Emperor of Rome

The heart-pounding bestselling Roman epic

Robert Fabbri

• Publisher: Corvus
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781782397113
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

THE EXPLOSIVELY GRIPPING, 300, 000 COPY BESTSELLING ROMAN EPIC SERIES, PERFECT FOR FANS OF GLADIATOR Rome, AD 68. Vespasian is tasked with the impossible. Should he quell the revolt in Judaea, as Nero the emperor has instructed, or resort to the unthinkable and sabotage his own campaign? If his conquest succeeds, he risks facing the mad emperor's jealousy. If he fails, his punishment will be severe. But then Nero commits suicide, catapulting Rome into turmoil. With a contested throne and an army at his disposal, now may finally be Vespasian's time - to ascend, to conquer, to achieve what countless prophecies have foretold and take control of Rome itself. Will Vespasian, at long last, be the one to wear the purple? THE NINTH AND FINAL BOOK IN THE BESTSELLING VESPASIAN SERIES

PART I

GABARA, GALILEE, MAY AD 67, TWO
YEARS AND SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER

CHAPTER I

TITUS FLAVIUS VESPASIANUS had the strange sensation that he had been here before. In fact, to Vespasian, the circumstances of the situation were so similar to an incident twenty-two years previously that he was not surprised by this sense of revisiting time. Almost every detail was in repetition: the legions and auxiliary cohorts drawn up awaiting the order to begin the assault; the objective itself: a small hilltop sett lement of rebels holding out against Roman rule; and then the possibility that the leader of said rebels was trapped within the township. It was uncannily akin to the siege of a hill fort in Britannia, during the second year of the Claudian invasion, when he, Vespasian, had hoped to capture the rebel chieftain, Caratacus. It was all so similar; all, except for one detail: then he had been a legionary legate in command of a single legion, the II Augusta, and its associated auxiliary cohorts; now he was a general in command of three legions and their auxiliaries as well as other contingents supplied by friendly, local client kings, including Herod Agrippa, the second of that name, nominal tetrarch of Galilee, as well as Vespasian’s old acquaintance, Malichus, King of the Nabatean Arabs. All in all he had over forty-five thousand men under his command. It was a huge difference; almost as big as the difference in the climate between that damp isle and this realm of the Jews, he reflected as he watched his son and second in command, Titus, ride, kicking up a cloud of dust, towards him and his companion sitt ing quietly upon his horse to his right. Vespasian could not remember the last time it had rained anything more than a light drizzle in the three months since he had arrived in this arid part of the Empire that had so violently risen up against Rome.

And it had been violent; violent and humiliating. For, but a year ago, Cestius Gallus, the then Governor of Syria, had come south to Galilee and Judaea, in an attempt to quell the burgeoning rebellion; with him he brought the XII Fulminata bolstered by contingents from the three other Syrian legions and their auxiliaries, upwards of thirty thousand men in total. His initial success in retaking Acre, in western Galilee, and then marching south to Caesarea and Jaffa in Judaea, where he massacred almost nine thousand rebels, was overturned when, citing threats to his supply lines, he withdrew, just as he was on the point of investing Jerusalem, and was ambushed at the pass of Beth Horon. More than six thousand Roman soldiers died that day, with nearly twice that number wounded; the XII Fulminata was almost annihilated and its Eagle lost. Gallus had fled back to Antioch in Syria, shamefully abandoning the remnants of his army to extract themselves from the province that, buoyed by this triumph, had now gone into a full-scale revolt. Now, however, the Jews’ revolt was bolstered by their leaders who claimed that their singular Jewish god had brought about the victory and therefore their success in ridding their land of Rome was a foregone conclusion.

The Emperor Nero had turned to Vespasian to disabuse the Jews of this notion.

But it was not the help of the jealous Jewish mono-deity that caused Vespasian concern as he awaited the reports of spies, working for Titus, who had infiltrated Gabara, the first town he had targeted in his campaign: it was the fact that the dead at Beth Horon had all been stripped of their armour and weapons; many of the wounded, and, indeed, many not so, had also abandoned their arms as they fled. Vespasian was very aware that he faced a well-armed fighting force and no mere rabble of rebels. And more than that, their leader, Yosef ben Matthias, the rebel Governor of Galilee, had the ability to inspire men; this Vespasian knew from first-hand experience having met him when he was a part of a Jewish delegation to Nero three years previously.

‘Well?’ Vespasian asked as, with prodigious skill and much dust, Titus brought his mount to a skidding halt next to him.

‘They refuse to parley and are keeping their gates closed.’

‘And Yosef?’

‘He’s not in there, Father.’

‘Not there? Then how did he get out?’

‘He didn’t; he was never in Gabara. Our informants were wrong.’

‘Your informants.’ Vespasian took off his high-plumed helmet and the cushioning felt cap and rubbed his bald, sweat-soaked pate; his strained expression, which was the default mode of his rounded face, gave the impression that he had been attempting to pass a stool which was putting up more of a fight than was the norm. ‘So who is the commander?’

‘Yohanan ben Levi, he’s Yosef’s rival for power in Galilee and every bit as fanatical; he leads the Zealot faction in Galilee.’

‘Zealots?’

‘They’re zealous for their god, which basically means that they’ll kill anyone who doesn’t believe or think like they do, especially us; and, even more especially, any Jew who has a less fanatical view of their religion than they do. They were the people who destroyed all the art and statuary in Tiberias because they claimed it offended their god.’

‘Barbarians!’ Vespasian’s disgust at such behaviour was plain. ‘How many of the fanatics do your informants reckon this Yohanan has under his command?’

Titus, whose prominent nose, intelligent, quick eyes and large ears made him the image of his fifty-seven-year-old father, suppressed the petulant urge to point out that many of the spies had been recruited by Vespasian; he had taken on the role of chief intelligence officer upon his arrival at the rendezvous with his father in the port of Ptolemais, having brought his legion, the XV Apollinaris, from Egypt. ‘Not as many as we first thought, our informants seem to have exaggerated somewhat.’

Vespasian shook his head and smiled. ‘I’m sorry, Son; I learnt long ago not to apportion blame. They’re as much mine as yours; more so, even, since it’s my army.’

Titus returned the smile. ‘Don’t you mean “the Emperor’s army”, Father?’

‘I do, of course. It’s just that he has, very kindly, lent it to me at the moment and the question is now: how am I going to use it? Roughly how many men of fighting age do our informants think are inside the walls?’

‘No more than five hundred.’

‘And others?’

‘At least two, but no more than three, thousand.’

‘Good; I can give this to the auxiliaries and let them have the chance to show me what they’re made of. It should provide the rest of the army with a bit of sport to whet their appetite for the coming campaign.’

Titus looked with regret at the stone walls of Gabara. ‘It’s a pity about that sly rat Yosef, though; it would have been good to have caught him this early on. Still, getting Yohanan ben Levi will be almost as good; that will be a great piece of news to have trumpeted around Rome. Nero should be very pleased to hear that we have made such a good start and captured one of the main rebel leaders.’

‘What should please Nero and what you think would please Nero and what really does please Nero are three completely separate things, as you should know by now, my boy. Doing too well too quickly won’t necessarily endear us to our Emperor; look at what happened to Corbulo.’

Titus sighed. ‘Very true.’

And that was just the problem that Vespasian faced: considered to have been the greatest general of the age, Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo had been a victim of a combination of his own success and Nero’s jealousy. Having effectively prosecuted a war with Parthia to wrest Armenia back into the Roman sphere of influence, it would have been thought a certainty that the Emperor would have sent Corbulo, his best general, to deal with the crisis, when news of Gallus’ defeat had reached his ears as he was touring Greece entering every competition for singing, poetry and chariot racing and, unsurprisingly, winning them all – all one thousand eight hundred of them; indeed, the Olympic Games and many other religious festivals had been brought forward out of their normal cycles so that Nero could indulge his vanity, believing himself to be the greatest artist and the most competent charioteer of all time.

But it was not so in Nero’s mind. It had been Vespasian to whom Nero had turned; and this despite the fact that he had angered the Emperor by falling asleep and then spluttering awake during one of Nero’s interminable recitals.

Vespasian had been hiding from the Emperor’s displeasure in the lands of the Caenii in Thracia having taken his long-time mistress, Caenis, home to visit her people for the first time since her mother had been sold into slavery whilst pregnant with her. It had been his old friend, Magnus, who had sought him out with the Emperor’s summons, having guessed where he was; Magnus had been with Vespasian, Corbulo and Centurion Faustus when they had been captured by the Caenii forty years previously. A pendant that Caenis had given Vespasian had saved their lives just before the four of them were due to fight to the death; the chieftain of the Caenii, Coronus, Caenis’ uncle, had recognised it as the emblem of his tribe. Upon their release, Vespasian had promised to, one day, reunite Caenis with her people.

Vespasian had known that if he did not obey Nero’s order to return then he would be forever an exile and always on the lookout for the executioner that the Emperor would, inevitably, send. But one man’s reprieve is another man’s downfall as Vespasian found out when, having been forgiven, Nero charged him with suppressing the growing uprising in Judaea and to meet with Corbulo in Corinth on his way to the province. Vespasian had assumed that the orders that he carried from the Emperor for his old acquaintance were for the great general to brief him on the finer points of eastern politics and dealing with rebel guerrillas. It was not so: Corbulo had committed suicide there and then, in compliance with the imperial command and had died at Vespasian’s feet.

It had been a salutary lesson in the workings of the imperial mind and it had left Vespasian in a dilemma: do too well in Judaea and he would attract the Emperor’s jealousy and, most likely, be obliged to suffer the fate of Corbulo; do too badly and, if he was spared execution or enforced suicide, then a fate worse than death awaited: humiliation and the disapprobation of his peers. Either way, the rise of the Flavii, which he and his brother, Sabinus, had striven for throughout their careers, would certainly be put on hold if not terminated.

So how should he conduct this campaign now that it was about to commence? He cursed, inwardly, the cowardly, unmartial nature of the Emperor who craved military success but, fearing to attain it himself, punished those who procured it for him. He was the first Emperor never to have led an army in battle; granted, his great-uncle and adoptive father, Claudius, had only nominally led an army during his lightning visit to Britannia in the first months of the invasion, but this had been enough to secure him a Triumph with a certain degree of legitimacy. His Uncle Gaius Caligula’s minor excursion into Germania Magna was still far more than Nero had achieved militarily and Caligula’s mighty defeat of the god Neptune on the shores of the northern sea had earned him, too, a Triumph – although this had been more a private joke on Caligula’s part as he had forced his legions to attack the sea after they had refused to embark on ships for the invasion of Britannia; he had much enjoyed the looks on the faces of the Senate as he had paraded scores of wagons full of seashells through Rome. Nero’s own Triumph had been when he returned from Greece with his one thousand eight hundred victor’s crowns; he would not want anyone to overshadow that. And yet if Vespasian were to crush the revolt with anything like the alacrity that was required then he would put himself in serious danger from the man who considered himself to be the only person of consequence in the entire world.

It seemed, therefore, to Vespasian that he had three viable choices and none of them were a guarantee of safety. He could do his duty to Rome and risk the wrath of the Emperor. He could deliberately fail and let the province erupt into violence and then slip from Rome’s grasp and trust that his punishment would not be too severe. Or he could … but, no, he did not want to dwell on that; he did not want to contemplate just what else he could do with the army that the Emperor had let fall into his hands.

And now here he was at the point of decision. He drew a breath and looked at Titus. ‘To fail on purpose would get the family nowhere. Therefore, we must succeed and pray to our guardian god, Mars, that the situation in Rome will change and success is no longer rewarded by death.’

Titus frowned. ‘What are you talking about, Father?’

‘I’m saying that I’ve made a decision: we’re going to prosecute this war ruthlessly and crush the rebellion as quickly as possible and then figure out how to proceed once we’re victorious because I’ll not be so compliant as Corbulo.’

‘You mean you would defy the Emperor.’

‘Someone at some stage has to. I’d prefer it not to be me but if it comes to the choice of certain death by suicide as the reward for good service or … well, let’s put it this way: whatever happens I shall not be choosing the first alternative.’ He turned to the party of staff officers awaiting orders a short distance behind him. ‘Gentlemen, the auxiliaries will handle this. Prefects Virdius and Gellianus, your two cohorts should be sufficient to take the walls supported by Petro’s archers. I want no mercy shown; utter destructi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Epilogue
• Author’s Note
• About the Author
• Also by Robert Fabbri
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements