Marius rarely left the house anymore.
His joints ached in the morning, and the stairs to the street seemed steeper than before. But sometimes, when the weather was kind, he walked to the edge of the forum and watched the world go about its business. Different people, different sounds. But still a world.
The pillars had worn smooth. Names once carved into marble were now unreadable. One bore a new inscription—in Gothic. Marius squinted at it, but the letters twisted in his mind. A different alphabet for a new age.
He saw young men drilling in the square, laughing between sword strokes. Not legionnaires. Soldiers of a different order. They wore no eagles. They marched to drums he didn’t recognize.
“New recruits,” a merchant beside him muttered. “King Athalaric’s trying to hold the borders. There are whispers out of the East.”
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Marius nodded, though the name meant little to him. Constantinople had always been the East—far-off and meddling. Greek Rome, some of the elders liked to say disparagingly.
He turned his gaze to the old temple of Saturn. It had become a grain store, then a shelter, and now stood empty, birds nesting in its crevices. Once a year, during the winter festival, someone still hung greenery over the door. But no one but the old ones, like Marius, remembered why.
Even his own son, now a man with graying temples, had stopped speaking of Roman things. “We must live in the world we have,” he’d said once. “Not the one you remember, father.”
Marius didn’t argue. He’d said the same thing to his own father once, long ago.
That night, as the fire cracked low in the hearth, Marius dug out out the scroll he’d copied from the Aeneid. The ink had faded, but the words were still there.
He ran a finger along the opening line. Arma virumque cano...
He whispered it aloud, but no one in the house understood. He had become the old man he’d laughed at in his youth, chasing the ghosts of the past.