Empire (77 page)

“Do you think he’ll ever visit me in my dreams, father?”

“I don’t know, my son.”

“What did he say to you this time?”

“He talked to me about the immortality of the soul. He said, ‘Here is the proof, presented to you from beyond the grave, which I couldn’t offer to you when I was a living man. The fact that I endure, and visit you in your dreams, shows you I have survived beyond my mortal life. Your soul is no less immortal than mine—but it is a fallacy to speak of ‘your’ soul and ‘my’ soul, for the soul is no one’s possession; it emanates from and returns to the Divine Singularity, and the body it inhabits is mere gross matter, which decays and vanishes. When the body dies, the soul rejoices; like a swift horse freed from its traces, it leaps upward and mingles with the air, loathing the spell of harsh and painful servitude it has endured.’ ”

“You should write all this down, father.”

Lucius shook his head. “I’m not sure that I should. Because in the next breath, the Teacher told me that all he had just said was of no real value to a living man. ‘But of what use can this knowledge be to you while you
live?’ he said. ‘The truth will be known to you soon enough, and you shall have no need for words to explain it or to convince you; you shall experience it for yourself. As long as you live, and move among other living beings, these things will be mysteries to you, like shadows cast on a wall by a light you cannot see.’ ”

Lucius looked down at his son, who gazed back at him with trusting green eyes—the eyes of his mother. Marcus sometimes still looked like a boy to him, though the world by every measure considered him a man.

“Come,” Lucius said. “Wash your face and dress yourself. Hilarion will have woken the kitchen slaves by now, and our breakfast will be waiting. You have a busy day ahead of you.”

Later that morning, holding a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other, Marcus stepped back and read aloud the inscription on the massive marble pedestal to which he had been putting some finishing touches: “ ‘The Senate and People of Roma Dedicate this Monument to the Emperor Caesar Nerva Trajan Augustus Germanicus Dacicus, Son of the Divine Nerva, Pontifex Maximus, in His Seventeenth Year in the Office of Tribune, Six Times Acclaimed as Imperator, Six Times Consul, Father of His Country.’ ”

He stepped farther back from the immense pedestal and gazed up. The towering column was surrounded by scaffolding, but in his mind’s eye Marcus could see the structure as it would appear when it was completed and the scaffolds were removed. Never before had there existed a monument like this one, and Marcus was immensely proud to have had a hand in creating it.

The column rose 100 feet—if one included the pedestal and the statue that would top the column, the total height would reach 125 feet—and was made of eighteen colossal marble drums stacked one atop another. Within the hollow column was a spiral staircase of 185 steps, lit by narrow slits in the drums. Wrapped around the column in an ascending spiral was a series of relief sculptures depicting Trajan’s conquest of Dacia. These sculptures were the reason for the scaffolds that surrounded the column; the hundreds of images that circled the drums were still being finished and painted.

The height of the column corresponded to the height of the hillside that had been excavated to make room for it; the volume of earth that had been removed by human labor—mostly Dacian slave labor—was staggering. Where before a spur of the Quirinal Hill had blocked the way between the city’s center and the Field of Mars, there was now a new forum bearing Trajan’s name, the centerpiece of which was the enormous column that pierced the sky above Marcus’s head.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. Standing beside him was the man who had designed not just the column but the entire forum complex. People called Apollodorus of Damascus a second Vitruvius, comparing him to the great architect and engineer who had served Julius Caesar. Trajan had met Apollodorus during his service in Syria, had realized his genius, and had kept him busy ever since.

In the Dacian campaigns, Apollodorus had served the emperor by designing siege engines and other weapons. To facilitate troop movements, he had constructed a stupendous bridge across the Danube River, the longest arch bridge ever built. To allow a vast army to move quickly and safely through the Iron Gates of the Danubian gorges, he had built a wooden roadway cantilevered from the sheer rock face; the legions had literally walked on top of the river and penetrated to the heart of the enemy’s territory. Roman bravery, the favor of the gods, and the leadership of the emperor had won the day, but it was the brilliance of Apollodorus that had allowed the legions to move with the speed and force of a lightning bolt.

Early in the Dacian war, Apollodorus had asked Trajan to give him an assistant. The emperor recalled the strikingly handsome youth who had stood before him one day in the House of the People, and the comment made by the boy’s onetime master: “His talent is considerable . . . he has a gift from the gods.” It had been the great good fortune of Marcus Pinarius to be summoned by the emperor to serve under Apollodorus of Damascus. Throughout the Dacian war, Marcus was at the man’s side day and night, assisting him, watching him work, learning from him, earning his trust and respect. Now, back in Roma, Apollodorus continued to work for the emperor, and Marcus continued to work under Apollodorus.

Marcus’s aptitude for engineering was considerable, but his special gift had always been for sculpture. Anything he could visualize in his imagination he could render in stone with a sureness and ease that astounded
even Apollodorus. While Apollodorus could take credit for the concept and the overall design of the great column, Marcus had sculpted many parts of the spiral relief, as well as the monumental sculpture at the base, a pile of weapons that symbolized the enemy’s defeat. With vivid images of warfare, many witnessed by Marcus firsthand, the spiral relief recounted the struggle of the Dacians, ending in their slaughter and enslavement by the Roman legions. Over and over in the sequence of images, the figure of the emperor appeared, often sacrificing animals to the gods or taking part in a furious battle.

Apollodorus joined Marcus in gazing up at the column. He was a tall man with big arms who kept fit by taking part in the actual construction of his projects, not merely overseeing the work. Like many of Trajan’s legionaries, his hair was shoulder length and he wore a beard, claiming that he had no time for barbers. At middle age, his hair was still thick and dark, with a bit of silver beginning to show at his temples and on his chin.

He gave Marcus’s shoulder a friendly squeeze. His grip was painfully strong. “What do you feel when you look up at it?”

“Pride,” Marcus said. It was true: Marcus took great pride in his artistry. And pride was what Romans were meant to feel when they gazed at the column—pride in their soldiers, pride in their emperor, pride in the conquest of another people. But pride was not all Marcus felt when he looked at the images that wrapped the column. Many of those images had been summoned from his own memories. Though he had not taken part in the fighting, Marcus had seen the aftermath of many battles, stepping over corpses, severed limbs, pools of blood, and scattered entrails. He had seen long trains of exhausted, naked Dacian prisoners, chained neck-to-neck with their hands tied, being driven to their new lives of slavery. He had seen the sack of villages and the rape of women and boys by Roman soldiers enjoying the privileges of victors after the terror and exhilaration of battle.

His father had taught Marcus the precepts of Apollonius of Tyana; it was hard to reconcile the ideas of a man who refused to kill an animal with the horrors Marcus had witnessed in the war, and the fact that the world glorified such horrors. Marcus had experienced life as a slave; it was hard for him to take pride in the enslavement of free men, even though
their enslavement meant the enrichment of the Roman state and of Roman citizens like himself.

The war against Dacia had been necessary to secure Roma’s frontiers, and had been sanctioned by the gods, whose favor was made manifest by auguries and other portents. To please Jupiter, the Romans desecrated every temple of the god Zalmoxis, pulling down his altars, smashing his images, and obliterating all inscriptions that referred to him. The Dacians’ holiest shrine, the cave in Mount Kogaionon where Zalmoxis had lived as a mortal, had been ruined, its interior looted and the entrance filled with rubble. Zalmoxis must have been a very weak god, for he had been powerless to save his followers. Except in a few remote corners of Dacia, his worship was now extinct.

The Dacians were an ignorant, impious, and dangerous people, a threat to the Danube frontier and, with their vast hoard of wealth, a menace to Roma itself; so the legionaries were told as their commanders exhorted them to fight. But sometimes it seemed to Marcus that the Dacians were simply a proud people desperately fighting to save themselves, their religion, their language, and their native land. Just as the atrocities he had witnessed in the war sometimes caused him distress, so Marcus’s work on the column that commemorated the war sometimes afflicted him with doubts. However dazzlingly executed the images on the column, were they not a celebration of brute strength and human suffering?

“Let’s take a closer look, shall we?” said Apollodorus, who seemed never to be bothered by such thoughts. He and Marcus mounted the scaffolding. They had examined the images many times before, yet each time, Marcus always saw a bit more work to be done. The most vexing problem at this late stage was the placement of the miniature swords. In numerous places, tiny holes had been drilled so that tiny metal swords could be fitted into the hands of the figures on the relief; it had been Marcus’s idea to use this novel effect, which gave the sculpture even greater depth, especially when seen at a distance. Unfortunately, the artisans responsible for the tedious task of fitting these embellishments had been quite careless and had missed a great many places on the first pass. Every time Marcus inspected the relief he found another area that had been overlooked. With 155 individual scenes, each blending into the next, and more than 2,500
individual figures, perhaps it was not surprising that the workmanship was not always consistent. Still, Apollodorus demanded perfection, and Marcus was determined to meet his expectations.

As the two men ascended the scaffolds, Marcus was swept into the encyclopedic history of the war recounted by the images. Taking thirteen legions—more than one hundred thousand men—into the field, Trajan’s campaign had resulted not just in victory but in a cultural annihilation. The fortresses of the Dacians had been demolished along with their temples and cities. Facing defeat, King Decebalus made a last, desperate attempt to hide his vast treasure: he diverted a river, buried trunks of gold and silver in the soft riverbed, then returned the river to its course. But an informant revealed the secret to the Romans, and the treasure was recovered. Hundreds of tons of gold and silver had been seized, carted out of Dacia under heavy guard, and brought to Roma. There would be more treasure to come, for the mines of the Dacians had been discovered, and Dacian slaves had been put to work digging new veins.

His armies defeated, his people enslaved, his cities and towns in flames, his treasure stolen, King Decebalus at last killed himself. He was discovered sitting upright on a stone bench outside the sealed cave at Mount Kogaionon, wearing his robes of state and surrounded by a great many of his nobles, who had all taken poison. The body of Decebalus was stripped and decapitated. The robes were burned. The naked, headless body was thrown down the rocky mountainside to be consumed by vultures. The head was taken to Roma by the same speedy messengers who brought news of the war’s successful conclusion. As the people of Roma thronged the Forum to celebrate, the head of Decebalus was displayed on the Capitoline Hill as proof of the Dacians’ defeat, then thrown down the Gemonian Stairs. Someone kicked the head into the crowd, where it was batted about like a ball until it was dropped on the paving stones. The crowd swarmed around it, competing with one another to stamp the last remains of King Decebalus into the ground.

When Trajan returned to Roma, he celebrated with an unprecedented 123 days of games at the Flavian Amphitheater and at other sites across the city. Ten thousand gladiators fought. Eleven thousand animals were slaughtered. The scale of these spectacles had never been seen before; nor had the scale of his lavish building program, the results of which were to
be seen in all directions from the uppermost tier of the scaffolding around the column. Apollodorus and Marcus gazed down at the largest basilica ever built, a vast hall revetted with marble and flooded with light. An adjoining courtyard, the largest open space in the city center, was dominated by an enormous statue of Trajan on horseback. Farther away, against the cliff face of the excavated Quirinal Hill, a sprawling, multistory shopping arcade was being built. There was also a gymnasium for sporting competitions and a new bathing complex even grander than the one Titus had built. On either side of the column, directly below them, were the two wings of Trajan’s library. The wing for Latin literature was almost finished, and the extravagantly decorated reading room, lined with busts of famous authors, would soon open to the public; the Greek wing was still under construction. Apollodorus, who had served as chief architect and designer of these new constructions, called them “the fruits of Dacia.”