4

But Julia’s sympathy was wasted; Aurelia was well satisfied with her lot, and scarcely missed her husband at all. This was not from any lack of love or dereliction of wifely duty; it lay in the fact that while he was away she could do her own work without fearing his disapproval, criticism, or—may it never happen!—his forbidding her to continue.

When they had married and moved into the larger of the two ground floor apartments within the insula apartment building that was her dowry, Aurelia had discovered that her husband expected her to lead exactly the kind of life she would have led had they lived in a private domus on the Palatine. Gracious, elite, and rather pointless. The kind of life she had criticized so tellingly in talking to Lucius Cornelius Sulla. So boring and devoid of challenge that a love affair became irresistible. Appalled and frustrated, Aurelia had learned that Caesar disapproved of her having anything to do with the many tenants who occupied her nine floors of apartments, preferred her to use agents to collect the rents, and expected her to dwell exclusively within the walls of a rather cramped domain.

But Gaius Julius Caesar was a nobleman of an ancient and aristocratic house, and had his own duties. Tied to Gaius Marius by marriage and lack of money, Caesar had begun his public career in Gaius Marius’s service, as a tribune of the soldiers and then a military tribune in his armies, and finally, after a quaestorship and admission to the Senate, as the land commissioner deputed to settle Gaius Marius’s African Head Count veterans on the island of Cercina in the African Lesser Syrtis. All of these duties had taken him away from Rome, the first of them not long after his marriage to Aurelia. It had been a love match and was blessed by two daughters and a son, none of whom their father had seen born, or progress through infancy. A quick visit home that resulted in a pregnancy, then he was off again for months, sometimes years.

At the time the great Gaius Marius had married Caesar’s sister Julia, the house of Julius Caesar had arrived at the end of its money. A providential adoption of the eldest son had given the other and senior branch the funds to ensure its remaining two sons could reach the consulship; that had been the adoption of the son whose new name was Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar. But Caesar’s father (Caesar Grandfather as he was known these days, long after his death) had two sons and two daughters to provide for, and money enough to provide for only one son out of the four. Until, that is, he had a brainwave and invited the enormously rich, disgracefully lowborn Gaius Marius to take his choice of the two daughters. It had been Gaius Marius’s money which dowered the girls and gave Caesar his six hundred iugera of land near Bovillae, more than enough income to qualify for the senatorial census. It had been Gaius Marius’s money which smoothed every obstacle from the path of the junior branch—Caesar Grandfather’s branch—of the house of Julius Caesar.

Caesar himself had summoned up the grace and fairness of mind to be sincerely grateful, though his older brother Sextus had writhed, and moved slowly away from the rest of the family after he married. Without Marius’s money, Caesar knew well that he would not even have been eligible for the Senate, and could have hoped for little for his children when they arrived. Indeed, had it not been for Gaius Marius’s money, Caesar would never have been permitted to marry the beautiful Aurelia, daughter of a noble and wealthy house, desired by many.

Undoubtedly had Marius been pressed, a private dwelling on the Palatine or Carinae would have been forthcoming for Caesar and his wife; indeed, Aurelia’s uncle and stepfather Marcus Aurelius Cotta had begged to use some of her large dowry to purchase this private dwelling. But the young couple had elected to follow Caesar Grandfather’s advice, and abandon the luxury of living in complete seclusion. Aurelia’s dowry had been invested in an insula, an apartment building in which the young couple could live until Caesar’s advancing career enabled him to buy a domus in a better part of town. A better part of town would not have been hard to find, for Aurelia’s insula lay in the heart of the Subura, Rome’s most heavily populated and poorest district, wedged into the declivity between the Esquiline Mount and the Viminal Hill—a seething mass of people of all races and creeds, with Romans of the Fourth and Fifth Classes and the Head Count mingled among it.

Yet Aurelia had found her metier, there in the Suburan insula. And the moment Caesar was gone and her first pregnancy over, she plunged with heart and mind into the business of being a landlady. The agents were dismissed, the books her own to keep, the tenants soon friends as well as clients. She dealt competently, sensibly and fearlessly with everything from murder to vandalism, and even compelled the crossroads college housed within her premises to behave itself. This club, formed of local men, was supposed—with the official sanction of the urban praetor—to care for the religious welfare and facilities of the big crossroads which lay beyond the apex of Aurelia’s triangular apartment building—its fountain, its roadbed and sidewalks, its shrine to the Lares of the Crossroads.