Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [47]
Let me say here that it cast a cloud over his arrival among the Romans, and that when he did come, it was no great consolation to the old ruling class, because he dressed very much in the extravagant Eastern style, with silk and damask, and would not be part of the important procession to the Temple of Jupiter, as the people had expected him to do.
Of course the Christians adored him. Rich and poor they flocked to see him in his Eastern robes and jewels. They were overwhelmed with his generosity as he laid the ground for more churches.
And though he had spent almost no time in Rome, he had over the years allowed for the completion of secular buildings begun by Maxentius, and he built a large public bath under his own name.
Then came appalling rumors. Constantine had plans for an entirely new city. Constantine found Rome old and decayed and lacking as a capital. Constantine meant to make a new city for the Empire; he meant to make it in the East, and it would honor his name!
Imagine it, if you can.
Of course the Emperors of the last century had moved all over the provinces of the Empire. They had fought each other, breaking into pairs and tetrarchies, and meeting here and murdering one another there.
But to give up Rome as the capital? To create another great city to be the center of the Empire?
It was unthinkable to me.
I brooded in hatred. I knew despair.
All of my nightly guests shared my misery. The elderly soldiers were broken by the news and one of the old philosophers wept bitterly. Another city to be the capital of the Roman Empire? The younger men were furious, but they could not hide their bitter curiosity, or their grudging guesses as to where this new city might be.
I could not dare weep as I wanted to for my tears would have been full of blood.
I asked the musicians to play old songs, songs I had to teach them for they had never heard them, and there came a strange moment when we sang together—my mortal guests and me—a slow mournful song about Rome’s tarnished glory which we would not forget.
The air was cool on that evening. I went out into the garden and looked down over the side of the hill. I could see lights here and there in the darkness. I could hear laughter and conversation from other houses.
“This is Rome!” I whispered.
How could Constantine abandon the city which had been the capital of the Empire for a thousand years of struggle, triumph, defeat, glory? Couldn’t someone reason with him? This simply could not come to pass.
But the more I roamed the city, the more I listened to talk both far and wide, the more I roamed outside the walls and into the towns thereabout, I came to see what had motivated the Emperor.
Constantine wanted to begin his Christian Empire in a place of incredible advantage, and could not retreat to the Italian peninsula when so much of the culture of his people lay to the East. Also he had to defend his Eastern borders. The Persian Empire of the East was always a threat. And Rome was not a fit place for a man in supreme power to reside.
Thus Constantine had chosen the distant Greek city of Byzantium to be the site of Constantinople, his new home.
And I should see my home, my sacred city, become now a castoff of a man whom I, as a Roman, could not accept.
There were rumors of the incredible if not miraculous speed with which Constantinople had been mapped out, and with which building was being done.
At once many Romans followed Constantine to the burgeoning new city. At his invitation perhaps, or simply on their own impulse Senators decamped with their families and their wealth to live in this new and shining place, a subject on everyone’s lips.
Soon