‘I think a month from today should be sufficient for your purposes,’ he said. ‘I doubt you will have any trouble gathering all the books you could ever want in this place. I don’t even think the owners will insist on your making copies to take away. And it would be a shame to deprive the furthermost Britons of two such holy and effective missionaries of the Faith.
‘I will have your residence permits sent over to your lodgings tomorrow or the day after. Please note they will not entitle you to receive anything from the papal dole.’
With that, the prefect rose, our audience at an end. As he rose, he knocked over his cup, spilling red wine over a heap of papers. He scowled and brushed them all onto the floor, shattering the cup, and sat heavily down again with his back to us.
12
Our business over, Maximin and I continued deeper into the Forum. This had once been the civil and religious centre of Rome. But times now were altered, and its buildings were no longer in use. Some had fallen down. Most had been locked shut. We passed by the Julian Basilica – big, though far smaller than the place we had just visited. Its great doors were secured with bars and a rusted padlock. As ever, its marble facing had been mostly stripped. The bronze statues that had once been crowded outside were evidenced only by their plinths. I think it was the Vandals who had stripped all the bronze they could carry in their leisurely sack of about a hundred and fifty years before.
It was the same for the Temple of Concord and even the Senate House – this hadn’t been used for generations. The Temple of Vesta we’d already seen. This was an elegant little building – the old temples, by the way, were generally built smaller than churches, which follow the basilica pattern. The reason is that temples were never meant to hold large numbers of worshippers, but housed the cult statues, the main worship taking place in the open. The Temple of Vesta had been broken open, and was in use as a cow shed. Other buildings had fallen down, and I couldn’t identify their function even by the broken inscriptions.
Once or twice, I turned to ask Maximin. He’d known Rome from any number of visits. Sometimes, he’d answer with a firm confidence that I was willing to trust. Quite often, even he was vague about the former uses of these falling or fallen buildings.
‘It was a temple to some demon,’ he said, pointing up at the great Temple of Jupiter that still loomed above us on the Capitoline Hill. ‘As with all the others, it was closed over two hundred years ago on the orders of Caesar. God willing, it may soon fall down – or be turned to some holy purpose. So many were the demons who resided in this city before men were brought to the True Faith of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Even now, they wander the Earth, tempting the unwary to blasphemy or heresy.’
Knowing Maximin as I did, I mastered the urge to sniff. I resolved instead to get him again when he was feeling less devout. Plainly, Rome was in no need of temples. With the decay of power and population, it also had little need of administrative buildings. But it would be nice to know what all these places had been.
It didn’t help that the Tiber had risen in the past hundred years, and the Forum was now regularly flooded. We mostly walked over compacted mud several feet higher than the old pavements.
Just in front of the Julian Basilica, though, the ground had been cleared, and there was a gleaming new column set up with a golden statue on top. About fifty feet up, the statue was a crude lump of bronze. It looked barely human. It made a shocking change from the smooth perfection of the marble statues we’d just seen in the Basilica or still dotted here and there about the city. The thin leaf covering was coming off. But the column was an elegant, fluted thing. Untouched by the elements, it had obviously been salvaged from some ruined interior – like all other new work in Rome.
This was my first sight of the Column of Phocas. The inscription on its base – placed over another that had been chiselled out – said everything. Part of it read:
We have erected a dazzling golden statue of His Majesty, our Lord Phocas, the Eternal Emperor, the Triumphator crowned of God, in return for countless good deeds, for the establishing of peace in Italy, and for the preservation of freedom.
It had been set up a year or so before by the pope in the presence of Exarch Smaragdus, over from Ravenna, in honour of the emperor. In recent years, pope and emperor had not always been at one. The emperor saw Italy as an outpost. It was a place where taxes should be collected rather than spent. His main concerns were the Persians across the Euphrates and the barbarians beyond the Danube. It took up all the work of diplomacy and strategy to bribe or otherwise to conciliate, or repel these groups by arms from the taxpaying provinces.
The pope, of course, saw things differently. He’d taken effective control over Rome and some other parts of Italy, and was dealing with the Lombards as if he were a sovereign prince. The treaty Pope Gregory had made some years earlier was technically an act of treason. But the days when an emperor could arrest and replace a pope – as Justinian had – were long past.
Then there was the matter of religious primacy. As the successor of Saint Peter, and bishop of Rome, the pope claimed a supreme status above all the other churchmen and an equality with the emperor himself. Pope Gregory had taken up and refurbished the old claim to be regarded as the universal bishop.
So long as they could, the emperors in Constantinople had deprecated or ignored this claim. But then Phocas had taken power by murdering the legitimate emperor, and had run into endless domestic and foreign challenges. Gregory, though old and dying, was still the most effective pope in hundreds of years. It was he who’d sent out the mission to England.
He’d seized his chance with Phocas. In return for some gross but vague flattery – of which this column, set up after his death, was one instance – and a more effective, though less public, series of bribes, the emperor had conceded the title of universal bishop and tacitly accepted the temporal supremacy of the pope in Rome. The gift of one of the larger temples for conversion to a church was a minor thing besides.
We bumped into one of the lawyers we’d seen earlier, pissing against a fallen column outside the Senate House. He gave us a little papyrus slip advertising his name and services, and launched into an overblown declamation on the splendid ceremony that had attended the dedication of the column. There was the exarch himself. There was Pope Boniface, just consecrated after a nine-month interval that had followed the sudden death of the previous Boniface – in those days, popes couldn’t be consecrated without the imperial warrant, and Phocas had held out for a bigger bribe.
‘There was,’ the lawyer said, spreading his arms dramatically, ‘a multitude of the highest dignitaries that came from all four corners of the universe, and all the glory and magnitude of the great Roman People assembled here in the very navel of the universe.’
It took an entire handful of copper to get the spouting wretch off our backs – I thought he’d follow us back to Marcella’s. Instead, he stuffed the coins into his purse and slouched off towards a wine shop set up under the Arch of Septimius Severus.
On the way back, I thought several times we were followed. As ever, the streets were mostly empty, and our shoes rasped loud on the paving stones. But could I hear a soft patter of feet behind us? I knew already Rome was a dangerous place, and cursed myself for leaving my sword behind when we’d set out to see the prefect. My knife would be of limited use against more than one attacker. But every time I stopped and looked round, the street behind was empty and silent. Was it an echo? It might have been. I only heard the noise when we were moving.
‘It’ll be dark soon,’ said Maximin. ‘Rome can be frightening when the light has gone. Let’s hurry back.’