Rome 4: The Art of War (57 page)

He is near the door. He stops. I say, ‘The woman Jocasta, who poisoned you, what happened to her?’

‘Trabo killed her,’ he says. ‘Not on our orders. But she could not have been let loose in the world and we all knew it. I think he did it
at her request, or at least her instigation. He has not been disciplined, but he has been permitted to retire from army life. The Guard was not big enough for him and Geminus together and neither could readily have been demoted to a legion.’

‘Good.’ All good, all wise. I will need this wisdom in the years ahead. I wish … it doesn’t matter what I wish. What matters is what I have. Which is a great deal.

I wave a hand and he departs, and I am left with Caenis, my Caenis, who smells of wild strawberries, whose smile can lift me over seas and over nations, who will reign with me in all but name for as long as we both may live.

Few periods of ancient history have been described in such depth and detail as the eighteen months from Nero’s death to Vespasian’s eventual assumption of the throne: the period that we now term the Year of the Four Emperors.

While much of our ancient history comes from a single literary source – Tacitus, say, or Josephus – and was often written long after the fact at fourth or fifth hand, the Year was documented as it happened by men who took part in it and then within a few years by the great historians of that time: Tacitus, Josephus, Plutarch, Suetonius and Cassius Dio.

Much of what they wrote is missing – the only ones of Plutarch’s
Lives
to survive are those of Galba and Otho, for instance, when we know he wrote from Augustus through to Vitellius – but what remains has been enough to keep academics in cheerful disagreement for centuries.

This kind of half-fleshed detail is, of course, a fiction writer’s dream. As long as I don’t put Otho before Galba in my lineage of emperors, or stick stirrups on the saddles of my cavalry; if, in other words, I commit no gross anachronistic errors, and keep to the time frames that are common to all our sources, then I can weave my narrative amongst the many pillars of accepted ‘fact’.

I can also – and this is a great deal harder – endeavour to find a sense of structure in a time that was, from a Roman perspective,
utterly chaotic. As Tacitus says (and I paraphrase), emperors were made in Rome, they weren’t ‘discovered’ by distant legions who then put their man on the throne. But the realization by those legions that they could do exactly that changed for ever the relationship between the rulers and their legions. The balance of power shifted and it never truly shifted back.

In addition, as Tacitus also points out, the premium on blue blood dropped with each successive emperor in this Year of Four, with the result that the man who, at the start, would never have been considered an option ended up as the last man standing in the war of attrition that saw all the others dead.

Vespasian was not another Corbulo: there is every evidence to suggest that he truly had no ambition to take the throne and he took a lot of persuading into the role. The attempted assassination is cited as one of the persuading factors – but the fact that someone bothered to persuade him at all leads me to think that someone had a vision of who he could become, if he were given ultimate power.

It would be convenient if that same someone had maintained a consistent vision from the time of Vespasian’s declaration: as a fiction writer, having an overall ‘intelligence’ to drive the narrative would have made life a lot easier. The sad fact is that, in this particular year, that was so manifestly not the case that to try to fit the facts to easy fiction would have been a travesty of history.

No sane man (or woman) would have set up the double destruction of Cremona, and even if he had it would have taken a tactician of rare imagination to expect one army to
run
eighteen miles in (we assume) full kit and then insist on fighting a pitched battle when they reached their destination, against equally willing opponents who had just force-marched a hundred miles in a handful of days, and all at a small town that
had already been sacked by one side in the previous battle for the throne.

In truth, the entire Year was a highly complex series of accidents where the bullish soldiery of the legions led by men of spectacularly venal ambition was interspersed by treachery, blackmail, double- and triple-dealing and sheer luck, good and bad; fortune favoured neither side in particular.

The best anyone could have done was to remain fluid and make the most of those opportunities that presented themselves, while having some kind of strategy to deal with the disasters – at the kind of remove forced on the players by the slow transfer of orders and messages.

Given all of this, the best a novelist can do is try to make sense of the nonsensical with the proviso that it needs all to be coherent. Otherwise, as Lindsey Davis so wisely pointed out in her
Course of Honour
, we risk going into great depth to describe battles fought by people we’ve never heard of, in places we’ve never been.

At the end, though, we can believe that the right man won. Otho might have made a good emperor; certainly his selflessness in committing suicide rather than forcing men to fight on in his name foreshadows a degree of decency remarkable in the ancient world, but Vespasian was one of the best things to happen to Rome.

It wasn’t just his age that made him right – Galba was older and manifestly unsuited to the role; as is said of him, everyone thought he’d make an excellent emperor until he actually got the job, at which point everyone except the man himself realized it was a catastrophe.

Nor was it merely Vespasian’s able command of the legions that made him so suited to power: Vitellius was a general, although not a very good one, and Vitellius was a disaster of an emperor.

It was that Vespasian had been a good general in an era when those could
be numbered on the fingers of one hand (Julius Caesar, Corbulo, Vespasian, Hadrian, Trajan – a long span and you’d be hard pressed to add to that number). We might conclude that good generals learn things in battle that lead them not to take life too seriously, but also not to throw it away without good cause.

They learn the management of finances – Vespasian was very much in the Democratic mould of balancing the books rather than the Neronian/Republican one of throwing the entire treasury at pointless wars and then blaming everyone else when the cupboard was bare – and they learn how to manage men efficiently.

And at the heart of it all lies one of the greatest love stories of the ancient world. It does seem that Vespasian fell in love with Caenis when she was still a slave girl, or at the very least newly freed – and that love lasted for the remainder of their natural lives.

Roman law forbade a senator from marrying a freed-woman, so Vespasian had to marry and get his children elsewhere – a rather crowded marriage, we might presume – but he returned in the end to his true love and lived with her in all respects as if she were his wife until the end of her life. That alone put him in a league quite different from the majority of the Julio-Claudians, and if it didn’t set a precedent for later, we can hardly hold him accountable for that.

For those who care about such things, you should know that the four emperors and their immediate adherents are all based in fact, while Pantera, Jocasta, Geminus, Trabo, Horus, the Marcuses, Felix, Borros and Amoricus are not.

The basic skeleton of the narrative is all based on our ancient sources, from the declaration of Vespasian by the eastern legions through Antonius Primus’ naked ambition, from Caecina’s outstanding generalship in putting Vitellius on the throne to
his apparently easy conversion to Vespasian’s side afterwards. The supposed ‘suicide’ of the centurion who fell on his sword because Vitellius wouldn’t listen to his tales of Caecina’s defection is true, as is the detail of the last five days when Antonius Primus had brought his legions to Rome’s gates, and sent Valens’ head to his former comrades on a pole. Vitellius’ dithering, his three meetings with Sabinus, the siege on the Capitol and the later conflagration, Sabinus’ death, and Vitellius’ … all these are based on the ancient sources.

What I have done is to flesh out the bare skeleton, but for those who want to read further into the history I can heartily recommend
69AD, The Year of the Four Emperors
by Gwyn Morgan and
The Year of the Four Emperors
by Kenneth Wellesley; the latter’s detail concerning the topography of the route marches is invaluable.

Anyone interested in the day-to-day living of those not at the top end of Roman society would find
Invisible Romans
by Robert Knapp a fascinating read, I certainly did; and for those who want a coherent synthesis of the primary sources, the biography of Vespasian by Barbara Levick knows no peer.

As always, this book has been a journey and I would like to offer wholehearted thanks to Mark Lucas and Bill Scott-Kerr for joining along the way; long may we travel. Thanks are due also to Nancy Webber and Vivien Garrett for outstanding help with the editorial process; to Phil Lord for design; to my colleagues and friends in the Historical Writers’ Association who have made the process of writing so much more social; to Tilly for keeping me moving; to the members of Rule of Three for keeping me sane; to Lauren and Lee for teaching me things I may one day remember; and, as always, to Faith for sharing home and hearth and life.

Shropshire,
21 September 2012

M. C. Scott
taught veterinary surgery at the universities of Cambridge and Dublin before taking up a career as a novelist. Now founder and Chair of the Historical Writers’ Association, her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize, nominated for an Edgar Award and translated into over twenty languages. In addition to the bestselling
Boudica
series, Scott is the author of an acclaimed sequence of Roman novels featuring the emperor’s spy, Sebastos Pantera.

Visit:
www.mcscott.co.uk

Also by M. C. Scott

HEN’S TEETH
NIGHT MARES
STRONGER THAN DEATH
NO GOOD DEED

BOUDICA: DREAMING THE EAGLE
BOUDICA: DREAMING THE BULL
BOUDICA: DREAMING THE HOUND
BOUDICA: DREAMING THE SERPENT SPEAR

THE CRYSTAL SKULL

ROME: THE EMPEROR’S SPY
ROME: THE COMING OF THE KING
ROME: THE EAGLE OF THE TWELFTH

For more information about M. C. Scott and her books, see her website at
www.mcscott.co.uk

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ROME: THE ART OF WAR
A BANTAM PRESS BOOK: 9780593065464
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448157310

First published in Great Britain
in 2013 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © M. C. Scott 2013

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