Rome's Lost Son(33)

Vespasian laughed, despite his freezing lips. ‘Much easier. But it didn’t happen that way and the result of that struggle and all those deaths has been hijacked by two self-serving freedmen.’

‘Ah! But at least they didn’t force a quarter of a million men to fight each other so that they could grab power. In a way Pallas and Narcissus have got less blood on their hands than Augustus. You senators almost resent the fact that they’ve come to power without a good civil war in which thousands of common citizens die; that would legitimize them in your eyes. Their greatest crime is sneaking their way to power rather than bludgeoning their way there like all those upstanding families in the Republic used to.’

Vespasian found himself unable to rebut that statement and instead wondered at the truth of it. To follow that line of logic, Augustus was the only ruler for the last eighty years to be legitimate because he had fought his way to power.

He had thought that his resentment of Narcissus and Pallas was mainly based on the way that they had come to power and then held on to it; but was their way any more unjustified than Caligula’s? He too had come to power by trickery and subterfuge if the rumours were to be believed. But then neither of the freedmen’s great-grandfathers had killed more of his enemies’ soldiers than they had his on this plain so far from Rome.

So, therefore, it was to do with who the freedmen were, not how they got to where they were, that was the real cause of the growing resentment. The resentment that he had felt when Narcissus had – as Pallas had predicted – ordered him to a private room as he left Pallas’ apartments had been bitter. The resentment had grown when the freedman had suggested that Vespasian’s appointment as ambassador to Armenia was a very convenient cover for him to use to stop off in Macedonia and speak to his brother so that he could furnish Narcissus with the information he needed to defeat Pallas. When he thought of Pallas he remembered him as Antonia’s steward. Then, he knew his place; now, he was forming imperial policy. He was a man who had risen way beyond his station and Vespasian realised, for the first time, that the real cause of his resentment for the pair of them was envy. Envy that people born so low should have risen so high. Ex-slaves had no right to such power. He came from a family far above them and yet they could order him to do things that he would rather not do. It began to seep into his mind that he was jealous of their power because he wanted it for himself, and if he were to have it he would have to take it in the old-fashioned manner: he would bludgeon – as Magnus had put it – his way there. Then the image of the ‘V’ on the sacrificial liver played in his mind and, much to his surprise, it seemed to calm him.

As the wind lessened and the snow thinned the wagon passed over the plain of Philippi and the walls of the city came into sight. Vespasian left his thoughts of power at the site of the battle that had decided so much and wondered, instead, how his brother would greet him after a three-year separation.

Before they reached the gates that granted access to the city of the living they passed through the city of the dead. Tombs lined the Via Egnatia for the last quarter of a mile or so; large and small and inscribed in both Latin and Greek attesting to the relative wealth and origin of the interred. But it was not just the dead in their cold and sombre dwellings that they passed; there were also the dying. Suspended between life and death, as they hung from crosses, a score or more of pain-wracked, newly crucified, naked men writhed above Vespasian and Magnus as they made their way. Groaning with agony, struggling for every breath, their flesh bluing in the bitter cold, some sobbed and some muttered what sounded to be prayers as their lives trickled away at a painfully sluggish pace.

‘Looks like Sabinus has been very busy,’ Magnus remarked as he cast a glance up at a youth who was staring in horror at the blood-crusted nail impaling his right wrist. Snow flurried around him.

Hormus flinched at the sight and lowered his head, keeping his eyes on the paved surface of the road as a wail of sheer agony rose from a man splayed out on a cross lying on the ground. The volume increased with every blow of the hammer, driving a nail through the base of his thumb, wielded by an auxiliary optio with the dexterity of one old in the way of crucifying men. The auxiliaries holding the victim down laughed at his torment and made jokes aimed at the last two shackled prisoners, eyes brimful of fear and tears, waiting their turn to be nailed to a cross, their breath misting from their mouths.

‘It must have been a serious incident if he’s been obliged to nail this many up,’ Vespasian observed, counting the crosses. ‘Twenty-two plus those last three.’ The executions did not surprise Vespasian: they had been told by the prefect of Thessalonike, on arrival in the capital of Macedonia, that the Governor had been called away the previous day to quell a disturbance in Philippi. This had not been an inconvenience as Philippi lay on their route, straddling, as it did, the main road to the East. ‘I’d guess that my brother has got the disorder in hand now; I can’t imagine that there are too many more who would wish to join them.’ He cast an eye over a bedraggled group of women, watching their menfolk’s execution in miserable impotence, flinching with every hammer-fall as the last nail was driven home and the screams intensified.