Robert Silverberg - The Reign of Terror

“To remove Torquatus from office—!” said Terentius Figulus, astounded. “You make it sound so easy! But could he do it?”

“Apollinaris has just reconquered four or five whole provinces without any serious difficulty. Why would he have any trouble overcoming one man?”

“What if he doesn’t want to?” Papinio asked. “What if he approves of what Torquatus has been doing?”

“Then we remove them both,” replied Rufus. “But let’s keep that for a last resort. Which of you will come with me to Apollinaris?”

“I,” said Papinio immediately. But no one else spoke out.

Rufus looked about at the others. “Well?” he said. “Figulus? Lollianus? What about you, Priscus? Salvius Julianus?”

In the end Rufus managed to collect just two companions for his mission, the ever-ambitious Julius Papinio and another Senator named Gaius Lucius Frontinus, a younger man whose family had enormous wine-producing properties in southern Italia. Though these were busy times in the Consular office—the Consuls’ days were consumed by the task of purification, making out arrest orders, attending trials, authorizing the executions of those found guilty, which was nearly everyone placed on trial—they had surprisingly little difficulty gaining an audience with the Consul Valerian Apollinaris. But winning his support was not quite so easy.

“What you’re asking is treasonous, as you surely must know,” said Apollinaris calmly. He had remained seated behind his desk; the others stood before him. “By suggesting that one constitutionally appointed Consul should depose his colleague, you’re inviting me to join the conspiracy that you apparently have formed to overthrow the legitimate government of the Empire. That in itself is a capital offense. I could have you whisked off to prison this very minute. Before the end of the week you’d be staring at the headsman’s axe. Eh, Rufus? Papinio? Frontinus?”

It was impossible to tell whether he meant it as a threat or as a joke. Lactantius Rufus, steadfastly meeting the Consul’s coolly appraising gaze, said, “You’d probably follow us there in the next week or two, Count Apollinaris. Certainly you, of all people, must understand how dangerous Torquatus is to everybody’s welfare, certainly to ours and yours, perhaps even to his own.”

“Dangerous to yours, yes. But why to mine? I’ve backed Torquatus in all of his actions, haven’t I? So why would my respected Consular colleague turn against me?”

“Because the way things are going,” said Rufus, “the removal of Emperor Demetrius will become a political necessity somewhere down the line, more likely sooner than later. And the Emperor has no sons. The heir to the throne is his addlepated and utterly incapable brother Marius, who sits quietly giggling to himself in his palace on Capreae. He can never reign. You and Torquatus are the only plausible successors to Demetrius in sight. But you can’t both become Emperor. Do you see my logic, Apollinaris?”

“Of course I do. But I have no intention of having the Emperor killed, and I doubt that Torquatus does either, or he’d have done it already.”

Rufus sighed. “Unless he’s simply biding his time. But let that be as it may: perhaps you don’t feel that you’re in any danger, dear Apollinaris, but we certainly do. Four members of the Senate are dead already. Others are probably on the proscribed list. Torquatus is drunk with power, killing people as quickly as he can, scores of them. Some of them very much deserved their fate. In other cases Torquatus is simply settling old personal accounts. To claim that the Senator Pactumeius Pollio was an enemy of the realm—or Marcus Florianus—”

“To save your skins, then, you want me to lift my hand against my colleague in violation of my oaths. And if I refuse?”

“The Senate, with the Emperor indisposed, has the power to strip you and Torquatus both of your Consulships.”

“Do you think so? And if you can manage to bring it off, who will our replacements be? You, Rufus? Young Frontinus here? And would the people ever accept you as their leaders? You know perfectly well that Torquatus and I are the only men left in this rotting Empire who have the strength to keep things from falling apart.” Apollinaris smiled and shook his head. “No, Rufus. You’re just bluffing. You have no candidates to take our places.”

“Agreed,” Rufus said, without any hesitation. “This is certainly so. But if you refuse us, you’ll leave us no choice but to try to strike Torquatus down ourselves, and we may very well fail, which will plunge everything into disorder and turmoil as he takes his revenge. You and you alone can save Roma from him. You must remove him and take sole command, and make an end to this reign of terror before a river of Senatorial blood runs in the streets.”

“You want me to be Emperor, then?”

This time Rufus, taken by surprise, did hesitate before replying. “Do you want to be?”

“No. Never. If I take sole command, though, I would be acting essentially as an Emperor. Before long, as you correctly foresee, I would be Emperor. But the throne has no appeal for me. The most I want is to be Consul.”

“Be Consul, then. Get rid of Torquatus and appoint some congenial partner, anyone you like. But you have to stop him before he devours us all. Yourself included, I warn you, Apollinaris.”

When the three Senators had left his office Apollinaris sat quietly for a time, replaying the discussion in his mind. There was no denying the truth of anything Rufus had said.

Rufus was grasping and manipulative, of course, as anyone of his great wealth and long occupation of a position close to the centers of Imperial power could be expected to be. But he was not really evil, as powerful men went, and he was certainly no fool. He saw very clearly, and Apollinaris saw it as well, how unlikely it was that there would be any end to Torquatus’s frenzied purification of the realm, that not only were prominent Senators like Lactantius Rufus in obvious danger but that it would go on and on until the list of victims included Count Valerian Apollinaris himself.

That was inevitable. Apollinaris, though he had approved from the start of the need to call a halt to the Emperor Demetrius’s excesses and purge the court of its parasites, had seen Torquatus’s zealousness growing day by day. And he was far from comfortable with the extreme nature of Torquatus’s methods—midnight arrests, secret trials, verdict within an hour, execution the next day.

Now that Torquatus had succeeded in establishing death as a valid penalty for undermining the moral fiber of the Empire, the list of potential victims of the purge had become almost infinite, too. Demetrius’s clump of odious hangers-on, some of them truly vicious and some mere witless buffoons, was gone now. So were dozens of the most corrupt members of the bureaucracy and four of their facilitators in the Senate. And, yes, just as Rufus had guessed, many more indictments were pending. Torquatus’s concentration was focused now on the unrest in the Subura, where the ordinary theft and vandalism had given way to rioting and anarchic outcries against the government. Soon Torquatus would be executing plebeians, too. If left unchecked he would purge Roma from top to bottom.

That a cleansing of the commonwealth had been in order was something that Apollinaris did not question. Despite his reservations he had made no attempt to interfere in what Torquatus had been doing these five weeks past. But it was clear to him now that Torquatus had begun ruling almost as a dictator, a murderous one at that, and that as Torquatus’s Consular colleague he was expected to continue to join him in that role, or else face the possibility of becoming a victim of Torquatus’s zeal himself. For a time would come—if it was not already at hand—when it would be necessary to say to Torquatus, “Things have gone far enough, now. This is where we should stop the killings.” And what if Torquatus disagreed?