Commodus Read online

  DEDICATION

  To the memory of my grandfather, Doug, who introduced me to Roman history at the age of six with the line:

  ‘Agricola . . . first cousin of Coca-Cola.’

  SIMON TURNEY

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Damnatio Memoriae

  The Antonine Dynasty

  Commodus’ Empire

  Part One: Born to the Purple

  I: Falling into the Grave

  II: Intelligence and Precociousness

  III: The Errant Prince

  IV: An Oasis of Peace

  V: A Cloak of Grey

  VI: The Year of Sorrows

  Part Two: A Young Hercules

  VII: A Gilded Cage

  VIII: A Man Who Would One Day Be Emperor

  IX: A Trail of Crimson

  X: The Rage of Neptune

  Part Three: The Golden Age

  XI: Ashes of the Dead

  XII: Hope

  XIII: Conspiracy

  XIV: The Fate of the Empire

  XV: God’s Plan

  XVI: Adopting Disguises

  XVII: Wicked Blades

  XVIII: The Life of Gods and Goddesses

  XIX: A Dangerous Mob

  Part Four: A Roman Icarus

  XX: No Mercy

  XXI: The Rome of Commodus

  XXII: Black Clouds

  XXIII: Demolishing My Defences

  XXIV: A Wave of Popularity

  XXV: Black with Sorrow, Crimson with Rage

  XXVI: The Glorious Hercules

  Dis Manibus – to the spirits of the departed

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  An extract from Caligula

  DAMNATIO MEMORIAE

  Upon the death of an emperor, it became practice for the senate to confer apotheosis upon his name, granting him divine status and a cult of his own. If the emperor had been despised, however, the senate could choose the precise opposite and vilify rather than deify him – damnatio memoriae (a modern term) would occur. Without hesitation or ceremony, the emperor’s name was erased from all public inscriptions (a process known as abolitio nominis), his image would be scratched from frescoes, his statues smashed. Sometimes even coins bearing his image would be defaced. The damned emperor was not only denied an ascent to heaven, but wiped from history. Such was the fate of the wicked, the unpopular or the unfortunate.

  A medallion struck in the reign of Commodus, 192ad, showing on the reverse the figure of Hercules, clutching his club and the body of the Nemean lion.

  It begins with a rush of water; terrifying and murderous. It also ends with a rush of water. A choking, deadly torrent, cloying and dreadful. In my life I witnessed a fire that tore through the dry houses of Rome, destroying all we held dear and leaving an age of death and ash. I survived a plague that made husks of strong men, ravaged the army more than any barbarian horde, and robbed Rome of its beating heart: its people. But, for me, nothing matches those killing waves at both beginning and end.

  I am Marcia, daughter of Marcia Aurelia Sabinianus, freedwoman seamstress of the emperor Lucius Verus.

  I was a bad Christian.

  I would have been a great empress.

  Rome, the Palatine, ad 193

  Lucius, my dearest man, I beg leave of you now. I have known you for so many years, and you, despite our closeness in many ways, both kind and cruel, have never really known me. That we might be together has only ever been a fiction based upon mutual survival, for you know that in my heart I only ever loved one man, and despite your goodness, it was never you.

  Our world has collapsed through our own devices and the chaos to which we gave birth comes to consume us. You know my faith as I know yours. I must away to my confession with a priest and pursue some kind of absolution for all that I have done, and you must seek peace in your own way before they come for us. Please consider this tale my confession to you, and my explanation for how we come to this dreadful place.

  I pray that my leaving you will save you the blade’s edge. You were the best of us, and you do not deserve what is coming.

  Dearest heart, go peacefully into the next world and pray that I can still be saved.

  Marcia

  PART ONE

  BORN TO THE PURPLE

  ‘Never while I live, shall you slay these sons of Heracles’

  – Euripides: Heracles, trans. Coleridge, 1938

  I

  FALLING INTO THE GRAVE

  Rome, ad 162

  I was having a nightmare, though I cannot for the life of me remember remotely what it was about. I lay wrapped in my blankets on the upper floor of our house in the Velabrum when it all began.

  I was just four years old, though my mother thought me beyond my years already. It was the year of the consuls Rusticus and Plautius in the reign of the new glorious emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. It was spring, a strangely warm and sultry night despite days of storms over the nearby hills.

  The Velabrum – my home – is a shallow valley between Rome’s greatest hills, the Capitoline and the Palatine, stretching from the forum to the river. In times past it had been a swamp, liable to flooding, but then the cloaca maxima, the great sewer of Rome, was built to drain the area. The cloaca runs beneath the Velabrum, its route defined by the valley’s course. But this was still not enough to prevent flooding and disaster and so, under the lunatic Nero, the ground level had been raised. Now, only the heaviest of floods would cross the bank.

  In a region where most other buildings were wooden insulae reaching seven storeys towards the clouds, filled with the crying poor, beggars and thieves, our house was a small oasis of quality. A brick residence only two storeys high, level with the structures below the palace on the slopes of the Palatine. I remember it well, though that was the last year we lived there, for that spring the banks could not contain great Father Tiber.

  A crash cut through the shroud of Morpheus and forced me to the waking world. My room was as dark as it ever got, for even in the middle of the night torches and lamps keep the shadows at bay in much of the city.

  I sat up sharply, shivering, confused. For a moment I could not work out whether the noise had been part of my dream or from somewhere in the true world, but a second crash clarified the issue. It sounded as though the world was collapsing into Hades below and I stood, shaking. I thought there was silence then, but it was a trick of the senses. The crashes had been so loud they had driven out all other sound for precious moments. Then it came flooding back in. Screams, bellows, thunderous rumbles and bangs. I could tell the lights in the Velabrum were going out as the shade of gold leaching through the tatty window hangings grew weaker.

  Slowly, with infinite trepidation, as though by delaying my investigation I could hold back events, I padded across the cold tiles to my window. I know. Tatty curtains and cold tiles. It sounds so poor now, but back then we were considered lucky – wealthy, even – for the emperor paid for our house and a small stipend allowed us to furnish it. I approached the window, and the noise outside crescendoed as the glow dimmed further. There was a roaring like that of some great, titanic subterranean lion. I flinched as I reached the curtains, hardly daring to touch them for fear of what lay behind.

  I pulled them aside and stared into the vaults of Tartarus.

  A great wave was washing along the Velabrum from the direction of the river. Even by what light remained, which was not much, I could see the flotsam borne by the crest of the wave. Not the
remains of some broken vessel, though, but of homes and shops; splintered wood and chunks of plaster that had been swept along. Only the stronger buildings were surviving the crashing wave and the hungry waters it brought, and only the torches and lamps on the upper floors of those buildings continued to burn and illuminate the horror.

  I watched in shock as the heavy stone covers over the drains down into the cloaca maxima were thrown into the air as though they were made of terracotta by a torrent of water that was simply too vast to be contained by the ancient watercourse.

  Screams came from the men and women, children and grey-hairs who were caught up by the wave, until they were dashed against walls or pulled down beneath the churning water. The living struggled and splashed, the dead bobbed and eddied, carried here from parts of the city upstream. I took everything in within mere heartbeats.

  Horror. Destruction. A fluid grave that claimed more lives with each passing moment. The spell of shock shattered at the sound of my name. Mother. She burst through the door into my room, wild-eyed and dishevelled, her short-sleeved woollen tunic unbelted and askew.

  ‘Marcia, come. Hurry.’

  Cold and unemotional as always, but I needed no further bidding. Mother’s word was law, her will iron, had been ever since her husband passed, or so people said. I had never known Marcus Aurelius Sabinianus Euhodius, my father, though his reputation still carried weight among those who had the slightest concern for freedfolk. Hurriedly straightening her hair, as though to be seen in such a state even during the midst of a disaster might somehow lower her standing, Mother dashed back out of the room into the dim stairway and descended. I paused at the top, watching her hurrying down, hastily knotting the belt around her waist. Down seemed like a bad idea. Down: towards the churning waters that so terrified me. But Mother was already there and lighting a lamp. By its golden glow I saw that the water had not begun to consume the chamber in earnest. Not yet, at least.

  I hurried down and my heart rose into my throat. Water was already rushing beneath the door from the shop out front, and I could see it pouring over the windowsills beneath the bottom edge of the shutters, which were held fast with iron bars. An ominous creak made me realise the horrible truth. The door and the twin window shutters were all that was holding back the flood. The waters were even now pressing against the shutters, threatening to burst them. If the bars gave way, this room would fill like a bath in moments.

  I stood rooted to the spot in panic. Why were we here? We were trapped downstairs, waiting until the water came in and stole our breath.

  Then I realised in astonishment why we were here. Mother was rooting through the chests and racks in her little workshop, which doubled as our living area. In her arms she was gathering neatly folded garments of linen and wool and even silk, some threaded with gold, some dyed purple. Garments fit for a king. Fit for an emperor. Garments belonging to an emperor.

  ‘Hurry, girl. Take these.’

  She thrust an armful of tunics at me and I took them, still in disbelief that we were rescuing her work in the face of impending doom.

  ‘Mama . . .’

  ‘Go upstairs. I will follow.’

  I watched her for a moment, still frozen there.

  ‘God will preserve us. Go, child.’

  I ran. Leaving my mother in that makeshift cistern, I ran up the stairs, hugging those priceless garments to my chest as though they contained all my mother’s love.

  At the top I stood, heaving in breaths, watching the empty patch of the workshop visible from the top of the stairs in that golden glow. There was no sign of Mother, though occasionally her shadow moved into view, distorted by the rising waters that had consumed the floor. There was half a foot of lapping filth down there now, but I knew how much dangerous water was being held back from the room by just thin layers of wood and iron bars.

  I stood clutching those precious bundles, willing Mother to hurry. Then there was an ominous creak, a splintering and a crash. The flood filled the ground floor of the house in an instant, a surging torrent of foaming darkness battering the walls and rushing up the staircase towards me. I felt my heart pounding, my eyes wide with shock.

  Mother . . . I couldn’t see her.

  Perhaps I should have turned and run; the water was rising towards my rooted feet so fast. But my mother was not there. The waters surged and churned, rising and consuming all, and Mother was gone.

  I couldn’t leave her . . .

  Suddenly a sodden bundle of clothes broke the surface of the water, a hand clutching each side. Step by step, Mother gradually appeared on the staircase, her face fixed on the vital imperial garments she was trying to keep above the filthy flood.

  I nearly dropped my own burden to throw my arms around my dripping mother but had no such chance; she bustled past me, urging me on.

  ‘I wish we lived in one of the tall insulae,’ I said in wavering tones, eyeing the water already rolling out onto the landing.

  ‘No, you do not, Marcia,’ Mother replied, and I turned to follow her gaze. Through her bedroom window we had a clear view of one of the neighbouring wooden apartment blocks leaning further and further out towards the Capitol, its foundations undermined by the floodwater. It seemed to reach an impossible angle, where only God was keeping it erect, and then it fell. I realised, as I listened to the almighty crash, and the screams, that it was one of those blocks falling that had dragged me from sleep in the first place. I watched figures dropping from the upper floors as it fell, perhaps thrown clear, perhaps leaping in the hope that the water would break their fall. They were doomed. The doomed, falling into the grave.

  ‘Pray, Marcia. Pray for deliverance.’

  Mother placed her pile of garments on top of a chest and dropped to her knees, hands clasped to her breast, invoking the blessed Saviour to come to our aid. I was four: I believed what I was told to believe. And yet even then, despite having been raised in the faith of our Lord the resurrected Christ by my mother, in the face of all this I found that my faith was simply not strong enough. God would surely be of little use when faced with what I had witnessed outside. Still, driven by faith in my mother as much as faith in the Lord, I added my garments to her pile, dropped to my knees and pleaded.

  Perhaps God spoke to Mother then, though I heard only screams and watery destruction, for she suddenly snapped out of her prayer, eyes full of purpose, and pointed to the rickety wooden ladder at the back of the landing.

  ‘The roof, Marcia.’

  The water level was at the upper floor already and ankle-deep, and I needed little urging. I rose, unclasped my hands and followed her to the ladder.

  ‘I will go first,’ she said. I watched in astonishment as she gathered a pile of the garments and began to struggle up the rungs with one hand, clinging to her livelihood with the other. With a little effort she unbolted the wooden hatch at the top and clambered out onto the roof. I saw her struggle with her footing for a moment, and worried that she would fall. But then she steadied herself, placed her precious burden on the tiles and made sure it was secure, then motioned for me to climb. I did so, my own pile of garments forgotten. I clambered up the rungs and flopped out onto the roof, exhausted. Mother wasted no time in descending to retrieve my abandoned cargo.

  The pitch of the roof was low, just enough to allow rainwater to gather in the runnel and drop into the barrel below, which was now, ironically, under several feet of water. Like other houses of this height, a hatch had been built into the roof to allow access, for the impoverished inhabitants of the towering insulae to each side had a habit of discarding their waste from high windows without care for whose roof it might coat. A broom stood close to the ladder for sweeping unmentionable mess from the tiles.

  She re-emerged with the rest of the garments, muttering her thanks to Heaven for having been preserved from the floodwater with the best of her stock relatively intact. I was a touch sceptical. We
may have escaped the rippling cistern of our ground floor, but we were now trapped on a roof. My gaze took in the full extent of the disaster around us. Perhaps half the towering insulae in our street had gone, turned to sediment and kindling in the churning waters below. It would have been impossible to tell where the usual course of the river was but for the circular roof of the Temple of Hercules Victor just protruding from the surface, which I knew to stand close to the riverbank. Each street was now a river in itself. Lights continued to burn in the high places, but the low-lying regions were lost, just a world of screams and shouts.

  ‘Woman!’

  We turned. It was odd and perhaps even arrogant that we both assumed the voice to be aimed at us, but somehow it seemed naturally to be the case, for every other voice in Rome was raised in a scream while this one was deep, authoritative and, above all, calm.

  A man stood upon the roof of the small bathhouse that nestled into the lower slope of the Palatine hill just behind our house. He was clad in the uniform of the urban cohorts, the branch of the military whose role was suppression of crime and preservation of public safety. Even as I realised that his uniform was dry, and that he must therefore have come from higher ground, I saw others of his unit clambering onto the roof behind him. Though the water had reached the upper floor of our house, parts of the bath complex still touched dry land thanks to the slope of the great hill.

  ‘Are you Marcia Aurelia Sabinianus?’ the man shouted.

  My mother, her brow furrowed, nodded. Then, realising the man probably couldn’t see her nodding, she cleared her throat and responded, ‘I am she.’

  ‘We are here to rescue you. Are you injured?’

  I stared in surprise. A party of the urban cohorts had come through all this for my mother?

  ‘No. I am fine.’