The year is 270 Anno Domini. Rome still stands—weathered, worn, but unbroken. From the golden domes of the Palatine to the smoky alleys near the Tiber, the Eternal City breathes a different kind of air now—one heavy with uncertainty, iron, and ash.
Emperor Aurelian has just seized the purple, inheriting an empire fractured by rebellion, invasion, and doubt. The frontiers crumble under the weight of foreign tribes, while within, generals rise and fall faster than statues can be carved in their honor. In the East, the Palmyrene Queen Zenobia casts her shadow over Syria and Egypt. In the West, the so-called Gallic Empire holds sway over Gaul, Britannia, and Hispania. Rome, once the center of the world, finds herself surrounded by pieces of her former self.
Yet life continues in the streets, in the baths, in the crowded insulae of the plebeians. Bread is still baked, contracts still signed, lovers still whisper under porticoes darkened by time. And amid it all, one man writes.
Lucius Aurelius Felix is not a senator, nor a general. He does not command legions or shape the fate of cities. He is a scribe—a free citizen, educated but modest, earning his living by ink and parchment. His world is not the marble grandeur of the Curia, but the echoing stairwells of a tenement near the Forum Boarium, where goats bleat and philosophers argue in the same breath.
This journal is his witness—written not to glorify, but to remember. Through his eyes we see a Rome no longer triumphant, but still alive. A city of noise and gods and ghosts, clinging to its myths while the empire shifts beneath it.