Collegium, Brotherhood of Rogues: Collegium

By Philip Remus

Shortlisted for the 2022 Chaucer Historical Fiction awards - Based around historically factual events.

Book #1: Collegium of Rogues:  Egypt has fallen, Cleopatra and Antonius are dead by their own hands and Octavius Caesar is now the most powerful man on earth. But Caesar's position is far from secure, with enemies in the Senate plotting against him and renegade legionaries still loyal to Antonius fermenting rebellion, among them, the renegade legate of the Third Aegyptus, Titus Eximius, who, sworn to topple the young tyrant, escapes from Egypt and turns to the Barbarians of Moesia to raise a Celtic army to invade Italy, financed by a vast treasure hidden by Marcus Antonius years ago. Titus has no idea that Caesar's legions are secretly poised to conquer Moesia to secure the empire's frontiers along the mighty Danube. Meanwhile, in Rome, an insidious group of senators and political enemies led by Fannius Caepio are plotting Caesar's assassination, but they know they're powerless without military assistance, and so, an alliance is made between the plotters and the Antonians, who are set on rekindling the bloody civil war. Sabinus, the ennobled blood son of the infamous and villainous Grassator (gangster) First Centurion of the Fifth Macedonica, Nepos Maximo, the Bastard of the Aventine. Sabinus is also the adopted son of the patrician adventurer Draco Cerialis, a one of Caesar's best spies and commander of the "Irregulars," a small band of elite Speculatorii (behind enemy lines special forces). After the fall of Egypt, Draco and the Irregulars are sent to hunt down and kill Titus Eximius and destroy his renegade legion. When Draco is killed in an ambush, Titus escapes to Byzantium. Sabinus vows vengeance against Titus who is responsible for Draco's death and Caesar's spymaster, Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus puts Sabinus in command of the Irregulars and sends him to hunt Titus down and to find Antonius fabled "Syrian gold" (Antonius's hidden war chest). Meanwhile, the Greek and Macedonian legions invade Moesia, and Sabinus with his half dozen Irregulars pursues Titus Eximius into war-torn Moesia, the reluctant commander of two cohorts of regular troops, battling their way through a formidable enemy to rendezvous with the Fifth Macedonica. Teutonius, with his officers has joined King Budorix of the Triballi, a warlike Moesian Celtic people who lay between the Fifth Macedonica and its prize – the fortified city of Ratiaria on the Danubius River. King Budorix has amassed a massive army of barbarian allies and intends to stop the Romans and drive them back to Macedonia and the two armies come face to face in a bloody and violent battle, upon which hangs the success or failure of the conquest and Sabinus's prize, Titus Eximius and the eventual fight to the death between two bitter enemies, only one will survive…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sword of Damocles
• Release date: May 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223157595

Philip Remus

I have two great passions in my life, history and writing, which is an irony, considering that I’m also dyslexic. I was educated at an Inner London state high school and graduated with above average grades in English, English Lit and History. I grew in South East London, the son of a truck driver and a bookkeeper. I lived for four years in France and travelled extensively throughout Europe.

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Prologue

Alexandria, Egypt, August 1, 30 BC

Across the immense harbour, the feluccas were returning with the day’s catch. Their small black silhouettes emerged from the shimmering haze into the amber hue of the late afternoon like a flotilla of ghost-ships, the sea around them scattered with solar jewels flaring and glinting on the rippled surface.

Like dragonflies, the feluccas darted swiftly this way and that, their single sails bringing the winds easily to their command.

Gaius Octavius Julius Caesar watched the nimble flotilla of little ships whipping through the water in the busy harbour, nipping deftly between the huge grain ships anchored in the bay, waiting to be loaded and sent back to feed the incessant hunger of Rome. They passed dexterously between the creaky old dahabeah, the cargo ships of the Nile that had entered the harbour from the canal laden with plunder.

He could smell the sea carried on the warm breeze blowing in from the bay, fresh and pleasant in his face and through his short-cropped hair. Still intoxicated on the fruits of victory, he had an air of arrogance about him as he looked over to Agrippa’s fleet anchored in the harbour beneath the majestic structures along Cape Lochias. His eyes followed the sea walls and the impressive fortifications upon them. They did Egypt no good in the end, in fact, they proved to be of no tactical advantage whatsoever. Caesar had taken the city by land in a broad pincer from which Antonius and Cleopatra could not escape.

Overawed by his own success, was Duilius’s thought as he wiped the sweat from his grimy face with the back of his hand, dust and desert sand abraded his skin like needles. His tongue squeezed between his dry, cracked lips and swept from left to right, the cracked skin like jagged shards of glass. I need a drink, he thought, stifling under the blazing sun beating down its oppressive heat, roasting him alive inside his cuirass like a joint of meat. This was how Icarus must have felt when he flew too close to the sun; too close to exalted power. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable.

There’s something inhuman about Caesar, he thought, being perfectly comfortable out here in this scorching heat. Forged in Vulcan’s workshop like his uncle, he thought, then withdrew the thought at once. Considering Caesar’s usual sickly disposition, he hardly felt Vulcan’s workshop an appropriate comparison. The constitution of a lizard perhaps, if he might make so bold as to ponder the thought of scaly flesh under all that unblemished armour.

Army life never did agree with Caesar, it was merely the means to the end, and now that end had been reached, only Caesar was left standing, all his enemies finally vanquished after years of bloody civil war.

He was more than a general now – he was the most powerful man on earth. The sickly and somewhat insipid boy had blossomed to the point of deification.

‘... We’ve come a long way since Velitrae,’ said Duilius, invoking the name of their home town in the Alban Hills, where they had been boys together.

Caesar felt the tug of his ancestors and recalled the processions and festivals of Jupiter Latiaris at his hilltop sanctuary, where his mother Atia Balba Caesonia, niece of the great Julius Caesar, once told him that on the night he was born, Jupiter’s burning finger had arced across the heavens over the sanctuary, auguring that a great destiny was written for him, and one day he would rule the world.

Here he stood, these years later, prophesy fulfilled. He could hear her now, calling him from the afterlife, telling him that this was just the beginning. He blinked and her voice was gone. He looked at Duilius. ‘Happy days, Duilius.’

‘The happiest of days, Caesar,’ Duilius replied as he looked out across the bay, supplanting the heaving sea beyond with the rolling hills of home, lush with olive groves and vineyards climbing into the haze of hot summer days. ‘I think I shall go home,’ he said wistfully, ‘and have an idle summer on my estate. Get drunk every night on passum and ravage my beautiful young wife until my pippina* drops off...’

The four men chuckled lowly.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little longer before you see Velitrae again, Duilius,’ Caesar said. ‘We both shall...’

Agrippa and Calvinus looked at one another.

‘Such melancholy,’ said Agrippa. ‘Riding into Rome at the head of your victory triumph with the riches of Asia and Egypt and the Greek whore following behind you will be the happiest of days.’

‘Firstly, we must consolidate our power, Agrippa,’ Caesar said as he walked towards the edge of the terrace, watching another dark shape metamorphose from the shimmering obscuration beyond Pharos Island, approaching the peninsular from the open sea, her broad white sail bloated to the wind as she slipped gracefully towards the harbour mouth. It was an Italian cargo ship.

It was an immutable feeling of elation, joy, power, disbelief and dread. It was as if he were walking in another man’s caligae, experiencing another man’s life, and for a moment Octavius wondered if he might be dreaming, because he had dreamt of this day every night for the past fourteen blood-soaked years, experiencing victory a thousand scenarios.

Antonius’s suicide had denied him the pleasure of seeing him paraded in chains with his queen through Rome, but it was a pleasure worth forfeiture in the cold reality of the here and now, and when he thought about it, he decided it was the best thing for expedience’s sake. Taking Antonius back to Rome alive would have been a risk, but then, it had never really been an option. Nobody was in any doubt that Marcus Antonius would never have allowed himself to be taken alive.

And as if reading his mind, Agrippa said: ‘Tomorrow, the sun will rise on a new era, Caesar. You have changed the world forever.’

Octavius looked at his three companions, and at length, he said: ‘For the first time in a hundred years, Rome is at peace with herself. But now is not the time for complacency. In fact, now, more than ever, we must be vigilant in what we do and there’s still much to be done. There are still Antonians out there, and they’re single-minded now more than ever,’ he warned. ‘Now Antonius is more than a mortal man, he’s even more dangerous.’

There was a long silence.

Duilius fiddled absentmindedly with the pommel of his sword, rubbing the ivory Aquila’s head with his thumb, stretching his sore lips across his teeth, feeling the skin pulling apart like opening fissures. ‘Rome is there for the taking,’ he said, looking out to sea. ‘You have the loyalty of the legions; no one will dare oppose you.’

Caesar shook his head. ‘No, Duilius. That’s not the way. I’ll return to Rome as her saviour, not her conqueror. As the man who preserved the Senate and saved the Republic from madness and endless war, not the man who subdued and destroyed her. The people must love me, not despise me. Under my guidance...’ he went on, watching the Roman merchant ship coming into the harbour’s broad expanse, ‘I command legions that Alexander the Great would have envied. I do not have to use threats or force, gentlemen. They will give me everything I want without needing to resort to either.’

Calvinus gave him a cautionary look. ‘Then I urge you, Caesar, do not make the same mistakes your father made before you, by allowing your enemies to live, or you bear your throat to your assassins,’ he warned ominously.

Caesar looked reassuringly at him. ‘Rest assured, old friend, by the time I’m done, it will be they who bear their throats to me. And I will strike ruthlessly and without favour or prejudice, any who plot against the good of Rome. My mercy does not come without a price.’

Calvinus fanned himself with his hand to no effect. Any breeze that did render them relief from the heat was as brief as a dying gasp. ‘They bear watching, Caesar. And all the while the Antonian renegades are on the loose, your position is threatened. As you said yourself, Antonius’s name now holds the divinity and mysticism of a god.’

Caesar wasn’t going to let a dead man usurp his destiny, as he tirelessly tried to in life. He had to see his vision through, no matter where it might take him. ‘We must make certain our enemies are either in chains or dead.’ He looked at Calvinus and Agrippa in turn.

‘My men are already about the business, Caesar,’ Calvinus said.

‘As are my ships,’ said Agrippa.

Conversation returned to consolidating Asia Minor and how to deal with the Senate back home.

With care, Calvinus thought. One always handles snakes with care.

Caesar was now patronus of Egypt, claimed as his personal spoil of war, giving him de facto rule over all Egypt as a man has over his own slaves and estates. Not only did he control the legions and the navy, he also controlled the grain that fed Rome, and that gave him an edge when it came to dealing with the Senate. Antonius and Cleopatra had already demonstrated the consequences to Rome when the grain ships from Egypt no longer sailed into Italian ports. It led to starvation and angry mobs. The revenue and grain would be vital assets in securing his position.

Every victorious general names his own terms, and his terms were simple ... he wanted to control the Empire and to Romanise the world. He wanted to build a legacy that would endure forever. He wanted to control the Senate rather than destroy it. Through the Senate he could enjoy legitimacy and the Republic would be the veil that hides his throne. He wanted imperium maius, supreme command of all Roman forces and oversight of Rome’s foreign policies and provinces.

He could risk everything in a single gambit and seize power by force as Duilius and Agrippa had urged him to. For a while at least, it would probably work, but he knew the Roman heart would soon sour and plot against him as it does all tyrants. The patient way was what was needed now, and that required political acumen, a strong nerve and firm vision. Octavius had all three in abundance. ‘Now we must battle in the Senate with words and deeds,’ he said. ‘And we must win the heart of Rome.’

‘You already have Rome’s heart, Caesar,’ said Agrippa. ‘And when they see the grain ships, you’ll have their souls too.’

‘And I intend to keep them by loving them back, Agrippa,’ Caesar responded. ‘We must return as Romans delivering victory to the Senate and the People of Rome in humble humility. We must return as benevolent heroes who have destroyed the deadly enemy. There will be no legions crossing the Rubicon this time.’

Duilius and Agrippa exchanged a worried look, men of war cowed by a sure-footed politician wearing a general’s garb.

Calvinus was much older than the others – a hero of Pharsalus, where Pompeius Magnus had been soundly defeated by Julius Caesar’s numerically inferior, but tactically superior forces eighteen years ago. He was a son of the Domitii, an old and influential family of the Patrician Order, and one of Caesar’s most trusted advisers and closest friends. He was clever and wise and commanded Caesar’s spies. Caesar had learned a great deal from Calvinus. Tactics and diplomacy, but above all, calculating patience.

‘At least let me take the fleet back to Italy.’

‘No, Agrippa,’ Caesar said sharply. ‘We must do nothing provocative. You’re a soldier and you think like a soldier. Now is the time to think like a politician. We must show Rome that the war is over, and we must show a different sort of strength by going among our enemies in friendship and reconciliation.’

‘They’re snakes,’ said Duilius.

Caesar looked at him. ‘Then we will dine with snakes, Duilius, and we will smile at them and flatter them, and if they dare try to bite us, we’ll cut off their heads.’

*Pippina was a Roman colloquialism for penis.

CHAPTER 1

Antonians

Somewhere near the Orontes River, Syria

Postumus Gratidius’s long shadow stretched across the floor, growing ever bigger on the wall behind Titus, who was pacing around like a caged animal. ‘I don’t trust that Judaean,’ he said, his eyes animated in the glow of the oil lamps flickering on the table. ‘His eyes are too close together. He’s probably selling us out to Caesar as we speak.’

Titus looked up slowly, his head bandaged from a glancing blow from a sword strike that pierced his helmet and thankfully saved his life. ‘I trust him; he’s loyal. So, we wait for Saul to come back.’

‘Then let us hope he’s got us all passage to Byzantium,’ said Ennius.

‘You could buy a fleet with the amount of money we gave him,’ said Marcus Agrius, pouring himself another cup of water from a terracotta jug on the table.

Postumus went to the window and looked out beyond the compound to the fertile hills stretching from the southern bank of the Orontes to meet the sky. ‘I feel like a goat tied to a tree outside a lion’s den,’ he muttered under his breath, looking now inside the compound at the threadbare remnants of the Third Aegyptus, barely five hundred men, all of them completely exhausted. Many were wounded, some too wounded to even stand, never mind fight. This is what defeat looks like, he thought as his eyes roved the misery of exhausted men lolling about on the ground, hungry and scared. They could have to take their chances with Octavius’s legions. If they surrender, they might be spared.

‘You worry too much,’ said Ennius. ‘Saul will be here. If he’s not, it’s because he’s dead or captured.’

Postumus couldn’t help but worry. Being beyond the comfort of Rome or of Antonius made him worry. He knew Caesar would never give them up, not until they were all dead. They were traitors and renegades now. ‘So, we sit here and wait for a legion to come marching over the hill, do we? I hate this fucking country...’

Arnensis glared at him: ‘That’s defeatist talk.’

Postumus looked back sharply at him. ‘It may have escaped you, Arnensis, but we’ve just had our arses kicked all over Egypt and half of Syria. Egypt and Asia Minor have collapsed and Antonius is dead. We are defeated!’ A fleck of spittle flew out from his mouth.

Nobody spoke, they just shifted their weight in the silence, exchanging glances, feeling the cold truth of his words.

Postumus wanted to be anywhere but here. He was tired of the war, tired of the treachery and weary of the perpetual danger they were in night and day. He had been fighting for so long, he had forgotten what peace felt like and he yearned for home, for his wife and children. He shook his head. ‘This idea of marching a barbarian army over the Alps like Hannibal is insane...’ He looked at them in turn. ‘Do you think Rome would ever forgive us? Would the gods ever forgive us?’ Only Marcus, Ennius and Arnensis seemed fully behind Titus and this mad idea he had of recruiting a Moesian barbarian army to invade Italy. ‘And if we do succeed, Titus, when we’ve given the barbarians all the Syrian treasure. Do you think they’re going to be happy with that and go home? They’ll strip Italy and Rome bare like locusts and they’ll leave nought but death and ash behind them. And we will be forever cursed by gods and men for our part in it. Our names will be invoked upon the levies of the infamous and the sinister. Romans will spit upon hearing them.’

‘You go too far, Postumus,’ said Arnensis. ‘Once the tyrant is gone and the legions returned to the Senate’s control, the barbarians will leave, or we’ll make them leave. They’re a means to an end.’

Postumus would have laughed had it not been so serious. Arnensis’s simplistic view was so ludicrous it might have been said by a child. ‘And all will be forgiven, eh, Arnensis?’ he said flippantly.

‘What do you suggest, Postumus? That we should do the honourable thing and kill ourselves?’ said Gaeus Testicius, squatting on a low stool in the corner, resting back against the wall with his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. ‘Or throw ourselves on Caesar’s mercy? I’d suck a dog’s cock before I kneel to that Julian cunt. And I’d rather die with my sword in Caesar’s guts than in my own. We have family in Rome. Wives, children and estates; what do you think Caesar’s going to do with them? Let all be?’ He shook his head. ‘We all remember the proscriptions from the Triumvirate years. Do you think he’ll be any different now? We fight as Romans and we die as Romans, but Octavius...’ He pulled a snarling face, his eyes burning with an intense hatred. ‘Has the nature of a viper.’

Titus rubbed his face, his fingers sinking into the bristles of his whiskers. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d shaved. He thought it a good idea for them to grow beards and try to pass themselves off as Greeks.

‘Ten thousand or a hundred thousand barbarians alone is not enough,’ Postumus said at length, turning back into the room to look at Titus, ‘we cannot win this by force. Antonius is dead, Cleopatra has thrown herself on Octavius’s mercy, hoping to seduce him as she seduced Julius and Antonius, and our legions are decimated...’ He shook his head. ‘We have to think of more subtle ways,’ he said without explaining what he meant. ‘We need to become more creative in ridding Rome of the tyrant.’

Titus looked at Postumus. ‘Do you have something in mind?’

Postumus took a swallow of water from a terracotta cup. ‘After Actium,’ he began, ‘Antonius began communications via Popidius Kaeso with a couple of other senators. Just a couple among many,’ he said, ‘who refuse to be beguiled by Caesar’s promises to restore the authority of the Senate and return the legions to their control.  He aims to castrate the Senate and make it his eunuch as his father attempted to do before him.’

Wordless, Marcus Agrius picked up a leg of pork from the platter of food on the table and took a ravenous bite from it, and savoured it, the juices dribbling down his chin into his whiskers.

‘There exists a wasp,’ Postumus went on, ‘that lays its eggs inside of living prey, and the hatchlings devour the creature from the inside. This is what I propose, Titus. That we attack with the greatest stealth from inside the body of Rome. I propose we become the wasps and lay our eggs inside the body of Rome by joining forces with these Senators and their friends.’

Marcus Agrius looked dauntedly at the leg of pork. Suddenly, he didn’t feel so hungry.

‘... They propose overthrowing Caesar from within and with minimal force,’ Postumus went on. ‘Their plan is to kill Caesar with a few handpicked men. Loyal veterans, inside the city, would arm themselves and take control of the treasury, blockade the praetorians in their barracks and arrest all senators known to be loyal to Caesar. The senators would declare Octavius’s death Tyrannicide and reinstate the Senate’s authority over the legions and provinces.’ He looked at them.

‘What makes you think the senators will deal with us?’ Marcus Agrius asked.

‘They want the same thing we do. Caesar gone and an end to this madness,’ said Ennius. ‘The only way to restore peace is to restore the Senate. Or what else is this now about? Must we follow Antonius to the Afterlife in some grand gesture? There must be an end to dictators, triumvirates and tyrants. We must decide what we stand for before we move a foot more. Do we stand for Antonius or the Republic?’

Titus was the first to answer. ‘The Republic.’

The rest soon followed and declared allegiance to the Republic, Senate and People of Rome.

‘Didn’t Popidius Kaeso used to be one of Draco’s tribunes?’

‘He did,’ said Testicius quickly. ‘They had a falling out when Kaeso tried to kill the boy.’

‘What boy?’ Arnensis asked.

‘The one Draco adopted. Sabinus Maximo Cerialis. The boy who wears a Greek sword on his back-’

‘The one who killed Severus in Judaea?’

‘Do we know who these Senators are?’ Titus asked, diverting the conversation back.

‘I know who one of them is,’ said Postumus. ‘Fannius Caepio. It can be done, I’ve considered the tactics, Titus. It can be achieved, if we have the men in place and the means to pay them while they wait.’

‘How many men?’

‘Two centuries. They’ll have to be dispersed in and around the city. Veterans who can move around freely and live ordinary lives until everything’s in place. Regular pay and the promise of bono once Octavius is dead and the senate restored.’

‘And how long before one of them starts to talk?’

‘About what. They’ll know nothing, except to answer the call when it comes. If they talk, they condemn themselves, and we’ll kill their families. They won’t talk.’

Titus considered the proposal. It was worth investigating. Overthrowing Caesar from within would be much more favourable, and cheaper than hiring a barbarian army. It would be more expedient too. ‘See how the ground lays, Postumus. Money will not be a problem. We have Antonius’s war chest. We may yet still need the Barbarians, and we certainly need their sanctuary so we can regroup,’ he said. ‘However it’s done, Caesar must be killed.’

CHAPTER 2

Victory

Alexandria, 11 August

The braziers seemed to burn brighter than they had an hour ago, and beyond the glimmering dance of their flames, the sun’s fiery yellow orb darkened as it slipped towards the cape like a crucible of molten bronze spilling into the sea, glowing deep red through the forest of masts rising from Agrippa’s mighty fleet of warships in the harbour, like spears dipped in Apollo’s blood.

Octavius gazed into the sunset, but did not seem to see it as his thoughts returned to the pressing problems back home and the troublesome Senate. ‘I think I’ve a greater destiny than this, Calvinus.’

Calvinus nodded his head. ‘So why are you asking for reassurance from me? Have you been wrong thus far? Never again will the beloved sisters of Fate grant you this opportunity, Octavius. You must seize it without hesitation, while it remains within your grasp. The last great enemy is dead and his queen will make an excellent bauble for your triumph. The last time she was in Rome, she wore cloth of gold, this time she will wear chains of iron. There will be no mistaking who is master and where, but only if you’re decisive and careful in your next move.’

Marcus Antonius hadn’t simply committed sacrilege by declaring himself a god – he had plunged the Empire into bloody civil war and insulted Caesar’s family by divorcing his sister Octavia for the Greek witch Cleopatra Ptolemy. And when Caesar revealed the treasonous contents of Antonius’s will to the Senate (which he had obtained through dubious means from the Temple of Vesta), it unleashed such a furor against Marcus Antonius in Rome, the Senate had no choice but to declare Antonius an enemy of the state, making it the duty of every Roman citizen everywhere to kill him on sight.

The will had been a gift from Vesta herself as far as Octavius was concerned, and he played it for all it was worth, taking the moral high ground, pointing out that it was he who had foreseen Antonius’ calamitous fall into immorality and bestial depravity under the spell of this Greek queen of Egypt.

The will was worth a man’s weight in gold. A shocking document that enraged decent Romans everywhere, even many of Marcus Antonius’s most loyal friends and allies found it impossible to continue their support, turning against him when its contents were revealed by the praecones, who heralded it in every Forum in every town in Italy and across the Empire. Their beloved Triumvir, Marcus Antonius had willed his provinces to his and Cleopatra’s bastards in the form of kingdoms, as if they were his own realms to dispose of as he pleased. It was treason, plain and simple. It had been the pretext Octavius had been waiting for, the perfect opportunity to eliminate his final and most dangerous rival once and for all.

Caesar and Antonius had always known it would come down to the two of them in the end, like some great Homeric tragedy played out upon the whims of the gods. The gravest threat was always encountered last in an epic war – Cicero, Scipio, Cassius, Brutus, Sextus Pompeius and all the others were but preludes to the final conflict between Octavius and Marcus Antonius and as is always the case in these matters, only one of them could be left alive afterwards. And in this instance, it was Caius Octavius Julius Caesar. Just as his mother had prophesied all those years ago.

Now his mind was set on another course. Securing Rome’s vulnerable European frontiers against the Germanic and Celtic barbarians. The Empire’s frontiers were quite simply inadequate, often undefended and undefined. All the while fools slumbered in procrastination, ineptitude and complacency, Rome was left vulnerable to the onslaught of the Celtic and Germanic savages. His adoptive father Julius Caesar, he told Calvinus, had warned of these dangers, but his assassination and the civil wars that followed got in the way of resolution. Now it was for him to finish what his father had begun. It would make a useful distraction too, a good old-fashioned war of conquest to keep those dangerously idle minds back in the Eternal City too busy thinking of how much money they could make in the new frontiers to concern themselves with conspiring and plotting against him. ‘Rome will never be at peace, Calvinus,’ he said. ‘It’s not in our nature. But there will be peace at Rome...’ He would make certain of it. ‘Is everything ready for Caepio and the others when they arrive?’ he asked.

‘Everything’s in hand. The Senators will be well taken care of.’

Caesar nodded and patted him on the arm. ‘Come, let’s go and look at the crocodiles,’ he said.

Back inside, Caesar and Calvinus were quickly joined by the legates and administrators, gathering around him like sheep flocking around their shepherd. They stood aside as the haughty general and his officers moved through Cleopatra’s immense court, sprawling over Antirhodos Island like a city within a city, everywhere glittering with gold, and polished marble and alabaster clad walls bathed in the setting sun’s orange hue which spilled through numerous windows and colonnaded porticoes.

The sweet fragrant smoke of frankincense rolled weightlessly in diaphanous wisps between the forest of columns, between which were the shifting host of Egyptian nobility and the priesthood, like peacocks in their colourful robes.

Caesar’s commanders were gathered on the peripheries, as well as a number of Greek aristocrats of the Ptolemaic court, their fates now entirely in Caesar’s hands.

They watched the precocious young dux strut arrogantly through the fragrant mist, followed by Agrippa, Calvinus and others, regaled in bristling armour, their plumed helmets tucked under their arms, their cloaks draping their backs, the clip of their hobnail boots resounding in the breathless silence.

Agrippa eyed the supplicating Egyptians with a contemptuous glare. They would have grovelled to a turd if it spared their lives, he thought.

Presently, Caesar spoke and he spoke of greatness and wisdom, of free men and peace, of brotherhood and new beginnings. He said that now was the time for Roman to embrace Roman, and though yesterday they were enemies, today they were brothers again.

His voice carried through the great hall like the voice of God to every attendant’s ear, and nobody spoke, lest God’s scornful eyes fall on them.

He told them the Republic was saved from a madman, and he promised them it would remain safe. He would make Rome great again, and every Roman, high or lowborn, would control his own destiny. Rome and the Empire, he told them, could only prosper if it was at peace with itself. Brother should not fight brother, it was against the natural order, he told them, before reminding them of the dark days when Romulus and Remus fell from brotherhood into the tempest of hatred. It boded ill for the Republic, it boded ill for the spirit that is Rome, he espoused with a passion that could only come from his heart.

He pointed to the floor, still stained with Marcus Antonius’ blood at the foot of the pharaonic thrones, where he and Cleopatra had sat as gods over all in their realms. ‘There,’ he declared, ‘lies the shadow of tyranny!’ The scorn of Hades