Here, today, this sweltering humid blue-skied day in early autumn, Antipater wandered like a sleepwalker under the blazing golden eye of Sol among the innumerable architectural wonders of the Forum. The mammoth Senate House, the lofty temples to Augustus and Vespasianus and Antoninus Pius and half a dozen other early Emperors who had been proclaimed as gods, the colossal tomb of Julius that had been built hundreds of years after his time by some Emperor who had claimed disingenuously to be his descendant. The arches of Septimius Severus and Constantinus; the five great basilicas; the House of the Vestal Virgins, and on and on and on. There were richly ornamented buildings everywhere, a surfeit of them, occupying every possible site to north and south and even up the sides of the Capitoline Hill. Nothing ever was torn down in the Forum. Each Emperor added his own contribution wherever room could be found, at whatever cost to rational planning and ease of movement.
At any hour, therefore, the Forum was a noisy, turbulent place. Antipater, numbed by the fierce heat and his own despair and confusion, was jostled again and again by unthinking common citizens hurrying blindly on to the shops and marketplaces along the fringes of the great public buildings. He began to feel a little dizzy. Clammy sweat soaked his light robe and his forehead was throbbing.
I must be somewhat ill, he decided.
Then, suddenly bewildered, he staggered and lurched and it was all he could do to keep from falling to the ground. He knew that he had to pause and rest. A high-domed eight-sided temple with massive ochre walls loomed up before him. Antipater lowered himself carefully to the bottommost of its broad stone steps and huddled there with his face in his hands, surprised to find himself shivering in this great warmth. Exhaustion, he thought. Exhaustion, stress, perhaps a little touch of fever.
“Thinking of making an offering to Concordia, are you, Antipater?” a cool mocking voice from above asked him.
He looked blearily up into the dazzling glare of the midday sunlight. A long smirking angular face, fashionably pale, caked with cracking makeup, hovered before him. Shining sea-green eyes, eyes precisely the color of the Emperor’s, but these were bloodshot and crazed.
Germanicus Caesar, it was, the royal heir, the profligate, sybaritic younger brother.
He had descended from a litter right in front of Antipater and stood rocking back and forth before him, grinning lopsidedly as if still drunk from the night before.
“Concordia?” Antipater asked muzzily. “Concordia?”
“The temple,” Germanicus said. “The one you’re sitting in front of.”
“Ah,” Antipater said. “Yes.”
He understood. The steps on which he had taken refuge, he saw now, were those of the magnificent Temple of Concordia. There was rich irony in that. The Temple of Concordia, Antipater knew, had been a gift to the city of Roma from the celebrated Eastern Emperor Justinianus, six hundred fifty years earlier, by way of paying homage to the spirit of fraternal harmony that existed between the two halves of the Roman Empire. And here was the Eastern Empire now, no longer so touchingly fraternal, about to invade Italia and subjugate as much of the senior Roman realm as it could manage to conquer, up to and including the city of Roma itself. So much for Concordia. So much for the harmony of the two empires.
“What’s the matter with you?” Germanicus demanded. “Drunk?”
“The heat—the crowds—”
“Yes. That could make anybody sick. What are you doing walking around by yourself here, anyway?” Germanicus leaned forward. His breath, stinking of wine and overripe anchovies, was like a blast out of Hades. Nodding toward his litter, he said, “My chair’s big enough for two. Come on: I’ll give you a ride home.”
That was the last thing Antipater wanted, to be cooped up with this foul-smelling lascivious prince inside a covered litter, even for the quarter of an hour it would take to cross the Forum to the Palatine. He shook his head. “No—no—”
“Well, get out of the sun, at least. Let’s go into the temple. I want to talk to you, anyway.”
“You do?”
Helplessly Antipater allowed himself to be tugged to his feet and herded up the dozen or more steps of Justinianus’s temple. Within, behind the great bronze door, all was cool and dark. The place was deserted, no priests, no worshipers. A brilliant shaft of light descending from an opening high overhead in the dome illuminated a marble slab above the altar that proclaimed, in fiery letters of gold, the Emperor Justinianus’s eternal love for his kinsman and royal counterpart of the West, His Imperial Roman Majesty Heraclius II Augustus.
Germanicus laughed softly. “Those two should only know what’s going on now! Could it ever have worked, d’ye think—dividing the Empire and expecting the two halves to live together peacefully forever after?”
Antipater, still dizzied and faint, felt little wish to discuss history with Prince Germanicus just now.
“Perhaps, in an ideal world—” he began.
Germanicus laughed again, this time a harsh cackle. “An ideal world, yes! Very good, Antipater! Very good! But we happen to live in the real one, is that not so? And in the real world there was no way that an empire the size of the one we once had could have been maintained intact, so it had to be divided. But once the first Constantinus divided it, Antipater, war between the two halves was inevitable. The wonder of it is that it took so long to happen.”
A discourse on history from the Emperor’s drunken dissolute brother, here in Justinianus’s serene temple. How strange, Antipater thought. And was there any truth in the point Germanicus was making, Antipater wondered? The war between East and West—inevitable?
He doubted that Constantinus the Great, who had split the unwieldy Roman world in half by setting up a second capital far to the east of Roma at Byzantium on the Bosporus, ever had thought so. Beyond question Constantinus had supposed that his sons would share power peacefully, one reigning over the eastern provinces from the new capital of Constantinopolis, one in Italia and the Danubian provinces, a third in Britannia and Gallia and Hispania. Hardly was Constantinus in his grave, though, than the divided Empire was embroiled in war, with one of the sons attacking another and seizing his realm; and for sixty years after that all was in flux, until the great Emperor Theodosius had brought about the final administrative division of the Roman world, separating its Greek-speaking territories from the Latin-speaking ones.
But Theodosius hadn’t accepted the inevitability of East-West war either. By his decree the two Emperors, the Eastern one and the Western one, were supposed to consider themselves colleagues, joint rulers of the entire realm, consulting each other on all high matters of state, each even having the power to name a successor for an Imperial colleague that died. It hadn’t worked out that way, of course. The two nations had drifted apart, though some measure of cooperation did continue for hundreds of years. And now—the friction of the past half century, culminating in the present slowly escalating war of East against West—the foolish, needless, ghastly war that was about to burst in all its fury upon this greatest of all cities—
“Look at this stuff!” Germanicus cried. He had left Antipater’s side to go roaming about in the deserted temple, peering at the paintings and mosaics with which Justinianus’s Byzantine craftsmen had bedecked the sides of the building. “I hate the Greek style, don’t you? Flat and stiff and creaky—you’d think they didn’t understand a damned thing about perspective. If I had been Heraclius, I’d have covered the walls over with plaster the moment Justinianus’s people were out of town. Too late for all that now, though.” Germanicus had reached the far side, and peered up for a moment at the vast regal portrait of solemn scowling Justinianus, done in gleaming golden tile, that loomed out from the belly of the dome like Jupiter himself glowering down. Then he whirled to face Antipater. “But what am I saying?” he bellowed through the echoing dimness. “You’re a Greek yourself! You love this kind of art!”