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.
The other two dominoes fell with similar, ruthless precision. Decimus Junius Pollio was found not at his villa, but in the nearby port town of Puteoli, trying to charter a fishing boat to escape to Greece. Maximus's men, tipped off by one of Perennis's informants, cornered him on a dark, salt-sprayed pier. His pleas for mercy were met with the cold, hard steel of a legionary's blade.
Lucius Villius Tappulus, the magistrate, proved to be the easiest. He had barricaded himself in his countryside villa, but his household slaves, who had suffered under his cruel hand for years, saw their chance. When Maximus's men arrived, the gates were opened from the inside. The slaves, promised their freedom and a share of the state's reward by a swift-talking agent, led the Speculatores directly to their master's hiding place in his own wine cellar. Tappulus was found drunk, weeping amongst his priceless amphorae. He did not even put up a fight.
The "Emperor's Peace," as the men had begun to grimly call their mission, was proving to be swift and merciless.
The final target was the ringleader, Quintus Sertorius Metellus. His villa near the fashionable resort town of Baiae was a palace, a monument to generations of senatorial wealth and arrogance. Unlike the others, Metellus had not been idle. He had used his vast fortune to hire a small private army, over a hundred men strong, composed of discharged soldiers, mercenaries, and gladiators from the local schools. He knew they were coming for him, and he intended to make a stand.
Maximus and his fifty men surveyed the compound. It was a formidable defensive position. But as Maximus studied the dispositions of the guards, he saw the tell-tale signs of a hired army: they were lazy, overconfident, and lacked true military discipline.
He devised a simple, classic plan. He divided his small force into three. The first group, a small team of ten, would create a noisy, obvious diversion at the main gate just after midnight, setting fire to a supply cart. As Metellus's forces rushed to respond to the frontal assault, the two other groups, led by Maximus himself and his most trusted centurion, would scale the walls on the villa's poorly defended seaward side.
The plan worked to perfection. As the mercenaries rushed towards the chaos at the front gate, Maximus and his forty remaining veterans swarmed over the walls, silent and deadly. The battle that followed in the moonlit gardens of the villa was not a battle of numbers, but of quality. Maximus's men were a cohesive unit of battle-hardened killers. Metellus's forces were a disorganized rabble of sell-swords. The legionaries moved with terrifying coordination, cutting down the surprised mercenaries, their short swords finding every gap in their armor.
Maximus fought his way towards the villa's main atrium, the heart of the complex. He personally cut down three of Metellus's personal bodyguards, massive Germans who fought with huge, clumsy axes. He kicked open the doors to the atrium and found his target.
Quintus Metellus stood there, his face pale with terror, a sword held with trembling hands. He was dressed in an old suit of ceremonial armor, a relic of some long-forgotten ancestor. He looked less like a warrior and more like a frightened child playing dress-up.
"You are a butcher, Maximus!" Metellus screamed, his voice high and thin. "A common thug sent by a boy-tyrant! You are destroying the Republic with this bloodshed!"
Maximus advanced slowly, his own sword held low and steady. "You destroyed the Republic, Senator," he said, his voice a low, contemptuous growl, "when you chose bribery and treason over honor and duty. When you conspired with foreign powers against your own people." He stopped a few feet from the terrified senator. "I am not destroying anything. I am simply cleaning the rot you left behind."
Metellus let out a wild cry and charged, swinging his sword clumsily. Maximus parried the blow with ease, the force of it jarring Metellus's arm. With a swift, contemptuous movement, Maximus spun inside the senator's guard and drove his blade home. The hunt was over.
As his men secured the villa, his senior centurion, a man named Tacitus, brought him a heavy, iron-bound strongbox, pried from Metellus's private chambers. Inside, amidst bags of gold and incriminating financial ledgers, were a series of scrolls sealed with unfamiliar markings.
Maximus broke the seal on one and began to read. His face, already grim, hardened into a mask of cold fury.
"What is it, General?" Tacitus asked.
"Proof," Maximus said, his voice dangerously quiet. "Proof of a deeper conspiracy than we ever imagined. Metellus wasn't just working with the Augusta and a few disgruntled senators." He held up the scroll, pointing to the seal at the bottom—a stylized image of a horseman with a bow. "This is the seal of the royal house of Parthia."
Tacitus stared. "The Parthians?"
"They were funding the coup," Maximus confirmed, his voice seething with rage. "They saw a chance to destabilize their greatest rival by placing a weak, pliable emperor on the throne. They were paying Metellus to start a civil war." He looked at his centurion, the full, horrifying scope of the treachery now clear. "This was never just about Roman politics. This was an act of war."