Chapter 179: The Politics of Piety
While one brave man walked into the wilderness to hunt a phantom, Alex turned his attention to the more immediate, and in some ways more dangerous, phantoms closer to home. The reports from Perennis were a constant, nagging reminder that the war for the Danube was only one of two fronts. The second was a silent, undeclared war for the loyalty of Northern Italy, and its unwilling general was a powerful, respected, and deeply resentful senator named Cassius Longinus.
Alex sat in the temporary headquarters of his "Party of Jupiter," a large villa on the outskirts of Vulcania that his loyal senators had appropriated for their use. Across a table laden with maps and dispatches sat Scipio and Volcatius. Their faces were grim.
"Longinus is a problem," Alex stated, tapping a scroll from Perennis that detailed the latest secret meetings at the senator's vast estates near Aquileia. "He is respected. He is wealthy. His family name carries immense weight in the north. And he is skillfully painting me as a radical tyrant who is trampling on Roman tradition and bleeding the heartland dry to fight a common barbarian rabble. We cannot afford a rebellion at our back while we have a horde at our front."
Scipio, a man whose solution to most problems involved a direct and forceful application of steel, slammed his fist on the table. "Then let us solve it in the Roman way. Send Perennis's Frumentarii. Arrest Longinus for sedition. Bring him to you in chains. Make an example of him. The others will fall into line out of fear."
Alex shook his head, rejecting the simple, brutal solution. "No. Longinus has been too clever for that. He has spoken no open treason. He has formed no army. He has simply... expressed his concerns to his friends. To arrest a man for speaking his mind in his own home would make him a martyr. It would prove his every accusation against me. It would turn every wavering landowner in the north against us. We will not fight him in the shadows with assassins and spies. We will fight him in the brilliant light of the Forum, with the very weapon he claims to own: tradition."
This was a new kind of war, and it required a new kind of strategy, one born of Alex's unique perspective. He had spent hours with Lyra, not analyzing troop movements, but compiling a deep, psychological dossier on his new political enemy. He had Lyra sift through every available record on Cassius Longinus: his family history stretching back to the Republic, his voting record in the Senate, his known business dealings, his public speeches, even the records of his family's religious affiliations and temple patronages.
The data had formed a clear profile. Longinus was a staunch traditionalist, a man who genuinely believed in the old ways. He was the single largest private patron of the ancient and deeply revered Temple of Mars Ultor—Mars the Avenger—in Rome, the temple originally built by Augustus to celebrate his victory over Caesar's assassins. Longinus was a man who cloaked his political ambition in a sincere and powerful piety. Alex now intended to use that piety as a weapon against him.
He laid out his plan for his loyal senators, a subtle and deeply cynical campaign of political theater. He turned first to Volcatius.
"Volcatius, you are the key to the first step," Alex began. "You are one of them. A northern landowner. You speak their language. You will request a formal meeting with Longinus and the other leading dissenters at his villa. You will go not as my agent, but as a concerned peer."