Chapter V: LXXXIII
Once I got started drawing–after a lot of warmups–finishing the pencils and inking went quickly. The dialogue started fighting back and being stubborn, though.
I accidentally left a speaker ambiguous a couple of comics ago, by having an off-panel not-yet-seen speaker. This time I thought I’d try doing it deliberately.
Don’t get above yourself, Ulpius.
Not yet, anyway….
Judging by that hair and beard, it looks like someone has been ignoring Ireneius.
But it’s so much time and effort that could be put instead into: wine drinking; sausage-roll eating; friend hugging; general snogging; more food; other wine.
Snuggling with Iusta, his quasi-official wife.
If I were in the imperial family, I’d be glad there was an Ulpius working for us.
He’s not such a bad bloke, so one hears. He could have a notable career ahead of him.
He already looks quite like his statue. He’s, what, 49 here?
Sorry this comment sat in the unapproved hamper for so long! I hope you’ll check back in on the comic in September!
What’s kind of ironic about this is Ulpius’ being all shirty about Felix as a homo novis in the Flavian court. I know that the Flavians – well, Vespasian and Titus, anyway – were notable “traditionalists” in insisting in doing what they could to “restore” the older Roman mores after the (ahem)…excesses of the later Julio-Claudians. But the Flavians themselves were very much in the tradition of the “new men”, and it was their institutionalization of military ascent to power – the “right to carry a sword here” – that helped put paid to the old republican and citizen government idea of the princeps and replace it with the imperator, the miltary ruler…
If this were twitter I’d Like this comment, but since it isn’t, I have to say: I really like this comment.
I’d like to extend the discussion, but I’m up late and my brain is tired….
Ulpius is more concerned about his own power. The court of a monarch is filled with ambitious people who all vie for a place next to their lord. Any new member of the court is resented and will become the target of political, and in some cases factual, knives.
Ulpius is jealous because:
1. Felix got a private meeting with Titus and he wasn’t even checked for weapons. Meaning that he is allowed to go armed in the presence of the imperial family.
2. He was enrolled into the Praetorians with an officer’s rank.
3. He was made a Knigth. Probably enrolled into the Equestrian Rank regardless of the property qualification. To be a member of the Equestrian Rank you had to have MONEY. Crassus levels of money.
4. He is shacking up with a member of powerful family, never mind that she is a minor member, family is family and the Petronious could be protective of her just because she is one of them.
5. He is probably aware of who is Felix’s direct ancestor and thus knows that he has a very slight claim to Rome’s throne.
The problem here is not that Felix will claim the throne but that Flavian enemies can find out and use Felix as a lodestar to depose the Flavians and install him as a Puppet Imperator. Good luck with that. This is probably what soured Domitian on Felix. The fact that he is a huge invisible sword right above their crowned heads.
Titus gave Felix his trust back because he had him watched, specially while in Rome and saw that he did not make any move at all to get in contact with any political faction.
While Ulpius only knows Felix as a former legionary making him believe that he is nothing more than a thug. He is dismissing the fact that Felix is an accountant, which at the time is the equivalent of holding a PhD in high math today.
Titus knows this. In fact it is the reason why he wants him back. A man of action that can kill and better yet that knows how to think. The fact that he escaped Domitian increased his worth. Better yet, know that Domitian wants Felix killed, he can be sure that Felix won’t be spying for anybody but him.
The only unknown is Domitian. The man was a monster. He wasn’t content with killing you, he wanted to destroy you before he killed you. Even Mus got that by being his “guest”. And Mus knows that the moment Domitian loses interest in him, he is as good as dead.
And thanks also for this comment, and for extending the discussion. My storytelling is slow, but I always feel extra energy and spurred on to write/draw more quickly when I read someone’s thoughtful look into what might be roiling behind the scenes and in the history and social thicket of the times.
Assuming that Ulpius has any sort of in with the Army bureaucracy (which, palace staff, wanna bet?) he surely knows that Felix was a duplicarius – a “double-pay” troop in his position as siginfier and company clerk. I suspect that, knowing that, he is aware that Felix is more than just muscle. Muscle comes cheap and doesn’t get invited to the palace.
I’m sure there’s jealousy involved, but I doubt that it’s over Felix-as-future-emperor. Ulpius probably knows perfectly well that the young princeps Domitian doesn’t like our boy, and after the mess the later Julio-Claudians made it’s highly unlikely that any faction of any heft is going to bother trying to foist some minor scion of an uprooted branch of a former, fairly-thoroughly-discredited imperial lineage on the Senate and People.
And I have to admit that it’s always hard for me to keep the Blues-Domitian in mind while reading; I tend to default to the current historical take on the guy. So I have to keep reminding myself “he’s a Bad Guy, he’s the Whacko Tyrant, remember…don’t trust Domitian!”
If the current historical take tries to rehabilitate Domitian completely, I still feel it has a long way to go. Before a ruler reaches the extremes of a Caligula or a Nero, there’s still a lot of territory for callousness, narcissism, sadism, paranoia, and occasional arbitrary viciousness–without rising to full-blown monster. And like any human, he was complex. He could be, say, fairly capable and smart but still not be someone you’d ever risk getting angry or making feel threatened.
I don’t know…the most ardent apologists haven’t convinced me–and as I’m sure I’ve mentioned a few thousand times, I’m an ardent apologist for another historical figure, so I like to dig under the surface assumptions. But I’m always open to more discussion 🙂
I don’t know about ‘apologists’, but currently historians don’t see Caligula as stark raving mad and judge Nero as especially tarred by later enemies. I wouln’t name the latter in the same league as the former. Essentially, most Roman rulers were, judged by modern standards, cruel mafia bosses.
Felix’s promotion to signifier was because of his actions during the siege of Jersualem. He singlehandedly stormed a strong position and disabled a ballista. He nearly died despite having the help of a goddess.
And being a signifier automatically made you the cohorts treasurer and paymaster. So anybody reading his file would find nothing out of the ordinary. Thus Ulpius jab of “A carelessly violent man”.
Felix was trained as an accountant by his father and Mus’ grandfather.
He is unaware that Felix was Titus spy in the army, or that he was Domitian’s spy on Titus.
So Ulpius is trying to know why Felix was elevated over the common legionary, even a duplicarius.
As for Felix as claimant to the throne. Succession wars were fought for the slightest connection, like being the son of the fourth daughter of the third cousin of the last emperor’s bastard child with a slave.
I don’t know about Domitian. He killed lots of Patricians, but so did Nero, Caligula, Tiberius and even Augustus, and yet none of them earned that Damniato Memoriae that was thrown on his name after his death. That tidbit speaks volumes about the man’s personality. He was a very efficient ruler and manager of the state. But at the same time it can be quite true that he was one of the most cruel members of the human race. Cruelty does not mean inhability to rule, unlike Nero or Caligula who were mediocre rulers.
Roman military bureaucracy was exceptionally thorough. Regardless of the circumstances of his promotion, I’m sure his Army file had his literacy and numeracy on record. Again; my point is that Ulpius would be unlikely to feel threatened by a simple gunsel (I suppose the Roman equivalent would be a “gladii”?). But one with some qualifications as a potentially useful palace functionary? Yeah, that’d be a problem.
And I’m still not sure of the historical danger presented to the Flavians by someone supposedly related to a former emperor. Certainly some of the more ruthlessthe Julio-Claudians tended to kill off family members who they thought represented potential rivals. But I don’t get any sort of sense that, post-Julians, there was much of any sort of factional support for pretenders based on their lineage. I mean, you had the “pseudo-Neros”, but they were supposed to be the actual guy, not a relative. ISTM that the Year of Four Emperors did a pretty good job of breaking off the relationship between the principate and the descendants of Augustus. Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that there is no historical evidence for any sort of plot to “restore” any of old Octavian’s family, unlike the sort of nonsense that attended, say, the Stuarts in Britain
“A man of action that can kill and better yet that knows how to think.”
I wish I could recall where I read the version of this that went something like: “I’ve read up on you. You can and will kill when you need to. But any fool can kill. I need you because I need a man who knows when not to kill.”
That sounds so familiar…now it’s going to bug me.
I love snoopy guy on the far left.
He insisted on being in the shot….
“But at the same time it can be quite true that he was one of the most cruel members of the human race.”
But the problem with this is that we have no evidence other than that printed by his enemies. I’ve certainly done enough evil that, were my biography to be written by someone I’d hated and who hated me, I could certainly be made out to be a very vicious man.
I’m not going to try and argue that Domitian was a sweetheart. Nobody who styles himself a living God is going to be anything but a very dangerous man to be around. My only point is that we really don’t know how awful he was. With people like Gaius (“Caligula”), or Nero – or, for that matter, Trajan, who was every bit as autocratic and heavy-handed as Domitian – we have some accounts from supporters as well as critics. With Domitian it’s all enemies all the way down.
Which, in a sense, means that it’s fine to make him the Villain of the Piece; there’s no proof to the contrary. I think it’s just worthwhile to remember that we don’t really know whether the real man was as awful as he’s painted.
I think I didn’t make my point.
I’m arguing that Domitian went above and beyond what a normal autocratic ruler would do. Yeah people were expecting him to kill his enemies.
I agree that we have nothing more than the smear campaign to go by, but I am arguing that whatever it is that he did, it was serious enough for the senate to try to erase his name from the official record. Going so far as forbidding to say his name out loud. Something that was not done for the Julians. They were killed, their bodies thrown into the Tiber but that was about it. Of course, in the case of Nero his palace was destroyed, but still. He remained on the official record.
Whatever he did is now lost to history thanks to that Damnatio Memoriae.
One of the things that I like about this comic is the attention to detail. In the first panel we can see that both Ulpius and Felix have different shoes. Usually in these cases both would have been drawn wearing a “sandal”, because that is what Romans used for shoes.
I can identify Ulpius shoes, it is a variation on this one: http://www.romeacrosseurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/From-the-Antonine-Wall.jpg
But I cannot identify Felix’s. They look like a caliga but they are enclosed not strips of leather.
Edited to add better pics and links:
BTW: The Vindolanda excavation has a Conserve A Shoe fund.
So, as I was originally saying in this reply before I got lost looking at shoes: I recently switched Felix from open- to closed-toe sandals. Might have been a little bit influenced by watching a friend unhappily walking around a crowded city in open-toe sandals. I feel a little abashed that, I guess, there isn’t enough detail this time.
The first image below is a reenactor, obviously not original source, but there are a lot of nice surviving examples of closed-in leather booties from Vindolanda and other places. They seem to keep finding shoes at Vindolanda all the time (many of these are a little bit later period than Felix’s feet would be, of course)….
Speaking as a GI, I’m guessing that any trooper with more than garrison duty would have gone to his unit’s cobbler and had these overboots put on. Even moreso since Felix served in the East, where bare, gritty soil and exposed rock would make open caligae unpleasant at best and a misery at worst.
My guess is that the open caligae were parade wear, and that in the field the boys has sturdier footgear. Same-same for the short tunic; I’ll bet that most line dogs had some sort of trousers made up for bad weather and/or thick brush. Nothing like trying to break trail with your bare shins to made a troop think “Sod THIS for a game of soldiers…”
Just checking in…you okay? Been quiet around here for a while.