The Legacy of Horato

The city of Horato produced the Horatione Empire, which has shaped the languages, geopolitics and currency of Calliste for centuries since. If Loribides (and Malicarn thereafter) offer visions of the spiritual city, the model for worldly power and the acme of statecraft is Horato.

Therefore, here are some of the cultural legacies of Horato, which percolate through to modern Calliste in art and learning. 

Horato seems to have been founded by a combination of migration from one of the states near Loribides, mingling with a local population of herders. A congress of clan-chiefs gave way to an elected Prince attached to numerous assemblies. Following a series of costly victories which expanded Horatione territory at the cost of internal disruption, this became a 'Popular Despotate' which drifted into a Hereditary Despotate. Steady expansion of Horatione influence across southern and western Calliste eventually reached the point where hegemony became dominion and the title of Emperor was coined. Emperor succeeded Emperor (by fair means or foul) for three centuries, until the Horatione Empire fell, pressured by waves of migration and internal sclerosis. 

Horato was far from dogmatic on religious matters, an attitude which extended into its Empire. Worship in early Horato focused on the 'Old Protectors', a series of gods taken from the region of Loribides and variously augmented or melded with local deities. However, in the fourth decade of the Popular Despotate,  the magistrate Kallipyx the Elder, then Preceptor of the College of Priests declared that the prosperity and safety promised by the Old Protectors had been delivered. Horato had high walls and rich fields. Not every harvest was bound to be rich, but the foundations of comfort and safety were in place. Worship of the Old Protectors could (and would) dwindle - excluding certain occasions, sacrifices would take place only once in a fortnight. Foreign cults and temples, already present in a city with plenty of client states and close allies, began to flourish. Naturally, this included the Majestic Vision. While it was expected that a respectable citizen would attend the fortnightly worship and that the scions of the Horatione elite would learn the legends of the Old Protectors, the Horatione faith would never seriously revive. 

Horatione remains have produced a stereotype of its architecture. This is characterised by a series of round arches, each opening onto a space covered by a barrel vault. This model could provide both a template for street-level open-ended workshops and vendors, and for individual chambers coming off a central courtyard. At the monumental scale, four sides of such arcades could support a wider dome. The commonest building material was a form of flat brick, with dressed stone being used for floors, corners and arches. 

Frequent sculptural motifs were the Bull's Head, Garland and stylised Sun-Arc. The Bull's Head is more often connected with Princely Horato; the Sun-Arc came in later, with the Hereditary Despotate. Displaying the path of the sun from rising to setting, this was a conscious symbolic claim of broad dominion and more-than-earthly strength. The possible connotation that Horatione power would set even as the sun does was either undetected or carefully ignored. 

Unlike much of the rest of Calliste at the time, Horato did not take or keep slaves. Slavery was illegal for Horatione citizens; the keeping of slaves by resident foreigners was frowned upon - and only wealthy and influential foreigners could practically manage to keep and maintain a household of slaves in Horato. (Of course, by the time of the Emperors no foreigner would ever be as wealthy or influential as a Horatione). However, this form of exceptionalism aside, the rapid expansion of Horatione hegemony demanded workers. The 'labour tithe' was levelled on client states, protectorates and defeated enemies to provide corvée for Horato. Tithed workers were expected to spend several years in Horato and its domains, absorbing much of Horatione culture and mores in the process. This transfer of population, combined with the violent practices required by client states to provide the labour tithe, made Horatione practices quite as dislocating and exploitative as slavery. 

A feature of Horatione urban life was the municipal herald or 'Voice of the City'. This was a rhetor, dressed in a plain white robe and arm-wraps dusted with chalk. He (and it often was a He) would walk the streets of a district, arms spread, wearing a large full-face mask, lips modelled in such fashion as to amplify the voice. The Voice of the City was responsible for communicating edicts of the Prince, Despot or Emperor, bringing news of victories or defeats and announcing civic religious rites. 

Details of the Horatione military have been raised elsewhere; for now, it will suffice to say that the Magisterial Guard preceded the Imperial Corps of Intimates and that the early system of raising regiments based on civic and rural districts could not last in the changing environment of the Popular Despotate - in which social atmosphere the Siege Hands rose to fame.  

A certain privilege could be awarded to generals (principally those generals that never attempted to play the political game for their own sake) and decorated veterans. They would be kept after death as 'Sentinel Burials' on the city walls. Their bodies would be embalmed and wrapped in shrouds; shining white metal cases would be set around those portions of the body uncovered by armour. Propped up by spears and poles displaying their medallions and honour plaques, their death masks stare out beyond the city. The pole honours supporting them are strong and weatherproofed, but a Sentinel Burial can still slump or fall: this is, unsurprisingly, a bad omen. Either some dread foe is on its way to the city, or some milksop or traitor has, by action or inaction, betrayed it.

The psychological impact of the Sentinel Burials was noted even in their own time: only the boldest thief, it was thought, would scale the city walls where the vigilant dead waited. To Horatione defenders a standing army of their greatest soldiers was constantly on guard. Even those who note that it wasn't a literal army observed that the soldiers and armed citizens of a besieged Horato would never let their honoured dead fall into the hands of the enemy - or so the rhetoric went. Indeed, Annullina Perpetua (by her own account, an Imperial Sub-Secretary) in her Annals of a Pensionary bitterly notes that in the days of the final Emperor every single Sentinel Burial remained firmly upright.