False God of Rome

miraculous recovery; I have just come from his room where he is sitting up in bed and eating. The crisis is over!’

A roar of cheers erupted from the rain-dampened crowd, carrying on until they were almost hoarse. The noise of the celebrations and the news of its cause filtered down from the Palatine and on throughout Rome, and by the time Chaerea was able to speak again the sound of joyous cheering echoed back up the hill from the city below.

‘The Emperor thanks you all for your prayers and sacrifices and bids you to…’ The doors behind him opened and the crowd gasped as Caligula walked out unsteadily but unaided. Unshaven for a month and palpably thinner with his eyes sunk even further in their sockets, he still looked ill and yet there was strength in the way that he held his head. He lifted his arms in the air to the raucous cries of ‘Hail Caesar!’ that greeted him.

Eventually he signalled for silence. ‘It is not your fault,’ he declaimed in a surprisingly loud voice, ‘that you hail me only as your Caesar. You do not know what has happened to me in this past month.’ He indicated to his emaciated body. ‘This body, this weak human body, nearly died as I ravaged it with the agony of transformation. Had it died I would still be here but not as you see me now, because, my flock, I am not only your Emperor, I have now become your god. Worship me!’

At this stunning piece of news and outrageous order a few of the more quick-thinking senators immediately pulled folds of their togas over their heads, as if officiating at a religious ceremony. The rest of the gathering quickly followed their example and Caligula burst out laughing as he surveyed the crowd that was now swathed from head to toe in wool.

‘You are truly my sheep; what a shearing we shall have. I believe one of you was good enough to offer his life to my brother Jupiter in return for mine; who was this noble sheep?’

‘It was I, Princeps,’ a voice oozing with pride came from behind Vespasian, who turned to see a well-built young eques smiling smugly at those around him, pleased to be the object of the Emperor’s attention.

‘What is your name, good sheep?’

‘Publius Afranius Potitus, Princeps.’

‘What are you doing here, Potitus? Don’t keep Jupiter waiting; we gods expect promptness.’

Potitus’ face fell as the hope of reward was replaced by the hideous realisation that Caligula was in earnest. He looked around at his companions for aid, but how could they countermand an order from their new god? They moved away, leaving him isolated in their midst. His shoulders sagged and he turned without a word.

‘What a good sheep he was,’ Caligula said, grinning approvingly as Potitus trudged away to his unnecessary death. ‘Now that I’m back among you the business of the city shall resume and the Plebeian Games, which should have begun five days ago, will commence immediately; all those of you who swore to fight as gladiators in return for my health will get the chance to fulfil your oath in the arena tomorrow.’

‘Save him, Caesar! Save him, Caesar!’ the twenty-thousand-strong crowd filling the stone-built Statilius Taurus Amphitheatre on the Campus Martius chanted in unison. An all-pervading stench of urine filled the atmosphere from where people — for fear of losing their seat should they go outside — had relieved themselves where they sat, so that it trickled down to be soaked up by the tunic of the person sitting below them on the stepped-stone seating.

The victorious retiarius, the last man standing in what had been a six-man free- for-all, kept the points of his trident firmly pressed on the throat of his last defeated opponent, a secutor entangled in a net, and looked up at the Emperor. Vespasian glanced over at Caligula, sitting next to Drusilla, in the imperial box adjacent to the senators’ seats, and wondered if he would grant the crowd’s wish; he had on every other occasion during the long four days of combat, but they had always been demands for death.

Caligula removed his fingers from the anus of a youth kneeling between him and his sister and extended it forward, still clenched in the signal for mercy, tilting his head against his shoulder. The crowd’s applause at their Emperor’s clemency turned to jeers as his thumb suddenly jutted up in mimicry of an unsheathed sword: the sign for death.

The summa rudis — the referee — withdrew his long staff from across the retiarius’s chest, who then pulled back to allow his opponent the dignity of a gladiator’s death, kneeling on one knee before his vanquisher rather than lying like a wounded stag on the reddened arena sand.

The crowd’s fury at their wish to spare a gladiator who had put up a brave fight escalated as the secutor, once free of the net, grasped his opponent’s thigh in preparation for the killing stroke. The retiarius dropped the trident and unsheathed his long, thin knife and placed it, point down, on the secutor’s throat just above his collar bone. With a nod of his head, completely encased in a smooth bronze rimless helmet with two small eye-holes in the face mask, the doomed man consented to the knife. As the two men tensed for the ritual killing the staff of the summa rudis abruptly slammed across the retiarius’s chest, stopping him.

The crowd fell suddenly silent. All eyes turned to Caligula, who sat laughing hysterically, his thumb now pressed down on his clenched fingers representing a sheathed sword: the sign of mercy. ‘I fooled you all!’ he shouted through his mirth. ‘Did you really think that I, I who have the wellbeing of all of you in my heart, wouldn’t grant your wish? Of course I would.’

The crowd burst into laughter, enjoying the joke that their Emperor had played on them. The retiarius withdrew the knife and the secutor started to hyperventilate in relief.

Vespasian glanced again in Caligula’s direction and saw his face suddenly change into a contorted mask of anger. He leapt to his feet and screamed for silence.

‘But you jeered at me,’ he shrieked, ‘as if you didn’t love me. Me! Your god and Emperor jeered at by you. How dare you! I wish you had one communal throat then I would slit it. You must be taught that from now on you will worship me and love me; I will have my statue placed in every temple to remind you of that, not only here in Rome but also around the Empire.’ He paused and looked mournfully about him. ‘I can give but I can also take away; I will no longer grant your wish.’ He punched his clenched fist out with his thumb extended.

The crowd remained silent as the two gladiators took up the killing stance once more. The thrust of the knife down into the heart and the resulting spray of blood were not greeted with cheers and multiple ejaculations but, rather, a deflated sullenness. The retiarius saluted the imperial box and walked towards the gates leading down to the gladiators’ cells with his trident and net raised in the air; no one acknowledged his victory.

Caligula beckoned Macro, seated behind him, to come closer. He whispered something in the prefect’s ear while pointing to an area of the crowd. A brief argument ensued before Macro, visibly angry, left his seat and spoke to Chaerea who stood by the entrance to the imperial box. Caligula reinserted his fingers petulantly into the catamite and turned his attention back to the arena while Drusilla fondly stroked the lad’s hair as if he were a pet. Chaerea left the box.

Down on the sand the carrion-man, dressed as Charon the Ferryman, bald-headed and robed in black, stalked around the dead checking for signs of life by pressing a red-hot poker to their genitals; once satisfied that a man was dead he removed his helmet and, with a heavy mallet cracked open his skull to release his spirit. This ritual complete, the bodies were dragged off for burial and the sand was raked and replaced in areas to get rid of the blood.

The crowd’s mood began to lighten as they started to look forward to the next part of the spectacle, which had been advertised as four of the equites who had been rash enough to promise to fight in the arena on Caligula’s return to health all pitched together in a fight to the death. A murmur of interest went around the amphitheatre as the gates opened and, instead of seeing four gladiators, the crowd heard the roar of beasts; a dozen hungry-looking lions tore into the arena goaded on by slaves waving flaming torches behind them. The gates closed leaving the lions alone on the sand. The crowd, knowing that lions would not fight each other and that their convict-victims or the bestiarii who would fight them were always in the arena first, began to wonder just who or what the lions were meant to kill.

The clatter of hobnailed sandals on the stone steps of two of the entrances to the seating area soon provided the answer. A half-century of sword-brandishing Praetorian Guardsmen stormed in, causing panic in the crowd nearby. Within a few heartbeats they had surrounded twenty spectators in the front row of the section to which Caligula had pointed. Behind them the crush of people desperate to escape the same fate that they guessed was in store for their hapless fellows caused many to be trampled underfoot amid a cacophony of screaming. The lions’ roars tore over the screams as the first two of the victims were hurled, begging for their lives, into the arena. The men had not even hit the ground before great claws ripped at their flesh, knocking them sideways, spinning through