Certain other party guests who returned to Roma, that day and the next, hadn’t needed to be lured. They understood perfectly well what was about to happen and intended to be present at the scene during the events. That group included Count Nero Romulus; Atticus, the ship-owner; the banker Garofalo; the merchant from Hispania, Scipio Lucullo; Diodorus the gladiator; and half a dozen other patricians and men of wealth who were members of the conspiracy. For them the jaunt to Tibur had been a way of inducing a mood of complacency at the capital, for what was there to fear with so many of the most powerful figures of the realm off at the great pleasure dome for a week of delights? But then these key figures took care to return quickly and quietly to Roma when the time to strike had arrived.
On the fatal morning these things occurred, as all the world would shortly learn:
A squadron of Marcus Sempronius Diodorus’s gladiators broke into the mansion of Praetorian Prefect Varro and slew him just before sunrise. The Praetorian Guard then was told that the Emperor had discovered that Varro was plotting against him, and had replaced him as prefect with Diodorus. This fiction was readily enough accepted; Varro had never been popular among his own men and the Praetorians are always willing to accept a change in leadership, since that usually means a distribution of bonuses to insure their loyalty to their new commander.
With the Praetorians neutralized, it was an easy matter for a team of gunmen to penetrate the palace where Emperor Maxentius was staying that night—the Vatican, it was, a palace on the far side of the river in the vicinity of the Mauseoleum of Hadrianus—and break into the royal apartments. The Emperor, his wife, and his children fled in wild panic through the hallways, but were caught and put to death just outside the Imperial baths.
Prince Camillus, who had reached the capital in the small hours of the night, had not yet gone to bed when the conspirators reached his palace on the Forum side of the Palatine. Hearing them slaughtering his guards, the poor fat fool fled through a cellar door and ran for his life toward the Temple of Castor and Pollux, where he hoped to find sanctuary; but his pursuers overtook him and cut him down on the steps of the temple.
As for Prince Flavius Rufus, he awakened to the sound of gunfire and reacted instantly, darting behind his palace to a winery that he kept there. His workmen were not yet done crushing the grapes of the autumn harvest. Jumping into a wooden cart, he ordered them to heap great bunches of grapes on top of him and to wheel him out of the city, concealed in that fashion. He actually succeeded in reaching Neapolis safely a couple of days later and proclaimed himself Emperor, but he was captured and killed soon after—with some help, I have heard, from Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus.
Two younger princes of the royal house still survived—Prince Augustus Caesar, who was sixteen and off in Parisi at the university, and Prince Quintus Fabius, a boy of ten, I think, who dwelled at one of the Imperial residences in Roma. Although Prince Augustus did live long enough to proclaim himself Emperor and actually set out across Gallia with the wild intention of marching on Roma, he was seized and shot in the third day of his reign. Those three days, I suppose, put this young and virtually unknown Augustus into history as the last of all the Emperors of Roma.
What happened to young Quintus Fabius, no one knows for sure. He was the only member of the Imperial family whose body never was found. Some say that he was spirited out of Roma on the day of the murders wearing peasant clothes and is still alive in some remote province. But he has never come forth to claim the throne, so if he is still alive to this day, he lives very quietly and secretively, wherever he may be.
All day long the killing went on. The assassination of Emperors was of course nothing new for Roma, but this time the job was done more thoroughly than ever before, an extirpation of root and branch. Royal blood ran in rivers that day. Not only was the immediate family of the Caesars virtually wiped out, but most of the descendants of older Imperial families were executed, too, I suppose so that they wouldn’t attempt to put themselves forward as Emperors now that the line of Laureolus was essentially extinct. A good many former Consuls, certain members of the priestly ranks, and others suspected of excessive loyalty to the old regime, including two or three dozen carefully selected Senators, met their deaths that day as well.
And at nightfall the new leaders of Roma gathered at the Capitol to proclaim the birth of the Second Republic. Gaius Junius Scaevola would hold the newly devised rank of First Consul for Life—that is to say, Emperor, but under another name—and he would govern the vast entity that we could no longer call the Empire through a Council of the Senate, by which he meant his little circle of wealthy and powerful friends, Atticus and Garofalo and Count Nero Romulus and General Cassius Frontinus and half a dozen others of that sort.
Thus, after nineteen hundred years, was the work of the great Augustus Caesar finally undone.
Augustus himself had pretended that Roma was still a Republic, even while gathering all the highest offices into a single bundle and taking possession of that bundle, thus making himself absolute monarch; and that pretense had lasted down through the ages. I am not a king, Augustus had insisted; I am merely the First Citizen of the realm, who humbly strives, under the guidance of the Senate, to serve the needs of the Roman people. And so it went for all those years, though somehow it became possible for many of the First Citizens to name their own sons as their successors, or else to select some kinsman or friend, even while the ostensible power to choose the Emperor was still in the hands of the Senate. But from now on it would be different. No one would be able to claim the supreme power in Roma merely because he was the son or nephew of someone who had held that power. No more crazy Caligulas, no more vile Neros, no more brutish Caracallas, no more absurd Demetriuses, no more weak and foppish Maxentiuses. Our ruler now would truly be a First Citizen—a Consul, as in the ancient days before the first Augustus—and the trappings of the monarchy would at last be abandoned.
All in a single day, a day of blood and fire. While I lounged in Tibur, at the villa of the Emperors, knowing nothing of what was taking place.
On the morning of the day after the revolution, word comes to the villa of what has occurred in Roma. As it happens, I have slept late that day, after having drunk myself into a stupor the night before to comfort myself for the absence of Lucilla; and the villa is virtually deserted by the time I rouse myself and emerge.
That alone is strange and disconcerting. Where has everyone gone? I find a butler, who tells me the news. Roma is in flames, he says, and the Emperor is dead along with all his family.
“All his family? His brothers and sisters too?”
“Brothers and sisters too. Everyone.”
“The Princess Severina?”
The butler looks at me without sympathy. He is very calm; he might be speaking of the weather, or next week’s chariot races. In the autumn warmth he is as chilly as a winter fog.
“The whole lot, is what I hear. Every last one, and good riddance to them. Scaevola’s the new Emperor. Things will all be very different now, you can be sure of that.”
All this dizzies me. I have to turn away and take seven or eight gasping breaths before I have my equilibrium again. Overnight our world has died and been born anew.
I bathe and dress and eat hurriedly, and arrange somehow for a carriage to take me to Roma. Even in this moment of flux and madness, a purse full of gold will get you what you want. There are no drivers, so I’ll have to find my way on my own, but no matter. Insane though it may be to enter the capital on this day of chaos, Roma pulls me like a magnet. Lucilla must be all right, if her uncle has seized the throne; but I have to know the fate of Severina Floriana.