Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

The Son of Rome

When I was a young boy, my father took me into the city of Rome to see a marching band.

“There are as many approaches to cultivation as there are stars in the sky,” Socrates spoke, his voice a distant thing.

It was my first clear memory of the great city. I had grown up sheltered even by the standards of a young patrician. My mother rarely let me out of her sight, such was her anxiety, and so I languished in my early years with only the members of our estate and a few family friends as company. For years the vineyard was all I knew - until the day that my father took me from my mother’s arms and brought me to the beating heart of the Republic.

The men of the band were dressed in their legion best, parade regalia of crimson cloth and pristine leather. They wore polished bronze breast plates that glimmered in the sun, the eagles of Rome etched lovingly into their surfaces, and had ceremonial blades strapped to their hips. They marched proud, and they marched strong. In perfect synch, as one existence.

“If there is an objectively correct way to approach the refinement of the self, we have yet to discover it.”

Some of the men carried tympanon, beating the shallow drums with their hands as they marched. Others bore the long, almost circular curves of brass cornu on their shoulders. Centurians set the pace, easily marked by their distinctive silver helmets - gold trimmed and bristling with crimson manes. They marched down the streets of Rome in cadence, and their music was like nothing I had ever heard before.

“Every cult has its own methods, and so do all the major families. There are schools of philosophy run by men who think themselves wise, and schools of war overseen by men who know that some virtues can only be taught at the tip of a blade. There are benefits to almost any method and drawbacks to match.”

I had never seen a city street before that day, let alone a city street in the midst of a parade. Hundreds of people - thousands - lined the stone steps of temples and bathhouses, balconies and rooftops, all of them straining for a clear look at the marching men. I was overwhelmed in more ways than one. The people, the music, the sights and sounds and scents of the city, they were all so much harsher than what I had known within the walls of my family‘s estate.

It was all so vibrant.

My father hefted me up in the crook of his arm so I could see over the crowds. He pointed out elements of the parade that a child’s eyes wouldn’t pick out on their own, describing with quiet pride the hours upon hours of practice that had gone into those simple marching columns. He explained to me the coded commands the centurions were barking out, how those same commands practiced here would serve the legions in coordinating men on the battlefield. Even here, they prepared themselves for war.

“In general, how a man refines the aspects of his virtue is less important than what that virtue is. It’s a common saying that the grandest monuments are built upon the strongest foundations. Virtue is that foundation - it is excellence of the soul, and it requires constant work. That is what cultivation is, stripped of all our proud descriptions. Refinement of the body and soul.”

What struck me the hardest about that day, watching legionnaires march down marble boulevards as if on their way to war, was how they greeted my father. Every boy grows up thinking the world of his father, but few have the privilege of seeing that respect reflected in the eyes of other men. That day, I realized that my father wasn’t the great man I had always known him to be.

No. Watching legionnaires, centurions, and even noble tribunes divert from their perfect formations as they passed to tip their heads in respect to my father, I realized that he was an even greater man than I had thought.

Captain, they called him, though he was not there in uniform. It didn’t matter. In the city of Rome, rank could be forfeited. It could be retired or revoked. But it could never be fully taken from a man once it had been given to him. Though Cincinnatus returned home to toil in his fields after the work of a Dictator was done, there wasn’t a soul in Rome that would dare refer to him with anything less than the full respect he had commanded at his height.

My father was no different. Though he wasn’t a Captain at that time, he had been in the past, and he had earned his place among the men of the legions. They never forgot it, and they never acted otherwise. Because, eventually, they knew he’d be back. They knew he was that kind of man. And in the end, they were proven right.

“Gravitas is your foundational virtue. A Roman virtue.”

“You know all these people?” I asked my father, astonished in the way that only young children could be. He chuckled.

“More than you’d think, but less than I should.”

“But they all know you.”

“Not quite. They know of me.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked, confused. But he only smiled and watched the band march.

“You have Rome in your mind’s eye,” Socrates said. “Keep it there, and refine your musing. You know of Rome and your place within it. Now, picture virtue within that. The heart beats inside the chest, the mind dwells inside the skull, and the gut hungers inside the stomach. But what of virtue?

“Where is Gravitas found within Rome?”

The cries of the people and the marching commands of the centurions fell away at once. The clarion calls of the curving horns vanished like they’d never been. The only sounds that remained in the city of Rome were the beating of the drums, and the pounding of marching boots.

“Son,” my father said, the last voice in Rome, “can you see where they’re going?”

Darkness encroached on the edges of memory, at the end of every alley, and the men of the legions walked in quick-step into that void. I reached out, inexplicably terrified for them in a way that I knew I hadn’t been when I was living this memory.

“They’re off to fight our demons.”

“Where?” I asked desperately, though I already knew.

“Here,” he said, and tapped my heart.

I blinked pyre smoke out of my eyes, staring down at my fathers corpse on its bed of broken shields. The men of the Fifth gathered around him in somber silence, drawn despite broken limbs and battered bodies to his side.

I scrubbed the smoke from my stinging eyes, and gazed upon the broken corpse of a wolf in the shape of a man. The men of the Fifth stood bristling around me, the Prime Cohort seething at the sight of the creatures that had brought down Caesar. I raised my boot and hammered it down, shattering the demon skull. The Prime Cohort roared their approval.

I squinted against the spray of blood, wavering points of light in the night sky above, and cast around for a single Roman soul. I didn’t find them, not one - but I found their corpses. The men of the fifth legion had known ours was a losing battle, and yet somehow, inexplicably, here they were. Surrounding me, when they should have fled. Flanking me, when they should have kept their ranks. Broken, beaten, and damned.

“There are as many paths to refinement as there are stars in the sky. What’s important is that you know where you’re going. What matters is that you know why you want to get there.”

It doesn’t matter who avenges the city of Rome, so long as she’s avenged. I had said those words, hadn’t I? I had believed them with all my heart.

“A cultivator can’t advance unless they know what they are advancing towards. You’ve captured Rome in your mind’s eye, and you’ve captured Gravitas. Your beginning, and your middle. Now, envision the end.”

As if I could ever be satisfied with such a conclusion.

I stalked through fields of broken corpses, demons crushed beneath the weight of Gravitas. I ripped and tore beneath crow-darkened skies. And when I finally reached the accursed city of Carthage, I burned it to the ground.

I tore out the Carthaginian captain’s beating heart while it choked on the ash, and I poured salt into the gaping wound. “Salt and ash,” I snarled in a voice more guttural and inhuman than its own, staring into its wicked gold eyes while I bit into its heart. Salt and ash. Salt and ash.

Do you know why Africanus salted the city of Carthage after his work was done, Solus? My father asked me, while I trudged across the ruin of their home with fistfuls of white mineral. His gut was a bloody ruin, the armor blown out. Do you know why he broke all their metal works and scattered their children?

Where my birth father was mangled, my adopted father moved in shadows - I didn't know how he'd died, even now. But his voice was still clear.

He burnt Carthage to ash so he could win the war. He salted it so nothing would ever grow again.

I opened my eyes inside the estate of the Raging Heaven’s late kyrios, and found myself covered in soot and cave minerals. Beside me, Selene continued to meditate with her eyes closed, humming a tuneless song.

Socrates eyed me, sitting across on his own nest of blankets and silk. “Are you familiar with your master’s theory of the elements, boy?”

“Of course,” I said. The words came out hoarse. “Air, water, earth, fire - and aether.”

“And aether,” he echoed, in quiet contemplation. He grunted. “Four terrestrial elements, and four properties that combine to create them.”

“Hot, cold, dry, and wet,” I recited. I ached for a jug of water, but unfortunately it had all been dumped out onto the floor. I frowned, considering the puddles scattered around the room. They had been closer to me before, hadn’t they?

“Aristotle posits that just as every material object on this earth can be reduced to its composite elements, so too can abstract concepts. Principles, passions, and purposes. He theorized that virtues can be expressed in an elemental form because they share the same fundamental properties.”

The great philosopher laid one hand on his knee, leaning forward.

“Do you remember which properties combine to create which elements, boy?”

I swallowed, and tasted the soot of the burning furniture. The tang of the minerals carved off of the cave’s stone walls.

“Hot and wet create air. Wet and cold create water. Cold and dry create earth. Dry and hot -”

I looked down at my hands, covered in soot and mineral dust. Dry and hot. The component parts of my virtue.

Socrates sighed and rose to his feet. “I should have guessed. That worthless boy is the same as he’s always been.

“Everything he touches turns to flame.”