Marcus decided that the workmen could restack the stones without his supervision. He climbed up the ladder, secretly glad for a chance to get out of the hole and breathe some fresh air.
A little distance away, with the Flavian Amphitheatre and the Colossus for a backdrop, Apollodora sat on a pile of neatly stacked bricks. Nearby, one of her slaves was holding little Lucius in her arms, cooing to him. Apollodora did not look happy.
“Has something happened?” asked Marcus.
“Two letters arrived for you,” she said, producing the little scrolls. “Brought by separate messengers.”
“Did you read them?” said Marcus, frowning.
“Of course not! That’s why I’m here.”
He understood. She wanted to know what was in the letters.
She handed him the first letter. The seal was familiar. Marcus himself had carved the carnelian stone in Apollodorus’s ring; when pressed into the sealing wax, it left an image of Trajan’s Column.
“This is from your father,” he said. “You could have opened it, if you wished.”
Apollodora shook her head. “I was too nervous. You read it, husband, and tell me what he says.”
The letter had come from Damascus, where Apollodorus had been living for several months. Technically, Hadrian had not banished Apollodorus from Roma, but the imperial order that assigned him to an indefinite posting in his native city amounted to the same thing. Apollodorus had no desire to return to Damascus. Officially, Hadrian had claimed that he needed a builder with Apollodorus’s experience to oversee repairs to the Roman garrison, but the posting was clearly a punishment.
In the letter, Apollodorus made no complaints and said nothing that might be construed as criticism of the emperor. Perhaps, Marcus thought, his father-in-law’s exile had at last taught him to choose his words carefully. Marcus skipped over the formalities and found the gist of the letter, which he read aloud to Apollodora.
“‘You know that I am most eager to return to Roma, so that I can resume my work on the Luna statue and serve the emperor to my fullest capacity on any other projects that may please him. Towards that end, in my spare time – of which I sadly have too much here – I have composed a treatise on siege engines. This treatise I dedicated to the emperor. I sent him the first copy, with a note to express my hope that this small contribution to the science of war might meet with his approval. Though I sent this copy to him some months ago, I have not heard back from him. If you have any way to discover whether the emperor received this offering, and what he thought of it, I should be grateful if you could let me know, sonin-law…’”
Marcus scanned the rest of the letter. Apollodorus described a sandstorm that had swept through the city, made some wry comments about Damascene cuisine (“goat, goat, and more goat”), and noted that unrest among the Jews throughout the region seemed to be on the rise again. Attached to the letter was a scrap of parchment upon which Apollodorus had drawn his latest version of the Luna statue.
“Poor father,” said Apollodora. “He’s so miserable.”
“He doesn’t say that.”
“Because he’s afraid to. That’s the saddest thing of all.”
Marcus had to agree. His father-in-law’s vanity and bombast had sometimes been difficult to take, but Marcus cringed to see the once-proud man reduced to the status of a miscreant servant, desperate to return to the emperor’s good graces.
“What’s the other letter?” Marcus said.
Apollodora handed it to him. It bore the imperial seal in red wax, and the parchment was of the high quality that Hadrian always used when corresponding with Marcus, which he did quite often, using the new imperial postal service, which was far quicker and more reliable than the piecemeal system it replaced.
Marcus broke the seal and unrolled the scroll. The letter came from a far northern outpost in Britannia. He quickly scanned the letter for any mention of his father-in-law, but saw none.
As usual, Hadrian inquired about progress on the temple and offered highly detailed instructions on how the work was to be carried out. He described his tour of Gaul and Britannia, which had succeeded in making him known to the legions with whom he had previously had no contact. Hadrian relished his reputation as a soldier’s soldier, able to endure hardship alongside his troops; like Trajan, he was not afraid to sleep on the ground, march for days, ford rivers, and climb mountains. He also included a few sketches he had made, studies for a massive wall that would cross the entire breadth of the island of Britannia at its narrowest point. To man this fortified wall he would need at least fifteen thousand auxiliaries from all over the empire.
“A wall across Britannia?” said Apollodora, looking at the drawings over his shoulder. Her dismissive tone made her sound uncannily like her father. “Trajan wouldn’t have built a wall. He would have conquered whatever lay beyond.”
“Only if the barbarians had something worth looting,” said Marcus.
The wall was emblematic of the emperor’s new frontier policy. Hadrian believed that there was no longer any incentive to push outwards in conquest; nothing remained that was worth conquering except the western provinces of Parthia, which Trajan had briefly seized but could not control.
Under Hadrian, a consensus was forming that the empire had reached a natural limit; the wild, impoverished lands beyond its borders offered little to loot, and instead were full of potential looters. It was Hadrian’s goal not to conquer these people but to keep them out. His task was to maintain peace and prosperity within the existing boundaries of the empire.
Almost as an afterthought, Hadrian mentioned that he had dismissed his private secretary, Suetonius, who would returning from Britannia to private life in Roma. Marcus read aloud: “‘I realize that you have been on friendly terms with this person, so I wish to tell you this news myself. You will doubtless hear rumours regarding the reason for his dismissal. The fact is that this person developed an inappropriate professional relationship with the empress.’”
“What in Hades does that mean?” said Apollodora.
“Court politics,” said Marcus. “Sabina has her courtiers and Hadrian has his, and when relations between the emperor and empress are strained, those courtiers sometimes find themselves in an awkward spot. Anyone too closely allied with Sabina runs the risk of being dismissed by Hadrian. I suspect that’s what’s happened to Suetonius.”
“My father, and now Suetonius – and there have been quite a few others,” said Apollodora. “Men whose lives have been ruined because they said a wrong word or gave the emperor a wrong look.”
“I hardly think Suetonius’s life is ruined,” said Marcus. “He’s coming back to Roma, isn’t he? He’ll finally have time to finish that history he’s always dreamed of writing, about the first Caesars.”
Apollodora gazed despondently at the letter. “No mention of my father, then, or the treatise he sent to Hadrian?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“What will happen if you cross the emperor, husband?”
Marcus blew out his cheeks. “I shall try my best not to do so.” He wanted to tell her there was no cause for fear, but in truth, there was a harsh and even petty side to Hadrian. Marcus told himself that the situation could be much worse. Except for the small number of executions that took place at the outset of his reign, Hadrian had kept his word to kill no senators, and his punishments were mild compared to those of some of his predecessors. When Marcus recalled the stories his father had told him about the reign of Domitian – who had forced Lucius Pinarius to face a lion in the arena, and whose favorite method of interrogation had been burning men’s genitals – the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian seemed gentle by comparison.