CHAPTER IV

THE WINTER AT NICOMEDIA

Saluted by the whole army on the evening of 8th June 218, the young Emperor, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, set out to cover the 20 odd miles which separated Immae from Antioch, the Eastern capital. Next morning, we are told by Dion, he entered the city amidst the customary rejoicings. It had been a principle with the late Caracalla to give conquered cities over to the rapacity of the soldiers, and here the conquering host imagined, nay, strongly urged, that this laudable custom should be revived, but the present Antonine saw no reason for any such proceeding. With a singular lack of subservience, which is, we are told, the first mark of a born sovereign, he informed them that a regular toll would be taken from the citizens instead, and each man paid a sum of 500 drachmae from the imperial exchequer; he thus satisfied their natural expectation of reward, and promised the population that no pillage would take place; that, on the other hand, the ordinary contributions to the exchequer (the marks of settled government in times of peace) were sufficient, while pillage would suggest the wars and disturbances which were now over.

It was certainly a bold act, this crossing the will of the soldiers at the very outset, too bold for either a woman or a boy of fourteen to have devised; but Antonine intended to make that city his temporary capital, and had in consequence more than soldiers to conciliate.

As to the question of principal adviser and chief minister, we have a most difficult matter to face from the outset. Lampridius asserts that Soaemias was in the position of absolute director of the Emperor and his government, an assertion utterly ludicrous to any one who understands that lady’s character, as Lampridius himself has expounded it. Soaemias would have been, psychologically speaking, quite incapable of directing any operations other than those of the nuptial couch; though she may have thought out some of the details of costume, etiquette, and precedence which later fell to her share as president of the Senate on the Quirinal; besides which, her name always follows that of Maesa on inscriptions and records where the two names appear together. Herodian, on the other hand, states that Maesa was the ruling spirit, which is much more likely. Maesa’s character is very different, if less attractive; crafty, cunning, able, and persistent, she had not schemed, fought, and expended her treasure except for her own ultimate good, and to her the ultimate good was the possession of power and authority. Besides which, she was fully _au fait_ with all governmental procedure in Rome, and was, in consequence, the fit and proper person to direct the immediate policy.

But there was much to temper her power. There was an element which even she, far-sighted as she was, had forgotten, and left out of count, namely, the Emperor himself. From the moment of his elevation he showed that he had a mind and will of his own; probably he had possessed them all along, but his grandmother had never thought that they would get in _her_ way till she was brought face to face with them.

By nature Bassianus was gentle and affectionate, with no other passions than an innocent fanaticism for the cult of the only God, and a hereditary temperament, which we know to-day is less of a vice than a perversion; a temperament which Suetonius assures us he shared with the majority of his predecessors, and Dion says was common amongst the Syrian clergy. Caracalla had, innate in his being, jealousy, hatred, and revenge. Bassianus hated no one; he was, in fact, only too prone to love his fellows, but, like Caracalla, he had a strong and imperious will. He had no sooner grasped the limitless possibilities of the imperial position than vertigo seems to have overtaken him. But fancy the position! On a peak piercing the heavens, shadowing the earth, a precipice on either side, the young Emperors of Old Rome stood. Did they look below, they could scarce see the world. From above, delirium came; while the horizon, though it hemmed the limits of their vision, could not mark the frontiers of their dream. In addition, there was the exaltation that altitudes produce.

The Emperor was alone; henceforward his will was unopposed. His grandmother tried to make herself felt; on each occasion she had to give way, to retire beaten, till one can well imagine that lady’s despair at the unforeseen development,—almost anticipate the final resolve of that crafty old sinner, to rid herself of the grandson whom she had set up, fondly imagining him her mere puppet. Still, advisers were necessary. From what we can see of the available men (and a man would certainly be Antonine’s choice) there is but one for whom consistently through his life the Emperor had respect, namely, Eutychianus. He had, so Dion states, conceived the plot of the proclamation, and carried it out by himself, while the women were still unconscious of what was going forward. He was immediately made Praetorian Praefect, later he was Consul, and twice City Praefect, which frequent recurrence of office, being unusual in one person, is put down by Dion as a gross breach of the constitution—where no constitution existed except the imperial will. The sneer of Xiphilinus at his buffooneries is obviously an untruth, considering the fact that we know of him as a soldier as far back as Commodus’ reign. If he had been a mere nonentity or a worthless person, it is incredible that, in the proscriptions and murders that followed that of Antonine, Eutychianus should have been reappointed to the office of Praefect of Rome for at least the ensuing year. Taking all the evidence into consideration, it is probable that from the outset the soldier Eutychianus was chief minister and director of the government, and as such supported Antonine against his grandmother. To him therefore, as well as to Maesa, may be attributed much of the sane common-sense work that was done; work which, especially in the dealings with the soldiers, shows a man’s hand, a soldier’s touch, indeed that of a soldier who knows, by reason of his position, just how far he can go.

The first recorded act of the new government was to announce to the Roman Fathers the restoration of the house of Antonine. Now the Senate of the Roman people was in no very pleasant position, considering the possibilities and the knowledge that the imperial house had not a few grudges to settle with their august assembly. Rome, as we know from the record of the Arval Brothers’ meeting held on 30th May, was expecting some announcement almost daily, either of the accession or extirpation of the late imperial connection. The last communication from the East had been signed by Macrinus. It was a distracted and illiterate epistle announcing the elevation of his small son to the empire, and the speedy fall of the pseudo-Antonine. In all probability the news which had reached the Arval Brothers was common property, and the Senate was not so sure of the result of the revolt as Macrinus would have liked them to be. The main cause for anxiety was their answer, which was probably still on its way to Macrinus: a dutiful response to his demand—made about 20th April—that the Antonine family should be proscribed and declared enemies to the state. With their usual subservience, the Conscript Fathers had decreed as desired, had even gone out of their way to level invectives and ordures against the memory of the house of Severus, and this with a hearty goodwill that showed their genuineness.

Now, if these tactless epistles, as the Fathers feared, had reached Antioch either just before or just after the new monarch’s arrival, they were likely to cause an infinity of trouble, especially if they fell into the wrong hands, which, as luck would have it, they promptly