We lay together until dawn, laughing and talking when we were not embracing. And then, having had no sleep, we rose in our nakedness and walked through the halls to the bath-chamber, and in great merriment washed ourselves, and, still naked, walked out into the sweet pink dawn. Side by side we stood, saying nothing, watching the sun come up out of Byzantium and begin its day’s journey onward toward Roma, toward the lands along the Western Sea, toward Nova Roma, toward far-off Khitai.
We dressed and had a breakfast of wine and cheese and figs, and I called for horses and took him on a tour of the estate. I showed him the olive groves, the fields of wheat, the mill and its stream, the fig trees laden with fruit. The day was warm and beautiful; the birds sang, the sky was clear.
Later, as we took our midday meal on the patio overlooking the garden, he said, “This is a marvelous place. I hope that when I’m old I can retire to a country estate like this.”
“Surely there must be one in your family,” I said.
“Several. But not, I think, as peaceful as this. We Romans have forgotten how to live peacefully.”
“Whereas we, since we are a declining race, can allow ourselves the luxury of a little tranquility?”
He looked at me strangely. “You see yourselves as a declining race?”
“Don’t be disingenuous, Quintus Pompeius. There’s no need to flatter me now. Of course we are.”
“Because you’re no longer an imperial power?”
“Of course. Once ambassadors from places like Nova Roma and Baghdad and Memphis and Khitai came to us. Not here to Venetia, I mean, but to Constantinopolis. Now the ambassadors go only to Roma; what the Greek cities get is tourists. And Roman proconsuls.”
“How strange your view of the world is, Eudoxia.”
“What do you mean?”
“You equate the loss of the Imperium with being in decline.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“If it happened to Roma, yes. But Byzantium isn’t Roma.” He was staring at me very seriously now. “The Eastern Empire was a folly, a distraction, a great mistake that somehow endured a thousand years. It should never have been. The burden of ruling the world was given to Roma: we accept it as our duty. There was never any need for an Eastern Empire in the first place.”
“It was all some terrible error of Constantinus’s, you say?”
“Exactly. It was a bad time for Roma, then. Even empires have their fluctuations; even ours. We had overextended ourselves, and everything was shaking. Constantinus had political problems at home, and too many troublesome sons. He thought the Empire was unwieldy and impossible to hold together, so he built the eastern capital and let the two halves drift apart. The system worked for a while—no, I admit it, for hundreds of years—but as the East lost sight of the fact that its political system had been set up by Romans and began to remember that it was really Greek, its doom became inevitable. A Greek Imperium is an anomaly that can’t sustain itself in the modern world. It couldn’t even sustain itself very long in the ancient world. The phrase is a contradiction in terms, a Greek Imperium. Agamemnon had no Imperium: he was only a tribal chief, who could barely make his power felt ten miles from Mycenae. And how long did the Athenian Empire last? How long did Alexander’s kingdom hold together, once Alexander had died? No, no, no, Eudoxia, the Greeks are a marvelous people, the whole world is in their debt for any number of great achievements, but building and sustaining governments on a large scale isn’t one of their skills. And never has been.”
“You think so?” I said, with glee in my voice. “Then why was it that we were able to defeat you in the Civil War? It was Caesar Maximilianus who surrendered to the Basileus Andronicus, is that not so, West yielding to East, and not the other way around. For two hundred years we of the East were supreme in the world, may I remind you.”
Falco shrugged. “The gods were teaching Roma a lesson, that’s all. It was another fluctuation. We were being punished for having allowed the Empire to be divided in the first place. We needed to be humbled for a little while, so we’d never make the same mistake again. You Greeks beat us very soundly in Maximilianus’s time, and you had a couple of hundred years of being, as you say, supreme, while we discovered what it felt like to be a second-rate power. But it was an impossible situation. The gods intend Roma to rule the world. There’s simply no doubt of that. It was true in the time of Carthago and it’s true today. And so the Greek Empire fell apart without even the need for a second Civil War. And so here we are. A Roman procurator sits in the royal palace at Constantinopolis. And a Roman proconsul in Venetia. Although at the moment he happens to be at the country estate of a lovely Venetian lady.”
“You’re serious?” I said. “You really believe that you are a chosen people? That Roma holds the Imperium by the will of the gods?”
“Absolutely.”
He was altogether sincere.
“The Pax Romana is Zeus’s gift to humanity? Jupiter’s gift, I should say.”
“Yes,” he said. “But for us, the world would fall into chaos. Gods, woman, do you think we want to spend our lives being administrators and bureaucrats? Don’t you think I’d prefer to retire to some estate like this and spend my days hunting and fishing and farming? But we are the race that understands how to rule. And therefore we have the obligation to rule. Oh, Eudoxia, Eudoxia, you think we’re simple brutal beasts who go around conquering everybody for the sheer joy of conquest, and you don’t realize that this is our task, our burden, our job.”
“I will weep for you, then.”
He smiled. “Am I a simple brutal beast?”
“Of course you are. All Romans are.”
He stayed with me for five days. I think we slept perhaps ten hours in all that time. Then he begged leave of me, saying that it was necessary that he return to his tasks in Venetia, and he went away.
I remained behind, with plenty to think about.
I could not, of course, accept his thesis that Greeks were incapable of governing anyone and that Roma had some divine mandate to run the world. The Eastern Empire had spread over great segments of the known world in its first few hundred years—Syria, Arabia, Aegyptus, much of eastern Europa even as far as Venetia, which is little more than a good stone’s throw from Urbs Roma itself—and we had thrived and prospered mightily, as the wealth of the great Byzantine cities still attests. And in later years, when the Romans had begun to find that their Greek cousins were growing uncomfortably powerful and had attempted to reassert the supremacy of the West, we had fought a fifty-year Civil War and had beaten them quite handily. Which had led to two centuries of Byzantine hegemony, hard times for the West while Byzantine merchant ships traveled to the rich cities of Asia and Africa. I suppose ultimately we had overreached ourselves, as all empires eventually do, or perhaps we simply went soft with too much prosperity, and so the Romans awakened out of their sleep of centuries and shook our empire apart. Maybe they are the great exception: maybe their Imperium really will go on and on and on through the ages to come, as it has done for the last fifteen hundred years, with only minor periods of what Falco would call “fluctuations” to disrupt its unbroken span of command. And therefore our territories have been reduced by the inexorable force of the imperial destiny of Roma to the status of Roman provinces again, as they were in the time of Augustus Caesar. But we had had our time of grandeur. We had ruled the world just as well as the Romans ever did.
Or so I told myself. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t so.
We Greeks could understand grandeur, yes. We understand splendor and imperial pomp. But the Romans know how to do the day-by-day work of governing. Maybe Falco was right after alclass="underline" maybe our pitiful few centuries of Imperium, interrupting the long Roman sway, had been just an anomaly of history. For now the Eastern Empire was only a memory and the Pax Romana was once again in force across thousands of miles, and from his hilltop in Roma the great Caesar Flavius Romulus presided over a realm such as the world had never before known, Romans in remotest Asia, Romans in India, Roman vessels traveling even to the astonishing new continents of the far western hemisphere, strange new inventions coming forth—printed books, weapons that hurl heavy missiles great distances, all sorts of miracles—and we Greeks are reduced to contemplation of past glories as we sit in our conquered cities sipping our wine and reading Homer and Sophocles. For the first time in my life I saw my people as a minor race, elegant, charming, cultivated, unimportant.