This alternate history is intended to be a combination of alternate history and hallucinatory images of impossible worlds. As such, it will not focus on detailing of traditional facts, but shall give its account through participants in history who might or might not have been real. It shall keep to truth as much as is possible, but in a specifically Roman manner, adopting the tragic trajectory of the traditional Roman epic, specifically the Aeneid.
CHAPTER I: WAKING UP
These writings give an account of the life of Caius of the gens Cornelius, with no cognomen to speak of. In the telling he is a plebeian, but those of an unsavoury bent towards gossip have speculated that this man was adopted into citizenry by freedom from slavery. If he was indeed of the liberti, the vast bureaucracy of most ancient and holy Rome has failed to keep an account of his adoption into freedom. As such, we shall not speculate any further on these affairs, for gossip augurs nothing but ill-fortune for the rumourmonger.
Indeed, it is true, we have little account of what and where Caius Cornelius came from. In the histories spun from his mouth, he is the son of good Roman parents, with a family that embodied civic virtue. Blessed by the Gods, one would say. The arcadian rhythms of life in the latifundium, among family and friends (and a good many slaves; Caius speaks eloquently of the slaves, and perhaps too sympathetically, hence the tongue-wagging. But once again, let us not dwell), the green pastures that extend as far as the eye can see, the cattle that graze on the green, their lazy heads lowering themselves down onto the verdant grass, chomping on the blades one by one, in dignified silence. He recalled the tutors who taught him Latin, that great mother language of Rome, the mark of the citizen, the Greek mathematics, and yes, the Greek philosophy too. Pythagorean theorems of the spheres and of the mind. The inner workings of optical illusions and of the roots and so on. Most of all he recalled the touch of his mother, the laughter of his brothers, the stern visage of his father. All this he remembered, and as memories nursed in his cranial tissue.
In those days, for the young man who lived on the latifundia, time proceeded as though it had impressed upon its objects the Platonic truth of the falsity of the past and the future; only the present was true, and the present was inaccessible to those who lived through it, always passing into past. In this non-present present, all men moved into eternity, utopia, freedom from want and from labour. Mastery over nature and the slave was the destiny of this sort of young man, leisure his entitlement. No republic survives on leisure. No republic survives on lethargy. Great Rome is the same.
In principle the conscription into the republican army under the banner of S.Q.P.R is for the defense of the glory of Rome. In truth, it is a war against the internal barbarian by means of the external barbarian. The leisurely young man, not knowing discipline nor the hardness of work, becomes a woman, falling into his mother's embrace, emasculated, unable to penetrate into the depths of what is expected of a Roman soldier. He becomes excluded from the political, a non-subject only caring about his own self-satisfaction, no energy, no offense, pure passivity, pure receptivity. The Roman man turned into a virginal girl! The root of corruption of man is the victory of woman over man. This has been foretold in the works of that great and poetic dramaturge Aristophanes, who looked more clearly into the primal truth of the world than any philosopher could ever, not even that great globule of intellect that was Socrates.
Into the course of this never-ending war against womankind were caught up Caius Cornelius' brothers, eldest first, then those in between, and when they hard martyred themselves at the altar of Hannibal's vanguard of womankind, his father too was caught up in the war, himself sacrificed in a war against his wife and his son's mother as lived through the sword of Hasdrubal. Then womankind, represented in the grey elephantine scourge of Hannibal's charge towards Rome, trampled over the verdant Sicilian abundance of Caius Cornelius' inheritance. As child, he was of womankind, and as such was by nature to betray the State in its war against its enemy. Then womankind won another victory, exemplified in its property of treachery and betrayal: Rome's partners-in-arms, who had been offered the privilege of participating as younger brothers in Rome's conquests, and for it had merely been requested to provide their own men in the eternal State-war against womankind, defected to the enemy. And finally, Rome itself defected to the enemy, its propitiatory sacrifices to the gods remaining unanswered. Rome had fallen. The spear was broken into two. It was Antigone before Creon, waiting for justice.
In the course of these matters, one can imagine the displeasure of the young Caius, excluded from heroic and valiant sacrifice on the altar of Roman manhood by sole virtue of the fact that he was a child. He was even more displeased at the quick and steady escape of the latifundium's chattel, who in the chaos of the demonic onslaught of Hannibal's army fled away into the night, as if Hermes had imbued their feet with winged might. The shock, says he, came from the lack of respect towards him as dominus of the house. Even in defeat Romanism impressed itself upon the proto-adolescent mind of the Roman inheritor. Set thee forth, his mother says, escape to great and holy Rome, Rome of peace, Rome of virtue, Rome of beauty and honour.
The march northwards from Sicilia onto the city is traditionally fraught with peril. Bandits, brigands and other figures of ill-repute haunt the forests that bracket the Roman highway in ordinary times. But when the Carthaginian host marches northwards, the entire approach takes on an altogether more diseased approach. The fear of the enemy renders man into something more primordial, something that recalls the primordial sin of Actaeus, with a thousand goddesses lying in wait behind the tall pine tree.
Our little Aeneas then marches from his own personal Troy on this field of awaiting horrors, but first, a detour into augury and superstition. This is what happened near Paestum, then a great city of proud Hellene heritage. Caius Cornelius went in those days to an oracle on the advice of hangers-on who had accompanied him on the route north, and who recognized in him an infantile and premature greatness awaiting to blossom.
He found the oracle of infamy in a cavern nearby, sleeping under a pole adorned with sunflowers and lilies, undulating in the soft, warm wind of the grotto. Laughter from nowhere reverbated through the air, and shadows on the walls contemplated artworks more ancient than even the Junian gens. Terrible masks, blood-stained on the floor, knives still fresh from the slaughter. Human blood? If so, all the better. Man's blood is the bloody cost that prefigures a greater benefit.
Caius noticed then the small bones distributed on the floor near the knives. No, more likely bird's bones. A perverse form of augury that told of the flight of birds only in manner of bloody slaughter already present in them. Eagle's bones. Now he felt queasy. He felt the sudden urge to leave, to save himself, but yet another force as though from Mars himself fought to keep him stuck, to learn of his own telling. And now the augur rises from his slumber, and the deep pools behind him swirl, their luminous surfaces collapsing inwards into whirpools of light and sound. The augur opens his eyes! Rivulets of blood trickle down from his eyelids, down onto the ground, mixing with the mud to form darker shades of grey. Now his hands move! The shadows dance on the walls, they move inwards, smoke and colour and laughter, terrible laughter whose origin was that origin where even the gods could not penetrate. The wall-murals revealed to be pictures of perverse eroticism, of violence done against men and against women, of unspeakable acts of violation and deeds of betrayal. The ground bursts and meets the whirpool and it meets the air. The shadowy lights become one with colour and inhale Caius down into the depths of the soil upon which he stands. He too starts to weep, out of terror, salty tears. And now the augur augurs, jealously grasping bones in his hand.
Demon-forsaken child, your death will be the life of Rome. Yea, Rome will be destroyed, must be destroyed, yet in its destruction will bloom a vengeance thousandfold more terrible for it. You shall be its instrument, you shall be the scalpel whereby Romulus' revenge shall annihilate the broken past and redeem the lost present. You shall serve and you shall enjoy your service, you shall be a slave and you shall follow your master for it. You shall suffer and you will beg for annihilation, but I, who speak as the mouth to the Parcaeic throat, tell you this: you shall be no Silenus, and no power in the world will save you. You shall give birth to a terrible race, and your lineage will rule over the world, and so too will your son, and his son's son and so forth. You, Trojan visage, you shall be the doom of the world.
And so recedes the augur now, having foretold this terrible fate of Caius. The colour and the light and the waters receded, the blood flowing back from the ground into the dull, dead demon-eyes of the ill-speaking oracle. The world itself swirls and leaves him without any anchoring in it, and he falls, falls for so long that he forgets both his prophesized future and his glum present. He faints.
His travel-companions find him in a disheveled state outside the caverns. They ask him what was said of him. He does not recall. He complains that he has been cheated. Does he truly not recall, his companions wonder, or does he not divulge some secret fact to them, some oracular medicine that is only efficacious in keeping it close to the breast?
He reaches Rome.
CHAPTER I: WAKING UP
These writings give an account of the life of Caius of the gens Cornelius, with no cognomen to speak of. In the telling he is a plebeian, but those of an unsavoury bent towards gossip have speculated that this man was adopted into citizenry by freedom from slavery. If he was indeed of the liberti, the vast bureaucracy of most ancient and holy Rome has failed to keep an account of his adoption into freedom. As such, we shall not speculate any further on these affairs, for gossip augurs nothing but ill-fortune for the rumourmonger.
Indeed, it is true, we have little account of what and where Caius Cornelius came from. In the histories spun from his mouth, he is the son of good Roman parents, with a family that embodied civic virtue. Blessed by the Gods, one would say. The arcadian rhythms of life in the latifundium, among family and friends (and a good many slaves; Caius speaks eloquently of the slaves, and perhaps too sympathetically, hence the tongue-wagging. But once again, let us not dwell), the green pastures that extend as far as the eye can see, the cattle that graze on the green, their lazy heads lowering themselves down onto the verdant grass, chomping on the blades one by one, in dignified silence. He recalled the tutors who taught him Latin, that great mother language of Rome, the mark of the citizen, the Greek mathematics, and yes, the Greek philosophy too. Pythagorean theorems of the spheres and of the mind. The inner workings of optical illusions and of the roots and so on. Most of all he recalled the touch of his mother, the laughter of his brothers, the stern visage of his father. All this he remembered, and as memories nursed in his cranial tissue.
In those days, for the young man who lived on the latifundia, time proceeded as though it had impressed upon its objects the Platonic truth of the falsity of the past and the future; only the present was true, and the present was inaccessible to those who lived through it, always passing into past. In this non-present present, all men moved into eternity, utopia, freedom from want and from labour. Mastery over nature and the slave was the destiny of this sort of young man, leisure his entitlement. No republic survives on leisure. No republic survives on lethargy. Great Rome is the same.
In principle the conscription into the republican army under the banner of S.Q.P.R is for the defense of the glory of Rome. In truth, it is a war against the internal barbarian by means of the external barbarian. The leisurely young man, not knowing discipline nor the hardness of work, becomes a woman, falling into his mother's embrace, emasculated, unable to penetrate into the depths of what is expected of a Roman soldier. He becomes excluded from the political, a non-subject only caring about his own self-satisfaction, no energy, no offense, pure passivity, pure receptivity. The Roman man turned into a virginal girl! The root of corruption of man is the victory of woman over man. This has been foretold in the works of that great and poetic dramaturge Aristophanes, who looked more clearly into the primal truth of the world than any philosopher could ever, not even that great globule of intellect that was Socrates.
Into the course of this never-ending war against womankind were caught up Caius Cornelius' brothers, eldest first, then those in between, and when they hard martyred themselves at the altar of Hannibal's vanguard of womankind, his father too was caught up in the war, himself sacrificed in a war against his wife and his son's mother as lived through the sword of Hasdrubal. Then womankind, represented in the grey elephantine scourge of Hannibal's charge towards Rome, trampled over the verdant Sicilian abundance of Caius Cornelius' inheritance. As child, he was of womankind, and as such was by nature to betray the State in its war against its enemy. Then womankind won another victory, exemplified in its property of treachery and betrayal: Rome's partners-in-arms, who had been offered the privilege of participating as younger brothers in Rome's conquests, and for it had merely been requested to provide their own men in the eternal State-war against womankind, defected to the enemy. And finally, Rome itself defected to the enemy, its propitiatory sacrifices to the gods remaining unanswered. Rome had fallen. The spear was broken into two. It was Antigone before Creon, waiting for justice.
In the course of these matters, one can imagine the displeasure of the young Caius, excluded from heroic and valiant sacrifice on the altar of Roman manhood by sole virtue of the fact that he was a child. He was even more displeased at the quick and steady escape of the latifundium's chattel, who in the chaos of the demonic onslaught of Hannibal's army fled away into the night, as if Hermes had imbued their feet with winged might. The shock, says he, came from the lack of respect towards him as dominus of the house. Even in defeat Romanism impressed itself upon the proto-adolescent mind of the Roman inheritor. Set thee forth, his mother says, escape to great and holy Rome, Rome of peace, Rome of virtue, Rome of beauty and honour.
The march northwards from Sicilia onto the city is traditionally fraught with peril. Bandits, brigands and other figures of ill-repute haunt the forests that bracket the Roman highway in ordinary times. But when the Carthaginian host marches northwards, the entire approach takes on an altogether more diseased approach. The fear of the enemy renders man into something more primordial, something that recalls the primordial sin of Actaeus, with a thousand goddesses lying in wait behind the tall pine tree.
Our little Aeneas then marches from his own personal Troy on this field of awaiting horrors, but first, a detour into augury and superstition. This is what happened near Paestum, then a great city of proud Hellene heritage. Caius Cornelius went in those days to an oracle on the advice of hangers-on who had accompanied him on the route north, and who recognized in him an infantile and premature greatness awaiting to blossom.
He found the oracle of infamy in a cavern nearby, sleeping under a pole adorned with sunflowers and lilies, undulating in the soft, warm wind of the grotto. Laughter from nowhere reverbated through the air, and shadows on the walls contemplated artworks more ancient than even the Junian gens. Terrible masks, blood-stained on the floor, knives still fresh from the slaughter. Human blood? If so, all the better. Man's blood is the bloody cost that prefigures a greater benefit.
Caius noticed then the small bones distributed on the floor near the knives. No, more likely bird's bones. A perverse form of augury that told of the flight of birds only in manner of bloody slaughter already present in them. Eagle's bones. Now he felt queasy. He felt the sudden urge to leave, to save himself, but yet another force as though from Mars himself fought to keep him stuck, to learn of his own telling. And now the augur rises from his slumber, and the deep pools behind him swirl, their luminous surfaces collapsing inwards into whirpools of light and sound. The augur opens his eyes! Rivulets of blood trickle down from his eyelids, down onto the ground, mixing with the mud to form darker shades of grey. Now his hands move! The shadows dance on the walls, they move inwards, smoke and colour and laughter, terrible laughter whose origin was that origin where even the gods could not penetrate. The wall-murals revealed to be pictures of perverse eroticism, of violence done against men and against women, of unspeakable acts of violation and deeds of betrayal. The ground bursts and meets the whirpool and it meets the air. The shadowy lights become one with colour and inhale Caius down into the depths of the soil upon which he stands. He too starts to weep, out of terror, salty tears. And now the augur augurs, jealously grasping bones in his hand.
Demon-forsaken child, your death will be the life of Rome. Yea, Rome will be destroyed, must be destroyed, yet in its destruction will bloom a vengeance thousandfold more terrible for it. You shall be its instrument, you shall be the scalpel whereby Romulus' revenge shall annihilate the broken past and redeem the lost present. You shall serve and you shall enjoy your service, you shall be a slave and you shall follow your master for it. You shall suffer and you will beg for annihilation, but I, who speak as the mouth to the Parcaeic throat, tell you this: you shall be no Silenus, and no power in the world will save you. You shall give birth to a terrible race, and your lineage will rule over the world, and so too will your son, and his son's son and so forth. You, Trojan visage, you shall be the doom of the world.
And so recedes the augur now, having foretold this terrible fate of Caius. The colour and the light and the waters receded, the blood flowing back from the ground into the dull, dead demon-eyes of the ill-speaking oracle. The world itself swirls and leaves him without any anchoring in it, and he falls, falls for so long that he forgets both his prophesized future and his glum present. He faints.
His travel-companions find him in a disheveled state outside the caverns. They ask him what was said of him. He does not recall. He complains that he has been cheated. Does he truly not recall, his companions wonder, or does he not divulge some secret fact to them, some oracular medicine that is only efficacious in keeping it close to the breast?
He reaches Rome.