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Meditations
In the flickering lamplight, the comely face of Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus, now Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antoninus in honour of his deceased father, is as smooth as alabaster, and as hard as granite. His eyes, dark like glowing coals, are trained on the high-quality vellum, darting along the columns of neatly printed letters. The black ink marks are vivid as night against the pale surface.
My hands shake. They shake for the Germanian cold, but more so the visitation of sickness in greater age. The light by which I write flickers and trembles as well, perhaps for the Germanian wind – but then again, I do do this frosty hinterland much injustice, to blame its poor weather as a substitution for my poor condition.
It is a bitter irony that I should have spent my earlier years at the slap of a grammaticus in an endeavour to perfect my hand-script; and now, when I have, the limbs that perform the deed will not oblige. I would laugh, but for the pain in my chest.
The letters are darker and clearer here, and a wider space left, as though Aurelius had paused, and made for fresh ink.
I die. It is another quirk of fate that an old philosopher such as I would waste away amidst soldiers – men who work weapons of body and iron, men who move with impulse and on instinct, men who only know to do these things and no more; everything at which they are the best I am not, nor have ever wished to be. Any prouder academic would think and call them beasts. Indeed, I know many such men who would.
Few of these names, though, have a need for the Roman army at their back, and their full allegiance in order to fulfil their household responsibilities; fewer still bear as their household an entire empire.
From among these "beasts", yet, I draw my power … from among them, I command some of the fiercest loyalty and pride I shall ever have from any other; it will be one of these men whom I bring closest to my heart, while I reject my own blood.
The gods have a sense of humour – one as cruel and black as the tumultuous sea.
Another pause, and sharper characters emerge once more.
I have sometimes considered whether this has been a cowardly elusion of mine, to be so poor a father to my one potential heir, and then to choose my successor from without my family circle. Alhough this is not an uncommon custom – indeed, my four immediate predecessors practised it – I feel a drop of guilt, that perhaps if I had raised Commodus in greater wisdom, I would not have had to look to other candidates.
Hands tighten on the paper.
The philosopher I play again – he who is always dissecting the hypothetical situation, a circumstance that has not existed and may never will exist. Occasionally I ponder – as philosophers tend to do – if this condition is what failed me, and if this is why I seek a successor who is none of it … that perhaps if I had been a better general, I would not have let Rome suffer sixteen years of war in twenty, and treated her with the same earthly passion as the one governing my Germania army does now …
That perhaps if I had been a better general, I would have been, as well, a better father.
Commodus's face is tense, void of any distinct expression, as he lowers the vellum. Clenching it in a fist, he throws back the tent flap, and flings the roll, ends and all, onto the open brazier outside. He watches impassively as the parchment – bearing the last written words of his father before death – smokes and flames; the wind gusts the awful stench beneath his flared nostrils.
His eyes lift, catching sight of Quintus Helvius Clarus in the makeshift entranceway of cloth and wood; the man's eyes bore into his emperor's, in a wordless accusation.
Commodus, displeased that he should flinch in front of a military officer, lashes out his indigo cloak, barrelling forward without hesitance.
As Clarus steps aside in deft deference, the emperor stops and looks over his shoulder into his commander's sharp face. "Senatus populusque Romanus," he says, before continuing on his way.
The Senate, and the Roman People.