Next, the Praetorians hated it as much as he did. That was much worse. To have Vinius foisted on them at twenty-three, after only two years in the army and three years in the vigiles, was extremely unpopular; the Guards wanted hoary veterans with long personal histories on the lines of some glorious fantasy: Gaius Vinius Clodianus, son of Marcus, first rank of the Praetorian Cohorts of the divine Augustus, chief centurion of the Twentieth Valeria Victrix legion, awarded two headless spears and gold crowns, military tribune of a cohort of vigiles, military tribune of an urban cohort, military tribune of a praetorian cohort, prefect of engineers, duumvir for the administration of justice, priest of the Augustan cult…
‘So what have you done, son?’
The officer who asked this was like all of them: older and heavier than Vinius, built like a mortuary slab, tough and terse, none too clever. He resembled Vinius’ father closely, though the late Marcus had at least been bright.
The admissions procedure had established that the newcomer met the requirement of being born in Italy, and that he had undergone basic training, though not to the Guards’ immaculate standards. Being able to run, ride, read, swim, make bricks, hurl javelins, build roads, cook soup, stab and stamp, put up a fort from a pre-formed kit, hold your beer, screw a peasant girl behind her parents’ backs then march for hours in full tackle were nowhere near enough. The Praetorian ideal was a special course on swaggering, bragging, breastplate buffing and trampling on the public’s toes.
‘Done?’ Gaius Vinius took a snap decision: ‘Not enough, I’m afraid. I pulled a priest out of a burning temple; maybe a watching god was grateful. Otherwise, all I can offer is that I won the civic crown.’
The Guard snapped to attention. ‘That we like!’
Vinius tapped his face to illustrate his tale. Being ugly would help. Most of these big brutes were seamed with old wounds like crumpled laundry.
With genuine modesty, he never normally discussed it. People knew; he just left it at that. He would rather have kept his full eyesight and not had a cheekful of scars that got cut open again every time a barber shaved him. But if there was one moment in his life when he needed to assert the honour he had won, this was it. The civic crown was a wreath of oak leaves, awarded for saving the life of a comrade in great danger. It was awarded very rarely indeed.
Vinius explained how he had been in the Twentieth legion in Britain, a province which he was careful not to criticise in case his interrogator had served there in some fondly remembered youth; the Praetorian was not old enough to have jollied around the south beating up hill forts under the young Vespasian, but he could well have fought Queen Boudicca under Nero. Vinius had been in Britain later, when Julius Agricola was governor, pressing into new territory to the west and north. Annoyed by Roman expansion, a tribe called the Ordovices had ambushed parties of troops. On arrival in his province, where he had served before, Agricola wasted no time on familiarisation but launched a surprise attack to write the Ordovices out of history.
‘He did it too — annihilation. They won’t resist us again: they won’t be there. When the missiles started coming, I shoved a tribune out of the way. It was how I lost the eye. I failed to jump fast enough. I took the spear in the face.’
‘Bit of luck, for you?’ suggested the Guard. That was how these Praetorian idiots saw it. Even getting yourself half killed was clever, so long as you emerged with a bauble to show off on your tombstone when the time came. Some of the bastards had a torque, bracelets and nine breastplate disks. They went on parade so highly decorated they glistened with gold like girls.
‘You just do what you have to,’ murmured Vinius.
‘Now you’re talking our language.’
That was it, then. He just had to bluff, like his father boozing among old comrades at some grisly cohort dinner. They were turning him into his father, however hard he fought against it.
Vinius and his father had in fact enjoyed a fair relationship. This was mainly because young Gaius was too peaceful to start confrontations. His father and two half-brothers had conditioned him to do what they said. For instance, they had all told him to go into the army, which fortunately he had not minded. As far as they knew — so far — he never minded anything. He grew up letting them push him around, which in some odd way made him feel comfortable. He was saving rebellion for when something really mattered. With his father dead at fifty-two, whatever he was waiting to kick against would never happen.
His father had been a solid, steady, military man. In Rome he had run his vigiles cohort with the right mix of rigidity, contempt for bureaucracy and loathing for the public; he terrorised petty criminals, slammed major gangsters, and out-schemed fraudsters of all kinds, while his firefighting successes were legendary. He kept the Aventine Hill, a lawless district full of poets and freed slaves, running as smoothly as anybody could.
Flouting the rules, as was traditional in all branches of the military, he had married and produced two sons, Marcus Vinius Felix and Marcus Vinius Fortunatus. Their mother died when they were in their teens. The father coped for a time, then brought in a young woman to help with the house and his unruly lads. After a flurry of initial suspicion, all three came to adore her. It worked so well the father married her to secure her.
Clodia was sweet, slight and babyishly pretty, yet they all did what she said. She gave her menfolk routines they had badly craved. She could cook. She made them leave dirty boots at the front door and tidy up their mess. She loved them all, gaining in return a devotion that came close to the religious. When she presented them with a baby, the family seemed perfect. The older boys treated their little brother Gaius as if he were an intriguing pet. Clodia persuaded them to be gentle, or at least not to pull his legs off.
Gaius was three years old when Clodia died. Even while their father was still living, Felix and Fortunatus took it upon themselves to look after him. Like many bullies, they were violently protective of the young in their own family. He was never bullied by anybody else, for certain. Only they could and did push him around, a system they continued into his adulthood. That he might not need their interference never occurred to them.
Their father was too dispirited by Clodia’s death to remarry again. While still small, Gaius was passed into the daily care of his grandmother, Clodia’s mother, a tough, even-handed woman at whose house the boy often slept. He also had a slew of aunts. Most were Clodia’s sisters, but there were a couple on his father’s side too, which made two competing groups. The aunts, who were at various times single, married, widowed or divorced, came and went but always spoiled Gaius. Rome was a paternalist society, but aunts who have an appealing, motherless little boy to dote on sweep aside such nonsense.
So Gaius Vinius grew up in the company of strong men, but with the influence of powerful women. His two elder brothers had always seemed like adults to him; he could only ever remember them shaving and drinking and talking about girls. Being so much younger, his position was almost that of an only child. A quiet, self-sufficient boy, he kept any sadness to himself, but he longed for the mother he could not remember, especially since Clodia was so frequently mentioned in conversation by his father, and by Felix and Fortunatus.
His grandmother and aunts were proud of him. Always good-looking, he was easygoing and rarely in trouble. He also had more intelligence and courage than people realised. His talents came as a shock, because his brothers had instilled in him that he was a milksop who needed tireless looking after. His father, too, had always made it plain he thought that Felix and Fortunatus would excel in the army while Gaius might struggle. Even so, they expected him to join up. He enlisted at eighteen, as each of them had done.