Oddly enough, Vinius was a relaxed soldier who did well. In Britain, he was loved like a son by a benign centurion who brought him on, then noticed favourably by their commander and, as the glaze on the almond cake, he saved the life of that senior tribune. The tribune was a young man from a senatorial family whose death would have been defined as a major social tragedy. High-class relatives might even have cried negligence though in fact when spears started flying the tribune, who was debonair but dim, had been looking the wrong way even though he had been warned not to. He was an idiot. Given time to think, Vinius would not have saved his life at all. Still, in a split-second decision his decency won out; he paid a high price physically.
The legionary legate recommended Vinius for one of Rome’s most coveted awards, amidst collective relief among the province’s high command. The governor, Agricola, personally signed off the citation before it went to Rome. The old emperor, Vespasian, approved it.
By way of thanks, the young tribune sent Vinius an amphora of extremely fine wine which, since he was still on his sickbed, his comrades drank for him.
His civic crown had been despatched to him in Britain, arriving after he was sent home. Three years later, he had still not seen the thing. Maybe it would never catch up with him.
Just before Vinius returned to Rome, his father achieved his lifelong ambition of a transfer to the Praetorian Guards. He died only six weeks later, without ever being on duty beside the Emperor. Of those other great military men, Felix and Fortunatus, there was little better to record. Whilst on service in Germany, Felix had had an accident involving a cartload of liquor barrels (he was larking about), acquiring a limp and a medical discharge. In Syria, Fortunatus had made it to centurion but was subsequently dismissed, clearly under a cloud. He made light of it, but Gaius suspected there had been some fiddling of legionary stores. Fortunatus worked for a builder when he came back to Rome; pieces of wood and hand tools were always coming home with him. Felix, who had no sense of irony, now earned his keep driving delivery carts.
Vinius was left to sustain the family tradition of military service, so after his convalescence he accepted a posting to the vigiles. Felix and Fortunatus pushed him into it, knowing their father would have approved. It allowed him to feel he was not written off. He quickly found his niche as an investigator. He enjoyed the work, and was good at it.
No one in the armed services could marry; many ignored the rule. Vinius had married before he joined up, which briefly solved the problem of sexual release, that ever-pressing matter for a seventeen-year-old. Felix and Fortunatus had been suggesting women they thought suitable, all rejected by Vinius, who gave them a hint of his independent spirit when he chose Arruntia for himself. They were childhood sweethearts, genuinely in love. The marriage was passionate, even romantic; he and Arruntia could hardly keep their hands off one another. Gaius also enjoyed extricating himself from his male and female relatives’ supervision.
Then the dream ended. Arruntia was horrified to learn he intended to join the legions; she could not believe he would leave home indefinitely, leave her, and do it voluntarily. Somebody warned her that legionary service was twenty years, plus more in the reserves — then another so-called friend pointed out that soldiers were not allowed to marry so she was in effect divorced. She felt utterly rejected. Coming from such a military family, the blase Vinius had taken his future for granted. He had not intended to deceive Arruntia; he was a lad, and just never thought about it.
He did not know, when he departed for Britain, that he was leaving his wife pregnant.
When Vinius then came home out of the blue, expecting to pick up their previous life, he fell over the cradle as he entered their rented room, and was severely knocked back. His wife’s angry mood over his career choice was also outside his experience; worse, she no longer had much interest in sexual relations. Had pregnancy and labour been frightening? Was she overwhelmed by domestic responsibility? Although she devoted herself to the child she now had, perhaps she did not want another baby. Perhaps, Vinius darkly suspected, she no longer wanted him. As far as he could tell (and he brooded on this continually) there had been no other man.
He knew for sure his damaged appearance horrified Arruntia. She shrieked and burst into tears when she first saw him; even their tiny daughter took the apparition more quietly.
He had no idea how to deal with an infant. Arruntia biffed him away when he tried. On rare occasions when he found himself alone with the baby, he picked her up gingerly but felt as guilty as if he had taken a secret lover. Once, the tiny child fell asleep clinging onto his tunic and Vinius found himself weeping, he did not know why.
Older now, and shaken by his army experience, he dimly recognised that Arruntia must have felt desperate when he left, though this understanding did not improve his subsequent behaviour. No teenaged girl would enjoy being shackled to a man she might not see again for twenty years; when she unexpectedly got him back, he was hideous, plagued with night terrors and moody with it. He made no real move to discuss this situation; he matured in his working life with the vigiles, but barely adjusted at home. He felt alienated and disappointed. Marriage, he discovered, was one thing he would never be good at.
So, joining the Praetorians who were barracked in an enormous camp outside the city relieved him of some stress by letting him escape arguments. For a man this was ideal. For Arruntia it was just another downhill lurch in their deteriorating life together.
But even Vinius himself was depressed; his transfer seemed a sixteen-year prison sentence (sixteen years was the Praetorian term of service, though he was appalled to hear that many Guards were so keen they stayed longer). His short stint in the army had instilled in him a loathing for this special corps; it rankled with regular legionaries that the Guards not only received pay-and-a-half but wallowed in a life of ease at home. Now Vinius suspected that there was no guarantee of the supposed easy life; the Praetorians were the emperor’s bodyguard, his personal regiment. If your august leader developed military ambitions, you went on campaign. Vinius, who had thought his fighting days were over, faced the unwelcome possibility of more overseas travel and more active service. Should Titus fancy roughing up barbarians, there would be no getting out of it.
Duty in Rome was a mix of luxury and tedium, he soon found. One cohort at a time, carrying weapons but in civilian dress, accompanied their emperor wherever he went. Since Vespasian, Praetorian cohorts had each been bumped up to close on a thousand men. At every change of the guard, they marched down from the Viminal Gate through the Fifth and Third Regions, crossed the Forum and stomped up the Palatine Hill; reverberations shook flagons from shelves in wine bars and made wet sheets slither off washing lines. Standing guard at a palace or a villa, a cohort of Guards filled up a lot of corridor.
Eight other cohorts would be left to hang around the camp. There, a tiresome amount of unnecessary drill occurred, plus occasional homosexuality and much undercover gambling. Sick leave was high. Vinius informed his wife that staying in the camp was rigidly enforced, though Arruntia could hardly miss the fact that off-duty Praetorians ran rife through the city like rats in a granary.
Vinius had a hard time fitting in at first. Nobody wanted him. He was too young. His service record was too short. He arrived with mysterious patronage, which gave no protection because if he had been favoured by Domitian Caesar that counted against him with Titus’ men. He did his best to survive. With what he had learned from his father, he managed to dodge various raucous clubs that had unpleasant initiation rituals. Many Praetorians wore beards; he grew one, found it disgusting and had it shaved off, which at least gave him impressive scabs temporarily. He followed his father in using only two of his three names, dropping ‘Clodianus’ and saying two had been good enough for Mark Antony, always the soldiers’ hero. Otherwise he lay low. Keeping to himself in such a fraternal environment marked him as antisocial, which to Praetorians meant plain disloyal. Loners cannot hope to be popular.