The Last Scroll of the Republic

The air in the Library of Lucullus tastes of smoke and fear. I am Lucius, a scribe and freedman, and my world is ending not with a philosophical sigh, but with the tramp of legionary boots on cobblestones.

For weeks, the news has been a torrent of panic. Caesar has crossed the Rubicon. He marches on Rome, and Pompey and the Senate have fled, a flock of frightened geese in their togas. The city is a nest of vipers, everyone waiting to see which way the wind of tyranny will blow.

My master, the Senator Gallus, is gone. He pressed a bag of gold into my hand and told me to save what I could. "Not the gold, you fool! The knowledge! The words!"

So I remain, a ghost among ghosts, in this temple of scrolls. My duty is not to a man, but to memory itself. While the city burns with rumor, I work by the light of a single lamp, my stylus scratching a frantic counter-rhythm to the chaos outside.

I am not copying treaties or tax records. I am trying to save the voices. The speeches of Cato, fierce and unforgiving. The poetry of Catullus, sharp and beautiful as a dagger. The philosophical musings of men who believed in a Republic of laws, not of men. I pack them into cedar boxes, my hands trembling. Each scroll is a soul, and I am their Charon, ferrying them to an uncertain shore.

The door to the library groans open. I freeze, my heart a trapped bird in my chest. A soldier stands there, his armor scarred, his face grimed with the dust of the Via Flaminia. He is not one of the city watch. He is a Caesarean.

He does not draw his sword. He looks around the vast, shadowy hall, his eyes lingering on the towering shelves, the smell of papyrus and ink.

“You,” he grunts. “The Senator’s man?”

I cannot speak. I merely nod, my body shielding the half-packed box.

He takes a step closer, and I see the exhaustion in his eyes. He is young, perhaps my own age. “The General is entering the city at dawn. All state property is to be seized.”

My heart sinks. This is it. The words will be burned, repurposed for proclamations, lost forever.

But the soldier does not call for his comrades. He walks to a nearby desk and picks up a scroll at random. He unrolls it, his calloused fingers surprisingly gentle on the delicate papyrus.

“What is this?” he asks, his voice quieter now.

“It is… a history,” I stammer. “By Polybius. On the rise of the Roman Republic.”

He reads a few lines, his lips moving silently. He is not an uneducated man. “It speaks of balance,” he murmurs. “Of preventing one man from having too much power.”

He looks from the ancient Greek words to my terrified face, then to the box I am protecting. He understands.

For a long moment, he is silent. The fate of a thousand years of thought rests on this common soldier.

He lets the scroll snap shut. “The General’s orders are for the Treasury on the Capitoline. For the grain silos. He said nothing,” he says, his eyes locking with mine, “about a library.”

He turns and walks to the door. He pauses on the threshold, without looking back. “Be gone by sunrise.”

Then he is gone.

I do not waste a second. I finish packing the box. I will take it to my cousin’s farm in the hills. The Republic may be dead, its laws broken, its leaders scattered. But its soul, its memory, its warning whispers—these, I have saved. And as long as one man is willing to guard them, the flame is not yet extinguished. The words will wait for a less bloody day.