Gods and Legions (23 page)

PARIS

All things that happen are as common and familiar as the rose in spring and the apple in summer; for such is sickness and death, calumny and treachery, and whatever else delights fools or vexes them.

– MARCUS AURELIUS

I

That winter was the first of several Julian spent at his new military headquarters of Paris. This city, before Julius Caesar's time, had been little more than a flood-prone fishing village clinging to a marshy island in the middle of the Seine and inhabited by the now vanished tribe of the Parisii. In the intervening centuries, however, it had become an administrative and cultural center of the highest repute, Brother, as you are aware from your contacts with your fellow bishops of that Christian urb. It had long since expanded beyond the confines of the miserable river island, and the walls had several times been extended outward along the left bank to encompass a magnificent forum; a large arena, capable of seating sixteen thousand people and hosting gladiator spectacles and mock naval battles; and what was the greatest comfort to Julian, appealing to those slight sybaritic tendencies that remained in his soul after having been largely driven out by his Christianity and Stoic philosophy, a series of most magnificent baths.

These were wonderfully high-arched facilities of glowing reddish brick, lit by broad expanses of high windows and skylights of glazed glass. They had been completely rebuilt by the best Roman architects several decades before, after the depredations of an earlier barbarian assault on the city. The ample
frigidaria
and
tepidaria,
as well as the ingeniously floor-heated hot pools and all the intervening interior waterfalls and fountains, were generously supplied, but not by the swampy Seine, which flowed lazily a mere thirty feet below the level of the baths. Rather, they were served by a massive stone aqueduct ten miles long, constructed of limestone cut from the underground quarries at the foot of the Montparnasse and sealed to a watertight impermeability by a rubbery mortar mixed of fig milk, pork tallow, and sand, which brought vast quantities of cold, crystalline water from deep in the surrounding forests.

Here Julian passed his morning hours in gymnastics and swordsmanship, training to which by this time he had arrived at quite a level of accomplishment. Here also he retreated at later hours whenever his public duties would allow, after the baths' official closing at sunset, to rest his mind. I lost count of the number of occasions I accompanied him through the dark, cobbled city streets in the very dead of night, to the house of the key-master adjoining the baths. This good fellow, tipped generously with a gold
solidus
or two, would open the facilities even at that unlikely hour and stoke the underground furnaces, that the Caesar might spend some quiet time alone with his muses and demons.

Such demons as he had were of both the domestic and official variety. Since the death of their child, his wife had become a source of torment and puzzlement to him due to her complete lack of regard for things of this world. Like her namesake in the
Iliad,
Helena came to Paris, after her long sojourn with the Emperor and his wife in Rome. But she had returned in body only, her mind having long since fled its physical confines. Her figure was restored to its former plumpness, though she lacked the sweet expression I so clearly recalled as decorating her homely face upon her earlier arrival in Gaul four years before. Her dignified bearing, too, had returned, for she no longer appeared as Julian's giggling bride but had reverted to her original state as the Emperor's unapproachable sister, a matron cold and distant even to her husband, for whom she had become a wife in name only.

She was not scornful and haughty – on this I must set the record straight, Brother, for I am certain that she made no conscious attempt to humiliate or bewilder Julian; it was simply as though there were a piece missing – some indefinable part of her soul that had been buried along with the baby, that part of her that had formerly made her capable of love and affection. Without that part she was able to function only adequately, not normally, like a disturbed child one occasionally sees who shrinks from the prospect of any human touch, even from her own parent. Thus did poor Helena make her way stumblingly through life, the inward flame eating away at her vitals, the silent wound bleeding in her breast. She ignored, even fled, any relations with her husband or other humans.

From Julian I heard never a word of complaint at this state of affairs; indeed, he rarely even mentioned the matter. Nor did his head ever turn toward any other female face or form, though the palace and official facilities were full of lovely Gauls, both slaves and noblewomen, who would have willingly bestowed their favors on the not-unhandsome young Caesar. He was so conspicuous in his chastity that even his closest servants, or those who had been dismissed by him for cause, never accused him of any hint of lustfulness. It was as if he had renounced all desire for commerce with the female race and with his own physical passions, and, indeed, he often quoted Marcus Aurelius' rather off-putting description of the act of love as being a mere 'internal rubbing of a woman's entrails and the excretion of mucus with a sort of spasm.' Instead, he masked his passions by an even more energetic application to his morning training sessions and his marathon nights of study and philosophy. Still, whenever the topic of conversation touched upon domestic issues, his expression assumed a sad wistfulness that could not but lay bare the true feelings he had for the wife he obviously still loved.

Despite the drubbing of Chonodomarius the summer before, the barbarians were not yet defeated, and Julian still had much work to do before his victories were completely consolidated. As a result of his campaigns over the past several years, the upper and middle courses of the Rhine, from its source in the Alps to the vicinity of Cologne, were entirely in the hands of Rome or its allies. The lower regions of the Rhine, however, to its discharge in the North Sea, were still in the hands of various barbarian tribes. These regions were of the utmost concern to Julian, for not only would securing them provide additional buffer against the barbarians' periodic marauding from the East, but would also open an alternate line of provisioning, from Britain across the sea and up the river. To take advantage of this route, however, two conditions needed to be fulfilled, the first being an adequate fleet, and the second free passage along the entire course of the Rhine to the sea. Both of these were lacking, and it was to these objectives that Julian devoted much time huddled with Sallustius and his other military advisers that winter. Indeed, many sessions were held in the steamy, torchlit baths, as soft snow fell on the sleeping city outside the high-vaulted chamber, and the vengeful barbarians plotted in their drafty huts many miles away on the banks of the Rhine.

The first requisite he succeeded in fulfilling himself, through a combination of outright audacity and brutal labor. A fleet of six hundred ships was assembled over a period of several months, beginning with the coordinated and closely timed seizure of two hundred vessels along the hither coasts of Britain and the navigable stretches of the upper Rhine. Their owners had been a combination of foreign merchants lax in the safekeeping of their property and Roman citizens delinquent in their tax payments, whom Julian decided had the patriotic duty to contribute their vessels to the Roman cause in lieu of the cash debts they otherwise would have owed. Upon inspecting his booty, however, it was determined that most of these vessels were in a rather wretched state of repair, being mere grain barges and fishing boats with the occasional rotting hulk formerly used in the Germanic and Britannic fleets, scarcely fit for use. As a result, he mobilized all his troops not on active garrison duty for the winter, marched them to the Rhine, and embarked on a massive shipbuilding campaign, resulting in the creation of an additional four hundred vessels by the next summer, which, if not masterpieces of craftsmanship, were certainly sufficient to transport quantities of men, horse, and grain the length of the river and across the channel.

The second requisite at first promised to be somewhat more difficult, but in the end proved to be an easier task than expected, when Julian's hand was forced by the Roman prefect Florentius, a sycophant of the Emperor Constantius whom Julian openly despised. This man, in his capacity as civil administrator of the province, took it into his own hands to engage in secret negotiations with the barbarians on the lower Rhine, and obtained their consent to allow the free passage of Roman boats in exchange for a one-time payment of two thousand pounds of silver. When the Emperor was informed of the treaty he ratified it and ordered Julian to pay the sum. I happened to be with him at the baths one freezing night in late November, reading official correspondence aloud to him while he soaked in a hot pool, seemingly dozing. When I came to Constantius' payment order, buried in an otherwise innocuous piece of droning bureaucratic drivel, he sat up with a start, swallowing a mouthful of water in his astonishment.

'Caesarius – read that again!' he spluttered. 'A
ton
of silver to those filthy barbarians, for allowing us passage on a river that is ours by right?'

I returned to the offending passage and reread it aloud.

'"...in exchange for a one-time payment of two thousand pounds of silver..." Indeed, that is what it says, Julian.'

'This is how he informs me of Florentius' dealings, by ordering me to pay two thousand pounds of silver in a treaty with which I was in no way involved?'

Julian was outraged. He clambered out of the pool and paced dripping wet along the side, naked in the frigid air, his furious expression ill-disguised by the dim light of the torches. He was still slight of build, but the stoop with which he had trudged as a scholar had been replaced by a springy, almost nervous bounce and the ramrod straightness of a soldier. So too, his physique had developed a hard, well-defined musculature and a series of scars resulting from his daily physical training and strenuous living on campaign. The boy Caesar now had a coarse coating of hair on his chest and shoulders, and a hard, determined look in his eyes, and his demeanor was far more impatient and demanding than when I had first come to know him. In fact, I reflected, there was very little left of the Julian I had first encountered years ago in Athens. I reexamined the letter.

'Here,' I said, 'the Emperor perhaps anticipated your resentment at being informed in this way of Florentius' agreement – in the next sentence, he softens his command by adding the phrase, "unless it seems absolutely disgraceful for you to do so..."'

'Disgraceful? It's an outrage! I refuse to submit to Florentius' bullying, and his preying on Constantius' ignorance of conditions here. Is he so uninformed of my goals? Does he believe this is how we restore Gaul to prosperity? This is how we recapture Rome's lost glory in the eyes of the barbarians? It is scandalous, an outrage!...' And for long moments afterwards he muttered in fury, until he finally realized the discomfort of pacing in that temperature outside the confines of the hot water, and slipped back in.

I did not even inquire at the time what he found so disgraceful about the payment: whether it was the high price or the manner in which it was presented to him. I suspect, however, that even if the outlay had been nothing more than a pound of dried cod and an old shoe, he still would have been infuriated with Florentius' back-dealing.

'And what do you imagine the Emperor's reaction will be at your refusal to pay the negotiated settlement?' I inquired evenly after he had calmed somewhat.

Julian glanced at me slyly and then slid under the steaming water till his head was completely submerged, where he remained motionless a long while, only a trail of bubbles rising to indicate he was still alive. After a moment, he slowly rose up again, now with a faint smile on his face as he wiped the water from his eyes with the back of his hand.

'He will have the same reaction as he did when I sent General Marcellus packing, when I reconquered Cologne, when I defeated the Alemanni without assistance from Barbatio, when I
exceeded my mandate
– nothing.'

I was not impressed. 'Julian,' I said, 'for four years you have been walking a very fine line as far as Constantius is concerned. You are perceived in the court as a threat to his sole rule. He has killed many rivals for much less worthy reasons.'

Julian snorted and, climbing out, began toweling himself off. 'Of all the things I should fear, that is the last,' he said.

'Oh?'

'Think, Caesarius. His eunuchs may perceive me as a threat – but clever Constantius knows better. For the first time in decades the province's treasury is full and tribute is pouring into the Emperor's coffers. The Alemanni are on the run, freeing up his legions for the Persians. And his troublesome young cousin is apparently quietly satisfied in his provincial little cities in Gaul, safely out of the Emperor's hair in Rome. Constantius could do much, much worse than to keep me alive and content in my position, don't you think?'

Thus in answer to the Emperor's missive, Julian's first order was to the city's bakers: since the season was still long before the snows would melt in the passes and his spring campaigning rations arrive from Aquitania, he ordered all the army's reserve stocks of grain to be mobilized from the surrounding depots, and the ovens to be operated day and night until a sufficient quantity of
buccellatum,
hardtack, had been baked to be distributed to each soldier to last twenty days. Their rucksacks filled with these crusts, he marched the army out of winter quarters two months before the traditional spring campaigning season was to begin. As planned, he encountered the barbarians still lolling in their beds. Within a matter of weeks, he had carried out such a number of lightning raids as to leave every barbarian king who had not submitted after Strasbourg, including King Hortarius, King Suomarius the Beardless, the brother kings Macrianus and Hariobaudes, the legendary King Vadomarius, King Urius the Harelip, and even the far-off kings Ursicinus and Vestralpus, begging him on their knees to accept hostages and allow their people to retreat back to the far side of the Rhine.

Even this Julian did not accept, however, for to him it was not sufficient that the Rhine serve as a mere boundary between Rome's empire and the barbarian lands: the river must henceforth be subject to free passage for all of Rome's ships and supplies, and so he demanded not only that the barbarians transfer across the river, but that they move far beyond, leaving a wide buffer zone between their own lands and the thither bank. When Urius the Harelip complained at what he viewed as excessively harsh treatment in forbidding his people from their ancestral lands, and refused to vacate his villages and farms, Julian deigned not even to respond to his envoys, but merely sent his legions across one of the new pontoon bridges he had built and put Urius' homes and harvests to flame, with all plunder and prisoners packed up and sent immediately to Rome. After that, there were no further challenges to Roman authority from the Alemanni.