Robert Silverberg

An Outpost of the Realm

You know your enemy from the first moment you see him. I saw mine on a gleaming spring day almost a year ago, when I had gone down to the Grand Canal as I usually do in the morning to enjoy the breezes. A flotilla of ornate Roman barges was moving along the water, shouldering our gondolas aside as though they were so much flotsam. In the prow of the foremost barge stood a sturdy dark-bearded young Imperial proconsul, grinning in the morning sunshine, looking for all the world like some new Alexander taking possession of his most recently conquered domain.

I was watching from the steps of the little Temple of Apollo, just by the Rialto. The proconsul’s barge bore three great poles from which the eagle standard fluttered, and they were too tall to pass. The drawbridge, for some reason, was slow to open. As he looked impatiently around his gaze fell on me and his bright, insolent eyes met mine. They rested there a moment, comfortably, presumptuously. Then he winked and waved, and cupped his hand to his lips and called something to me that I could not make out.

“What?” I said, automatically, speaking in Greek.

“Falco! Quintus Pompeius Falco!”

Then the bridge opened and his barge passed through and was gone, swiftly heading down the canal. His destination, I soon would learn, was the Palace of the Doges on the great plaza, where he was going to take up residence in the house where the princes of Venetia formerly had dwelled.

I glanced at Sophia, my waiting-maid. “Did you hear him?” I asked. “What was that he said?”

“His name, lady. He is Pompeius Falco, our new master.”

“Ah. Of course. Our new master.”

How I hated him in that first moment! This hairy-faced garlic-eating Italian boy, making his swaggering way into our serene and lovely city to be our overlord—how could I not detest him? Some crude soldier from Neapolis or Calabria, jumped up out of sweaty obscurity to become proconsul of Venetia as a reward, no doubt, for his bloodthirstiness on the battlefield, who now would fill our ears with his grating Latin crudities and desecrate the elegance of our banquets with his coarse Roman ways—I loathed him on sight. I felt soiled by the cool, casual glance he had bestowed on me in that moment before his barge passed under the drawbridge. Quintus Pompeius Falco, indeed! What could that ugly name possibly mean to me? I, a highborn woman of Venetia, Byzantine to the core, who could trace her ancestry to the princes of Constantinopolis, who had mingled since childhood with the great ones of the Greek world?

It was no surprise that the Romans were here. For months I had felt the Empire seeping into our city the way the bitter ocean tides slip past our barrier islands into our quiet lagoon. That is the way it is in Venetia: we shelter ourselves as best we can from the sea, but in time of storm it prevails over everything and comes surging in upon us, engulfing us and flooding us. There is no sea in all the world more powerful than the Empire of Roma; and now it was about to sweep over us at last.

We were a defeated race, after all. Five, eight, ten years had passed, already, since the Basileus Leo XI and the Emperor Flavius Romulus had signed the Treaty of Ravenna by which the Eastern and Western Empires were reunited under Roman rule and all was as it had been so many centuries ago in the time of the earliest Caesars. The great Greek moment was over. We had had our time of glory, two hundred years of it, but the Romans had prevailed in the end. Piece by piece the whole independent Byzantine world had returned to Roman control, and it was our turn to be swallowed up now, Venetia, the westernmost outpost of the fallen realm. Roman barges sailed our canals. A Roman proconsul had come here to live in the Palace of the Doges. Roman soldiers strutted in our streets. Fifty years of bloody civil war, two hundred years of Greek ascendancy after that, and now it was all nothing but history. We did not even have an Emperor of our own. For a thousand years, since the time of Constantinus, we of the East had had that. But now we would have to bend our knees to the Caesars as we did in ancient times. Do you wonder that I hated Caesar’s man on sight, as he proudly made his entry into our conquered but not humbled city?

Scarcely anything changed at first. They did not reconsecrate the Temple of Zeus as a temple of Jupiter. Our fine Byzantine coins, our solidi and miliaresia, continued to circulate, though I suppose there were Roman aurei and sesterces among them now. We spoke the language we had always spoken. Official documents now bore the Roman date—it was their year 2206—instead of using the Greek numbering, which ran from the founding of Constantinopolis. But who among us paid attention to official documents? For us it was still the year 1123.

We saw Roman officials occasionally in the plaza, or in the shops of the Rialto, or journeying in gondolas of state along the main canals, but they were few in number and they seemed to take care not to intrude on our lives. The great men of the city, the members of the old patrician class from whose ranks the Doges once had been drawn, went about in proper pomp and majesty as usual. There was no Doge, of course, but there had been none for a long time.

My own existence was as it had been. As the daughter of Alexios Phokas and the widow of Heraclios Cantacuzenos I had wealth and privilege. My palace on the Grand Canal was a center for the highborn and cultured. My estate to the east in warm and golden Istria yielded a rich bounty of figs, olives, oats, and wheat, and afforded me a place of diversion when I wearied of the watery charms of Venetia. For as much as I love Venetia I find the city’s dank winters and sweltering miasmic summers very much of a burden on my spirit, and must escape from it when those times come.

I had my lovers and my suitors, who were not necessarily the same men. It was generally assumed that I would marry again: I was still only thirty, childless and wealthy and widely hailed for my beauty, and of high family with close connection to the Byzantine imperial dynasty. But although my mourning time was over, I was in no hurry for a new husband. I had been too young when I was married to Heraclios, and had had insufficient experience of the world. The accident that had robbed me of my lord so early had given me the opportunity to make up for my past innocence, and so I had done. Like Penelope, I surrounded myself with suitors who would gladly have taken a daughter of the Phokases to wife, widow that she might be. But while these ambitious grandees, most of them ten years older than I or more, buzzed about me bringing their gifts and murmuring their promises, I amused myself with a succession of less distinguished gentlemen of greater vigor—gondoliers, grooms, musicians, a soldier or two—to the great enhancement of my knowledge of life.

I suppose it was inevitable that I would encounter the Roman proconsul sooner or later. Venetia is a small city; and it was incumbent upon him to ingratiate himself with the local aristocracy. For our part we were obliged to be civil with him: among the Romans all benefits flow downward from the top, and he was the Emperor’s man in Venetia. When lands, military rank, lucrative municipal offices became available, it was Quintus Pompeius Falco who would distribute them, and he could, if he chose, ignore the formerly mighty of the city and raise new men to favor. So it behooved those who had been powerful under the fallen government to court him if they hoped to maintain their high positions. Falco had his suitors just as I had mine. On feast days he was seen at the Temple of Zeus, surrounded by Venetian lords who fawned on him as though he were Zeus himself come to visit. He had the place of honor at many banquets; he was invited to join in the hunt at the estates of the great noblemen; often, as the barges of the wealthy traveled down our canals, there was Pompeius Falco among them on deck, laughing and sipping wine and accepting the flattery of his hosts.

As I say, I could not help but encounter him eventually. From time to time I saw him eyeing me from afar at some grand occasion of state; but I never gave him the satisfaction of returning his glance. And then came an evening when I could no longer avoid direct contact with him.

It was a banquet at the villa of my father’s younger brother, Demetrios. With my father dead, Demetrios was the head of our family, and his invitation had the power of a command. What I did not know was that Demetrios, for all his sacks of gold and his many estates in the hinterland, was angling for a political post in the new Roman administration. He wished to become Master of the Cavalry, not a military position at all—for what sort of cavalry could seaborne Venetia have?—but simply a sinecure that would entitle him to a share of the city’s customs revenues. Therefore he was cultivating the friendship of Pompeius Falco and had invited him to the banquet. And, to my horror, he had seated me at the proconsul’s right hand at the dinner table. Was my uncle willing to play the pimp for the sake of gaining a few extra ducats a year? So it would appear. I was ablaze with fury. But there was nothing I could do now except go through with my part. I had no wish to cause a scandal in my uncle’s house.

Falco said to me, “We are companions this evening, it would seem. May I escort you to your seat, Lady Eudoxia?”

He spoke in Greek, and accurate Greek at that, though there was a thick-tongued barbarian undercurrent to his speech. I took his arm. He was taller than I had expected, and very broad through the shoulders. His eyes were alert and penetrating and his smile was a quick, forceful one. From a distance he had seemed quite boyish but I saw now that he was older than I had thought, at least thirty-five, perhaps even more. I detested him for his easy, confident manner, for his proprietarial air, for his command of our language. I even detested him for his beard, thick and black: beards had not been in fashion in the Greek world for several generations now. His was a short, dense fringe, a soldier’s beard, that gave him the look of an emperor on one of the old Roman coins. Very likely that was its purpose.

Platters of grilled fish came, and cool wine to go with it. “I love your Venetian wine,” he said. “So much more delicate than the heavy stuff of the south. Shall I pour, lady?”

There were servants standing around to do the pouring. But the proconsul of Venetia poured my wine for me, and everyone in the room noticed it.

I was the dutiful niece. I made amiable conversation, as though Pompeius Falco were a mere guest and not the agent of our conqueror; I pretended that I had utterly accepted the fall of Byzantium and the presence of Roman functionaries among us. Where was he from? Tarraco, he said. That was a city far in the west, he explained: in Hispania. The Emperor Flavius Romulus was from Tarraco also. Ah, and was he related to the Emperor, then? No, said Falco, not at all. But he was a close friend of the Emperor’s youngest son, Marcus Quintilius. They had fought side by side in the Cappadocian campaign.

“And are you pleased to have been posted to Venetia?” I asked him, as the wine came around again.

“Oh, yes, yes, lady, very much. What a beautiful little city! So unusual: all these canals, all these bridges. And how civilized it is here, after the frenzy and clamor of Roma.”

“Indeed, we are quite civilized,” I said.

But I was boiling within, for I knew what he really meant, which was, How quaint your Venetia is, how sweet, a precious little bauble of a place. And how clever it was of you to build your pretty little town in the sea as you did, so that all the streets are canals and one must get about by gondola instead of by carriage. And what a relief it is for me to spend some time in a placid provincial backwater like this, sipping good wine with handsome ladies while all the local lordlings scurry around me desperately trying to curry my favor, instead of my having to make my way in the cutthroat jungle that surrounds the Imperial court in Roma. And as he went on praising the beauties of the city I came to hate him more and more. It is one thing to be conquered, and quite another to be patronized.

I knew he intended to seduce me. One didn’t need the wisdom of Athena to see that. But I resolved then and there to seduce him first: to seize such little control as I could over this Roman, to humble him and thus to defeat him. Falco was an attractive enough animal, of course. On a sheer animal level there surely was pleasure to be had from him. And also the other pleasure of the conqueror conquered, the pursuer made the pursued: yes. I was eager for that. I was no longer the innocent of seventeen who had been given as bride to the radiant Heraclios Cantacuzenos. I had wiles, now. I was a woman, not a child.

I shifted the conversation to the arts, to literature, to philosophy, to history. I wanted to show him up as the barbarian he was; but he turned out to be unexpectedly well educated, and when I asked if he had been to the theater to see the current play, which was the Nausicaa of Sophocles, he said that he had, but that his favorite play of Sophocles was the Philoctetes, because it so well defined the conflict between honor and patriotism. “And yet, Lady Eudoxia, I can see why you are partial to the Nausicaa, for surely that kind princess must be a woman close to your heart.” More flattery, and I loathed him for it; but in truth I had wept at the theater when Nausicaa and Odysseus had loved and parted, and perhaps I did see something of her in myself, or something of myself in her.

At the evening’s end he asked me to take the midday meal with him at his palace two days hence. I was prepared for that and coolly begged a prior engagement. He proposed dinner, then, the first of the week following. Again I invented a reason for declining. He smiled. He understood the nature of the game we had entered into.

“Perhaps another time, then,” he said, and gracefully left me for my uncle’s company.

I meant to see him again, of course, but at a time and a place of my own choosing. And soon I found the occasion. When traveling troupes of musicians reach Venetia, they find a ready welcome at my home. A concert was to be held; I invited the proconsul. He came, accompanied by a stolid Roman retinue. I gave him the place of honor, naturally. Falco lingered after the performance to praise the quality of the flutes and the poignance of the singer; but he said nothing further about my joining him for dinner. Good: he had abdicated in my favor. From this point on I would define the nature of the chase. I offered him no further invitations either but allowed him a brief tour of the downstairs rooms of my palace before he left, and he admired the paintings, the sculptures, the cabinet of antiquities, all the fine things that I had inherited from my father and my grandfather.

The next day a Roman soldier arrived with a gift for me from the proconsul: a little statuette in highly polished black stone, showing a woman with the head of a cat. The note from Falco that accompanied it said that he had obtained it while serving in the province of Aegyptus some years ago: it was an image of one of the Aegyptian gods, which he had purchased at a temple in Memphis, and he thought I might find some beauty in it. Indeed it was beautiful, after a fashion, but also it was frightening and strange. In that way it was very much like Quintus Pompeius Falco, I found myself thinking, to my own great surprise. I put the statuette on a shelf in my cabinet—there was nothing like it there; I had never seen anything of its kind—and I resolved to ask Falco to tell me something of Aegyptus the next time I saw him, of its pyramids, its bizarre gods, its torrid sandy wastes.

I sent him a brief note of thanks. Then I waited seven days and invited him to join me for a holiday at my Istrian estate the following week.

Unfortunately, he replied, that week the cousin of Caesar would be passing through Venetia and would have to be entertained. Could he visit my estate another time?

The rejection caught me off guard. He was a better player of the game than I had suspected; I broke into hot tears of rage. But I had enough sense not to answer immediately. After three days I wrote again, telling him that I regretted being unable to offer him an alternate date at present, but perhaps I would find myself free to entertain him later in the season. It was a risky ploy: certainly it jeopardized my uncle’s ambitions. But Falco seemingly took no offense. When our gondolas passed on the canal two days later, he bowed grandly to me and smiled.

I waited what seemed to be the right span of time and invited him again; and this time he accepted. A ten-man bodyguard came with him: did he think I meant to murder him? But of course the Empire must proclaim its power at every opportunity. I had been warned he would bring an entourage, and I was prepared for it, lodging his soldiers in distant outbuildings and sending for girls of the village to amuse and distract them. Falco himself I installed in the guest suite of my own dwelling.

He had another gift for me: a necklace made from beads of some strange green stone, carved in curious patterns, with a blood-red wedge of stone at its center.

“How lovely,” I said, although I thought it frightening and harsh.

“It comes from the land of Mexico,” he told me. “Which is a great kingdom in Nova Roma, far across the Ocean Sea. They worship mysterious gods there. Their festivals are held atop a great pyramid, where priests cut out the hearts of sacrificial victims until rivers of blood run in the streets of the city.”

“And you have been there?”

“Oh, yes, yes. Six years past. Mexico and another land called Peru. I was in the service of Caesar’s ambassador to the kingdoms of Nova Roma then.”

It stunned me to think that this man had been to Nova Roma. Those two great continents on the other side of the Ocean—they seemed as remote as the face of the moon to me. But of course in this great time of the Empire under Flavius Romulus the Romans have carried their banners to the most remote parts of the world.

I stroked the stone beads—the green stone was smooth as silk and seemed to burn with an inner fire—and put the necklace on.

“Aegyptus—Nova Roma—” I shook my head. “And have you been everywhere, then?”

“Yes, very nearly so,” he said, laughing. “The men who serve Flavius Caesar grow accustomed to long journeys. My brother has been to Khitai and the islands of Cipangu. My uncle went far south in Africa, beyond Aegyptus, to the lands where the hairy men dwell. It is a golden age, lady. The Empire reaches out boldly to every corner of the world.” Then he smiled and leaned close and said, “And you, lady? Have you traveled very much?”

“I have seen Constantinopolis,” I said.

“Ah. The great capital, yes. I stopped there on my way to Aegyptus. The races in the Hippodrome—nothing like it, even in Urbs Roma itself! I saw the royal palace: from the outside, of course. They say it has walls of gold. I think not even Caesar’s house can equal it.”

“I was in it, once, when I was a child. When the Basileus still ruled, I mean. I saw the golden halls. I saw the lions of gold that sit beside the throne and roar and wave their tails, and the jewelled birds on the gold and silver trees in the throne-chamber, who open their beaks and sing. The Basileus gave me a ring. My father was his distant relative, you know. I am of the Phokas family. Later I married a Cantacuzenos: my husband too had royal connections.”

“Ah,” he said, as though greatly impressed, as though the names of the Byzantine aristocracy might possibly mean something to him.

But in fact I knew he was still condescending to me. A dethroned emperor is no emperor at all; a fallen aristocracy merits little awe.

And what did it matter to him that I had been once to Constantinopolis—he who had been there too, in passing, on his way to fabulous Aegyptus? The one great journey I had taken in my life was a mere stopover to him. His cosmopolitanism humbled me, as I suppose it was meant to do. He had been to other continents: other worlds, really. Aegyptus! Nova Roma! He could find things to praise about our capital, yes, but it was clear from his effusive tone that he really regarded it as inferior to the city of Roma, and inferior perhaps to the cities of Mexico and Peru as well, and other exotic places that he had visited in Caesar’s name. The breadth and scope of his travels dazzled me. Here we Greeks were, penned up in our ever-shrinking realm that now had collapsed utterly. Here was I, daughter of one minor city on the periphery of that fallen realm, pathetically proud of my one visit long ago to our formerly mighty capital. But he was a Roman; all the world was open to him. If mighty Constantinopolis of the golden walls was just one more city to him, what was our little Venetia? What was I?

I hated him more violently than ever. I wished I had never invited him.

But he was my guest. I had had a wondrous banquet prepared, with the finest of wines, and delicacies that even a far-traveled Roman might not have met with before. He was obviously pleased. He drank and drank and drank, growing flushed though never losing control, and we talked far into the night.

I must confess that he amazed me with the scope and range of his mind.

He was no mere barbarian. He had had a Greek tutor, as all Romans of good family had had for over a thousand years. A wise old Athenian named Eukleides, he was, who had filled the young Falco’s head with poetry and drama and philosophy, and drilled him in the most obscure nuances of our language, and taught him the abstract sciences, at which we Greeks have always excelled. And so this proconsul was at home not just in Roman things like science and engineering and the art of warfare, but also in Plato and Aristoteles, in the playwrights and poets, in the history of my race back to Agamemnon’s time—indeed, he was able to discourse on all manner of things that I myself knew more by name than by their inner meaning.

He talked until I had had all the talking I could bear, and then some. And at last—it was the middle hour of the night, and the owls were crying in the darkness—I took him by the hand and led him to my bed, if only to silence that flow of words that came from him like the torrents of Aegyptus’s Nilus itself.

He lit a taper in the bedchamber. Our clothes dropped away as though they had turned to mist.

He reached for me and drew me down.

I had never been loved by a Roman before. In the last moment before he embraced me I had a sudden fresh burst of fiery contempt for him and all his kind, for I was certain that his innate brutality now would come to the fore, that all his philosophic eloquence had been but a pose and now he would take possession of me the way Romans for fifteen hundred years had taken possession of everything in their path. He would subjugate me; he would colonize me. He would be coarse and violent and clumsy, but he would have his way, as Romans always did, and afterward he would rise and leave without a word.

I was wrong, as I had been wrong about everything else concerning this man.

His touch indeed was Roman, not Greek. That is to say, instead of insinuating himself into me in some devious, cunning, left-handed manner, he was straightforward and direct. But not clumsy, not at all. He knew what to do, and he set about doing it; and where there were things he had to learn, as any man must when it is his first time with a new woman, he knew what they were and he knew how to learn them. I understood now what was meant when women said that Greek men make love like poets and Romans like engineers. What I had never realized until that moment was that engineers have skills that many poets never have, and that an engineer could be capable of writing fine poetry, but would you not think twice about riding across a bridge that had been designed or built by a poet?

We lay together until dawn, laughing and talking when we were not embracing. And then, having had no sleep, we rose in our nakedness and walked through the halls to the bath-chamber, and in great merriment washed ourselves, and, still naked, walked out into the sweet pink dawn. Side by side we stood, saying nothing, watching the sun come up out of Byzantium and begin its day’s journey onward toward Roma, toward the lands along the Western Sea, toward Nova Roma, toward far-off Khitai.

We dressed and had a breakfast of wine and cheese and figs, and I called for horses and took him on a tour of the estate. I showed him the olive groves, the fields of wheat, the mill and its stream, the fig trees laden with fruit. The day was warm and beautiful; the birds sang, the sky was clear.

Later, as we took our midday meal on the patio overlooking the garden, he said, “This is a marvelous place. I hope that when I’m old I can retire to a country estate like this.”

“Surely there must be one in your family,” I said.

“Several. But not, I think, as peaceful as this. We Romans have forgotten how to live peacefully.”

“Whereas we, since we are a declining race, can allow ourselves the luxury of a little tranquility?”

He looked at me strangely. “You see yourselves as a declining race?”

“Don’t be disingenuous, Quintus Pompeius. There’s no need to flatter me now. Of course we are.”

“Because you’re no longer an imperial power?”

“Of course. Once ambassadors from places like Nova Roma and Baghdad and Memphis and Khitai came to us. Not here to Venetia, I mean, but to Constantinopolis. Now the ambassadors go only to Roma; what the Greek cities get is tourists. And Roman proconsuls.”

“How strange your view of the world is, Eudoxia.”

“What do you mean?”

“You equate the loss of the Imperium with being in decline.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“If it happened to Roma, yes. But Byzantium isn’t Roma.” He was staring at me very seriously now. “The Eastern Empire was a folly, a distraction, a great mistake that somehow endured a thousand years. It should never have been. The burden of ruling the world was given to Roma: we accept it as our duty. There was never any need for an Eastern Empire in the first place.”

“It was all some terrible error of Constantinus’s, you say?”

“Exactly. It was a bad time for Roma, then. Even empires have their fluctuations; even ours. We had overextended ourselves, and everything was shaking. Constantinus had political problems at home, and too many troublesome sons. He thought the Empire was unwieldy and impossible to hold together, so he built the eastern capital and let the two halves drift apart. The system worked for a while—no, I admit it, for hundreds of years—but as the East lost sight of the fact that its political system had been set up by Romans and began to remember that it was really Greek, its doom became inevitable. A Greek Imperium is an anomaly that can’t sustain itself in the modern world. It couldn’t even sustain itself very long in the ancient world. The phrase is a contradiction in terms, a Greek Imperium. Agamemnon had no Imperium: he was only a tribal chief, who could barely make his power felt ten miles from Mycenae. And how long did the Athenian Empire last? How long did Alexander’s kingdom hold together, once Alexander had died? No, no, no, Eudoxia, the Greeks are a marvelous people, the whole world is in their debt for any number of great achievements, but building and sustaining governments on a large scale isn’t one of their skills. And never has been.”

“You think so?” I said, with glee in my voice. “Then why was it that we were able to defeat you in the Civil War? It was Caesar Maximilianus who surrendered to the Basileus Andronicus, is that not so, West yielding to East, and not the other way around. For two hundred years we of the East were supreme in the world, may I remind you.”

Falco shrugged. “The gods were teaching Roma a lesson, that’s all. It was another fluctuation. We were being punished for having allowed the Empire to be divided in the first place. We needed to be humbled for a little while, so we’d never make the same mistake again. You Greeks beat us very soundly in Maximilianus’s time, and you had a couple of hundred years of being, as you say, supreme, while we discovered what it felt like to be a second-rate power. But it was an impossible situation. The gods intend Roma to rule the world. There’s simply no doubt of that. It was true in the time of Carthago and it’s true today. And so the Greek Empire fell apart without even the need for a second Civil War. And so here we are. A Roman procurator sits in the royal palace at Constantinopolis. And a Roman proconsul in Venetia. Although at the moment he happens to be at the country estate of a lovely Venetian lady.”

“You’re serious?” I said. “You really believe that you are a chosen people? That Roma holds the Imperium by the will of the gods?”

“Absolutely.”

He was altogether sincere.

“The Pax Romana is Zeus’s gift to humanity? Jupiter’s gift, I should say.”

“Yes,” he said. “But for us, the world would fall into chaos. Gods, woman, do you think we want to spend our lives being administrators and bureaucrats? Don’t you think I’d prefer to retire to some estate like this and spend my days hunting and fishing and farming? But we are the race that understands how to rule. And therefore we have the obligation to rule. Oh, Eudoxia, Eudoxia, you think we’re simple brutal beasts who go around conquering everybody for the sheer joy of conquest, and you don’t realize that this is our task, our burden, our job.”

“I will weep for you, then.”

He smiled. “Am I a simple brutal beast?”

“Of course you are. All Romans are.”

He stayed with me for five days. I think we slept perhaps ten hours in all that time. Then he begged leave of me, saying that it was necessary that he return to his tasks in Venetia, and he went away.

I remained behind, with plenty to think about.

I could not, of course, accept his thesis that Greeks were incapable of governing anyone and that Roma had some divine mandate to run the world. The Eastern Empire had spread over great segments of the known world in its first few hundred years—Syria, Arabia, Aegyptus, much of eastern Europa even as far as Venetia, which is little more than a good stone’s throw from Urbs Roma itself—and we had thrived and prospered mightily, as the wealth of the great Byzantine cities still attests. And in later years, when the Romans had begun to find that their Greek cousins were growing uncomfortably powerful and had attempted to reassert the supremacy of the West, we had fought a fifty-year Civil War and had beaten them quite handily. Which had led to two centuries of Byzantine hegemony, hard times for the West while Byzantine merchant ships traveled to the rich cities of Asia and Africa. I suppose ultimately we had overreached ourselves, as all empires eventually do, or perhaps we simply went soft with too much prosperity, and so the Romans awakened out of their sleep of centuries and shook our empire apart. Maybe they are the great exception: maybe their Imperium really will go on and on and on through the ages to come, as it has done for the last fifteen hundred years, with only minor periods of what Falco would call “fluctuations” to disrupt its unbroken span of command. And therefore our territories have been reduced by the inexorable force of the imperial destiny of Roma to the status of Roman provinces again, as they were in the time of Augustus Caesar. But we had had our time of grandeur. We had ruled the world just as well as the Romans ever did.

Or so I told myself. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn’t so.

We Greeks could understand grandeur, yes. We understand splendor and imperial pomp. But the Romans know how to do the day-by-day work of governing. Maybe Falco was right after all: maybe our pitiful few centuries of Imperium, interrupting the long Roman sway, had been just an anomaly of history. For now the Eastern Empire was only a memory and the Pax Romana was once again in force across thousands of miles, and from his hilltop in Roma the great Caesar Flavius Romulus presided over a realm such as the world had never before known, Romans in remotest Asia, Romans in India, Roman vessels traveling even to the astonishing new continents of the far western hemisphere, strange new inventions coming forth—printed books, weapons that hurl heavy missiles great distances, all sorts of miracles—and we Greeks are reduced to contemplation of past glories as we sit in our conquered cities sipping our wine and reading Homer and Sophocles. For the first time in my life I saw my people as a minor race, elegant, charming, cultivated, unimportant.

How I had despised my handsome proconsul! And how he had revenged himself on me for that!

I stayed in Istria two more days and then I returned to the city. There was a gift waiting for me from Falco: a sleek piece of carved ivory that showed a house of strange design and a woman with delicate features sitting pensively beside a lake under a tree with weeping boughs. The note from him that accompanied it said that it was from Khitai, that he had obtained it in the land of Bactria, on India’s borders. He had not told me that he had been to Bactria too. The thought of his travels on behalf of Roma dizzied me: so many voyages, such strenuous journeys. And I imagined him gathering little treasures such as these wherever he went, and carrying them about with him to bestow on his ladies in other lands. That thought so angered me that I nearly hurled the ivory piece away. But I reconsidered and put it in my cabinet of curios next to the stone goddess from Aegyptus.

It was his turn now to invite me to dine with him at the palace of the Doges, and—I assumed—to spend the night in the bed where the Doges and their consorts once had slept. But I waited a week and then a second week, and the invitation did not come. That seemed out of keeping with my new awareness of him as a man of great attainment. Perhaps I had overestimated him, though. He was, after all, a Roman. He had had what he wanted from me; now he was on to other adventures, other conquests.

I was wrong about that, too.

When my impatience had darkened once again into anger toward him and my fury over having let him use me this way had obliterated all the regard for him that had developed in me during his visit to my estate, I went to my uncle Demetrios and said, “Have you seen this Roman proconsul of ours lately? Has he been ill, do you think?”

“Why, is he of any concern to you, Eudoxia?”

I glowered at him. Having pushed me into Falco’s arms to serve his own purposes, Demetrios had no right to mock me now. Sharply I said, “He owes me the courtesy of an invitation to the palace, uncle. Not that I would accept it—not now. But he should know that he has given offense.”

“And I am supposed to tell him that?”

“Tell him nothing. Nothing!”

Demetrios gave me a knowing smirk. But I was sure he would keep silent. There was nothing for him to gain from humiliating me in the eyes of Pompeius Falco.

The days went by. And then at last came a note from Falco, in elegant Greek script as all his notes were, asking if he might call on me. My impulse was to refuse. But one did not refuse such requests from a proconsul. And in any case I realized that I wanted to see him again. I wanted very much to see him again.

“I hope you will forgive me, lady, for my inattentiveness,” he said. “But I have had a great deal on my mind in these recent weeks.”

“I’m certain that you have,” I said drily.

Color came to his face. “You have every right to be angry with me, Eudoxia. But this has been a time of unusual circumstances. There have been great upheavals in Roma, do you know? The Emperor has reshuffled his Cabinet. Important men have fallen; others have risen suddenly to glory.”

“And how has this concerned you?” I asked him. “Are you one of those who has fallen, or have you risen to glory? Or should I not ask you any of this?”

“One of those who has risen,” he said, “is Gaius Julius Flavillus.”

The name meant nothing to me.

“Gaius Julius Flavillus, lady, had held the post of Third Flamen. Now he is First Tribune. Which is a considerable elevation, as you may know. It happens that Gaius Flavillus is a man of Tarraco, like the Emperor, like myself. He is my father’s cousin. He has been my patron throughout my career. And so—messengers have been going back and forth between Venetia and Roma for all these weeks—I too have been elevated, it seems, by special favor of the new Tribune.”

“Elevated,” I said hollowly.

“Indeed. I have been transferred to Constantinopolis, where I am to be the new procurator. It is the highest administrative post in the former Eastern Empire.” His eyes were glittering with self-satisfaction. But then his expression changed. A kind of sadness came into them, a kind of tenderness. “Lady, you must believe me when I tell you that I greeted the news with a mixture of feelings, not all of them pleasant ones. It is a great honor for me. And yet I would not have left Venetia so quickly of my own choosing. We have barely begun to know each other; and now, to my immense regret, we must part.”

He took my hands in his. He seemed almost to be at the edge of tears. His sincerity seemed real; or else he was a better actor than I suspected.

A kind of numbness spread through me.

“When do you leave?” I asked.

“In three days, lady.”

“Ah. Three days.”

“Three very busy days.”

You could always take me with you to Constantinopolis, I found myself thinking. There would surely be room for me somewhere in the vast palace of the former Basileus where you now will make your home.

But of course that could never be. A Roman rising as swiftly as he was would never want to encumber himself with a Byzantine wife. A Byzantine mistress, perhaps. But mistresses of any sort were no longer what he needed. Now was the time for him to make an auspicious marriage and undertake the next stage of his climb. The procurator’s seat at Constantinopolis would detain him little longer than his proconsulship in Venetia had; his path would lead him before very long back to Roma. He would be a flamen, a tribune, perhaps Pontifex Maximus. If he played his cards right he might some day be Emperor. I might be summoned then to Roma to relive old times, perhaps. But I would not see him again before then.

“May I stay this night with you?” he asked, with a strange new note of uncertainty in his voice, as though expecting that I might refuse.

But of course I did not refuse. That would have been crass and petty; and in any case I wanted him. I knew that this was the last chance.

It was a night of wine and poetry, of tears and laughter, of ecstasy and exhaustion.

And then he was gone, leaving me mired in my petty little provincial life while he went on to Constantinopolis and glory. A grand procession of gondolas followed him down the canal as he made his way to the sea. A new Roman proconsul, so they say, will be arriving in Venetia any day now.

From Falco I had one parting gift: the plays of Aeschylus, in a finely bound volume that had been produced on the printing press, which is one of those new inventions of which they are so proud in Roma. My first reaction was one of scorn, that he should give me this machine-made thing instead of a manuscript indited by hand. And then, as I had done so many times in the days of my involvement with this difficult man, I was forced to reconsider, to admire what at first sight I had seen as cheap and vulgar. The book was beautiful, in its way. More than that: it was a sign of a new age. To deny that new age, or turn my back on it, would be folly.

And so I have learned at first hand of the power of Roma and of the insignificance of the formerly great. Our lovely Venetia was only a way station for him. Constantinopolis of Imperial grandeur will be the same. It was a powerful lesson: I have been thoroughly educated in the ways of Roma and the Romans, to my own great cost, for I see now as I never could have seen before that they are everything and we, polished and refined as we may be, are nothing at all.

I had underestimated Quintus Pompeius Falco at every turn; I had underestimated his race the same way. As had we all, which is why they once again rule the world, or most of it, and we smile and bow and hope for their favor.

He has written to me several times. So I must have made a strong impression on him. He speaks fondly, if guardedly, of our times together. He says nothing, though, about hoping that I will pay a visit to Constantinopolis to see him.

But perhaps I will, one of these days, nevertheless. Or perhaps not. It all depends on what the new proconsul is like.

Content

Robert Silverberg
An Outpost of the Realm