Tales of Ancient Rome Read Online Free PDF

officer’s side, above the cuirass and below his folded arms, pushing the hilt with a grunt and listening to the grating as the blade slid between bones and vital organs. It was a masterly blow, worthy of a soldier; an almost instant kill.
    Silenced first by shock and then simply by the journey to Elysium, Titus Flavius Genialis, prefect of the Praetorian Guard, collapsed in a heap, his legs buckling beneath him as blood rushed from the mortal wound in his side. A single gasp escaped his lips. Repentinus let go of the sword hilt and helped lower the dead man to the floor with a surprising show of respect. Fumbling with his toga, the young man stood.
    Julianus, his eyes still wide with shock, started to nod madly, grinning like an idiot.
    “ Of course. Good boy. He had to go. He would never have let me live. Now we can buy them off and I can…”
    His voice tailed off as Repentinus stood again. The respectful lowering of the body and strange toga-fumbling had simply been the boy removing the prefect’s dagger from his belt. Now he brandished the leaf-shaped blade with a sad, resigned look.
    “ What is it, Repentinus?” the emperor squeaked.
    “ You see, Caesar, there is a problem. Genialis would never manage to save us. Severus will kill him for simply being in your guard, and Didia and I will follow quickly. But he was right that you simply have to die. No amount of generosity and coin will save you now. But there is still time for me to secure my future.”
    Reaching out with his free hand, he grasped the emperor’s toga and bunched it in his fist in the same fashion as Genialis had done.
    The emperor stared in shock and panic.
    “ But you’re my family!” he wailed.
    “ Sadly you’re no longer in mine, Caesar.”
    Julianus tried to say something. His last words may have been profound and noble, though they probably weren’t. Whatever they may have been, they were inaudible as Repentinus drew the knife across his throat, watching as the blood began to gush and spray, soaking his own toga.
    Letting go of his father-in-law as he fell, Repentinus ignored the thrashing as the emperor tried to hold his throat closed, making hissing, rattling sounds. Reaching down with the knife, he began the onerous task of sawing through the prefect’s neck with the razor-sharp dagger and removing the head. Moments later, treading through the blood-slick, he repeated the process on the now-expired emperor.
    Letting the knife fall and grasping the heads by the hair, he walked, one in each hand, toward the balcony.
     
    Quintus Aemilius Saturninus, loyal soldier of Septimius Severus and future prefect of the Praetorian Guard looked up. The crowds of soldiers in the circus maximus continued to shout momentarily, but the noise gradually died away as they took note of the small figure, high up in the palace window perhaps sixty or eighty feet above them, past the stands of the circus and the Imperial box.
    The man was clearly wearing a toga, though it could be seen even at this distance that it was stained heavily red.
    “ Behold the heads” the figure repeated for the third time, now finally sure of attention in the silence, “of the traitorous renegade Marcus Didius Julianus and his chief enforcer Genialis!”
    With masterly theatrics, the man hurled first one head and then the other out into the air, watching along with the gathered crowd of legionaries as the heads of the emperor and praetorian prefect struck the seating area below the window and bounced, clunked and rolled down the stands until they fell, bloody and battered, to the sand of the circus.
    The guards stared down at the grisly prizes as the killer in the window bellowed once again.
    “ Hail and long life to the Emperor Septimius Severus, Lion of Leptis!”
    A roar rose from the crowd.
     
    And so passed Marcus Didius Julianus: the man who bought Rome.
    Sold by his own kin in return for a future.
     
    Trackside seats
     
    Lentullus leaned to his left, closing on