The Bow of Heaven - Book I: The Other Al - By Andrew Levkoff Page 0,1

of the consulship of

Gaius Marius the Elder and Lucius Cornelius Cinna

If you are a citizen of Rome, you will not know the count of the year, because history, being a thing of the past, is of little interest to you. Rome concerns itself with today and tomorrow, but cares little for yesterday. So while we Greeks (the learned ones, that is) know that 690 years had passed since the first Olympiad, you Romans know only that which concerns you most: who is in power now. Which I suppose is a very modern, forward-looking attitude, for who can remember who was in charge seventy or eighty years ago? Should a Roman astound you with the ability to recall such a year, you may assume with some assuredness that some costly and bloody war was fought, a renegade noble took political matters into his own hands, or a rebellion of one sort or another was put down. Or perhaps a bit of each.

When I was little more than a boy, time had stopped altogether: the count of the year reset itself to 1, and would remain there the following year and the one after that, for so many turns of the calendar I cannot recall the count. Ah, invincible, immortal youth. You see, free men may make use of the passage of time as if each golden coin may forever be newly minted: lay plans, set goals, chart achievements. But never mind. However you set your clock, what I speak of now transpired sixty-six years ago. I was 19, about to be imprisoned for the next thirty-three years of my life, not in a cell, but to the will a single man.

My, Alexandros, you whine like a stuck boar. Reader, pay no attention to the sniveling of a melodramatic ancient who has outstayed his welcome above ground. I have had more than my fair portion of satisfaction and accomplishment. I have even known love. And as you see, I am quite accomplished in the art of digression. Move along, Alexandros, move along.

***

Who am I, you may protest, and with what credentials do I claim the right to chronicle the life of one of Rome’s once venerable patriarchs? I am no one. I am less than no one. But I was there through it all, and now I shall bear witness. You of breeding and substance, you senators and aristocrats may dismiss with a wave of your soft hands the thread of my narrative should it not unravel to your liking. Nonetheless, I shall tell what I know for truth’s sake and my master’s honor, and the glory of Rome be damned!

My name is Alexandros, son of Theodotos of Elateia. I may be bald, half-blind and more than a little wobbly on these eighty-five year-old willow branches that serve for legs, but my mind has yet to fail me; it is as keen today as the day I was made a slave of Rome.

Now there’s a dull word for you, commonplace and prosaic, like the chalky base coat of a mural, necessary to fortify the coming of the artist’s colorful strokes but ultimately invisible, its worth unseen. It is a word without bias or weight, like ‘water,’ or ‘tree.’ Unless you happen to be one. Then, the world becomes a simple but lopsided place. There are owners and there are the owned. And the latter, those afflicted with fits of common sense and introspection, must soon come to ask themselves in the black, sleepless hours, why? Why would the gods, in their unfathomable wisdom, give us life only to watch us fall to a state as low as this? What good could ever come of such a fate? There were those of us, I among them, who once blithely sought answers to the essence of being, who contemplated the meaning of existence with a pomposity only the truly ignorant may display. Without warning, the focus of our contemplation was wrenched from such esoteric heights and narrowed most effectively to the chafing sores of our ankle chains. The pursuit of knowledge is an inaudible whisper lost in the stentorian debate of an empty stomach, drowned out even by the quiet discourse of muffled sobs in the night.

What folly to once believe we were the masters of our fate, when at the point of a sword we may so swiftly and permanently become the mastered. In this world, philosophy must go begging. No, not so, for even a beggar may choose his street corner. To