Vespasian: Tribune of Rome Read Free

leading to the atrium.
    ‘Vespasian,’ she called, stopping him in his tracks.
    ‘Yes, Mother,’ he replied warily, meeting her stern gaze.
    ‘A message from your brother arrived whilst you were away playing at being a farmer. He’s returning home; we expect him this evening.’
    Her dismissive tone immediately soured his excellent mood. ‘So the preparations are not in honour of my return from three days in the field?’ he asked, unable to resist goading her.
    She looked at him quizzically. ‘Don’t be impertinent; what makes you think that you would be honoured for doing menial tasks around the estate? Sabinus has been serving Rome; the day you decide to do the same rather than skulk up here in the hills fraternising with freedmen and mules is the day that you can expect some honour. Now go and get cleaned up. I expect you to behave civilly to your brother this evening, though I doubt that anything has changed in the way you feel about him in the years that he has been away. However, it would do you no harm to try and get along with him.’
    ‘I would do, Mother,’ Vespasian replied, running a hand through his sweaty, short-cropped, dark-brown hair, ‘if he liked me, but all he ever did was bully and humiliate me. Well, I’m four years older and stronger now so he had better watch himself, because I won’t stand for it like an eleven-year-old boy any more.’
    Vespasia Polla peered at her son’s round, olive-skinned face and noticed a steely determination in his normally good-humoured, large brown eyes; she had never seen that before.
    ‘Well, I’ll speak to Sabinus when he arrives and ask him to do his part in keeping the peace, as I expect you to do yours. Remember, it may be four years since you last saw him, but it is eight for your father and me as we were already in Asia when he joined the legions. I don’t want your fighting to ruin our reunion.’
    Giving him no chance to reply she disappeared off in the direction of the kitchen. No doubt to terrorise some lowly kitchen slave, Vespasian thought as he went to his room to change, his good humour now completely destroyed by the unwelcome news of his brother’s imminent return.
    Vespasian had not missed Sabinus at all for the four years he had been serving as a military tribune, the most junior of the officerranks, with the Legio VIIII Hispana in Pannonia and Africa. They had never got on. Vespasian didn’t understand or care why, it was just a fact: Sabinus hated him and he, in return, loathed Sabinus. However, they were brothers and nothing could change that, so they kept their dealings confined to frosty formality in public, and in private – well, Vespasian had learnt at a very young age to avoid being alone with his brother.
    A bowl full of warm water had been set for him on the chest in his small bedroom. He pulled the curtain across the entrance, stripped and set about rinsing off the dust accumulated from three long days’ mule-wrangling. That achieved, he rubbed himself dry with a linen sheet and then pulled on and belted a clean white tunic with the thin purple stripe down the front that indicated his equestrian rank. Picking up a stylus and a new scroll he sat down at his desk that, apart from the bed, was the only other item of furniture in the small room, and began to record from notes on a wax tablet the number of mules that they had transferred. Strictly speaking this was the farm steward’s job, but Vespasian enjoyed record-keeping and stock-taking, and looked upon this task as good practice for the day that he inherited one of the family estates.
    He had always thrived on estate work, although manual labour by someone of the equestrian class was frowned upon. His grandmother had encouraged his interest in farming in the five years that he and his brother had lived on her estate at Cosa whilst their parents had been in Asia. Throughout that time he had paid more attention to the doings of the freedmen and slaves working the fields