The Last Stoic (25 page)

April brought news of the emperor Caracallus’
assassination.

According to reports that had
filtered up into the northern town, months after the event, Caracallus had
journeyed to a temple of Lunus, the moon-god, at Carrhae twenty-five miles from
the military camp at Edessa, where his legions were wintered, preparing for
another incursion into Parthia.  The guerrilla war with Parthia was going
poorly, the Roman army was making little progress.  Among other dubious
tactics, Caracallus had resorted to letting wild beasts, lions and tigers, into
the battle.  He was determined that Parthicus be added to his imperial name. 

The emperor was anxious for
success, to send positive reports back to the Senate in Rome so they could
prepare for an extravagant triumph in his honour.  In his desperation, he left
the camp for Carrhae, where he intended to show his devotion by making a
sacrifice at the temple of Lunus, and to pray for victory.  The emperor
traveled with a small party of guardsmen, hand-picked by the praetorian
praefect Macrinus.  But Caracallus never made it back to the camp at Edessa. 
The expedition returned with an account that the emperor had been ambushed
while relieving himself in the woods, set upon by one disgruntled guardsman, a
wretch named Martialis.  Martialis had been executed on the spot, by order of
Macrinus.  Upon returning to Rome, Macrinus, who as the praetorian praefect
held the second most important post in the empire, was made emperor by a
confused and divided Senate.  By the time the news had reached Verulamium, the
general consensus was that Macrinus, Caracallus’ most powerful and trusted
advisor, had carefully planned and executed the emperor’s assassination. 

Marcus decided now was the time
to leave.  Into his rucksack he packed the urn containing the last of his
grandfather’s ashes.

“You’re really going back to
Rome?” his brother Annaeus asked.

They had agreed that Vincentius,
at least part of him, belonged in the columbarium after all, in the heart of
the eternal city.  In Rome, Marcus would meet with Senator Frontinus who had
undertaken an investigation of Gus and his dealings with the road building
firm.  Marcus would look for Sura, to make sure she was healthy and well, and
to deliver the news of her brother’s death. 

“Aren’t you afraid?”

Mark pulled his grandfather’s
copy of the emperor’s journal from his rucksack and he showed it to his
brother.

“Every part of me will be reduced
by change into some part of the universe,” he said, “and that again will change
into another part of the universe, and so on forever. And by consequence of
such a change I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on forever in the
other direction.  The universe is change, life is opinion.”

“We’ll miss you,” Annaeus said.

“Don’t worry, we’ll meet again.”

The two embraced, and parted, and
Mark again set out to continue the journey that he had started several years
previous, in a southerly direction, along the narrow path to the beaten trail,
down the laneway, to the main street out of Verulamium, on to the provincial
highway, following the progression of thoroughfares, each road gradually
leading to a wider, busier road, joining a final, major artery, stopping only
where all the roads meet.

Author’s Notes

In the spring of 2003, as the radio delivered
report after breathless report of the second American invasion of Iraq,
charting the progress of the Abrams tanks rolling into Baghdad, I was reading
Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
for the first
time.  It had been on my “must read” list for years and I’d finally worked up
the nerve. 

Gibbon’s masterpiece lives up to its
reputation: it is a rich and rewarding read.  But what struck me most, in
passages describing how the ancient “golden age” had passed from prosperity and
relative peace to decay and continual war, is how closely the trajectory of the
contemporary American empire mirrors that of the Roman empire. 

From Gibbon I turned to Will Durant for
a more general view.  In his
Caesar to Christ,
the similarity between
the two empires is made even more apparent.  Read page 88 of that book for a
remarkable, though unintentional, correspondence; Durant could have been
writing about 21
^st
century America. 

Today, pundits often casually refer to
the US as a reincarnation of the Roman empire.  They talk of Pax Americana,
imperial presidencies, and American exceptionalism.  The founding fathers,
steeped in the neo-classicism of the Enlightenment era, envisioned the United
States in Rome’s image.  Of course, it was republican, not imperial, Rome they
had in mind – it takes time for a nation to trace that downward arc. 
Commentators draw superficial parallels between the two empires.  But in
reading Gibbon and Durant I wondered how far one could go.  I began work on
The
Last Stoic
that summer.

Some of the characters and places in
The
Last Stoic
are historical, others are fictional.  Where they are
historical, I have endeavoured to hew as closely as possible to the received
facts as they have been handed down by the chroniclers.  Of course, some
sources are considered more reliable than others.  The reliability of the
Historia
Augusta
, for example, while accepted by historians like Gibbon, has lately
been cast into doubt; some modern scholars wonder if it isn’t deliberate
fiction or even satire.  Thus, while
The Last Stoic
isn’t meant to be a
piece of scholarly research, and many historical descriptions, if they are
interesting, are taken at face value, I have tried to keep with the current,
common consensus.  

All quotations from
The Meditations
appearing in
The Last Stoic
are taken from the following translation:
Aurelius, Marcus. 
The Meditations
, transl. Maxwell Staniforth (London:
Folio Society, Penguin Books, 2005).

Here are a few additional notes on some
of the historical characters that appear in
The Last Stoic
.

Commodus

Commodus is emblematic of the fall of
the Roman empire.  In his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, Edward
Gibbon describes the period of the Antonine emperors (138 C.E. – 193 C.E.) as
the “golden age”.  Marcus Aurelius, philosopher-king, was the last of these
golden emperors who oversaw the
Pax Romana
.  His son, Commodus, was
“born into the purple,” the first emperor in many generations rising to the
throne, not through merit, but bloodline.  In most ways he was the opposite of
his father and he has come to represent the degeneracy that rotted the empire
from within.  Marcia, his Christian concubine attempted to poison him. 
Narcissus, his wrestling partner, finished him off through strangulation.

Caracallus

The emperor Caracallus ruled Rome from
211 to 217 C.E..  Born Lucius Septimius Bassianus, and renamed Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus when he was seven, he was popularly known as Caracalla, for the
Germanic cloak he would often wear, though at least one historian (Cassius Dio)
records that he was sometimes called "Karakallos" (Greek) or
“Caracallus” (Latin).  Though the nickname was originally meant to be an
epithet, and was never used in the emperor's presence, some commentators suggest
it was secretly relished by Caracallus because it lent him a patina of low
savagery - perhaps an ancient version of "street cred." 

(Thanks to Professor James Fraser,
University of Edinburgh, for his clarifications.)

President of the United States (POTUS)

Presidential administrations consciously
and unconsciously present themselves with an air of imperial Rome.  And the
parallels appear to go both ways.  In chapters four and twenty-two, a good
portion of Caracallus’ address to the troops is taken verbatim from similar
addresses made by George W. Bush to the American military.  

The Story of Sextus Condianus   

Sextus Condianus was a real person, if
we can believe Cassius Dio in his
History of Rome
.  The story that the
innkeeper relates to Marcus in Chapter Two about how Sextus escaped execution
largely follows Dio’s own retelling. 

Dio writes,

Sextus
Condianus, the son of Maximus, who surpassed all others by reason both of his
native ability and his training, when he heard that sentence of death had been
pronounced against him, too, drank the blood of a hare (he was living in Syria
at the time), after which he mounted a horse and purposely fell from it; then,
as he vomited the blood, which was supposed to be his own, he was taken up,
apparently on the point of death, and was carried to his room.  He himself now
disappeared, while a ram's body was placed in a coffin in his stead and burned.
After this, constantly changing his appearance and clothing, he wandered about
here and there. And when this story got out (for it is impossible that such
matters should remain hidden very long), diligent search was made for him high
and low.

Loeb Classical Library, 9 volumes, Greek texts and facing
English translation: Harvard University Press, 1914 thru 1927. Translation
by Earnest Cary.

Mithraism

At the time of
The Last Stoic
,
Mithraism was Christianity’s chief rival.  Like Christianity, it had its
origins in the East.  Though Mithraism is several thousand years older, the two
religions share a similar mythology:  Mithras was born on Dec. 25
^th
,
is identified with both the lion and the lamb, a divine light led to him
gift-bearing shepherds, he worked miracles, etc.  The cult was enormously
popular with the soldiers, who took its rituals and customs all around the
nations of the empire.  Both Commodus and Caracallus were initiates.  There
were two major threats to its longevity, however; secrecy and exclusivity –
only males could participate.  When Constantine converted and made Christianity
the state religion in the fourth century, Mithraism was suppressed and
gradually withered into obscurity.

Barbarian Invasions of Rome

There is no evidence that the barbarian
attack on the Emporium in Rome that occurs at the end of Chapter Sixteen
actually took place.  Neither am I aware of any evidence to the contrary. 
Invasions of Rome by the Vandals and Goths began to happen with regularity in
the fifth century.

The Meditations

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,
philosopher-emperor, the last of Gibbon’s “five good emperors,” wrote this
volume near the end of his life while he was encamped on the banks of the
Danube, in between campaigns against the tide of Quadi, Marcomanni, and Sarmati
surging across the Germanic border.  Maxwell Staniforth, in the introduction to
his 1964 translation writes as follows: “there, among the misty swamps and
reedy islands of that melancholy region, [Aurelius] consoled the hours of
loneliness and exile by penning the volume of his
Meditations
.”  Galen,
the emperor’s physician, was perhaps his only companion as an infectious
disease took hold and ended his life in 180 C.E.. 

It is believed that the emperor’s
journal, entitled “To Myself,” was never meant for publication and wasn’t
discovered by scholars until the fourth century.  As distant heirs, we are fortunate
that the parchment managed to survive the empire’s disintegration and the
heedlessness of time.  It is a conceit of
The Last Stoic
that an extant
copy found its way from Galen’s steady hand to Commodus, to Narcissus,
Commodus’ assassin, to the assassin’s kin, and then was sold, perhaps at a
market or a bookseller, to Vincentius, Marcus’ grandfather, and finally to
Marcus himself.      

Please visit the website (http://www.laststoic.morganwade.ca) for
more information on the history and background of the novel.