Conspiracies of Rome by Richard Blake

Vesta had been broken open, and was in use as a cow shed. Other buildings had fallen down, and I couldn’t identify their function even by the broken inscriptions.
        Once or twice, I turned to ask Maximin. He’d known Rome from any number of visits. Sometimes, he’d answer with a firm confidence that I was willing to trust. Quite often, even he was vague about the former uses of these falling or fallen buildings.
        ‘It was a temple to some demon,’ he said, pointing up at the great Temple of Jupiter that still loomed above us on the Capitoline Hill. ‘As with all the others, it was closed over two hundred years ago on the orders of Caesar. God willing, it may soon fall down – or be turned to some holy purpose. So many were the demons who resided in this city before men were brought to the True Faith of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Even now, they wander the Earth, tempting the unwary to blasphemy or heresy.’
        Knowing Maximin as I did, I mastered the urge to sniff. I resolved instead to get him again when he was feeling less devout. Plainly, Rome was in no need of temples. With the decay of power and population, it also had little need of administrative buildings. But it would be nice to know what all these places had been.
        It didn’t help that the Tiber had risen in the past hundred years, and the Forum was now regularly flooded. We mostly walked over compacted mud several feet higher than the old pavements.
        Just in front of the Julian Basilica, though, the ground had been cleared, and there was a gleaming new column set up with a golden statue on top. About fifty feet up, the statue was a crude lump of bronze. It looked barely human. It made a shocking change from the smooth perfection of the marble statues we’d just seen in the Basilica or still dotted here and there about the city. The thin leaf covering was coming off. But the column was an elegant, fluted thing. Untouched by the elements, it had obviously been salvaged from some ruined interior – like all other new work in Rome.
        This was my first sight of the Column of Phocas. The inscription on its base – placed over another that had been chiselled out – said everything. Part of it read:
     
We have erected a dazzling golden statue of His Majesty, our Lord Phocas, the Eternal Emperor, the Triumphator crowned of God, in return for countless good deeds, for the establishing of peace in Italy, and for the preservation of freedom.
     
    It had been set up a year or so before by the pope in the presence of Exarch Smaragdus, over from Ravenna, in honour of the emperor. In recent years, pope and emperor had not always been at one. The emperor saw Italy as an outpost. It was a place where taxes should be collected rather than spent. His main concerns were the Persians across the Euphrates and the barbarians beyond the Danube. It took up all the work of diplomacy and strategy to bribe or otherwise to conciliate, or repel these groups by arms from the taxpaying provinces.
        The pope, of course, saw things differently. He’d taken effective control over Rome and some other parts of Italy, and was dealing with the Lombards as if he were a sovereign prince. The treaty Pope Gregory had made some years earlier was technically an act of treason. But the days when an emperor could arrest and replace a pope – as Justinian had – were long past.
        Then there was the matter of religious primacy. As the successor of Saint Peter, and bishop of Rome, the pope claimed a supreme status above all the other churchmen and an equality with the emperor himself. Pope Gregory had taken up and refurbished the old claim to be regarded as the universal bishop.
        So long as they could, the emperors in Constantinople had deprecated or ignored this claim. But then Phocas had taken power by murdering the legitimate emperor, and had run into endless domestic and foreign challenges. Gregory, though old and dying, was still the most