Robert Silverberg - With Caesar in the Underworld

Faustus lost no time unsealing the Emperor’s message once he had escaped from Menandros.

You said you thought our time of greatness was ending, Faustus, that day in the marketplace of the sorcerers. But no, Faustus, you are wrong. We are not ended at all. We are only just begun. It is a new dawn and a new sun rises.

And there below that casually scrawled initial was the formal signature in all its majesty, Maximilianus Tiberius Antoninus Caesar Augustus Imperator.

Faustus’s pension was a generous one, and when he and Maximilianus met, as occasionally they did in the early months of Maximilianus’s reign, the Emperor was affable enough, with always the amicable word, though they never were intimates again. And in the second year of his reign Maximilianus went north to the frontier, where the legions of his royal colleague Justinianus were assembling to join him, and he remained there, doing battle against the barbarians, for the next seven years, which were the last years of Faustus’s life.

The northern wars of Maximilianus III ended in complete triumph. Roma would have no further trouble with invading barbarians. It was a significant turning point in the history of the Empire, which now was free to enter into a time of prosperity and abundance such as it had not known since the great days of Trajan and Hadrianus and Antoninus Pius four centuries before. There had been two mighty Emperors named Maximilianus before him, but men would never speak of the third Maximilianus other than as Maximilianus the Great.