David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

The two golden eagles swept in low over the city from the west, their wingbeats slow and deep as they flew unswervingly towards the podium. In the pastel light of dawn their shadows seemed to undulate and magnify across the temples and monuments of the Forum, like two denizens of Hades come to take their rightful place at the table of victory. At the last moment the eagles dipped their wings and veered north along the line of the Sacred Way. The man with the laurel crown who stood alone on the podium felt the brush of their wings, saw the purple streamers issuing from their talons and the speckled radiance where their plumage had been brushed with gold. They were his prize pair, descendants of mighty eagles he had brought back to Rome for another triumph half a lifetime ago, snatched from their desolate mountaintop eyries on the northern fringes of the empire. Now as he watched they rose majestically over the very heart of the city, their wings lifted as if on an updraught from the massed exhalation of the people thronging either side of the Sacred Way far below. At the highest point they seemed to hang motionless, as if Jupiter himself had reached down and seized them in his embrace. Then with a raucous screech they flapped upwards and dived down on closed wings, swooping low over the Capitoline Temple and out of sight back towards the massed legions waiting on the Field of Mars.

In the tremulous silence that followed, all eyes strained towards the podium. The man drew his cloak up over his head in the customary way and raised his right arm for all to see, palm facing outwards. The omen had been propitious. The greatest triumph of all time could now begin.

As a thudding drumbeat of the procession began to echo from the Field of Mars, a slave mounted the podium and proffered his hand.

“Fresh from the mint, princeps.”

The man took the coin and quickly turned back, impatient not to miss any of the spectacle. He held the coin up so it was framed by the triumphal arch at the beginning of the Sacred Way, the place where the procession would appear. The coin was a silver denarius, minted from the spoils of war brought up from the river port at Ostia only the day before. He squinted and read the inscription around the edge. IMP CAESAR VESPASIANVS AVG. Imperator Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, holder of tribunician power, consul for the third time, pontifex maximus. He had been emperor for less than a year, and the words still sent a tremor through his heart. He saw the image in the centre and grunted. It showed a heavyset, balding man, advanced in years, with jutting chin and hooked nose, deep creases around his eyes and mouth and lines on his forehead. It was not a pretty sight, but his was a grunt of satisfaction. He had ordered his portrait deliberately made in the old fashion of the Roman Republic, warts and all, in contrast to his reviled predecessor Nero, whose effeminate Greek-style images were being torn down and erased all over the empire. Vespasian was tough, gritty, honourable, a man close to the earth. A Roman of the old ways.

He flipped the coin over and held it high so the first rays of the sun behind him glinted off the silver. In the centre was a bowed, weeping woman, her hair done up in the eastern fashion. Beside her was a Roman legionary standard, identical to those that lined the Sacred Way today. Below her was the word he had ordered put on all his coins, the word that made this day his crowning triumph.

Judaea

Judaea captured.

At that moment the crowd, hushed by the flight of the eagles, erupted in a huge crescendo of noise. The insistent drumbeat which had been coming up from the Circus Maximus suddenly became a thudding boom. Through the arch emerged an enormous African elephant, its trunk swaying from side to side almost to the hands of the spectators who were reaching out to touch it. Astride the elephant sat two immense Nubian slaves, their heavily muscled arms beating in unison on drums slung to either side. Immediately behind came the six Vestal Virgins, their hair in braids and their white robes shimmering as if they were emissaries from heaven itself. Then came a cohort of the Praetorian Guard, resplendent in their black breastplates and plumed helmets, giants among men recruited from the finest warriors across the Roman Empire. Then the first in a long procession of men and boys, senators and equestrians and members of Vespasian’s own family, all dressed in purple togas interwoven with gold. Between them at close intervals came wagons piled high with fabulous riches, some resting on biers and pedestals and others held aloft by slaves from all corners of the empire.

Vespasian watched as the wagons trundled by, each new wonder bringing a gasp of awe from the crowd. There were magnificent statues of gods in gilt bronze, sumptuous royal treasures from the kingdoms of the East, wild-haired slaves wearing heavy gold neck torques from Gaul and Germany, mounds of emeralds and diamonds from beyond the Indus, shimmering silk tapestries from the far-off land called Thina. All the wonders that men had previously travelled the world to see were here today in this one place, this Eternal City.

Only Vespasian knew that many of these treasures were being seen for the last time. Beside him on the podium was a thin sheet of marble prepared by his architects, its surface etched with an intricate city plan dominated by a huge elliptical structure. As the last of the wagons rolled past, Vespasian glanced beyond the procession to Nero’s Golden House, the wreathed head of Nero’s monstrous Colossus just visible over the tops of the temples. On that site Vespasian would build a vast amphitheatre, the biggest the city had ever seen, the first of many projects he had planned to give the spoils of conquest to the people of Rome.

Next marched a garish procession of dwarves and deformities, freaks the gods had created for their own amusement, culled from all over the empire. Some were carried high on silver platters like pigs to a feast, children with bulbous heads and others with shrivelled limbs and elephantine growths. There was even one screaming monster with a single eye in its forehead, a Cyclops in the making. Following them was a manic chattering dwarf driving a four-horse chariot, an imperial quadriga, only this one was pulled by haltered goats. The dwarf was attired as a Greek god with an absurdly oversized golden wig and bore a placard with the words damnatio memoriae, “Of Damned Memory.” It was a grotesque parody of the hated Nero. Vespasian slapped his thighs and guffawed along with the crowd. He was a man of the people. This was not just a triumph. It was entertainment on an epic scale. And the best was yet to come.

There was a gap in the procession and then a blast of trumpets. Through the archway came two horsemen riding side by side, both bedecked in crimson and wearing laurel diadems just like the emperor. The crowd erupted in thunderous applause, and Vespasian felt a surge of nostalgia as he watched his sons, Titus and Domitian, receive the acclamation. The next spectacle had the crowd dumbstruck, and Vespasian himself felt his jaw drop. Following the horsemen came a succession of immense travelling stages, each drawn by a team of white-garlanded bulls and carrying a vast scenic backdrop that towered to the full height of the arch. Each was a living tableau of scenes from the war, with prisoners and legionaries playing their part. One showed a countryside laid waste and its occupants put to the sword. Another depicted Roman siege engines battering a huge wall, the city’s occupants valiantly defending from above. Others showed scenes of utter destruction. Enemy soldiers annihilated on the battlefield. Whole families committing suicide in a clifftop citadel rather than surrendering. A great temple ripped down and destroyed in a conflagration, its priests locked inside. A triumphant legion marching through a ruined city, shackled prisoners and carts of booty in tow. Scenes of desolation so chastening that even the bloodthirsty Roman crowd was cowed to silence, and roared its approval only after the last tableau had been hauled past.