Free Vespasian: Tribune of Rome by Robert Fabbri Page B

spit you out.’
    ‘One taste of that little runt and I’m sure he’ll find that in his case mistress Rome is a spitter not a swallower.’ Sabinus laughed at his own wit as he drew level with them.
    ‘Very funny, Sabinus,’ Vespasian snapped. As much as he enjoyed a coarse joke he was feeling far too unsure of himself to appreciate such flippancy. He kicked his horse forward and headed off down the hill to the sound of Titus admonishing Sabinus for his foul mouth.
    As he gazed at the centre of the empire, immovable on the plain below him, bathing in the morning sun and feeding off the roads and aqueducts that pumped life into her, he felt inspired by her magnificence and power. His nerves steadied. Perhaps no longer would he be content to limit his horizons to the hills that surrounded his rural home. Perhaps no longer would he count himself fulfilled by the mundane business of farming and raising mules with nothing to mark the passing of time other than thechange in the seasons. He was going to enter a larger and more perilous world, and there he would survive and prosper. With a growing sense of excitement he descended the hill, oblivious to his father’s calls to slow down. He weaved his way through the other travellers thinking only of arriving as soon as possible.
    After a couple of miles the traffic slowed out of necessity as tombs, large and small, on either side of the road squeezed it in. Vespasian paused and felt the hand of history upon him as he read the names carved into the walls of each one. There were famous families alongside names that he had never heard of. Some tombs were very ancient, others newly erected, but all had one thing in common: they contained the remains of men and women who had in their lifetimes contributed to the rise of Rome from a few mud huts on the Capitoline Hill, almost eight hundred years before, to the metropolis of marble and brick before whose walls they were now interred. All the joys and disappointments of these past Romans, whose souls now resided in the shades, all their achievements and failures were now just part of the sum total of their city’s glory. They had all had their time, and he hoped that they had made the most of it because there was no coming back from that dark land once they had been ferried across the Styx. He vowed to himself that before he made that same journey he would do his utmost to leave the city that he was about to enter for the first time greater, in some small way, for him having been there.
    Coming out of his reverie he realised that he’d got far ahead of his party and decided to wait for them there, amongst the tombs. He dismounted and tied his horse to a small tree and, pulling his cloak around his shoulders, sat down to wait, idly watching the passing traffic. After a short while a wagon pulled off the road near him and disgorged a family with its house slaves. The slaves immediately started to set up a table and stools in front of a small, new-looking tomb. The paterfamilias poured a libation and said a prayer, and thenthe family sat down and were served a picnic meal which they seemed to share with the occupant of the tomb by laying food and drink upon it. Vespasian watched this curious ritual as the family ate and drank with their deceased relative, talking to him as if he was still alive, seemingly oblivious to the traffic rumbling by on the road only a few feet away. Even death, it seemed, did not stop honour being shown to a man, if in life he had earned it in the service of his family and Rome.
    The meal was coming to an end when he heard his brother’s voice bellowing at him. ‘What do you think you’re doing, you little shit, sitting by the side of the road without a care in the world? Do you think you’re a match for the cut-throats and worse that live amongst these tombs?’ Sabinus jumped off his horse and kicked his brother hard on the thigh. ‘You’ve had our mother half crazy with worry running off like