Gaius Vinius Clodianus did not want to be his father. The late Marcus Rubella had passionately yearned to be a Praetorian, but his youngest son had no similar desire. His unnamed patron had badly misjudged the situation — or was cruelly indifferent to his feelings. His brothers, of course, called it ‘bloody brilliant’. They would be living through him. That was his first problem.
Next, the Praetorians hated it as much as he did. That was much worse. To have Vinius foisted on them at twenty-three, after only two years in the army and three years in the vigiles, was extremely unpopular; the Guards wanted hoary veterans with long personal histories on the lines of some glorious fantasy: Gaius Vinius Clodianus, son of Marcus, first rank of the Praetorian Cohorts of the divine Augustus, chief centurion of the Twentieth Valeria Victrix legion, awarded two headless spears and gold crowns, military tribune of a cohort of vigiles, military tribune of an urban cohort, military tribune of a praetorian cohort, prefect of engineers, duumvir for the administration of justice, priest of the Augustan cult…
‘So what have you done, son?’
The officer who asked this was like all of them: older and heavier than Vinius, built like a mortuary slab, tough and terse, none too clever. He resembled Vinius’ father closely, though the late Marcus had at least been bright.
The admissions procedure had established that the newcomer met the requirement of being born in Italy, and that he had undergone basic training, though not to the Guards’ immaculate standards. Being able to run, ride, read, swim, make bricks, hurl javelins, build roads, cook soup, stab and stamp, put up a fort from a pre-formed kit, hold your beer, screw a peasant girl behind her parents’ backs then march for hours in full tackle were nowhere near enough. The Praetorian ideal was a special course on swaggering, bragging, breastplate buffing and trampling on the public’s toes.
‘Done?’ Gaius Vinius took a snap decision: ‘Not enough, I’m afraid. I pulled a priest out of a burning temple; maybe a watching god was grateful. Otherwise, all I can offer is that I won the civic crown.’
The Guard snapped to attention. ‘That we like!’
Vinius tapped his face to illustrate his tale. Being ugly would help. Most of these big brutes were seamed with old wounds like crumpled laundry.
With genuine modesty, he never normally discussed it. People knew; he just left it at that. He would rather have kept his full eyesight and not had a cheekful of scars that got cut open again every time a barber shaved him. But if there was one moment in his life when he needed to assert the honour he had won, this was it. The civic crown was a wreath of oak leaves, awarded for saving the life of a comrade in great danger. It was awarded very rarely indeed.
Vinius explained how he had been in the Twentieth legion in Britain, a province which he was careful not to criticise in case his interrogator had served there in some fondly remembered youth; the Praetorian was not old enough to have jollied around the south beating up hill forts under the young Vespasian, but he could well have fought Queen Boudicca under Nero. Vinius had been in Britain later, when Julius Agricola was governor, pressing into new territory to the west and north. Annoyed by Roman expansion, a tribe called the Ordovices had ambushed parties of troops. On arrival in his province, where he had served before, Agricola wasted no time on familiarisation but launched a surprise attack to write the Ordovices out of history.
‘He did it too — annihilation. They won’t resist us again: they won’t be there. When the missiles started coming, I shoved a tribune out of the way. It was how I lost the eye. I failed to jump fast enough. I took the spear in the face.’
‘Bit of luck, for you?’ suggested the Guard. That was how these Praetorian idiots saw it. Even getting yourself half killed was clever, so long as you emerged with a bauble to show off on your tombstone when the time came. Some of the bastards had a torque, bracelets and nine breastplate disks. They went on parade so highly decorated they glistened with gold like girls.
‘You just do what you have to,’ murmured Vinius.
‘Now you’re talking our language.’
That was it, then. He just had to bluff, like his father boozing among old comrades at some grisly cohort dinner. They were turning him into his father, however hard he fought against it.
Vinius and his father had in fact enjoyed a fair relationship. This was mainly because young Gaius was too peaceful to start confrontations. His father and two half-brothers had conditioned him to do what they said. For instance, they had all told him to go into the army, which fortunately he had not minded. As far as they knew — so far — he never minded anything. He grew up letting them push him around, which in some odd way made him feel comfortable. He was saving rebellion for when something really mattered. With his father dead at fifty-two, whatever he was waiting to kick against would never happen.
His father had been a solid, steady, military man. In Rome he had run his vigiles cohort with the right mix of rigidity, contempt for bureaucracy and loathing for the public; he terrorised petty criminals, slammed major gangsters, and out-schemed fraudsters of all kinds, while his firefighting successes were legendary. He kept the Aventine Hill, a lawless district full of poets and freed slaves, running as smoothly as anybody could.
Flouting the rules, as was traditional in all branches of the military, he had married and produced two sons, Marcus Vinius Felix and Marcus Vinius Fortunatus. Their mother died when they were in their teens. The father coped for a time, then brought in a young woman to help with the house and his unruly lads. After a flurry of initial suspicion, all three came to adore her. It worked so well the father married her to secure her.
Clodia was sweet, slight and babyishly pretty, yet they all did what she said. She gave her menfolk routines they had badly craved. She could cook. She made them leave dirty boots at the front door and tidy up their mess. She loved them all, gaining in return a devotion that came close to the religious. When she presented them with a baby, the family seemed perfect. The older boys treated their little brother Gaius as if he were an intriguing pet. Clodia persuaded them to be gentle, or at least not to pull his legs off.
Gaius was three years old when Clodia died. Even while their father was still living, Felix and Fortunatus took it upon themselves to look after him. Like many bullies, they were violently protective of the young in their own family. He was never bullied by anybody else, for certain. Only they could and did push him around, a system they continued into his adulthood. That he might not need their interference never occurred to them.
Their father was too dispirited by Clodia’s death to remarry again. While still small, Gaius was passed into the daily care of his grandmother, Clodia’s mother, a tough, even-handed woman at whose house the boy often slept. He also had a slew of aunts. Most were Clodia’s sisters, but there were a couple on his father’s side too, which made two competing groups. The aunts, who were at various times single, married, widowed or divorced, came and went but always spoiled Gaius. Rome was a paternalist society, but aunts who have an appealing, motherless little boy to dote on sweep aside such nonsense.
So Gaius Vinius grew up in the company of strong men, but with the influence of powerful women. His two elder brothers had always seemed like adults to him; he could only ever remember them shaving and drinking and talking about girls. Being so much younger, his position was almost that of an only child. A quiet, self-sufficient boy, he kept any sadness to himself, but he longed for the mother he could not remember, especially since Clodia was so frequently mentioned in conversation by his father, and by Felix and Fortunatus.
His grandmother and aunts were proud of him. Always good-looking, he was easygoing and rarely in trouble. He also had more intelligence and courage than people realised. His talents came as a shock, because his brothers had instilled in him that he was a milksop who needed tireless looking after. His father, too, had always made it plain he thought that Felix and Fortunatus would excel in the army while Gaius might struggle. Even so, they expected him to join up. He enlisted at eighteen, as each of them had done.
Oddly enough, Vinius was a relaxed soldier who did well. In Britain, he was loved like a son by a benign centurion who brought him on, then noticed favourably by their commander and, as the glaze on the almond cake, he saved the life of that senior tribune. The tribune was a young man from a senatorial family whose death would have been defined as a major social tragedy. High-class relatives might even have cried negligence though in fact when spears started flying the tribune, who was debonair but dim, had been looking the wrong way even though he had been warned not to. He was an idiot. Given time to think, Vinius would not have saved his life at all. Still, in a split-second decision his decency won out; he paid a high price physically.
The legionary legate recommended Vinius for one of Rome’s most coveted awards, amidst collective relief among the province’s high command. The governor, Agricola, personally signed off the citation before it went to Rome. The old emperor, Vespasian, approved it.
By way of thanks, the young tribune sent Vinius an amphora of extremely fine wine which, since he was still on his sickbed, his comrades drank for him.
His civic crown had been despatched to him in Britain, arriving after he was sent home. Three years later, he had still not seen the thing. Maybe it would never catch up with him.
Just before Vinius returned to Rome, his father achieved his lifelong ambition of a transfer to the Praetorian Guards. He died only six weeks later, without ever being on duty beside the Emperor. Of those other great military men, Felix and Fortunatus, there was little better to record. Whilst on service in Germany, Felix had had an accident involving a cartload of liquor barrels (he was larking about), acquiring a limp and a medical discharge. In Syria, Fortunatus had made it to centurion but was subsequently dismissed, clearly under a cloud. He made light of it, but Gaius suspected there had been some fiddling of legionary stores. Fortunatus worked for a builder when he came back to Rome; pieces of wood and hand tools were always coming home with him. Felix, who had no sense of irony, now earned his keep driving delivery carts.
Vinius was left to sustain the family tradition of military service, so after his convalescence he accepted a posting to the vigiles. Felix and Fortunatus pushed him into it, knowing their father would have approved. It allowed him to feel he was not written off. He quickly found his niche as an investigator. He enjoyed the work, and was good at it.
No one in the armed services could marry; many ignored the rule. Vinius had married before he joined up, which briefly solved the problem of sexual release, that ever-pressing matter for a seventeen-year-old. Felix and Fortunatus had been suggesting women they thought suitable, all rejected by Vinius, who gave them a hint of his independent spirit when he chose Arruntia for himself. They were childhood sweethearts, genuinely in love. The marriage was passionate, even romantic; he and Arruntia could hardly keep their hands off one another. Gaius also enjoyed extricating himself from his male and female relatives’ supervision.
Then the dream ended. Arruntia was horrified to learn he intended to join the legions; she could not believe he would leave home indefinitely, leave her, and do it voluntarily. Somebody warned her that legionary service was twenty years, plus more in the reserves — then another so-called friend pointed out that soldiers were not allowed to marry so she was in effect divorced. She felt utterly rejected. Coming from such a military family, the blase Vinius had taken his future for granted. He had not intended to deceive Arruntia; he was a lad, and just never thought about it.
He did not know, when he departed for Britain, that he was leaving his wife pregnant.
When Vinius then came home out of the blue, expecting to pick up their previous life, he fell over the cradle as he entered their rented room, and was severely knocked back. His wife’s angry mood over his career choice was also outside his experience; worse, she no longer had much interest in sexual relations. Had pregnancy and labour been frightening? Was she overwhelmed by domestic responsibility? Although she devoted herself to the child she now had, perhaps she did not want another baby. Perhaps, Vinius darkly suspected, she no longer wanted him. As far as he could tell (and he brooded on this continually) there had been no other man.
He knew for sure his damaged appearance horrified Arruntia. She shrieked and burst into tears when she first saw him; even their tiny daughter took the apparition more quietly.
He had no idea how to deal with an infant. Arruntia biffed him away when he tried. On rare occasions when he found himself alone with the baby, he picked her up gingerly but felt as guilty as if he had taken a secret lover. Once, the tiny child fell asleep clinging onto his tunic and Vinius found himself weeping, he did not know why.
Older now, and shaken by his army experience, he dimly recognised that Arruntia must have felt desperate when he left, though this understanding did not improve his subsequent behaviour. No teenaged girl would enjoy being shackled to a man she might not see again for twenty years; when she unexpectedly got him back, he was hideous, plagued with night terrors and moody with it. He made no real move to discuss this situation; he matured in his working life with the vigiles, but barely adjusted at home. He felt alienated and disappointed. Marriage, he discovered, was one thing he would never be good at.
So, joining the Praetorians who were barracked in an enormous camp outside the city relieved him of some stress by letting him escape arguments. For a man this was ideal. For Arruntia it was just another downhill lurch in their deteriorating life together.
But even Vinius himself was depressed; his transfer seemed a sixteen-year prison sentence (sixteen years was the Praetorian term of service, though he was appalled to hear that many Guards were so keen they stayed longer). His short stint in the army had instilled in him a loathing for this special corps; it rankled with regular legionaries that the Guards not only received pay-and-a-half but wallowed in a life of ease at home. Now Vinius suspected that there was no guarantee of the supposed easy life; the Praetorians were the emperor’s bodyguard, his personal regiment. If your august leader developed military ambitions, you went on campaign. Vinius, who had thought his fighting days were over, faced the unwelcome possibility of more overseas travel and more active service. Should Titus fancy roughing up barbarians, there would be no getting out of it.
Duty in Rome was a mix of luxury and tedium, he soon found. One cohort at a time, carrying weapons but in civilian dress, accompanied their emperor wherever he went. Since Vespasian, Praetorian cohorts had each been bumped up to close on a thousand men. At every change of the guard, they marched down from the Viminal Gate through the Fifth and Third Regions, crossed the Forum and stomped up the Palatine Hill; reverberations shook flagons from shelves in wine bars and made wet sheets slither off washing lines. Standing guard at a palace or a villa, a cohort of Guards filled up a lot of corridor.
Eight other cohorts would be left to hang around the camp. There, a tiresome amount of unnecessary drill occurred, plus occasional homosexuality and much undercover gambling. Sick leave was high. Vinius informed his wife that staying in the camp was rigidly enforced, though Arruntia could hardly miss the fact that off-duty Praetorians ran rife through the city like rats in a granary.
Vinius had a hard time fitting in at first. Nobody wanted him. He was too young. His service record was too short. He arrived with mysterious patronage, which gave no protection because if he had been favoured by Domitian Caesar that counted against him with Titus’ men. He did his best to survive. With what he had learned from his father, he managed to dodge various raucous clubs that had unpleasant initiation rituals. Many Praetorians wore beards; he grew one, found it disgusting and had it shaved off, which at least gave him impressive scabs temporarily. He followed his father in using only two of his three names, dropping ‘Clodianus’ and saying two had been good enough for Mark Antony, always the soldiers’ hero. Otherwise he lay low. Keeping to himself in such a fraternal environment marked him as antisocial, which to Praetorians meant plain disloyal. Loners cannot hope to be popular.
Joining in the reign of Titus, his first major exercise was the opening of the Flavian Amphitheatre. This helped his colleagues forget their antagonism. The Guards now had too much to do to waste energy on bullying him. Vinius was too busy perfecting new skills to worry about them.
The Praetorians were supposed to look friendly to the public, but their role was to scrutinise faces. While everyone else was staring at the Emperor, they would pack around their charge looking outwards, searching for signs of trouble. Soon it came as second nature. Vinius knew to the inch where Titus was sitting or standing, but he never glanced that way. Instead, his one good eye was constantly moving, raking the crowds. With forty or fifty thousand seats in the elegant new amphitheatre, this was a damned large crowd.
‘Still, we’re all having fun, aren’t we?’ was the sarcastic comment each centurion barked. For them, the inauguration was a nightmare. They wanted their man back in his easily patrolled throne room.
There were a hundred days of celebration, with Titus attending all the shows and constantly needing the ultimate security. Often his brother and other relatives came with him, so extra bodyguards were detailed. The imperial box, with its private access corridor, gave protection, but once on show the gregarious Titus liked to throw himself into the occasion. He was never the sort of Games president who just dropped the white scarf to signal the start, then sat like an automaton. Titus was always bobbing up to throw balls labelled with lottery prizes into the crowd, or enjoying arguments with them about contestants’ merits, especially Thracian gladiators who were his favourites. Whenever he leapt to his feet, decorative ranks of Praetorians in celebration uniforms cheered nearby; their breastplates flashed in the sunlight and their tall helmet plumes bristled. But a small, almost invisible cadre of duty Guards in civilian dress were closest to Titus, watching for any suspicious movements that could threaten him, grim faced and with hands on their sword pommels.
The Prefect was twitchy. All the cohort tribunes were jerky in reaction, so the centurions found it hard to relax and they took it out on the men. This made it easier for newcomers to bond, as everyone suffered. At least, on duty or off, they regularly got the best seats.
The order of play was similar on most days: animal entertainments in the morning; at midday criminals were executed in various inventive ways, at which point the Emperor and fastidious audience members slipped away for lunch; on their return in the afternoon there were races or gladiatorial displays. Sometimes the arena was flooded for mock sea battles. These were conducted briskly, before the waves leaked out; subsequent performers had a soggy time of it until the arena floor dried.
Anyone had to marvel at the building’s beauty and efficiency. But its greatest achievement was imperial propaganda. Nero had offended people by commandeering the Forum to build his Golden House, turning the whole centre of the city into one man’s private home and grounds. In giving back the stolen site for public use Vespasian had imposed benign rulership in place of maniacal despotism. When Vespasian returned the Forum to the people, he restored Rome to itself. The massive crowds who assembled in the marble-clad arena, including groups from faraway parts of the world with their colourful robes and outlandish turbans and hairstyles, were staring at the ultimate in statement architecture. Here, sport was pursued not as mystic religion in the way of the Greeks, but as part of the pragmatic politics of Rome.
The programme made available that August was one nobody present would ever forget. Wild animals had been gathered from all over the Empire for the hunting scenes and beast contests. Elephants, lions, leopards, panthers and tigers; boars and bears from the north; desert ostriches, camels and crocodiles; even cranes and rabbits -
Rabbits?
Oh killer bunnies pack a mean thump, Gaius Vinius.
Don’t even try to tell me how!
It was exciting when the nervous trainers managed to persuade unusual combinations to fight, and even more exciting when uncooperative animals ran amuck, throwing things in the air and threatening to clamber over the safety barrier right beside the marble seats on the front rows where the senators sat. Fortunately — or not, if you loathed the aristocracy — the barrier was a cunning arrangement of vertical rollers that defeated both animals and gladiators who tried to escape. The maverick rhinoceros was a firm favourite. The bull maddened by torches briefly had his fan club. The trained elephant that approached the royal box then knelt submissively before Titus showed the Emperor as a man with so much charisma he could control wild creatures, while the lion that let a hare play harmlessly between his paws was generally thought adorable. Less appealing was another lion, who unsportingly mauled his trainer.
Gaius Vinius had never been cold-blooded; he was generally pleased that Titus left for lunch so he could miss the execution interlude. That had fairly routine pitting of thieves and army deserters against ferocious wild beasts — or sulky beasts that had to be goaded to attack the cringing convicts. There were also lurid re-enactments of scenes from mythology and theatre: Pasiphae being raped by a bull, supposedly for real; crucifixion of a bandit in a notorious play, adapted to a gory new version where Prometheus had his liver torn out by a Caledonian boar; the Orpheus myth cruelly perverted so that although the pinioned criminal who was acting the lyre player did seem to tame various creatures with his exquisite melodies, a wild bear who was presumably tone-deaf then tore him to pieces.
After this basic stuff, professional gladiatorial combat seemed to represent pure skill. There were single bouts and group fights. To meet the Roman fascination with the exotic there were female contestants and dwarves. At one point, Titus presided over a record-breaking combat: two evenly matched fighters called Verus and Priscus slogged it out for hours, neither able to break his opponent, neither willing to concede defeat. A draw was not unknown but a draw with honour was unheard of. When Titus eventually persuaded the crowd to allow him to declare equal rewards for these fabulous contestants, giving both gladiators their freedom, the occasion crowned the Games.
This inauguration would be the highlight of his reign. Nevertheless, a sense of anticlimax visibly began to affect the Emperor. Perhaps it was exhaustion, perhaps he was grieving his father’s demise, perhaps he was already in poor health. On the final day, Titus dedicated the building formally, along with the nearby public baths that he had built in his own name. Something went wrong at the sacrifice, and the bull escaped, which was a bad omen. It was said that Titus wept.
Vinius was not on duty but he heard about it. Many of the Guards were unsettled.
There were no more celebrations. The following September, Titus set off from Rome along the Via Salaria towards the Sabine Hills, his father’s place of origin and a long-time family resort in summer. They owned a beautiful villa above Falacrina where Vespasian had been born. On the way, at Aqua Cutiliae, where only two years previously Vespasian had developed a fatal fever after bathing in the ice-cold springs, Titus also fell sick. Immediately his condition must have looked serious. He was taken on to Falacrina, clearly aware that he was dying. His brother must either have been travelling with him or was called to the scene. Lack of clarity about Domitian’s whereabouts and role would add to subsequent suspicions over what happened.
Back in Rome, the first Gaius Vinius knew was a clamour in the Praetorian Camp. When he emerged from his barracks block to investigate, he was told all leave had been cancelled and a full parade summoned. News had flown round. Men reappeared from all quarters of the city. The camp was soon packed. Tension was so palpable the air tingled.
It seemed Domitian Caesar had arrived in a state of high excitement. He galloped in and demanded the Guards’ protection and acclamation. Vinius saw him a short time later, his eyes so bright that he looked drugged, his face flushed, heavy sweat stains on his tunic. Any of Vinius’ resourceful aunts would have made the agitated prince open wide for a big spoonful of calming syrup, followed by a lie-down. Vinius himself thought the man needed a stiff drink among older, more equable friends, then a siesta with a couple of well-articulated dancing girls to put life in perspective. But real life had ended for ever for the impatient Caesar.
Domitian insisted his brother was dead. The Praetorian Prefect responded with caution, still nominally Titus’ man; he probably thought his own days would be numbered from the moment Titus was officially declared dead. Troops began talking amongst themselves of a large accession bonus — for most of them, their second in two years. Somebody said to Vinius in a speculative voice, ‘This should be good news for you!’ but the prospect of Domitian coming to power failed to fill him with joy.
A small mounted squadron was quietly despatched to Falacrina but met a sobbing messenger who confirmed the news. All kinds of rumours rapidly circulated. Most fanciful was the Jewish belief that when he destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem, Titus had slept with a prostitute and a gnat entered his ear, growing inside his head for years until he could no longer bear the noise of it. Perhaps the headaches he suffered were really malarial, though doctors seemed to doubt that. Popular belief was that Domitian’s plots had finally succeeded; one way or another, he had murdered Titus. More believable was that he had ordered Titus to be finished off by putting him into an ice-bath; but could this be a proper medical recourse for a patient with such a high fever? The certain truth was that Domitian abandoned Titus to die alone while he raced to Rome, indecently eager to replace his brother.
An announcement was sent from Domitian to the Senate. To his pique, the senators spent all the rest of that day applauding the virtues of Titus and grieving their loss of such a beloved leader. Theoretically they could hail anyone to follow him, which was the reason Domitian so hurriedly pleaded for Praetorian support. Only the next day did the senators appoint Domitian formally as successor. They would pay for their delay.
The Praetorian Prefect lined up the ranks. To a man, the nine thousand Guards dutifully swore the oath of allegiance to their new master, their mighty shout audible across large parts of the city and intentionally threatening. So, apart from the first year, Gaius Vinius would spend his service as a Praetorian Guard with Domitian as his emperor.
He swore the oath. He took the money. He supposed that he would do his duty.