It was in April, shortly after the newly elected censors had confirmed Mamercus as Princeps Senatus, that Pompey announced he would celebrate votive victory games commencing in Sextilis and ending just before the ludi Romani were due to begin on the fourth day of September. His satisfaction in making this announcement was apparent to all, though not every scrap of it was due to the victory games themselves; Pompey had brought off a marital coup of enormous significance to a man from Picenum. His widowed sister, Pompeia, was to wed none other than the dead Dictator’s nephew, Publius Sulla sive Sextus Perquitienus. Yes, the Pompeii of northern Picenum were rising up in the Roman world! His grandfather and father had had to make do with the Lucilii, whereas he had allied himself with the Mucii, the Licinii, and the Cornelii! Tremendously satisfying!
But Crassus didn’t care a scrap whom Pompey’s sister chose as her second husband; what upset him was the victory games.
“I tell you,” Crassus said to Caesar, “he intends to keep the countryfolk spending up big in Rome for over two months, and right through the worst of summer! The shopkeepers are going to put up statues to him all over the city—not to mention old grannies and daddies who love to take in lodgers during summer and earn a few extra sesterces!”
“It’s good for Rome. And good for money.”
“Yes, but where am I in all this?” asked Crassus, squeaking.
“You’ll just have to create a place for yourself.”
“Tell me how—and when? Apollo’s games last until the Ides of Quinctilis, then there are three sets of elections five days apart—curule, People, Plebs. On the Ides of Quinctilis he intends to hold his wretched parade of the Public Horse. And after the plebeian elections there’s an ocean of time for shopping—but not enough time to go home to the country and come back again!—until his victory games begin in the middle of Sextilis. They last for fifteen days! What conceit! And after they end it’s straight into the Roman games! Ye gods, Caesar, his public entertainments are going to keep the bumpkins in town for closer to three months than two! And has my name been mentioned? No! I don’t exist!”
Caesar looked tranquil. “I have an idea,” he said.
“What?’’ demanded Crassus. “Dress me up as Pollux?’’
“And Pompeius as Castor? I like it! But let’s be serious. Anything you do, my dear Marcus, is going to have to cost more than Pompeius is outlaying for his entertainments. Otherwise whatever you do won’t eclipse him. Are you willing to spend a huge fortune?”
“I’d be willing to pay almost anything to go out of office looking better than Pompeius!” Crassus snorted. “After all, I am the richest man in Rome—have been for two years now.”
“Don’t delude yourself,” said Caesar. “You just talk about your wealth, and no one has come up with a bigger figure. But our Pompeius is a typical landed rural nobleman—very closemouthed about what he’s worth. And he’s worth a lot more than you are, Marcus, so much I guarantee. When the Ager Gallicus was officially brought within the boundary of Italy, the price of it soared. He owns—owns, not leases or rents!—several million iugera of the best land in Italy, and not only in Umbria and Picenum. He inherited all that magnificent property the Lucilii used to own on the Gulf of Tarentum, and he came back from Africa in time to pick up some very nice river frontage on the Tiber, the Volturnus, the Liris and the Aternus. You are not the richest man in Rome, Crassus. I assure you that Pompeius is.”
Crassus was staring. “That’s not possible!”
“It is, you know. Just because a man doesn’t shout to the world how much he’s worth doesn’t mean he’s poor. You shout about your money to everyone because you started out poor. Pompeius has never been poor in his life—and never will be poor. When he gives his land to his veterans he looks glamorous, but I’d be willing to bet that all he really gives them is tenure of it, not title to it. And that everyone pays him a tithe of what their land produces. Pompeius is a kind of king, Crassus! He didn’t choose to call himself Magnus for no reason. His people regard him as their king. Now that he’s senior consul, he just believes his kingdom has grown.”
“I’m worth ten thousand talents,” said Crassus gruffly.
“Two hundred and fifty million sesterces to an accountant,” said Caesar, smiling and shaking his head. “Would you draw ten percent of that in annual profits?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then would you be willing to forgo this year’s profits?”
“You mean spend a thousand talents?”
“I mean exactly that.”
The idea hurt; Crassus registered his pain visibly. “Yes—if in so doing I can eclipse Pompeius. Not otherwise.”
“The day before the Ides of Sextilis—which is four days before Pompeius’s victory games begin—is the feast of Hercules Invictus. As you remember, Sulla dedicated a tenth of his fortune to the god by giving a public feast on five thousand tables.”
“Who could forget that day? The black dog drank the first victim’s blood. I’d never seen Sulla terrified before. Nor after, for that matter. His Grass Crown fell in the defiled blood.”
“Forget the horrors, Marcus, for I promise you there will be no black dogs anywhere near when you dedicate a tenth of your fortune to Hercules Invictus! You’ll give a public banquet on ten thousand tables!” said Caesar. “Those who might otherwise have preferred the comfort of a seaside holiday to watching one spectacle after another will all stay in Rome—a free feast is top of everyone’s priorities.”
“Ten thousand tables? If I heaped every last one of them feet high in licker—fish, oysters, freshwater eels and dug—mullets by the cartload, it would still not cost me more than two hundred talents,” said Crassus, who knew the price of everything. “And besides, a full belly today might make a man think he’ll never be hungry again, but on the morrow that same man will be hungry. Feasts vanish in a day, Caesar. So does the memory of them.”
“Quite right. However,” Caesar went on dreamily, “those two hundred talents leave eight hundred still to be spent. Let us presume that in Rome between Sextilis and November there will be about three hundred thousand Roman citizens. The normal grain dole provides each citizen with five modii—that is, one medimnus—of wheat per month, at a price of fifty sesterces. A cheap rate, but not as cheap as the actual price of the grain, of course. The Treasury makes at least a little profit, even in the lean years. This year, they tell me, will not be lean. Nor—such is your luck!—was last year a lean one. Because it is out of last year’s crop you will have to buy.”
“Buy?” asked Crassus, looking lost.
“Let me finish. Five modii of wheat for three months … Times three hundred thousand people … Is four and a half million modii. If you buy now instead of during summer, I imagine you could pick up four and a half million modii of wheat for five sesterces the modius. That is twenty-two and a half million sesterces—approximately eight hundred talents. And that, my dear Marcus,” Caesar ended triumphantly, “is where the other eight hundred talents will go! Because, Marcus Crassus, you are going to distribute five modii of wheat per month for three months to every Roman citizen free of charge. Not at a reduced price, my dear Marcus. Free!”
“Spectacular largesse,” said Crassus, face expressionless.
“I agree, it is. And it has one great advantage over every ploy Pompeius has devised. His entertainments will have finished over two months before your final issue of free grain. If memories are short, then you have to be the last man left on the field. Most of Rome will eat free bread thanks to Marcus Licinius Crassus between the month when the prices soar and the time when the new harvest brings them down again. You’ll be a hero! And they’ll love you forever!”
“They might stop calling me an arsonist,” grinned Crassus.
“And there you have the difference between your wealth and Pompeius’s,” said Caesar, grinning too. “Pompeius’s money doesn’t float as cinders on Rome’s air. It really is high time that you smartened up your public image!”
*
As Crassus chose to go about purchasing his vast quantity of wheat with stealth and personal anonymity and said not a word about intending to dedicate a tenth of his wealth to Hercules Invictus on the day before the Ides of Sextilis, Pompey proceeded with his own plans in sublime ignorance of the danger that he would find himself eclipsed.
His intention was to make all of Rome—and Italy—aware that the bad times were over; and what better way to do that than to give the whole country over to feasting and holidaymaking? The consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus would live in the memory of the people as a time of prosperity and freedom from anxiety—no more wars, no more famines, no more internal strife. And though the element of self spoiled his intentions, they were genuine enough. The ordinary people, who were not important and therefore did not suffer during the proscriptions, spoke these days with wistful longing for the time when Sulla had been the Dictator; but after the consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus was over, Sulla’s reign would not loom so large in memory.
At the beginning of Quinctilis Rome began to fill up with country people, most of whom were looking for lodgings until after the middle of September. Nor did as many as usual leave for the seashore, even among the upper classes. Aware that crime and disease would both be on the increase, Pompey devoted some of his splendid organizational talents to diminishing crime and disease by hiring ex-gladiators to police the alleys and byways of the city, by making the College of Lictors keep an eye on the shysters and tricksters who frequented the Forum Romanum and other major marketplaces, by enlarging the swimming holes of the Trigarium, and plastering vacant walls with warning notices about good drinking water, urinating and defaecating anywhere but in the public latrines, clean hands and bad food.
Unsure how many of these countryfolk understood how amazing it was that Rome’s senior consul had been a knight at the time he was elected (and did not become a senator until he, was inaugurated on New Year’s Day), Pompey had resolved to use the parade of the Public Horse to reinforce this fact. Thus had his tame censors Clodianus and Gellius revived the transvectio, as the parade was called, though it had not been held after the time of Gaius Gracchus. Until the consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, who wanted to make a public splash with his Public Horse.
It began at dawn on the Ides of Quinctilis in the Circus Flaminius on the Campus Martius, where the eighteen hundred holders of the Public Horse offered to Mars Invictus—Undefeated Mars—whose temple lay within the Circus. The offering made, the knights mounted their Public Horses and rode in solemn procession, century by century, through the gate in the vegetable markets, along the Velabrum into the Vicus Iugarius, and thence into the lower Forum Romanum. They turned to ride up the Forum to where, on a specially erected tribunal in front of the temple of Castor and Pollux, the censors sat to review them. Each man when he drew close to the tribunal was expected to dismount and lead his Public Horse up to the censors, who minutely inspected it and him. Did it or he not measure up to the ancient equestrian standards, then the censors were at liberty to strip the knight of his Public Horse and expel him from the eighteen original Centuries. It had been known to happen in the past; Cato the Censor had been famous for the stringency of his inspections.
So novel was the transvectio that most of Rome tried to jam into the Forum Romanum to watch it, though many had to content themselves with seeing the parade pass by between the Circus Flaminius and the Forum. Every vantage point was solid with people—roofs, plinths, porticoes, steps, hills, cliffs, trees. Vendors of food, fans, sunshades and drinks scrambled through the masses in the most precarious way crying their wares, banging people on the head with the corners of their neck—slung open boxes, giving back as much abuse as they collected, each one with a slave in attendance to replenish the box or keep some sticky—fingered member of the crowd from pilfering the goods or the proceeds. Toddlers were held out to piss on those below them, babies howled, children dived this way and that through the masses, gravy dribbled down tunics in a nice contrast to custard cascades, fights broke out, the susceptible fainted or vomited, and everybody ate nonstop. A typical Roman holiday.
The knights rode in eighteen Centuries, each one preceded by its ancient emblem—wolf, bear, mouse, bird, lion, and so on. Because of the narrowness of some parts of the route they could ride no more than four abreast, which meant that each Century held twenty-five rows, and the whole procession stretched for nearly a mile. Each man was clad in his armor, some suits of incredible antiquity and therefore bizarre appearance; others (like Pompey’s, whose family had nudged into the eighteen original Centuries and did not own ancient armor they would have cared to try to pass off as Etruscan or Latin) magnificent with gold and silver. But nothing rivaled the Public Horses, each a splendid example of horseflesh from the rosea rura, and mostly white or dappled grey. They were bedizened with every medallion and trinket imaginable, with ornate saddles and bridles of dyed leather, fabulous blankets, brilliant colors. Some horses had been trained to pick up their feet in high—stepping prances, others had manes and tails braided with silver and gold.
It was beautifully staged, and all to show off Pompey. To have examined every man who rode, no matter how rapid the censors were, was manifestly impossible; the parade would have taken thirty summer hours to ride past the tribunal. But Pompey’s Century had been placed as one of the first, so that the censors solemnly went through the ritual of asking each of some three hundred men in turn what his name was, his tribe, his father’s name, and whether he had served in his ten campaigns or for six years, after which his financial standing (previously established) was approved, and he led his horse off to obscurity.
When the fourth Century’s first row dismounted, Pompey was in its forefront; a hush fell over the Forum specially induced by Pompey’s agents in the crowd. His golden armor flashing in the sun, the purple of his consular degree floating from his shoulders mixed with the scarlet of his general’s degree, he led his big white horse forward trapped in scarlet leather and golden phalerae, his own person liberally bedewed with knight’s brasses and medallions, and the scarlet plumes in his Attic helmet a twinkling mass of dyed egret’s feathers.
“Name?” asked Clodianus, who was the senior censor.
“Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus!” hollered Pompey.
“Tribe?”
“Clustumina!”
“Father?”
“Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, consul!”
“Have you served in your ten campaigns or for six years?”
“Yes!” screamed Pompey at the top of his voice. “Two in the Italian War, one defending the city at the Siege of Rome, two with Lucius Cornelius Sulla in Italy, one in Sicily, one in Africa, one in Numidia, one defending Rome from Lepidus and Brutus, six in Spain, and one cleaning up the Spartacani! They are sixteen campaigns, and every one of them beyond cadet status took place under my own generalship!”
The crowd went berserk, shouting, cheering, applauding, feet drumming, arms flailing; wave after wave of acclamation smote the stunned ears of the censors and the rest of the parade, setting horses plunging and some riders on the cobbles.
When the noise finally died down—it took some time to do so, because Pompey had walked out into the center of the open space in front of Castor’s, his bridle looped over his arm, and turned in slow circles applauding the crowds—the censors rolled up their screeds and sat regally nodding while the sixteen Centuries behind Pompey’s rode past at a trot.
“A splendid show!” snarled Crassus, whose Public Horse was the property of his elder boy, Publius, now twenty. He and Caesar had watched from the loggia of Crassus’s house, this having originally belonged to Marcus Livius Drusus, and owning a superb view of the lower Forum. “What a farce!”
“But brilliantly staged, Crassus, brilliantly staged! You must hand Pompeius top marks for inventiveness and crowd appeal. His games should be even better.”
“Sixteen campaigns! And all beyond his cadetship he claims he generaled himself! Oh yes, for about a market interval after his daddy died at the Siege of Rome and during which he did nothing except ready his daddy’s army to march back to Picenum—and Sulla generaled him in Italy, so did Metellus Pius—and Catulus was the general against Lepidus and Brutus—and what do you think about that last claim, that he ‘cleaned up the Spartacani’? Ye gods, Caesar, if we interpreted our own careers as loosely as he’s interpreted his, we’re all generals!”
“Console yourself with the fact that Catulus and Metellus Pius are probably saying much the same thing,” said Caesar, who hurt too. “The man’s a parvenu from an Italian backwater. ’’
“I hope my ploy with the free grain works!”
“It will, Marcus Crassus, I promise you it will.”
*
Pompey went home to his house on the Carinae exultant, but the mood didn’t last. On the following morning Crassus’s heralds began proclaiming the news that on the feast of Hercules Invictus, Marcus Licinius Crassus the consul would dedicate a tenth of everything he owned to the god, that there would be a public feast laid out on ten thousand tables, and that the bulk of the donation would be used up in giving every Roman citizen in Rome five free modii of wheat during September, October and November.
“How dared he!” gasped Pompey to Philippus, who had come to compliment him upon his performance at the transvectio—and to see how the Great Man would swallow Crassus’s ploy.
“It’s very clever,” said Philippus in an apologetic voice, “especially because Romans are so quick at reckoning up how much anything costs. Games are too abstruse, but food is common knowledge. They know the price of everything from a licker—fish to a salt sprat. Even when they can’t afford the salt sprat, they’ll ask its cost in the market. Human curiosity. They’ll all know how much Crassus paid for his wheat too, not to mention how many modii he’s had to buy. We’ll be deafened by clicking abacuses.”
“What you’re trying to say without actually saying it is that they’ll conclude Crassus has spent more on them than I have!” said Pompey, a red glint in his blue eyes.
“I am afraid so.”
“Then I’ll have to set my agents to gossiping about how much games cost.” Pompey glanced at Philippus from under his lids. “How much will Crassus lay out? Any idea?”
“A thousand talents or thereabouts.”
“Crassus? A thousand talents?”
“Easily.”
“He’s too much the miser!”
“Not this year, Magnus. Your generosity and showmanship have evidently stung our big ox into goring with both his horns.”
“What can I do?”
“Very little except turn on absolutely wondrous games.”
“You’re holding something back, Philippus.”
The fat jowls wobbled, the dark eyes flickered. Then he sighed, shrugged. “Oh well, better it comes from me than from one of your enemies. It’s the free grain will win for Crassus.”
“What do you mean? Because he’s filling empty bellies? There are no empty bellies in Rome this year!”
“He’ll distribute five modii of free grain to every Roman citizen in Rome during September, October and November. Count up! That’s two one—pound loaves a day for ninety days. And the vast majority of those ninety days will occur long after your entire—gamut of entertainment is over. Everyone will have forgotten you and what you did. Whereas until the end of November, every Roman mouth taking a bite out of a loaf of bread will make an invocation of thanks to Marcus Licinius Crassus. He can’t lose, Magnus!” said Philippus.
It had been a long time since Pompey had last thrown a tantrum, but the one he threw for the sole edification of Lucius Marcius Philippus was one of his best. The hair came out in hanks, the cheeks and neck were raw with scratches, the body covered in bruises where he had dashed various parts of his anatomy against the floor or the walls. Tears ran like rain, he broke furniture and art into small pieces, his howls threatened to lift the roof. Mucia Tertia, hurrying to see what had happened, took one look and fled again. So did the servants. But Philippus sat in a fascinated appreciation until Varro arrived.
“Oh, Jupiter!” whispered Varro.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” asked Philippus. “He’s a lot quieter now. You ought to have seen him a few moments ago. Awesome!”
“I’ve seen him before,” said Varro, edging around the prone figure on the black—and—white marble tiles to join Philippus on his couch. “It’s the news about Crassus, of course.”
“It is. When have you seen him like this?”
“When he couldn’t fit his elephants through the triumphal gate,” said Varro, voice too low for the supine Pompey to hear; he was never sure how much of a Pompey tantrum was contrived, how much an actual travail which really did blot out conversation and action around him. “Also when Carrinas slipped through his siege at Spoletium. He can’t bear to be thwarted.”
“The ox gored with both horns,” said Philippus pensively.
“The ox,” said Varro tartly, “has three horns these days, and the third is—so feminine rumor has it!—far the biggest.”
“Ah! It has a name, then.”
“Gaius Julius Caesar.”
Pompey sat up immediately, clothing shredded, scalp and face bleeding. “I heard that!” he said, answering Varro’s unspoken debate about his tantrums. “What about Caesar?”
“Only that he masterminded Crassus’s campaign to win huge popularity,” said Varro.
“Who told you?’’ Pompey climbed lithely to his feet and accepted Philippus’s handkerchief.
“Palicanus.”
“He’d know, he was one of Caesar’s tame tribunes,” said Philippus, wincing as Pompey blew his nose productively.
“Caesar’s thick with Crassus, I know,” said Pompey, tones muffled; he emerged from the handkerchief and tossed it to a revolted Philippus. “It was he did all the negotiating last year. And suggested that we restore the tribunate of the plebs.” This was said with an ugly look at Philippus, who had not suggested it.
“I have enormous respect for Caesar’s ability,” said Varro.
“So does Crassus—and so do I.” Pompey still looked ugly. “Well, at least I know where Caesar’s loyalties lie!”
“Caesar’s loyalties lie with Caesar,” said Philippus, “and you should never forget that. But if you’re wise, Magnus, you’ll keep Caesar on a string despite his ties to Crassus. You’ll never not need a Caesar, especially after I’m dead—and that can’t be far off. I’m too fat to see seventy. Lucullus fears Caesar, you know! Now that takes some doing. I can think of only one other man whom Lucullus feared. Sulla. You look at Caesar closely. Sulla!”
“If you say I ought to keep him on a string, Philippus, then I will,” said Pompey magnanimously. “But it will be a long time before I forget that he spoiled my year as consul!”
*
Between the end of Pompey’s victory games (which were a great success, chiefly because Pompey’s tastes in theater and circus were those of a common man) and the beginning of the ludi Romani, the Kalends of September intervened, and on the Kalends of September the Senate always held a meeting. It was always a significant session, and this year’s session followed that tradition; Lucius Aurelius Cotta revealed his findings at it.
“I have acquitted myself of the commission which you laid upon me early in the year, Conscript Fathers,” Lucius Cotta said from the curule dais, “I hope in a manner you will approve. Before I go into details, I will briefly outline what I intend to ask you to recommend into law.”
No scrolls or papers resided in his hands, nor did his urban praetor’s clerk seem to have documents. As the day was exceedingly hot (it still being midsummer by the seasons), the House breathed a faint sigh of relief; he was not going to make it a long—drawn meeting. But then, he was not a long—drawn person; of the three Cottae, Lucius was the youngest and the brightest.
“Candidly, my fellow members of this House,” Lucius Cotta said in his clear, carrying voice, “I was not impressed by the record of either senators or knights in the matter of jury duty. When a jury is composed entirely of senators, it favors those of the senatorial order. And when a jury is composed of knights who own the Public Horse, it favors the equestrian order. Both kinds of jurors are susceptible to bribes, chiefly because, I believe, all a man’s fellow jurors are of his own kind—either senatorial or equestrian.
“What I propose to do,” he said, “is to divide jury duty up more equitably than ever before. Gaius Gracchus took juries off the Senate and gave them to the eighteen Centuries of the First Class who own a Public Horse and a census of at least four hundred thousand sesterces per annum in income. Now it is incontrovertible that with few exceptions every senator comes from a family within the ranks of the eighteen Centuries at the top end of the First Class. What I am saying is that Gaius Gracchus did not go far enough. Therefore I propose to make every jury a three—way forum by having each jury composed of one—third senators, one—third knights of the Public Horse, and one—third tribuni aerarii—the knights who comprise the bulk of the First Class, and have a census of at least three hundred thousand sesterces per annum in income.”
A hum began, but not of outrage; the faces turned like flowers toward the sun of Lucius Cotta were astonished, but in a thoughtful way.
Lucius Cotta grew persuasive. “It seems to me,” he said, “that we of the Senate grew sentimental over the years which elapsed between Gaius Gracchus and the dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. We remembered with longing the privilege of jury duty without remembering the reality of jury duty. Three hundred of us to staff every jury, against fifteen hundred knights of the Public Horse. Then Sulla gave us back our beloved jury duty, and even though he enlarged the Senate to cope with this, we soon learned that each and every one of us resident in Rome was perpetually chained to some jury or other. Because, of course, the standing courts have greatly added to jury duty. Trial processes were far less numerous when most trial processes had to be individually enacted by an Assembly. I think Sulla had reasoned out that the smaller size of each jury and the greater size of the Senate itself would overcome the vexations of perpetual jury duty, but he underestimated the problem.
“I entered upon my enquiry convinced of that one fact only—that the Senate, even in its enlarged condition, is not a body numerous enough to provide juries for every trial. And yet, Conscript Fathers, I was loath to hand the courts back to the knights of the eighteen Public Horse Centuries. To do that, I felt, would have been a betrayal of two things—my own senatorial order, and the truly excellent system of justice which Sulla gave us in his permanent standing courts.”
Everyone was leaning forward now, rapt: Lucius Cotta was speaking absolute sense!
“At first, then, I thought of dividing jury duty equally between the Senate and the eighteen senior Centuries, with each jury composed of fifty percent senators and fifty percent knights. However, a few calculations showed me that the onus of duty for senators was still too heavy.”
Face very serious, eyes shining, both hands out, Lucius Cotta changed his thrust slightly. “If a man is to come to sit in judgement on his fellow man,” he said quietly, “no matter what his rank or status might be, then he should come fresh, eager, interested. That is not possible when a man has to serve on too many juries. He grows jaded, skeptical, disinterested—and more prone to accept bribes. For what other compensation, he might ask himself, can he obtain except a bribe? The State does not pay its jurors. Therefore the State ought not to have the right to suck up huge quantities of any man’s time.”
There were nods and murmurs of approval; the House liked where Lucius Cotta was going very much.
“I am aware that many of you were thinking along these lines, that jury duty ought to be given to a larger body of men than the Senate. I am aware, naturally, that for a short time once before the juries were divided between the two orders. But, as I have said already, none of the solutions which had occurred to us until now went far enough. If there are eighteen hundred minus the membership of the Senate in the eighteen senior Centuries, then the knight pool is reasonably wide, and one knight might perhaps sit on one jury in any year.”
Lucius Cotta paused, well satisfied with what his eyes saw. He went on more briskly. “A man of the First Class, my fellow senators, is just that. A man of the First Class. A prominent citizen of means, with an income of no less than three hundred thousand sesterces per annum. Yet because Rome is now ancient, some things have not changed, or else have continued in the old way but with extra people or functions tacked on. Like the First Class. At the very beginning we had only the eighteen senior Centuries, but because we doggedly kept those eighteen Centuries to only one hundred men in each, we had to expand the First Class by tacking on more Centuries. When we got to seventy—three extra Centuries tacked on, we decided to expand the First Class in a different way—not by keeping on adding more Centuries, but by increasing the number of men in each Century beyond the old one hundred. So we ended up with what I might call a top—light First Class! Just one thousand eight hundred men in the senior eighteen Centuries, and many thousands of men in the seventy—three other Centuries.
“So why not, I asked myself, offer public duty to these many, many thousands of men of the First Class who are not senior enough in family or name to belong to the eighteen Centuries of the Public Horse? If these more junior men were to form one third of each and every jury empaneled, the burden of duty for one man would be extremely light, yet a great incentive for the vast body of more junior knights we call the tribuni aerarii. Imagine if you will a jury of, say, fifty-one men: seventeen senators, seventeen knights of the Public Horse, and seventeen tribuni aerarii. The seventeen senators have the clout of experience, legal knowledge and long association with jury duty. The seventeen knights of the Public Horse have the clout of distinguished family and great wealth. And the seventeen tribuni aerarii have the clout of freshness, a new and different experience, membership in the First Class of Roman citizens, and at least considerable wealth.”
Both the hands went out again; Lucius Cotta dropped the right one and extended the left toward the massive bronze doors of the Curia Hostilia. “That is my solution, Conscript Fathers! A tripartite jury of equal numbers of men from all three orders within the First Class. If you award me a senatus consultum, I will draft my measure in properly legal fashion and present it to the Assembly of the People.”
Pompey held the fasces for the month of September, and sat upon his curule chair at the front of the dais. Beside him was an empty chair—that of Crassus.
“How says the senior consul—elect?’’ Pompey asked correctly of Quintus Hortensius.
“The senior consul—elect commends Lucius Cotta for this splendid piece of work,” said Hortensius. “Speaking as a curule magistrate—elect and as an advocate in the courts, I applaud this eminently sensible solution to a vexed problem.”
“The junior consul—elect?” asked Pompey.
“I concur with my senior colleague,” said Metellus Little Goat, who had no reason to oppose the measure now that the case of Gaius Verres was in the past and Verres himself vanished.
And so it went through the ranks of those asked to speak; no one could find fault. There were some who were tempted to find fault, of course, but every time they thought of how much jury duty finding fault was likely to let them in for, they shuddered and ended in saying nothing.
*
“It really is splendid,” said Cicero to Caesar as the exodus from the House drew them together. “We’re both men who like to work with honest juries. How cunning Lucius Cotta was! Two segments of the jury would have to be bribed to secure the right verdict—which is more expensive by far than half!—and what one segment accepted, the other two would be inclined to deny. I predict, my dear Caesar, that while jury bribery may not entirely disappear, there will be considerably less of it. The tribuni aerarii will regard it as a matter of honor to behave decently and justify their incorporation. Yes indeed, Lucius Cotta has been very clever!”
Caesar took great pleasure in reporting this to his uncle over dinner in his own triclinium. Neither Aurelia nor Cinnilla was present; Cinnilla was into her fourth month of pregnancy and suffering an almost constant sickness of the stomach, and Aurelia was caring for little Julia, who was also ailing in a minor way. So the two men were alone, and not ungrateful for it.
“I admit that the bribery aspect did occur to me,” said Lucius Cotta, smiling, “but I couldn’t very well be blunt in the House when I wanted the measure approved.”
“True. Nonetheless it has occurred to most, and as far as Cicero and I are concerned, it’s a terrific bonus. On the other hand, Hortensius may well privately deplore it. Bribery aside, the best part about your solution is that it will preserve Sulla’s standing courts, which I believe are the greatest advance in Roman justice since the establishment of trial and jury.”
“Oh, very nice praise, Caesar!” Lucius Cotta glowed for a moment, then put his wine cup on the table and frowned. “You’re in Marcus Crassus’s confidence, Caesar, so perhaps you can allay my fears. In many ways this has been a halcyon year—no wars on the horizon we’re not winning comfortably, the Treasury under less stress than it has been in a very long time, a proper census being taken of all the Roman citizens in Italy, a good harvest in Italy and the provinces, and something like a nice balance struck between old and new in government. If one leaves aside the unconstitutionality of Magnus’s consulship, truly this year has been a good one. As I walked here through the Subura, I got a feeling that the ordinary Roman people—the sort who rarely get to exercise a vote and find Crassus’s free grain a genuine help in stretching their income—are happier than they have been in at least a generation. I agree that they’re not the ones who suffer when heads roll and the gutters of the Forum run with blood, but the mood that kind of thing engenders infects them too, even though their own heads are not in jeopardy.”
Pausing for breath, Lucius Cotta took a mouthful of wine.
“I think I know what you’re going to say, Uncle, but say it anyway,” said Caesar.
“It’s been a wonderful summer, especially for the lowly. A host of entertainments, food enough to eat to bursting point and take home sackloads to feed every member of the family to bursting point, lion hunts and performing elephants, chariot races galore, every farce and mime known to the Roman stage—and free wheat! Public Horses on parade. Peaceful elections held on time for once. Even a sensational trial wherein the villain got his just deserts and Hortensius a smack in the eye. Cleaned up swimming holes in the Trigarium. Not nearly as much disease as everyone expected, and no outbreak of the summer paralysis. Crimes and confidence tricks quite depressed!” Lucius Cotta smiled. “Whether they deserve it or not, Caesar, most of the credit—and the praise!—is going to the consuls. People’s feelings about them are as romantic as they are fanciful. You and I, of course, know better. Though one cannot deny that they’ve been excellent consuls—legislated only to save their necks, and for the rest, left well enough alone. And yet—and yet—there are rumors growing, Caesar. Rumors that all is not amicable between Pompeius and Crassus. That they’re not speaking to each other. That when one is obliged to be present somewhere, the other will be absent. And I’m concerned, because I believe that the rumors are true—and because I believe that we of the upper class owe the ordinary people one short little perfect year.”
“Yes, the rumors are true,” said Caesar soberly.
“Why?”
“Chiefly because Marcus Crassus stole Pompeius’s thunder and Pompeius cannot bear to be eclipsed. He thought that between the Public Horse farce and his votive games, he’d be everyone’s hero. Then Crassus provided three months of free grain. And demonstrated to Pompeius that he’s not the only man in Rome with an absolutely vast fortune. So Pompeius has retaliated by cutting Crassus out of his life, consular and private. He should, for instance, have notified Crassus that there was a meeting of the Senate today—oh, everyone knows there’s always a meeting on the Kalends of September, but the senior consul calls it, and must notify his juniors.”
“He notified me,” said Lucius Cotta.
“He notified everyone except Crassus. And Crassus interpreted that as a direct insult. So he wouldn’t go. I tried to reason with him, but he refused to budge.”
“Oh, cacat!” cried Lucius Cotta, and flopped back on his couch in disgust. “Between the pair of them, they’ll ruin what would otherwise be a year in a thousand!”
“No,” said Caesar, “they won’t. I won’t let them. But if I do manage to patch up a peace between them, it won’t last long. So I’ll wait until the end of the year, Uncle, and bring some Cottae into my schemes. At the end of the year we’ll force them to stage some sort of public reconciliation that will bring tears to every eye. That way, it’s exeunt omnes on the last day of the year with everybody singing their lungs out—Plautus would be proud of the production.”
“You know,” said Lucius Cotta thoughtfully, straightening up, “when you were a boy, Caesar, I had you in my catalogue of men as what Archimedes might have called a prime mover—you know, ‘Give me a place to stand, and I will shift the whole globe!’ That was genuinely how I saw you, and one of the chief reasons why I mourned when you were made flamen Dialis. So when you managed to wriggle out of it, I put you back where I used to have you in my catalogue of men. But it hasn’t turned out the way I thought it would. You move through the most complicated system of gears and cogs! For such a young man, you’re very well known at many levels from the Senate to the Subura. But not as a prime mover. More in the fashion of a lord high chamberlain in an oriental court—content to be the mind behind events, but allowing other men to enjoy the glory.” He shook his head. “I find that so odd in you!”
Caesar had listened to this with tight mouth and two spots of color burning in his normally ivory cheeks. “You didn’t have me wrongly catalogued, Uncle,” he said. “But I think perhaps my flaminate was the best thing could have happened to me, given that I did manage to wriggle out of it. It taught me to be subtle as well as powerful, it taught me to hide my light when showing it might have snuffed it out, it taught me that time is a more valuable ally than money or mentors, it taught me the patience my mother used to think I would never own—and it taught me that nothing is wasted! I am still learning, Uncle. I hope I never stop! And Lucullus taught me that I could continue to learn by developing ideas and launching them through the agency of other men. I stand back and see what happens. Be at peace, Lucius Cotta. My time to stand forth as the greatest prime mover of them all will come. I will be consul in my year, even. But that will only be my beginning.”
*
November was a cruel month, even though its weather was as fair and pleasant as any May when season and calendar coincided. Aunt Julia suddenly began to sicken with some obscure complaint none of the physicians including Lucius Tuccius could diagnose. It was a syndrome of loss—weight, spirit, energy, interest.
“I think she’s tired, Caesar,” said Aurelia.
“But not tired of living, surely!” cried Caesar, who couldn’t bear the thought of a world without Aunt Julia.
“Oh yes,” answered Aurelia. “That most of all.”
“She has so much to live for!”
“No. Her husband and her son are dead, so she has nothing to live for. I’ve told you that before.” And, wonder of wonders, the beautiful purple eyes filled with tears. “I half understand. My husband is dead. If you were to die, Caesar, that would be my end. I would have nothing to live for.”
“It would be a grief, certainly, but not an end, Mater,” he said, unable to believe he meant that much to her. “You have grandchildren, you have two daughters.”
“That is true. Julia does not, however.” The tears were dashed away. “But a woman’s life is in her men, Caesar, not in the women she has borne or the children they bear. No woman truly esteems her lot, it is thankless and obscure. Men move and control the world, not women. So the intelligent woman lives her life through her men.”
He sensed a weakening in her, and struck. “Mater, just what did Sulla mean to you?”
And, weakened, she answered. “He meant excitement and interest. He esteemed me in a way your father never did, though I never longed to be Sulla’s wife. Or his mistress, for that matter. Your father was my true mate. Sulla was my dream. Not because of the greatness in him, but because of the agony. Of friends he had none who were his peers. Just the Greek actor who followed him into retirement, and me, a woman.” The weakness left her, she looked brisk. “But enough of that! You may take me to see Julia.”
Julia looked and sounded a shadow of her old self, but sparked a little when she saw Caesar, who understood a little better what his mother had told him: the intelligent woman lived through men. Should that be? he wondered. Ought not women have more? But then he envisioned the Forum Romanum and the Curia Hostilia filled half with women, and shuddered. They were for pleasure, private company, service, and usefulness. Too bad if they wanted more!
“Tell me a Forum story,” said Julia, holding Caesar’s hand.
Her own hand, he noted, grew more and more to resemble a talon, and his nostrils, so attuned to that exquisite perfume she had always exuded, these days sensed a sourness in it, an underlying odor it could not quite disguise. Not exactly age. The word death occurred to him; he pushed it away and glued a smile to his face.
“Actually I do have a Forum story to tell you—or rather, a basilica story,” he said lightly.
“A basilica? Which one?”
“The first basilica, the Basilica Porcia which Cato the Censor built a hundred years ago. As you know, one end of its ground floor has always been the headquarters of the College of Tribunes of the Plebs. And perhaps because the tribunes of the plebs are once more enjoying their full powers, this year’s lot decided to improve their lot. Right in the middle of their space is a huge column which makes it just about impossible for them to conduct a meeting of more than their ten selves. So Plautius, the head of the college, decided to get rid of the pillar. He called in our most distinguished firm of architects, and asked it if there was any possibility the column could be dispensed with. And after much measuring and calculating, he got his answer: yes, the column could be dispensed with and the building would remain standing comfortably.”
Julia lay on her couch with her body fitted around Caesar, sitting on its edge; her big grey eyes, sunk these days into bruised-looking orbits, were fixed on his face. She was smiling, genuinely interested. “I cannot imagine where this story is going,” she said, squeezing his hand.
“Nor could the tribunes of the plebs! The builders brought in their scaffolds and shored the place up securely, the architects probed and tapped, everything was ready to demolish the pillar. When in walked a young man of twenty-three—they tell me he will be twenty-four in December—and announced that he forbade the removal of the pillar!
” ‘And who might you be?’ asked Plautius.
‘“I am Marcus Porcius Cato, the great—grandson of Cato the Censor, who built this basilica,’ said the young man.
” ‘Good for you!’ said Plautius. ‘Now shift yourself out of the way before the pillar comes down on top of you!’
“But he wouldn’t shift, and nothing they could do or say would make him shift. He set up camp right there beneath the offending obstacle, and harangued them unmercifully while ever there was someone present to harangue. On and on and on, in a voice which, says Plautius—and I agree with him, having heard it for myself—could shear a bronze statue in half.”
Aurelia now looked as interested as Julia, and snorted. “What rubbish!” she said. “I hope they vetoed him!”
“They tried. He refused to accept the veto. He was a full member of the Plebs and his great—grandfather built the place, they would disturb it over his dead body. I give him this—he hung on like a dog to a rat! His reasons were endless, but mostly all revolved around the fact that his great—grandfather had built the Basilica Porcia in a certain way, and that certain way was sacred, hallowed, a part of the mos maiorum.’’
Julia chuckled. “Who won?” she asked.
“Young Cato did, of course. The tribunes of the plebs just couldn’t stand that voice anymore.”
“Didn’t they try force? Couldn’t they throw him off the Tarpeian Rock?” asked Aurelia, looking scandalized.
“I think they would have loved to, but the trouble was that by the time they might have been driven to use force, word had got around, and so many people had gathered every day to watch the struggle that Plautius felt it would do the tribunes of the plebs more harm in the eyes of the populace to use real force than any good removal of the column might have brought them. Oh, they threw him out of the building a dozen times, but he just came back! And it became clear that he would never give up. So Plautius held a meeting and all ten members of the college agreed to suffer the continued presence of the pillar,” said Caesar.
“What does this Cato look like?’’ asked Julia.
Caesar wrinkled his brow. “Difficult to describe. He’s as ugly as he is pretty. Perhaps the closest description is to say that he reminds me of a highly bred horse trying to eat an apple through a latticework trellis.”
“All teeth and nose,” said Julia instantly.
“Exactly.”
“I can tell you another story about him,” said Aurelia.
“Go ahead!” said Caesar, noting Julia’s interest.
“It happened before young Cato turned twenty. He had always been madly in love with his cousin Aemilia Lepida—Vlamercus’s daughter. She was already engaged to Metellus Scipio when Metellus Scipio went out to Spain to serve with his father, but when he came back some years before his father, he and Aemilia Lepida fell out badly. She broke off the engagement and announced that she was going to marry Cato instead. Mamercus was furious! Especially, it seems, because my friend Servilia—she’s Cato’s half sister—had warned him about Cato and Aemilia Lepida. Anyway, it all turned out fine in the end, because Aemilia Lepida had no intention of marrying Cato. She just used him to make Metellus Scipio jealous. And when Metellus Scipio came to her and begged to be forgiven, Cato was out, Metellus Scipio was in again. Shortly afterward they were married. Cato, however, took his rejection so badly that he tried to kill both Metellus Scipio and Aemilia Lepida, and when that was frustrated, he tried to sue Metellus Scipio for alienating Aemilia Lepida’s affections! His half brother Servilius Caepio—a nice young man, just married to Hortensius’s daughter—persuaded Cato that he was making a fool of himself, and Cato desisted. Except, apparently, that for the next year he wrote endless poetry I am assured was all very bad.”
“It’s funny,” said Caesar, shoulders shaking.
“It wasn’t at the time, believe me! Whatever young Cato may turn out to be like later on, his career to date indicates that he will always have the ability to irritate people intensely,” said Aurelia. “Mamercus and Cornelia Sulla—not to mention Servilia!—detest him. So these days, I believe, does Aemilia.”
“He’s married to someone else now, isn’t he?” asked Caesar.
“Yes, to an Attilia. Not a terribly good match, but then, he doesn’t have a great deal of money. His wife bore a little girl last year.”
And that, decided Caesar, studying his aunt, was as much diverting company as she could tolerate for the moment.
“I don’t want to believe it, but you’re right, Mater. Aunt Julia is going to die,” he said to Aurelia as soon as they left Julia’s house.
“Eventually, but not yet, my son. She’ll last well into the new year, perhaps longer.”
“Oh, I hope she lasts until after I leave for Spain!”
“Caesar! That’s a coward’s hope,” said his remorseless mother. “You don’t usually shirk unpleasant events.”
He stopped in the middle of the Alta Semita, both hands out and clenched into fists. “Oh, leave me alone!” he cried, so loudly that two passersby glanced at the handsome pair curiously. “It’s always duty, duty, duty! Well, Mater, to be in Rome to bury Aunt Julia is one duty I don’t want!” And only custom and courtesy kept him at his mother’s side for the rest of that uncomfortable walk home; he would have given almost anything to have left her to find her own way back to the Subura.
Home wasn’t the happiest of places either. Now into her sixth month of pregnancy, Cinnilla wasn’t very well. The “all day and all night sickness” as Caesar phrased it, trying to make a joke, had disappeared, only to be succeeded by a degree of swelling in the feet and legs which both distressed and alarmed the prospective mother. Who was obliged to spend most of her time in bed, feet and legs elevated. Not only was Cinnilla uncomfortable and afraid; she was cross too. An attitude of mind the whole household found difficult to cope with, as it did not belong in Cinnilla’s nature.
Thus it was that for the first time during his periods of residence in Rome, Caesar elected to spend his nights as well as his days elsewhere than the apartment in the Subura. To stay with Crassus was not possible; Crassus could only think of the cost of feeding an extra mouth, especially toward the end of the most expensive year of his life. And Gaius Matius had recently married, so the other ground—floor apartment of Aurelia’s insula (which would have been the most convenient place to stay) was also not available. Nor was he in the mood for dalliance; the affair with Caecilia Metella Little Goat had been abruptly terminated when Verres decamped to Massilia, and no one had yet appealed to him as a replacement. Truth to tell, the frail state of physical well-being in both his aunt and his wife did not encourage dalliance. So he ended in renting a small four—roomed apartment down the Vicus Patricius from his home, and spent most of his time there with Lucius Decumius for company. As the neighborhood was quite as unfashionable as his mother’s insula, his political acquaintances would not have cared to visit him there, and the secretive side of him liked that anyway. The forethought in him also saw its possibilities when the mood for dalliance returned; he began to take an interest in the place (it was in a good building) and acquire a few nice pieces of furniture and art. Not to mention a good bed.
*
At the beginning of December he effected a most touching reconciliation. The two consuls were standing together on the rostra waiting for the urban praetor Lucius Cotta to convene the Assembly of the People; it was the day upon which Cotta’s law reforming the jury system was to be ratified. Though Crassus held the fasces for December and was obliged to attend, Pompey was not about to permit a public occasion of such moment to pass without his presence. And as the consuls could not very well stand one to either end of the rostra without provoking much comment from the crowd, they stood together. In silence, admittedly, but at least in apparent amity.
Along to attend the meeting came Caesar’s first cousin, young Gaius Cotta, the son of the late consul Gaius Cotta. Though he was not yet a member of the Senate, nothing could have prevented his casting his vote in the tribes; the law belonged to his Uncle Lucius. But when he saw Pompey and Crassus looking more like a team than they had done in months, he cried out so loudly that the noise and movement around him stilled. Everyone looked his way.
“Oh!” he cried again, more loudly still. “My dream! My dream has come true!”
And he bounded onto the rostra so suddenly that Pompey and Crassus automatically stepped apart. Young Gaius Cotta planted himself between them, one arm around each, and gazed at the throng in the well of the Comitia with tears streaming down his face.
“Quirites!” he shouted, “last night I had a dream! Jupiter Optimus Maximus spoke to me out of cloud and fire, soaked me and burned me! Far below where I stood I could see the two figures of our consuls, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus. But they were not as I saw them today, standing together. Instead they stood one to the east and one to the west, stubbornly looking in opposite directions. And the voice of the Great God said to me out of the cloud and the fire, ‘They must not leave their consular office disliking each other! They must leave as friends!’ ”
An utter silence had fallen; a thousand faces looked up at the three men. Gaius Cotta let his arms fall from about the consuls and stepped forward, then turned to face them.
“Gnaeus Pompeius, Marcus Licinius, will you not be friends?” the young man asked in a ringing voice.
For a long moment no one moved. Pompey’s expression was stern, so was Crassus’s.
“Come, shake hands! Be friends!” shouted Gaius Cotta.
Neither consul moved. Then Crassus rotated toward Pompey and held out one massive hand.
“I am delighted to yield first place to a man who was called Magnus before he so much as had a beard, and celebrated not one but two triumphs before he was a senator!” Crassus yelled.
Pompey emitted a sound somewhere between a squeal and a yelp, grabbed at Crassus’s paw and wrung both it and his forearm, face transfigured. They stepped toward each other and fell on each other’s necks. And the crowd went wild. Soon the news of the reconciliation was speeding into the Velabrum, into the Subura, into the manufactories beyond the swamp of the Palus Ceroliae; people came running from everywhere to see if it was true that the consuls were friends again. For the rest of that day the two of them walked around Rome together, shaking hands, allowing themselves to be touched, accepting congratulations.
*
“There are triumphs, and then again, there are triumphs,” said Caesar to his uncle Lucius and his cousin Gaius. ‘Today was the better kind of triumph. I thank you for your help.”
“Was it hard to convince them that they had to do it?” asked the young Gaius Cotta.
“Not really. If that pair understand nothing else, they always understand the importance of popularity. Neither of them is an adept at the art of compromise, but I split the credit equally between them, and that satisfied them. Crassus had to swallow his pride and say all those nauseating things about dear Pompeius. But on the other hand he reaped the accolades for being the one to hold out his hand first and make the concessions. So, as in the duel about pleasing the people, it was Crassus won. Luckily Pompeius doesn’t see that. He thinks he won because he stood aloof and forced his colleague to admit his superiority.”
“Then you had better hope,” said Lucius Cotta, “that Magnus doesn’t find out who really won until after the year is over.”
“I’m afraid it disrupted your meeting, Uncle. You’ll never keep a crowd still enough to vote now.”
“Tomorrow will do just as well.”
The two Cottae and Caesar left the Forum Romanum via the Vestal Stairs onto the Palatine, but halfway up Caesar stopped and turned to look back. There they were, Pompey and Crassus, surrounded by hordes of happy Romans. And happy themselves, the breach forgotten.
“This year has been a watershed,” said Caesar, beginning to ascend the rest of the steps. “All of us have crossed some kind of barrier. I have the oddest feeling that none of us will enjoy the same life again.”
“Yes, I know what you mean,” said Lucius Cotta. “My stab at the history books happened this year, with my jury law. If I ever decide to run for consul, I suspect it will be an anticlimax.”
“I wasn’t thinking along the lines of anticlimax,” said Caesar, laughing.
“What will Pompeius and Crassus do when the year is ended?” asked young Gaius Cotta. “They say neither of them wants to go out to govern a province.”
“That’s true enough,” said Lucius Cotta. “Both of them are returning to private life. Why not? They’ve each had great campaigns recently—they’re both so rich they don’t need to stuff provincial profits in their purses—and they crowned their dual consulship with laws to exonerate them from any suspicion of treason and laws to grant their veterans all the land they want. I wouldn’t go to govern a province if I were in their boots!”
“You’d find their boots more uncomfortable than they’re worth,” said Caesar. “Where can they go from here? Pompeius says he’s returning to his beloved Picenum and will never darken the doors of the Senate again. And Crassus is absolutely driven to earn back the thousand talents he spent this year.” He heaved a huge and happy sigh. “And I am going to Further Spain as its quaestor, under a governor I happen to like.”
“Pompeius’s ex-brother-in-law, Gaius Antistius Vetus,” said young Cotta with a grin.
Caesar didn’t mention his most devout wish: that he leave for Spain before Aunt Julia died.
*
But that was not to be. He was summoned to her bedside on a blustery night midway through February; his mother had been staying in Julia’s house for some days.
She was conscious, and could still see; when he entered the room her eyes lit up a little. “I waited for you,” she said.
His chest ached with the effort of keeping his emotions under control, but he managed to smile as he kissed her, then sat upon the edge of her bed, as he always did. “I wouldn’t have let you go,” he said lightly.
“I wanted to see you,” she said; her voice was quite strong and distinct.
“You see me, Aunt Julia. What can I do for you?”
“What would you do for me, Gaius Julius?”
“Anything in the world,” he said, and meant it.
“Oh, that relieves me! It means you will forgive me.”
“Forgive you?” he asked, astonished. “There’s nothing to forgive, absolutely nothing!”
“Forgive me for not preventing Gaius Marius from making you the flamen Dialis,” she said.
“Aunt Julia, no one could stop Gaius Marius from doing what he wanted to do!” Caesar cried. “Rome’s outskirts are ornamented with the tombs of the men who tried! It never for one moment occurred to me to blame you! And you mustn’t blame yourself.”
“I won’t if you don’t.”
“I don’t. You have my word on it.”
Her eyes closed, tears oozed from beneath their lids. “My poor son,” she whispered. “It is a terrible thing to be the son of a great man…. I hope you have no sons, for you will be a very great man.”
His gaze met his mother’s, and he suddenly saw a tinge of jealousy in her face.
The response was savage and immediate; he gathered Julia into his arms and put his cheek to hers. “Aunt Julia,” he said into her ear, “what will I do without your arms around me and all your kisses?” And there! his eyes were saying to his mother, she was the source of my juvenile hugs and kisses, not you! Never you! How can I live without Aunt Julia?
But Aunt Julia didn’t answer, nor did she lift her lids to look at him. She neither spoke nor looked again, but died still clasped in his arms several hours later.
Lucius Decumius and his sons were there, so was Burgundus; he sent his mother home with them, and himself walked through the bustling crowds of day without seeing a single person. Aunt Julia was dead, and no one save he and his family knew of it. The wife of Gaius Marius was dead, and no one save he and his family knew of it. Just when the tears should have come this thought came, and the tears were driven inward forever. Rome should know of her death! And Rome would know of her death!
“A quiet funeral,” said Aurelia when he entered her apartment at the going down of the sun.
“Oh no!” said Caesar, who looked enormously tall, filled with light and power. “Aunt Julia is going to have the biggest woman’s funeral since the death of Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi! And all the ancestral masks will come out, including the masks of Gaius Marius and his son.”
She gasped. “Caesar, you can’t! Hortensius and Metellus Little Goat are consuls, Rome has gone conservative with a vengeance! Some Hortensian tribune of the plebs will have you thrown from the Tarpeian Rock if you display the imagines of two men their Rome brands as traitors!”
“Let them try,” said Caesar scornfully. “I will send Aunt Julia to the darkness with all the honor and public acclaim she ought to have.”
And that resolution of course made the grief easier to bear; Caesar had something concrete to do, an outlet he found worthier of that lovely lady than bouts of tears and a constant feeling of irreplaceable loss. Keep busy, keep working. Work for her.
He knew how he was going to get away with it, of course. Which was to make it impossible for any of the magistrates to foil him or prosecute him, no matter how they tried. But preferably to make it impossible for them to try at all. The funeral was arranged with Rome’s most prestigious undertakers, and the price agreed upon was fifty talents of silver; for this huge amount of money everyone agreed to participate despite the fact that Caesar intended to display the masks of Gaius Marius and Young Marius for all of Rome to see. Actors were hired, chariots for them to ride in: the ancestors would include King Ancus Marcius, Quintus Marcius Rex, Iulus , that early Julian consul, Sextus Caesar and Lucius Caesar, and Gaius Marius and his son.
But that was not the most important arrangement; he would trust no one except Lucius Decumius and his Brethren of the crossroads college to do that. Which was to spread the word as far and wide as possible through Rome that the great Julia, widow of Gaius Marius, had died and would be buried at the third hour in two days’ time. Everyone who wanted to come must come. For Gaius Marius there had been no public funeral, and for his son only the sight of a head rotting away on the rostra. Therefore Julia’s obsequies would be splendid, and Rome could do her long overdue mourning for the Marii by attending Julia’s rites.
He caught all the magistrates napping, for no one informed them what was going to happen, and none of the magistrates had planned to be present at Julia’s funeral. But Marcus Crassus came, and so did Varro Lucullus, and Mamercus with Cornelia Sulla, and none other than Philippus. So too did Metellus Pius the Piglet come. Plus the two Cottae, of course. All of them had been warned; Caesar wanted no one unwillingly compromised.
And Rome turned out en masse, thousands upon thousands of ordinary people who cared nothing for interdictions and decrees of outlawry or sacrilege. Here was a chance at last to mourn for Gaius Marius, to see that beloved fierce face with its gigantic eyebrows and its stern frown worn by a man who was as tall and as broad as Gaius Marius had been. And Young Marius too, so comely, so impressive! But more impressive still was Gaius Marius’s living nephew, robed in a mourning toga as black as the coats of the horses which drew the chariots, his golden hair and pale face a striking contrast to the pall of darkness around him. So good-looking! So godlike! This was Caesar’s first appearance before a huge crowd since the days when he had supported crippled old Marius, and he needed to ensure that the people of Rome would not forget him. He was the only heir Gaius Marius had left, and he intended that every man and woman who came to Julia’s funeral would know who he was: Gaius Marius’s heir.
He gave her eulogy from the rostra; it was the first time he had spoken from that lofty perch, the first time he had looked down upon a sea of faces whose eyes were all directed at him. Julia herself had been exquisitely prepared for her last and most public appearance, so artfully made up and padded that she looked like a young woman; her beauty alone made the crowd weep. Three other very beautiful women were near her on the rostral platform, one in her fifties whom Lucius Decumius’s agents were busy whispering here and there was Caesar’s mother, one of about forty whose red-gold hair proclaimed her Sulla’s daughter, and a very pregnant little dark girl sitting in a black sedan chair who turned out to be Caesar’s wife. On her lap there sat the most ravishing silver—fair child perhaps seven years old; it was not difficult to tell that this was Caesar’s daughter.
“My family,” cried Caesar from the rostra in his high—pitched orator’s voice, “is one of women! There are no men of my father’s generation left alive, and of the men in my own generation, I am the only one here in Rome today to mourn the passing of my family’s most senior woman. Julia, whose name was never shortened or added to, for she was the eldest of her Julian peers, and graced the name of her gens so incomparably that Rome knows no other woman like her. She had beauty, a gentle disposition, all the loyalty a man could ask for in a wife or mother or aunt, the warmth of a loving nature, the kindness of a generous spirit. The only other woman to whom I might compare her also lost her husband and her children long before she died—I mean, of course, another great patrician woman, Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi. Their careers were not unalike in that Cornelia and Julia both suffered the loss of a son whose head was removed from his body, and neither of whom was allowed burial. And who can tell which woman’s sorrows were the greater, when one suffered the deaths of all her sons but knew not the disgrace of a dishonored husband, and the other suffered the death of her only child but knew the disgrace of a dishonored husband and poverty in her old age? Cornelia lived into her eighties, Julia expired in her fifty-ninth year. Was that lack of courage on Julia’s part, or an easier life on Cornelia’s? We will never know, people of Rome. Nor should we ever ask. They were two great and illustrious women.
“But I am here to honor Julia, not Cornelia. Julia of the Julii Caesares, whose lineage was greater than any other Roman woman’s. For in her were joined the Kings of Rome and the founding Gods of Rome. Her mother was Marcia, the youngest daughter of Quintus Marcius Rex, the august descendant of the fourth King of Rome, Ancus Marcius, and who is remembered every day in this great city with gratitude and praise, for he it was who brought Rome fresh sweet water to gush out of fountains in every public square and crossroads. Her father was Gaius Julius Caesar, the younger son of Sextus Julius Caesar. Patricians of the tribe Fabia, once the Kings of Alba Longa, and descended from Iulus , who was the son of Aeneas, who was the son of the goddess Venus. In her veins there ran the blood of a mighty and powerful goddess, and the blood of Mars and Romulus too—for who was Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus? She was Julia! Thus in my blood—aunt Julia the supreme mortal power of kings conjoined with the immortal power of the gods who hold even the greatest kings in thrall.
“When she was eighteen years old, she married a man of whom every last one of you knows, and many of you knew as a living man. She married Gaius Marius, consul of Rome an unprecedented seven times, called the Third Founder of Rome, the conqueror of King Jugurtha of Numidia, the conqueror of the Germans, and winner of the earliest battles in the Italian War. And until this indisputably mighty man died at the height of his power, she remained his loyal and faithful wife. By him she had her only child, Gaius Marius Junior, who was senior consul of Rome at the age of twenty-six.
“It is not her fault that neither husband nor son kept his reputation untarnished after death. It is not her fault that an interdiction was placed upon her and that she was forced to move from her home of twenty-eight years to a far meaner house exposed to the bitter north winds which whistle across the outer Quirinal. It is not her fault that Fortune left her little to live for save to help the people of her new district in their troubles. It is not her fault that she died untimely. It is not her fault that the life masks of her husband and son were forbidden ever to be displayed again.
“When I was a child I knew her well, for I was Gaius Marius’s boy during that terrible year when his second stroke left him a helpless cripple. Every day I went to her house to do my duty to her husband and to receive her sweet thanks. From her I had a love I have known from no other woman, for my mother had to be my father too, and could not permit herself the luxury of hugs and kisses, for they are not the province of a father. But I had Aunt Julia for those, and though I live to be a thousand years old, I will never forget a single hug, a single kiss, a single loving glance from her beautiful grey eyes. And I say to you, people of Rome, mourn for her! Mourn for her as I do! Mourn for her fate and for the sadness of an undeservedly sad life. And mourn too for the fates of her husband and her son, whose imagines I show you on this unhappy day. They say I am not allowed to show you the Marian masks, that I can be stripped of my rank and my citizenship for committing this outrageous crime of displaying here in the Forum—which knew both men so well!—two inanimate things made of wax and paint and someone else’s hair! And I say to you that if it be so ordered, if I be stripped of my rank and my citizenship for displaying the Marian masks, then so be it! For I will honor this aunt of my blood as she ought to be honored, and that honor is all wrapped up in her devotion to the Marii, who were husband and son. I show these imagines for Julia’s sake, and I will permit no magistrate in this city to remove them from her funeral procession! Step forward, Gaius Marius, step forward, Gaius Marius Junior! Honor your wife and mother, Julia of the Julii Caesares, daughter of kings and gods!”
The crowd had wept desolately, but when the actors wearing the masks of Gaius Marius and Young Marius stepped forward to make their obesiances to the stiff still figure on the bier, a murmuring began that swelled into a chorus of exclamations and then exploded into a full—throated roar. And Hortensius and Metellus Little Goat, watching appalled from the top of the Senate House steps, turned away in defeat. Gaius Julius Caesar’s crime would have to be suffered in legal and disciplinary silence, for Rome wholeheartedly approved.
“It was brilliant,” said Hortensius to Catulus a little later. “Not only did he defy Sulla’s and the Senate’s laws, but he used the opportunity to remind every last face in that crowd that he is descended from kings and gods!”
“Well, Caesar, you got away with it,” said Aurelia at the end of that very long day.
“I knew I would,” he said, dropping his black toga on the floor with a sigh of sheer weariness. “The conservative rump of the Senate may be in power this year, but not one member of it can be sure that next year’s electors will feel the same way. Romans like a change of government. And Romans like a man with the courage of his convictions. Especially if he elevates old Gaius Marius to the pedestal from which the people of this city have never torn him down, no matter how many of his statues toppled.”
Moving like an ancient dropsical woman, Cinnilla dragged herself into the room and went to sit at Caesar’s side on the couch. “It was wonderful,” she said, pushing her hand into his. “I am glad I felt well enough to attend the eulogy, even if I couldn’t get any further. And how well you spoke!”
Turning side on, he cupped her face in his fingers and pushed a stray strand of hair away from her brow. “My poor little one,” he said tenderly, “not much longer to go now.” He swept her feet from the floor and placed them in his lap. “You ought not to sit with your legs dangling, you know that.”
“Oh, Caesar, it has been so long! I carried Julia with no trouble whatsoever, yet here I am this second time in such a mess! I don’t understand it,” she said, eyes filling with tears.
“I do,” said Aurelia. “This one is a boy. I carried both my girls without trouble, but you, Caesar, were a burden.”
“I think,” said Caesar, putting Cinnilla’s feet on the couch beside him and rising, “that I’ll go to my own apartment to sleep tonight.”
“Oh, please, Caesar, don’t!” begged his wife, face puckering. “Stay here tonight. I promise we won’t talk of babies and women’s troubles. Aurelia, you must stop or he’ll leave us.”
“Pah!” said Aurelia, getting up from her chair. “Where is Eutychus? What all of us need is a little food.”
“He’s settling Strophantes in,” said Cinnilla sadly, her face clearing when Caesar, resigned, sank back onto the couch. “Poor old man! They’re all gone.”
“So will he be soon,” said Caesar.
“Oh, don’t say that!”
“It’s in his face, wife. And it will be a mercy.”
“I hope,” said Cinnilla, “that I don’t live to be the last one left. That is the worst fate of all, I think.”
“A worse fate,” said Caesar, who didn’t want to be reminded of painful things, “is to speak of nothing except gloom.”
“It’s just Rome,” she said, smiling to reveal that little pink crease of inner lip. “You’ll be better when you get to Spain. You’re never really as happy in Rome as you are when you’re traveling.”
“Next nundinus, wife, by sea at the start of winter. You are quite right. Rome isn’t where I want to be. So how about having this baby anytime between now and the next nundinus! I’d like to see my son before I leave.”
*
He saw his son before he left at the next nundinus, but the child when finally the midwife and Lucius Tuccius managed to remove it from the birth canal had obviously been dead for several days. And Cinnilla, swollen and convulsing, one side paralyzed from a massive stroke, died at almost the same moment as she put forth her stillborn boy.
No one could believe it. If Julia had been a shock and a grief, the loss of Cinnilla was unbearable. Caesar wept as he never had in his life before, and cared not who saw him. Hour after hour, from the moment of that first horrible convulsion until it was time to bury her too. One was possible. Two was a nightmare from which he never expected to awaken. Of the dead child he had neither room nor inclination to think; Cinnilla was dead, and she had been a part of his family life from his fourteenth year, a part of the pain of his flaminate, the chubby dark mite whom he had loved as a sister for as long as he had loved her as a wife. Seventeen years! They had been children together, the only children in that house.
Her death smote Aurelia as Julia’s could not, and that iron woman wept as desolately as her son did. A light had gone out that would dim the rest of her life. Part grandchild, part daughter-in-law, a sweet little presence left only in echoes, an empty loom, half of an empty bed. Burgundus wept, Cardixa wept, their sons wept, and Lucius Decumius, Strophantes, Eutychus, all the servants who scarcely remembered Aurelia’s apartment without Cinnilla there. The tenants of the insula wept, and a great many people in the Subura.
This funeral was different from Julia’s. That had been a glory of sorts, a chance for the orator to show off a great woman and his own family. There were similarities; Caesar extracted the Cornelius Cinna imagines from the storage room in which he had hidden them alongside the masks of the two Marii, and they were worn by actors to scandalize Hortensius and Metellus Little Goat anew; and though it was not accepted practice to eulogize a young woman from the rostra, Caesar went through that public ordeal too. But not in a kind of glory. This time he spoke softly, and confined his remarks to the pleasure he had known in her company and the years during which she had consoled him for the loss of his boy’s freedom. He talked about her smile and those dismal hairy garments she had dutifully woven for her destiny as flaminica Dialis. He talked about his daughter, whom he held in his arms while he spoke. He wept.
And he ended by saying, “I know nothing of grief beyond what I feel inside myself. That is grief’s tragedy—that each of us must always deem his or her own grief greater than anyone else’s. But I am prepared to confess to you that perhaps I am a cold, hard man whose greatest love is for his own dignitas. So be it. Once I refused to divorce Cinna’s daughter. At the time I thought I refused to obey Sulla’s command to divorce her for my own private benefit and the possibilities it opened up. Well, I have explained to you what grief’s tragedy is. But that tragedy is as nothing to the tragedy of never knowing how much someone has meant to you until after that someone is dead.”
No one cheered the imago of Lucius Cornelius Cinna, nor those of his ancestors. But Rome wept so deeply that for the second time in two nundinae, Caesar’s enemies found themselves rendered impotent.
*
His mother was suddenly years older, absolutely heartbroken. A difficult business for the son, whose attempts to comfort her with hugs and kisses were still repulsed.
Am I so cold and hard because she is so cold and hard? But she isn’t cold and hard with anyone except me! Oh, why does she do this to me? Look how she grieves for Cinnilla. And how she grieved for awful old Sulla.
If I were a woman, my child would be such a consolation. But I am a Roman nobleman, and a Roman nobleman’s children are at best on the periphery of his life. How many times did I see my father? And what did I ever have to talk to him about?
“Mater,” he said, “I give you little Julia to be your own. She’s almost exactly the same age now as Cinnilla was when she came to live here. In time she’ll fill the largest part of your vacant space. I won’t try to suborn her away from you.”
“I’ve had the child since she was born,” said Aurelia, “and I know all that.”
Old Strophantes shuffled in, looked rheumily at mother and son, shuffled out again.
“I must write to Uncle Publius in Smyrna,” Aurelia said. “He’s another one who has outlived everybody, poor old man.”
“Yes, Mater, you do that.”
“I don’t understand you, Caesar, when you behave like the child who cries because he’s eaten all his honey cake yet thinks it ought never to diminish.”
“And what has provoked that remark?”
“You said it during Julia’s funeral oration. That I had to be both mother and father to you, which meant I couldn’t give you the hugs and kisses Julia did. When I heard you say that, I was relieved. You understood it at last. But now I find you just as bitter as ever. Accept your lot, my son. You mean more to me than life, than little Julia, than Cinnilla, than anyone. You mean more to me than your father did. And more by far than Sulla ever could have, even had I weakened. If there cannot be peace between us, can’t we at least declare a truce?”
He smiled wryly. “Why not?” he asked.
“You’ll come good once you get out of Rome, Caesar.”
“That’s what Cinnilla said.”
“She was right. Nothing will ever blow away your grief at this death, but a brisk sea voyage will blow away the rubbish cluttering up your mind. It will function again. It can’t not.”
It can’t not, echoed Caesar, riding the short miles between Rome and Ostia, where his ship waited. That is a truth. My spirit might be bruised to pulp, but my mind is unharmed. New things to do, new people to meet, a new country to explore—and no sign of Lucullus! I will survive.
FINIS
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