Caesar Dies

Caesar Dies

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Caesar Dies, by Talbot Mundy This
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Title: Caesar Dies
Author: Talbot Mundy
Release Date: December 9, 2003 [EBook #10422]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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DIES ***

Produced by Jake Jaqua

CAESAR DIES
by Talbot Mundy

I. IN THE REIGN OF THE EMPEROR COMMODUS

Golden Antioch lay like a jewel at a mountain's throat. Wide,
intersecting streets, each nearly four miles long, granite-paved, and
marble-colonnaded, swarmed with fashionable loiterers. The gay
Antiochenes, whom nothing except frequent earthquakes interrupted
from pursuit of pleasure, were taking the air in chariots, in litters, and
on foot; their linen clothes were as riotously picturesque as was the

fruit displayed in open shop-fronts under the colonnades, or as the
blossom on the trees in public gardens, which made of the city, as seen
from the height of the citadel, a mosaic of green and white.
The crowd on the main thoroughfares was aristocratic; opulence was
accented by groups of slaves in close attendance on their owners; but
the aristocracy was sharply differentiated. The Romans, frequently less
wealthy (because those who had made money went to Rome to spend
it)-- frequently less educated and, in general, not less
dissolute--despised the Antiochenes, although the Romans loved
Antioch. The cosmopolitan Antiochenes returned the compliment,
regarding Romans as mere duffers in depravity, philistines in art, but
capable in war and government, and consequently to be feared, if not
respected. So there was not much mingling of the groups, whose slaves
took example from their masters, affecting in public a scorn that they
did not feel but were careful to assert. The Romans were intensely
dignified and wore the toga, pallium and tunic; the Antiochenes
affected to think dignity was stupid and its trappings (forbidden to them)
hideous; so they carried the contrary pose to extremes. Patterning
herself on Alexandria, the city had become to all intents and purposes
the eastern capital of Roman empire. North, south, east and west, the
trade-routes intersected, entering the city through the ornate gates in
crenelated limestone walls. From miles away the approaching caravans
were overlooked by legionaries brought from Gaul and Britain,
quartered in the capitol on Mount Silpius at the city's southern limit.
The riches of the East, and of Egypt, flowed through, leaving their
deposit as a river drops its silt; were ever- increasing. One quarter,
walled off, hummed with foreign traders from as far away as India,
who lodged at the travelers' inns or haunted the temples, the wine-shops
and the lupanars. In that quarter, too, there were barracks, with
compounds and open-fronted booths, where slaves were exposed for
sale; and there, also, were the caravanserais within whose walls the
kneeling camels grumbled and the blossomy spring air grew fetid with
the reek of dung. There was a market-place for elephants and other
oriental beasts.
Each of Antioch's four divisions had its own wall, pierced by arched
gates. Those were necessary. No more turbulent and fickle population
lived in the known world--not even in Alexandria. Whenever an

earthquake shook down blocks of buildings--and that happened nearly
as frequently as the hysterical racial riots--the Romans rebuilt with a
view to making communications easier from the citadel, where the
great temple of Jupiter Capitolinus frowned over the gridironed streets.
Roman officials and the wealthier Macedonian Antiochenes lived on an
island, formed by a curve of the River Orontes at the northern end
within the city wall. The never-neglected problem of administration
was to keep a clear route along which troops could move from citadel
to island when the rioting began.
On the island was the palace, glittering with gilt and marble, gay with
colored awnings, where kings had lived magnificently until Romans
saved the city from them, substituting a proconsular paternal kind of
tyranny originating in the Roman patria potestas. There was not much
sentiment about it. Rome became the foster-parent, the possessor of
authority. There was duty, principally exacted from the governed in the
form of taxes and obedience; and there were privileges, mostly reserved
for the rulers and their parasites, who were much more numerous than
anybody liked. Competition made the parasites as discontented as their
prey.
But there were definite advantages of Roman rule, which no
Antiochene denied, although their comic actors and the slaves who
sang at private entertainments mocked the Romans and invented
accusations of injustice and extortion that were even more outrageous
than the truth. Not since the days when Antioch inherited the luxury
and