“If there are many more such ‘Pyrrhic victories,’” declared Appius Claudius Caecus, “King Pyrrhus may soon discover, to his dismay, that he has won one battle too many!” The chamber resounded with laughter. The unflagging wit and relentless optimism of the blind senator were much appreciated amid the gloomy debates of recent years.
“Some of you are calling for peace with Pyrrhus,” said Claudius. “You want an end to the spilling of Roman blood and the blood of our allies and subjects. You are ready to offer concessions. You will allow Pyrrhus to gain the permanent foothold he seeks on Italian soil, hoping he will be content with a little kingdom here and put aside his dream of a Western empire to rival Alexander’s empire in the East. I tell you, Pyrrhus will never settle for that! He will never stop scheming to rob us of everything. He will not be satisfied until he has made us his slaves.
“You all know that I am a man who treasures Greek learning and the beauties of Greek literature and art. But I will never have a Greek rule over me, and I will never obey any law that is not chiseled in Latin! The future of Italy belongs to us—to the people and Senate of Roma. It does not belong to any Greek, and not to any king. We must continue the struggle against Pyrrhus, no matter the cost, until we drive him out of Italy entirely. When the last Greek ship bears away the last remnants of his exhausted army, Italy shall be ours, and Roma shall be free to fulfill the destiny the gods have decreed for us!”
A majority of the senators sprang to their feet, applauding and shouting accolades. Seeing that Claudius had decisively carried the day, those who had argued for appeasing Pyrrhus begrudgingly joined the ovation. The war against Pyrrhus would continue.
Even as he was leaving the Senate House, assisted by a slave to guide him on the steps, Claudius was thinking ahead to his next oration. Unable any longer to read or write, he had become adept at composing and memorizing long passages in his head. The topic would be Roma’s relationship with Carthage, the great seaport on the coast of Africa founded by Phoenicians at about the same time Romulus founded his city, whose rise to prominence in many ways mirrored that of Roma. The Senate had just signed a treaty of friendship with Carthage, and the incursion of Pyrrhus into their mutual sphere of interest had made Roma and Carthage allies—but for how long? Once Pyrrhus was expelled, Claudius believed that a natural rivalry between Roma and Carthage for domination of Sicily, southern Italy, and the sea lanes of the western Mediterranean was certain to come to the fore.
“Of course, once again, those fools the Fabii can’t see the obvious,” he muttered to himself. “They still think Roma should expand her reach northward to the Alps and beyond, and pursue a policy of moderation toward Carthage. But southward and seaward lies our destiny. A clash with Carthage is inevitable!”
The slave remained silent. He was used to hearing his master talk to himself. Sometimes Claudius carried on elaborate arguments with himself that lasted for hours, changing voices as he shifted points of view.
Now in the twilight of his life, frail and nearly blind, a lesser man than Claudius might have succumbed to bitterness. His radical attempts at reform had failed; a few years after his censorship, Quintus Fabius had seized control of the office and had ruthlessly undone almost all of Claudius’s populist enactments. Quintus Fabius was repeatedly elected consul, and his supporters dubbed him Maximus. Appius Claudius became the Blind, while Quintus Fabius became the Greatest! Claudius had been forced to realize that true popular government would never take root in Roma. But his physical monuments would endure. The Appian Aqueduct remained a marvel of engineering, and each year another stretch of the Appian Way was paved with stone that would last for the ages. After a lifetime of victories and defeats, Appius Claudius Caecus was more passionate than ever about the destiny of Roma.
Crossing the Forum, clinging to the arm of his guide, Claudius heard a voice call out, “Senator! May I have a word with you?”
Claudius stopped abruptly, almost certain that he recognized the voice—and yet, it was impossible! That voice, beloved to his memory, belonged to his one-time protégé, Kaeso Fabius Dorso. But Kaeso was no longer among mortals. He had died many months ago in a battle against Pyrrhus. Although they had drifted apart over the years, Claudius had followed Kaeso’s career at a distance. His youthful interest in building had eventually been eclipsed by his excellence at soldiering; like a typical Fabius, Kaeso was born to become a warrior. Claudius grieved when he learned of his death. Hearing his voice now brought back a flood of memories.
Claudius gripped the arm of his guide. “Who speaks to me? What do you see, slave? Is it a man, or only the shade of a man?”
“I assure you, Senator, I am not a shade,” said the voice that sounded so familiar. “My name is Kaeso Fabius Dorso.”
“Ah! You must be the son of my old friend.”
“You remember my father, then?”
“I certainly do. My condolences to you on his death.”
“He died honorably, fighting for Roma. I also fought in that battle, under his command. I saw him fall. Afterward, I tended to his body.”
“You can be very proud of him.”
“I am. He was a fearsome warrior. Men say he killed more of the enemy in that campaign than any other soldier in the legion. My father took a fierce delight in bringing death to the invaders.”
“Bloodlust has its place on the field of battle,” declared Claudius. “Your father’s joy in killing redounded to the glory of Roma and the honor of our gods.”
Kaeso reached up to touch the talisman at his neck—the golden fascinum he had retrieved it from his father’s corpse on the battlefield. The amulet had failed to protect its wearer against the spear that killed him, but it was a cherished heirloom nonetheless. Kaeso wore it in memory of his father.
“Tell me, Kaeso, how old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“And your father, when he died?”
“He was fifty.”
“Can so many years have passed, so swiftly?” Claudius shook his head. “But what’s that, young man? Do I hear you weep?”
“Only a little. I’m very honored, sir, to hear my father praised by a man so renowned for noble speech.”
“Indeed?” Claudius beamed.
His slave eyed Kaeso suspiciously and spoke into Claudius’s ear. “Master! The fellow is a Fabius.”
“So he is. But his father was different from the rest of them. Perhaps the son takes after the father. He seems respectful enough.”
“I assure you, Senator, I hold your achievements in the highest regard. That’s why I approached you today. I was hoping you might honor a request.”
“Perhaps, young man, though I’m very busy. Speak.”
“My father was always quoting your aphorisms. Sometimes it seemed that half his sentences began, ‘As Appius Claudius so wisely put it…’ I was hoping, in honor of my father, that you might assist me to make a collection of those sayings. I know many of them by heart, of course, but I should hate to get a single word wrong, and there must be some I’ve forgotten, and some I’ve never heard. I was thinking that you could dictate them to me, and I could write them down, and we could group them according to subject. We might even attempt a translation of the Latin into Greek.”
“You know Greek?”
“Well enough to have served as my father’s translator, for the messages we intercepted from Pyrrhus’s couriers.”
“The son of Kaeso not only has a literary bent, but has mastered Greek! Truly, each generation improves upon the last.”
“I can never hope to be the man-killer my father was,” said Kaeso humbly.
“Come, walk with me. The day is mild and I need the exercise. We shall walk up to the Capitoline, and you shall describe to me the recent adornments which, alas, I am unable to see with my failing eyes.”
They ambled up the winding path to the summit, where in recent years the city had indulged its fervor for grand public works. The barren hilltop where once Romulus had set up his asylum for outcasts had become a place of lavish temples and magnificent bronze statues.
“This new statue of Hercules,” said Claudius. “Is it as impressive as men say? I’ve touched the thing, but it’s so big I can do no more than grasp its ankles.”
To Kaeso the statue hardly seemed new—it had been there since he was a boy—but perhaps time was measured differently by the much older Claudius. “Well, of course, my family is descended from Hercules—”
“Ah! You Fabii never miss a chance to remind us of that claim.”
“So I have a tendency to favor any image of the god, and the bigger the better. Actually, the bronze workmanship is quite good. Hercules wears the cowl of the Nemean lion and carries a club. His expression is quite fierce. Should the Gauls ever dare to come back, I think his image alone might scare them away from the Capitoline.”
“How does it compare to the colossal statue of Jupiter, over by the temple?”
“Oh, the Jupiter is much taller than the Hercules, as I suppose the father should be. People can see it all the way from Mount Alba, ten miles down the Appian Way!”
“You know the story of the statue’s creation?”
“Yes. After Spurius Carvilius crushed the Samnites, he melted their breastplates, greaves, and helmets to make the statue. The god’s enormous size represents, literally, the magnitude of our victory over our old enemy. Out of the bronze filings left over, the consul made the life-sized statue of himself that stands at the feet of the Jupiter.”
“You need not describe that to me. I remember quite clearly how ugly Carvilius is! And atop the Temple of Jupiter—is the quadriga as magnificent as they say? It used to be made of terra cotta, you know, an expressive but rather delicate material. It was repaired from time to time, but some parts were as old as the temple, and probably made by the hand of the artist Vulca himself. But now the terra cotta has been taken down and replaced with an exact duplicate, done entirely in bronze.”
“I remember the original terra cotta,” said Kaeso. “Believe me, the bronze is much more impressive. The details of Jupiter’s face, the flaring nostrils of the steeds, the decoration of the chariot, are all remarkable.”
“Alas, if only I still had eyes to see! The bronze replacement for the quadriga was done by my dear colleagues Gnaeus and Quintus Ogulnius, you know. It heartens me to see men of a younger generation take up the populist banner. In the year both Ogulnius brothers served as curule aediles, they put the worst of the rich moneylenders on trial and convicted them. Out of the confiscated property, the Ogulnii paid for that new bronze quadriga. They also paid for that new statue of Romulus and Remus over on the Palatine, which has become such a shrine for the common people of the city.”