You see a connection to this in the revival of “magic” in fantasy literature. Magical protagonists are nearly always better, stronger, and more powerful than other characters not because they earned their status through preparation, or merit, or argument, but because of some intrinsic mystical power or force, setting them above other mortals. In these fantasy societies, power is either inherited or rooted in the Ubermensch’s overwhelming ego, coercing nature to bend to his force of will. Spurned or forgotten is the cooperative effort of skilled professionals that has wrought real wonders of science and liberty in this century. Wielders of magical words are portrayed as better than mere shapers of matter, especially when those words are secret words, all-powerful and (of course) never to be shared with mere ignorant peasants. This kind of literature rejects the egalitarian thrust of Western Civilization, reverting to older traditions that praised and excused the power elites in every other civilization.
In my story “Temptation”—an offshoot adventure from events depicted in Infinity’s Shore—we confronted that old malignant notion, the ever-lurking temptation of wishful thinking. As the dolphin characters conclude, it is possible to mix science and art. We can combine honesty with extravagant self-expression. We are not limited beings.
But far too much harm has been done by human beings who decide that persuasion is the only thing that matters.
Everything isn’t subjective. Reality also matters. Truth matters. It is still a word with meaning.
—David Brin
ROMA ETERNA
Robert Silverberg
“To the Promised Land” (1989)
“Tales from the Venia Woods” (1989)
“An Outpost of the Empire” (1991)
“Via Roma” (1994)
“Waiting for the End” (1998)
The Roma Eterna stories are based on an alternate-history scenario in which the ancient Hebrews remained in Egypt instead of being led forth by Moses as recorded in the Book of Exodus. Since the Jews thus never settled in Palestine, the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth did not exist, Christianity failed to develop, and Rome remained pagan. The history of Rome in this alternate world is generally identical to that of our Rome as it unfolded through the fourth century A.D.—the foundation of the Empire under Augustus, its great expansion under Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius, its difficulties during the time of the third-century military dictatorships, and the division of the Empire by Constantine the Great into eastern and western domains.
But after Constantine, who in our universe had been responsible for making Christianity the official Roman state religion, things begin to diverge. The Empire, instead of being riven by the quarrels that divided Constantine’s heirs in our time line, and weakened politically by the changed social attitudes introduced by Christianity, thrives and expands in the fifth century and succeeds in renewing itself constantly during the period we call the Dark Ages, fending off the invasions of the barbarians and sustaining itself as a thriving worldwide empire stretching from Britain to the borders of India and China. The Empire has no serious rivals in the world, although at times there is strife between its eastern and western halves, and the Aztec and Inca empires of the New World remain independent and powerful despite an illfated Roman attempt to conquer them and establish a Nova Roma across the sea.
The time line of the Roma Eterna stories starts in 753 B.C., the traditional date of the founding of the city; thus our year A.D. 1999 is 2752 A.U.C. by Roman reckoning. Of the stories written so far, the earliest along this chronology is “Waiting for the End,” set in 1951 A.U.C. (A.D. 1198), which shows the western half of the empire, during a period of decadence, being invaded and conquered by the army of the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire.
In “An Outpost of the Empire,” which takes place 250 years later in 2206 A.U.C. (A.D. 1453), the Western Empire has not only regained its independence but, under the vigorous leadership of Emperor Flavius Romulus, has defeated the Eastern Empire and incorporated it into a reunited Imperial state that includes both halves of the empire that Constantine had split eleven hundred years before.
In the Imperial years 2250-2550, which parallel our sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the Empire undergoes a renaissance that is given its first impetus by the great emperor Trajan VII, who undertook worldwide voyages and the development of trade with Asia. The resurgence of economic growth through the opening of new trade routes leads eventually to an industrial revolution, the breakdown of the Imperial heartland into regions that speak dialects approaching separate languages (Gallian, Hispanian, Britannian, “Roman” [Italian], etc.), and, ultimately, the gradual collapse of the central authority of the Empire during a second period of prosperous decadence. An attempt at reunification of the virtually independent European provinces launched in 2563 A.U.C. (A.D. 1810) by the Napoleonic figure of Count Valerian Apollinaris is successful, and for a time the Empire, with Apollinaris ruling sternly as the power behind the throne, seems rejuvenated.
But the assassination of Apollinaris dooms the Imperial system: after eighteen centuries of Caesars, there is an intense public yearning to sweep away the lazy and luxury-loving aristocracy and return to the ancient republican governmental form that Augustus abolished. The next of the presently existing stories, “Via Roma,” depicts the overthrow of the last Emperor in 2603 A.U.C. (A.D. 1850), the murder of most members of the royal family, and the establishment of the Second Republic under the aegis of the authoritarian and conservative Gaius Junius Scaevola, who takes the title of First Consul for Life.
The following story, “Tales of the Venia Woods,” which takes place about fifty years after the fall of the Caesars, provides a glimpse of the last surviving member of the old Imperial house, an old man living as a quiet recluse in the forest outside the city we know as Vienna. Then the series jumps to 2723 A.U.C. (A.D. 1970), and the story, “To the Promised Land,” in which Moshe, a charismatic Egyptian Jew, attempts to build a spacegoing vessel to take his people to another world. The attempt to launch the spaceship is disastrous and Moshe is killed, but as the story ends we see the first stages in the development of a new messianic religion in the Middle East, with Moshe being looked upon as the Son of God.
The present story, set in 2503 A.U.C. (A.D. 1750), fills in a gap in the series by depicting the Empire late in the Second Decadence, when the Emperor Demetrius II is about to come to the throne, and one historian looks back to the Renaissance inaugurated by Trajan VII a quarter of a millennium earlier as a golden age.
—Robert Silverberg
GETTING TO KNOW
THE DRAGON
by Robert Silverberg
I reached the theater at nine that morning, half an hour before the appointed time, for I knew only too well how unkind the Caesar Demetrius could be to the unpunctual. But the Caesar, it seemed, had arrived even earlier than that. I found Labienus, his personal guard and chief drinking companion, lounging by the theater entrance; and as I approached, Labienus smirked and said, “What took you so long? Caesar’s been waiting for you.”
“I’m half an hour early,” I said sourly. No need to be tactful with the likes of Labienus—or Polycrates, as I should be calling him, now that Caesar has given us all new Greek names. “Where is he?”
Labienus pointed through the gate and turned his middle finger straight upward, jabbing it three times toward the heavens. I limped past him without another word and went inside.
To my dismay I saw the figure of Demetrius Caesar right at the very summit of the theater, the uppermost row, his slight figure outlined sharply against the brilliant blue of the morning sky. It was less than six weeks since I had broken my ankle hunting boar with the Caesar in the interior of the island; I was still on crutches, and walking, let alone climbing stairs, was a challenge for me. But there he was, high up above.
“So you’ve turned up at last, Pisander!” he called. “It’s about time. Hurry on up! I’ve got something very interesting to show you.”
; Pisander. It was last summer when he suddenly bestowed the Greek names on us all. Julius and Lucius and Marcus lost their good honest Roman praenomina and became Eurystheus and Idomeneus and Diomedes. I who was Tiberius Ulpius Draco was now Pisander. It was the latest fashion at the court that the Caesar maintained—at his Imperial father’s insistence—down here in Sicilia, these Greek names: to be followed, we all supposed, by mandatory Greek hairstyles and sticky pomades, the wearing of airy Greek costumes, and, eventually, the introduction on an obligatory basis of the practice of Greek buggery. Well, the Caesars amuse themselves as they will; and I might not have minded it if he had named me something heroic, Agamemnon or Odysseus or the like. But Pisander? Pisander of Laranda was the author of that marvelous epic of world history, Heroic Marriages of the Gods, and it would have been reasonable enough for Caesar to name me for him, since I am an historian also. And also there is the earlier Pisander, Pisander of Camirus, who wrote the oldest known epic of the deeds of Heracles. But there was yet another Pisander, a fat and corrupt Athenian politician who comes in for some merciless mockery in the Hyperbolus of Aristophanes, and I happen to know that play is one of Caesar’s special favorites. Since the other two Pisanders are figures out of antiquity, obscure except to specialists like me, I cannot help but think that Caesar had Aristophanes’s character in mind when coining my Greek name for me. I am neither fat nor corrupt, but the Caesar takes great pleasure in vexing our souls with such little pranks.
Forcing a cripple to climb to the top of the theater, for example. I went hobbling painfully up the steep stone steps, flight after flight after flight, until I emerged at last at the very highest row. Demetrius was staring off toward the side, admiring the wonderful spectacle of Mount Etna rising in the west, snowcapped, stained by ashes at its summit, a plume of black smoke coiling from its boiling maw. The views that can be obtained up here atop the great theater of Tauromenium are indeed breathtaking; but my breath had been taken sufficiently by the effort of the climb, and I was in no mood just then to appreciate the splendor of the scenery about us.
He was leaning against the stone table in the top-row concourse where the wine-sellers display their wares during intermission. An enormous scroll was laid out in front of him. “Here is my plan for the improvement of the island, Pisander. Come take a look and tell me what you think of it.”
It was a huge map of Sicilia, covering the entire table. Drawn practically to full scale, one might say. I could see great scarlet circles, perhaps half a dozen of them, marked boldly on it. This was not at all what I was expecting, since the ostensible purpose of the meeting this morning was to discuss the Caesar’s plan for renovating the Tauromenium theater. Among my various areas of expertise is a certain knowledge of architecture. But no, no, the renovation of the theater was not at all on Demetrius’s mind today.
“This is a beautiful island,” he said, “but its economy has been sluggish for decades. I propose to awaken it by undertaking the most ambitious construction program Sicilia has ever seen. For example, Pisander, right here in our pretty little Tauromenium there’s a crying need for a proper royal palace. The villa where I’ve been living these past three years is nicely situated, yes, but it’s rather modest, wouldn’t you say, for the residence of the heir to the throne?” Modest, yes. Thirty or forty rooms at the edge of the steep cliff overlooking town, affording a flawless prospect of the sea and the volcano. He tapped the scarlet circle in the upper right-hand corner of the map surrounding the place that Tauromenium occupies in northeastern Sicilia. “Suppose we turn the villa into a proper palace by extending it down the face of the cliff a bit, eh? Come over here, and I’ll show you what I mean.”
I hobbled along behind him. He led me around to a point along the rim where his villa’s portico was in view, and proceeded to describe a cascading series of levels, supported by fantastic cantilevered platforms and enormous flaring buttresses, that would carry the structure down the entire face of the cliff, right to the shore of the Ionian Sea far below. “That would make it ever so much simpler for me to get to the beach, wouldn’t you say? If we were to build a track of some sort that ran down the side of the building, with a car suspended on cables? Instead of having to take the main road down, I could simply descend within my own palace.”
I stared the goggle-eyed stare of incredulity. Such a structure, if it could be built at all, would take fifty years to build and cost a billion sesterces at the least. Ten billion, maybe.
But that wasn’t all. Far from it.
“Then, Pisander, we need to do something about the accommodations for visiting royalty at Panormus.” He ran his finger westward across the top of the map to the big port farther along the northern shore. “Panormus is where my father likes to stay when he comes here; but the palace is six hundred years old and quite inadequate. I’d like to tear it down and build a full-scale replica of the Imperial palace on Palatine Hill on the site, with perhaps a replica of the Forum of Roma just downhill from it. He’d like that: make him feel at home when he visits Sicilia. Then, as a nice place to stay in the middle of the island while we’re out hunting, there’s the wonderful old palace of Maximianius Herculeus near Enna, but it’s practically falling down. We could erect an entirely new palace—in Byzantine style, let’s say—on its site, being very careful not to harm the existing mosaics, of course. And then—”
I listened, ever more stupefied by the moment. Demetrius’s idea of reawakening the Sicilian economy involved building unthinkably expensive royal palaces all over the island. At Agrigentum on the southern coast, for example, where the royals liked to go to see the magnificent Greek temples that are found there and at nearby Selinunte, he thought that it would be pleasant to construct an exact duplicate of Hadrianus’s famous villa at Tibur as a sort of tourist lodge for them. But Hadrianus’s villa is the size of a small city. It would take an army of craftsmen at least a century to build its twin at Agrigentum. And over at the western end of the island he had some notion for a castle in rugged, primordial Homeric style, or whatever he imagined Homeric style to be, clinging romantically to the summit of the citadel of Eryx. Then, down at Syracusa—well, what he had in mind for Syracusa would have bankrupted the Empire. A grand new palace, naturally, but also a lighthouse like the one in Alexandria, and a Parthenon twice the size of the real one, and a dozen or so pyramids like those in Aiguptos, only perhaps a little bigger, and a bronze Colossus on the waterfront like the one that used to stand in the harbor at Rhodos, and—I’m unable to set down the entire list without wanting to weep.
“Well, Pisander, what do you say? Has there ever been a building program like this in the history of the world?”
His face was shining. He is a very handsome man, is Demetrius Caesar, and in that moment, transfigured by his own megalomaniac scheme, he was a veritable Apollo. But a crazy one. What possible response could I have made to all that he had just poured forth? That I thought it was the wildest lunacy? That I very much doubted there was enough gold in all his father’s treasury to underwrite the cost of such an absurd enterprise? That we would all be long dead before these projects could be completed? The Emperor Lodovicus his father, when assigning me to the service of the Caesar Demetrius, had warned me of his volatile temper. A word placed wrongly and I might find myself hurled sprawling down the very steps up which I had just clambered with so much labor.
But I know how to manage things when speaking with royalty. Tactfully but not unctuously I said, “It is a project that inspires me with awe, Caesar. I am hard pressed to bring its equal to mind.”
“Exactly. There’s never been anything like it, has there? I’ll go down in history. Neither Alexander nor Sardanapalus nor Augustus Caesar himself ever attempted a public-works program of such ambitious size.—You, of course, will be the chief architect of the entire project, Pisander.”
If he had kicked me in the gut I would not have been more thoroughly taken aback.
I smothered a gasp and said, “I, Caesar? You do me to
o much honor. My primary field these days is historical scholarship, my lord. I’ve dabbled a bit in architecture, but I hardly regard myself as qualified to—”
“Well, I do. Spare me your false modesty, will you, Draco?” Suddenly he was calling me by my true name again. That seemed very significant. “Everyone knows just how capable a man you are. You hide behind this scholarly pose because you think it’s safer that way, I would imagine, but I’m well aware of your real abilities, and when I’m Emperor I mean to make the most of them. That’s the mark of a Great Emperor, wouldn’t you say—to surround himself with men who are great themselves, and to inspire them to rise to their full potentiality? I do expect to be a great Emperor, you know, ten years from now, twenty, whenever it is that my turn comes. But I’m already beginning to pick out my key men. You’ll be one of them.” He winked at me. “See to it that leg heals fast, Draco. I mean to start this project off by building the Tauromenium palace, which I want you to design for me, and that means that you and I are going to be scrambling around on the face of that cliff looking for the best possible site. I don’t want you on crutches when we do that.—Isn’t the mountain beautiful today, Pisander?”
In the space of three breaths I had become Pisander again.
He rolled up his scroll. I wondered if we were finally going to discuss the theater-renovation job. But then I realized that the Caesar, his mind inflamed by the full magnificence of his plan for transforming every major city of the island, was no more interested just now in talking about a petty thing like replacing the clogged drainage channel running down the hillside adjacent to this theater than a god would be in hearing about somebody’s personal health problems, his broken ankle, say, when his godlike intellect is absorbed with the task of designing some wondrous new plague with which he intends to destroy eleven million yellow-skinned inhabitants of far-off Khitai a little later in the month.