I could think of endless times over the years when I’d ached to see that serene shell of hers cracked in half. See her weep, see her break. Now I was seeing it, and the only thing breaking was me.
She looked at me, her face white and wet and ravaged. “I never had any freedom at all, did I?”
“Most of us don’t,” I said.
“‘Vibia Sabina, Empress of the seven hills.’” She gave her new title a bitter twist. “When you come right down to it, an empress is just another wife. Nothing but that.”
I wondered if I’d ever see my wife again. Mirah’s reddish hair, her neat sashed waist, the way she gestured with her chin when her hands were full. My thumb found a tiny corner of the blue scarf tied under my greave, caressed the worn cloth. Why hadn’t I begged a transfer to a legion in Judaea, given Mirah the life of honor and respect she wanted as the wife of Masada’s last living heir?
I banished Mirah from my mind. I couldn’t think of her, not when I already hurt inside like I’d been gutted with a spear. “Maybe Empress only means wife,” I said to Sabina. “But Praetorian means assassin. That’s what I am now. I’m to stop off on my way back to Rome and kill all your husband’s enemies for him.”
“All his enemies?” Sabina’s voice was bitter. “That’s too long a list for one man. Even you.”
“His top five enemies, anyway.” I hadn’t gotten the list until this morning. Celsus and Palma, two former consuls. A former governor of Dacia. Lusius Quietus, my former cavalry commander… my heart had lurched when I read that, and then died entirely in my chest when I saw the final name.
Titus.
I remembered one of his absurd quotations, Ovid or maybe Juvenal; something Titus had trotted out to me once when I was gloomy over some failure. Be patient, and tough, he’d said with his gentle expression. Someday this pain will be useful to you.
But how could this pain ever be useful? The pain of knowing I had to put a sword through the heart of the best man I’d ever known?
“Maybe I’ll just put a sword through my own heart instead,” I said aloud. “What I should have done when Trajan died.”
“The Empire would be poorer for it,” said Sabina. She rested her cheek on her folded arms, and we sat in silence again. I fingered my row of campaign tokens—the only item I’d officially been allowed to carry over to my new Praetorian armor. Campaign tokens won for territories that would now go back to the weeds and the wild men. I wasn’t supposed to wear my lion skin with the new armor, or any of the precious good-luck tokens from my wife or my father or Sabina. “Praetorians do not drape themselves in superstitious trash,” or so I’d already been told by the Praetorian whom Hadrian had assigned to brief me on my new duties. I’d hit him short and hard in the nose, and he’d howled. I suppose I was out of practice at being told what to do.
“I’ll need to go soon.” Sabina looked down the rocky path toward the abandoned harbor. Even from here, I could see the swarm of activity. “They’ll need me for my new duties. Namely standing like a statue and smiling. There’s a lot of that when you’re an empress. Though of course I’ll have many more important responsibilities once I reach Rome and am installed in the palace. Weaving the household cloth, for example. Overseeing the slaves. Hosting Imperial dinner parties. Those are my duties now, Plotina says. Gods, did I underestimate her.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to keep making the bitch miserable.”
“She also wants me to start whelping babies, but thank the gods, Hadrian isn’t so interested in that. He doesn’t seem to care about heirs, at least not from me.” A grimace. “Can you imagine a child of Hadrian’s inheriting the Empire? It would destroy the human race.”
“A child of yours too. Surely it wouldn’t be so bad as that.” Oh, Hell’s gates, my daughters—both of them so young, Dinah just three and Chaya barely out of babyhood, but they’d be Hadrian’s hold on me forever. Hostages to my good behavior, not that they knew it. Did they even know me? If I were to die now, would they remember their father at all?
“Maybe I should get myself pregnant,” Sabina was musing. “Hadrian would know it wasn’t his—he’d have to divorce me…”
“Don’t be stupid. He’d kill you rather than divorce you.”
“Yes, he hates being made a fool of.”
“Make a fool of him anyway.” My voice was savage. “Keep your head shaved, keep your pleb friends, keep hiring street urchins for your maids and wading barefoot in the Tiber and taking lovers who snicker at him over the pillow. Don’t turn into the wife he wants, some perfect marble-carved empress. Keep Rome laughing. Make him sorry he ever married you.”
“Excellent idea,” said Sabina. “Let’s start now.”
I looked at her. Her face was hard, mocking, a gleam of anger turning her eyes to blue ice.
“Want to help me?” she asked. “Help me make a fool out of him?”
Have you slept with my wife? Hadrian whispered in my ear, and behind the whisper I heard the deadly hiss of steel. I gazed at the new Empress of Rome, and she gazed back.
I didn’t want her. God help me, I didn’t want her, I wanted my Mirah. But my hand was already stretching out, jerking Sabina up from the column, and my mouth was biting down on hers. She jumped up into my arms, her legs clinging about my waist, kissing me ferociously as I yanked the clasps out of her stiff formal dress and ran my fingers through her short hair.
“Promise me you won’t grow your hair,” I murmured as I pressed her down into the weeds. “He hates the hair.”
“I promise.” She laced her fingers behind my neck, pulling me down into her. “Now shut up and take me.” No finesse, no tenderness—just rage.
And maybe friendship. Maybe all the lust and the love and my occasional bouts of hatred over the years had given us that.
Afterward I gave her a hand up, and she straightened her dress and put the blond wig back into place, and we stood for a moment looking down the slope of the hill to the beach. The trireme waited there, and a hundred Imperial retainers laying wood for an emperor’s funeral pyre, but I don’t think either of us saw it. I think we saw Rome—but not the Rome we knew. The new and dangerous Rome that awaited us.
I put my hand on Sabina’s shoulder. She reached up, lacing her fingers briefly with mine, and her mouth flicked wryly. Then she pulled the gold veil up over her hair and descended the path alone, going down to stand like a polite statue as the new Emperor was hailed on his way back to Rome. I stood with the other soldiers, and I still had tears left to weep after all as Trajan’s funeral pyre was lit. My Emperor. The new Emperor presided, his head ostentatiously bowed.
Have you slept with my wife?
Yes, Caesar, I thought straight at him. The day after you took my legion away and put a kill list in its place, I slept with your wife. And someday, I will watch you die.
Maybe I should have gone into astrology instead of soldiering, because that was another prophecy that ended up coming true. I didn’t get all the details right—I didn’t know yet that I’d gotten Sabina pregnant up on that hilltop full of ruins. But I would someday watch Hadrian die.
Never mind how.
I’ll tell you later.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Except for Vix and a few minor players, every character in Empress of the Seven Hills is a real person. Emperors Trajan and Hadrian, their wives Plotina and Sabina, Vix’s friends Titus and Simon, even Vix’s adopted son Antinous all existed in real life. Vix’s life and career are based on those of several notable soldiers of the day, especially a cavalry officer named Tiberius Claudius Maximus, who captured the dying Dacian king Decebalus and brought his head and right hand back to the Emperor, and one Marcius Turbo, who was promoted through the ranks on grit and bravery to end up Hadrian’s Praetorian Prefect. Vix is therefore guilty of stealing the credit for other men’s deeds, which I doubt would bother him at all. Not many common legionaries pulled off the kind of meteoric rise through the ranks that Vix does, but it was possible: Trajan’s m
any active years of campaigning meant heavy casualties among his officers and swift promotion for those who managed to stay alive. Battlefield promotions were frequently handed out for acts of bravery, and patronage was all: With the backing of the Emperor or some other powerful Roman, even a common legionary like Vix could dream of command.
Sabina’s adventures are not recorded by history, but what is recorded is a deep hostility between her and her husband. Hadrian, openly homosexual, married her for political ends but found her “moody and difficult.” In return, Sabina remarked publicly that she would never bear him children because they would harm the human race. The historical Sabina managed to travel a great deal, inviting herself along on most of her husband’s wanderings, so she must have had some taste for adventure. Her level of freedom might be unusual, but it was not unheard of: Roman women had as much liberty as their husbands or fathers allowed them to have, and despite the traditional image of an iron-handed paterfamilias, ancient Rome had plenty of doting fathers (Cicero was notoriously indulgent to his daughter) and lenient husbands. Many Roman women traveled extensively in the provinces, bringing up their children in the Empire’s wild places while their husbands ruled as provincial governors or served in provincial military outposts, and the occasional adventurous woman got to see a military campaign firsthand. Emperor Augustus’s granddaughter Agrippina the Elder famously accompanied her husband’s army throughout all his wars, and I decided Sabina (and Mirah) might easily do the same. Sabina’s interest in good works would have been a traditional occupation for a well-connected woman; record exists of the huge contribution she made to Trajan’s alimenta scheme supporting Roman orphans. It’s not known if Sabina had affairs outside her barren marriage, but Hadrian later notoriously reprimanded and dismissed several men for being “too informal” with his wife—including one career soldier in the Praetorian Guard. We have no way of knowing if such a charge means Sabina took lovers or simply had a gift for informality in her friendships.
Empress Pompeia Plotina is another matter. I have probably been very unfair to Trajan’s wife, whom history records as a perfectly pleasant and conventional woman who did not meddle much in Imperial politics. But Trajan’s deathbed adoption of Hadrian was definitely a fishy affair, and a persistent rumor circulated at the time that Plotina had masterminded the whole thing. She had always made a pet out of Trajan’s ward Hadrian; she pushed his marriage to Sabina to tie him to the Imperial family, and she made no secret of her hopes that he would succeed her husband. Trajan awarded Hadrian considerable honors, but their relations were never very warm, and we don’t know if Trajan ever planned for Hadrian to succeed him. He did propose sending the Senate a short list of candidates (though Titus, as a rising but young politician, would probably not have been on it) and he may have had his freedman Phaedimus write one up. But Plotina wrote a decree of adoption for Hadrian instead and signed it for her husband while he lay dying. Plotina’s elaborate pretense that Trajan was still alive so she could fake a deathbed adoption of Hadrian may sound like bad farce, but it’s another persistent rumor that comes down to us through the ages from Plotina’s contemporaries. I may have wronged Plotina by implying that she was either a madwoman or a thief—but ancient sources record that Trajan on his deathbed believed he might have been poisoned by someone in his inner circle, and that his secretary freedman Phaedimus died suddenly on the same day of Hadrian’s acclamation, as if someone wanted to silence him.
I have taken some liberties with small historical details, compressing events, places, and timelines in order to serve the story. The Dacian Wars and the Cyprus rebellion have been moved up a bit in time to suit Vix’s convenience, and Hadrian’s year in Athens as magistrate moved back. Annia Galeria Faustina was in reality Sabina’s half-niece instead of her half-sister (their family tree is a Rubik’s cube of connections and counterconnections that desperately needed simplification) and although the date of Faustina’s betrothal to Titus is not known, it probably happened a few years earlier than I made it happen here, as did Sabina’s own marriage. It’s not known whether Titus ever served as tribune in a legion, though it was a traditional starting point for many young politicians, and he was notoriously averse to the military for the rest of his life. To suit Titus’s career I have also fudged a few building dates on projects such as Trajan’s Column and his massive public baths, which both still stand today as splendid ruins in the middle of Rome. Vix’s legion, the Tenth Fidelis, is fictional, but its exploits are based on those of real legions that took part in the Dacian and Parthian wars. Hadrian was present at the siege of Sarmizegetusa, though as the legate of a different legion, and the Dacian and Parthian wars unfolded much as I have described them.
Conversely, many of the book’s more outlandish details are entirely true. The idea of secret astrological prophecies sounds ridiculous, but historians record that Hadrian recieved such a prophecy at a young age foretelling his rise to the purple (of course, many other emperors supposedly did too). Trajan’s various near-death experiences are also fact—he narrowly missed dying at Hatra when an enemy archer spotted him without his helmet, and he also escaped being crushed to death by the devastating earthquake in Antioch. Mention is made, during that earthquake, of a woman trapped in the rubble who managed to keep both herself and her newborn baby alive on her own breast milk until they could be rescued.
A modern audience might find it surprising that two of Rome’s most famous and effective emperors were openly homosexual, or at least bisexual with a strong preference for men. Ancient Romans held a very relaxed view of sexual preferences: Bisexuality was the norm rather than the exception among upper-class Roman men. Both Trajan and Hadrian made political marriages, but their relationships with their wives are assumed to have remained platonic since both men openly preferred male lovers. Neither emperor was ever reviled as less of a man or a soldier.
Trajan’s easy nature and rampant popularity are well documented, but Hadrian is a much more elusive figure. He appears to have been a very difficult man to understand: The Historia Augusta chronicle wrote of him in frustration: “He was, in the same person, austere and genial, dignified and playful, dilatory and quick to act, niggardly and generous, deceitful and straightforward, cruel and merciful, and always in all things changeable.” Thanks to historians like Gibbon, he is now considered one of Rome’s Five Good Emperors (a term originally coined by Machiavelli), and certainly Hadrian was well-spoken and well-read, with a gift for organization, a formidable intellect, myriad artistic interests, a famous love of animals, and a powerful ability to charm. But despite his gifts he was one of the most unpopular emperors Rome ever had—at least during his lifetime. That unpopularity kicked off at the beginning of his reign when he first relinquished Trajan’s hard-won new provinces and then went on to purge a number of his political enemies in a series of murders. Hadrian denied all involvement in the bloodbath, but Rome remained convinced he masterminded the executions, and his reputation never recovered. The most famous fictional portrait of Hadrian is Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, which takes a positive slant on most of his actions and portrays him as thoughtful and saintly—but I had fun exploring another possible side of his character: the man seen by his fellow Romans as a brilliant schemer smart enough to hide his innate cruelty behind an affable mask. Vix, Sabina, and Titus are all in for plenty of adventures now that their mortal enemy has become Emperor of Rome.
Special thanks to my friend Helen Shankman, who not only answered many of my questions on early Judaism, but put me in touch with Professor Steven Fine, who took time from New York’s Yeshiva University to answer the questions Helen could not. Thanks as well to Ben Kane for recommending me to RomanArmy.com, a wonderful online forum full of helpful experts on Rome’s complex military system. I was lucky enough to make the acquaintance there of Nathan Ross, Paul Elliott, Max Conzemius, and Quinton Johansen, who were kind enough to answer my questions about Vix’s legionary career and tactfully point out my mistakes.
/> And a final fervent thank-you to Anthony Everitt, whose splendid biography Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome has been my bible and security blanket during the entire writing process of Empress of the Seven Hills.
CHARACTERS
IMPERIAL FAMILY
*Marcus Ulpius TRAJAN, Emperor of Rome
*Empress Pompeia PLOTINA, his wife
*Publius Aelius HADRIAN, his ward
*Domitia Longina, called MARCELLA, widow of Emperor Domitian and former Empress of Rome
ROMAN SENATORS AND THEIR FAMILIES
Senator MARCUS Vibius Augustus Norbanus
CALPURNIA, his third wife
*Vibia SABINA, his daughter from his second wife
*Annia Galeria FAUSTINA, his daughter by Calpurnia
Linus and his three brothers, Marcus and Calpurnia’s sons
Gaia, a slave girl in the Norbanus house
Quintus, steward of the Norbanus house
*TITUS Aurelius Fulvus Boionius Arrius Antoninus, patrician
Ennia, his housekeeper
*Celsus, a consul
*Palma, a consul
*Gaius Avidius Nigrinus, a governor of Dacia
ROMAN SOLDIERS AND THEIR FAMILIES
Vercingetorix, called VIX, bodyguard, legionary, and former gladiator
*SIMON ben Cosiba, legionary
MIRAH, his niece
Dinah and Chaya, her daughters
Boil, legionary
Julius, legionary
Philip, legionary
*Lusius Quietus, Berber cavalry commander
ROMAN CITIZENS AND SUBJECTS
DEMETRA, a bakehouse cook in Moguntiacum
*ANTINOUS, her son
*Decebalus, King of Dacia, rebel against Rome