Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,99
power from the food.”
I didn’t argue with him.
By the end of the second century, Antioch was a heavily Christian city. And it seemed to me as I read the works of new Bishops and philosophers that worse things than Christianity could come upon us.
Realize, however, David, that Antioch did not lie under a cloud of decay; there was no sense in the air of the end of the Empire. If anything there was bustling energy everywhere. Commerce gives one this feel, that false sense that there is growth and creativity, perhaps, when there is none. Things are exchanged, not necessarily improved.
Then came the dark time for us. Two forces came together which bore down on Marius, straining all his courage. Antioch was more interesting than it had ever been.
The Mother and the Father had never stirred since the first night of my coming!
Let me describe the first disaster, because for me it was not so hard to bear, and I had only sympathy for Marius.
As I’ve told you, the question of who was Emperor had become a joke. But it really became a howl with the events of the early 200s.
The Emperor of the moment was Caracalla, a regular murderer. On a pilgrimage to Alexandria to see the remains of Alexander the Great, he had—for reasons no one knows even now—rounded up thousands of young Alexandrians and slaughtered them. Alexandria had never seen such a massacre.
Marius was distraught. All the world was distraught.
Marius spoke of leaving Antioch, of getting far far away from the ruin of the Empire. I began to agree with him.
Then this revolting Emperor Caracalla marched in our direction, intending to make a war on the Parthians North of us and to the East of us. Nothing out of the ordinary for Antioch!
His Mother—and you need not remember these names—Julia Domna, took up residence in Antioch. She was dying from cancer of her breast. And let me add here that this woman had, with her son Caracalla, helped murder her other son, Geta, because the two brothers had been sharing Imperial power and threatening to make a Civil War.
Let me continue, and again you need not remember the names.
Troops were massed for this Eastern war against two Kings to the East, Vologases the Fifth and Artabanus the Fifth. Caracalla did make war, achieve victory and return in triumph. Then, only miles from Antioch, he was assassinated by his own soldiers while trying to relieve himself!
All this cast Marius in a hopeless frame of mind. For hours he sat in the Shrine staring at the Mother and the Father. I felt I knew what he was thinking, that we should immolate ourselves and them, but I couldn’t bear the thought of it. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to lose life. I didn’t want to lose Marius.
I did not care so much about the fate of Rome. Life still stretched before me, extending the promise of wonders.
Back to the Comedy. The Army promptly made an Emperor out of a man from the Provinces named Macrinus, who was a Moor and wore an earring in his ear.
He at once had a fight with the dead Emperor’s Mother, Julia Domna, because he wouldn’t allow her to leave Antioch to die elsewhere. She starved herself to death.
This was all too close to home! These lunatics were in our dry, not far away in a capital which we mourned.
Then war broke out again, because the Eastern Kings, who were caught off guard before by Caracalla, were now ready, and Macrinus had to lead the Legions into battle.
As I told you, the Legions now controlled everything. Somebody should have told Macrinus. Instead of fighting he bought off the enemy. The troops were hardly proud of this. And then he cracked down on them, taking away some of their benefits.
He didn’t seem to grasp that he had to maintain their approval to survive. Though of course what good had this done for Caracalla, whom they loved?
Whatever, the sister of Julia Domna, named Julia Maesa, who was a Syrian and of a family dedicated to the Syrian sun god, seized this dreary moment in the life of the lusty legions to put her grandson, born of Julia Soemis, in power as Emperor! It was an outrageous plan actually, for any number of reasons. First and foremost, all three Julias were Syrian. The boy himself was fourteen years old, and also he was a hereditary Priest of the Syrian sun god.
But somehow or other