Yes. Enormous Imperial dwellings, two score or even more of them, all higgledy-piggledy, cheek by jowl. Whole mountains of marble must have been leveled to build that incomprehensible maze of splendor.
And we are heading right into the midst of it all. The entrance to the Palatine is well patrolled, hordes of Praetorians everywhere, but they all seem to know Lucilla by sight and they wave us on in. She tries to explain to me which palace is whose, but it’s all a hopeless jumble, and even she isn’t really sure. Underneath what we see, she says, are the original palaces of the early Imperial days, those of Augustus and Tiberius and the Flavians, but of course nearly every Emperor since then has wanted to add his own embellishments and enhancements, and by now the whole hill is a crazyquilt of Imperial magnificence and grandiosity in twenty different styles, including a few very odd Oriental and pseudo-Byzantine structures inserted into the mix in the twenty-fourth century by some of the weirder monarchs of the Decadence. Towers and arcades and pavilions and gazebos and colonnades and domes and basilicas and fountains and peculiar swooping vaults jut out everywhere.
“And the Emperor himself?” I ask her. “Where in all that does he live?”
She waves her hand vaguely toward the middle of the heap. “Oh, he moves around, you know. He never stays in the same place two nights in a row.”
“Why is that? Is he the restless type?”
“Not at all. But Actinius Varro makes him do it.”
“Who?”
“Varro. The Praetorian Prefect. He worries a lot about assassination plots.”
I laugh. “When an Emperor is assassinated, isn’t it usually his own Praetorian Prefect who does it?”
“Usually, yes. But the Emperor always thinks that his prefect is the first completely loyal one, right up till the moment the knife goes into his belly. Not that anyone would want to assassinate a foolish fop like our Maxentius,” she adds.
“If he’s as incompetent as everyone says, wouldn’t that be a good reason for removing him, then?”
“What, and make one of his even more useless brothers Emperor in his place? Oh, no, Cymbelin. I know them all, believe me, and Maxentius is the best of the lot. Long life to him, I say.”
“Indeed. Long life to Emperor Maxentius,” I chime in, and we both enjoy a good laugh.
The particular palace we are heading for is one of the newest on the hilclass="underline" an ornate, many-winged guest pavilion, much bedizened with eye-dazzling mosaics, brilliant wild splotches of garish yellows and uninhibited scarlets. It had been erected some fifty years before, she tells me, early in the reign of the lunatic Emperor Demetrius, the last Caesar of the Decadence. Lucilla has a little apartment in it, courtesy of her good friend, Prince Flavius Rufus. Apparently a good many non-royal members of the Imperial Roman social set live up here on the Palatine. It’s more convenient for everyone that way, traffic being what it is in Roma and the number of parties being so great.
The beginning of my stay in the capital is Neapolis all over again: there is a glittering social function for me to attend on my very first night. The host, says Lucilla, is none other than the famous Count Nero Romulus Claudius Palladius, who is terribly eager to meet me.
“And who is he, exactly?” I ask.
“His grandfather’s brother was Count Valerian Apollinaris. You know who he was?”
“Of course.” One doesn’t need a Cantabrigian education to recognize the name of the architect of the modern Empire, the great five-term Consul of the First War of Reunification. It was Valerian Apollinaris who had dragged the frayed and crumbling Empire out of the sorry era known as the Decadence, put an end to the insurrections in the provinces that had wracked the Empire throughout the troubled twenty-fifth century, restored the authority of the central government, and installed Laureolus Caesar, grandfather of our present Emperor, on the throne. It was Apollinaris who—acting in Laureolus’s name, as an unofficial Caesar standing behind the true one—had instituted the Reign of Terror, that time of brutal discipline that had, for better or for worse, brought the Empire back to some semblance of the greatness that it last had known in the time of Flavius Romulus and the seventh Trajan. And then perished in the Terror himself, along with so many others.
I know nothing of this grand-nephew of his, this Nero Romulus Claudius Palladius, except what I’ve heard of him from Lucilla. But she conveys merely by the way she utters his name, his full name every time, that he has followed his ancestor’s path, that he too is a man of great power in the realm.
And indeed it is obvious to me right away, when Lucilla and I arrive at Count Nero Romulus’s Palatine Hill palace, that my guess is correct.
The palace itself is relatively modest: a charming little building on the lower slope of the hill, close to the Forum, that I am told dates from the Renaissance and was originally built for one of the mistresses of Trajan VII. Just as Count Nero Romulus has never bothered to hold the Consulate or any of the other high offices of the realm, Count Nero Romulus doesn’t need a grand edifice to announce his importance. But the guest list at his party says it all.
The current Consul, Aulus Galerius Bassanius, is there. So are two of the Emperor’s brothers, and one of his sisters. And also Lucilla’s uncle, the distinguished and celebrated Gaius Junius Scaevola, four times Consul of Roma and by general report the most powerful man in the Empire next to Emperor Maxentius himself—more powerful than the Emperor, many believe.
Lucilla introduces me to Scaevola first. “My friend Cymbelin Vetruvius Scapulanus from Britannia,” she says, with a grand flourish. “We met at Marcello Domiziano’s house in Neapolis, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. Isn’t he splendid, Uncle Gaius?”
What does one say, when one is a mere artless provincial on his first night in the capital and one finds oneself thrust suddenly into the presence of the greatest citizen of the realm?
But I manage not to stammer and blurt and lurch. With reasonable smoothness, in fact, I say, “I could never have imagined, when I set out from Britannia to see the fatherland of the Empire, Consul Scaevola, that I would have the honor to encounter the father of the country himself!”
At which he smiles amiably and says, “I think you rank me too highly, my friend. It’s the Emperor who’s the father of the country, you know. As it says right here.” And pulls a shiny new sestertius piece from his purse and holds it up so I can see the inscriptions around the edge, the cryptic string of abbreviated Imperial titles that all the coinage has carried since time immemorial. “You see?” he says, pointing to the letters on the rim of the coin just above the eyebrows of Caesar Maxentius. “P.P., standing for ‘Pater Patriae.’ There it is. Him, not me. Father of the country.” Then, with a wink to take the sting out of his rebuke, such as it had been, he says, “But I appreciate flattery as much as the next man, maybe even a little more. So thank you, young man. Lucilla’s not being too much trouble for you, is she, now?”
I’m not sure what he means by that. Perhaps nothing.
“Hardly,” I say.
I realize that I’m staring. Scaevola is a gaunt, wiry man of middle height as well, perhaps fifty years old, balding, with his remaining thin strands of hair—red hair, like Lucilla’s—pulled taut across his scalp. His cheekbones are pronounced, his nose is sharp, his chin is strong; his eyes are a very pale, icy gray-blue, the blue of a milky-hued sapphire. He looks astonishingly like Julius Caesar, the famous portrait that is on the ten-denarius postage stamp: that same expression of utterly unstoppable determination that arises out of infinite resources of inner power.