On the fourth day Menandros returned. Faustus saw the litter bearing him crossing the Palatine and unhesitatingly hurried across to the Severan to greet him. Perhaps Menandros would bear some word for him from Maximilianus.
Indeed he did. Menandros handed Faustus a bit of parchment sealed with the Imperial seal and said, “The Emperor gave me this for you.”
Faustus yearned to open it at once, but that seemed unwise. He realized he was a little afraid of finding out what Maximilianus had to say to him, and he preferred not to read the message in Menandros’s presence.
“And the Emperor?” Faustus asked. “You found him well?”
“Very well. Not at all troubled by the cares of office, thus far. He has made an excellent adaptation to the great change in his circumstances. You may have been wrong about him, my friend, when you said he had no interest in being Emperor. I think he rather likes being Emperor.”
“He can be very surprising at times,” said Faustus.
“I think that is true. Be that as it may, my task here is done. I thank you for your good company, friend Faustus, and for your having enabled me to gain the friendship of the former Caesar Maximilianus. A happy accident, that was. The days I spent with the Caesar in the Underworld greatly facilitated the negotiations I have now completed with him on the treaty of alliance.”
“There is a treaty, is there?”
“Oh, yes, most definitely a treaty. His Majesty will marry the Emperor Justinianus’s sister Sabbatia in the place of his late and much lamented brother. His Majesty has a gift of some wonderful jewelry to offer his bride: magnificent gems, opals, quite fine. He showed them to me himself. And there will be military assistance, of course. The Eastern Empire will send its finest legions to aid your Emperor in crushing the barbarians who trouble your borders.” Menandros’s cheeks were glowing with pleasure. “It has all gone very well, I think. I will leave tomorrow. You will send me, I hope, some of that noble wine of Gallia Transalpina that you shared with me on my first day in Roma? And I will have gifts for you as well, my friend. I am deeply grateful to you for everything. In particular,” he said, “for the chapel of Priapus, and the pool of the Baptai, eh, friend Faustus?” And he winked.
Faustus lost no time unsealing the Emperor’s message once he had escaped from Menandros.
You said you thought our time of greatness was ending, Faustus, that day in the marketplace of the sorcerers. But no, Faustus, you are wrong. We are not ended at all. We are only just begun. It is a new dawn and a new sun rises.
And there below that casually scrawled initial was the formal signature in all its majesty, Maximilianus Tiberius Antoninus Caesar Augustus Imperator.
Faustus’s pension was a generous one, and when he and Maximilianus met, as occasionally they did in the early months of Maximilianus’s reign, the Emperor was affable enough, with always the amicable word, though they never were intimates again. And in the second year of his reign Maximilianus went north to the frontier, where the legions of his royal colleague Justinianus were assembling to join him, and he remained there, doing battle against the barbarians, for the next seven years, which were the last years of Faustus’s life.
The northern wars of Maximilianus III ended in complete triumph. Roma would have no further trouble with invading barbarians. It was a significant turning point in the history of the Empire, which now was free to enter into a time of prosperity and abundance such as it had not known since the great days of Trajan and Hadrianus and Antoninus Pius four centuries before. There had been two mighty Emperors named Maximilianus before him, but men would never speak of the third Maximilianus other than as Maximilianus the Great.