Saturnalia by Lindsey Davis

Easterners did not appeal. They were very quick to label the east-bank tribes as barbarians.
    I probed delicately how they had felt about Veleda. I was chancing it here. Rebellion was a sensitive subject in Europe. Even on the western bank, which had been in Roman control for a long time, there were those who had sought independence not so long ago when they thought Rome was vulnerable. But if these men had felt any sympathy with Veleda back then, they knew better than to show it now.
    Laeta's injunction to secrecy made it impossible to ask whether they would help Veleda if she came to them as a supplicant. I could see a risk that her well-known hostility to Rome might arouse anti-German feeling generally, if the public heard she was in our city. If that happened, maybe the traders would turn against her for causing them problems. Insofar as they would talk about her, they claimed that Veleda had always denounced them as collaborators and they denied that there had ever been any possibility of an alliance across the river.
    This was bosh. I knew that before Vespasian stabilised the region recently, there had been contact, of which some was very violent but much was friendly. I did not trust the traders, therefore; and since they obviously wondered why I was questioning them, it was fair to say they did not trust me.
    I got nowhere. Since I had to disguise my purpose, I had expected nothing better. I did obtain one useful piece of information: how to find a particular group of Germans who had lived in Rome for decades. The traders sent me to them with sardonic expressions--and I knew why. They were hoping their notorious fellow-countrymen would do me physical damage. In fact, they probably thought I was about to be bent into a mystical Celtic knot with all my protruding bits neatly tucked in.
    The group I went visiting had shrunk to a grim little enclave: I had tracked down the neglected remnants of Nero's legendary German bodyguard.
    I was among elderly men giving off a strong odour of the dangerous past. Those were sour times, and these were sprawling old bullies, nostalgic for a culture that no longer existed. Why had they remained in Rome? Probably to avoid disappointment if they returned to their own land and discovered that it was now populated by neat Roman towns where citizens carried out Romanised occupations in a Roman ethos. Even the fanners and country manufacturers brought in their produce to sell at our kind of market in our style of urban forum. Across Europe, fewer and fewer people lived in roundhouses. Tribal culture was dying. Upper and Lower Gennany were filled with industries making equipment for the legions. Beer was losing out; vineyards were spreading ever northward.
    Originally the bodyguard must have numbered around five hundred. Some had died, some had drifted elsewhere, yet a hard core stayed on, dreaming of the good old days as fighting men do. Now they were pushing pension age--had they been given pensions. From their shabby dress and faded energy I deduced that public handouts for these one-time palace servants were few. In Roman politics during the mad days of the Julio-Claudians, loyalties had tended either towards Nero or Claudius; political advancement had depended on alliances made with one or the other; and Vespasian was a Claudian supporter. When Nero died and he came to power, fortune finally stopped smiling on these men.
    It was thirty years since their heyday. They had not so much run to seed as decayed into compost. I found a mildewed huddle of about fifteen, teasing out a flagon or two at their regular lunch club. A withered Ubian waiter, who must have served their bread and blood-sausage for forty years, tottered away to fetch extra wine that I paid for, muttering what sounded like bitter Ubian curses under his onion-flavoured breath. The old warriors regarded me with greater toleration, aware that few people nowadays would stand them a warm toddy on a cold morning, but even they