Chapter 47: The Hunt in Campania
The Speculatores Augusti moved not like a legion, but like a pack of wolves. Fifty men, hand-picked by Maximus from the hardiest veterans of the Danube frontier, they shed their polished Roman armor for the drab, anonymous tunics of merchants, travelers, and itinerant farmhands. They carried their short swords and daggers hidden in sacks of grain or strapped beneath their cloaks. They were a ghost squad, an extension of the Emperor's will, and they melted into the bustling traffic of the Appian Way, their faces grim, their purpose absolute.
Maximus rode with them, not as a general in a purple cloak, but as a grizzled olive oil merchant, his demeanor gruff and unremarkable. But his eyes, sharp and analytical, missed nothing. He had spent his life fighting barbarians in dark forests; hunting pampered senators in their sun-drenched country estates felt like a far simpler, if more distasteful, task.
Their first target was the landowner, Gaius Asinius Flavius. His villa was a fortress, a sprawling estate in the hills south of Capua, surrounded by high stone walls and staffed by a small army of private bodyguards—mostly retired gladiators and thuggish overseers. A frontal assault would have been costly and loud. Maximus had no intention of being loud.
They spent a day observing the villa from a wooded ridge, noting the guard patrols, the delivery schedules, the routines of the house. Perennis's agents had provided them with detailed schematics of the estate, highlighting its weaknesses. That night, under the sliver of a new moon, they struck.
They did not go over the main walls. They used a series of ropes and grappling hooks to scale the sheer cliff face at the rear of the property, a section deemed "unclimbable" and therefore lightly guarded. They moved in perfect silence, three-man teams dispatching the few sentries they encountered with the swift, brutal efficiency of a blade in the dark. No alarms were raised.
They infiltrated the sprawling villa like smoke, moving through the opulent gardens and silent corridors. Their targets were not the guards, but the man at the center of the web. They found Flavius in his lavish, oversized study, frantically burning scrolls and papyrus ledgers in a large bronze brazier—the incriminating evidence of his dealings with Metellus and the Parthians.
The senator looked up from the fire, his fat, jowly face illuminated by the flames, and saw Maximus standing in the doorway, flanked by two of his deadliest men. Flavius's eyes went wide with terror. He reached for a decorative dagger on his desk, a pathetic, jeweled toy.
"By what right do you enter my home?" he blustered, his voice a trembling squeak.
Maximus stepped forward into the light, his face a hard, unforgiving mask. He unrolled the imperial edict, the crisp papyrus crackling in the silent room. "By the right of the Emperor of Rome," he said, his voice a low growl. He read the proscription order aloud, each word a nail in Flavius's coffin.
Flavius's face collapsed. He tried to fight, swinging the toy dagger wildly. Maximus simply stepped aside and drove the pommel of his own gladius into the senator's temple. Flavius crumpled to the floor, unconscious. The general then drew his sword, and with one clean, efficient stroke, carried out the Emperor's justice. The hunt had claimed its first prize.