“This will be ours one day,” Fausta assured him, running her finger across the marble boundaries of nations and seas. “The whole of it, and even more.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I know myself and I’m beginning to know you,” she told him. “When I saw you for the first time last night, Constantine, I knew that a great and deep ambition burns within you, just as it does within me. I must be Augusta and, since a woman cannot rule Rome, it must be as the wife of an Augustus. You should be proud that I chose you.”
“I still find it a little dazzling.”
“It takes a woman to show a man what he can really do. Between us we shall go far.”
Almost three hundred years
Constantine looked at the great sun dial of Augustus, which had stood in this place for almost three hundred years. Already the sun was so low that its shadow was hardly discernible from the surrounding marble pavement.
“We had better find your bearers,” he said. “In an hour I’m supposed to accompany the Emperor to the great feast your father is giving in his honor.”
“I shall see you there,” she promised. “Be sure to wear your handsomest uniform, for I shall be very proud of you.”
In the week that followed, Constantine saw Fausta almost every day and each time was even more entranced. He quickly learned that she was quite serious in her ambition to become Augusta through him and, in truth, he was not at all disheartened by the prospect. He was not so dazzled even by love, however, that he failed to keep his eyes and ears open; and nothing he saw or heard in Rome made him feel that accomplishing his ambition would be either easy or soon. Powerful factions were obviously already plotting against the day when Diocletian would doff the purple for the role he had confided often to Constantine that he longed for most that of gardener in his beautiful palace of Salonae overlooking the Adriatic Sea. And none of the plotting in Rome Constantine was sure included a place for him.
Maxentius’ obvious desire to centralize all power at Rome once again and Constantine did not doubt the ambition of the Senate and the Praetorian Guard to regain much of its former power through encouraging him, was discarded as the sort of thing he would expect from a boaster and a wastrel. But the CoEmperor Maximian, Faust a’s father, he quickly realized, planned nothing less than to succeed both Diocletian and himself as sole Augustus.
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