Rome
Palatine Hill
July 15th, 170 CE
Fronto didn’t wear a toga as often as many men of Senatorial family did. He wore military gear—including the elaborate fancy form generals donned for ceremony—much more often. But when you were appearing before the Senate itself in the capital of the Empire it was obligatory, and he flattered himself that he’d carried it off with aplomb.
He smiled. The Senate session that had ended a few minutes ago had just voted him the ornamenta triumphalia for a third time, an almost unprecedented honor… and it wouldn’t make the Emperor apprehensive because he was the one who’d introduced the motion, sitting on his throne-chair between the two consuls.
The glittering gold wreath wrought like laurel leaves was around his brow, with its dangling gold ribbons; his tunic was embroidered with palm-leaves, and his toga was entirely purple with an edge embroidered in gold. An ivory baton was in his hand… Though he intended to change as soon as he was in the house he’d rented. It wouldn’t do to go about clad like an Emperor!
Particularly since the current Emperor hated ostentation and only wore the costume when he had to for ceremony’s sake. He supposed Marcus Aurelius knew that not all men shared his taste for plain clothing… but, no, it wouldn’t do.
Though there will be a bronze statue of me in the Forum of Augustus; the artist will be doing his sketches in the next few days. And I can commission a statue of myself in this garb, and put it in the hall of my domus back home… and my descendants can display it too! True and lasting glory!
The Senators had also voted Marcus Aurelius a new name—Germanicus, for his deeds north of the Danube, with a round of quite genuine cheers.
And unlike previous recipients of that honor, Marcus Aurelius hadn’t just scored a victory or two over the savages. He’d conquered Germania, and already annexed most of it—as provinces, not via the more dubious and generally temporary means of client kingdoms. And it looked to be settled for good and all with the recent cascade of surrenders.
Even wild Germani savages can act sensibly, if you kick their balls up around their ears hard enough and often enough.
The speech Marcus Aurelius had given had also mentioned the new northeastern frontier of the Empire, and it was the one Fronto had recommended and discussed with Artorius that spring. Some of the Senators had been surprised—the ones who knew things were going well, but not how well.
The Emperor had departed, and the session of the Senate was over. Hundreds of them were pouring out of the Curia Julia, discussing the blizzard of good news as they went through the great bronze doors and into the hot sunshine—
And haunting stink, Fronto thought.
Like most men who spent much of their time in the countryside he found cities appalling until the nose wearied of sending alarm signals.
—of the Forum. To greet their entourages of clients, or to clamber into their litters and be born off to their mansions with their clients trailing along behind in order of importance. He’d be using a litter himself this time, though he usually preferred a horse—the costume he was wearing and the regulations on daytime street-traffic in Rome made it inescapable.
The original forum of Rome… ornamented by Emperors, but not founded by them. Smaller and less glorious than Trajan’s forum, but much older, he thought, looking out from shade into the bright Italian summer sunlight.
Fronto lingered in one of the doorways to the portico for a moment, looking around; this building had been begun by the Divine Julius himself, and completed by the first Augustus decades later.
It was an oddly austere sight—even with the additions Domitian had added a very long lifetime ago, more than eighty years past. Things from the first Emperor’s reign often were rather bleak by today’s standards.
The council-hall of Julia—which was what ‘Curia Julia’ meant—was about eighty feet long and sixty wide, with three broad steps at the rear that could hold five rows of chairs each and a high painted ceiling. The walls were veneered in Carrara marble for two thirds of the way up; that had been a new thing in the time of the Divine Julius’ and only really common in that of the first Augustus.
At the far end was the Altar of Victory, with a lovingly-painted statue of Victoria—the personification of triumph—standing on a globe and extending the conqueror’s wreath in one hand. The floor was the most luxurious aspect, opus sectile work in which colored marble was inlaid into stylized rosettes in squares alternating with opposed pairs of entwined cornucopias in rectangles, all worked in green and red porphyry on backgrounds of Numidian yellow and Phrygian purple.
His smile grew broader. His grandfather had come back from his first Senate session in late middle age and ordered a smaller duplicate of the floor in a new dining hall in one wing of the family domus.
Then he sighed and headed towards the exit. There were a string of would-be clients waiting out there, ready to try and get personal notice…
The price of success and glory! he thought dryly. And that’s just the rich and powerful would-be clients!
A senator and his narrow-stripe client fell silent as he passed, glaring at him with barely hidden hostility. He briefly inclined his head in a polite response—the senator was of a very old family, which made that advisable. Old family was a mark of distinction… and a rather rare one. Turnover in the Senate was high, as families died out, or lost interest in a distinction that kept them in Rome a good deal and stayed at home. You could be a Big Man locally instead if you didn’t want to plod through the cursus honorum or spend a lot of time on battlefields.
Unless you want to be a general with the ornaments of a triumph awarded to you. Three times, by the Gods! he thought smugly.
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Senator Lucius Funisulanus Firmus knew he shouldn’t be scowling at the hero of the hour as he strode by. He did it anyway, and it was all the more provoking when he got a polite nod in reply.
“Damned Greekling,” he muttered under his breath. “And dressed like an ancient king of Rome!”
He spoke once the erect, soldierly, darkly handsome figure was safely out the entrance and into the milling… and rather loud… crowd beyond. That gave more than adequate cover, if you weren’t too close to anyone else. You were never entirely sure if an agent of the Praetorian Prefect, one of the Frumentari spies, was listening if you were elbow to elbow with others.
His client Marcus Bruttius Rusticus nodded; he was a slim man in contrast to the Senator’s stocky figure, with a…
Lean and hungry look, the Senator thought; Marcus was a well-to-do eques with estates in Campania, and a domus here in Rome, but also an ambitious one. Which makes him very useful.
“His Latin is good,” Marcus said. “But you can tell it was learned from tutors.”
“Greeks are well enough as teachers of rhetoric and actors and doctors, and for those who’d fritter away their time on hair-splitting philosophy,” Lucius said bitterly. “Though I prefer common sense. But in the Senate? Bad enough it’s overrun with Gauls and Spaniards and Africans these days, now they’re adding Greeklings! Hadrian started it—he was a Philhellene.”
“Fronto wouldn’t have been getting the ornaments again if it weren’t for this Artorius,” Marcus said. “At least he hasn’t been promoted to Senatorial rank!”
“Not yet,” Lucius said sourly. “What’s one more accented foreigner? Oh, excuse me, Roman citizen… for all of five years! And an Eques for just under three! My ancestors…”
He fell silent for a moment as someone he didn’t know well came into earshot, and then they strolled towards the great bronze doorway.
“And a violator of the mos maiorum,” he added, naming the customs of the ancestors—sacred in the eyes of upper-crust Romans.
“Indeed. All these innovations, these new things!” Marcus replied.
Lucius nodded vigorously. “I said as much to the Emperor,” he said sourly.
“And, sir?”
“He replied that the most ancient Roman custom of all was to seize any opportunity that presented itself to win victory or make Rome greater. But Rome grew great by the sword,” he said, his voice growing earnest. “By courage and discipline and strong right arms, not by cowardly… perhaps sorcerous… innovations. But Artorius is cursed lucky. Deodamnatus! The Emperor is in his belt-pouch. Or his pocket. Another new thing!”
Marcus smiled. “Yet he has made many enemies,” he said softly. “Sir, something might be done with that.”
Lucius stopped and gave him a sidelong look. His own voice dropped.
“Not many in Rome itself,” he said. “Too many are taken in by the victories. The Emperor first and foremost! And the other new things. Merely useful for money-grubbing, most of them. A Senator should dismiss money and concentrate all his virtue and action upon public affairs—”
“Ah, but that wasn’t quite what I was thinking of, sir,” Marcus replied with a slight smile. “Artorius is dung. And for that, you use a pitchfork. Ideally one with a long handle and sharp tines on the business end. There are Germani who—”
He went on. Before long the Senator was smiling and nodding.
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Luoyang, China
July 20th, 168 CE
“Antikles son of Onetas, of Alexandria-in-Egypt, do not assume you have any secrets from us,” the woman… her name meant Black Jade, of all strange things… said.
Antikles started violently at the accented but fluent Greek; the chains around his wrists and ankles rattled. His head still hurt from the blow with a cloth cylinder filled with damp sand behind the ear that had knocked him out when they finally tracked him down where he’d been hiding.
But he felt his mind frantically trying to remember what he… and the others, presumably all dead, now… had said to each other.
Assuming that nobody at this court spoke Greek! he thought bitterly.
From his own smell and itches, he’d spent most of the time he’d been unconscious in a dungeon, and one just as filthy here as they were in Alexandria.
This room was one of the ones the strangers had taken over in the Palace. Most people here squatted or knelt or sat cross-legged on the floor. On mats of wicker for nobles, or on carpets: the Emperor and the very highest had low platforms that raised them above others… and they still sat cross-legged or knelt. Emperor Lin himself sometimes used a folding stool of northern nomad origin when he hunted or traveled, but mainly as a stepping-stone to horseback.
These people were different, he saw. They had four-legged chairs with backs and arms, and high tables—evidently they ate sitting rather than reclining. The five of them were all sitting, while he knelt before them—and two guards with clubs and long knives stood behind him.
“I kneel before you, Mistress Black Jade,” he said—in Greek.
Which is true literally and metaphorically, he thought.
“Not before me alone,” she replied, face blank. “Also before Colonel—”
She used Cohortarch as the military title, cohort-commander, a Hellenic adaption of a Latin term.
“—Liu. He is in command here. If you do not fear me, fear him.”
She shifted back to whatever language it was these people spoke among themselves. Antikles was frightened, but he deliberately allowed it to leak out and show itself in his face and body—as if he was trying to conceal his terror and failing. It never hurt to have an enemy despise you, the more so if you were in their power.
As he cowered, he listened carefully. Whatever these strangers spoke it certainly wasn’t the Han tongue, or anything closely related to it as far as he could tell. He’d learned the local tongue quickly, and he spoke both the Empire’s major languages himself, and had a smattering of Egyptian and Aramaic and was fluent in two Indian languages. He’d hired locals from there teach him, accompanying him back and forth on voyages out of Berenike on the Red Sea coast, to use the long voyage time usefully. Interpreters were expensive, a general a pain in the arse and might be dishonest or after a concealed agenda of their own.
Close attention when they spoke it had shown none of the similarities of vocabulary that you noticed if you grew up speaking Greek and learned Latin later. Terms like mother and father, which were mater and pater in Latin and mitéra and patéras in Greek. In his times in India, he’d noticed that there were similarities there, too—mother and father words similar to both Latin and Greek, and fire was ignis in Latin and agni there.
Nothing like that had hit his ear with the strangers. And at times it was as if they were singing when they spoke with each other.
Black Jade turned to him. “We will question you about Rome and your mission here. You would be well-advised to tell the truth!”
“I will tell you everything,” he said, letting his teeth chatter.
That wasn’t hard. Just remembering how this Cohortarch Liu had dealt with the eunuch official was enough for that—extending his hand with the little black metallic thing in it. Then the sharp crack of the noise, unlike anything he’d heard before, and the man’s head erupting and shattering as if it had been hit by a lead sling-bullet. One from the hand of a God.
Many of the Han courtiers had screamed in terror. He nearly had himself.
And I will let them become overconfident, he thought. Something may be done with that. Even if they are powerful sorcerors.
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Copyright © 2025 by S.M. Stirling