This time, Caesar sailed to the east. His mother’s steward, Eutychus (really his steward, but Caesar never made the mistake of thinking that), soft and semi—sedentary for years, discovered that traveling with Gaius Julius Caesar was no leisurely progress. On land—particularly when the road was as respectable as the Via Appia—he would cover forty miles in a day, and anyone who did not keep up was left behind. Only dread of disappointing Aurelia enabled Eutychus to hang on, especially during the first few days, when the steward’s fat smooth legs and pampered bottom dissolved into one enormous pain.
“You’re saddlesore!” laughed Caesar unsympathetically when he found Eutychus weeping miserably after they stopped at an inn near Beneventum.
“It’s my legs hurt the worst,” sniffled Eutychus.
“Of course they do! On a horse they’re unsupported weight, they just dangle off the end of your behind and flop about—particularly true of yours, Eutychus! But cheer up! By the time we get to Brundisium they’ll feel much better. So will you. Too much easy Roman living.”
The thought of reaching Brundisium did nothing to elevate the steward’s mood; he burst into a fresh spate of tears at the prospect of a heaving Ionian Sea.
“Caesar’s a beggar,” said Burgundus, grinning, after Caesar had departed to make sure their accommodation was clean.
“He’s a monster!” wailed Eutychus. “Forty miles a day!’’
“You’re lucky. This is just the beginning. He’s going easy on us. Mostly because of you.”
“I want to go home!”
Burgundus reached out to give the steward’s shoulder a clumsy pat. “You can’t go home, Eutychus, you know that.” He shivered, grimaced, his wide and slightly vacant-looking eyes filled with horror. “Come on, dry your face and try to walk a bit. It’s better to suffer with him than go back to face his mother—brrr! Besides, he’s not as unfeeling as you think he is. Right at this moment he’s arranging for a nice hot bath for your nice sore arse.”
Eutychus survived, though he wasn’t sure he would survive the sea crossing. Caesar and his small entourage took nine days to cover the three hundred and seventy miles between Rome and Brundisium, where the relentless young man shepherded his hapless flock onto a ship before any of them could find the breath to petition him for a few days’ rest first. They sailed to the lovely island of Corcyra, took another ship there for Buthrotum in Epirus, and then rode overland through Acarnania and Delphi to Athens. This was a Greek goat path, not a Roman road; up and down the tall mountains, through wet and slippery forests.
“Obviously even we Romans don’t move armies along this route,’’ Caesar observed when they emerged into the awesome vale of Delphi, more a gardened lap on a seated massif. The idea had to be finished before he could gaze about and admire; he said, “That’s worth remembering. An army could move along it if the men were stouthearted. And no one would know because no one would believe it. Hmmm.”
Caesar liked Athens, and Athens liked him. In contrast to his noble contemporaries, he had nowhere solicited hospitality from the owners of large houses or estates, contenting himself with hostelries where available, and a camp beside the road where they were not. So in Athens he had found a reasonable-looking inn below the Acropolis on its eastern side, and taken up residence. Only to find himself summoned immediately to the mansion of Titus Pomponius Atticus. He didn’t know the man, of course, though (like everyone else in Rome) he knew the history of the famous financial disaster Atticus and Crassus had suffered the year after Gaius Marius died.
“I insist you stay with me,” said the urbane man—of—the—world, who (despite that earlier miscalculation) was a very shrewd judge of his peers. One look at Caesar told him what reports had hinted; here was someone who was going to matter.
“You are too generous, Titus Pomponius,” Caesar said with a wide smile. “However, I prefer to remain independent.”
“Independence in Athens will only give you food poisoning and dirty beds,” Atticus answered.
The cleanliness fanatic changed his mind. “Thank you, I will come. I don’t have a large following—two freedmen and four servants, if you have room for them.”
“More than enough room.”
And so it was arranged. As were dinner parties and tourist expeditions; Caesar found an Athens suddenly opened to him that demanded a longer stay than expected. Epicurean and lover of luxury though Atticus was reputed to be, he was not soft, so there were plenty of opportunities to engage in some rough scrambling up cliffs and mountain shoulders of historical note, and good hard gallops across the flats at Marathon. They rode down to Corinth, up to Thebes, looked at the marshy foreshores of Lake Orchomenus where Sulla had won the two decisive battles against the armies of Mithridates, explored the tracks which had enabled Cato the Censor to circumvent the enemy at Thermopylae—and the enemy to circumvent the last stand of Leonidas.
“Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their command,’’ Caesar read off the stone commemorating that valiant last stand. He turned to Atticus. “The whole world can quote this inscription, but it has a resonance here on the spot that it doesn’t when read off a piece of paper.”
“Would you be content to be so remembered, Caesar?”
The long, fair face closed up. “Never! It was a stupid and futile gesture, a waste of brave men. I will be remembered, Atticus, but not for stupidity or futile gestures. Leonidas was a Spartan king. I am a patrician Roman of the Republic. The only real meaning his life had was the manner in which he threw it away. The meaning of my life will lie in what I do as a living man. How I die doesn’t matter, provided I die like a Roman.”
“I believe you.”
Because he was a natural scholar and very well educated, Caesar found himself with much in common with Atticus, whose tastes were intellectual and eclectic. They found themselves with a similar taste in literature and works of art, and spent hours poring over a Menander play or a Phidias statue.
“There are not, however, very many good paintings left in Greece,” Atticus said, shaking his head sadly. “What Mummius didn’t carry off to Rome after he sacked Corinth—not to mention Aemilius Paullus after Pydna!—have successfully vanished in the decades since. If you want to see the world’s best paintings, Caesar, you must go to the house of Marcus Livius Drusus in Rome,”
“I believe Crassus owns it now.”
Atticus’s face twisted; he disliked Crassus, colleagues in speculation though they had been. “And has probably dumped the paintings in a dusty heap somewhere in the basement, where they will lie until someone drops a hint to him that they’re worth more than tutored slaves on the market or insulae bought up cheap.”
Caesar grinned. “Well, Atticus my friend, we can’t all be men of culture and refinement! There’s room for a Crassus.”
“Not in my house!”
“You’re not married,” said Caesar toward the end of his time in Athens. He had his ideas as to why Atticus had avoided the entanglements of matrimony, but the statement as he put it was not insulting because the answer did not need to be revealing.
Atticus’s long, ascetic and rather austere face produced a faint moue of disgust. “No, Caesar. Nor do I intend to marry.”
“Whereas I have been married since I was thirteen. And to a girl who is still not old enough to take to my bed. That is a strange fate.”
“Stranger than most. Cinna’s younger daughter. Whom you would not divorce, even for Jupiter Optimus Maximus.”
“Even for Sulla, you mean,” said Caesar, laughing. “It was very fortunate. I escaped Gaius Marius’s net—with Sulla’s active connivance!—and ceased to be the flamen Dialis.”
“Speaking of marriages, are you acquainted with Marcus Tullius Cicero?” asked Atticus.
“No. I’ve heard of him, of course.”
“You ought to get on well together, but I suspect you may not,” said Atticus thoughtfully. “Cicero is touchy about his intellectual abilities, and dislikes rivals. You may well be his intellectual superior.”
“What has this to do with marriage?”
“I’ve just found him a wife.”
“How splendid,” said Caesar, uninterested.
“Terentia. Varro Lucullus’s adoptive sister.”
“A dreadful woman, I hear.”
“Indeed. But socially better than he could have hoped for.”
Caesar made up his mind; time to go, when one’s host was reduced to aimless conversation. Whose fault that was, the guest knew. His reading of this Roman plutocrat in self-imposed exile was that Atticus’s sexual preferences were for young boys, which imposed upon Caesar a degree of reserve normally foreign to his outgoing nature. A pity. There might otherwise have grown out of this first meeting a deep and lasting friendship.
From Athens, Caesar took the Roman-built military road north from Attica through Boeotia and Thessaly and the pass at Tempe, with a casual salute to Zeus as they rode at Caesar’s remorseless pace past the distant peak of Mount Olympus. From Dium just beyond the party took ship again and sailed from island to island until it reached the Hellespont. From there to Nicomedia was a voyage of three days.
His reception in the palace at Nicomedia was ecstatic. The old King and Queen had quite given up hope of ever seeing him again, especially after word had come from Mitylene that Caesar had gone back to Rome in company with Thermus and Lucullus. But it was left to Sulla the dog to express the full extent of the joy Caesar’s advent provoked. The animal tore about the palace yelping and squealing, would leap up at Caesar, race over to the King and Queen to tell them who was here, then back to Caesar; its antics quite paled the royal hugs and kisses into insignificance.
“He almost talks,” said Caesar when the dog finally let him sink into a chair, so winded that it contented itself with sitting on his feet and producing a series of strangled noises. He leaned down to give the dog’s belly a rub. “Sulla, old man, I never thought I’d be so glad to see your ugly face!”
*
His own parents, Caesar reflected much later that evening, when he had retired to his room and lay unclothed upon his bed, had always been rather distant figures. A father rarely home who when he was home seemed more intent upon conducting some sort of undeclared war upon his wife than in establishing a rapport with any of his children; and a mother who was unfailingly just, unsparingly critical, unable to give physical affection. Perhaps, thought Caesar from his present vantage point, that had been a large part of his father’s inexplicable but patent disapproval of his mother—her fleshly coolness, her aloofness. What the young man could not see, of course, was that the real root of his father’s dissatisfaction had lain in his wife’s unstinting love for her work as landlady—work he considered utterly beneath her. Because they had never not known Aurelia the landlady, Caesar and his sisters had no idea how this side of her had galled their father. Instead, they had equated their father’s attitude with their own starvation for hugs and kisses; for they could not know how pleasurable were the nights their parents spent together. When the dreadful news had come of the father’s death—borne as it had been by the bearer of his ashes—Caesar’s immediate reaction had been to take his mother in his arms and comfort her. But she had wrenched herself away and told him in clipped accents to remember who he was. It had hurt until the detachment he had inherited from her asserted itself, told him that he could have expected no other behavior from her.
And perhaps, thought Caesar now, that was no more than a sign of something he had noticed all around him—that children always wanted things from their parents that their parents were either not willing to give, or incapable of giving. His mother was a pearl beyond price, he knew that. Just as he knew how much he loved her. And how much he owed her for pointing out to him perpetually where the weaknesses lay within him—not to mention for giving him some wonderfully worldly and unmaternal advice.
And yet—and yet… How lovely it was to be greeted with hugs and kisses and unquestioning affection, as Nicomedes and Oradaltis had greeted him today. He didn’t go so far as to wish consciously that his own parents had been more like them; he just wished that they had been his parents.
This mood lasted until he broke the night’s fast with them on the next morning, and the light of day revealed the wish’s manifest absurdity. Sitting looking at King Nicomedes, Caesar superimposed his own father’s face upon the King’s (in deference to Caesar, Nicomedes had not painted himself), and wanted to laugh. As for Oradaltis—a queen she might be, but not one—tenth as royal as Aurelia. Not parents, he thought then: grandparents.
It was October when he had arrived in Nicomedia and he had no plans to move on quickly, much to the delight of the King and Queen, who strove to fall in with all their guest’s wishes, be it to visit Gordium, Pessinus, or the marble quarries on the island of Proconnesus. But in December, when Caesar had been in Bithynia two months, he found himself asked to do something very difficult and passing strange.
*
In March of that year the new governor of Cilicia, the younger Dolabella, had started out from Rome to go to his province in the company of two other Roman noblemen and a retinue of public servants. The more important of his two companions was his senior legate, Gaius Verres; the less important was his quaestor, Gaius Publicius Malleolus, apportioned to his service by the lots.
One of Sulla’s new senators through election as quaestor, Malleolus was by no means a New Man; there had been consuls in his family, there were imagines in his atrium. Of money, however, there was little; only some lucky buys in the proscriptions had enabled the family to pin their hopes on the thirty-year-old Gaius, whose duty was to restore the family’s old status by rising to the consulship. Knowing how small Gaius’s salary would be and how expensive maintaining the younger Dolabella’s life—style was going to be, his mother and sisters sold their jewels to plump out Malleolus’s purse, which he intended to plump out further when he reached his province. And the women had eagerly pushed on him the greatest family treasure left, a magnificent collection of matching gold and silver plate. When he gave a banquet for the governor, the ladies said, it would increase his standing to use the family plate.
Unfortunately Gaius Publicius Malleolus was not as mentally capable as earlier men of his clan had been; he possessed a degree of gullible naivete that did not bode well for his survival in the forefront of the younger Dolabella’s retinue. No slouch, the senior legate Gaius Verres had assessed Malleolus accurately before the party had got as far as Tarentum, and cultivated the quaestor with such charm and winning ways that Malleolus deemed Verres the best of good fellows.
They traveled together with another governor and his party going to the east: the new governor of Asia Province, Gaius Claudius Nero; a patrician Claudius, he had more wealth but far less intelligence than that prolific branch of the patrician Claudii cognominated Pulcher.
Gaius Verres was hungry again. Though he had (thanks to prior knowledge of the area) done very well out of proscribing major landowners and magnates around Beneventum, he owned a genuine passion for works of art which Beneventum had not assuaged. The proscribed of Beneventum had been on the whole an untutored lot, as content with a mawkish Neapolitan copy of some sentimental group of nymphs as with a Praxiteles or a Myron. At first Verres had watched and waited for the proscription of the grandson of the notorious Sextus Perquitienus, whose reputation as a connoisseur was quite unparalleled among the knights, and whose collection thanks to his activities as a tax—farmer in Asia was perhaps even better than the collection of Marcus Livius Drusus. Then the grandson had turned out to be Sulla’s nephew; the property of Sextus Perquitienus was forever safe.
Though his family was not distinguished—his father was a pedarius on the back benches of the Senate, the first Verres to belong to that body—Gaius Verres had done remarkably well thanks to his instinct for being where the money was and his ability to convince certain important men of his worth. He had easily fooled Carbo but had never managed to fool Sulla, though Sulla had not scrupled to use him to ruin Samnium. Unfortunately Samnium was as devoid of great works of art as Beneventum; that side of Verres’s insatiably avaricious character remained unappeased.
The only place to go, decided Verres, was to the east, where a Hellenized world had scattered statues and paintings literally everywhere from Alexandria to Olympia to Pontus to Byzantium. So when Sulla had drawn the lots for next year’s governors, Verres had weighed up his chances and opted for cultivating the younger Dolabella. His cousin the elder Dolabella was in Macedonia—a fruitful province when it came to works of art—but the elder Dolabella was a hard man, and had his own aims. Gaius Claudius Nero, going to Asia Province, was a bit of a stickler for the right thing. Which left the next governor of Cilicia, the younger Dolabella. Exactly the material for a Gaius Verres, as he was greedy, unethical, and a secret participant in vices which involved dirty smelly women of the most vulgar kind and substances capable of enhancing sensuous awareness. Long before the journey to the east actually began, Verres had made himself indispensable to Dolabella in pursuing his secret vices.
Luck, thought Verres triumphantly: he had Fortune’s favor! Men like the younger Dolabella were not many, nor on the whole did they usually rise so high. Had not the elder Dolabella proven militarily helpful to Sulla, the younger would never have gained praetorship and province. Of course praetorship and province had been grabbed at, but the younger Dolabella lived in constant fear; so when Verres showed himself as sympathetic as he was resourceful, Dolabella sighed in relief.
While the party had traveled in conjunction with Claudius Nero, Verres had metaphorically bound his itching hands to his sides and resisted the impulse to snatch this work from a Greek sanctuary and that work from a Greek agora. In Athens especially it had been difficult, so rich was the treasure trove all around; but Titus Pomponius Atticus sat like a huge spider at the center of the Roman web which enveloped Athens. Thanks to his financial acumen, his blood ties to the Caecilii Metelli, and his many gifts to Athens, Atticus was not a man to offend, and his condemnation of the kind of Roman who plundered works of art was well known.
But when they left Athens by ship there came the parting of the ways with Claudius Nero, who was anxious to reach Pergamum and not by nature a Grecophile. So Claudius Nero’s ship sped as fast as it could to Asia Province, while Dolabella’s ship sailed to the tiny island of Delos.
Until Mithridates had invaded Asia Province and Greece nine years earlier, Delos had been the epicenter of the world’s slave trade. There all the bulk dealers in slaves had set up shop, there came the pirates who provided the eastern end of the Middle Sea with most of its slaves. As many as twenty thousand slaves a day had changed hands in the old Delos, though that had not meant an endless parade of slave—filled vessels choking up the neat and commodious Merchant Harbor. The trading was done with bits of paper, from transfers of ownership of slaves to the moneys paid over. Only special slaves were transported to Delos in person; the island was purely for middlemen.
There had used to be a large Italo—Roman population there, as well as many Alexandrians and a considerable number of Jews; the largest building on Delos was the Roman agora, wherein the Romans and Italians who conducted business on Delos had located their offices. These days it was windswept and almost deserted, as was the western side of the isle, where most of the houses clustered because the weather was better. In terraces up the slopes of Mount Cynthus were the precincts and temples of those gods imported to Delos during the years when it had lain under the patronage of the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. A sanctuary of Artemis, sister of Apollo, lay closest to the smaller of the two harbors, the Sacred Harbor, in which only the ships of pilgrims anchored. Beyond this, going north, was the mighty and wonderful precinct of Apollo—huge, beautiful, stuffed with some of the greatest works of art known. And between Apollo’s temple and the Sacred Lake lay the white Naxian marble lions which flanked the Processional Way linking the two.
Verres went wild with delight, could not be prised from his explorations. He flitted from one temple to another, marveling at the image of Ephesian Artemis loaded down with bulls’ testicles like sterile pendulous breasts, astonished at the goddess Ma from Comana, at Sidonian Hecate, at Alexandrian Serapis, literally drooling at images in gold and chryselephantine, at gem—studded oriental thrones on which, it seemed, the original occupants must have sat cross—legged. But it was inside the temple of Apollo that he found the two statues he could not resist—a group of the satyr Marsyas playing his rustic pipes to an ecstatic Midas and an outraged Apollo, and an image in gold and ivory of Leto holding her divine babies said to have been fashioned by Phidias, master of chryselephantine sculpture. Since these two works of art were small, Verres and four of his servants stole into the temple in the middle of the night before Dolabella was due to sail, removed them from their plinths, wrapped them tenderly in blankets, and stowed them in that part of the ship’s hold wherein were deposited the belongings of Gaius Verres.
“I’m glad Archelaus sacked this place, and then Sulla after him,” said a pleased Verres to Malleolus at dawn. “If the slave trade still made a hive of activity out of Delos, it would be far harder to walk about undetected and do a little acquiring, even in the night marches.”
A little startled, Malleolus wondered what Verres meant, but a look at that perversely beautiful honey—colored face did not encourage him to ask. Not half a day later, he knew. For a wind had risen suddenly which prevented Dolabella’s sailing, and before it had blown itself out the priests of Apollo’s precinct had come to Dolabella crying that two of the god’s most prized treasures had been stolen. And (having remarked for how long Verres had prowled about them, stroking them, rocking them on their bases, measuring them with his eyes) they accused Verres of the deed. Horrified, Malleolus realized that the allegation was justified. Since he liked Verres, it went hard with Malleolus to go to Dolabella and report what Verres had said, but he did his duty. And Dolabella insisted that Verres return the works.
“This is Apollo’s birthplace!” he said, shivering. “You can’t pillage here. We’ll all die of disease.”
Balked and in the grip of an overmastering rage, Verres “returned” the works by tossing them over the side of the ship onto the stony shore. Vowing that Malleolus would pay. But only to himself; much to Malleolus’s surprise, Verres came to thank him for preventing the deed.
“I have such a lust for works of art that it is a great trouble to me,” said Verres, golden eyes warm and moist. “Thank you, thank you!”
His lust was not to be thwarted again, however. In Tenedos (which Dolabella had a fancy to visit because of the part the isle had played in the war against Troy) Verres appropriated the statue of Tenes himself, a beautiful wooden creation so old it was only remotely humanoid. His new technique was candid and unapologetic: “I want it, I must have it!” he would say, and into the ship’s hold it would go while Dolabella and Malleolus sighed and shook their heads, unwilling to cause a rift in what was going to be a long and necessarily closely knit association. In Chios and in Erythrae the looting occurred again; so did Verres’s services to Dolabella and Malleolus, the latter now being steadily drawn into a corruption which Verres had already made irresistible to Dolabella. So when Verres decided to remove every work of art from the temple and precinct of Hera in Samos, he was able to persuade Dolabella to hire an extra ship—and to order the Chian admiral Charidemus, in command of a quinquereme, to escort the new governor of Cilicia’s flotilla on the rest of its journey to Tarsus. No pirates must capture the swelling number of treasures! Halicarnassus lost some statues by Praxiteles—the last raid Verres made in Asia Province, now buzzing like an angry swarm of wasps. But Pamphylia lost the wonderful Harper of Aspendus and most of the contents of the temple of Artemis at Perge—here, deeming the statue of the goddess a poorly executed thing, Verres contented himself with stripping its coat of gold away and melting it down into nicely portable ingots.
And so at last they came to Tarsus, where Dolabella was glad to settle into his palace and Verres glad to commandeer a villa for himself wherein the treasures he had pillaged could be put on display for his delectation. His appreciation of the works was genuine, he had no intention of selling a single one; simply, in Gaius Verres the obsessions and amoralities of the fanatical collector reached a height hitherto unknown.
Gaius Publicius Malleolus too was glad to find himself a nice house beside the river Cydnus; he unpacked his matching gold and silver plate and his moneybags, for he intended to augment his fortune by lending money at exorbitant rates of interest to those who could not borrow from more legitimate sources. He found Verres enormously sympathetic—and enormously helpful.
By this time Dolabella had sunk into a torpor of gratified sensuality, his thought processes permanently clouded by the Spanish fly and other aphrodisiac drugs Verres supplied him, and content to leave the governing of his province to his senior legate and his quaestor. Displaying sufficient sense to leave the art of Tarsus alone, Verres concentrated upon revenge. It was time to deal with Malleolus.
He introduced a subject close to the hearts of all Romans—the making of a will.
“I lodged my new one with the Vestals just before I left,” said Verres, looking particularly attractive with the light of a chandelier turning his softly curling hair into old gold. “I presume you did the same, Malleolus?”
“Well, no,” Malleolus answered, flustered. “I confess the thought never occurred to me.”
“My dear fellow, that’s insanity!” cried Verres. “Anything can happen to a man away from home, from pirates to illnesses to shipwreck—look at the Servilius Caepio who drowned on his way home twenty-five years ago—he was a quaestor, just like you!” Verres slopped more fortified wine into Malleolus’s beautiful vermeil cup. “You must make a will!”
And so it went while Malleolus grew drunker and drunker—and Verres appeared to. When the senior legate decided Dolabella’s foolish quaestor was too befuddled to read what he was signing, Verres demanded paper and pen, wrote out the dispositions Gaius Publicius Malleolus dictated, and then assisted him to sign and seal. The will was tucked into a pigeonhole in Malleolus’s study and promptly forgotten by its author. Who, not four days later, died of an obscure malady the Tarsian physicians finally elected to call food poisoning. And Gaius Verres, producing the will, was surprised and enchanted to discover that his friend the quaestor had left him everything he owned, including the family plate.
“Dreadful business,” he said to Dolabella sadly. “It’s a very nice legacy, but I’d rather poor Malleolus was still here.”
Even through his aphrodisiac—induced haze Dolabella sensed a touch of hypocrisy, but confined his words to wondering how he was going to get another quaestor from Rome in a hurry.
“No need!” said Verres cheerfully. “I was Carbo’s quaestor, and good enough at the job to be prorogued as his proquaestor when he went to govern Italian Gaul. Appoint me proquaestor.’’
And so the affairs of Cilicia—not to mention Cilicia’s public purse—passed into the hands of Gaius Verres.
All through the summer Verres worked industriously, though not for the good of Cilicia; it was his own activities that benefited, particularly the moneylending he had taken over from Malleolus. However, the art collection remained static. Even Verres at that point in his career was not quite confident enough to foul his own nest by stealing from towns and temples in Cilicia itself. Nor could he—at least while Claudius Nero remained its governor—begin again to plunder Asia Province; the island of Samos had sent an angry deputation to Pergamum to complain to Claudius Nero about the pillaging of Hera’s sanctuary, only to be told regretfully that it was not in Claudius Nero’s power to punish or discipline the legate of another governor, so the Samians would have to refer their complaint to the Senate in Rome.
It was late in September that Verres had his inspiration; he then lost no time in turning fancy into fact. Both Bithynia and Thrace abounded in treasures, so why not increase his art collection at the expense of Bithynia and Thrace? Dolabella was persuaded to appoint him ambassador—at—large and issue him with letters of introduction to King Nicomedes of Bithynia and King Sadala of the Thracian Odrysiae. And off Verres set at the start of October, overland from Attaleia to the Hellespont. This route avoided Asia Province and might besides yield a little gold from temples along the way, even if no desirable art.
It was an embassage composed entirely of villains; Verres wanted no honest, upright characters along. Even the six lictors (to whom as an ambassador with propraetorian status Verres was entitled) he chose with great care, sure they would aid and abet him in all his nefarious undertakings. His chief assistant was a senior clerk on Dolabella’s staff, one Marcus Rubrius; Verres and Rubrius had already had many dealings together, including the procurement of Dolabella’s dirty smelly women. His slaves were a mixture of big fellows to heft heavy statues around and little fellows to wriggle into locked rooms, and his scribes were only there to catalogue whatever he purloined.
The journey overland was disappointing, as Pisidia and that part of Phrygia he traversed had been thoroughly looted by the generals of Mithridates nine years before. He debated swinging wider onto the Sangarius to see what he could filch at Pessinus, but in the end elected to head straight for Lampsacus on the Hellespont. Here he could commandeer one of Asia Province’s warships to act as escort, and sail along the Bithynian coast loading whatever he found and fancied onto a good stout freighter.
The Hellespont was a small slice of No Man’s Land. Technically it belonged to Asia Province, but the mountains of Mysia cut it off on the landward side, and its ties were more with Bithynia than with Pergamum. Lampsacus was the chief port on the Asian side of the narrow straits, almost opposite to Thracian Callipolis; here the various armies which crossed the Hellespont made their Asian landfall. In consequence Lampsacus was a big and busy port, though a great measure of its economic prosperity lay in the abundance and excellence of the wine produced in the Lampsacan hinterland.
Nominally under the authority of the governor of Asia Province, it had long enjoyed independence, Rome being content with a tribute. There was—as always in every prosperous settlement on every shore of the Middle Sea—a contingent of Roman merchants who lived there permanently, but the government and the major wealth of Lampsacus rested with its native Phocaean Greeks, none of whom held the Roman citizenship; they were all socii, allies.
Verres had diligently researched every likely place along his route, so when his embassage arrived in Lampsacus he was well aware of its status and the status of its leading citizens. The Roman cavalcade which rode into the port city from the hills behind it caused an immediate stir almost verging on a panic; six lictors preceded the important Roman personage, who was also accompanied by twenty servants and a troop of one hundred mounted Cilician cavalry. Yet no warning of its advent had been received, and no one knew what its purpose in Lampsacus might be.
One Ianitor was chief ethnarch that year; word that a full Roman embassage was awaiting him in the agora sent Ianitor flying there posthaste, together with some of the other city elders.
“I’m not sure how long I’ll be staying,” said Gaius Verres, looking handsome, imperious, and not a little arrogant, “but I require fitting lodgings for myself and my people.”
It was impossible, Ianitor explained hesitantly, to find a house large enough to take everyone, but he himself would of course accommodate the ambassador, his lictors and body servants, while the rest were boarded with other households. Ianitor then introduced his fellow elders, including one Philodamus, who had been chief ethnarch of Lampsacus during Sulla’s time there.
“I hear,” said the clerk Marcus Rubrius low—voiced to Verres as they were being escorted to the mansion of Ianitor, “that the old man Philodamus has a daughter of such surpassing beauty and virtue that he keeps her shut away. Name of Stratonice.”
Verres was no Dolabella when it came to bodily appetites. As with his statues and paintings, he liked his women to be pure and perfect works of art, Galateas come to life. In consequence he tended when not in Rome to go for long periods without sexual satisfaction, since he would not content himself with inferior types of women, even famous courtesans like Praecia. As yet he was unmarried, intending when he did to own a bride of splendid lineage and peerless beauty—a modern Aurelia. This trip to the east was going to cement his fortune and make it possible to negotiate a suitable marital alliance with some proud Caecilia Metella or Claudia Pulchra. A Julia would have been the best, but all the Julias were taken.
Thus it was months since Verres had enjoyed a sexual flutter, nor had he expected to find one in Lampsacus. But Rubrius had made it his business to find out the weaknesses of Verres—aside from inanimate works of art—and had done a little whispering in any gossipy-looking ears as soon as the embassage had ridden into town. To find that Philodamus had a daughter, Stratonice, who was quite the equal of Aphrodite herself.
“Make further enquiries,” said Verres curtly, then put on his most charmingly false smile as he came to Ianitor’s door, where the chief ethnarch waited in person to welcome him.
Rubrius nodded and went off in the wake of the slave to his own quarters, less august by far; he was, after all, a very minor official with no ambassadorial status.
After dinner that afternoon Rubrius reappeared at the house of Ianitor and sought a private interview with Verres.
“Are you comfortable here?” asked Rubrius.
“More or less. Not like a Roman villa, however. A pity none of the Roman citizens in Lampsacus ranks among the richest. I hate making do with Greeks! They’re too simple for my taste. This Ianitor lives entirely on fish—didn’t even produce an egg or a bird for dinner! But the wine was superb. How have you progressed in the matter of Stratonice?”
“With great difficulty, Gaius Verres. The girl is a paragon of every virtue, it seems, but perhaps that’s because her father and brother guard her like Tigranes the women in his harem.”
“Then I’ll have to go to dinner at Philodamus’s place.”
Rubrius shook his head emphatically. “I’m afraid that won’t produce her, Gaius Verres. This town is Phocaean Greek to its core. The women of the family are not shown to guests.”
The two heads drew together, honey—gold and greying black, and the volume of the conversation dropped to whispers.
“My assistant Marcus Rubrius,” said Verres to Ianitor after Rubrius had gone, “is poorly housed. I require better quarters for him. I hear that after yourself, the next man of note is one Philodamus. Please see that Marcus Rubrius is relocated in the house of Philodamus first thing tomorrow.”
“I won’t have the worm!” snapped Philodamus to Ianitor when Ianitor told him what Verres wanted. “Who is this Marcus Rubrius? A grubby little Roman clerk! In my days I’ve housed Roman consuls and praetors—even the great Lucius Cornelius Sulla when he crossed the Hellespont that last time! In fact, I’ve never housed anyone as unimportant as Gaius Verres himself! Who is he after all, Ianitor? A mere assistant to the governor of Cilicia!”
“Please, Philodamus, please!” begged Ianitor. “For my sake! For the sake of our city! This Gaius Verres is a nasty fellow, I feel it in my bones. And he has a hundred mounted troopers with him. In all Lampsacus we couldn’t raise half that many competent professional soldiers.”
So Philodamus gave in and Rubrius transferred his lodgings. But it had been a mistake to give in, as Philodamus soon discovered. Rubrius hadn’t been inside the house for more than a few moments before he was demanding to see the famous beautiful daughter, and, denied this privilege, immediately began to poke and pry through Philodamus’s spacious dwelling in search of her. This proving fruitless, Rubrius summoned Philodamus to him in his own house as if he had been a servant.
“You’ll give a dinner for Gaius Verres this afternoon—and serve something other than course after course of fish! Fish is fine in its place, but a man can’t live on it. So I want lamb, chicken, other fowls, plenty of eggs, and the very best wine.”
Philodamus kept his temper. “But it wasn’t easy,” he said to his son, Artemidorus.
“They’re after Stratonice,” said Artemidorus, very angry.
“I think so too, but they moved so quickly in foisting this Rubrius clod on me that I had no opportunity to get her out of the house. And now I can’t. There are Romans creeping round our front door and our back door.”
Artemidorus wanted to be present at the banquet for Verres, but his father, looking at that stormy face, understood that his presence would worsen the situation; after much cajoling, the young man agreed to hie himself off and eat elsewhere. As for Stratonice, the best father and son could do was to lock her in her own room and put two strong servants inside with her.
Gaius Verres arrived with his six lictors, who were posted on duty in front of the house while a party of troopers was sent to watch the back gate. And no sooner was the Roman ambassador comfortable upon his couch than he demanded that Philodamus fetch his daughter.
“I cannot do that, Gaius Verres,” said the old man stiffly. “This is a Phocaean town, which means our womenfolk are never put in the same room as strangers.”
“I’m not asking that she eat with us, Philodamus,” said Verres patiently. “I just want to see this paragon all of your Phocaean town talks about.”
“I do not know why they should, when they have never seen her either,” Philodamus said.
“No doubt your servants gossip. Produce her, old man!”
“I cannot, Gaius Verres.”
Five other guests were present, Rubrius and four fellow clerks; no sooner had Philodamus refused to produce his child than they all shouted to see her. The more Philodamus denied them, the louder they shouted.
When the first course came in Philodamus seized the chance to leave the room, and sent one of his servants to the house where Artemidorus was eating, begging that he come home to help his father. No sooner had the servant gone than Philodamus returned to the dining room, there to continue obdurately refusing to show the Romans his daughter. Rubrius and two of his companions got up to look for the girl; Philodamus stepped across their path. A pitcher of boiling water had been set upon a brazier near the door, ready to be poured into bowls in which smaller bowls of food might be reheated after the trip from the kitchen. Rubrius grabbed the pitcher and tipped boiling water all over Philodamus’s head. While horrified servants fled precipitately, the old man’s screams mingled with the shouts and jeers of the Romans, forming up to go in search of Stratonice.
Into this melee the sounds of another intruded. Artemidorus and twenty of his friends had arrived outside his father’s door, only to find Verres’s lictors barring their entry. The prefect of the decury, one Cornelius, had all the lictor’s confidence in his own inviolability; it never occurred to him for a moment that Artemidorus and his band would resort to force to remove them from before the door. Nor perhaps would they have, had Artemidorus not heard the frightful screams of his scalded father. The Lampsacans moved in a mass. Several of the lictors sustained minor hurts, but Cornelius died of a broken neck.
The banquet participants scattered when Artemidorus and his friends ran into the dining room, clubs in their hands and murder on their faces. But Gaius Verres was no coward. Pushing them contemptuously to one side, he quit the house in company with Rubrius and his fellow clerks to find one dead lictor sprawled in the road surrounded by his five frightened colleagues. Up the street the ambassador hustled them, the body of Cornelius lolling in their midst.
By this the whole town was beginning to stir, and Ianitor himself stood at his open front door. His heart sank when he saw what the Romans carried, yet he admitted them to his house—and prudently barred the gate behind them. Artemidorus had stayed to tend to his father’s injuries, but two of his friends led the rest of the band of young men to the city square, calling on others to meet them as they marched. All the Greeks had had enough of Gaius Verres, and even a fervent speech from Publius Tettius (the town’s most prominent Roman resident) could not dissuade them from retaliation. Tettius and his houseguest Gaius Terentius Varro were swept aside, and the townspeople surged off in the direction of Ianitor’s house.
There they demanded entry. Ianitor refused, after which they battered at the gate with a makeshift ram to no effect, and decided instead to burn the place down. Kindling and logs of wood were piled against the front wall and set alight. Only the arrival of Publius Tettius, Gaius Terentius Varro and some other Roman residents of Lampsacus prevented disaster; their impassioned pleading cooled the hottest heads down sufficiently to see that immolation of a Roman ambassador would end in worse than the violation of Stratonice. So the fire (which had gained considerable hold on the front part of Ianitor’s house) was put out, and the men of Lampsacus went home.
A less arrogant man than Gaius Verres would have fled from the seething Greek city as soon as he deemed it safe to leave, but Gaius Verres had no intention of running; instead he sat down calmly and wrote to Gaius Claudius Nero, the governor of Asia Province, steeled in his resolve not to be beaten by a pair of dirty Asian Greeks.
“I demand that you proceed forthwith to Lampsacus and try the two socii Philodamus and Artemidorus for the murder of a Roman ambassador’s chief lictor,” he said.
But swift though the letter’s journey to Pergamum was, it was still slower than the detailed report Publius Tettius and Gaius Terentius Varro had jointly provided to the governor.
“I will certainly not come to Lampsacus,” said Claudius Nero’s reply to Verres. “I have heard the real story from my own senior legate, Gaius Terentius Varro, who considerably outranks you. A pity perhaps that you weren’t burned to death. You are like your name, Verres—a pig.”
The rage in which Verres wrote his next missive added venom and power to his pen; this one was to Dolabella in Tarsus and it reached Tarsus in a scant seven days, couriered by a petrified trooper who was so afraid of what Verres might do to him if he tarried that he was fully prepared to do murder in order to obtain a fresh horse every few hours.
“Go to Pergamum at once, and at a run,” Verres instructed his superior without formal salute or evidence of respect. “Fetch Claudius Nero to Lampsacus without a moment’s delay to try and execute the socii who murdered my chief lictor. If you don’t, I will have words to say in Rome about certain debaucheries and drugs. I mean it, Dolabella. And you may tell Claudius Nero that if he does not come to Lampsacus and convict these Greek fellatores, I will accuse him of sordid practices as well. And I’ll make the charges stick, Dolabella. Don’t think I won’t. If I die for it, I’ll make the charges stick.”
*
When word of the events in Lampsacus reached the court of King Nicomedes, matters had arrived at an impasse; Gaius Verres was still living in the house of Ianitor and moving freely about the city, Ianitor had been ordered to notify the Lampsacan elders that Verres would remain right where he was, and everyone knew Claudius Nero was coming from Pergamum to try the father and son.
“I wish there was something I could do,” said the worried King to Caesar.
“Lampsacus falls within Asia Province, not Bithynia,” said Caesar. “Anything you did do would have to be in diplomatic guise, and I’m not convinced it would help those two unfortunate socii.”
“Gaius Verres is an absolute wolfshead, Caesar. Earlier in the year he robbed sanctuaries of their treasures all over Asia Province, then went on to steal the Harper of Aspendus and the golden skin of Artemis at Perge.”
“How to endear Rome to her provinces,” said Caesar, lifting his lip contemptuously.
“Nothing is safe from the man—including, it seems, virtuous daughters of important Greek socii.”
“What is Verres doing in Lampsacus, anyway?”
Nicomedes shivered. “Coming to see me, Caesar! He carries letters of introduction to me and to King Sadala in Thrace—his governor, Dolabella, has endowed him with ambassadorial status. I imagine his true purpose is to steal our statues and paintings.”
“He won’t dare while I’m here, Nicomedes,” soothed Caesar.
The old king’s face lit up. “That is what I was going to say. Would you go to Lampsacus as my ambassador so that Gaius Claudius Nero understands Bithynia is watching carefully? I daren’t go myself—it might be seen as an armed threat, even if I went without a military escort. My troops are much closer to Lampsacus than are the troops of Asia Province.”
Caesar saw the difficulties this would mean for him before Nicomedes had finished speaking. If he went to Lampsacus to observe events on official behalf of the King of Bithynia, the whole of Rome would assume he was indeed on intimate terms with Nicomedes. Only how could he avoid going? It was, on the surface, a very reasonable request.
“I mustn’t appear to be acting for you, King,” he said seriously. “The fate of the two socii is firmly in the hands of the governor of Asia Province, who would not appreciate the presence of a twenty-year-old Roman privatus claiming to be the representative of the King of Bithynia.”
“But I need to know what happens in Lampsacus from someone detached enough not to exaggerate and Roman enough not to side with the Greeks automatically!” Nicomedes protested.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. I will go. But as a Roman privatus pure and simple—a fellow who chanced to be in the vicinity and whose curiosity got the better of him. That way the hand of Bithynia will not be seen at all, yet I’ll be able to provide you with a full report when I return. Then if you feel it necessary, you can lodge a formal complaint with the Senate in Rome, and I will testify.”
Caesar departed the next day, riding overland with no one for company save Burgundus and four servants; he might then have come from anywhere and be on the road to anywhere. Though he wore a leather cuirass and kilt, his favored apparel for riding, he had taken care to pack toga and tunic and senatorial shoes, and to take with him the slave whom he employed to make new Civic Crowns for him out of oak leaves. Unwilling though he was to flaunt himself in the name of King Nicomedes, he fully intended to flaunt himself in his own name.
It was the very end of December when he rode into Lampsacus on the same road Verres had used, to find himself unnoticed; the whole town was down at the quay watching Claudius Nero and Dolabella tie up their considerable fleet. Neither governor was in a good mood, Dolabella because he writhed in the grip of Verres permanently, and Claudius Nero because Dolabella’s indiscreet activities now threatened to compromise him also. Their grim faces did not lighten when they learned that suitable lodgings were not to be had, as Ianitor still housed Verres and the only other commodious mansion in Lampsacus belonged to Philodamus, the accused. Publius Tettius had solved the problem by evicting a colleague from his establishment and offering it to Claudius Nero and Dolabella to share between them.
When Claudius Nero received Verres (who was already waiting at the commandeered dwelling when the governor arrived), he learned that he was expected to preside over the court—and to accept Verres as organizer of the prosecution, as a witness, as a member of the jury, and as an ambassador whose official propraetorian status was unimpaired by the events in Lampsacus.
“Ridiculous!” he said to Verres in the hearing of Dolabella, Publius Tettius, and the legate Gaius Terentius Varro.
“What do you mean?” Verres demanded.
“Roman justice is famous. What you propose is a travesty. I have acquitted myself well in my province! As things stand at the moment, I am likely to be replaced in the spring. The same can be said of your superior, Gnaeus Dolabella. I can’t speak for him”—Claudius Nero glanced toward the silent Dolabella, who avoided his gaze—“but for myself, I intend to quit my province with a reputation as one of its better governors. This case will probably be my last major one, and I won’t condone a travesty.”
The handsome face of Verres grew flintlike. “I want a quick conviction!” he cried. “I want those two Greek socii flogged and beheaded! They murdered a Roman lictor in the course of his duty! If they are allowed to get away with it, Rome’s authority is further undermined in a province which still hankers to be ruled by King Mithridates.”
It was a good argument, but it was not the reason why Gaius Claudius Nero ended in yielding. He did that because he had not the strength or the backbone to resist Verres in a face—to—face confrontation. With the exception of Publius Tettius and his houseguest Gaius Terentius Varro, Verres had succeeded in winning over the entire Roman contingent who lived in Lampsacus, and had worked their feelings into a state which threatened the town’s peace for many moons to come. It was Roman versus Greek with a vengeance; Claudius Nero was just not capable of resisting the pressures now exerted upon him.
In the meantime Caesar had managed to find accommodation in a small hostelry adjacent to the wharves. As dirty as it was mean, it catered mainly to sailors, and was the only place willing to take him in: he was a detested Roman. Had it not been so cold he would gladly have camped; were he not determined to maintain his independence, he might have sought shelter in a Roman resident’s house. As it was, the harborside inn it must be. Even as he and Burgundus took a stroll before what they suspected was going to be a bad supper, the town heralds were abroad crying that the trial of Philodamus and Artemidorus was to be held on the morrow in the marketplace.
The morrow saw Caesar in no hurry; he wanted everyone assembled for the hearing before he made his grand entrance on the scene. And when he did arrive he created a small sensation—a Roman nobleman, a senator, a war hero—and owning no loyalty to any of the Roman participants. None of these knew his face well enough to assign it a name, especially now Caesar was clad not in laena and apex, but in a snowy toga with the broad purple stripe of the senator on the right shoulder of his tunic and the maroon leather shoes of the senator on his feet. Added to which, he wore a chaplet of oak leaves upon his head, so every Roman including both governors was obliged to get to his feet and applaud Caesar’s advent.
“I am Gaius Julius Caesar, nephew of Lucius Cornelius Sulla the Dictator,” he said to Claudius Nero guilelessly, holding out his right hand. “Just passing through when I heard about this fuss! Thought I’d better turn up to see if you needed an extra man on the jury.”
The name brought instant recognition, of course, more due to flamen Dialis than siege of Mitylene; these men had not been in Rome when Lucullus returned, did not know the fine details of Mitylene’s surrender. Caesar’s offer of jury duty was declined, but he was accommodated on a chair hastily found for one who was not only a war hero, but also the Dictator’s nephew by marriage.
The trial began. Of Roman citizens to serve as jurors there was no lack, for Dolabella and Claudius Nero had brought a large number of minor officials with them as well as a full cohort of Roman soldiers from Pergamum—Fimbriani who recognized Caesar at once, and hailed him joyfully. Yet another reason why neither governor was pleased to have him sitting there.
Though Verres had organized the prosecution, the actual role of prosecutor was taken by a local Roman resident, a usurer who needed Claudius Nero’s lictors to extract money from delinquent clients—and was aware that if he did not consent to prosecute, the lictors would cease to be forthcoming. All of Greek Lampsacus congregated about the perimeter of the court, muttering, glaring, shaking an occasional fist. Despite which, no one among them had volunteered to plead for Philodamus and Artemidorus, who were therefore obliged to conduct their own case under an alien system of law.
It was, thought the expressionless Caesar, a complete travesty. Claudius Nero, the titular president of the court, made no attempt to run it; he sat mumchance and let Verres and Rubrius do that. Dolabella was on the jury and kept making pro—Verres comments in a loud voice, as did Verres himself, also on the jury. When the Greek onlookers realized that Philodamus and Artemidorus were not going to be allowed the proper amount of court time to conduct their defense, some among them began to shout abuse; but there were five hundred armed Fimbriani stationed in the square, more than a match for any rioting crowd.
The verdict when it came was no verdict: the jury ordered a retrial, this being the only way the majority of them could register their disapproval of the cavalier proceedings without bringing down a Verrine storm about their heads.
And when he heard the retrial ordered, Verres panicked. If Philodamus and Artemidorus did not die, he suddenly realized, they could indict him in Rome with a whole indignant town to back them up—and possibly a Roman senator war hero to testify for them; Verres had gained the distinct impression that Gaius Julius Caesar was not on his side. The young man had given nothing away by look or comment, but that in itself indicated opposition. And he was related to Sulla, the Dictator of Rome! It was also possible that Gaius Claudius Nero would regain his courage were Verres to be tried in a Roman court inside Rome; any allegations Verres might make about Claudius Nero’s personal conduct would then sound like a smear campaign to discredit an important witness.
That Claudius Nero was thinking along the same lines became apparent when he announced that he would schedule the retrial for early summer, which probably meant a new governor in Asia Province—and a new governor in Cilicia. Despite the death of a Roman lictor, Philodamus and Artemidorus suddenly had an excellent chance of going free. And if they went free, they would come to Rome to prosecute Gaius Verres. For, as Philodamus had said when he had addressed the jury,
“We socii know that we are under the care of Rome and that we must answer to the governor, to his legates and officials, and through him to the Senate and People of Rome. If we are not willing to lie down under Roman rule, we understand that there must be reprisals, and that many of us will suffer. But what are we alien subjects of Rome to do when Rome permits a man who is no greater than a governor’s assistant to lust after our children and snatch them from us for his own evil purposes? My son and I did no more than defend his sister and my daughter from a wicked lout! No one intended that any man should die, and it was not a Greek hand struck the first blow. I was scalded by boiling water in my own house while I tried to prevent the companions of Gaius Verres from carrying my child off to pain and dishonor. Had it not been for the arrival of my son and his friends, my daughter would indeed have been carried off to pain and dishonor. Gaius Verres did not behave like a civilized member of a civilized people. He behaved like the barbarian he is.”
The verdict of a retrial, delivered as it had been by an all—Roman jury loudly urged by Dolabella and Verres throughout the trial to do its duty and convict, emboldened the Greek crowd to speed Claudius Nero and his court out of the marketplace with jeers, boos, hisses, angry gestures.
“You’ll schedule the retrial for tomorrow,” said Verres to Claudius Nero.
“Next summer,” said Claudius Nero faintly.
“Not if you want to be consul, my friend,” said Verres. “I will pull you down with great pleasure—never doubt that for a moment! What goes for Dolabella goes for you. Do as I say in this or be prepared to take the consequences. For if Philodamus and Artemidorus live to indict me in Rome, I will have to indict you and Dolabella in Rome long before the Greeks can get there. I will make sure you’re both convicted of extortion. So neither of you would be on hand to testify against me.”
The retrial occurred the day following the trial. Between bribing those members of the jury willing to take a bribe and threatening those who were not, Verres got no sleep; nor did Dolabella, compelled to accompany Verres on his rounds.
That hard night’s work tipped the balance. By a small majority of the jurors, Philodamus and Artemidorus were convicted of the murder of a Roman lictor. Claudius Nero ordered their immediate dispatch. Kept at a distance by the cohort of Fimbriani, the Greek crowd watched helplessly as father and son were stripped and flogged. The old man was unconscious when his head was lopped from his shoulders, but Artemidorus retained his faculties until his end, and wept not for his own fate or for his father’s, but for the fate of his orphaned sister.
At the end of it Caesar walked fearlessly into the densely packed mass of Greek Lampsacans, all weeping with shock, beyond anger now. No other Roman went near them; escorted by Fimbriani, Claudius Nero and Dolabella were already shifting their belongings down to the quay. But Caesar had a purpose. It had not taken him long to decide who in the crowd were the influential ones, and these men he sought out.
“Lampsacus isn’t big enough to stage a revolt,” he said to them, “but revenge is possible. Don’t judge all Romans by this sorry lot, and hold your tempers. I give you my word that when I return to Rome, I will prosecute the governor Dolabella and make sure that Verres is never elected a praetor. Not for gifts or for honors. Just for my own satisfaction.”
After that he went to the house of Ianitor, for he wanted to see Gaius Verres before the man quit Lampsacus.
“Well, if it isn’t the war hero!” cried Verres cheerfully when Caesar walked in.
He was overseeing his packing.
“Do you intend to take possession of the daughter?” Caesar asked, disposing himself comfortably in a chair.
“Naturally,” said Verres, nodding at a slave who brought in a little statue for him to inspect. “Yes, I like it. Crate it.” His attention returned to Caesar. “Anxious to set eyes on the cause of all this fuss, are you?”
“Consumed with curiosity. She ought to outdo Helen.”
“So I think.”
“Is she blonde, I wonder? I’ve always thought Helen must have been blonde. Yellow hair has the edge.”
Verres eyed Caesar’s thatch appreciatively, lifted a hand to pat his own. “You and I ought to know!”
“Where do you intend to go from Lampsacus, Gaius Verres?”
The tawny brows rose. “To Nicomedia, of course.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Caesar gently.
“Really? And why not?” asked Verres, deceptively casual.
Caesar bent his gaze to study his own nails. “Dolabella will bite the dust as soon as I return to Rome, which will be in the spring of this year or the next. I will prosecute him myself. And I will prosecute you. Unless, that is, you return to Cilicia now.”
Caesar’s blue eyes lifted; the honeyed eyes of Verres met them. For a long moment neither man moved.
Then Verres said, “I know who you remind me of. Sulla.”
“Do I?”
“It’s your eyes. Not as washed out as Sulla’s, but they have the same look. I wonder will you go as far as Sulla?”
“That is on the laps of the gods. I would rather say, I hope no one forces me to go as far as Sulla.”
Verres shrugged. “Well, Caesar, I am no Gaius Marius, so it won’t be me.”
“You are certainly no Gaius Marius,” Caesar agreed calmly. “He was a great man until his mind gave way. Where are you going from Lampsacus, have you decided?”
“To Cilicia with Dolabella,” said Verres with another shrug.
“Oh, very wise! Would you like me to send someone down to the port to inform Dolabella? I’d hate to see him sail off and leave you behind.”
“If you wish,” said Verres indifferently.
Off went Caesar to find Burgundus and instruct him what to tell Dolabella. As he returned to the room through an inner door, Ianitor brought in a muffled form through the door onto the street.
“This is Stratonice?” asked Verres eagerly.
Ianitor brushed the tears from his cheeks. “Yes.”
“Leave us alone with her, Greek.”
Ianitor fled.
“Shall I unveil her for you while you stand at a suitably remote distance to take all of her in at once?’’ asked Caesar.
“I prefer to do it myself,” said Verres, moving to the girl’s side; she had made no sound, no attempt to run away.
The hood of her heavy cloak fell forward over her face, impossible to see. Like Myron anxious to check the result of a bronze casting, Verres twitched the cloak from her with a trembling hand. And stared, and stared.
It was Caesar broke the silence; he threw back his head and laughed until he cried. “I had a feeling!” he said when he was able, groping for a handkerchief.
The body she owned was shapeless, poor Stratonice. Her eyes were slits, her snub nose spread across her face, the reddish hair atop her flat—backed skull was sparse to the point of semi—baldness, her ears were vestigial and she had a badly split harelip. Of reasoning mentality she had very little, poor Stratonice.
Face scarlet, Verres turned on his heel.
“Don’t miss your ship!” Caesar called after him. “I’d hate to have to spread the end of this story all over Rome, Verres!”
The moment Verres had gone Caesar sobered. He came across to the mute and immobile creature, picked up her cloak from the floor and draped it about her tenderly.
“Don’t worry, my poor girl,” he said, not sure she could even hear him. “You’re quite safe.” He called then for Ianitor, who came in immediately. “You knew, ethnarch, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why in the name of Great Zeus didn’t you speak out if they wouldn’t? They died for nothing!”
“They died because they elected death as the preferable alternative,” said Ianitor.
“And what will become of the wretched creature now?’’
“She will be well looked after.”
“How many of you knew?”
“Just the city’s elders.”
Unable to find anything to say in answer to that, Caesar left Ianitor’s house, and left Lampsacus.
*
Gaius Verres hurried down to the port, stumbling. How dared they, those stupid, stupid Greeks? Hiding her away as if she was Helen of Troy, when all the time she was a gorgon.
Dolabella was not pleased at having to delay his departure while various crates and trunks belonging to Verres were loaded; Claudius Nero had already gone, and the Fimbriani with him.
“Quin taces!” snarled Verres when his superior asked where was the beauteous Stratonice. “I left her behind in Lampsacus. They deserve each other.”
His superior was feeling the pinch of some time without the stimulating sexual sessions he had grown to rely upon; Verres soon found himself back in Dolabella’s good graces, and spent the voyage from Lampsacus to Pergamum planning. He would return Dolabella to his usual condition and spend the rest of his term in Tarsus using up the gubernatorial stipend. So Caesar thought he’d prosecute, did he? Well, he wouldn’t get the chance. He, Verres, would get in first! The moment Dolabella returned to Rome, he, Verres, would find a prosecutor with a prestigious name and testify Dolabella into permanent exile. Then there would be no one to contest the set of account books Verres intended to present to the Treasury. A pity that he hadn’t managed to get to Bithynia and Thrace, but he had really done very nicely.
“I believe,” he said to Dolabella after they left Pergamum behind, “that Miletus has some of the finest wool in the world, not to mention rugs and tapestries of rare quality. Let’s stop in at Miletus and look at what’s available.”
*
“I can’t get over the fact that those two socii died for nothing,” said Caesar to Nicomedes and Oradaltis. “Why? Tell me why they just didn’t produce the girl and show Verres what she was? That would have been the end of the affair! Why did they insist upon turning what ought to have been a comedy with Verres the butt into a tragedy as great as anything Sophocles dreamed of?”
“Pride, mostly,” said Oradaltis, tears in her eyes. “And perhaps a sense of honor.”
“It might have been understandable if the girl had looked presentable when she was a baby, but from the moment of her birth they would have known what she was. Why didn’t they expose her? No one would have condemned them for it.”
“The only person who might have been able to enlighten you, Caesar, died in the marketplace of Lampsacus,” said Nicomedes. “There must have been a good reason, at least inside the mind of Philodamus. A vow to some god—a wife and mother determined to keep the child—a self-inflicted pain—who can tell? If we knew all the answers, life would hold no mysteries. And no tragedies.”
“I could have wept when I saw her. Instead I laughed myself sick. She couldn’t tell the difference, but Verres could. So I laughed. He’ll hear it inside his head for years, and fear me.”
“I’m surprised we haven’t seen the man,” said the King.
“You won’t see him,” said Caesar with some satisfaction. “Gaius Verres has folded his tents and slunk back to Cilicia.”
“Why?”
“I asked him to.”
The King decided not to probe this remark. Instead he said, “You wish you could have done something to avert the tragedy.”
“Of course. It’s an actual agony to have to stand back and watch idiots wreak havoc in Rome’s name. But I swear to you, Nicomedes, that I will never behave so myself when I have the age and the authority!”
“You don’t need to swear. I believe you.”
This report had been given before Caesar went to his rooms to remove the ravages of his journey, these being unusually trying. Each of the three nights he had spent in the harborside inn he had woken to find a naked whore astride him and the traitor inside the gates of his body so lacking in discernment that, freed by sleep from his mind’s control, it enjoyed itself immensely. With the result that he had picked up an infestation of pubic lice. The discovery of his crop of tiny vermin had induced a horror and disgust so great that he had been able to keep no food down since, and only a sensible sensitivity about the effects of questionable substances upon his genitalia had prevented his seizing anything offered to kill the things. So far they had defied him by living through a dip in every freezing body of water he had encountered between Lampsacus and Nicomedia, and all through his talk with the old King he had been aware of the dreadful creatures prowling through the thickets of his body hair.
Now, clenching teeth and fists, he rose abruptly to his feet. “Please excuse me, Nicomedes. I have to rid myself of some unwelcome visitors,” he said, attempting a light tone.
“Crab lice, you mean?” asked the King, who missed very little, and could speak freely because Oradaltis and her dog had departed some time before.
“I’m driven mad! Revolting, sickening things!”
Nicomedes strolled from the room with him.
“There is really only one way to avoid picking up vermin when you travel,” said the King. “It’s painful, especially the first time you have it done, but it does work.”
“I don’t care if I have to walk on hot coals, tell me and I’ll do it!” said Caesar with fervor.
“There are those in your peculiar society who will condemn you as effeminate!” Nicomedes said wickedly.
“No fate could be worse than these pests. Tell me!”
“Have all your body hair plucked, Caesar. Under the arms and in the groin, on the chest if you have hair there. I will send the man who attends to me and Oradaltis to you if you wish.”
“At once, King, at once!” Up went Caesar’s hand to his head. “What about my hair hair?”
“Have you visitors there too?”
“I don’t think so, but I itch everywhere.”
“They’re different visitors, and can’t survive in a bed. I wouldn’t think you’ll ever play host to them because you’re so tall. They can’t crawl upward, you see, so the people who pick them up from others are always the same height or shorter than the original host.” Nicomedes laughed. “You’d catch them from Burgundus, but from few others. Unless your Lampsacan whores slept with you head to head.”
“My Lampsacan whores attacked me in my sleep, but I can assure you that they got short shrift the moment I woke!”
An extraordinary conversation, but one Caesar was to thank his luck for many times in the years to come. If plucking out his body hair would keep these clinging horrors away, he would pluck, pluck, pluck.
The slave Nicomedes sent to him was an expert; under different circumstances Caesar would have banished him from such an intimate task, for he was a perfect pansy. Under the prevailing circumstances, however, Caesar found himself eager to experience his touch.
“I’ll just take a few out every day,” lisped Demetrius.
“You’ll take the lot out today,” said Caesar grimly. “I’ve drowned all I could find in my bath, but I suppose their eggs stick. That seems to be why I haven’t managed to get rid of all of them so far. Pah!”
Demetrius squealed, appalled. “That isn’t possible!” he cried. “Even when I do it, it’s hideously painful!”
“The lot today,” said Caesar.
So Demetrius continued while Caesar lay naked, apparently in no distress. He had self-discipline and great courage, and would have died rather than flinch, moan, weep, or otherwise betray his agony. And when the ordeal was over and sufficient time had passed for the pain to die down, he felt wonderful. He also liked the look of his hairless body in the big silver mirror King Nicomedes had provided for the palace’s principal guest suite. Sleek. Unashamed. Amazingly naked. And somehow more masculine rather than less. How odd!
Feeling like a man released from slavery, he went to the dining room that evening with his new pleasure in himself adding a special light to face and eyes; King Nicomedes looked, and gasped. Caesar responded with a wink.
*
For sixteen months he remained in or around about Bithynia, an idyll he was to remember as the most wonderful period of his life until he reached his fifty-third year and found an even more wonderful one. He visited Troy to do homage to his ancestor Aeneas, he went to Pessinus several times, and back to Byzantium, and anywhere, it seemed, save Pergamum and Tarsus, where Claudius Nero and Dolabella remained an extra year after all.
Leaving aside his relationship with Nicomedes and Oradaltis, which remained an enormously satisfying and rewarding experience for him, the chief joy of that time lay in his visit to a man he hardly remembered: Publius Rutilius Rufus, his great—uncle on his mother’s side.
Born in the same year as Gaius Marius, Rutilius Rufus was now seventy—nine years old, and had been living in an honorable exile in Smyrna for many years. He was as active as a fifty-year-old and as cheerful as a boy, mind as sharp as ever, sense of humor as keenly developed as had been that of his friend and colleague, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus.
“I’ve outlived the lot of them,” Rutilius Rufus said with gleeful satisfaction after his eyes and mind had approved the look of this fine young great—nephew.
“That doesn’t cast you down, Uncle?”
“Why should it? If anything, it cheers me up! Sulla keeps writing to beg me to return to Rome, and every governor and other official he sends out here comes to plead in person.”
“But you won’t go.”
“I won’t go. I like my chlamys and my Greek slippers much more than I ever liked my toga, and I enjoy a reputation here in Smyrna far greater than any I ever owned in Rome. It’s a thankless and savage place, young Caesar—what a look of Aurelia you have! How is she? My ocean pearl found on the mud flats of Ostia … That was what I always called her. And she’s widowed, eh? A pity. I brought her and your father together, you know. And though you may not know it, I found Marcus Antonius Gnipho to tutor you when you were hardly out of diapers. They used to think you a prodigy. And here you are, twenty-one years old, a senator twice over, and Sulla’s most prized war hero! Well, well!”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m his most prized war hero,” said Caesar, smiling.
“Oh, but you are! I know! I sit here in Smyrna and hear everything. Sulla writes to me. Always did. And when he was settling the affairs of Asia Province he visited me often—it was I gave him his model for its reorganization. Based it on the program Scaurus and I evolved years ago. Sad, his illness. But it hasn’t seemed to stop him meddling with Rome!”
He continued in the same vein for many days, hopping from one subject to another with the lightness of an easy heart and the interest of a born gossip, a spry old bird the years had not managed to strip of plumage or the ability to soar. If he had a favorite topic, that was Aurelia; Caesar filled in the gaps in his knowledge of her with gracefully chosen words and evident love, and learned in return many things about her he had not known. Of her relationship with Sulla, however, Rutilius Rufus had little to tell and refused to speculate, though he had Caesar laughing over the confusion as to which of his nieces had borne a red-haired son to a red-haired man.
“Gaius Marius and Julia were convinced it was Aurelia and Sulla, but it was Livia Drusa, of course, with Marcus Cato.”
“That’s right, your wife was a Livia.”
“And the older of my two sisters was the wife of Caepio the Consul, who stole the Gold of Tolosa. You are related to the Servilii Caepiones by blood, young man.”
“I don’t know the family at all.”
“A boring lot no amount of Rutilian blood could leaven. Now tell me about Gaius Marius and the flaminate he wished upon you.”
Intending to remain only a few days in Smyrna, Caesar ended in staying for two months; there was so much Rutilius Rufus wanted to know, and so much Rutilius Rufus wanted to tell. When finally he took his leave of the old man, he wept.
“I shall never forget you, Uncle Publius.”
“Just come back! And write to me, Caesar, do. Of all the pleasures my life still holds, there is none to equal a rich and candid correspondence with a genuinely literate man.”
*
But every idyll must end, and Caesar’s came to a conclusion when he received a letter from Tarsus in April of the year Sulla died; he was in Nicomedia.
“Publius Servilius Vatia, who was consul last year, has been sent to govern Cilicia,” Caesar said to the King and Queen. “He requests my services as a junior legate—it seems Sulla has personally recommended me to him.”
“Then you don’t have to go,” said Oradaltis eagerly.
Caesar smiled. “No Roman has to do anything, and that is really true from highest to lowest. Service in any institution is voluntary. But there are certain considerations which do tend to influence our decisions, voluntary in name though the duty may be. If I want a public career, I must serve in my ten campaigns, or else steadily for a full six years. No one is ever going to be able to accuse me of circumventing our unwritten laws.”
“But you’re already a senator!”
“Only because of my military career. And that in turn means I must continue my military career.”
“Then you’re definitely going,” said the King.
“At once.”
“I’ll see about a ship.”
“No. I shall ride overland through the Cilician Gates.”
“Then I’ll provide you with a letter of introduction to King Ariobarzanes in Cappadocia.”
The palace began to stir, and the dog to mourn; poor Sulla knew the signs that Caesar was about to depart.
And once more Caesar found himself committed to return. The two old people pestered him until he agreed he would, then disarmed him by bestowing Demetrius the hair—plucker upon him.
However, before he left Caesar tried yet again to convince King Nicomedes that the best course for Bithynia after his death would be as a Roman province.
“I’ll think about it” was as far as Nicomedes would go.
Caesar now cherished little hope that the old King would decide in favor of Rome; the events in Lampsacus were too fresh in every non—Roman mind—and who could blame the King if he could not face the idea of bequeathing his realm to the likes of Gaius Verres?
*
The steward Eutychus was sent back to Aurelia in Rome; Caesar traveled with five servants (including Demetrius the hair—plucker) and Burgundus, and traveled hard. He crossed the Sangarius River and rode first to Ancyra, the largest town in Galatia. Here he met an interesting man, one Deiotarus, leader of the segment Tolistobogii.
“We’re all quite young these days,” said Deiotarus. “King Mithridates murdered the entire Galatian thanehood twenty years ago, which left our people without chieftains. In most countries that would have led to the disintegration of the people, but we Galatians have always preferred a loose confederation. So we survived until the young sons of the chieftains grew up.”
“Mithridates won’t trap you again,” said Caesar, who thought this Gaul was as cunning as he was clever.
“Not while I’m here, anyway,” said Deiotarus grimly. “I at least have had the advantage of spending three years in Rome, so I’m more sophisticated than my father ever was—he died in the massacre.”
“Mithridates will try again.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“You won’t be tempted?”
“Never! He’s still a vigorous man with many years left to rule, but he seems incapable of learning what I know for a fact—that Rome must win in the end. I would rather be in a position where Rome was calling me Friend and Ally.”
“That’s right thinking, Deiotarus.”
On Caesar went to the Halys River, followed its lazy red stream until Mount Argaeus dominated the sky; from here to Eusebeia Mazaca was only forty miles northward across the wide shallow slope of the Halys basin.
Of course he remembered Gaius Marius’s many tales of this country, of the vividly painted town lying at the foot of the gigantic extinct volcano, of the brilliant blue palace and that meeting with King Mithridates of Pontus. But these days Mithridates skulked in Sinope and King Ariobarzanes sat more or less firmly on the Cappadocian throne.
Less rather than more, thought Caesar after meeting him. For some reason no one could discover, the kings of Cappadocia had been as weak a lot as the kings of Pontus had been strong. And Ariobarzanes was no exception to the rule. He was patently terrified of Mithridates, and pointed out to Caesar how Pontus had stripped the palace and the capital of every treasure, down to the last golden nail in a door.
“But surely,” said Caesar to the timid king, a small and slightly Syrian-looking man, “the loss of those two hundred thousand soldiers in the Caucasus will strap Mithridates for many years to come. No proprietor of armies can afford the loss of such a huge number of men—especially men who were not only fully trained, but veterans of a good campaign. For they were, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. They had fought to regain Cimmeria and the northern reaches of the Euxine Sea for Mithridates the summer before.”
“Successfully, one hears.”
“Indeed. His son Machares was left in Panticapaeum to be satrap. A good choice. I believe his chief task is to recruit a new army for his father.”
“Who prefers Scythian and Roxolanian troops.”
“They are superior to mercenaries, certainly. Both Pontus and Cappadocia are unfortunate in that the native peoples are not good soldiers. I am still forced to rely upon Syrian and Jewish mercenaries, but Mithridates has had hordes of warlike barbarians at his disposal now for almost thirty years.”
“Have you no army at the moment, King Ariobarzanes?”
“At the moment I have no need of one.”
“What if Mithridates marches without warning?”
“Then I will be off my throne once more. Cappadocia, Gaius Julius, is very poor. Too poor to afford a standing army.”
“You have another enemy. King Tigranes.”
Ariobarzanes twisted unhappily. “Do not remind me! His successes in Syria have robbed me of my best soldiers. All the Jews are staying home to resist him.”
“Then don’t you think you should at least be watching the Euphrates as well as the Halys?”
“There is no money,” said the King stubbornly.
Caesar rode away shaking his head. What could be done when the sovereign of a land admitted himself beaten before the war began? His quick eyes noticed many natural advantages which would give Ariobarzanes untold opportunities to pounce upon an invader, for the countryside when not filled with towering snowcapped peaks was cut up into the most bizarre gorges, just as Gaius Marius had described. Wonderful places militarily as well as scenically, yet perceived by the King as no more than ready—made housing for his troglodytes.
“How do you feel now that you’ve seen a great deal more of the world, Burgundus?” Caesar asked his hulking freedman as they picked their way down into the depths of the Cilician Gates between soaring pines and roaring cascades.
“That Rome and Bovillae, Cardixa and my sons are grander than any waterfall or mountain,” said Burgundus.
“Would you rather go home, old friend? I will send you home gladly,” said Caesar.
But Burgundus shook his big blond head emphatically. “No, Caesar, I’ll stay.” He grinned. “Cardixa would kill me if I let anything happen to you.”
“But nothing is going to happen to me!”
“Try and tell her that.”
*
Publius Servilius Vatia was installed in the governor’s palace at Tarsus so comfortably by the time Caesar arrived before the end of April that he looked as if he had always been there.
“We are profoundly glad to have him,” said Morsimus, captain of the Cilician governor’s guard and a Tarsian ethnarch.
Dark hair grizzled by the passage of twenty years since he had accompanied Gaius Marius to Cappadocia, Morsimus had been on hand to welcome Caesar, to whom the Cilician felt more loyalty than ever he could to a mere Roman governor; here was the nephew by marriage of both his heroes, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and he would do whatever he could to assist the young man.
“I gather Cilicia suffered greatly under Dolabella and Verres,” said Caesar.
“Terribly. Dolabella was out of his mind on drugs most of the time, which left Verres to do precisely what he fancied.”
“Nothing was done to eject Tigranes from eastern Pedia?”
“Nothing at all. Verres was too preoccupied with usury and extortion. Not to mention the pilfering of temple artifacts he considered wouldn’t be missed.”
“I shall prosecute Dolabella and Verres as soon as I go home, so I shall need your help in gathering evidence.”
“Dolabella will probably be in exile by the time you get home,” Morsimus said. “The governor had word from Rome that the son of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus and the lady Dalmatica is assembling a case against Dolabella even now, and that Gaius Verres is covering himself in glory by supplying young Scaurus with all his evidence—and that Verres will testify in court.”
“The slippery fellator! That means I won’t be able to touch him. And I don’t suppose it matters who prosecutes Dolabella, as long as he gets his just deserts. If I’m sorry it won’t be me, that’s because I’m late into the courts thanks to my priesthood, and victory against Dolabella and Verres would have made me famous.” He paused, then said, “Will Vatia move against King Tigranes?”
“I doubt it. He’s here specifically to eliminate pirates.”
A statement confirmed by Vatia himself when Caesar sought an interview. An exact contemporary of Metellus Pius the Piglet (who was his close cousin into the bargain), Vatia was now fifty years old. Originally Sulla had intended that Vatia be consul with Gnaeus Octavius Ruso nine years earlier, but Cinna had beaten him in that election, and Vatia, like Metellus Pius, had had to wait a long time for the consulship which was his by birthright. His reward for unswerving loyalty to Sulla had been the governorship of Cilicia; he had preferred this province to the other consular province, Macedonia, which had in consequence gone to his colleague in the consulship, Appius Claudius Pulcher.
“Who never got to Macedonia,” said Vatia to Caesar. “He fell ill in Tarentum on his way, and returned to Rome. Luckily this happened before the elder Dolabella had left Macedonia, so he’s been instructed to stay there until Appius Claudius is well enough to relieve him.”
“What’s the matter with Appius Claudius?”
“Something long—standing, is all I know. He wasn’t a fit man during our consulship—never cheered up no matter what I said! But he’s so impoverished he has to govern. If he doesn’t, he won’t be able to repair his fortune.”
Caesar frowned, but kept his thoughts to himself. These dwelt upon the limitations inherent in a system which virtually forced a man sent to govern a province into a career of clerical crime; tradition had hallowed the right of a governor to sell citizenships, contracts, immunities from taxation and tithe, and pop the proceeds into his own hungry purse. Senate and Treasury unofficially condoned these activities in order to keep Rome’s costs down, one of the reasons why it was so hard to get a jury of senators to convict a governor of extortion in his province. But exploited provinces meant hatred of Rome, a rolling reckoning for the future.
“I take it we are to go to war against the pirates, Publius Servilius?’’ Caesar asked.
“Correct,” said the governor, surrounded by stacks of paper; clearly he enjoyed the clerical side of his duties, though he was not a particularly avaricious man and did not need to augment his fortune by provincial exploitation. Particularly when he was to go to war against the pirates, whose ill—gotten gains would give the governor of Cilicia plenty of legitimate spoils.
“Unfortunately,” Vatia went on, “I will have to delay my campaign because of the straits to which my province has been reduced by the activities of my predecessor in this office. This year will have to be devoted to internal affairs.”
“Then do you need me?” asked Caesar, too young to relish the idea of a military career spent at a desk.
“I do need you,” said Vatia emphatically. “It will be your business to raise a fleet for me.”
Caesar winced. “In that I do have some experience.”
“I know. That’s why I wanted you. It will have to be a superior fleet, large enough to split into several flotillas if necessary. The days when pirates skipped round in open little hemioliai and myoparones have almost gone. These days they man fully decked triremes and biremes—even quinqueremes!—and are massed in fleets under the command of admirals—strategoi they call these men. They cruise the seas like navies, their flagships encrusted in gilt and purple. In their hidden bases they live like kings, employing chained gangs of free men to serve their wants. They have whole arsenals of weapons and every luxury a rich man in Rome might fancy. Lucius Cornelius made sure the Senate understood why he was sending me to a remote, unimportant place like Cilicia. It is here the pirates have their main bases, so it is here we must begin to clear them out.”
“I could make myself useful by discovering whereabouts the pirate strongholds are—I’m sure I’d have no trouble managing that as well as the raising of a fleet.”
“That won’t be necessary, Caesar. We already know the location of the biggest bases. Coracesium is notorious—though so well fortified by nature and by men that I doubt whether I or any other man will ever succeed in taking it. Therefore I intend to begin at the far end of my territory—in Pamphylia and Lycia. There is a pirate king called Zenicetes who controls the whole of the Pamphylian gulf, including Attaleia. It is he who will first feel Rome’s wrath.”
“Next year?’’ asked Caesar.
“Probably,” said Vatia, “though not before the late summer, I think. I cannot start to war against the pirates until Cilicia is properly regulated again and I am sure I have the naval and military strength to win.”
“You expect to be prorogued for several years.”
“The Dictator and the Senate have assured me I will not be hurried. I am to have however many years prove necessary. Lucius Cornelius is now retired, of course, but I do not believe the Senate will go against his wishes.”
*
Off went Caesar to raise a fleet, but not with enthusiasm; it would be more than a year before he saw action, and his assessment of Vatia’s character was that when war did come, Vatia would lack the speed and initiative the campaign called for. In spite of the fact that Caesar bore no love for Lucullus, there was no doubt in his mind that this second general he was serving under was no match in mind or ability for Lucullus.
It was, however, an opportunity to do more traveling, and that was some compensation. The naval power without rival at this eastern end of the Middle Sea was Rhodes, so to Rhodes did Caesar betake himself in May. Always loyal to Rome (it had successfully defied King Mithridates nine years before), Rhodes could be relied upon to contribute vessels, commanders and crews to Vatia’s coming campaign, though not marine troops; the Rhodians did not board enemy ships and turn a naval engagement into a land—style fight.
Luckily Gaius Verres had not had time to visit Rhodes, so Caesar found himself welcomed and the island’s war leaders willing to talk. Most of the dickering revolved around whether Rome was to pay Rhodes for its participation, which was unfortunate. Vatia felt none of the allied cities, islands and communities called upon to provide ships was entitled to any sort of payment in moneys; his argument was that every contributor would directly benefit from removal of the pirates, so ought to donate its services free of charge. Therefore Caesar was obliged to negotiate within his superior’s parameters.
“Look at it this way,” he said persuasively. “Success means enormous spoils as well as relief from raids. Rome isn’t in a position to pay you, but you will share in the division of the spoils, and these will pay for your participation—and give you something over as profit. Rhodes is Friend and Ally of the Roman People. Why jeopardize that status? There are really only two alternatives—participation or nonparticipation. And you must decide now which it is going to be.”
Rhodes yielded. Caesar got his ships, promised for the summer of the following year.
From Rhodes he went to Cyprus, unaware that the ship he passed sailing into the harbor of Rhodus bore a precious Roman cargo; none other than Marcus Tullius Cicero, worn down by a year of marriage to Terentia and the delicate negotiations he had brought to a successful conclusion in Athens when his younger brother, Quintus, married the sister of Titus Pomponius Atticus. Cicero’s own union had just produced a daughter, Tullia, so he had been able to depart from Rome secure in the knowledge that his wife was fully occupied in mothering her babe. On Rhodes lived the world’s most famous teacher of rhetoric, Apollonius Molon, and to his school was Cicero going. He needed a holiday from Rome, from the courts, from Terentia and from his life as it was. His voice had gone, and Apollonius Molon was known to preach that an orator’s vocal and physical apparatus had to equal his mental skills. Though he loathed travel and feared that any absence from Rome would undermine his forensic career, Cicero was looking forward very much to this self-imposed exile far from his friends and family. Time for a rest.
For Caesar there was to be no rest—not that one of Caesar’s temperament needed a rest. He disembarked in Paphos, which was the seat of Cyprus’s ruler, Ptolemy the Cyprian, younger brother of the new King of Egypt, Ptolemy Auletes. More a wastrel than a nonentity, the regent Ptolemy’s long residence at the courts of Mithridates and Tigranes showed glaringly during Caesar’s first interview with him. Not merely did he understand nothing; he wasn’t interested in understanding anything. His education seemed to have been entirely overlooked and his latent sexual preferences had asserted themselves the moment he left the custody of the kings, so that his palace was not unlike the palace of old King Nicomedes. Except that Ptolemy the Cyprian was not a likable man. The Alexandrians, however, had accurately judged him when he had first arrived in Alexandria with his elder brother and their wives; though the Alexandrians had not opposed his appointment as regent of Cyprus, they had sent a dozen efficient bureaucrats to Cyprus with him. It was these men, as Caesar discovered, who really ruled Cyprus on behalf of the island’s owner, Egypt.
Having artfully evaded the advances of Ptolemy the Cyprian, Caesar devoted his energies to the Alexandrian bureaucrats. Not easy men to deal with—and no lovers of Rome—they could see nothing for Cyprus in Vatia’s coming campaign, and clearly had taken umbrage because Vatia had sent a junior legate twenty-one years old as his petitioner.
“My youth,” said Caesar haughtily to these gentlemen, “is beside the point. I am a decorated war hero, a senator at an age when routine admission to the Senate is not permitted, and Publius Servilius Vatia’s chief military assistant. You ought to think yourselves lucky I deigned to drop in!”
This statement was duly taken note of, but bureaucratic attitudes did not markedly change for the better. Argue like a politician though he did, Caesar could get nowhere with them.
“Cyprus is affected by piracy too. Why can’t you see that the pirate menace will be eliminated only if all the lands which suffer from their depredations club together to eliminate them? Publius Servilius Vatia’s fleet has to be large enough to act like a net, sweeping the pirates before it into some place from which there is no way out. There will be enormous spoils, and Cyprus will be able to rejoin the trading markets of the Middle Sea. As you well know, at present the Cilician and Pamphylian pirates cut Cyprus off.”
“Cyprus does not need to join the trading markets of the Middle Sea,” said the Alexandrian leader. “Everything Cyprus produces belongs to Egypt, and goes there. We tolerate no pirates on the seas between Cyprus and Egypt.”
Back to the regent Ptolemy for a second interview. This time, however, Caesar’s luck asserted itself; the regent was in the company of his wife, Mithridatidis Nyssa. Had Caesar known what was the physical style of the Mithridatidae he would have seen that this young lady was a typical member of her house—large in frame, yellow of hair, eyes a greenish gold. Her charms were of coloring and voluptuousness rather than in any claim to true beauty, but Caesar instantly appreciated her charms. So, she made it obvious, did she appreciate Caesar’s charms. And when the silly interview with Ptolemy the Cyprian was over, she strolled out with her husband’s guest on her arm to show him the spot where the goddess Aphrodite had risen from the foam of the sea to embark upon her divine course of earthly havoc.
“She was my thirty-nine—times great—grandmother,” said Caesar, leaning on the white marble balustrade which fenced the official site of the goddess’s birth off from the rest of the shore.
“Who? Not Aphrodite, surely!”
“Surely. I am descended from her through her son, Aeneas.”
“Really?” The slightly protuberant eyes studied his face as if searching for some sign of this staggeringly august lineage.
“Very much really, Princess.”
“Then you belong to Love,” purred the daughter of Mithridates, and put out one long, spatulate finger to stroke Caesar’s sun—browned right arm.
The touch affected him, though he did not show it. “I’ve never heard it put that way before, Princess, but it makes sense,” he said, smiling, looking out to the jewel of the horizon where the sapphire of the sea met the aquamarine of the sky.
“Of course you belong to Love, owning such an ancestress!”
He turned his head to gaze at her, eyes almost at the same level as hers, so tall was she. “It is remarkable,” he said in a soft voice, “that the sea produces so much foam at this place yet at no other, though I can see nothing to account for it.” He pointed first to the north and then to the south. “See? Beyond the limits of the fence there is no foam!”
“It is said she left it to be here always.”
“Then the bubbles are her essence.” He shrugged off his toga and bent to unbuckle his senatorial shoes. “I must bathe in her essence, Princess.”
“If you were not her thirty-nine—times great—grandson, I would tell you to beware,” said the Princess, watching him.
“Is it religiously forbidden to swim here?”
“Not forbidden. Only unwise. Your thirty-nine—times great—grandmother has been known to smite bathers dead.”
He returned unsmitten from his dip to find she had made a sheet out of her robe to cover the spiky shore grasses, and lay waiting for him upon it. One bubble was left, clinging to the back of his hand; he leaned over to press it gently against her virginally smooth nipple, laughed when it burst and she jumped, shivered uncontrollably.
“Burned by Venus,” he said as he lay down with her, wet and exhilarated from the caress of that mysterious sea—foam. For he had just been anointed by Venus, who had even arranged for this superb woman to be on hand for his pleasure, child of a great king and (as he discovered when he entered her) his alone. Love and power combined, the ultimate consummation.
“Burned by Venus,” she said, stretching like a huge golden cat, so great was the goddess’s gift.
“You know the Roman name of Aphrodite,” said the goddess’s descendant, perfectly poised on a bubble of happiness.
“Rome has a long reach.”
The bubble vanished, but not because of what she said; the moment was over, was all.
Caesar got to his feet, never enamored of lingering once the lovemaking was done. “So, Mithridatidis Nyssa, will you use your influence to help me get my fleet?’’ he asked, though he did not tell her why this request caused him to chuckle.
“How very handsome you are,” she said, lying on her elbow, head propped on her hand. “Hairless, like a god.”
“So are you, I note.”
“All court women are plucked, Caesar.”
“But not court men?”
“No! It hurts.”
He laughed. Tunic on, he dealt with his shoes, then began the difficult business of arranging his toga without assistance. “Up with you, woman!” he said cheerfully. “There’s a fleet to be obtained, and a hairy husband to convince that all we’ve been doing is looking at the sea—foam.”
“Oh, him!” She started to dress. “He won’t care what we’ve been doing. Surely you noticed that I was a virgin!”
“Impossible not to.”
Her green—gold eyes gleamed. “I do believe,” she said, “that if I were not in a position to help you raise your fleet, you would have spared me hardly a glance.”
“I have to deny what you say,” he stated, but tranquilly. “I was once accused of doing exactly that to raise a fleet, and what I said then is still true—I would rather put my sword through my belly than employ women’s tricks to achieve my ends. But you, dear and lovely Princess, were a gift from the goddess. And that is a very different thing.”
“I have not angered you?”
“Not in the least, though you’re a sensible girl to have assumed it. Do you get your good sense from your father?”
“Perhaps. He’s a clever man. But he’s a fool too.”
“In what way?”
“His inability to listen to advice from others.” She turned to walk with him toward the palace. “I’m very glad you came to Paphos, Caesar. I was tired of being a virgin.”
“But you were a virgin. Why then with me?’’
“You are the descendant of Aphrodite, therefore you are more than a mere man. I am the child of a king! I can’t give myself to a mere man, only to one of royal and divine blood.”
“I am honored.”
*
The negotiations for the fleet took some time, time Caesar didn’t grudge. Every day he and Ptolemy the Cyprian’s unenjoyed wife made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Aphrodite, and every day Caesar bathed in her essence before expending some of his own essence in Ptolemy the Cyprian’s greatly enjoyed wife. Clearly the Alexandrian bureaucrats had a great deal more respect for Mithridatidis Nyssa than for her husband—which may have had something to do with the fact that King Tigranes was just across the water in Syria. Egypt was remote enough to consider itself safe, but Cyprus was a different matter.
He parted from the daughter of King Mithridates amicably, and with a regret which haunted him for a long time. Aside from his physical pleasure in her, he found that he liked and esteemed her unselfconscious assurance, her knowledge that she was any man’s equal because she was the child of a great king. A man could not exactly wipe his feet upon a Roman woman, Caesar reflected, but a Roman woman was nonetheless no man’s equal. So upon leaving Paphos, he gave Mithridatidis Nyssa an exquisitely carved cameo of the goddess, though he could ill afford the rare and costly striated stone it was worked upon.
Understanding much of this, she was immensely pleased, as she wrote to her elder sister, Cleopatra Tryphaena, in Alexandria:
I suppose I will never see him again. He is not the kind of man who goes anywhere or does anything without an excellent reason, and by reason, I mean a man’s reason. I think he might have loved me a little. But that would never draw him back to Cyprus. No woman will ever come between him and his purpose.
I had not met a Roman before, though I understand that in Alexandria they are to be met fairly frequently, so you probably know quite a few. Is his difference because he is a Roman? Or because he is himself alone? Perhaps you can tell me. Though I think I know what you will answer.
I liked best the unassailable quality he owned; and his calmness, which was not matter—of—fact. Admittedly with my help, he got his fleet. I know, I know, he used me! But there are times, dear Tryphaena, when one does not mind being used. He loved me a little. He prized my birth. And there is not a woman alive who could resist the way he laughs at her.
It was a very pleasant interlude. I miss him, the wretch! Do not worry about me. To be on the safe side, I took the medicine after he left. Was I married in truth rather than in name only, I might have been tempted not to—Caesar blood is better blood than Ptolemy. As it is, there will never be children for me, alas.
I am sorry for your difficulties, and sorry too that we were not reared to understand the situation in Egypt. Not, mind you, that our father, Mithridates, and our uncle, Tigranes, would have cared about these difficulties. We are simply their way to obtain an interest in Egypt, since we do have the necessary Ptolemaic blood to establish our claims. But what we could not know was this business about the priests of Egypt and their hold upon the common people, those of true Egyptian blood rather than Macedonian. It is almost as if there were two countries called Egypt, the land of Macedonian Alexandria and the Delta, and the land of the Egyptian Nile.
I do think, dearest Tryphaena, that you ought to proceed to make your own negotiations with the Egyptian priests. Your husband Auletes is not a man for men, so you do have hope of children. You must bear children! But that you cannot do under Egyptian law until after you are crowned and anointed, and you cannot be crowned and anointed until the Egyptian priests agree to officiate. I know the Alexandrians pretended to the embassage from Rome that you were crowned and anointed—they had the security of knowing that Marcus Perperna and his other ambassadors are ignorant of Egyptian laws and ways. But the people of Egypt know you have not been confirmed in the monarchy. Auletes is a silly man, somewhat deficient in true intellect and quite without political acumen. Whereas you and I are our father’s daughters, and better blessed.
Go to the priests and begin to negotiate. In your own name. It is clear to me that you will achieve nothing—even children—until the priests are brought around. Auletes chooses to believe that he is more important than they, and that the Alexandrians are powerful enough to end in defeating the priests. He is wrong. Or perhaps it might be best to say, Auletes believes it is more important to be the Macedonian King than the Egyptian Pharaoh—that if he is King, he must also end in becoming Pharaoh. From your letters to me, I am aware that you have not fallen into this trap. But it is not enough. You must also negotiate. The priests understand that our husbands are the last of the line, and that to establish rival dynasts of Egyptian blood after almost a thousand years of foreign invasions and foreign rulers would be more perilous than sanctioning the last of the Ptolemies. So I imagine that what they really want is to be deferred to rather than ignored or held lightly. Defer to them, dearest Tryphaena. And make your husband defer to them! After all, they have custody of the Pharaoh’s treasure labyrinths, of Nilotic income, and of the Egyptian people. The fact that Chickpea succeeded in sacking Thebes seven years ago is beside the point. He was crowned and anointed, he was Pharaoh. And Thebes is not the whole of the Nile!
In the meantime continue to take the medicine and do not antagonize either your husband or the Alexandrians. As long as they remain your allies, you have a basis for your negotiations with the priests in Memphis.
By the end of Sextilis, Gaius Julius Caesar had returned to Vatia in Tarsus and could present him with agreements to provide ships and crews at his demand from all the important naval cities and territories in Vatia’s bailiwick. Clearly Vatia was pleased, especially at the agreement with Cyprus. But he had no further military duties for his young subordinate, and was besides the harbinger of the news that Sulla was dead in Rome.
“Then, Publius Servilius,” said Caesar, “with your leave I would like to return home.”
Vatia frowned. “Why?”
“For several reasons,” said Caesar easily. “First—and most importantly—I am of little use to you—unless, that is, you intend to mount an expedition to eject King Tigranes from eastern Pedia and Euphratic Cappadocia?”
“Such are not my orders, Gaius Julius,” said Vatia stiffly. “I am to concentrate upon governing my province and eliminating the pirate menace. Cappadocia and eastern Pedia must wait.”
“I understand. In which case, you have no military duties for me in the near future. My other reasons for wishing to return home are personal. I have a marriage to consummate and a career in the law courts to embark upon. My time as flamen Dialis has meant that I am already long in the tooth to begin as an advocate. I mean to become consul in my year. It is my birthright. My father was praetor, my uncle consul, my cousin Lucius consul. The Julii are once more in the forefront.”
“Very well, Gaius Julius, you may go home,” said Vatia, who was sensitive to these arguments. “I will be happy to commend you to the Senate, and to classify your gathering of my fleet as campaign duty.”