One day it was all but official. Tiberius recommended that the Senate confer the proconsular imperium on Sejanus, and it was done. This promoted him to virtual half emperor, since it was by means of the proconsular authority that Tiberius could legally govern the empire beyond Rome. Constitutionally, Pilate could now take his orders from either Tiberius or Sejanus. In fact, only the tribunician power was lacking for Sejanus to be joint emperor with Tiberius. For the prerogatives of tribune would make the prefect, like the princeps, personally inviolate, and with full executive veto powers to boot.
Procula’s father wrote that Sejanus’s mansion was now so jammed with followers that one of his large couches had broken down under the crowds seated in his waiting room. With the same dispatch came a letter from the great one himself, in which Sejanus raised Pilate’s salary from 100,000 to 200,000 sesterces per year, awarding him the grade of a ducenarius. This promotion, Sejanus hoped, would inspire Pilate to even greater efforts in Judea. The last, Pilate presumed, would mean more anti-Semitic directives from Rome. But a doubling of one’s salary was always welcome.
It was her father’s letter which gave Procula the idea of returning to Rome for a vacation at home. Gaius Proculeius was not well, and his lines betrayed a wistful desire to see his daughter again. Pilate encouraged her to make the trip.
As Roman marriages went, theirs was proving a success. With a fifth anniversary nearing, a time when it was quite fashionable for each partner to be halfway through a second marriage, Pilate and Procula were remarkably happy. His trials as governor had tested their love, bringing stresses which Procula, in her sheltered life, had never known before. But facing them together had deepened their relationship, and they cheerfully admitted that they needed each other, especially in a far-off province like Judea.
At times Pilate wondered if they would have been as faithful to one another had they remained in voluptuous Rome. Perhaps their virtue was sheltered by the insular position in which they found themselves in a foreign land. There simply was little opportunity to sin in Caesarea, at least with members of one’s own social stratum. Yet Procula was returning to Rome—alone. Pilate felt a ripple of concern, even a tinge of jealousy at that prospect. But, knowing his wife, he banished it immediately.
Curiously, their quarrels were usually over matters of state, not personality. Procula was not the typical Roman wife, preoccupied with running the household or flitting from one social engagement to the next. Gifted with superior intelligence, she showed a lively interest in what her husband was doing, or leaving undone. In moments of crisis, she wanted most to offer her advice, but she was sensible enough to realize that precisely then Pilate would least tolerate any intrusion. So she supplied her ideas only when the government was running smoothly. While Pilate never formally acknowledged her help—that, she knew, would have been unmagisterial and un-Roman—Procula’s delight was to find some of her best suggestions incorporated from time to time.
Their personalities were attuned by curious harmonies. Pilate was the realist; the calculating, ambitious, even opportunistic public official; the sub-emotional man; the religious neutral. She was the sensitive, imaginative idealist, with a creative focus toward the worlds of art, literature, and religion. What had held this polarity in balance was not simply romantic love—the romantic part of it was waning—but a flexible, mutual understanding, the undergirding necessary whenever a man and a woman must live together for life.
There was one considerable flaw in their marriage: they had no children. The first year or two they had tried to avoid them, but now that they wanted a family, it was apparently denied them. Procula promised that she would consult the Proculeius family physician after her return to Rome.
In late May, when the Mediterranean would be at its calmest, Procula set sail from Caesarea. Several tribunes’ wives and attendants accompanied her on the voyage to Rome. It would be some months before Pilate saw his wife again. Depending on her father’s illness, Procula might not return until the new year.
Later that summer, three large, unidentified ships approached Caesarea. A lookout on a tower near the harbor mouth reported that the craft seemed to be teeming with armed men. In the ensuing alert, Pilate led an auxiliary cohort and a company of archers down to the waterfront. Ballistae were readied atop the towers rising from the jetty, catapulting machines which could shoot 150-pound stone balls over a range of three hundred yards.
The harbor alert was a standard procedure against piracy. Although Pompey had driven the buccaneers off the Mediterranean a century earlier, random companies of maritime cutthroats might still descend on an unsuspecting town, plunder it, and make off with the spoils before help arrived.
Pilate was about to order a warning shot across the bow of the lead ship when he saw it posting its colors—somewhat tardily. To his chagrin, these turned out to be Roman military standards. As the ships approached the narrows, a herald called across the water, “I-den-ti-fy your-selves!” Pirates had the nasty habit of using any disguise, even that of Roman legionaries, to put their victims off guard.
“Cohors Secunda ltalica Civium Romanorum Voluntariorum!” was the shouted reply.
Pilate’s face was transformed by a huge grin. The Latin for “Second Italian Cohort of Roman Citizen Volunteers” was perfect—he knew of such a unit—and as the ships slipped into the harbor of Caesarea, the Italian faces crowding the railings were unmistakable. Pilate’s cohort let out a cheer and scrambled to convert its image into that of an honor guard, while the artillery men sheepishly crawled out from behind their ballistae and waved greetings from the turrets.
As the lead ship docked, a voice called down, “What were you trying to do, Prefect, sink your fellow Romans?”
The comment came from the smiling face of a centurion leaning over the starboard gunwale.
“Why you…you’re the courier…Cornelius, aren’t you?” said Pilate.
“Honored that you remember me. Four years ago you invited me to return to Judea. So here I am.”
“Salve, Cornelius! But why didn’t Rome tell me the Second Italian Cohort was being dispatched here? Or are you only visiting?”
“No. We’re assigned to Caesarea. The Prefect Sejanus wrote you about it some weeks ago, I understand.”
“Strange! I never got word!”
But he did when the arriving cohort delivered a bundle of communications from Rome, a sad commentary on the imperial mail service. The letter stated that Sejanus was finally adopting Pilate’s suggestion that a nucleus of Roman citizen troops be sent to such outposts as Judea, rather than having the governor rely entirely on local non-Roman auxiliaries. The new cohort, recruited from Italian volunteers, would add five hundred genuine Romans to Pilate’s military arm and so improve the security of the prefecture.
Although as a centurion Cornelius was only a junior officer, Pilate soon found him more congenial than the newly arrived tribune who commanded the Italian Cohort. While he showed him no partiality in official or military matters—that would have created dangerous jealousies within his officers’ staff—Pilate soon came to depend on Cornelius for discreet, off-duty camaraderie. The centurion had a blazing wit and the kind of stability and common sense that Pilate had not really enjoyed in a fellow Roman since Gaius Galerius.