smile was hard to resist – Zeno would be turning over all the possible meanings of what he had said, and must recognize the dangerous implications of ‘things out of season’.
‘My mind is not yet made up,’ Gallienus said. ‘But now I want my comites to advise me on my decennalia.’
Unsurprisingly, given the nature of the subject, it was a civilian, one of the heads of chanceries, who began. ‘ Dominus,’ said Caecilius Hermianus, the ab Admissionibus, ‘your ten glorious years on the throne demand a fitting, magnificent spectacle.’
‘Indeed,’ replied Gallienus. ‘Although I was hoping for more specific suggestions.’ The pleasure of crushing men with words was insidious. He must keep it in check. He did not want to become like Tiberius or Caligula: kingship and tyranny were two sides of a coin.
‘It will have to wait for the autumn, when the campaigning season is over.’ The senior Praetorian Prefect, unlike his deputy, Censorinus, did not affect the accent and manners of the upper class. Volusianus was a military man through and through. He had started out as a cavalry trooper, and he was proud of it. He was one of the few men Gallienus trusted unreservedly. How the senate had loathed it when he had made Volusianus consul the year before.
‘Which gives us time to plan a truly wonderful occasion.’ The urbane voice of Palfurius Sura, the ab Epistulis, was full of enthusiasm. ‘Obviously, it must open with a grand procession: the senate and equestrian order, in togas, selected matrons of good character; torch-lit, at night, ascending the Capitol.’
‘White oxen with gilded horns, white lambs: two hundred of each – a holocaust to thank the gods of Rome for their providence in watching over the best of emperors in these difficult times.’ Achilleus, the a Memoria, nodded at his own sagacity and plain speaking in even alluding to the chaos that disfigured the empire.
One of the military officers spoke. ‘The standards of the legions and auxiliaries, the prisoners-of-war: Persians, Goths, Sarmatians.’ Aureolus, the Prefect of Cavalry, once a shepherd boy among the Getan tribesmen up by the Danube, was another tough military man whom Gallienus trusted.
‘Elephants,’ said Achilleus. ‘They would add grandeur to the procession; and golden cloaks for the matrons.’
‘There must be at least three days of spectacles.’ The ab Admissionibus Hermianus clearly wished to win back ground after his earlier rebuff. ‘Circus races – a full programme of course; gladiators – fewer than 1,200 would not be right; and theatrical performances of all kinds: mimes and buffoons, as well as pantomimes and serious actors.’
‘Buffoons putting on a Cyclops-performance, and boxing. Your people love both.’ Zeno was on good ground; all knew the emperor’s liking for such things – nothing out of season here.
‘Excellent,’ pronounced Gallienus. ‘Excellent. The gladiators will march in the procession, and the boxers and pantomimes can be exhibited on wagons.’
There was a tiny pause, as the comites assured themselves that the emperor was serious, before a great deal of decorous agreement.
‘And buildings – an emperor must provide work to feed his people – there must be buildings.’ Some of the glacial self-control customary with an emperor slipped. Architecture was one of Gallienus’s keenest passions, along with philosophy, poetry, oratory, women, his patron god Hercules, and several other things; he was a man of many and varied passions. ‘The architects have been commissioned to draw up plans for the new colossus on the Esquiline Hill. The foundations at least must be ready to be dedicated by the decennalia. But more is needed. I wish to construct a portico along the Via Flaminia. It will extend as far as the Mulvian Bridge. It should be four columns deep, the foremost bearing statues of the great men of Rome.’
The comites murmured their appreciation of his kingly vision.
‘But, Quirinius, can our fiscus afford such grandiose plans?’ Gallienus laughed, self-deprecatingly – if he had not been an emperor.
The a Rationibus, in charge of the finances of the imperium, did not hestitate. ‘Celebrating your maiestas is without price and, as you know, Dominus, plans are in hand to debase the precious metal in the coinage again. It will be a few months before the merchants catch up.’
‘Things must be done open-handedly, even if the fiscus is short.’ Gallienus was quite serious now. ‘We cannot ever appear short of money, or our enemies would take heart.’
Rufinus cleared his throat. ‘The confiscated estates of the recent round of deluded traitors, and those of their families, can be sold. Celsus in Africa, Ingenuus and Regalianus on the Danube, Valens and Piso in Greece, the Macriani in the east – they were all rich men, with rich friends.’
‘The wages of treachery,’ nodded Gallienus. Perhaps Rufinus still had some usefulness yet as the spymaster in charge of the frumentarii .
A slave glided up to the ab Admissionibus and whispered in his ear. Hermianus rose to his feet and announced that, if the most noble emperor had finished his lunch, the leading men of the polis of Byzantium were awaiting him in the hippodrome; almost all the members of the Boule had been rounded up.
The councillors of Byzantium, a hundred and fifty or so of them, were standing in a ragged line on the chariot-racing track. They were surrounded by soldiers. All the members of the Boule looked terrified. They were right to be. The previous year, Byzantium had joined the wrong side in a civil war. When the advance guard of the armies of the Macriani arrived, the city had opened its gates. That need not have been fatal. Many cities had done the same. Those cities were now paying reparations to the fiscus of Gallienus set at two to four times the contributions previously extracted by the pretenders. A punishment as mild as potential financial ruin was not a likely option for Byzantium.
When news had come from the west that both the young usurper Macrianus and his father, the sinister Macrianus the Lame, the real power behind the revolt, had been killed outside Serdica, the city of Byzantium had held fast in the faction of the remaining usurper, the young Quietus, who was far away in Syria. This misguided adherence had not been removed either by the arrival before the Byzantine walls of an imperial force commanded by the African general Memor, or by the setting up in front of the main Thracian Gates of the severed heads of the Macriani, father and son. By the time word came that Quietus had been killed in Emesa, it was too late. The siege had begun. By the usage of war, when the first ram touched the walls, the only surrender could be unconditional; all the men could be killed; the women and children sold into slavery. Some held they could be killed too.
The siege had continued into the winter. Gallienus had sent two more of his protectores, the famed siege engineers Bonitus and Celer. It had not appreciably hastened things. Byzantium was rich, well supplied. It occupied a very strong position. It was surrounded by the sea on three sides; the Bosphorus, fast-flowing, to the east. There was high ground for its acropolis. To the west, its land walls were substantial, watched over by tall towers, well equipped with torsion artillery.
The wealth of Byzantium and the strength of its position had long fed the contumacy of the city. Two generations earlier, the polis had defied the emperor Septimius Severus and the might of the whole empire for three years. It looked fit to do the same again. The siege had dragged into the spring. The birds had long since picked the skulls of the Macriani clean.
Gallienus himself had broken the deadlock. He had arrived suddenly from the west, accompanied only by the cavalry of the guard. After a herald had arranged a truce, he had ridden alone up to the Thracian Gates. He had not offered terms, but had sworn he would prove more merciful than had Septimius Severus.
The latter emperor had ordered many killed, sections of the walls and most public buildings razed, and had reduced Byzantium to the legal status of a village ruled by its neighbour and rival polis of Perinthus. After a brief debate, to try to avoid such things happening again, the Boule had recommended that the people throw themselves on the clementia of Gallienus. Now, getting to their feet after performing adoration, sweating as the early-afternoon sun beat down in the hippodrome, the councillors were more than anxious about whether they had made a good decision.
‘Those two in the middle,’ Achilleus, the a Memoria, whispered to his emperor, ‘the ones standing a pace in front of the others.’
Gallienus regarded the men. Both were tall, with full but neat beards and heads of hair. They were clad in Hellenic himation and tunic, right arms decorously wrapped in the cloaks. They clung to their self-control for dear life: only their eyes – ever moving, circling – betrayed them.
In the morning, the consilium had expressed the view that Byzantium was too venerable and too important, both as a crossing point between Europe and Asia and as a bulwark against the barbarians from the Black Sea, to
