the north attacked again, who would be more use?
‘From that bald head, to that one over there.’ Gallienus’s pointing finger swept along about twenty of the main line of councillors. ‘Kill them all. They are guilty of maiestas, their entire estates are confiscated. Proceed with the executions.’
Soldiers herded the condemned men out from the spared. Some begged, some cried, a few went with dignity. One by one, they were forced to their knees. Steel shone bright in the sun. The sickening sounds of the blows; the blood spraying very red in the air then, dulled, draining into the soiled sand.
There had been no reaction from the comites behind the emperor. They knew as well as Gallienus that while an emperor was expected to listen to the views of his consilium, he was in no way bound to follow them. The will of the emperor was law; arbitrary and untrammelled. It always had been thus, and so it would be for ever.
IV
The soft, blue sweetness of a Mediterranean spring night hid a multitude of things. Ballista stood on the terrace of the governor’s palace, high on the slope of the central mount of Ephesus. Darkness had not long fallen. The offshore breeze hissed through the ornamental shrubs and the scrub of the hillside; the gubernatorial and the unclaimed – the wind made no differentiation.
He looked out. To the left, lights shone from the residential district that climbed the opposite slope. Above them, the mountain loomed dark blue, the sky eggshell blue above that. In front of him and below, past the pale semicircle of the theatre, the famous fifty lanterns illuminating the street that ran arrow-straight to the port. There were lights down by the water, too, not enough to mask the silver-black harbour. Beyond, in the Aegean, the lamps of the fishing boats drifted out on the offshore breeze. Off to the right, more lights: in the open spaces of the exercise ground, the Harbour Baths and the Olympeion; more outside the city itself, out on the plain of the Caystros river.
In the gloaming, if you did not know what had happened, it all looked good. But Ballista did know, and it was all far from good. There were too few lights in the residential district and the port; too few lights out to sea. The lights off to the right, in the grounds of the Harbour Baths and the other places, were the campfires of the homeless. The flaring street lanterns were little more than civic bravado.
It was eight days since the earthquake. There had been no tidal wave. But there had been four big aftershocks. Among the many rescuers and looters scrabbling among the ruins, many more had died. As ever, it was not the earthquake that had killed but the buildings. More fires had broken out as homeowners raked through the debris, desperately searching for their loved ones or possessions.
Yet everything that could be done had been done. The governor of Asia, Maximillianus, had put the two hundred and fifty auxiliary soldiers in the town at the disposal of the civic authorities. Corvus, the eirenarch of Ephesus, had deployed them with his fifty men of the watch. Fires had been doused, the most dangerous ruins that could be got at had been pulled down. Looting and lynching had been discouraged by means of some exemplary executions in prominent places.
The meeting Ballista had just left had addressed the longer-term concerns. The governor had gathered a small consilium of men of rank: the scribe to the demos Publius Vedius Antoninus, the asiarch Gaius Valerius Festus, the wealthy notable Flavius Damianus, the eirenarch Corvus, and Ballista himself. Ballista knew all these men except one from his previous time in Ephesus. Three years before, he had been there, serving as deputy to the governor. Ironically, the governor was the one man he had not met previously. One thing he knew of the others was that they disliked each other strongly. Inamicitia was rife among them; in some cases, it had run in their families for generations.
Yet today, personal and familial animosities mainly set aside, in something almost approaching collegiality, the men had spent hours in discussion. How to prevent rioting and rapine, and how to avoid pestilence and famine – the problems were grave, but the consensus among the hegemones present was that they were not insuperable.
Maintaining public order was always an issue in a city such as Ephesus, whose population was often estimated to approach a quarter of a million. One aspect of the discussion had surprised Ballista. Flavius Damianus, the Christian-hater, whom Ballista detested of old as a man who took perverse pleasure in the physical suffering of others, had proposed that proclamations be posted announcing that attacks on those who might be thought to have brought down the anger of the gods be banned from the city on pain of death. It might be, thought Ballista, that Flavius Damianus hated the idea of the poor taking matters into their own hands even more than he loathed the atheist followers of the crucified Jew.
The imperial priest Gaius Valerius Festus had raised serious concerns about the great temple of Artemis outside the city. On the one hand, it was filled with incalculable treasures, both sacred and profane; not for nothing was it known as the bank of Asia. On the other, it had an imperially recognized right of asylum and, because of that, as was ever the case with such places, in its grounds abided a horde of murderers, kidnappers, rapists, and other lesser criminals down on their luck. Either way, it was a potential source of serious trouble. After due deliberation, and acknowledging that it would stretch the tiny force of armed men thinner still, Maximillianus ordered fifty of the auxiliary soldiers to reinforce the civilian temple guards. No one had suggested that the goddess might look after her own.
Ballista had recommended that the troops be brought in from their individual billets, which were spread across the city, and gathered in two or three requisitioned barracks so that the largest possible numbers could be sent out quickly in the event of serious disorder. The consilium was divided. Publius Vedius Antoninus and Flavius Damianus supported the notion: only a fool trusted the fickle hoi polloi. But in the end, the governor had been swayed by the views of Corvus. Given that there were no sizable bandit groups in the nearby mountains at the moment, and that there had been a robust investigation of all lower-class clubs in the city, with any suspicious collegia being suppressed, just the previous year, a more visible presence of armed men throughout the city would have a calming effect. Ballista had to acknowledge that there was something in the local eirenarch’s view.
Everyone knew that pestilence followed an earthquake like vulgar abuse followed a philosopher. Already the governor’s palace was hung with swags of laurel, that sure preventative of plague. Ephesus possessed public slaves whose sole duty was to carry the dead out of the city. But the number of corpses visible, let alone those still buried in the ruins, was far beyond anything with which the libitinarii could deal. The scribe to the demos was assigned just twenty soldiers to assist the libitinarii, but he was to have the authority to compulsorily recruit as many privately owned able-bodied slaves as he felt necessary. Areas of public land out on the Caystros plain were designated for anonymous mass graves.
The aqueducts and water supply had been less damaged than might have been expected, but not all was as it should be. Clean drinking water might stave off disease. Flavius Damianus promised to put things to rights, using his own slaves and tenants, at no cost to the city or the imperial fiscus. The governor’s accensus wrote out a commission, which Maximillianus had signed there and then.
No apocalyptic vision was complete without famine. Hunger was the terror that constantly gnawed at all the
