2

Fortune certainly continued to favor Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, reflected Caesar early in December, smiling to himself. The Great Man had indicated a wish to eradicate the pirate menace, and Fortune obediently connived to gratify him when the Sicilian grain harvest arrived in Ostia, Rome’s port facility at the mouth of the Tiber River. Here the deep-drafted freighters unloaded their precious cargo into barges for the final leg of the grain journey up the Tiber to the silo facilities of the Port of Rome itself. Here was absolute security, home at last.

Several hundred ships converged on Ostia to discover no barges waiting; the quaestor for Ostia had mistimed things so badly that he had allowed the barges an extra trip upstream to Tuder and Ocriculum, where the Tiber Valley harvest was demanding transportation downstream to Rome. So while captains and grain tycoons fulminated and the hapless quaestor ran in ever-decreasing circles, an irate Senate directed the sole consul, Quintus Marcius Rex, to rectify matters forthwith.

It had been a miserable year for Marcius Rex, whose consular colleague had died soon after entering office. The Senate had immediately appointed a suffect consul to take his place, but he too died, and too quickly even to insert his posterior into his curule chair. A hurried consultation of the Sacred Books indicated that no further measures ought to be taken, which left Marcius Rex to govern alone. This had utterly ruined his plan to proceed during his consulship to his province, Cilicia, bestowed on him when hordes of lobbying knight businessmen had succeeded in having it taken off Lucullus.

Now, just when Marcius Rex was hoping to leave for Cilicia at last, came the grain shambles in Ostia. Red with temper, he detached two praetors from their law courts in Rome and sent them posthaste to Ostia to sort things out. Each preceded by six lictors in red tunics bearing the axes in their fasces, Lucius Bellienus and Marcus Sextilius bore down on Ostia from the direction of Rome. And at precisely the same moment, a pirate fleet numbering over one hundred sleek war galleys bore down on Ostia from the Tuscan Sea.

The two praetors arrived to find half the town burning, and pirates busily forcing the crews of laden grain ships to row their vessels back onto the sea lanes. The audacity of this raid—whoever could have dreamed that pirates would invade a place scant miles from mighty Rome?—had taken everyone by surprise. No troops were closer than Capua, Ostia’s militia was too concerned with putting out fires on shore to think of marshaling resistance, and no one had even had the sense to send an urgent message for help to Rome.

Neither praetor was a man of decision, so both stood stunned and disorientated amid the turmoil on the docks. There a group of pirates discovered them, took them and their lictors prisoner, loaded them on board a galley, and sailed merrily off in the wake of the disappearing grain fleet. The capture of two praetors—one no less than the uncle of the great patrician nobleman Catilina—together with their lictors and fasces would mean at least two hundred talents in ransom!

The effect of the raid inside Rome was as predictable as it was inevitable: grain prices soared immediately; crowds of furious merchants, millers, bakers and consumers descended upon the lower Forum to demonstrate against governmental incompetence; and the Senate went into a huddle with the Curia doors shut so that no one outside would hear how dismal the debate within was bound to be. And dismal it was. No one even wanted to open it.

When Quintus Marcius Rex had called several times to no avail for speakers, there finally rose—it seemed with enormous reluctance—the tribune of the plebs-elect Aulus Gabinius, who looked, thought Caesar, even more the Gaul in that dim, filtered light. That was the trouble with all the men from Picenum—the Gaul in them showed more than the Roman. Including Pompey. It wasn’t so much the red or gold hair many of them sported, nor the blue or green eyes; plenty of impeccably Roman Romans were very fair. Including Caesar. The fault lay in Picentine bone structure. Full round faces, dented chins, short noses (Pompey’s was even snubbed), thinnish lips. Gaul, not Roman. It put them at a disadvantage, proclaimed to the whole of their world that they might protest all they liked that they were descended from Sabine migrants, but the truth was that they were descended from Gauls who had settled in Picenum over three hundred years ago.

The reaction among the majority of the senators who sat on their folding stools was palpable when Gabinius the Gaul rose to his feet: distaste, disapproval, dismay. Under normal circumstances his turn to speak would have been very far down the hierarchy. At this time of year he was outranked by fourteen incumbent magistrates, fourteen magistrates-elect, and some twenty consulars—if, of course, everyone was present. Everyone was not. Everyone never was. Nonetheless, to have a tribunician magistrate open the debate was almost unprecedented.

“It hasn’t been a good year, has it?” Aulus Gabinius asked the House after completing the formalities of addressing those above and below him in the pecking order. “During the past six years we have attempted to wage war against the pirates of Crete alone, though the pirates who have just sacked Ostia and captured the grain fleet—not to mention kidnapped two praetors and their insignia of office—don’t hail from anywhere half as far away as Crete, do they? No, they patrol the middle of Our Sea from bases in Sicily, Liguria, Sardinia and Corsica. Led no doubt by Megadates and Pharnaces, who for some years have enjoyed a really delightful little pact with various governors of Sicily like the exiled Gaius Verres, whereby they can go wherever they please in Sicilian waters and harbors. I imagine they rounded up their allies and shadowed this grain fleet all the way from Lilybaeum. Perhaps their original intention was to raid it at sea. Then some enterprising person in their pay at Ostia sent them word that there were no barges at Ostia, nor likely to be for eight or nine days. Well, why settle for capturing a part only of the grain fleet by attempting to raid it at sea? Better to do the job while it lay intact and fully laden in Ostia harbor! I mean, the whole world knows Rome keeps no legions in her home territory of Latium! What was to stop them at Ostia? What did stop them at Ostia? The answer is very short and simple—nothing!”

This last word was bellowed; everyone jumped, but no one replied. Gabinius gazed about and wished Pompey was present to hear him. A pity, a great pity. Still, Pompey would love the letter Gabinius intended to send him this night!

“Something has got to be done,” Gabinius went on, “and by that I do not mean the usual debacle so exquisitely personified by the campaign our chief Little Goat is still waging in Crete. First he barely manages to defeat some Cretan rabble in a land battle, then he lays siege to Cydonia, which eventually capitulates—but he lets the great pirate admiral Panares go free! So a couple more towns fall, then he lays siege to Cnossus, within whose walls the great pirate admiral Lasthenes is skulking. When the fall of Cnossus looks inevitable, Lasthenes destroys what treasures he can’t carry away with him, and escapes. An efficient siege operation, eh? But which disaster causes our chief Little Goat more sorrow? The flight of Lasthenes or the loss of the treasure trove? Why, the loss of the treasure trove, of course! Lasthenes is only a pirate, and pirates don’t ransom each other. Pirates expect to be crucified like the slaves they once were!”

Gabinius the Gaul from Picenum paused, grinning savagely in the way a Gaul could. He drew a deep breath, then said, “Something has got to be done!” And sat down.

No one spoke. No one moved.

Quintus Marcius Rex sighed. “Has no one anything to say?” His eyes roamed from one tier to another on both sides of the House, and rested nowhere until they encountered a derisive look on Caesar’s face. Now why did Caesar stare like that?

“Gaius Julius Caesar, you were once captured by pirates, and you managed to get the better of them. Have you nothing to say?” asked Marcius Rex.

Caesar rose from his seat on the second tier. “Just one thing, Quintus Marcius. Something has got to be done.” And sat down.

The sole consul of the year lifted both hands in the air as a gesture of defeat, and dismissed the meeting.

“When do you intend to strike?” asked Caesar of Gabinius as they left the Curia Hostilia together.

“Not quite yet,” said Gabinius cheerfully. “1 have a few other things to do first, so does Gaius Cornelius. I know it’s customary to start one’s year as a tribune of the plebs with the biggest things first, but I consider those bad tactics. Let our esteemed consuls-elect Gaius Piso and Manius Acilius Glabrio warm their arses on their curule chairs first. I want to let them think Cornelius and I have exhausted our repertoire before I so much as attempt to reopen today’s subject.”

“January or February, then.”

“Certainly not before January,” said Gabinius.

“So Magnus is fully prepared to take on the pirates.”

“Down to the last bolt, nail and skin of water. I can tell you, Caesar, that Rome will never have seen anything like it.”

“Then roll on, January.” Caesar paused, turned his head to look at Gabinius quizzically. “Magnus will never succeed in getting Gaius Piso on his side, he’s too glued to Catulus and the boni, but Glabrio is more promising. He’s never forgotten what Sulla did to him.”

“When Sulla forced him to divorce Aemilia Scaura?’’

“Precisely. He’s the junior consul next year, but it’s handy to have at least one consul in thrall.”

Gabinius chuckled. “Pompeius has something in mind for our dear Glabrio.”

“Good. If you can divide the consuls of the year, Gabinius, you can go a lot further, a lot faster.”

*

Caesar and Servilia resumed their liaison after she returned from Cumae at the end of October, no less absorbed in it and in each other. Though Aurelia tried to fish from time to time, Caesar confined his information about the progress of the affair to a minimum, and gave his mother no real indication how serious a business it was, nor how intense. He still disliked Servilia, but that couldn’t affect their relationship because liking wasn’t necessary. Or perhaps, he thought, liking would have taken something vital away from it.

“Do you like me?’’ he asked Servilia the day before the new tribunes of the plebs assumed office.

She fed him one breast at a time, and delayed her answer until both nipples had popped up and she could feel the heat start to move downward through her belly.

“I like no one,” she said then, climbing on top of him. “I love or I hate.”

“Is that comfortable?”

Because she lacked a sense of humor, she did not mistake his question for a reference to their present juxtaposition, but went straight to its real meaning. “Far more comfortable than liking, I’d say. I’ve noticed that when people like each other, they become incapable of acting as they ought. They delay telling each other home truths, for example, it seems out of fear that home truths will wound. Love and hate permit home truths.”

“Would you care to hear a home truth?” he asked, smiling as he kept absolutely still; that drove her to distraction when her blood was afire and she needed him to move inside her.

“Why don’t you just shut up and get on with it, Caesar?”

“Because I want to tell you a home truth.”

“All right, then, tell it!” she snapped, kneading her own breasts when he would not. “Oh, how you love to torment!”

“You like being on top a great deal more than being underneath, or sideways, or any other way,” he said.

“That’s true, I do. Now are you happy? Can we get on with it?”

“Not yet. Why do you like being on top best?”

“Because I’m on top, of course,” she said blankly.

“Aha!” he said, and rolled her over. “Now I’m on top.”

“I wish you weren’t.”

“I am happy to gratify you, Servilia, but not when it means I also gratify your sense of power.”

“What other outlet do I have to gratify my sense of power?” she asked, wriggling. “You’re too big and too heavy this way!”

“You’re quite right about comfort,” he said, pinning her down. “Not liking someone means one is not tempted to relent.”

“Cruel,” she said, eyes glazing.

“Love and hate are cruel. Only liking is kind.”

But Servilia, who did not like anyone, had her own method of revenge; she raked her carefully tended nails from his left buttock to his left shoulder, and drew five parallel lines with his blood.

Though she wished she hadn’t, for he took both her wrists and ground their bones, then made her lie beneath him for what seemed an eternity ramming himself home deeper and deeper, harder and harder; when she cried and screamed at the end, she scarcely knew whether agony or ecstasy provoked her, and for some time was sure her love had turned to hate.

The worst of that encounter did not occur until after Caesar went home. Those five crimson tracks were very sore, and his tunic when he peeled it away showed that he was still bleeding. The cuts and scratches he had sustained in the field from time to time told him that he would have to ask for someone to wash and dress the damage or run the risk of festering. If Burgundus had been in Rome it would have been easy, but these days Burgundus lived in the Caesar villa at Bovillae with Cardixa and their eight sons, caring for the horses and sheep Caesar bred. Lucius Decumius wouldn’t do; he was not clean enough. And Eutychus would blab the story to his boyfriend, his boyfriend’ s boyfriends and half the members of the crossroads college. His mother, then. It would have to be his mother.

Who looked and said, “Ye immortal Gods!”

“I wish I was one, then it wouldn’t hurt.”

Off she went to bring two bowls, one half-full of water and the other half-full of fortified but sour wine, together with wads of clean Egyptian linen.

“Better linen than wool, wool leaves fluff behind in the depths of the wounds,” she said, beginning with the strong wine. Her touch wasn’t tender, but it was thorough enough to make his eyes water; he lay on his belly, as much of him covered as her sense of decency dictated, and endured her ministrations without a sound. Anything capable of festering after Aurelia got through with it, he consoled himself, would kill a man from gangrene.

“Servilia?” she asked some time later, finally satisfied that she had got enough wine into the tracks to cow any festering thing lurking there, and beginning afresh with water.

“Servilia.”

“What sort of relationship is this?” she demanded.

“Not,” he said, and shook with laughter, “a comfortable one.”

“So much I see. She might end in murdering you.”

“I trust I preserve sufficient vigilance to prevent that.”

“Bored you’re not.”

“Definitely not bored, Mater.”

“I do not think,” she finally pronounced as she patted the water dry, “that this relationship is a healthy one. It might be wise to end it, Caesar. Her son is betrothed to your daughter, which means the two of you will have to preserve the proprieties for many years to come. Please, Caesar, end it.”

“I’ll end it when I’m ready, not before.”

“No, don’t get up yet!” Aurelia said sharply. “Let it dry properly first, then put on a clean tunic.” She left him and began to hunt through his chest of clothes until she found one which satisfied her sniffing nose. “It’s plain to see Cardixa isn’t here, the laundry girl isn’t doing her job as she ought. I shall have something to say about that tomorrow morning.” Back to the bed she came, and tossed the tunic down beside him. “No good will come of this relationship, it isn’t healthy,” she said.

To which he answered nothing. By the time he had swung his legs off the bed and plunged his arms into the tunic, his mother was gone. And that, he told himself, was a mercy.

*

On the tenth day of December the new tribunes of the plebs entered office, but it was not Aulus Gabinius who dominated the rostra. That privilege belonged to Lucius Roscius Otho of the boni, who told a cheering crowd of senior knights that it was high time they had their old rows at the theater restored for their exclusive use. Until Sulla’s dictatorship they had enjoyed sole possession of the fourteen rows just behind the two front rows of seats still reserved for senators. But Sulla, who loathed knights of all kinds, had taken this perquisite away from them together with sixteen hundred knight lives, estates and cash fortunes. Otho’s measure was so popular it was carried at once, no surprise to Caesar, watching from the Senate steps. The boni were brilliant at currying favor with the knights; it was one of the pillars of their continuing success.

The next meeting of the Plebeian Assembly interested Caesar far more than Otho’s equestrian honeycomb: Aulus Gabinius and Gaius Cornelius, Pompey’s men, took over. The first order of business was to reduce the consuls of the coming year from two to one, and the way Gabinius did it was deliciously clever. He asked the Plebs to give the junior consul, Glabrio, governance of a new province in the East to be called Bithynia-Pontus, then followed this up by asking the Plebs to send Glabrio out to govern it the day after he was sworn into office. That would leave Gaius Piso on his own to deal with Rome and Italia. Hatred of Lucullus predisposed the knights who dominated the Plebs to favor the bill because it stripped Lucullus of power—and of his four remaining legions. Still commissioned to fight the two kings Mithridates and Tigranes, he now had nothing save an empty title.

Caesar’s own feelings about it were ambivalent. Personally he detested Lucullus, who was such a stickler for the correct way to do things that he deliberately elected incompetence in others if the alternative was to ignore proper protocols. Yet the fact remained that he had refused to allow the knights of Rome complete freedom to fleece the local peoples of his provinces. Which of course was why the knights hated him so passionately. And why they were in favor of any law which disadvantaged Lucullus. A pity, thought Caesar, sighing inwardly. That part of himself longing for better conditions for the local peoples of Rome’s provinces wanted Lucullus to survive, whereas the monumental injury Lucullus had offered his dignitas by implying that he had prostituted himself to King Nicomedes demanded that Lucullus fall.

Gaius Cornelius was not quite as tied to Pompey as Gabinius was; he was one of those occasional tribunes of the plebs who genuinely believed in righting some of Rome’s most glaring wrongs, and that Caesar liked. Therefore Caesar found himself silently willing Cornelius not to give up after his first little reform was defeated. What he had asked the Plebs to do was to forbid foreign communities to borrow money from Roman usurers. His reasons were sensible and patriotic. Though the moneylenders were not Roman officials, they employed Roman officials to collect when debts became delinquent. With the result that many foreigners thought the State itself was in the moneylending business. Rome’s prestige suffered. But of course desperate or gullible foreign communities were a valuable source of knight income; little wonder Cornelius failed, thought Caesar sadly.

His second measure almost failed, and showed Caesar that this Picentine fellow was capable of compromise, not usual in the breed. Cornelius’s intention was to stop the Senate’s owning the power to issue decrees exempting an individual from some law. Naturally only the very rich or the very aristocratic were able to procure an exemption, usually granted when the senatorial mouthpiece had a meeting specially convened, then made sure it was filled with his creatures. Always jealous of its prerogatives, the Senate opposed Cornelius so violently that he saw he would lose. So he amended his bill to leave the power to exempt with the Senate—but only on condition that a quorum of two hundred senators was present to issue a decree. It passed.

By now Caesar’s interest in Gaius Cornelius was growing at a great rate. The praetors earned his attention next. Since Sulla’s dictatorship their duties had been confined to the law, both civil and criminal. And the law said that when a praetor entered office he had to publish his edicta, the rules and regulations whereby he personally would administer justice. The trouble was that the law didn’t say a praetor had to abide by his edicta, and the moment a friend needed a favor or there was some money to be made, the edicta were ignored. Cornelius simply asked the Plebs to stop up the gap, compel praetors to adhere to their edicta as published. This time the Plebs saw the sense of the measure as clearly as Caesar did, and voted it into law.

Unfortunately all Caesar could do was watch. No patrician might participate in the affairs of the Plebs. So he couldn’t stand in the Well of the Comitia, or vote in the Plebeian Assembly, or speak in it, or form a part of a trial process in it. Or run for election as a tribune of the plebs. Thus Caesar stood with his fellow patricians on the Curia Hostilia steps, as close to the Plebs in session as he was permitted to go.

Cornelius’s activities presented an intriguing aspect of Pompey, whom Caesar had never thought the slightest bit interested in righting wrongs. But perhaps after all he was, given Gaius Cornelius’s dogged persistence in matters which couldn’t affect Pompey’s plans either way. More likely, however, Caesar concluded, that Pompey was merely indulging Cornelius in order to throw sand in the eyes of men like Catulus and Hortensius, leaders of the boni. For the boni were adamantly opposed to special military commands, and Pompey was once again after a special command.

The Great Man’s hand was more evident—at least to Caesar—in Cornelius’s next proposal. Gaius Piso, doomed to govern alone now that Glabrio was going to the East, was a choleric, mediocre and vindictive man who belonged completely to Catulus and the boni. He would rant against any special military command for Pompey until the Senate House rafters shook, with Catulus, Hortensius, Bibulus and the rest of the pack baying behind. Owning little attractive apart from his name, Calpurnius Piso, and his eminently respectable ancestry, Piso had needed to bribe heavily to secure election. Now Cornelius put forward a new bribery law; Piso and the boni felt a cold wind blowing on their necks, particularly when the Plebs made its approval plain enough to indicate that it would pass the bill. Of course a boni tribune of the plebs could interpose his veto, but Otho, Trebellius and Globulus were not sure enough of their influence to veto. Instead the boni shifted themselves mightily to manipulate the Plebs—and Cornelius—into agreeing that Gaius Piso himself should draft the new bribery law. Which, thought Caesar with a sigh, would produce a law endangering no one, least of all Gaius Piso. Poor Cornelius had been outmaneuvered.

When Aulus Gabinius took over, he said not one word about the pirates or a special command for Pompey the Great. He preferred to concentrate on minor matters, for he was far subtler and more intelligent than Cornelius. Less altruistic, certainly. The little plebiscite he succeeded in passing that forbade foreign envoys in Rome to borrow money in Rome was obviously a less sweeping version of Cornelius’s measure to forbid the lending of money to foreign communities. But what was Gabinius after when he legislated to compel the Senate to deal with nothing save foreign delegations during the month of February? When Caesar understood, he laughed silently. Clever Pompey! How much the Great Man had changed since he entered the Senate as consul carrying Varro’s manual of behavior in his hand so he wouldn’t make embarrassing mistakes! For this particular lex Gabinia informed Caesar that Pompey planned to be consul a second time, and was ensuring his dominance when that second year arrived. No one would poll more votes, so he would be senior consul. That meant he would have the fasces—and the authority—in January. February was the junior consul’s turn, and March saw the fasces back with the senior consul. April went to the junior consul. But if February saw the Senate confined to foreign affairs, then the junior consul would have no chance to make his presence felt until April. Brilliant!

*

In the midst of all this pleasurable turbulence, a different tribune of the plebs inserted himself into Caesar’s life far less enjoyably. This man was Gaius Papirius Carbo, who presented a bill to the Plebeian Assembly asking that it arraign Caesar’s middle uncle, Marcus Aurelius Cotta, on charges of stealing the spoils from the Bithynian city of Heracleia. Unfortunately Marcus Cotta’s colleague in the consulship that year had been none other than Lucullus, and they were well known to be friends. Knight hatred of Lucullus inevitably prejudiced the Plebs against any close friend or ally, so the Plebs allowed Carbo to have his way. Caesar’s beloved uncle would stand trial for extortion, but not in the excellent standing court Sulla had established. Marcus Cotta’s jury would be several thousand men who all hungered to tear Lucullus and his cronies down.

“There was nothing to steal!” Marcus Cotta said to Caesar. “Mithridates had used Heracleia as his base for months, then the place withstood siege for several months more—when I entered it, Caesar, it was as bare as a newborn rat! Which everybody knew! What do you think three hundred thousand soldiers and sailors belonging to Mithridates left? They looted Heracleia far more thoroughly than Gaius Verres looted Sicily!”

“You don’t need to protest your innocence to me, Uncle,” said Caesar, looking grim. “I can’t even defend you because it’s trial by the Plebs and I’m a patrician.”

“That goes without saying. However, Cicero will do it.”

“He won’t, Uncle. Didn’t you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“He’s overwhelmed by grief. First his cousin Lucius died, then his father died only the other day. Not to mention that Terentia has some sort of rheumatic trouble which Rome at this season makes worse, and she rules that particular roost! Cicero has fled to Arpinum.”

“Then it will have to be Hortensius, my brother Lucius, and Marcus Crassus,” said Cotta.

“Not as effective, but it will suffice, Uncle.”

“I doubt it, I really do. The Plebs are after my blood.”

“Well, anyone who is a known friend of poor Lucullus’s is a target for the knights.”

Marcus Cotta looked ironically at his nephew. “Poor Lucullus?” he asked. “He’s no friend of yours!”

“True,” said Caesar. “However, Uncle Marcus, I can’t help but approve of his financial arrangements in the East. Sulla showed him the way, but Lucullus went even further. Instead of allowing the knight publicani to bleed Rome’s eastern provinces dry, Lucullus has made sure Rome’s taxes and tributes are not only fair, but also popular with the local communities. The old way, with the publicani permitted to squeeze mercilessly, might mean bigger profits for the knights, but it also means a great deal of animosity for Rome. I loathe the man, yes. Lucullus not only insulted me unpardonably, he denied me the military credit I was entitled to as well. Yet as an administrator he’s superb, and I’m sorry for him.”

“A pity the pair of you didn’t get on, Caesar. In many ways you’re as like as twins.”

Startled, Caesar stared at his mother’s half brother. Most of the time he never saw much of a family resemblance between Aurelia and any of her three half brothers, but that dry remark of Marcus Cotta’s was Aurelia! She was there too in Marcus Cotta’s large, purplish-grey eyes. Time to go, when Uncle Marcus turned into Mater. Besides, he had an assignation with Servilia to keep.

But that too turned out to be an unhappy business.

If Servilia arrived first, she was always undressed and in the bed waiting for him. But not today. Today she sat on a chair in his study, and wore every layer of clothing.

“I have something to discuss,” she said.

“Trouble?’’ he asked, sitting down opposite her.

“Of the most basic and, thinking about it, inevitable kind. I am pregnant.”

No identifiable emotion entered his cool gaze; Caesar said, “I see,” then looked at her searchingly. “This is a difficulty?”

“In many ways.” She wet her lips, an indication of nervousness unusual in her. “How do you feel about it?”

He shrugged. “You’re married, Servilia. That makes it your problem, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. What if it’s a boy? You have no son.”

“Are you sure it’s mine?” he countered quickly.

“Of that,” she said emphatically, “there can be no doubt. I haven’t slept in the same bed as Silanus for over two years.”

“In which case, the problem is still yours. I would have to take a chance on its being a boy, because I couldn’t acknowledge it as mine unless you divorced Silanus and married me before its birth. Once it’s born in wedlock to Silanus, it’s his.”

“Would you be prepared to take that chance?” she asked.

He didn’t hesitate. “No. My luck says it’s a girl.”

“I don’t know either. I didn’t think of this happening, so I didn’t concentrate on making a boy or a girl. It will indeed take its chances as to its sex.”

If his own demeanor was detached, so, he admitted with some admiration, was hers. A lady well in control.

“Then the best thing you can do, Servilia, is to hustle Silanus into your bed as soon as you possibly can. Yesterday, I hope?”

Her head moved slowly from side to side, an absolute negative. “I am afraid,” she said, “that is out of the question. Silanus is not a well man. We ceased to sleep together not through any fault of mine, I do assure you. Silanus is incapable of sustaining an erection, and the fact distresses him.”

To this news Caesar reacted: the breath hissed between his teeth. “So our secret will soon be no secret,” he said.

To give her credit, she felt no anger at Caesar’s attitude, nor condemned him as selfish, uninterested in her plight. In many ways they were alike, which perhaps was why Caesar could not grow emotionally attached to her: two people whose heads would always rule their hearts—and their passions.

“Not necessarily,” she said, and produced a smile. “I shall see Silanus today when he comes home from the Forum. It may be that I will be able to prevail upon him to keep the secret.”

“Yes, that would be better, especially with the betrothal of our children. I don’t mind taking the blame for my own actions, but I can’t feel comfortable with the idea of hurting either Julia or Brutus by having the result of our affair common gossip.” He leaned forward to take her hand, kissed it, and smiled into her eyes. “It isn’t a common affair, is it?”

“No,” said Servilia. “Anything but common.” She wet her lips again. “I’m not very far along, so we could continue until May or June. If you want to.”

“Oh yes,” said Caesar, “I want to, Servilia.”

“After that, I’m afraid, we won’t be able to meet for seven or eight months.”

“I shall miss it. And you.”

This time it was she who reached for a hand, though she did not kiss his, just held it and smiled at him. “You could do me a favor during those seven or eight months, Caesar.”

“Such as?”

“Seduce Cato’s wife, Atilia.”

He burst out laughing. “Keep me busy with a woman who stands no chance of supplanting you, eh? Very clever!”

“It’s true, I am clever. Oblige me, please! Seduce Atilia!”

Frowning, Caesar turned the idea over in his mind. “Cato isn’t a worthy target, Servilia. What is he, twenty-six years old? I agree that in the future he might prove a thorn in my side, but I’d rather wait until he is.”

“For me, Caesar, for me! Please! Please!”

“Do you hate him so much?”

“Enough to want to see him broken into tiny pieces,” she said through her teeth. “Cato doesn’t deserve a political career.”

“Seducing Atilia won’t prevent his having one, as you well know. However, if it means so much to you—all right.”

“Oh, wonderful! Thank you!” She huffed happily, then thought of something else. “Why have you never seduced Bibulus’s wife, Domitia? Him you certainly owe the pleasure of wearing horns, he is already a dangerous enemy. Besides, his Domitia is my half sister Porcia’s husband’s cousin. It would hurt Cato too.”

“A bit of the bird of prey in me, I suppose. The anticipation of seducing Domitia is so great I keep postponing the actual deed.”

“Cato,” she said, “is far more important to me.”

Bird of prey, nothing, she thought to herself on the way back to the Palatine. Though he may see himself as an eagle, Servilia thought, his conduct over Bibulus’s wife is plain feline.

Pregnancy and children were a part of life, and, with the exception of Brutus, just a something which had to be endured with a minimum of inconvenience. Brutus had been hers alone; she had fed him herself, changed his diapers herself, bathed him herself, played with him and amused him herself. But her attitude to her two daughters had been far different. Once she dropped them, she handed them to nursemaids and more or less forgot about them until they grew sufficiently to need a more sternly Roman supervision. This she applied without much interest, and no love. When each of them turned six, she sent them to Marcus Antonius Gnipho’s school because Aurelia had recommended it as suitable for girls, and she had not had cause to regret this decision.

Now, seven years later, she was going to have a love child, the fruit of a passion which ruled her life. What she felt for Gaius Julius Caesar was not alien to her nature, that being an intense and powerful one well suited to a great love; no, its chief disadvantage stemmed from him and his nature, which she read correctly as unwilling to be dominated by emotions arising out of personal relationships of any kind. This early and instinctive divination had saved her making the mistakes women commonly made, from putting his feelings to the test, to expecting fidelity and overt demonstrations of interest in anything beyond what happened between them in that discreet Suburan apartment.

Thus she had not gone that afternoon to tell him her news in any anticipation that it would provoke joy or add a proprietary feeling of ownership in him, and she had been right to discipline herself out of hope. He was neither pleased nor displeased; as he had said, this was her business, had nothing to do with him. Had she anywhere, buried deep down, cherished a hope that he would want to claim this child? She didn’t think so, didn’t walk home conscious of disappointment or depression. As he had no wife of his own, only one union would have needed the legality of divorce—hers to Silanus. But look at how Rome had condemned Sulla for summarily divorcing Aelia. Not that Sulla had cared once the young wife of Scaurus was freed by widowhood. Not that Caesar would have cared. Except that Caesar had a sense of honor Sulla had not; oh, it wasn’t a particularly honorable sense of honor, it was too bound up in what he thought of himself and wanted from himself to be that. Caesar had set a standard of conduct for himself which embraced every aspect of his life. He didn’t bribe his juries, he didn’t extort in his province, he was not a hypocrite. All no more and no less than evidence that he would do everything the hard way; he would not resort to techniques designed to render political progress easier. His self-confidence was indestructible; he never doubted for one moment his ability to get where he intended to go. But claim this child as his own by asking her to divorce Silanus so he could marry her before the child was born? No, that he wouldn’t even contemplate doing. She knew exactly why. For no other reason than that it would demonstrate to his Forum peers that he was under the thumb of an inferior—a woman.

She wanted desperately to marry him, of course, though not to acknowledge the paternity of this coming child. She wanted to marry him because she loved him with mind as much as body, because in him she recognized one of the great Romans, a fitting husband who would never disappoint her expectations of his political and military performance any more than his ancestry and dignitas could do aught than enhance her own. He was a Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, a Gaius Servilius Ahala, a Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, a Lucius Aemilius Paullus. Of the true patrician aristocracy—a quintessential Roman—possessed of immense intellect, energy, decision and strength. An ideal husband for a Servilia Caepionis. An ideal stepfather for her beloved Brutus.

The dinner hour was not far away when she arrived home, and Decimus Junius Silanus, the steward informed her, was in his study. What was the matter with him? she wondered as she entered the room to find him writing a letter. At forty years of age he looked closer to fifty, lines of physical suffering engraved down either side of his nose, his prematurely grey hair toning into grey skin. Though he was striving to acquit himself well as urban praetor, the demands of that duty were sapping an already fragile vitality. His ailment was mysterious enough to have defeated the diagnostic skills of every physician Rome owned, though the consensus of medical opinion was that its progress was too slow to suggest an underlying malignancy; no one had found a palpable tumor, nor was his liver enlarged. The year after next he would be eligible to stand for the consulship, but Servilia for one now believed he had not the stamina to mount a successful campaign.

“How are you today?” she asked, sitting in the chair in front of his desk.

He had looked up and smiled at her when she entered, and now laid down his pen with some pleasure. His love for her had grown no less with the accumulation of almost ten years of marriage, but his inability to be a husband to her in all respects ate at him more corrosively than his disease. Aware of his innate defects of character, he had thought when the disease clamped down after the birth of Junilla that she would turn on him with reproaches and criticisms; but she never had, even after the pain and burning in his gut during the night hours forced him to move to a separate sleeping cubicle. When every attempt at love-making had ended in the ghastly embarrassment of impotence, it had seemed kinder and less mortifying to remove himself physically; though he would have been content to cuddle and kiss, Servilia in the act of love was not cozy and not prone to dalliance.

So he answered her question honestly by saying, “No better and no worse than usual.”

“Husband, I want to talk to you,” she said.

“Of course, Servilia.”

“I am pregnant, and you have good cause to know that the child is not yours.”

His color faded from grey to white, he swayed. Servilia leaped to her feet and went to the console table where two carafes and some silver goblets resided, poured un-watered wine into one and stood supporting him while he sipped at it, retching slightly.

“Oh, Servilia!” he exclaimed after the stimulant had done its work and she had returned to her chair.

“If it is any consolation,” she said, “this fact has nothing to do with your own illness and disabilities. Were you as virile as Priapus, I would still have gone to this man.”

The tears gathered in his eyes, poured faster and faster down his cheeks.

“Use your handkerchief, Silanus!” snapped Servilia.

Out it came, mopped away. “Who is he?” he managed to ask.

“In good time. First I need to know what you intend to do about my situation. The father will not marry me. To do so would diminish his dignitas, and that matters more to him than I ever could. I do not blame him, you understand.”

“How can you be so rational?” he asked in wonder.

“I can see little point in being anything else! Would you rather I had rushed in squalling and screaming, and made what is still our business everyone’s business?”

“I suppose not,” he said tiredly, and sighed. The handkerchief was tucked away. “No, of course not. Except that it might have proved you are human. If anything about you worries me, Servilia, it is your lack of humanity, your inability to understand frailty. You bore on like an auger applied to the framework of your life with the skill and drive of a professional craftsman.”

“That is a very muddled metaphor,” said Servilia.

“Well, it was what I always sensed in you—and perhaps what I envied in you, for I do not have it myself. I admire it enormously. But it isn’t comfortable, and it prevents pity.”

“Don’t waste your pity on me, Silanus. You haven’t answered my question yet. What do you intend to do about my situation?”

He got up, supporting himself by holding on to the back of his chair until he was sure his legs would hold him up. Then he paced up and down the room for a moment before looking at her. So calm, so composed, so unaffected by disaster!

“Since you don’t intend to marry the man, I think the best thing I can do is move back into our bedroom for enough time to make the child’s origin look like my doing,” he said, going back to his chair.

Oh, why couldn’t she at least accord him the gratification of seeing her relax, or look relieved, or happy? No, not Servilia! She simply looked exactly the same, even within her eyes.

“That,” she said, “is sensible, Silanus. It is what I would have done in your situation, but one never knows how a man will see what touches his pride.”

“It touches my pride, Servilia, but I would rather my pride remained intact, at least in the eyes of our world. No one knows?”

“He knows, but he won’t air the truth.”

“Are you very far along?’’

“No. If you and I resume sleeping together, I doubt anyone will be able to guess from the date of the child’s birth that it is anyone’s but yours.”

“Well, you must have been discreet, for I’ve heard not one rumor, and there are always plenty of people to let slip rumors like that to the cuckolded husband.”

“There will be no rumors.”

“Who is he?” Silanus asked again.

“Gaius Julius Caesar, of course. I would not have surrendered my reputation to anyone less.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t have. His birth is as great as rumor says his procreative equipment is,” said Silanus bitterly. “Are you in love with him?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I can understand why, for all that I dislike the man. Women do tend to make fools of themselves over him.”

“I,” said Servilia flatly, “have not made a fool of myself.”

“That’s true. And do you intend to go on seeing him?”

“Yes. I will never not see him.”

“One day it will come out, Servilia.”

“Probably, but it suits neither of us to have our affair made public, so we will try to prevent that.”

“For which I should be grateful, I suppose. With any luck, I’ll be dead before it does.”

“I do not wish you dead, husband.”

Silanus laughed, but its note was not amused. “For which I ought to be grateful! I wouldn’t put it past you to speed my quittance if you thought it might serve your purposes.”

“It does not serve my purposes.”

“I understand that.” His breath caught. “Ye gods, Servilia, your children are formally contracted to be married! How can you hope to keep the affair secret?”

“I fail to see why Brutus and Julia endanger us, Silanus. We do not meet anywhere in their vicinity.”

“Or anyone else’s vicinity, obviously. As well that the servants are afraid of you.”

“Indeed.”

He put his head between his hands. “I would like to be alone now, Servilia.”

She rose immediately. “Dinner will be ready shortly.”

“Not for me today.”

“You should eat,” she said on the way to the door. “It has not escaped me that your pain lessens for some hours after you eat, especially when you eat well.”

“Not today! Now go, Servilia, go!”

Servilia went, well satisfied with this interview, and in better charity with Silanus than she had expected to be.

*

The Plebeian Assembly convicted Marcus Aurelius Cotta of peculation, fined him more than his fortune was worth, and forbade him fire and water within four hundred miles of Rome.

“Which denies Athens to me,” he said to his younger brother, Lucius, and to Caesar, “but the thought of Massilia is revolting. So I think I’ll go to Smyrna, and join Uncle Publius Rutilius.”

“Better company than Verres,” said Lucius Cotta, aghast at the verdict.

“I hear that the Plebs is going to vote Carbo consular insignia as a token of its esteem,” said Caesar, lip curling.

“Including lictors and fasces?” asked Marcus Cotta, gasping.

“I admit we can do with a second consul now that Glabrio’s gone off to govern his new combined province, Uncle Marcus, but though the Plebs may be able to dispense purple-bordered togas and curule chairs, it’s news to me that it can bestow imperium!” snapped Caesar, still shaking with anger. “This is all thanks to the Asian publicani!”

“Leave it be, Caesar,” said Marcus Cotta. “Times change, it is as simple as that. You might call this the last backlash of Sulla’s punishment of the Ordo Equester. Lucky for me that we all recognized what might happen, and transferred my lands and money to Lucius here.”

“The proceeds will follow you to Smyrna,” said Lucius Cotta. “Though it was the knights brought you down, there were elements in the Senate contributed their mite as well. I acquit Catulus and Gaius Piso and the rest of the rump, but Publius Sulla, his minion Autronius and all that lot were assiduous in helping Carbo prosecute. So was Catilina. I shan’t forget.”

“Nor shall I,” said Caesar. He tried to smile. “I love you dearly, Uncle Marcus, you know that. But not even for you will I put horns on Publius Sulla’s head by seducing Pompeius’s hag of a sister.”

That provoked a laugh, and the fresh comfort of each man’s reflecting that perhaps Publius Sulla was already reaping a little retribution by being obliged to live with Pompey’s sister, neither young nor attractive, and far too fond of the wine flagon.

*

Aulus Gabinius finally struck toward the end of February. Only he knew how difficult it had been to sit on his hands and delude Rome into thinking he, the president of the College of Tribunes of the Plebs, was a lightweight after all. Though he existed under the odium of being a man from Picenum (and Pompey’s creature), Gabinius was not precisely a New Man. His father and his uncle had sat in the Senate before him, and there was plenty of respectable Roman blood in the Gabinii besides. His ambition was to throw off Pompey’s yoke and be his own man, though a strong streak of common sense told him that he would never be powerful enough to lead his own faction. Rather, Pompey the Great wasn’t great enough. Gabinius hankered to ally himself with a more Roman man, for there were many things about Picenum and the Picentines exasperated him, particularly their attitude toward Rome. Pompey mattered more than Rome did, and Gabinius found that hard to take. Oh, it was natural enough! In Picenum Pompey was a king, and in Rome he wielded immense clout. Most men from a particular place were proud to follow a fellow countryman who had established his ascendancy over people generally considered better.

That Aulus Gabinius, fair of face and form, was dissatisfied with the idea of owning Pompey as master could be laid at no one else’s door than Gaius Julius Caesar’s. Much of an age, they had met at the siege of Mitylene and liked each other at once. Truly fascinated, Gabinius had watched young Caesar demonstrate a kind of ability and strength that told him he was privileged to be the friend of a man who would one day matter immensely. Other men had the looks, the height, the physique, the charm, even the ancestors; but Caesar had much more. To own an intellect like his yet be the bravest of the brave was distinction enough, for formidably intelligent men usually saw too many risks in valor. It was as if Caesar could shut anything out that threatened the enterprise of the moment. Whatever the enterprise was, he found exactly the right way to utilize only those qualities in himself able to conclude it with maximum effect. And he had a power Pompey would never have, something which poured out of him and bent everything to the shape he wanted. He counted no cost, he had absolutely no fear.

And though in the years since Mitylene they had not seen much of each other, Caesar continued to haunt Gabinius. Who made up his mind that when the day came that Caesar led his own faction, Aulus Gabinius would be one of his staunchest adherents. Though how he was going to wriggle out of his cliental obligations to Pompey, Gabinius didn’t know. Pompey was his patron, therefore Gabinius had to work for him as a proper client should. All of which meant that he struck with more intention of impressing the relatively junior and obscure Caesar than Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, the First Man in Rome. His patron.

He didn’t bother going to the Senate first; since the full restoration of the powers of the tribunes of the plebs, that was not mandatory. Better to strike the Senate without warning by informing the Plebs first, and on a day no one could suspect might produce earthshaking changes.

Some five hundred men only were dotted around the Well of the Comitia when Gabinius ascended the rostra to speak; these were the professional Plebs, that nucleus which never missed a meeting and could recite whole memorable speeches by heart, not to mention detail plebiscites of note going back a generation at least.

The Senate House steps were not well populated either; just Caesar, several of Pompey’s senatorial clients including Lucius Afranius and Marcus Petreius, and Marcus Tullius Cicero.

“If we had ever needed reminding how serious the pirate problem is to Rome, then the sack of Ostia and the capture of our first consignment of Sicilian grain a mere three months ago ought to have administered a gigantic stimulus!” Gabinius told the Plebs—and the watchers on the Curia Hostilia steps.

“And what have we done to clear Our Sea of this noxious infestation?’’ he thundered. “What have we done to safeguard the grain supply, to ensure that the citizens of Rome do not suffer famines, or have to pay more than they can afford for bread, their greatest staple? What have we done to protect our merchants and their vessels? What have we done to prevent our daughters’ being kidnapped, our praetors’ being abducted?

“Very little, members of the Plebs. Very, very little!”

Cicero moved closer to Caesar, touched his arm. “I am intrigued,” he said, “but not mystified. Do you know where he’s going, Caesar?”

“Oh, yes.”

On went Gabinius, enjoying himself highly.

“The very little we have done since Antonius the Orator attempted his pirate purge over forty years ago started in the aftermath of our Dictator’s reign, when his loyal ally and colleague Publius Servilius Vatia went out to govern Cilicia under orders to flush out the pirates. He had a full proconsular imperium, and the authority to raise fleets from every city and state affected by pirates, including Cyprus and Rhodes. He began in Lycia, and dealt with Zenicetes. It took him three years to defeat one pirate! And that pirate was based in Lycia, not among the rocks and crags of Pamphylia and Cilicia, where the worst pirates are. The remainder of his time in the governor’s palace at Tarsus was devoted to a beautiful small war against a tribe of inland Pamphylian soil-scratching peasants, the Isauri. When he defeated them, took their two pathetic little towns captive, our precious Senate told him to tack an extra name onto Publius Servilius Vatia—Isauricus, if you please! Well, Vatia isn’t very inspiring, is it? Knock-knees for a cognomen! Can you blame the poor fellow for wanting to go from being Publius of the plebeian family Servilius who has Knock-knees, to Publius Servilius Knock-knees the Conqueror of the Isauri? You must admit that Isauricus adds a trifle more luster to an otherwise dismal name!”

To illustrate his point, Gabinius pulled his toga up to show his shapely legs from midthigh downward, and minced back and forth across the rostra with knees together and feet splayed wide apart; his audience responded by laughing and cheering.

“The next chapter in this saga,” Gabinius went on, “happened in and around the island of Crete. For no better reason than that his father the Orator—a far better and abler man who still hadn’t managed to do the job!—had been commissioned by the Senate and People of Rome to eliminate piracy in Our Sea, the son Marcus Antonius collared the same commission some seven years ago, though this time the Senate alone issued it, thanks to our Dictator’s new rules. In the first year of his campaign Antonius pissed undiluted wine into every sea at the western end of Our Sea and claimed a victory or two, but never did produce tangible evidence like spoils or ship’s beaks. Then, filling his sails with burps and farts, Antonius caroused his way to Greece. Here for two years he sallied forth against the pirate admirals of Crete, with what disastrous consequences we all know. Lasthenes and Panares just walloped him! And in the end, a broken Man of Chalk—for that too is what Creticus means!—he took his own life rather than face the Senate of Rome, his commissioner.

“After which came another man with a brilliant nickname—that Quintus Caecilius Metellus who is the grandson of Macedonicus and the son of Billy Goat—Metellus Little Goat. It would seem, however, that Metellus Little Goat aspires to be another Creticus! But will Creticus turn out to mean the Conqueror of the Cretans, or a Man of Chalk? What do you think, fellow plebeians?’’

“Man of Chalk! Man of Chalk!” came the answer.

Gabinius finished up conversationally. “And that, dear friends, brings us up to the present moment. It brings us to the debacle at Ostia, the stalemate in Crete, the inviolability of every pirate bolt-hole from Gades in Spain to Gaza in Palestina! Nothing has been done! Nothing!”

His toga being a little rumpled from demonstrating how a knock-kneed man walked, Gabinius paused to adjust it.

“What do you suggest we do, Gabinius?” called Cicero from the Senate steps.

“Why hello there, Marcus Cicero!” said Gabinius cheerfully. “And Caesar too! Rome’s best pair of orators listening to the humble pratings of a man from Picenum. I am honored, especially since you stand just about alone up there. No Catulus, no Gaius Piso, no Hortensius, no Metellus Pius Pontifex Maximus?”

“Get on with it, man,” said Cicero, in high good humor.

“Thank you, I will. What do we do, you ask? The answer is simple, members of the Plebs. We find ourselves a man. One man only. A man who has already been consul, so that there can be no doubt about his constitutional position. A man whose military career has not been fought from the front benches of the Senate like some I could name. We find that man. And by we, fellow plebeians, I mean we of this assemblage. Not the Senate! The Senate has tried all the way from knock-knees to chalky substances without success, so I say the Senate must abrogate its power in this matter, which affects all of us. I repeat, we find ourselves a man, a man who is a consular of established military ability. We then give this man a commission to clear Our Sea of piracy from the Pillars of Hercules to the mouths of Nilus, and to clear the Euxine Sea as well. We give him three years to do this, and within three years he must have done this—for if he has not, members of the Plebs, then we will prosecute him and exile him from Rome forever!”

Some of the boni had come running from whatever business engaged them, summoned by clients they put in the Forum to monitor even the least suspicious Assembly meeting. Word was spreading that Aulus Gabinius was speaking about a pirate command, and the boni—not to mention many other factions—knew that meant Gabinius was going to ask the Plebs to give it to Pompey. Which could not be allowed to happen. Pompey must never receive another special command, never! It allowed him to think he was better and greater than his equals.

With the freedom to look around that Gabinius had not, Caesar noted Bibulus descend to the bottom of the Well, with Cato, Ahenobarbus and young Brutus behind him. An interesting quartet. Servilia wouldn’t be pleased if she heard her son was associating with Cato. A fact Brutus obviously understood; he looked hunted and furtive. Perhaps because of that he didn’t seem to listen to what Gabinius was saying, though Bibulus, Cato and Ahenobarbus had anger written large in their faces.

Gabinius ploughed on. “This man must have absolute autonomy. He must exist under no restrictions whatsoever from Senate or People once he begins. That of course means that we endow him with an unlimited imperium—but not just at sea! His power must extend inward for fifty miles on all coasts, and within that strip of land his powers must override the imperium of every provincial governor affected. He must be given at least fifteen legates of pro-praetorian status and have the freedom to choose and deploy them himself, without hindrance from anyone. If necessary he must be granted the whole contents of the Treasury, and be given the power to levy whatever he needs from money to ships to local militia in every place his imperium encompasses. He must have as many ships, fleets, flotillas as he demands, and as many of Rome’s soldiers.”

At which point Gabinius noticed the newcomers, and gave a huge, stagy start of surprise. He looked down into Bibulus’s eyes, then grinned delightedly. Neither Catulus nor Hortensius had arrived, but Bibulus, one of the heirs apparent, was enough.

“If we give this special command against the pirates to one man, members of the Plebs,” cried Gabinius, “then we may at last see the end of piracy! But if we allow certain elements in the Senate to cow us or prevent us, then we and no other body of Roman men will be directly responsible for whatever disasters follow on our failure to act. Let us get rid of piracy for once and for all! It’s time we dispensed with half-measures, compromises, sucking up to the self-importance of families and individuals who insist that the right to protect Rome is theirs alone! It’s time to finish with doing nothing! It’s time to do the job properly!”

“Aren’t you going to say it, Gabinius?” Bibulus shouted from the bottom of the Well.

Gabinius looked innocent. “Say what, Bibulus?”

“The name, the name, the name!”

“I have no name, Bibulus, just a solution.”

“Rubbish!” came the harsh and blaring voice of Cato. “That is absolute rubbish, Gabinius! You have a name, all right! The name of your boss, your Picentine upstart boss whose chief delight is destroying every tradition and custom Rome owns! You’re not up there saying all of this out of patriotism, you’re up there serving the interests of your boss, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus!”

“A name! Cato said a name!” cried Gabinius, looking overjoyed. “Marcus Porcius Cato said a name!” Gabinius leaned forward, bent his knees, got his head as close to Cato below as he could, and said quite softly, “Weren’t you elected a tribune of the soldiers for this year, Cato? Didn’t the lots give you service with Marcus Rubrius in Macedonia? And hasn’t Marcus Rubrius departed for his province already? Don’t you think you should be making a nuisance of yourself with Rubrius in Macedonia, rather than being a nuisance in Rome? But thank you for giving us a name! Until you suggested Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, I had no idea which man would be best.”

Whereupon he dismissed the meeting before any of the boni tribunes of the plebs could arrive.

Bibulus turned away with a curt jerk of his head to the other three, lips set, eyes glacial. When he reached the surface of the lower Forum he put his hand out, clutched Brutus’s forearm.

“You can run a message for me, young man,” he said, “then go home. Find Quintus Lutatius Catulus, Quintus Hortensius and Gaius Piso the consul. Tell them to meet me at my house now.”

Not very many moments later the three leading members of the boni sat in Bibulus’s study. Cato was still there, but Ahenobarbus had gone; Bibulus deemed him too much of an intellectual liability in a council containing Gaius Piso, who was quite dense enough without reinforcements.

“It’s been too quiet, and Pompeius Magnus has been too quiet,” said Quintus Lutatius Catulus, a slight and sandy-colored man whose Caesar ancestry showed less in him than his mother’s Domitius Ahenobarbus.

Catulus’s father, Catulus Caesar, had been a greater man opposing a greater enemy, Gaius Marius, and he had perished in his own way during the hideous slaughter Marius had inflicted on Rome at the beginning of his infamous seventh consulship. The son had been caught in an invidious position after he chose to remain in Rome throughout the years of Sulla’s exile, for he had never truly expected Sulla to overcome Cinna and Carbo. So after Sulla became Dictator, Catulus had trodden very warily until he managed to convince the Dictator of his loyalty. It was Sulla had appointed him consul with Lepidus, who rebelled—one more unhappy chance. Though he, Catulus, had defeated Lepidus, it was Pompey who got the job fighting Sertorius in Spain, a far more important enterprise. Somehow that kind of thing had become the pattern of Catulus’s life: never quite enough in the forefront to excel the way his formidable father had.

Embittered and now well into his fifties, he listened to the story Bibulus told without having the faintest idea how to combat what Gabinius was proposing to do beyond the traditional technique of uniting the Senate in opposition to any special commands.

Much younger, and fueled by a greater reservoir of hatred for the pretty fellows who would stand above all others, Bibulus knew too many senators would be inclined to favor the appointment of Pompey if the task was as vital as eradication of the pirates. “It won’t work,” he said to Catulus flatly.

“It has to work!” Catulus cried, striking his hands together. “We cannot allow that Picentine oaf Pompeius and all his minions to run Rome as a dependency of Picenum! What is Picenum except an outlying Italian state full of so-called Romans who are actually descended from Gauls? Look at Pompeius Magnus—he’s a Gaul! Look at Gabinius—he’s a Gaul! Yet we genuine Romans are expected to abase ourselves before Pompeius Magnus? Elevate him yet again to a position more prestigious than genuine Romans can condone? Magnus! How could a patrician Roman like Sulla have permitted Pompeius to assume a name meaning great?”

“I agree!” snapped Gaius Piso fiercely. “It’s intolerable !’’

Hortensius sighed. “Sulla needed him, and Sulla would have prostituted himself to Mithridates or Tigranes if that had been the only way back from exile to rule in Rome,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“There’s no point in railing at Sulla,” said Bibulus. “We have to keep our heads, or we’ll lose this battle. Gabinius has circumstances on his side. The fact remains, Quintus Catulus, that the Senate hasn’t dealt with the pirates, and I don’t think the good Metellus in Crete will succeed either. The sack of Ostia was all the excuse Gabinius needed to propose this solution.”

“Are you saying,” asked Cato, “that we won’t manage to keep Pompeius out of the command Gabinius is suggesting?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Pompeius can’t win against the pirates,” said Gaius Piso, smiling sourly.

“Exactly,” said Bibulus. “It may be that we’ll have to watch the Plebs issue that special command, then sit back and bring Pompeius down for good after he fails.”

“No,” said Hortensius. “There is a way of keeping Pompeius out of the job. Put up another name to the Plebs that it will prefer to Pompeius’s.”

A small silence fell, broken by the sharp sound of Bibulus’s hand cracking down on his desk. “Marcus Licinius Crassus!” he cried. “Brilliant, Hortensius, brilliant! He’s quite as good as Pompeius, and he has massive support among the knights of the Plebs. All they really care about is losing money, and the pirates lose them millions upon millions every year. No one in Rome will ever forget how Crassus handled his campaign against Spartacus. The man’s a genius at organization, as unstoppable as an avalanche, and as ruthless as old King Mithridates.”

“I don’t like him or anything he stands for, but he does have the blood,” from Gaius Piso, pleased. “Nor are his chances any less than Pompeius’s.”

“Very well then, we ask Crassus to volunteer for the special command against the pirates,” said Hortensius with satisfaction. “Who will put it to him?”

“I will,” said Catulus. He looked at Piso sternly. “In the meantime, senior consul, I suggest that your officers summon the Senate into session at dawn tomorrow. Gabinius didn’t convoke another meeting of the Plebs, so we’ll bring the matter up in the House and secure a consultum directing the Plebs to appoint Crassus.”

*

But someone else got in first, as Catulus was to discover when he tracked Crassus down at his home some hours later.

Caesar had left the Senate steps in a hurry, and went straight from the Forum to Crassus’s offices in an insula behind the Macellum Cuppedenis, the spice and flower markets which the State had been compelled to auction off into private ownership years before; it had been the only way to fund Sulla’s campaigns in the East against Mithridates. A young man at the time, Crassus had not owned the money to buy it; during Sulla’s proscriptions it fell at another auction, and by then Crassus was in a position to buy heavily. Thus he now owned a great deal of very choice property behind the eastern fringe of the Forum, including a dozen warehouses wherein merchants stored their precious peppercorns, nard, incenses, cinnamon, balms, perfumes and aromatics.

He was a big man, Crassus, taller than he looked because of his width, and there was no fat on him. Neck, shoulders and trunk were thickset, and that combined with a certain placidity in his face had caused all who knew him to see his resemblance to an ox—an ox which gored. He had married the widow of both his elder brothers, a Sabine lady of fine family by name of Axia who had become known as Tertulla because she had married three brothers; he had two promising sons, though the elder, Publius, was actually Tertulla’s son by his brother Publius. Young Publius was ten years from the Senate, while the son of Crassus’s loins, Marcus, was some years younger than that. No one could fault Crassus as a family man; his uxoriousness and devotion were famous. But his family was not his abiding passion. Marcus Licinius Crassus had only one passion—money. Some called him the richest man in Rome, though Caesar, treading up the grimy narrow stairs to his lair on the fifth floor of the insula, knew better. The Servilius Caepio fortune was almost infinitely larger, and so too the fortune of the man he went to see Crassus about, Pompey the Great.

That he had chosen to walk up five flights of stairs rather than occupy more commodious premises lower down was typical of Crassus, who understood his rents exquisitely well. The higher the floor, the lower the rent. Why fritter away a few thousands of sesterces by himself using profitable lower floors which could be rented out? Besides, stairs were good exercise. Nor did Crassus bother with appearances; he sat at a desk in one corner of a room in permanent turmoil with all his senior staff beneath his eyes, and cared not a whit if they jostled his elbow or talked at the tops of their voices.

“Time for a little fresh air!” shouted Caesar, jerking his head in the direction of the doorway behind him.

Crassus got up immediately to follow Caesar down and out into a different kind of turmoil, that of the Macellum Cuppedenis.

They were good friends, Caesar and Crassus, had been since Caesar had served with Crassus during the war against Spartacus. Many wondered at this peculiar association, for the differences between them blinded observers to the far greater similarities. Under those two very contrasting facades existed the same kind of steel, which they understood even if their world did not.

Neither man did what most men would have done, namely to go over to a famous snack bar and buy spiced minced pork encased in a deliciously light and flaky pastry made by covering flour dough with cold lard, folding it and rolling it, then more lard, and repeating the process many times. Caesar as usual wasn’t hungry, and Crassus deemed eating anywhere outside his own home a waste of money. Instead, they found a wall to lean on between a busy school of boys and girls taking their lessons in the open air and a booth devoted to peppercorns.

“All right, we’re well protected against eavesdroppers,” said Crassus, scratching his scalp; it had quite suddenly made itself visible after his year as Pompey’s junior consul when most of his hair fell out—a fact Crassus blamed on the worry of having to earn an extra thousand talents to replace what he had spent on making sure he ended up the consul with the best reputation among the people. That his baldness was more likely due to his age did not occur to him; he would turn fifty this year. Irrelevant. Marcus Crassus blamed everything on worries about money.

“I predict,” said Caesar, eyes on an adorable little dark girl in the impromptu classroom, “that you will receive a visit this evening from none other than our dear Quintus Lutatius Catulus.”

“Oh?” asked Crassus, his gaze fixed on the extortionate price chalked on a wooden card propped up against a glazed ceramic jar of peppercorns from Taprobane. “What’s in the wind, Caesar?”

“You should have abandoned your ledgers and come to today’s meeting of the Plebeian Assembly,” said Caesar.

“Interesting, was it?”

“Fascinating, though not unexpected—by me, at any rate. I had a little conversation with Magnus last year, so I was prepared. I doubt anyone else was save for Afranius and Petreius, who kept me company on the Curia Hostilia steps. I daresay they thought someone might smell which way the wind was blowing if they stood in the Well of the Comitia. Cicero kept me company too, but out of curiosity. He has a wonderful nose for sensing which meetings might be worth attending.”

No fool politically either, Crassus withdrew his gaze from the costly peppercorns and stared at Caesar. “Oho! What’s our friend Magnus up to?”

“Gabinius proposed to the Plebs that it should legislate to give an unlimited imperium and absolutely unlimited everything else to one man. Naturally he didn’t name the man. The object of this unlimited everything is to put an end to the pirates,” said Caesar, smiling when the little girl slammed her wax tablet down on the head of the little boy next to her.

“An ideal job for Magnus,” said Crassus.

“Of course. I understand, incidentally, that he’s been doing his homework for over two years. However, it won’t be a popular commission with the Senate, will it?”

“Not among Catulus and his boys.”

“Nor among most members of the Senate, I predict. They’ll never forgive Magnus for forcing them to legitimize his desire to be consul.”

“Nor will I,” said Crassus grimly. He drew a breath. “So you think Catulus will ask me to run for the job in opposition to Pompeius, eh?”

“Bound to.”

“Tempting,” said Crassus, his attention attracted to the school because the little boy was bawling and the pedagogue was trying to avert a free-for-all among his pupils.

“Don’t be tempted, Marcus,” said Caesar gently.

“Why not?”

“It wouldn’t work, Marcus. Believe me, it wouldn’t work. If Magnus is as prepared as I think Magnus is, then let him have the job. Your businesses suffer the effects of piracy as much as any businesses do. If you’re clever, you’ll stay in Rome and reap the rewards of pirate-free waterways. You know Magnus. He’ll do the job, and he’ll do it properly. But everyone else will wait and see. You can use the however many months this general skepticism will give you to prepare for the good times to come,” said Caesar.

That was, as Caesar well knew, the most compelling argument he could have put forward.

Crassus nodded and straightened. “You’ve convinced me,” he said, and glanced up at the sun. “Time to put in a bit more work on those ledgers before I go home to receive Catulus.”

The two men picked their way unconcernedly through the chaos which had descended upon the school, with Caesar giving the small cause of it all a companionable grin as he passed her. “Bye-bye, Servilia!” he said to her.

Crassus, about to go the other way, looked startled. “Do you know her?” he asked. “Is she a Servilia?”

“No, I don’t know her,” called Caesar, already fifteen feet away. “But she does remind me vividly of Julia’s prospective mother-in-law!”

*

Thus it was that when Piso the consul convoked the Senate at dawn the next morning, the leading lights of that body had found no rival general to put up against Pompey; Catulus’s interview with Crassus had foundered.

News of what was in the wind had spread from one back tier clear across to the other, of course, and opposition from all sides had hardened, much to the delight of the boni. The demise of Sulla was just too recent for most men to forget how he had held the Senate to ransom, despite his favors; and Pompey had been his pet, his executioner. Pompey had killed too many senators of Cinnan and Carboan persuasion, then killed Brutus too, and had forced the Senate to allow him to be elected consul without ever having been a senator. That last crime was the most unforgivable of all. The censors Lentulus Clodianus and Poplicola were still influential in Pompey’s favor, but his most powerful employees, Philippus and Cethegus, were gone, the one into retirement as a voluptuary, the other through the offices of death.

Not surprising then that when they entered the Curia Hostilia this morning in their solid-purple censors’ togas, Lentulus Clodianus and Poplicola resolved after looking at so many set faces that they would not speak up for Pompey the Great today. Nor would Curio, another Pompeian employee. As for Afranius and old Petreius, their rhetorical skills were so limited that they were under orders not to try. Crassus was absent.

“Isn’t Pompeius coming to Rome?” asked Caesar of Gabinius when he realized Pompey himself was not there.

“On his way,” said Gabinius, “but he won’t appear until his name is mentioned in the Plebs. You know how he hates the Senate.”

Once the auguries had been taken and Metellus Pius Pontifex Maximus had conducted the prayers, Piso (who held the fasces for February because Glabrio had vanished east) began the meeting.

“I realize,” he said from his curule chair on the elevated platform at the far end of the chamber, “that today’s meeting is not, under the recent legislation of Aulus Gabinius, tribune of the plebs, germane to February’s business. In one way! But in another, as it concerns a foreign command, it definitely is. All of which is beside the point. Nothing in that lex Gabinia can prevent this body’s meeting to discuss urgent affairs of any kind during the month of February!”

He rose to his feet, a typical Calpurnius Piso, being tall, very dark, and possessed of bushy eyebrows. “This same tribune of the plebs, Aulus Gabinius from Picenum”—he gestured with one hand at the back of Gabinius ‘s head, below him and on the far left end of the tribunician bench—”yesterday, without first notifying this body, convoked the Assembly of the Plebs and told its members—or those few who were present, anyway—how to get rid of piracy. Without consulting us, without consulting anyone! Toss unlimited imperium, money and forces into one single man’s lap, he said! Not mentioning any names, but which one of us can doubt that only one name was inside his Picentine head? This Aulus Gabinius and his fellow Picentine tribune of the plebs, Gaius Cornelius of no distinguished family despite his nomen, have already given us who have inherited Rome as our responsibility more trouble than enough since they entered office. I, for example, have been forced to draft counter-legislation for bribery at the curule elections. I, for example, have been cunningly deprived of my colleague in this year’s consulship. I, for example, have been accused of numberless crimes to do with electoral bribery.

“All of you present here today are aware of the seriousness of this proposed new lex Gabinia, and aware too how greatly it infringes every aspect of the mos maiorum. But it is not my duty to open this debate, only to guide it. So as it is too early in the year for any magistrates-elect to be present, I will proceed first to this year’s praetors, and ask for a spokesman.”

As the debating order had already been worked out, no praetor offered his services, nor did any aedile, curule or plebeian; Gaius Piso passed to the ranks of the consulars in the front rows on either side of the House. That meant the most powerful piece of oratorical artillery would fire first: Quintus Hortensius.

“Honored consul, censors, magistrates, consulars and senators,” he began, “it is time once and for all to put paid to these so-called special military commissions! We all know why the Dictator Sulla incorporated that clause in his amended constitution—to purchase the services of one man who did not belong to this august and venerable body—a knight from Picenum who had the presumption to recruit and general troops in Sulla’s employ while still in his early twenties, and who, having tasted the sweetness of blatant unconstitutionality, continued to espouse it—though espouse the Senate he would not! When Lepidus revolted he held Italian Gaul, and actually had the temerity to order the execution of a member of one of Rome’s oldest and finest families—Marcus Junius Brutus. Whose treason, if treason it really was, this body defined by including Brutus in its decree outlawing Lepidus. A decree which did not give Pompeius the right to have Brutus’s head lopped off by a minion in the marketplace at Regium Lepidum! Nor to cremate the head and body, then casually send the ashes to Rome with a short, semiliterate note of explanation!

“After which, Pompeius kept his precious Picentine legions in Mutina until he forced the Senate to commission him—no senator, no magistrate!—with a proconsular imperium to go to Spain, govern the nearer province in the Senate’s name and make war on the renegade Quintus Sertorius. When all the time, Conscript Fathers, in the further province we had an eminent man of proper family and background, the good Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Pontifex Maximus, already in the field against Sertorius—a man who, I add, did more to defeat Sertorius than this extraordinary and unsenatorial Pompeius ever did! Though it was Pompeius who took the glory, Pompeius who collected the laurels!”

Quite a good-looking man of imposing presence, Hortensius turned slowly in a circle and seemed to look into every pair of eyes, a trick he had used to good effect in law courts for twenty and more years. “Then what does this Picentine nobody Pompeius do when he returns to our beloved country? Against every provision of the constitution, he brings his army across the Rubico and into Italia, where he sits it down and proceeds to blackmail us into allowing him to stand for consul! We had no choice. Pompeius became consul. And even today, Conscript Fathers, I refuse with every fiber of my being to accord him that abominable name of Magnus he awarded himself! For he is not great! He is a boil, a carbuncle, a putrid festering sore in Rome’s maltreated hide!

“How dare Pompeius assume he can blackmail this body yet again? How dare he put his fellating minion Gabinius up to this? Unlimited imperium and unlimited forces and unlimited money, if you please! When all the time the Senate has an able commander in Crete doing an excellent job! An excellent job, I repeat! An excellent job! Excellent, excellent!” Hortensius’s Asianic style of oratory was now in full flight, and the House had settled down (particularly as it was in agreement with every word he said) to listen to one of its all-time great speakers. “I tell you, fellow members of this House, that I will never, never, never consent to this command, no matter whose name might be put up to fill it! Only in our time has Rome ever needed to resort to unlimited imperium, unlimited commands! They are unconstitutional and unconscionable and unacceptable! We will clear Our Sea of pirates, but we will do it the Roman way, not the Picentine way!”

At which point Bibulus began to cheer and drum his feet, and the whole House joined him. Hortensius sat down, flushed with a sweet victory.

Aulus Gabinius had listened impassively, and at the end shrugged his shoulders, lifted his hands. “The Roman way,” he said loudly when the cheering died down, “has degenerated to such a point of ineffectuality that it might better be called the Pisidian way! If Picenum is what the job needs, then Picenum it has to be. For what is Picenum, if it is not Rome? You draw geographical boundaries, Quintus Hortensius, which do not exist!”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” screamed Piso, leaping to his feet and down off the curule dais to face the tribunician bench beneath it. “You dare to prate of Rome, you Gaul from a nest of Gauls? You dare to lump Gaul with Rome? Beware then, Gabinius the Gaul, that you do not suffer the same fate as Romulus, and never return from your hunting expedition!”

“A threat!” shouted Gabinius, leaping to his feet. “You hear him, Conscript Fathers? He threatens to kill me, for that is what happened to Romulus! Killed by men who weren’t his bootlace, lurking in the Goat Swamps of the Campus Martius!”

Pandemonium broke out, but Piso and Catulus quelled it between them, unwilling to see the House dissolve before they had had their say. Gabinius had returned to his perch on the end of the bench where the tribunes of the plebs sat, and watched bright-eyed as the consul and the consular went their rounds, soothing, clucking, persuading men to put their behinds back on their stools.

And then, when quiet had more or less returned and Piso was about to ask Catulus his opinion, Gaius Julius Caesar rose to his feet. As he wore his corona civica and therefore ranked with any consular in the speaking order, Piso, who disliked him, threw him a dirty look which invited him to sit down again. Caesar remained standing, Piso glaring.

“Let him speak, Piso!” cried Gabinius. “He’s entitled!”

Though he didn’t exercise his oratorical privilege in the House very often, Caesar was acknowledged as Cicero’s only real rival; Hortensius’s Asianic style had fallen out of favor since the advent of Cicero’s plainer but more powerful Athenian style, and Caesar too preferred to be Attic. If there was one thing every member of the Senate had in common, it was a connoisseur’s appreciation for oratory. Expecting Catulus, they all opted for Caesar.

“As neither Lucius Bellienus nor Marcus Sextilius has yet been returned to our bosom, I believe I am the only member of this House present here today who has actually been captured by pirates,” he said in that high, absolutely clear voice he assumed for public speech. “It makes me, you might say, an expert on the subject, if expertise can be conveyed by firsthand experience. I did not find it an edifying experience, and my aversion began in the moment I saw those two trim war galleys bearing down on my poor, plodding merchant vessel. For, Conscript Fathers, I was informed by my captain that to attempt armed resistance was as certain to produce death as it was bound to be futile. And I, Gaius Julius Caesar, had to yield my person to a vulgar fellow named Polygonus, who had been preying upon merchantmen in Lydian, Carian and Lycian waters for over twenty years.

“I learned a lot during the forty days I remained the prisoner of Polygonus,” Caesar went on in more conversational tones. “I learned that there is an agreed sliding scale of ransom for all prisoners too valuable to be sent to the slave markets or chained up to wait on these pirates back home in their lairs. For a mere Roman citizen, slavery it is. A mere Roman citizen isn’t worth two thousand sesterces, which is the bottom price he could fetch in the slave markets. For a Roman centurion or a Roman about halfway up the hierarchy of the publicani, the ransom is half a talent. For a top Roman knight or publicanus, the price is one talent. For a Roman nobleman of high family who is not a member of the Senate, the price is two talents. For a Roman senator of pedarius status, the ransom is ten talents. For a Roman senator of junior magisterial status—quaestor or aedile or tribune of the plebs—the ransom is twenty talents. For a Roman senator who has held a praetorship or consulship, the ransom is fifty talents. When captured complete with lictors and fasces, as in the case of our two latest praetor victims, the price goes up to one hundred talents each, as we have learned only days ago. Censors and consuls of note fetch a hundred talents. Though I am not sure what value pirates put on consuls like our dear Gaius Piso here—perhaps one talent? I wouldn’t pay more for him myself, I do assure you. But then, I am not a pirate, though I sometimes wonder about Gaius Piso in that respect!

“One is expected during one’s imprisonment,” Caesar continued in that same casual manner, “to blanch in fear and fall down with great regularity to beg for one’s life. Not something these Julian knees of mine are accustomed to doing—nor did. I spent my time spying out the land, assessing possible resistance to attack, discovering what was guarded and whereabouts. And I also spent my time assuring everyone that when my ransom was found—it was fifty talents—I would return, capture the place, send the women and children to the slave markets, and crucify the men. They thought that a wonderful joke. I would never, never find them, they told me. But I did find them, Conscript Fathers, and I did capture the place, and I did send the women and children to the slave markets, and I did crucify all the men. I could have brought back the beaks of four pirate ships to adorn the rostra, but since I used the Rhodians for my expedition, the beaks stand now on a column in Rhodus next door to the new temple of Aphrodite that I caused to be built by my share of the spoils.

“Now Polygonus was only one of hundreds of pirates at that end of Our Sea, and not even a major pirate, if they are to be graded. Mind you, Polygonus had been having such a lucrative time of it working on his own with a mere four galleys that he saw no point in joining forces with other pirates to form a little navy under a competent admiral like Lasthenes or Panares—or Pharnaces or Megadates, to move a little closer to home. Polygonus was happy to pay five hundred denarii to a spy in Miletus or Priene in return for information as to which ships were worth boarding. And how assiduous his spies were! No fat pickings escaped their attention. Among his hoard were many items of jewelry made in Egypt, which indicates that he raided vessels between Pelusium and Paphos too. So his network of spies must have been enormous. Paid only for information which found him good prey, of course, not routinely paid. Keep men short and their noses keen, and in the end it’s cheaper as well as more effective.

“Noxious and of great nuisance value though they are, however, pirates like Polygonus are a minor affair compared to the pirate fleets under their pirate admirals. They don’t need to wait for lone ships to come along, or ships in unarmed convoys. They can attack grain fleets escorted by heavily armed galleys. And then they proceed to sell back to Roman middlemen what was Rome’s in the first place, already bought and paid for. Little wonder Roman bellies are empty, half of that vacuum from lack of grain, half because what grain there is sells at three and four times what it should, even from the aedile’s dole list.”

Caesar paused, but no one interrupted, even Piso, face red at the insult tossed his way as if no moment. “I do not need to labor one point,” he said evenly, “because I can see no merit in laboring it. Namely, that there have been provincial governors appointed by this body who have actively connived with pirates to allow them port facilities, food, even vintage wines on stretches of coast that otherwise would have been closed to pirate tenancy. It all came out during the trial of Gaius Verres, and those of you sitting here today who either engaged in this practice or let others engage in it know well who you are. And if the fate of my poor uncle Marcus Aurelius Cotta is anything to go by, be warned that the passage of time is no guarantee that crimes, real or imagined, will not one day be put to your accounts.

“Nor am I about to labor another point so obvious that it is very old, very tired, very threadbare. Namely, that so far Rome—and by Rome I mean both the Senate and the People!—has not even touched the problem of piracy, let alone begun to scotch it. There is absolutely no way one man in one piddling little spot, be that spot Crete or the Baleares or Lycia, can hope to terminate the activities of pirates. Strike at one place, and all that happens is that the pirates pick up their gear and sail off somewhere else. Has Metellus in Crete actually succeeded in cutting off a pirate head? Lasthenes and Panares are but two of the heads this monster Hydra owns, and theirs are still on their shoulders, still sailing the seas around Crete.

“What it needs,” cried Caesar, his voice swelling, “is not just the will to succeed, not just the wish to succeed, not just the ambition to succeed! What it needs is an all-out effort in every place at one and the same moment, an operation masterminded by one hand, one mind, one will. And hand and mind and will must belong to a man whose prowess at organization is so well known, so well tested, that we, the Senate as well as the People of Rome, can give the task to him with confidence that for once our money and our manpower and our materiel will not be wasted!”

He drew in a breath. “Aulus Gabinius suggested a man. A man who is a consular and whose career says that he can do the job as it must be done. But I will go one better than Aulus Gabinius, and name that man! I propose that this body give command against the pirates with unlimited imperium in all respects to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus!”

“Three cheers for Caesar!” Gabinius shouted, leaping onto the tribunician bench with both arms above his head. “I say it too! Give the command in the war against piracy to our greatest general, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus!”

All outraged attention swung from Caesar to Gabinius, with Piso in the lead; off the curule dais he jumped, grabbed wildly at Gabinius, hauled him down. But Piso’s body temporarily gave Gabinius the cover he needed, so he ducked under one flailing fist, tucked his toga around his thighs for the second time in two days, and bolted for the doors with half the Senate in pursuit.

Caesar picked his way between upended stools to where Cicero sat pensively with his chin propped up on one palm; he turned the stool next to Cicero the right way up, and sat down too.

“Masterly,” said Cicero.

“Nice of Gabinius to divert their wrath from my head to his,” said Caesar, sighing and stretching his legs out.

“It’s harder to lynch you. There’s a barrier built into their minds because you’re a patrician Julian. As for Gabinius, he’s—how did Hortensius put it?—a fellating minion. Add as understood, Picentine and Pompeian. Therefore he may be lynched with impunity. Besides, he was closer to Piso than you, and he didn’t win that,” Cicero ended, pointing to the chaplet of oak leaves Caesar wore. “I think there will be many times when half of Rome may want to lynch you, Caesar, but it would be an interesting group succeeded. Definitely not led by the likes of Piso.”

Sounds of shouting and violence outside rose in volume; the next thing Piso flew back into the chamber with various members of the professional Plebs behind him. Catulus in his wake dodged around the back of one of the open doors, and Hortensius around the other. Piso fell under a tackle and was dragged outside again, head bleeding.

“I say, it looks as if they’re in earnest,” Cicero observed with clinical interest. “Piso might be lynched.”

“I hope he is,” said Caesar, not moving.

Cicero giggled. “Well, if you won’t stir to help, I fail to see why I should.”

“Oh, Gabinius will talk them out of it, that will make him look wonderful. Besides, it’s quieter up here.”

“Which is why I transferred my carcass up here.”

“I take it,” said Caesar, “that you’re in favor of Magnus’s getting this gigantic command?”

“Definitely. He’s a good man, even if he isn’t one of the boni. There’s no one else has a hope. Of doing it, I mean.”

“There is, you know. But they wouldn’t give the job to me anyway, and I really do think Magnus can do it.”

“Conceit!” cried Cicero, astonished.

“There is a difference between truth and conceit.”

“But do you know it?”

“Of course.”

They fell silent for a while, then as the noise began to die away both men rose, descended to the floor of the chamber, and sallied out into the portico.

There it became clear that victory had gone to the Pompeians; Piso sat bleeding on a step being tended by Catulus, but of Quintus Hortensius there was no sign.

“You!” cried Catulus bitterly as Caesar ranged alongside him. “What a traitor to your class you are, Caesar! Just as I told you all those years ago when you came begging to serve in my army against Lepidus! You haven’t changed. You’ll never change, never! Always on the side of these ill-born demagogues who are determined to destroy the supremacy of the Senate!”

“At your age, Catulus, I would have thought you’d come to see that it’s you ultraconservative sticks with your mouths puckered up like a cat’s anus will do that,” said Caesar dispassionately. “I believe in Rome, and in the Senate. But you do it no good by opposing changes that your own incompetence have made necessary.”

“I will defend Rome and the Senate against the likes of Pompeius until the day I die!”

“Which, looking at you, may not be so far off.”

Cicero, who had gone to hear what Gabinius on the rostra was saying, returned to the bottom of the steps. “Another meeting of the Plebs the day after tomorrow!” he called, waving farewell.

“There’s another one who will destroy us,” said Catulus, lip curling contemptuously. “An upstart New Man with the gift of the gab and a head too big to fit through these doors!”

*

When the Plebeian Assembly met, Pompey was standing on the rostra next to Gabinius, who now proposed his lex Gabinia de piratis persequendis with a name attached to the man: Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Everybody’s choice, so much was clear from all the cheering. Though he was a mediocre speaker, Pompey had something in its way more valuable, which was a fresh and open, honest and engaging look about him, from the wide blue eyes to the wide frank smile. And that quality, reflected Caesar, watching and listening from the Senate steps, I do not have. Though I do not think I covet it. His style, not mine. Mine works equally well with the people.

Today’s opposition to the lex Gabinia de piratis persequendis was going to be more formal, though possibly no less violent; the three conservative tribunes of the plebs were very much in evidence on the rostra, Trebellius standing a little in front of Roscius Otho and Globulus to proclaim that he was their leader.

But before Gabinius went into the details of his bill, he called upon Pompey to speak, and none of the senatorial rump from Trebellius to Catulus to Piso tried to stop him; the whole crowd was on his side. It was very well done of its kind. Pompey began by protesting that he had been under arms in Rome’s service since his boyhood, and he was profoundly weary of being called upon to serve Rome yet again with yet another of these special commands. He went on to enumerate his campaigns (more campaigns than he had years, he sighed wistfully), then explained that the jealousy and hatred increased each time he did it again, saved Rome. And oh, he didn’t want yet more jealousy, yet more hatred! Let him be what he most wanted to be—a family man, a country squire, a private gentleman. Find someone else, he beseeched Gabinius and the crowd, both hands outstretched.

Naturally no one took this seriously, though everyone did approve heartily of Pompey’s modesty and self-deprecation. Lucius Trebellius asked leave of Gabinius, the College president, to speak, and was refused. When he tried anyway, the crowd drowned his words with boos, jeers, catcalls. So as Gabinius proceeded, he produced the one weapon Gabinius could not ignore.

“I interpose my veto against the lex Gabinia de piratis persequendis!” cried Lucius Trebellius in ringing tones.

Silence fell.

“Withdraw your veto, Trebellius,” said Gabinius.

“I will not. I veto your boss’s law!”

“Don’t force me to take measures, Trebellius.”

“What measures can you take short of throwing me from the Tarpeian Rock, Gabinius? And that cannot change my veto. I will be dead, but your law will not be passed,” said Trebellius.

This was the true test of strength, for the days had gone when meetings could degenerate into violence with impunity for the man convoking the meeting, when an irate Plebs could physically intimidate tribunes into withdrawing their vetoes while the man in charge of the Plebs remained an innocent bystander. Gabinius knew that if a riot broke out during this proper meeting of the Plebs, he would be held accountable at law. Therefore he solved his problem in a constitutional way none could impeach.

“I can ask this Assembly to legislate you out of your office, Trebellius,” answered Gabinius. “Withdraw your veto!”

“I refuse to withdraw my veto, Aulus Gabinius.”

There were thirty-five tribes of Roman citizen men. All the voting procedures in the Assemblies were arrived at through the tribes, which meant that at the end of several thousand men’s voting, only thirty-five actual votes were recorded. In elections all the tribes voted simultaneously, but when passing laws the tribes voted one after the other, and what Gabinius was seeking was a law to depose Lucius Trebellius. Therefore Gabinius called the thirty-five tribes to vote consecutively, and one after the other they voted to depose Trebellius. Eighteen was the majority, so eighteen votes were all Gabinius needed. In solemn quiet and perfect order, the ballot proceeded inexorably: Suburana, Sergia, Palatina, Quirina, Horatia, Aniensis, Menenia, Oufentina, Maecia, Pomptina, Stellatina, Clustumina, Tromentina, Voltinia, Papiria, Fabia... The seventeenth tribe to vote was Cornelia, and the vote was the same. Deposition.

“Well, Lucius Trebellius?” asked Gabinius, turning to his colleague with a big smile. “Seventeen tribes in succession have voted against you. Do I call upon the men of Camilla to make it eighteen and a majority, or will you withdraw your veto?”

Trebellius licked his lips, looked desperately at Catulus, Hortensius, Piso, then at the remote and aloof Pontifex Maximus, Metellus Pius, who ought to have honored his membership in the boni, but since his return from Spain four years ago was a changed man—a quiet man—a resigned man. Despite all of which, it was to Metellus Pius that Trebellius addressed his appeal.

“Pontifex Maximus, what ought I to do?” he cried.

“The Plebs have shown their wishes in the matter, Lucius Trebellius,” said Metellus Pius in a clear, carrying voice which did not stammer once. “Withdraw your veto. The Plebs have instructed you to withdraw your veto.”

“I withdraw my veto,” Trebellius said, turned on his heel and retreated to the back of the rostra platform.

But having outlined his bill, Gabinius now seemed in no hurry to pass it. He asked Catulus to speak, then Hortensius.

“Clever little fellow, isn’t he?” asked Cicero, a trifle put out that no one was asking him to speak. “Listen to Hortensius! In the Senate the day before yesterday, he said he’d die before any more special commands with unlimited imperium would pass! Today he’s still against special commands with unlimited imperium, but if Rome insists on creating this animal, then Pompeius and no one else should have its leash put into his hand. That certainly tells us which way the Forum wind is blowing, doesn’t it?”

It certainly did. Pompey concluded the meeting by shedding a few tears and announcing that if Rome insisted, then he supposed he would have to shoulder this new burden, lethal though the exhaustion it produced would be. After which Gabinius dismissed the meeting, the vote as yet untaken. However, the tribune of the plebs Roscius Otho had the last word. Angry, frustrated, longing to kill the whole Plebs, he stepped to the front of the rostra and thrust his clenched right fist upward, then very slowly extended its medicus finger to its full length, and waggled it.

“Shove it up your arse, Plebs!” laughed Cicero, appreciating this futile gesture enormously.

“So you’re happy to allow the Plebs a day to consider, eh?” he asked Gabinius when the College came down from the rostra.

“I’ll do everything exactly as it ought to be done.”

“How many bills?”

“One general, then one awarding the command to Gnaeus Pompeius, and a third detailing the terms of his command.”

Cicero tucked his arm through Gabinius’s and began to walk. “I loved that little bit at the end of Catulus’s speech, didn’t you? You know, when Catulus asked the Plebs what would happen if Magnus was killed, with whom would the Plebs replace him?”

Gabinius doubled up with laughter. “And they all cried with one voice, ‘You, Catulus! You and no one but you!’ ”

“Poor Catulus! The veteran of an hour-long rout fought in the shade of the Quirinal.”

“He got the point,” said Gabinius.

“He got shafted,” said Cicero. “That’s the trouble with being a rump. You contain the posterior fundamental orifice.”

*

In the end Pompey got more than Gabinius had originally asked for: his imperium was maius on sea and for fifty miles inland from every coast, which meant his authority overrode the authority of every provincial governor and those with special commands like Metellus Little Goat in Crete and Lucullus in his war against the two kings. No one could gainsay him without revocation of the act in the Plebeian Assembly. He was to have five hundred ships at Rome’s expense and as many more as he wanted in levies from coastal cities and states; he was to have one hundred and twenty thousand Roman troops and as many more as he considered necessary in levies from the provinces; he was to have five thousand horse troopers; he was to have twenty-four legates with propraetorian status, all of his own choice, and two quaestors; he was to have one hundred and forty-four million sesterces from the Treasury at once, and more when he wanted more. In short, the Plebs awarded him a command the like of which had never been seen.

But, to do him justice, Pompey wasted no time puffing out his chest and rubbing his victory in to people like Catulus and Piso; he was too eager to begin what he had planned down to the last detail. And, if he needed further evidence of the people’s faith in his ability to do away with piracy on the high seas once and for all, he could look with pride to the fact that on the day the leges Gabiniae were passed, the price of grain in Rome dropped.

Though some wondered at it, he did not choose his two old lieutenants from Spain among his legates—that is, Afranius and Petreius. Instead, he attempted to soothe the fears of the boni by picking irreproachable men like Sisenna and Varro, two of the Manlii Torquati, Lentulus Marcellinus and the younger of his wife Mucia Tertia’s two half brothers, Metellus Nepos. It was to his tame censors Poplicola and Lentulus Clodianus, however, that he gave the most important commands, Poplicola of the Tuscan Sea and Lentulus Clodianus of the Adriatic Sea. Italy reposed between them, safe and secure.

He divided the Middle Sea into thirteen regions, each of which he allocated a commander and a second-in-command, fleets, troops, money. And this time there would be no insubordination, no assuming initiative by any of his legates.

“There can be no Arausio,” he said sternly in his command tent, his legates assembled before the great enterprise began. “If one of you so much as farts in a direction I have not myself in person instructed as the right direction for farting, I will cut out your balls and send you to the eunuch markets in Alexandria,” he said, and meant it. “My imperium is maius, and that means I can do whatever I like. Every last one of you will have written orders so detailed and complete that you don’t have to decide for yourselves what’s for dinner the day after tomorrow. You do as you’re told. If any man among you isn’t prepared to do as he’s told, then speak up now. Otherwise it’s singing soprano at the court of King Ptolemy, is that understood?”

“He may not be elegant in his phraseology or his metaphors,” said Varro to his fellow literatus, Sisenna, “but he does have a wonderful way of convincing people that he means what he says.”

“I keep visualizing an almighty aristocrat like Lentulus Marcellinus trilling out his tonsils for the delectation of King Ptolemy the Flautist in Alexandria,” said Sisenna dreamily.

Which set both of them to laughing.

Though the campaign was not a laughing matter. It proceeded with stunning speed and absolute efficiency in exactly the way Pompey had planned, and not one of his legates dared do aught else than as his written orders dictated. If Pompey’s campaign in Africa for Sulla had astonished everyone with its speed and efficiency, this campaign cast that one into permanent shade.

He began at the western end of the Middle Sea, and he used his fleets, his troops, and—above all—his legates to apply a naval and military broom to the waters. Sweeping, sweeping, ever sweeping a confused and helpless heap of pirates ahead of the broom; every time a pirate detachment broke for cover on the African or the Gallic or the Spanish or the Ligurian coast, it found no refuge at all, for a legate was waiting for it. Governor-designate of both the Gauls, the consul Piso issued orders that neither province was to provide Pompey with aid of any kind, which meant that Pompey’s legate in the area, Pomponius, had to struggle to achieve results. But Piso too bit the dust when Gabinius threatened to legislate him out of his provinces if he didn’t desist. His debts mounting with frightening rapidity, Piso needed the Gauls to recoup his losses, so he desisted.

Pompey himself followed the broom from west to east, timing his visit to Rome in the middle to coincide with Gabinius’s actions against Piso, and looked more gorgeous than ever when he publicly prevailed upon Gabinius not to be such a cad.

“Oh, what a poseur!” exclaimed Caesar to his mother, but not in any spirit of criticism.

Aurelia, however, was not interested in Forum doings. “I must talk to you, Caesar,” she said, ensconced in her chair in his tablinum.

Amusement fled; Caesar stifled a sigh. “What about?”

“Servilia.”

“There’s nothing to say, Mater.”

“Did you make a remark to Crassus about Servilia?” was his mother’s reply.

Caesar frowned. “To Crassus? No, of course not.”

“Then why did Tertulla come to see me on a fishing expedition? She did, yesterday.” Aurelia grunted a laugh. “Not one of Rome’s more expert fisherwomen, Tertulla! Comes of her Sabine background, I suppose. The hills are not fishing territory for any save the real experts with a willow rod.”