The Emperor's study, usually a place of command and calculation, had transformed into a courtroom. There was no jury, only the silent busts of past emperors staring down from their marble plinths, their stone eyes seeming to hold a judgment of their own. There was no defendant and no accuser, only an emperor and a senator locked in a confrontation that transcended politics.
Senator Servius Rufus stood before the Emperor's desk, his back straight, his frail body held erect by a force of sheer, unwavering principle. He had refused the offer of a chair. To sit would be to accept the role of a guest or a petitioner. He had come as an equal, as a conscience, and his posture made that devastatingly clear. His face, usually a mask of weary integrity, was etched with a profound and personal sadness. This was not an act of political opposition; it was an intervention for a soul he believed was lost.
"I have come from the city, Caesar," Rufus began, his voice quiet but carrying the immense weight of his station. "I have listened in the Forum. I have spoken with men of substance and with common laborers. And I have heard the whispers that now fester in the heart of our Rome."
He did not speak with the frantic energy of Perennis. He spoke with the slow, crushing gravity of a historian recounting a tragedy. "They no longer speak of a famine averted. They speak of a blight that has moved from the fields to the palace itself. They have given a name to your villa on the hill: the Domus Morbus, the Plague House. They tell tales of your guards, our loyal Germans, becoming possessed by unnatural spirits, their bodies granted monstrous strength by some dark pact."
He looked Alex directly in the eye, his gaze unflinching. "They speak of a new elixir, a 'Caesar's Fire,' that burns away not sickness, but a man's piety and his soul. They do not see the son of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-king. They see a sorcerer-king from the mythic East, a Medean prince dabbling in forbidden arts for his own inscrutable ends."
Alex felt a familiar surge of frustration. He opened his mouth to defend himself with the truth, or at least a version of it. "Rufus, you are a man of reason. This is superstition, ignorance. The men were sick from a strange property in the new grain. The 'fire' is merely a potent distilled spirit, a scientific process of fermentation that purifies it. It is a medicine, nothing more!"
His explanation, which would have sounded so clear and logical in his own mind, sounded feeble and hollow in the vast, silent study.
Rufus dismissed it all with a sad, weary wave of his hand. He was not interested in the mechanics of the thing. "Science? Process? Fermentation?" he repeated the words as if they were a foreign, meaningless tongue. "These are not concepts that built our world, Caesar. They are not words the Roman people understand. The mason who builds the aqueduct does not need to understand the physics of the arch; he needs to trust in the traditions of the engineers who came before him. The people do not need to understand your methods. They need to trust your heart."
He took a slow step closer, his voice dropping, becoming more personal, more pained. "They understand Pietas—a man's sacred duty to the gods and his ancestors. They understand Virtus—the manly courage that faces an enemy on the battlefield, not in a hidden laboratory. They understand Gloria—the shared glory of the Republic, won in the light of the sun for all to see. You have offered them none of these things. You have offered them only secrets and shadows. And Rome, Caesar… Rome cannot thrive in the dark."
The accusation was devastating because it was true. Alex had been treating Rome like a broken machine, a complex project to be managed. He had been applying 21st-century solutions while ignoring the 1st-century operating system.
Cornered, his modern sensibilities chafing against the intractable wall of ancient belief, he finally lashed out, his own frustration and loneliness boiling over. "Pietas? Virtus?" he shot back, his voice rising. "Was it Virtus that led brother to kill brother in a century of civil war? Was it Pietas that allowed a corrupt and decadent Senate to hoard wealth while the people starved? Was it Gloria that led Caligula to make his horse a consul? Your traditional Rome, the Rome of empty rituals and rotting foundations, was dying, Rufus! It was a corpse painted to look alive! I am trying to build something that lasts, something that works!"
He was panting when he finished, his outburst echoing in the sudden silence.
Rufus did not flinch. He simply absorbed the tirade, his sad expression unchanging. When Alex fell silent, he asked a single, quiet question that dismantled Alex's entire defense.
"And what are you building, Caesar?"
The question hung in the air, sharp and deadly as a poised dagger.
"A city that will soon be dependent on a magic potion to feel strong?" Rufus continued, his voice relentlessly soft. "An empire whose highest virtue is the efficient execution of secret plans? You are not building a new Rome. You are building a gilded cage. A healthier, more stable, more efficient cage, perhaps, but a cage nonetheless. That is not Rome."
He paused, and for the first time, a flicker of the old fire, the spirit of the Republic, entered his eyes. "Rome is an idea, Caesar. An idea that must be tested by adversity. An idea that must be carried outward on the tips of our spears and in the hearts of our colonists. It must be proven against the savagery of the Germanian forests and tempered by the heat of the Parthian deserts. We grow, or we die. We have always known this. The moment a Roman looks inward for his glory, he is lost."
The words struck Alex with the force of a physical revelation. It was a thunderclap of understanding. Rufus, in his traditionalist, almost reactionary argument, had inadvertently handed him the very answer he'd been searching for. Expansion. Conquest. A grand, unifying project. A mission that would channel the restless, violent energy of the Roman spirit outward, giving them a common enemy and a shared goal, starving the internal rot of the oxygen it needed to fester. It was a concept both the ancient Roman traditionalist and the modern grand strategist could understand. It was a path out of the darkness.
Alex stared at Rufus, the anger and frustration draining away from him, replaced by a new, cold clarity. He had been thinking like a project manager trying to fix a failing company. He needed to think like a Roman Emperor.
"You are right, Senator," Alex said. His voice was suddenly calm, devoid of its earlier passion, and filled with a new, terrifying purpose that made the hairs on Rufus's arms stand on end. "You are absolutely right. I have been looking inward, trying to patch the rot and cure the sicknesses within our walls."
He walked to the large window overlooking the city, the setting sun bathing the marble rooftops in a sea of orange and purple.
"But the only way to cure a sickness in the heart," he murmured, more to himself than to Rufus, "is to give the body a greater purpose. A grander destiny." He turned back to face the old senator, his eyes gleaming with a light Rufus had never seen before. It was not the light of a boy, or a tyrant, or even a sorcerer. It was the light of ambition, vast and continental in its scope.
"Rome needs a new frontier."
Senator Rufus looked at the young man before him, the boy he had tried to guide, and felt a sudden, chilling premonition. He had come here to lecture a wayward student on the virtues of tradition. He now realized, with a sense of profound dread, that he may have just unleashed an Alexander.