DOMUS AQUILAE
The House of Aquila · Building / Landmark · Regio Senatus, Nova Romae
"The Domus Aquilae is the opposite of the Domus Corvini in almost every architectural particular, which tells you something about both houses and about the political distance between their occupants. Senator Aquila has been back from the frontier for twelve years. The house still feels like somewhere she has not entirely unpacked."
The Domus Aquilae is the townhouse of Senator Livia Serena Aquila, fifty-eight, leader of the reform faction and Chair of the Comitia Provincialis. It sits three streets east of the Domus Corvini, which is close enough in the Senate Quarter’s geography to be a daily reminder of their political proximity and far enough to be a daily reminder of their difference. Where Corvinus’s house announces its age and authority through mass and restraint, Aquila’s is lighter, more open, and furnished with the things a senator brings back from twelve years on the western frontier: practical objects, gifts from peoples Corvinus considers enemies, books in languages the conservative faction does not read.
In 1200 A.P. the Domus Aquilae is the most active political household in the Senate Quarter for a reason nobody outside a small circle knows: it is where the goblin treaty is being finalised, in conversations that Aquila conducts with Ambassador Pons in a private house in the Subura and brings back to her tablinum to work through. The house is not the meeting place. It is where the meeting’s consequences are processed. The distinction matters.
Purpose / Function
The Domus Aquilae functions, like all senatorial townhouses, as residence and political office simultaneously. The morning reception is smaller than Corvinus’s — Aquila’s faction is smaller and her style is direct rather than ceremonial; she meets colleagues by appointment rather than reception, and the appointments are kept to the point. The working rooms are genuinely working rooms: the tablinum is a scholar’s office as much as a senator’s, with Plinius’s field notes on the western frontier, the Academy’s published monographs on goblin culture, and Aquila’s own notes from twelve years on the Terminus Magnus occupying shelves that are organised by subject rather than by date or status.
The house’s most significant current function is as the processing node for the goblin treaty negotiation. Aquila meets Pons in the Subura to avoid surveillance. She returns to the Domus Aquilae to work through the legal and political implications of what was discussed. Her personal secretary, a woman named Flavia who has been with her for eleven years, manages the documentation of this process with a precision that Aquila trusts entirely. The documentation does not leave the house. It is not sent to the Tabularium. It is not shared with the Imperial Secretariat. It is the working record of a negotiation that the Emperor knows about and that nobody else is supposed to know about and that at least one person outside the authorised circle does know about.
Design
The Domus Aquilae is slightly smaller than Corvinus’s house but feels larger, because Aquila uses it differently. The atrium is not arranged for reception; it is arranged for movement. The garden is practical rather than formal: a working kitchen garden, maintained by two staff rather than a gardening team, producing the herbs and vegetables that Aquila’s household uses. The triclinium, when it is used, seats ten. It is used for working dinners that are distinguished from Corvinus’s breakfast meetings primarily by the fact that they run late and produce formal policy documents by the following morning.
The tablinum is the house’s real centre. It faces the garden rather than the atrium, which is Aquila’s deliberate choice: she works with her back to the street, facing the thing she grows rather than the thing she manages. The bookshelves are floor-to-ceiling and organised by subject: frontier geography, goblin culture and political structure, citizenship law, the Academy’s publications on non-Roman peoples. Plinius’s field notes have their own shelf. His monograph on the western frontier has been annotated in the margins in Aquila’s hand throughout.
Sensory & Appearance
The street exterior is similar to its neighbours: high walls, dark timber door, the standard Senate Quarter architecture of privacy expressed in stone. The difference is audible before it is visible: the house produces more sound than its neighbours, a quality of activity rather than the managed quiet of Corvinus’s establishment. People arrive throughout the day rather than at set reception hours. The doorkeeper, a freedwoman named Pia, has the disposition of someone managing a working environment rather than a formal household.
Inside: the smell of ink and old paper from the tablinum, the kitchen-garden herbs from the garden, and occasionally — on the evenings when the working dinner is in session — food and conversation from the triclinium until the second hour after dark. The house has the quality of a place that is doing things. Corvinus’s house has the quality of a place from which things are decided. The distinction, to people who have been in both, is immediate.
Denizens
Senator Livia Serena Aquila, fifty-eight. Dark-eyed, quick, dressed in provincial administrator’s deep blue rather than senatorial purple — a signal maintained for twelve years in Rome after twelve years on the frontier. She is not idealistic about the goblins; she is pragmatic about the arithmetic of fourteen million against eight million and the question of which side Rome should be on when the answer resolves. She is, in 1200 A.P., closer to a significant political success than she has ever been, and simultaneously more exposed than she realises. She does not know the extent to which Corvinus suspects. She should find out before the twentieth of Martius.
Personal Secretary Flavia Sertorina, thirty-eight, eleven years in Aquila’s service. A non-citizen scholar from Provincia Orientalis whose writing and analytical capabilities Aquila recognised and retained at a salary that is, by some measures, more than the position officially justifies. Flavia manages the treaty negotiation’s documentation with the specific thoroughness of someone who knows that what she is maintaining is the only record of something consequential. She is also the person in the household most likely to notice if the documentation has been accessed or observed by someone outside the circle. She has been noticing something for three weeks.
Defenses
The Domus Aquilae is not obviously defended, which is a deliberate choice and not an oversight. Aquila spent twelve years in a military environment and has specific views on security theatre. The house’s actual security is in its staff’s alertness and Flavia’s documentation protocols rather than in guards or locks that could be circumvented. The tablinum’s treaty negotiation documentation is maintained in a document case that is not locked — because a locked document case in an otherwise accessible room announces the importance of its contents. The document case is indistinguishable from the other document cases on the tablinum’s shelves. Its position on the shelf is not consistent from one visit to the next.
Flavia knows which case it is. She notices if it is not where she left it. She has noticed.
Access
By appointment; working dinners by invitation.
No formal reception hours.
Doorkeeper Pia manages access with more discretion than her manner implies.
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