1

Marcus Licinius Crassus was now so rich that he had begun to be called by a second cognomen, Dives, which just meant fabulously wealthy. And when together with Quintus Lutatius Catulus he was elected censor, nothing was missing from his career save a great and glorious military campaign. Oh, he had defeated Spartacus and earned an ovation for it, but six months in the field against a gladiator in whose army were many slaves rather took the gloss off his victory. What he hankered after was something more in the line of Pompey the Great—savior of his country, that kind of campaign. And that kind of reputation. It hurt to be eclipsed by an upstart!

Nor was Catulus an amicable colleague in the censorship, for reasons which escaped the bewildered Crassus. No Licinius Crassus had ever been apostrophized as a demagogue or any other sort of political radical, so what was Catulus prating about?

“It’s your money,” said Caesar, to whom he addressed this peevish question. “Catulus is boni, he doesn’t condone commercial activities for senators. He’d dearly love to see himself in tandem with another censor and both of them busy investigating you. But since you’re his colleague, he can’t very well do that, can he?”

“He’d be wasting his time if he tried!” said Crassus indignantly. “I do nothing half the Senate doesn’t do! I make my money from owning property, which is well within the province of every or any senator! I admit I have a few shares in companies, but I am not on a board of directors, I have no vote in how a company will conduct its business. I’m simply a source of capital. That’s unimpeachable!”

“I realize all that,” said Caesar patiently, “and so does our beloved Catulus. Let me repeat: it’s your money. There’s old Catulus toiling away to pay for the rebuilding of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, never managing to increase the family fortune because every spare sestertius has to go into Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Whereas you just keep on making money. He’s jealous.”

“Then let him save his jealousy for men who deserve it!” growled Crassus, unmollified.

Since stepping down from the consulship he had shared with Pompey the Great, Crassus had gone into a new kind of business, one pioneered forty years earlier by a Servilius Caepio: namely, the manufacture of arms and armaments for Rome’s legions in a series of townships north of the Padus River in Italian Gaul. It was his good friend Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the armaments gatherer for Rome during the Italian War, who had drawn Crassus’s attention to it. Lucius Piso had recognized the potential in this new industry, and espoused it so wholeheartedly that he succeeded in making a great deal of money out of it. His ties of course were to Italian Gaul anyway, for his mother had been a Calventia from Italian Gaul. And when Lucius Piso died, his son, another Lucius Piso, continued both in this activity and in the warm friendship with Crassus. Who had finally been brought to see the advantages in owning whole towns devoted to the manufacture of chain mail, swords, javelins, helmets, daggers; senatorially proper too.

As censor Crassus was now in a position to help his friend Lucius Piso as well as young Quintus Servilius Caepio Brutus, the heir to the Servilius Caepio manufactories in Feltria, Cardianum, Bellunum. Italian Gaul on the far side of the Padus had been Roman for so long by now that its citizens, many of them Gauls but many more of mixed stock due to intermarriage, had come to harbor much resentment because they were still being denied the citizenship. Only three years earlier there had been stirrings, quietened after the visit of Caesar returning from Spain. And Crassus saw his duty very clearly once he became censor and had charge of the rolls of Roman citizens: he would help his friends Lucius Piso and Caepio Brutus and establish a huge clientele for himself by giving the full Roman citizenship to everyone on the far side of the Padus in Italian Gaul. Everyone south of the Padus had the full citizenship—it didn’t seem right to deny people of exactly the same blood just because they were located on the wrong side of a river!

But when he announced his intention to enfranchise all of Italian Gaul, his fellow censor Catulus seemed to go mad. No, no, no! Never, never, never! Roman citizenship was for Romans, and Gauls were not Romans! There were already too many Gauls calling themselves Romans, like Pompey the Great and his Picentine minions.

“The old, old argument,” said Caesar, disgusted. “The Roman citizenship must be for Romans only. Why can’t these idiot boni see that all the peoples of Italia everywhere are Romans? That Rome herself is really Italia?”

“I agree with you,” said Crassus, “but Catulus doesn’t.”

Crassus’s other scheme was not favored either.

He wanted to annex Egypt, even if that meant going to war—with himself at the head of the army, of course. On the subject of Egypt, Crassus had become such an authority that he was encyclopaedic. And every single fact he learned only served to confirm what he had suspected, that Egypt was the wealthiest nation in the world.

“Imagine it!” he said to Caesar, face for once anything but bovine and impassive. “Pharaoh owns everything! There’s no such thing as freehold land in Egypt—it’s all leased from Pharaoh, who collects the rents. All the products of Egypt belong to him outright, from grain to gold to jewels to spices and ivory! Only linen is excluded. It belongs to the native Egyptian priests, but even then Pharaoh takes a third of it for himself. His private income is at least six thousand talents a year, and his income from the country another six thousand talents. Plus extra from Cyprus.”

“I heard,” said Caesar, for no other reason than that he wanted to bait the Crassus bull, “that the Ptolemies have been so inept they’ve run through every drachma Egypt possesses.”

The Crassus bull did snort, but derisively rather than angrily. “Rubbish! Absolute rubbish! Not the most inept Ptolemy could spend a tenth of what he gets. His income from the country keeps the country—pays for his army of bureaucrats, his soldiers, his sailors, police, priests, even his palaces. They haven’t been to war in years except on each other, and then the money simply goes to the victor, not out of Egypt. His private income he puts away, and all the treasures—the gold, the silver, the rubies and ivory and sapphires, the turquoise and carnelian and lapis lazuli—he never even bothers to convert into cash, they all get put away too. Except for what he gives to the artisans and craftsmen to make into furniture or jewelry.”

“What about the theft of the golden sarcophagus of Alexander the Great?’’ asked Caesar provocatively. “The first Ptolemy called Alexander was so impoverished he took it, melted it down into gold coins and replaced it with the present rock-crystal sarcophagus.”

“And there you have it!” said Crassus scornfully. “Truly, all these ridiculous stories! That Ptolemy was in Alexandria for about five days all told before he fled. And do you mean to tell me that in the space of five days he removed an object of solid gold weighing at least four thousand talents, cut it into pieces small enough to fit into a goldsmith’s beaker-sized furnace, melted all those little pieces down in however many furnaces, and then stamped out what would have amounted to many millions of coins? He couldn’t have done it inside a year! Not only that, but where’s your common sense, Caesar? A transparent rock-crystal sarcophagus big enough to contain a human body—yes, yes, I am aware Alexander the Great was a tiny fellow!—would cost a dozen times what a solid-gold sarcophagus would cost. And take years to fashion once a big enough piece was found. Logic says someone found that big enough piece, and by coincidence the replacement happened while Ptolemy Alexander was there. The priests of the Sema wanted the people to actually see Alexander the Great.”

“Ugh!” said Caesar.

“No, no they preserved him perfectly. I believe he’s quite as beautiful today as he was in life,” said Crassus, thoroughly carried away.

“Leaving aside the questionable topic of how well preserved Alexander the Great is, Marcus, there’s never smoke without some fire. One is forever hearing tales of this or that Ptolemy down the centuries having to flee shirtless, without two sesterces to rub together. There cannot be nearly as much money and treasure as you say there is.”

“Aha!” cried Crassus triumphantly. “The tales are based on a false premise, Caesar. What people fail to understand is that the Ptolemaic treasures and the country’s wealth are not kept in Alexandria. Alexandria is an artificial graft on the real Egyptian tree. The priests in Memphis are the custodians of the Egyptian treasury, which is located there. And when a Ptolemy—or a Cleopatra—needs to fly the coop, they don’t head down the delta to Memphis, they sail out of the Cibotus Harbor at Alexandria and they head for Cyprus or Syria or Cos. Therefore they can’t lay their hands on more funds than there are in Alexandria.”

Caesar looked terrifically solemn, sighed, leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “My dear Crassus, you have convinced me,” he said.

It was only then that Crassus calmed down enough to see the ironic gleam in Caesar’s eyes, and burst out laughing. “Wretch! You’ve been teasing me!”

“I agree with you about Egypt in every respect,” said Caesar. “The only trouble is that you’ll never manage to talk Catulus into this venture.”

Nor did he talk Catulus into it, while Catulus talked the Senate out of it. The result was that after less than three months in office and long before they could revise the roll of the Ordo Equester, let alone take a census of the people, the censorship of Catulus and Crassus ceased to be. Crassus resigned publicly and with much to say about Catulus, none of it complimentary. So short a term had it been, in fact, that the Senate decided to have new censors elected in the following year.

*

Caesar acquitted himself as a good friend ought by speaking in the House in favor of both Crassus’s proposals, enfranchisement of the Trans-Padane Gauls and the annexation of Egypt, but his chief interest that year lay elsewhere: he had been elected one of the two curule aediles, which meant that he was now permitted to sit in the ivory curule chair, and was preceded by two lictors bearing the fasces. It had happened “in his year,” an indication that he was exactly as far up the cursus honorum of public magistracies as he was supposed to be. Unfortunately his colleague (who polled far fewer votes) was Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus.

They had very different ideas as to what the curule aedileship consisted of, and that went for every aspect of the job. Together with the two plebeian aediles, they were responsible for the general upkeep of the city of Rome: the care of streets, squares, gardens, marketplaces, traffic, public buildings, law and order, the water supply including fountains and basins, land registers, building ordinances, drainage and sewers, statues displayed in public places, and temples. Duties were either carried out by all four together, or else amicably assigned to one or more among them.

Weights and measures fell to the lot of the curule aediles, who had their headquarters in the temple of Castor and Pollux, a very central location on the Vestal fringe of the lower Forum; the set of standard weights and measures was kept under the podium of this temple, always referred to simply as “Castor’s,” Pollux being quite overlooked. The plebeian aediles were located much farther away, in the beautiful temple of Ceres at the foot of the Aventine, and perhaps because of this seemed to pay less attention to the duties involved in caring for Rome’s public and political center.

One duty all four shared was most onerous of all: the grain supply in all its aspects, from the moment in which it was taken off the barges until it disappeared into an entitled citizen’s sack to be carried home. They also were responsible for buying in grain, paying for it, tallying it on arrival, and collecting the money for it. They kept the list of citizens entitled to low-priced State grain, which meant they had a copy of the roll of Roman citizens. They issued the chits from their booth in the Porticus Metelli on the Campus Martius, but the grain itself was stored in huge silos lining the cliffs of the Aventine along the Vicus Portae Trigeminae at the Port of Rome.

The two plebeian aediles of that year were no competition for the curule aediles, with Cicero’s younger brother, Quintus, the senior of the pair.

“Which means undistinguished games from them,” said Caesar to Bibulus, and sighing as he said it. “It appears they’re not going to do much about the city either.”

Bibulus eyed his colleague with sour dislike. “You may disabuse yourself of any grand pretensions in the curule aediles as well, Caesar. I will contribute to good games, but not great games. My purse won’t run to that any more than yours will. Nor do I intend to undertake any surveys of the sewers, or have the adjutages inspected along every branch of the water supply, or put a new coat of paint on Castor’s, or go rushing around the markets checking every pair of scales.”

“What do you intend to do?” asked Caesar, lifting his lip.

“I intend to do what is necessary, and nothing more.”

“Don’t you think checking scales is necessary?”

“I do not.”

“Well,” said Caesar, grinning nastily, “I think it’s very appropriate that we’re located in Castor’s. If you want to be Pollux, go right ahead. But don’t forget Pollux’s fate—never to be remembered and never to be mentioned.”

Which was not a good start. However, always too busy and too well organized to bother with those who declared themselves unwilling to co-operate, Caesar went about his duties as if he were the only aedile in Rome. He had the advantage of owning an excellent network of reporters of transgressions, for he enlisted Lucius Decumius and his crossroads brethren as informers, and cracked down very hard on merchants who weighed light or measured short, on builders who infringed boundaries or used poor materials, on landlords who had cheated the water companies by inserting bigger-bore adjutage pipes from the mains into their properties than the law prescribed. He fined ruthlessly, and fined heavily. No one escaped, even his friend Marcus Crassus.

“You’re beginning to annoy me,” said Crassus grumpily as February commenced. “So far you’ve cost me a fortune! Too little cement in some building mix, too few beams in that insula I’m putting up on the Viminal—and it does not encroach on public land, I don’t care what you say! Fifty thousand sesterces in fines just because I tapped into the sewer and put private latrines into my new flats on the Carinae? That’s two talents, Caesar!”

“Break the law and I’ll get you for it,” said Caesar, not at all contrite. “I need every sestertius I can put into my fine chest, and I’m not about to exempt my friends.”

“If you continue like this, you won’t have any friends.”

“What you’re saying, Marcus, is that you’re a fine-weather friend,” said Caesar, a little unfairly.

“No, I am not! But if you’re after money to fund spectacular games, then borrow it, don’t expect every businessman in Rome to foot the bill for your public extravaganzas!” cried Crassus, goaded. “I’ll lend you the money, and I won’t charge you interest.”

“Thank you, but no,” said Caesar firmly. “If I did that, I’d be the fine-weather friend. If I have to borrow, I’ll go to a proper moneylender and borrow.”

“You can’t, you’re in the Senate.”

“I can, Senate or no. If I get thrown out of the Senate for borrowing from usurers, Crassus, it will go down to fifty members overnight,” said Caesar. His eyes gleamed. “There is something you can do for me.”

“What?”

“Put me in touch with some discreet pearl merchant who might want to pick up the finest pearls he’s ever seen for less by far than he’ll sell them for.”

“Oho! I don’t remember your declaring any pearls when you tabulated the pirate booty!”

“I didn’t, nor did I declare the five hundred talents I kept. Which means my fate is in your hands, Marcus. All you have to do is lodge my name in the courts and I’m done for.”

“I won’t do that, Caesar—if you stop fining me,” said Crassus craftily.

“Then you’d better go down to the praetor urbanus this moment and lodge my name,” said Caesar, laughing, “because you won’t buy me that way!”

“Is that all you kept, five hundred talents and some pearls?’’

“That’s all.”

“I don’t understand you!”

“That’s all right, nor does anyone else,” said Caesar, and prepared to depart. “But look up that pearl merchant for me, like a good chap. I’d do it myself—if I knew whereabouts to start. You can have a pearl as your commission.”

“Oh, keep your pearls!” said Crassus, disgusted.

*

Caesar did keep one pearl, the huge strawberry-shaped and strawberry-colored one, though why he didn’t quite know, for it would probably have doubled the five hundred talents he got for all the others. Just some instinct, and that was even after the eager buyer had seen it.

“I’d get six or seven million sesterces for it,” the man said wistfully.

“No,” said Caesar, tossing it up and down in his hand, “I think I’ll keep it. Fortune says I should.”

Profligate spender though he was, Caesar was also capable of totting up the bill, and when by the end of February he had totted up the bill, his heart sank. The aedile’s chest would probably yield five hundred talents; Bibulus had indicated that he would contribute one hundred talents toward their first games, the ludi Megalenses in April, and two hundred talents toward the big games, the ludi Romani, in September; and Caesar had close to a thousand talents of his own money—which represented all he had in the world aside from his precious land, and that he would not part with. That kept him in the Senate.

According to his reckoning, the ludi Megalenses would cost seven hundred talents, and the ludi Romani a thousand talents. Seventeen hundred all told, just about what he had. The trouble was that he intended to do more than give two lots of games; every curule aedile had to give the games, all the distinction a man could earn was in their magnificence. Caesar wanted to stage funeral games for his father in the Forum, and he expected them to cost five hundred talents. He would have to borrow, then offend everyone who voted for him by keeping on, fining for his aedile’s chest. Not prudent! Marcus Crassus tolerated it only because, despite his stinginess and his rooted conviction that a man helped his friends even at the expense of the State, he really did love Caesar.

“You can have what I got, Pavo,” said Lucius Decumius, who was there to watch Caesar work over his figures.

Though he looked tired and a little discouraged, out flashed a special smile for this odd old man who was such a huge part of his life. “Go on, dad! What you’ve got wouldn’t hire a single pair of gladiators.”

“I got close to two hundred talents.”

Caesar whistled. “I can see I’m in the wrong profession! Is that what you’ve salted away all these years guaranteeing peace and protection for the residents of the outer Via Sacra and the Vicus Fabricii?”

“It mounts up,” said Lucius Decumius, looking humble.

“You keep it, dad, don’t give it to me.”

“Where you going to get the rest from, then?”

“I’ll borrow it against what I make as propraetor in a good province. I’ve written to Balbus in Gades, and he’s agreed to give me letters of reference to the right people here in Rome.”

“Can’t you borrow it from him?”

“No, he’s a friend. I can’t borrow from my friends, dad.”

“Oh, you are a strange one!” said Lucius Decumius, shaking his grizzled head. “That’s what friends are for.”

“Not to me, dad. If something happens and I can’t pay the money back, I’d rather owe strangers. I couldn’t bear the thought that my idiocies meant any of my friends were out of purse.”

“If you can’t pay it back, Pavo, I’d say Rome was done.”

Some of the care lifted, Caesar drew a breath. “I agree, dad. I’ll pay it back, have no fear. Therefore,” he went on happily, “what am I worrying about? I’ll borrow however much it takes to be the greatest curule aedile Rome has ever seen!”

This Caesar proceeded to do, though at the end of the year he was a thousand talents in debt rather than the five hundred he had estimated. Crassus helped by whispering in these obliging moneylending ears that Caesar was a good prospect, so ought not to be charged extortionate rates of interest, and Balbus helped by putting him in touch with men who were prepared to be discreet as well as not too greedy. Ten percent simple interest, which was the legal rate. The only difficulty was that he had to begin to pay the loan back within a year—otherwise the interest would go from simple to compound; he would be paying interest on the interest he owed as well as on the capital borrowed.

*

The ludi Megalenses were the first games of the year and religiously the most solemn, perhaps because they heralded the arrival of spring (in years when the calendar coincided with the seasons) and emerged out of the terrible second war Rome had fought against Carthage, when Hannibal marched up and down Italy. It was then that the worship of Magna Mater, the Great Asian Earth Mother, was introduced to Rome, and her temple was erected on the Palatine looking directly down on the Vallis Murcia, in which lay the Circus Maximus. In many ways it was an inappropriate cult for conservative Rome; Romans abhorred eunuchs, flagellatory rites, and what was considered religious barbarism. However, the deed was done in the moment the Vestal Virgin Claudia miraculously pulled the barge bearing Magna Mater’s Navel Stone up the Tiber, and now Rome had to suffer the consequences as castrated priests bleeding from self-inflicted wounds screeched and trumpeted their way through the streets on the fourth day of April, towing the Great Mother’s effigy and begging alms from all those who came to watch this introduction to the games.

The games themselves were more typically Roman, and lasted for six days, from the fourth to the tenth day of April. The first day consisted of the procession, then a ceremony at Magna Mater’s temple, and finally some events in the Circus Maximus. The next four days were devoted to theatrical performances in a number of temporary wooden structures put up for the purpose, while the last day saw the procession of the Gods from the Capitol to the Circus, and many hours of chariot racing in the Circus.

As senior curule aedile, it was Caesar who officiated at the first day’s events, and Caesar who offered the Great Mother an oddly bloodless sacrifice, considering that Kubaba Cybele was a bloodthirsty lady; the offering was a dish of herbs.

Some called these games the patrician games, for on the first evening patrician families feasted each other and kept their guest lists absolutely patrician; it was always thought an auspicious omen for the Patriciate when the curule aedile who made the sacrifice was a patrician, as was Caesar. Bibulus of course was plebeian in rank, and felt utterly ostracized on that opening day; Caesar had filled the special seating on the great wide steps of the temple with patricians, doing special honor to the Claudii Pulchri, so intimately connected to the presence of Magna Mater in Rome.

Though on this first day the celebrating aediles and the official party did not descend into the Circus Maximus, but rather watched from Magna Mater’s temple steps, Caesar had elected to put on a pageant in the Circus instead of trying to entertain the crowd which had followed the Goddess’s bloody procession with the usual fare of boxing matches and foot races. Time did not permit chariot racing. Caesar had tapped into the Tiber and channeled water across the Forum Boarium to create a river inside the Circus, with the spina doing duty as Tiber Island and separating this cunning stream. While the vast crowd oohed and aahed its total enchantment, Caesar depicted the Vestal Claudia’s feat of strength. She towed the barge in from the Forum Boarium end where on the last day the starting gates for the chariots would be installed, took it once entirely around the spina, then brought it to rest at the Capena end of the stadium. The barge glittered with gilt and had billowing purple embroidered sails; all the eunuch priests were assembled on its deck around a glassy black ball representing the Navel Stone, while high on the poop stood Magna Mater’s statue in her chariot drawn by a pair of lions, absolutely lifelike. Nor did Caesar employ a strongman dressed as a Vestal for Claudia; he used a slight and slender, beautiful woman of Claudia’s type, and concealed the men who pushed the barge, shoulders bent to it in waist-deep water, with a gilded false hull.

The crowd went home ecstatic after this three-hour show. Caesar stood surrounded by delighted patricians, accepting their fulsome compliments for his taste and imagination. Bibulus took the hint and left in a huff because everyone ignored him.

There were no fewer than ten wooden theaters erected from the Campus Martius to the Capena Gate, the largest of which held ten thousand, the smallest five hundred. And instead of being content to have them look what they were, temporary, Caesar had insisted they be painted, decorated, gilded. Farces and mimes were staged in the bigger theaters, Terence and Plautus and Ennius in the smaller ones, and Sophocles and Aeschylus in the littlest, very Greek-looking auditorium; every thespian taste was catered for. From early in the morning until nearly dusk, all ten theaters played for four whole days, a feast. Literally a feast, as Caesar served free refreshments during the intervals.

On the last day the procession assembled on the Capitol and wended its way down through the Forum Romanum and the Via Triumphalis to the Circus Maximus, parading gilded statues of some Gods like Mars and Apollo—and Castor and Pollux. Since Caesar had paid for the gilding, it was perhaps not surprising that Pollux was much smaller in size than his twin, Castor. Such a laugh!

Though the games were supposed to be publicly funded and the chariot races were dearest to every spectator’s heart, in actual fact there was never State money for the entertainments themselves. This hadn’t stopped Caesar, who produced more chariot races on that last day of the ludi Megalenses than Rome had ever seen. It was his duty as senior curule aedile to start the races, each one comprising four chariots—Red, Blue, Green and White. The first race was for cars drawn by four horses poled up abreast, but other races saw two horses poled up abreast, or two or three horses harnessed in tandem one after the other; Caesar even put on races with unyoked horses ridden bareback by postilions.

The course of each race was five miles long, consisting of seven laps around the central division of the spina, a narrow and tall ridge adorned with many statues and showing at one end seven golden dolphins, at the other seven golden eggs perched in big chalices; as each lap ended one dolphin’s nose was pulled down to bring its tail up, and one golden egg was taken from its chalice. If the twelve hours of day and the twelve hours of night were of equal length, then each race took one quarter of an hour to run, which meant the pace was fast and furious, a wild gallop. Spills when they happened usually occurred rounding the metae, where each driver, reins wound many times about his waist and a dagger tucked into them to free him if he crashed, fought with skill and courage to keep on the inside, a shorter course.

The crowd adored that day, for instead of long breaks after each race, Caesar kept them coming with hardly an interruption; the bookmakers scrambling through the excited spectators taking bets had to work in a frenzy to keep up. Not a single bleacher was vacant, and wives sat on husbands’ laps to jam more in. No children, slaves or even freedmen were allowed, but women sat with men. At Caesar’s games more than two hundred thousand free Romans jammed into the Circus Maximus, while thousands more watched from every vantage point on Palatine and Aventine.

“They’re the best games Rome has ever seen,” said Crassus to Caesar at the end of the sixth day. “What a feat of engineering to do that to the Tiber, then remove it all and have dry ground again for the chariot races.”

“These games are nothing,” replied Caesar with a grin, “nor was it particularly difficult to use a Tiber swollen from the rains. Wait until you see the ludi Romani in September. Lucullus would be devastated if only he’d cross the pomerium to see.”

But between the ludi Megalenses and the ludi Romani he did something else so unusual and spectacular that Rome talked about it for years. When the city was choked with vacationing rural citizens who had poured into town for the great games early in September, Caesar put on funeral games in memory of his father, and used the entire Forum Romanum. Of course it was hot and cloudless, so he tented the whole area over with purple sailcloth, hitching its edges to the buildings on either side if they were high enough; where there were no buildings to serve as supports, he propped up the massive fabric structure with great poles and guy ropes. An exercise in engineering he relished, both devising and supervising it himself.

But when all this incredible construction began, a wild rumor went round that Caesar intended to display a thousand pairs of gladiators. Catulus summoned the Senate into session.

“What are you really planning, Caesar?” demanded Catulus to a packed House. “I’ve always known you intended to undermine the Republic, but a thousand pairs of gladiators when there are no legions to defend our beloved city? This isn’t secretly mining a tunnel, this is using a battering ram!”

“Well,” drawled Caesar, rising to his feet on the curule dais, “it is true that I do own a mighty battering ram, and also true that I have secretly mined many a tunnel, but always the one with the other.” He pulled the front neckline of his tunic away from his chest and put his head down to address the space thus created, and shouted, “Isn’t that right, O battering ram?” His hand fell, his tunic flattened, and he looked up with his sweetest smile. “He says that’s right.”

Crassus emitted a sound somewhere between a mew and a howl, but before his laugh could gather force Cicero’s bellow of mirth overtook it; the House dissolved in a gale of hilarity which left Catulus as speechless as his face was purple.

Whereupon Caesar proceeded to display the number he had always meant to display, three hundred and twenty pairs of gladiators gorgeously clad in silver.

But before the funeral games actually got under way, another sensation outraged Catulus and his colleagues. When the day dawned and the Forum appeared from the houses on the edge of the Germalus to look like Homer’s gently heaving wine-dark sea, those who came early to get the best places discovered something else than a tent had been added to the Forum Romanum. During the night Caesar had restored every statue of Gaius Marius to its pedestal or plinth, and put Gaius Marius’s trophies of war back inside the temple to Honor and Virtue he had built on the Capitol. But what could the arch-conservative senators actually do about it? The answer was, nothing. Rome had never forgotten—nor learned to stop loving—the magnificent Gaius Marius. Out of everything Caesar did during that memorable year when he was curule aedile, the restoration of Gaius Marius was deemed his greatest act.

Naturally Caesar didn’t waste this opportunity to remind all the electors who and what he was; in every little arena wherein some of his three hundred and twenty pairs of sawdust soldiers clashed—at the bottom of the Comitia well, in the space between the tribunals, near the temple of Vesta, in front of the Porticus Margaritaria, on the Velia—he had his father’s ancestry proclaimed, all the way back to Venus and to Romulus.

Two days after this, Caesar (and Bibulus) staged the ludi Romani, which at this time ran for twelve days. The parade from the Capitol through the Forum Romanum to the Circus Maximus took three hours to pass. The chief magistrates and the Senate led it off, with bands of beautifully mounted youths following, then all the chariots which were to race and the athletes who were to compete; many hundreds of dancers and mummers and musicians; dwarves tricked out as satyrs and fauns; every prostitute in Rome clad in her flame-colored toga; slaves bearing hundreds of gorgeous silver or gold urns and vases; groups of mock warriors in bronze-belted scarlet tunics wearing fabulous crested helmets on their heads and brandishing swords and spears; the sacrificial animals; and then, in last and most honored place, all twelve major Gods and many other Gods and heroes riding on open litters of gold and purple, realistically painted, clad in exquisite clothes.

Caesar had decorated the whole of the Circus Maximus, and gone one better than for any of his other entertainments by using millions of fresh flowers. As Romans adored flowers, the vast audience was ravished almost to swooning point, drowned in the perfume of roses, violets, stocks, wallflowers. He served free refreshments, thought of novelties of all kinds from rope walkers to fire belchers to scantily clad women who seemed to be able almost to turn themselves inside out.

Each day of the games saw something else new and different, and the chariot races were superb.

Said Bibulus to any who remembered him enough to comment, “He told me I’d be Pollux to his Castor. How right he was! I may as well have saved my precious three hundred talents—they only served to pour food and wine down two hundred thousand greedy throats, while he took the credit for the rest.”

Said Cicero to Caesar, “On the whole I dislike games, but I must confess yours were splendid. To have the most lavish in history is laudable enough in one way, but what I really liked about your games was that they weren’t vulgar.”

Said Titus Pomponius Atticus, knight plutocrat, to Marcus Licinius Crassus, senatorial plutocrat, “It was brilliant. He managed to give business to everybody. What a year the flower growers and wholesalers have had! They’ll vote for him for the rest of his political career. Not to mention bakers, millers—oh, very, very clever!”

And said young Caepio Brutus to Julia, “Uncle Cato is really disgusted. Of course he is a great friend of Bibulus’s. But why is it that your father always has to make such a splash?”

*

Cato loathed Caesar.

When he had finally returned to Rome at the time Caesar took up his duties as curule aedile, he executed his brother Caepio’s will. This necessitated a visit to see Servilia and Brutus, who at almost eighteen years of age was well embarked on his Forum career, though he had undertaken no court case yet.

“I dislike the fact that you are now a patrician, Quintus Servilius,” said Cato, punctilious in his use of the correct name, “but as I was not willing to be anyone other than a Porcius Cato, I suppose I must approve.” He leaned forward abruptly. “What are you doing in the Forum? You should be in the field with someone’s army, like your friend Gaius Cassius.”

“Brutus,” said Servilia stiffly, emphasizing the name, “has received an exemption.”

“No one ought to be exempt unless he’s crippled.”

“His chest is weak,” said Servilia.

“His chest would soon improve if he got out and did his legal duty, which is to serve in the legions. So would his skin.”

“Brutus will go when I consider him well enough.”

“Doesn’t he have a tongue?” Cato demanded, but not in the fierce way he would have before leaving for the East, though it still came out aggressively. “Can’t he speak for himself? You smother this boy, Servilia, and that is un-Roman.”

To all of which Brutus listened mumchance, and in a severe dilemma. On the one hand he longed to see his mother lose this—or any other—battle, but on the other hand he dreaded military duty. Cassius had gone off gladly, while Brutus developed a cough which kept getting worse. It hurt to see himself lessened in his Uncle Cato’s eyes, but Uncle Cato didn’t tolerate weakness or frailty of any kind, and Uncle Cato, winner of many decorations for valor in battle, would never understand people who didn’t thrill when they picked up a sword. So now he began to cough, a thick hacking sound which started at the base of his chest and reverberated all the way to his throat. That of course produced copious phlegm, which enabled him to look wildly from his mother to his uncle, mumble an excuse, and leave.

“See what you’ve done?” asked Servilia, teeth bared.

“He needs exercise and a bit of life in the open air. I also suspect you’re quacking his skin, it looks appalling.”

“Brutus is not your responsibility!”

“Under the terms of Caepio’s will, he most certainly is.”

“Uncle Mamercus has already been through everything with him, he doesn’t need you. In fact, Cato, no one needs you. Why don’t you take yourself off and jump into the Tiber?”

“Everyone needs me, so much is plain. When I left for the East, your boy was starting to go to the Campus Martius, and for a while it looked as if he might actually learn to be a man. Now I find a mama’s lapdog! What’s more, how could you let him contract himself in marriage to a girl with no dowry to speak of, another wretched patrician? What sort of weedy children will they have?’’

“I would hope,” said Servilia icily, “that they have sons like Julia’s father and daughters like me. Say what you will about patricians and the old aristocracy, Cato, in Julia’s father you see everything a Roman ought to be, from soldier to orator to politician. Brutus wanted the match, actually, it wasn’t my idea, but I wish I had thought of it. Blood as good as his own—and that is far more important than a dowry! However, for your information her father has guaranteed a dowry of one hundred talents. Nor does Brutus need a girl with a big dowry, now that he’s Caepio’s heir.”

“If he’s prepared to wait years for a bride, he could have waited a few more and married my Porcia,” said Cato. “That is an alliance I would have applauded wholeheartedly! My dear Caepio’s money would have gone to the children of both sides of his family.”

“Oh, I see!” sneered Servilia. “The truth will out, eh, Cato? Wouldn’t change your name to get Caepio’s money, but what a brilliant scheme to get it through the distaff side! My son marry the descendant of a slave? Over my dead body!”

“It might happen yet,” said Cato complacently.

“If that happened, I’d feed the girl hot coals for supper!” Servilia tensed, understanding that she was not doing as well against Cato as she used to—he was cooler, more detached, and more difficult to wound. She produced her nastiest barb. “Aside from the fact that you, the descendant of a slave, are Porcia’s father, there’s her mother to think of too. And I can assure you that I will never let my son marry the child of a woman who can’t wait for her husband to come home!”

In the old days he would have flown at her verbally, shouted and badgered. Today he stiffened, said nothing for a long moment.

“I think that statement needs elucidating,” he said at last.

“I am happy to oblige. Atilia has been a very naughty girl.”

“Oh, Servilia, you are one of the best reasons why Rome needs a few laws on the books to oblige people to hold their tongues!”

Servilia smiled sweetly. “Ask any of your friends if you doubt me. Ask Bibulus or Favonius or Ahenobarbus, they’ve been here to witness the carryings-on. It’s no secret.”

His mouth drew in, lips disappearing. “Who?” he asked.

“Why, that Roman among Romans, of course! Caesar. And don’t ask which Caesar—you know which Caesar has the reputation. My darling Brutus’s prospective father-in-law.”

Cato rose without a word.

He went home immediately to his modest house in a modest lane at the viewless center of the Palatine, wherein he had installed his philosopher friend, Athenodorus Cordylion, in the only guest suite before he had remembered to greet his wife and children.

Reflection confirmed Servilia’s malice. Atilia was different. For one thing, she smiled occasionally and presumed to speak before being spoken to; for another, her breasts had filled out, and that in some peculiar way revolted him. Though three days had elapsed since his arriving in Rome, he had not visited her sleeping cubicle (he preferred to occupy the master sleeping cubicle alone) to assuage what even his revered great-grandfather Cato the Censor had deemed a natural urge, not only permissible between man and wife (or slave and master), but really quite an admirable urge.

Oh, what dear kind benevolent God had prevented him? To have put himself inside his legal property not knowing that she had become someone else’s illegal property—Cato shivered, had to force down his rising gorge. Caesar. Gaius Julius Caesar, the worst of a decayed and degenerate lot. What on earth had he seen in Atilia, whom Cato had chosen because she was the absolute opposite of round, dark, adorable Aemilia Lepida? Cato knew himself to be a little intellectually slow because it had been drummed into him from infancy that he was, but he didn’t have to search very far for Caesar’s reason. Patrician though he was, that man was going to be a demagogue, another Gaius Marius. How many wives of the stalwart traditionalists had he seduced? Rumor was rife. Yet here was he, Marcus Porcius Cato, not old enough yet to be in the Senate—but obviously deemed a future enemy of note. That was good! It said he, Marcus Porcius Cato, had the strength and will to be a great force in Forum and Senate. Caesar had cuckolded him! Not for one moment did it occur to him that Servilia was the cause, for he had no idea Servilia lived on intimate terms with Caesar.

Well, Atilia may have admitted Caesar into her bed and between her legs, but she hadn’t admitted Cato since the day it happened. What Caepio’s death had begun, Atilia’s treachery finished. Never care! Never, never care. To care meant endless pain.

He did not interview Atilia. He simply summoned his steward to his study and instructed the man to pack her up and throw her out at once, send her back to her brother.

A few words scrawled on a sheet of paper, and the deed was done. She was divorced, and he would not give back one sestertius of an adultress’s dowry. As he waited in his study he heard her voice in the distance, a wail, a sob, a frantic scream for her children, and all the time his steward’s voice overriding hers, the noise of slaves falling over each other to do the master’s bidding. Finally came the front door opening, closing. After which, his steward’s knock.

“The lady Atilia is gone, domine.”

“Send my children to me.”

They came in not many moments later, bewildered at the fuss but unaware what had taken place. That both were his he could not deny, even now that doubt gnawed. Porcia was six years old, tall and thin and angular, with his chestnut hair in a thicker and curlier version, his grey and well-spaced eyes, his long neck, his nose in a smaller form. Cato Junior was two years younger, a skinny little boy who always reminded Cato of what he himself had been like in the days when that Marsian upstart Silo had held him out the window and threatened to drop him on sharp rocks; except that Cato Junior was timid rather than doughty, and tended to cry easily. And, alas, already it was apparent that Porcia was the clever one, the little orator and philosopher. Useless gifts in a girl.

“Children, I have divorced your mother for infidelity,” said Cato in his normal harsh voice, and without expression. “She has been unchaste, and proven herself unfit to be wife or mother. I have forbidden her entry to this house, and I will not allow either of you to see her again.”

The little boy hardly understood all these grown-up words, save that something awful had just happened, and that Mama was at the heart of it. His big grey eyes filled with tears; his lip wobbled. That he did not burst into howls was purely due to his sister’s sudden grip on his arm, the signal that he must control himself. And she, small Stoic who would have died to please her father, stood straight and looked indomitable, no tear or wobble of the lip.

“Mama has gone into exile,” she said.

“That is as good a way of putting it as any.”

“Is she still a citizen?’’ asked Porcia in a voice very like her father’s, no lilt or melody to it.

“I cannot deprive her of that, Porcia, nor would I want to. What I have deprived her of is any participation in our lives, for she does not deserve to participate. Your mother is a bad woman. A slut, a whore, a harlot, an adultress. She has been consorting with a man called Gaius Julius Caesar, and he is all that the Patriciate stands for—corrupt, immoral, outmoded.”

“Will we truly never see Mama again?”

“Not while you live under my roof.”

The intent behind the grown-up words had finally sunk in; four-year-old Cato Junior began to wail desolately. “I want my mama! I want my mama! I want my mama!”

“Tears are not a right act,” said the father, “when they are shed for unworthy reasons. You will behave like a proper Stoic and stop this unmanly weeping. You cannot have your mother, and that is that. Porcia, take him away. The next time I see him I expect to see a man, not a silly runny-nosed baby.”

“I will make him understand,” she said, gazing at her father in blind adoration. “As long as we are with you, Pater, everything is all right. It is you we love most, not Mama.”

Cato froze. “Never love!” he shouted. “Never, never love! A Stoic does not love! A Stoic does not want to be loved!”

“I didn’t think Zeno forbade love, just wrong acts,” said the daughter. “Is it not a right act to love all that is good? You are good, Pater. I must love you, Zeno says it is a right act.”

How to answer that? “Then temper it with detachment and never let it rule you,” he said. “Nothing which debases the mind must rule, and emotions debase the mind.”

When the children had gone, Cato too left the room. Not far down the colonnade were Athenodorus Cordylion, a flagon of wine, some good books, and even better conversation. From this day on, wine and books and conversation must fill every void.

Ah, but it cost Cato dearly to meet the brilliant and feted curule aedile as he went about his duties so stunningly well, and with such a flair!

“He acts as if he’s King of Rome,” said Cato to Bibulus.

“I think he believes he’s King of Rome, dispensing grain and circuses. Everything in the grand manner, from the easy way he has with ordinary people to his arrogance in the Senate.”

“He is my avowed enemy.”

“He’s the enemy of every man who wants the proper mos maiorum, no man to stand one iota taller than any of his peers,” said Bibulus. “I will fight him until I die!”

“He’s Gaius Marius all over again,” said Cato.

But Bibulus looked scornful. “Marius? No, Cato, no! Gaius Marius knew he could never be King of Rome—he was just a squire from Arpinum, like his equally bucolic cousin Cicero. Caesar is no Marius, take my word for it. Caesar is another Sulla, and that is far, far worse.”

*

In July of that year Marcus Porcius Cato was elected one of the quaestors, and drew a lot for the senior of the three urban quaestors; his two colleagues were the great plebeian aristocrat Marcus Claudius Marcellus and a Lollius from that Picentine family Pompey the Great was happily thrusting into the heart of Roman dominance of Senate and Comitia.

With some months to go before he actually took office or was allowed to attend the Senate, Cato occupied his days in studying commerce and commercial law; he hired a retired Treasury bookkeeper to teach him how the tribuni aerarii who headed that domain did their accounting, and he ground away at what did not come at all naturally until he knew as much about State finances as Caesar knew, unaware that what cost him so much pain had been taken in almost instantly by his avowed enemy.

The quaestors took their duty lightly and never bothered to concern themselves overmuch with an actual policing of what went on in the Treasury; the important part of the job to the average urban quaestor was liaison with the Senate, which debated and then deputed where the State’s moneys were to go. It was accepted practice to cast a cursory eye over the books Treasury staff let them see from time to time, and to accept Treasury figures when the Senate considered Rome’s finances. The quaestors also did their friends and families favors if these people were in debt to the State by turning a blind eye to the fact or ordering their names erased from the official records. In short, the quaestors located in Rome simply permitted the permanent Treasury staff to go about their business and get the work done. And certainly neither the permanent Treasury staff nor Marcellus and Lollius, the two other urban quaestors, had any idea that things were about to change radically.

Cato had no intention of being lax. He intended to be more thorough within the Treasury than Pompey the Great within Our Sea. At dawn on the fifth day of December, the day he took office, he was there knocking at the door in the side of the basement to the temple of Saturn, not pleased to learn that the sun was well up before anyone came to work.

“The workday begins at dawn,” he said to the Treasury chief, Marcus Vibius, when that worthy arrived breathless after a harried clerk had sent for him urgently.

“There is no rule to that effect,” said Marcus Vibius smoothly. “We work within a timetable we set for ourselves, and it’s flexible.”

“Rubbish!” said Cato scornfully. “I am the elected custodian of these premises, and I intend to see that the Senate and People of Rome get value for every sestertius of their tax moneys. Their tax moneys pay you and all the rest who work here, don’t forget!”

Not a good beginning. From that point on, however, things for Marcus Vibius just got worse and worse. He had a zealot on his hands. When on the rare occasions in the past he had found himself cursed with an obstreperous quaestor, he had proceeded to put the fellow in his place by withholding all specialized knowledge of the job; not having a Treasury background, quaestors could do only what they were allowed to do. Unfortunately that tack didn’t stop Cato, who revealed that he knew quite as much about how the Treasury functioned as Marcus Vibius did. Possibly more.

With him Cato had brought several slaves whom he had seen trained in various aspects of Treasury pursuits, and every day he was there at dawn with his little retinue to drive Vibius and his underlings absolutely mad. What was this? Why was that? Where was so-and-so? When had such-and-such? How did whatever happen? And on and on and on. Cato was persistent to the point of insult, impossible to fob off with pat answers, and impervious to irony, sarcasm, abuse, flattery, excuses, fainting fits.

“I feel,” gasped Marcus Vibius after two months of this, when he had gathered up his courage to seek solace and assistance from his patron, Catulus, “as if all the Furies are hounding me harder than ever they hounded Orestes! I don’t care what you have to do to shut Cato up and ship him out, I just want it done! I have been your loyal and devoted client for over twenty years, I am a tribunus aerarius of the First Class, and now I find both my sanity and my position imperiled. Get rid of Cato!”

The first attempt failed miserably. Catulus proposed to the House that Cato be given a special task, checking army accounts, as he was so brilliant at checking accounts. But Cato simply stood his ground by recommending the names of four men who could be temporarily employed to do a job no elected quaestor should be asked to do. Thank you, he would stick to what he was there for.

After that Catulus thought of craftier ploys, none of which worked. While the broom sweeping out every corner of the Treasury never wore down or wore out. In March the heads began to roll. First one, then two, then three and four and five Treasury officials found Cato had terminated their tenure and emptied out their desks. Then in April the axe descended: Cato fired Marcus Vibius, and added insult to injury by having him prosecuted for fraud.

Neatly caught in the patron’s trap, Catulus had no alternative other than to defend Vibius personally in court. One day’s airing of the evidence was enough to tell Catulus that he was going to lose. Time to appeal to Cato’s sense of fitness, to the time-honored precepts of the client-and-patron system.

“My dear Cato, you must stop,” said Catulus as the court broke up for the day. “I know poor Vibius hasn’t been as careful as perhaps he ought, but he’s one of us! Fire all the clerks and bookkeepers you like, but leave poor Vibius in his job, please! I give you my solemn word as a consular and an ex-censor that from now on Vibius will behave impeccably. Just drop this awful prosecution! Leave the man something!”

This had been said softly, but Cato had only one vocal volume, and that was top of his voice. His answer was shouted in his usual stentorian tones, and arrested all progress out of the area. Every face turned; every ear cocked to listen.

“Quintus Lutatius, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!” yelled Cato. “How could you be so blind to your own dignitas as to have the effrontery to remind me you’re a consular and ex-censor, then try to wheedle me out of doing my sworn duty? Well, let me tell you that I will be ashamed if I have to summon the court’s bailiffs to eject you for attempting to pervert the course of Roman justice! For that is what you’re doing, perverting Roman justice!”

Whereupon he stalked off, leaving Catulus standing bereft of speech, so nonplussed that when the case resumed the following day he didn’t appear for the defense at all. Instead, he tried to acquit himself of his patron’s duty by talking the jury into a verdict of ABSOLVO even if Cato succeeded in producing more damning evidence than Cicero had to convict Verres. Bribe he would not; talk was both cheaper and more ethical. One of the jurors was Marcus Lollius, Cato’s colleague in the quaestorship. And Lollius agreed to vote for acquittal. He was, however, extremely ill, so Catulus had him carried into court on a litter. When the verdict came in, it was ABSOLVO. Lollius’s vote had tied the jury, and a tied jury meant acquittal.

Did that defeat Cato? No, it did not. When Vibius turned up at the Treasury, he found Cato barring his path. Nor would Cato consent to re-employ him. In the end even Catulus, summoned to preside over the unpleasantly public scene outside the door into the Treasury, had to give up. Vibius had lost his position, and that was going to be that. Then Cato refused to give Vibius the pay owing to him.

“You must!” cried Catulus.

“I must not!” cried Cato. “He cheated the State, he owes the State far more than his pay. Let it help to compensate Rome.”

“Why, why, why?” Catulus demanded. “Vibius was acquitted!”

“I am not,” shouted Cato, “going to take the vote of a sick man into account! He was out of his head with fever.”

And so in the end it had to be left. Absolutely sure that Cato would lose, the survivors in the Treasury had been planning all kinds of celebrations. But after Catulus shepherded the weeping Vibius away, the survivors in the Treasury took the hint. As if by magic every account and every set of books settled into perfect order; debtors were made to rectify years of neglected repayments, and creditors were suddenly reimbursed sums outstanding for years. Marcellus, Lollius, Catulus and the rest of the Senate took the hint too. The Great Treasury War was over, and only one man stood on his feet: Marcus Porcius Cato. Whom all of Rome was praising, amazed that the Government of Rome had finally produced a man so incorruptible he couldn’t be bought. Cato was famous.

“What I don’t understand,” said a shaken Catulus to his much loved brother-in-law Hortensius, “is what Cato intends to make of his life! Does he really think he can vote-catch by being utterly incorruptible? It will work in the tribal elections, perhaps, but if he continues as he’s begun, he’ll never win an election in the Centuries. No one in the First Class will vote for him.”

Hortensius was inclined to temporize. “I understand what an invidious position he put you in, Quintus, but I must say I do rather admire him. Because you’re right. He’ll never win a consular election in the Centuries. Imagine the kind of passion it needs to produce Cato’s sort of integrity!”

“You,” snarled Catulus, losing his temper, “are a fish-fancying dilettante with more money than sense!”

*

But having won the Great Treasury War, Marcus Porcius Cato set out to find fresh fields of endeavor, and succeeded when he started perusing the financial records stored in Sulla’s Tabularium. Out of date they might be, but one set of accounts, very well kept, suggested the theme of his next war. These were the records itemizing all those who during Sulla’s dictatorship had been paid the sum of two talents for proscribing men as traitors to the State. In themselves they spoke no more than figures could, but Cato began to investigate each person on the list who had been paid two talents (and sometimes several lots of two talents) with a view to prosecuting those who turned out to have extracted it by violence. At the time it had been legal to kill a man once he was proscribed, but Sulla’s day had gone, and Cato thought little of the legal chances these hated and reviled men would stand in today’s courts—even if today’s courts were Sulla’s brainchild.

Sadly, one small canker ate at the righteous virtue of Cato’s motives, for in this new project he saw an opportunity to make life very difficult for Gaius Julius Caesar. Having finished his year as curule aedile, Caesar had been given another job; he was appointed as the iudex of the Murder Court.

It never occurred to Cato that Caesar would be willing to co-operate with a member of the boni by trying those recipients of two talents who had murdered to get them; expecting the usual sort of obstructive tactics that court presidents used to wriggle out of trying people they didn’t think ought to be on trial, Cato discovered to his chagrin that Caesar was not only willing, but even prepared to be helpful.

“You send them, I’ll try them,” said Caesar to Cato cheerfully.

Despite the fact that all of Rome had buzzed when Cato divorced Atilia and sent her back dowerless to her family, citing Caesar as her lover, it was not in Caesar’s nature to feel at a disadvantage in these dealings with Cato. Nor was it in Caesar’s nature to suffer qualms of conscience or pity at Atilia’s fate; she had taken her chances, she could always have said no. Thus the president of the Murder Court and the incorruptible quaestor did well together.

Then Cato abandoned the small fish, the slaves, freed-men and centurions who had used those two-talent rewards to found fortunes. He decided to charge Catilina with the murder of Marcus Marius Gratidianus. It had happened after Sulla won the battle at the Colline Gate of Rome, and Marius Gratidianus had been Catilina’s brother-in-law at the time. Later, Catilina inherited the estate.

“He’s a bad man, and I’m going to get him,” said Cato to Caesar. “If I don’t, he’ll be consul next year.”

“What do you suspect he might do if he were consul?” Caesar asked, curious. “I agree that he’s a bad man, but—”

“If he became consul, he’d set himself up as another Sulla.”

“As Dictator? He couldn’t.”

These days Cato’s eyes were full of pain, but they looked into Caesar’s cold pale orbs sternly. “He’s a Sergius; he has the oldest blood in Rome, even including yours, Caesar. If Sulla had not had the blood, he couldn’t have succeeded. That’s why I don’t trust any of you antique aristocrats. You’re descended from kings and you all want to be kings.”

“You’re wrong, Cato. At least about me. As to Catilina—well, his activities under Sulla were certainly abhorrent, so why not try? I just don’t think you’ll succeed.”

“Oh, I’ll succeed!” shouted Cato. “I have dozens of witnesses to swear they saw Catilina lop Gratidianus’s head off.”

“You’d do better to postpone the trial until just before the elections,” Caesar said steadily. “My court is quick, I don’t waste any time. If you arraign him now, the trial will be over before applications close for the curule elections. That means Catilina will be able to stand if he’s acquitted. Whereas if you arraign him later, my cousin Lucius Caesar as supervisor would never permit the candidacy of a man facing a murder charge.”

“That,” said Cato stubbornly, “only postpones the evil day. I want Catilina banished from Rome and any dream of being consul.”

“All right then, but be it on your own head!” said Caesar.

The truth was that Cato’s head had been just a little turned and swollen by his victories to date. Sums of two talents were pouring into the Treasury now because Cato insisted on enforcing the law the consul/censor Lentulus Clodianus had put on the tablets some years before, requiring that all such moneys be paid back no matter how peacefully they had been collected. Cato could foresee no obstacles in the case of Lucius Sergius Catilina. As quaestor he didn’t prosecute himself, but he spent much thought on choosing a prosecutor—Lucius Lucceius, close friend of Pompey’s and an orator of great distinction. This, as Cato well knew, was a shrewd move; it proclaimed that Catilina’s trial was not at the whim of the boni, but an affair all Roman men must take seriously, as one of Pompey’s friends was collaborating with the boni. Caesar too!

When Catilina heard what was in the wind, he shut his teeth together and cursed. For two consular elections in a row he had seen himself denied the chance to stand because of a trial process; now here he was again, on trial. Time to see an end to them, these twisted persecutions aimed at the heart of the Patriciate by mushrooms like Cato, descended from a slave. For generations the Sergii had been excluded from the highest offices in Rome due to poverty—a fact that had been as true of the Julii Caesares until Gaius Marius permitted them to rise again. Well, Sulla had permitted the Sergii to rise again, and Lucius Sergius Catilina was going to put his clan back in the consul’s ivory chair if he had to overthrow the whole of Rome to do so! He had, besides, a very ambitious wife in the beauteous Aurelia Orestilla; he loved her madly and he wanted to please her. That meant becoming consul.

It was when he understood that the trial would come on well before the elections that he decided on a course of action: this time he would be acquitted in time to stand—if he could ensure acquittal. So he went to see Marcus Crassus and struck a bargain with that senatorial plutocrat. In return for Crassus’s support throughout the trial, he undertook when consul to push Crassus’s two pet schemes through the Senate and the Popular Assembly. The Trans-Padane Gauls would be enfranchised, and Egypt formally annexed into the empire of Rome as Crassus’s private fief.

Though his name was never bruited as one of Rome’s outstanding advocates for technique, brilliance or oratorical skills, Crassus nonetheless had a formidable reputation in the courts because of his doggedness and his immense willingness to defend even the humblest of his clients to the top of his bent. He was also very much respected and cultivated in knight circles because so much Crassus capital underlay all kinds of business ventures. And these days all juries were tripartite, consisting of one third of senators, one third of knights belonging to the Eighteen, and one third of knights belonging to the more junior tribuni aerarii Centuries. It was therefore safe to say that Crassus had tremendous influence with at least two thirds of any jury, and that this influence extended to those senators who owed him money. All of which meant that Crassus didn’t need to bribe a jury to secure the verdict he wanted; the jury was disposed to believe that whatever verdict he wanted was the right verdict to deliver.

Catilina’s defense was simple. Yes, he had indeed lopped off the head of his brother-in-law, Marcus Marius Gratidianus; he did not deny the deed because he could not deny the deed. But at the time he had been one of Sulla’s legates, and he had acted under Sulla’s orders. Sulla had wanted Marius Gratidianus’s head to fire into Praeneste as a missile aimed at convincing Young Marius that he couldn’t succeed in defying Sulla any longer.

Caesar presided over a court which listened patiently to the prosecutor Lucius Lucceius and his team of supporting counsel, and realized very soon that it was a court which had no intention of convicting Catilina. Nor did it. The verdict came in ABSOLVO by a large majority, and even Cato afterward was unable to find hard evidence that Crassus had needed to bribe.

“I told you so,” said Caesar to Cato.

“It isn’t over yet!” barked Cato, and stalked off.

*

There were seven candidates for the consulship when the nominations closed, and the field was an interesting one. His acquittal meant Catilina had declared himself, and he had to be regarded as a virtual certainty for one of the two posts. As Cato had said, he had the blood. He was also the same charming and persuasive man he had been at the time he wooed the Vestal Virgin Fabia, so his following was very large. If too it consisted of too many men who skated perilously close to ruin, that did not negate its power. Besides which, it was now generally known that Marcus Crassus supported him, and Marcus Crassus commanded very many of the First Class of voters.

Servilia’s husband Silanus was another candidate, though his health was not good; had he been hale and hearty, he would have had little trouble in gathering enough votes to be elected. But the fate of Quintus Marcius Rex, doomed to be sole consul by the deaths of his junior colleague and then the suffect replacement, intruded into everyone’s mind. Silanus didn’t look as if he would last out his year, and no one thought it wise to let Catilina hold the reins of Rome without a colleague, Crassus notwithstanding.

Another likely candidate was the vile Gaius Antonius Hybrida, whom Caesar had tried unsuccessfully to prosecute for the torture, maiming and murder of many Greek citizens during Sulla’s Greek wars. Hybrida had eluded justice, but public opinion inside Rome had forced him to go into a voluntary exile on the island of Cephallenia; the discovery of some grave mounds had yielded him fabulous wealth, so when he returned to Rome to find himself expelled from the Senate, Hybrida simply started again. First he re-entered the Senate by becoming a tribune of the plebs; then in the following year he bribed his way into a praetorship, ardently supported by that ambitious and able New Man Cicero, who had cause to be grateful to him. Poor Cicero had found himself in a severe financial embarrassment brought about by his passion for collecting Greek statues and installing them in a plethora of country villas; it was Hybrida who lent him the money to extricate himself. Ever since then Cicero spoke up for him, and was doing so at the moment so strenuously that it could safely be deduced that he and Hybrida were planning to run as a team for the consulship, Cicero lending their campaign respectability and Hybrida putting up the money.

The man who might have offered Catilina the stiffest competition was undoubtedly Marcus Tullius Cicero, but the trouble was that Cicero had no ancestors; he was a homo novus, a New Man. Sheer legal and oratorical brilliance had pushed him steadily up the cursus honorum, but much of the First Class of the Centuries deemed him a presumptuous hayseed, as did the boni. Consuls ought to be men of proven Roman origins, and from illustrious families. Though everyone knew Cicero to be an honest man of high ability (and knew Catilina to be extremely shady), still and all the feeling in Rome was that Catilina deserved the consulship ahead of Cicero.

After Catilina was acquitted, Cato held a conference with Bibulus and Ahenobarbus, who had been quaestor two years before; all three were now in the Senate, which meant they were now fully entrenched within the ultra-conservative rump, the boni.

“We cannot permit Catilina to be elected consul!” brayed Cato. “He’s seduced the rapacious Marcus Crassus into supporting him.”

“I agree,” said Bibulus calmly. “Between the two of them, they’ll wreak havoc on the mos maiorum. The Senate will be full of Gauls, and Rome will have another province to worry about.”

“What do we do?” asked Ahenobarbus, a young man more famous for the quality of his temper than his intellect.

“We seek an interview with Catulus and Hortensius,” Bibulus said, “and between us we work out a way to swing opinion in the First Class from the idea of Catilina as consul.” He cleared his throat. “However, I suggest that we appoint Cato the leader of our deputation.”

“I refuse to be a leader of any kind!” yelled Cato.

“Yes, I know that,” Bibulus said patiently, “but the fact remains that ever since the Great Treasury War you’ve become a symbol to most of Rome. You may be the youngest of us, but you’re also the most respected. Catulus and Hortensius are well aware of that. Therefore you will act as our spokesman.”

“It ought to be you” from Cato, annoyed.

“The boni are against men thinking themselves better than their peers, and I am of the boni, Marcus. Whoever is the most suitable on a particular day is the spokesman. Today, that’s you.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Ahenobarbus, “is why we have to seek an audience at all. Catulus is our leader, he ought to be summoning us.”

“He’s not himself,” Bibulus explained. “When Caesar humiliated him in the House over that battering-ram business, he lost clout.” The cool silvery gaze transferred to Cato. “Nor were you very tactful, Marcus, when you humiliated him in public while Vibius was on trial for fraud. Caesar was self-evident, but a man loses huge amounts of clout when his own adherents upbraid him.”

“He shouldn’t have said what he did to me!”

Bibulus sighed. “Sometimes, Cato, you’re more a liability than an asset!”

The note asking Catulus for an audience was under Cato’s seal, and written by Cato. Catulus summoned his brother-in-law Hortensius (Catulus was married to Hortensius’s sister, Hortensia, and Hortensius was married to Catulus’s sister, Lutatia) feeling a small glow of pleasure; that Cato should seek his help was balm to his wounded pride.

“I agree that Catilina cannot be allowed the consulship,” he said stiffly. “His deal with Marcus Crassus is now public property because the man can’t resist an opportunity to boast, and at this stage he’s convinced he can’t lose. I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem, and I’ve come to the conclusion that we ought to use Catilina’s boasting of his alliance with Marcus Crassus. There are many knights who esteem Crassus, but only because there are limitations to his power. I predict that droves of knights won’t want to see Crassus’s influence increased by an influx of clients from across the Padus, as well as from all that Egyptian money. If they thought Crassus would share Egypt with them, it would be different, but luckily everyone knows Crassus won’t share. Though technically Egypt would belong to Rome, in actual fact it would become the private kingdom of Marcus Licinius Crassus to rape to his heart’s content.”

“The trouble is,” said Quintus Hortensius, “that the rest of the field is horribly unappealing. Silanus, yes—if he were a well man, which he’s so obviously not. Besides which, he declined to take a province after his term as praetor on the grounds of ill health, and that won’t impress the voters. Some of the candidates—Minucius Thermus, for example—are hopeless.”

“There’s Antonius Hybrida,” said Ahenobarbus.

Bibulus’s lip curled. “If we take Hybrida—a bad man, but so monumentally inert that he won’t do the State any harm—we also have to take that self-opinionated pimple Cicero.”

A gloomy silence fell, broken by Catulus.

“Then the real decision is, which one of two unpalatable men is the preferable alternative?” he said slowly. “Do the boni want Catilina with Crassus triumphantly pulling his strings, or do we want a low-class braggart like Cicero lording it over us?”

“Cicero,” said Hortensius.

“Cicero,” said Bibulus.

“Cicero,” said Ahenobarbus.

And, very reluctantly from Cato, “Cicero.”

“Very well,” said Catulus, “Cicero it is. Ye Gods, I’ll find it hard to hang on to my gorge in the House next year! A jumped-up New Man as one of Rome’s consuls. Tchah!”

“Then I suggest,” said Hortensius, pulling a face, “that we all eat very sparingly before meetings of the Senate next year.”

The group dispersed to go to work, and for a month they worked very hard indeed. Much to Catulus’s chagrin it became obvious that Cato, barely thirty years old, was the one who had the most clout. The Great Treasury War and all those proscription rewards safely back in the State coffers had made a terrific impression on the First Class, who had been the ones to suffer most under Sulla’s proscriptions. Cato was a hero to the Ordo Equester, and if Cato said to vote for Cicero and Hybrida, then that was whom every knight lower than the Eighteen would vote for!

The result was that the consuls-elect were Marcus Tullius Cicero in senior place and Gaius Antonius Hybrida as his junior colleague. Cicero was jubilant, never really understanding that he owed his victory to circumstances having nothing to do with merit or integrity or clout. Had Catilina not been a candidate, Cicero would never have been elected at all. But as no one told him this, he strutted around Forum Romanum and Senate in a daze of happiness liberally larded with conceit. Oh, what a year! Senior consul in suo anno, the proud father of a son at last, and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Tullia, formally betrothed to the wealthy and august Gaius Calpurnius Piso Frugi. Even Terentia was being nice to him!

*

When Lucius Decumius heard that the present consuls, Lucius Caesar and Marcius Figulus, proposed to legislate the crossroads colleges out of existence, he was thrown into a panic-stricken rage and horror, and ran immediately to see his patron, Caesar.

“This,” he said wrathfully, “is just not fair! When has we ever done anything wrong? We minds our own business!”

A statement which threw Caesar into a dilemma, for he of course knew the circumstances leading to the proposed new law.

It all went back to the consulship of Gaius Piso three years earlier, and to the tribunate of the plebs of Pompey’s man, Gaius Manilius. It had been Aulus Gabinius’s job to secure the eradication of the pirates for Pompey; now it became Gaius Manilius’s job to secure the command against the two kings for Pompey. In one way an easier job, thanks to Pompey’s brilliant handling of the pirates, yet in another way a more difficult job, as those opposed to special commands could see only too clearly that Pompey was a man of enormous ability who might just use this new commission to make himself Dictator when he returned victorious from the East. And with Gaius Piso as sole consul, Manilius faced an adamant and irascible foe in the Senate.

At first glance Manilius’s initial bill seemed harmless and irrelevant to Pompey’s concerns: he merely asked the Plebeian Assembly to distribute Rome’s citizen freedmen across the full gamut of the thirty-five tribes, instead of keeping them confined to two urban tribes, Suburana and Esquilina. But no one was fooled. Manilius’s bill directly affected senators and senior knights, as they were both the major slave owners and those who had multitudes of freedmen in their clienteles.

A stranger to the way Rome worked might have been pardoned for assuming that the law of numbers would ensure that any measure altering the status of Rome’s freedmen would make no difference, for the definition of abject poverty in Rome was a man’s inability to own one slave—and there were few indeed who did not own one slave. Therefore on the surface any plebiscite distributing freedmen across all thirty-five tribes should have little effect on the top end of society. But such was not the case.

The vast majority of slave owners in Rome kept no more than that single slave, or perhaps two slaves. But these were not male slaves; they were female. For two reasons: the first, that her master could enjoy a female slave’s sexual favors, and the second, that a male slave was a temptation to the master’s wife, and the paternity of his children suspect in consequence. After all, what need had a poor man for a male slave? Servile duties were domestic—washing, fetching water, preparing meals, assisting with the children, emptying chamber pots—and not well done by men. Attitudes of mind didn’t change just because a person was unlucky enough to be slave rather than free; men liked to do men’s things, and despised the lot of women as drudgery.

Theoretically every slave was paid a peculium and got his or her keep besides; the little sum of money was hoarded to buy freedom. But practically, freedom was something only the well-to-do master could afford to bestow, especially since manumission carried a five percent tax. With the result that the bulk of Rome’s female slaves were never freed while useful (and, fearing destitution more than unpaid labor, they contrived to remain useful even after they grew old). Nor could they afford to belong to a burial club enabling them to buy a funeral after death, together with decent interment. They wound up in the lime pits without so much as a grave marker to say they had ever existed.

Only those Romans with a relatively high income and a number of households to maintain owned many slaves. The higher a Roman’s social and economic status, the more servants in his employ—and the more likely he was to have males among them. In these echelons manumission was common and a slave’s service limited to between ten and fifteen years, after which he (it was usually he) became a freedman in the clientele of his previous master. He donned the Cap of Liberty and became a Roman citizen; if he had a wife and adult children, they too were freed.

His vote, however, was useless unless—as did happen from time to time—he made a large amount of money and bought himself membership in one of the thirty-one rural tribes, as well as being economically qualified to belong to a Class in the Centuries. But the great majority remained in the urban tribes of Suburana and Esquilina, which were the two most enormous tribes Rome owned, yet were able to deliver only two votes in the tribal Assemblies. This meant that a freedman’s vote could not affect a tribal Assembly vote result.

Gaius Manilius’s projected bill therefore had huge significance. Were Rome’s freedmen to be distributed across the thirty-five tribes, they might alter the outcome of tribal elections and legislation, and this despite the fact that they were not in a majority among the citizens of Rome. The prospective danger lay in the fact that freed-men lived inside the city; were they to belong to rural tribes, they could by voting in these rural tribes outnumber the genuine rural tribe members present inside Rome during a vote. Not such a problem for the elections, held during summer when many rural people were inside Rome, but a serious peril for legislation. Legislation happened at any time of year, but was particularly prevalent during December, January and February, the months which saw the lawmaking pinnacle of the new tribunes of the plebs—and months when rural citizens did not come to Rome.

Manilius’s bill went down to decisive defeat. The freedmen remained in those two gigantic urban tribes. But where it spelled trouble for men like Lucius Decumius lay in the fact that Manilius had sought out Rome’s freedmen to drum up support for his bill. And where did Rome’s freedmen congregate? In crossroads colleges, as they were convivial places as stuffed with slaves and freedmen as they were with ordinary Roman lowly. Manilius had gone from one crossroads college to another, talking to the men his law would benefit, persuading them to go to the Forum and support him. Knowing themselves possessed of worthless votes, many freedmen had obliged him. But when the Senate and the senior knights of the Eighteen saw these masses of freedmen descend on the Forum, all they could think of was the danger. Anyplace where freedmen gathered ought to be outlawed. The crossroads colleges would have to go.

A crossroads was a hotbed of spiritual activity, and had to be guarded against evil forces. It was a place where the Lares congregated, and the Lares were the myriad wraiths which peopled the Underworld and found a natural focus for their forces at a crossroads. Thus each crossroads had a shrine to the Lares, and once a year around the start of January a festival called the Compitalia was devoted to the placation of the Lares of the crossroads. On the night before the Compitalia every free resident of the district leading to a crossroads was obliged to hang up a woolen doll, and every slave a woolen ball; in Rome the shrines were so overwhelmed by dolls and balls that one of the duties of the crossroads colleges was to rig up lines to hold them. Dolls had heads, and a free person had a head counted by the censors; balls had no heads, for slaves were not counted. Slaves were, however, an important part of the festivities. As on the Saturnalia, they feasted as equals with the free men and women of Rome, and it was the duty of slaves (stripped of their servile insignia) to make the offering of a fattened pig to the Lares. All of which was under the authority of the crossroads colleges and the urban praetor, their supervisor.

Thus a crossroads college was a religious brotherhood. Each one had a custodian, the vilicus, who made sure that the men of his district gathered regularly in rent-free premises close to the crossroads and the Lares shrine; they kept the shrine and the crossroads neat, clean, unattractive to evil forces. Many of Rome’s intersections did not have a shrine, as these were limited to the major junctions.

One such crossroads college lay in the ground-floor apex of Aurelia’s insula under the care of Lucius Decumius. Until Aurelia had tamed him after she moved into her insula, Lucius Decumius had run an extremely profitable side business guaranteeing protection to the shop owners and factory proprietors in his district; when Aurelia exerted that formidable strength of hers and demonstrated to Lucius Decumius that she was not to be gainsaid, he solved his quandary by moving his protection business to the outer Sacra Via and the Vicus Fabricii, where the local colleges were lacking in such enterprise. Though his census was of the Fourth Class and his tribe urban Suburana, Lucius Decumius was definitely a power to be reckoned with.

Allied with his fellow custodians of Rome’s other crossroads colleges, he had successfully fought Gaius Piso’s attempt to close down all the crossroads colleges because Manilius had exploited them. Gaius Piso and the boni had therefore been forced to look elsewhere for a victim, and chose Manilius himself, who managed to survive a trial for extortion, then was convicted of treason and exiled for life, his fortune confiscated to the last sestertius.

Unfortunately the threat to the crossroads colleges did not go away after Gaius Piso left office. The Senate and the knights of the Eighteen had got it into their heads that the existence of crossroads colleges provided rent-free premises wherein political dissidents might gather and fraternize under religious auspices. Now Lucius Caesar and Marcius Figulus were going to ban them.

Which led to Lucius Decumius’s wrathful appearance at Caesar’s rooms on the Vicus Patricii.

“It isn’t fair!” he repeated.

“I know, dad,” said Caesar, sighing.

“Then what are you going to do about it?” the old man demanded.

“I’ll try, dad, that goes without saying. However, I doubt there’s anything I can do. I knew you’d come to see me, so I’ve already talked to my cousin Lucius, only to learn that he and Marcius Figulus are quite determined. With very few exceptions, they intend to outlaw every college, sodality and club in Rome.”

“Who gets excepted?’’ Lucius Decumius barked, jaw set.

“Religious sodalities like the Jews. Legitimate burial clubs. The colleges of civil servants. Trade guilds. That’s all.”

“But we’re religious!”

“According to my cousin Lucius Caesar, not religious enough. The Jews don’t drink and gossip in their synagogues, and the Salii, the Luperci, the Arval Brethren and others rarely meet at all. Crossroads colleges have premises wherein all men are welcome, including slaves and freedmen. That makes them potentially very dangerous, it’s being said.”

“So who’s going to care for the Lares and their shrines?”

“The urban praetor and the aediles.”

“They’re already too busy!”

“I agree, dad, I agree wholeheartedly,” said Caesar. “I even tried to tell my cousin that, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“Can’t you help us, Caesar? Honestly?”

“I’ll be voting against it and I’ll try to persuade as many others as I can to do the same. Oddly enough, quite a few of the boni oppose the law too—the crossroads colleges are a very old tradition, therefore to abolish them offends the mos maiorum. Cato is shouting about it loudly. However, it will go through, dad.”

“We’ll have to shut our doors.”

“Oh, not necessarily,” said Caesar, smiling.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me down! What does we do?”

“You’ll definitely lose your official standing, but that merely puts you at a financial disadvantage. I suggest you install a bar and call yourselves a tavern, with you as its proprietor.”

“Can’t do that, Caesar. Old Roscius next door would complain to the urban praetor in a trice—we’ve been buying our wine from him since I was a boy.”

“Then offer Roscius the bar concession. If you close your doors, dad, he’s severely out of purse.”

“Could all the colleges do it?”

“Throughout Rome, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t see why not. However, due to certain activities I won’t name, you’re a wealthy college. The consuls are convinced the colleges will have to shut their doors because they’ll have to pay ground-floor rents. As you will to my mother, dad. She’s a businesswoman, she’ll insist. In your case you might get a bit of a discount, but others?” Caesar shrugged. “I doubt the amount of wine consumed would cover expenses.”

Brows knitted, Lucius Decumius thought hard. “Does the consuls know what we does for a real living, Caesar?”

“If I didn’t tell them—and I didn’t!—then I don’t know who would.”

“Then there’s no problem!” said Lucius Decumius cheerfully. “We’re most of us in the same protection business.” He huffed with great content. “And we’ll go on caring for the crossroads too. Can’t have the Lares running riot, can we? I’ll call a meeting of us custodians—we’ll beat ’em yet, Pavo!”

“That’s the spirit, dad!”

And off went Lucius Decumius, beaming.

*

Autumn that year brought torrential rains to the Apennines, and the Tiber flooded its valley for two hundred miles. It had been some generations since the city of Rome had suffered so badly. Only the seven hills protruded out of the waters; the Forum Romanum, Velabrum, Circus Maximus, Forums Boarium and Holitorium, the whole of the Sacra Via out to the Servian Walls and the manufactories of the Vicus Fabricii drowned. The sewers back-washed; buildings with unsafe foundations crumbled; the sparsely settled heights of Quirinal, Viminal and Aventine became vast camps for refugees; and respiratory, diseases raged. Miraculously the incredibly ancient Wooden Bridge survived, perhaps because it lay farthest downstream, whereas the Pons Fabricius between Tiber Island and the Circus Flaminius perished. As this happened too late in the year to stand for next year’s tribunate of the plebs, Lucius Fabricius, who was the current promising member of his family, announced that he would stand next year for the tribunate of the plebs. Care of bridges and highways into Rome lay with the tribunes of the plebs, and Fabricius was not about to allow any other man to rebuild what was his family’s bridge! The Pons Fabricius it was; and the Pons Fabricius it would remain.

And Caesar received a letter from Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, conqueror of the East.

Well, Caesar, what a campaign. Both the kings rolled up and everything looking good. I can’t understand why Lucullus took so long. Mind you, he couldn’t control his troops, yet here I’ve got every man who served under him, with never a peep out of them. Marcus Silius sends his regards, by the way. A good man.

What a strange place Pontus is. I now see why King Mithridates always had to use mercenaries and northerners in his army. Some of his Pontic people are so primitive that they live in trees. They also brew some sort of foul liquor out of twigs, of all things, though how they manage to drink it and stay alive I don’t know. Some of my men were marching through the forest in eastern Pontus and found big bowls of the stuff on the ground. You know soldiers! They guzzled the lot, had a fine time of it. Until they all fell over dead. Killed them!

The booty is unbelievable. I took all those so-called impregnable citadels he built all over Armenia Parva and eastern Pontus, of course. Not very hard to do. Oh, you mightn’t know who I mean by “he.” Mithridates. Yes, well, the treasures he’d managed to salt away filled every one of them—seventy-odd, all told—to the brim. It will take years to ship the lot back to Rome; I’ve got an army of clerks taking inventory. It’s my reckoning that I’ll double what’s in the Treasury and then double Rome’s income from tributes from now on.

I brought Mithridates to battle in a place in Pontus I renamed Nicopolis—already had a Pompeiopolis—and he went down badly. Escaped to Sinoria, where he grabbed six thousand talents of gold and bolted down the Euphrates to find Tigranes. Who wasn’t having a good time of it either! Phraates of the Parthians invaded Armenia while I was tidying up Mithridates, and actually laid siege to Artaxata. Tigranes beat him off, and the Parthians went back home. But it finished Tigranes. He wasn’t in a fit state to hold me off, I can tell you! So he sued for a separate peace, and wouldn’t let Mithridates enter Armenia. Mithridates went north instead, headed for Cimmeria. What he didn’t know was that I’ve been having some correspondence with the son he’d installed in Cimmeria as satrap—called Machares.

Anyway, I let Tigranes have Armenia, but tributary to Rome, and took everything west of the Euphrates off him along with Sophene and Corduene. Made him pay me the six thousand talents of gold Mithridates filched, and asked for two hundred and forty sesterces for each of my men.

What, wasn’t I worried about Mithridates? The answer is no. Mithridates is well into his sixties. Well past it, Caesar. Fabian tactics. I just let the old boy run, couldn’t see he was a danger anymore. And I did have Machares. So while Mithridates ran, I marched. For which blame Varro, who doesn’t have a bone in his body isn’t curious. He was dying to dabble his toes in the Caspian Sea, and I thought, well, why not? So off we went northeastward.

Not much booty and far too many snakes, huge vicious spiders, giant scorpions. Funny how our men will fight all manner of human foes without turning a hair, then scream like women over crawlies. They sent me a deputation begging me to turn back when the Caspian Sea was only miles away. I turned back. Had to. I scream at crawlies too. So does Varro, who by this was quite happy to keep his toes dry.

You probably know that Mithridates is dead, but I’ll tell you how it actually happened. He got to Panticapaeum on the Cimmerian Bosporus, and began levying another army. He’d had the forethought to bring plenty of daughters with him, and used them as bait to draw Scythian levies—offered them to the Scythian kings and princes as brides.

You have to admire the old boy’s persistence, Caesar. Do you know what he intended to do? Gather a quarter of a million men and march on Italia and Rome the long way! He was going to go right round the top end of the Euxine and down through the lands of the Roxolani to the mouth of the Danubius. Then he intended to march up the Danubius gathering all the tribes along the way into his forces—Dacians, Bessi, Dardani, you name them. I hear Burebistas of the Dacians was very keen. Then he was going to cross to the Dravus and Savus, and march into Italia across the Carnic Alps!

Oh, I forgot to say that when he got to Panticapaeum he forced Machares to commit suicide. Bloodthirsty for his own kin, can never understand that in eastern kings. While he was busy raising his army, Phanagoria (the town on the other side of the Bosporus) revolted. The leader was another son of his, Pharnaces. I’d also been writing to him. Of course Mithridates put the rebellion down, but he made one bad mistake. He pardoned Pharnaces. Must have been running out of sons. Pharnaces repaid him by rounding up a fresh lot of revolutionaries and storming the fortress in Panticapaeum. That was the end, and Mithridates knew it. So he murdered however many daughters he had left, and some wives and concubines and even a few sons who were still children. Then he took an enormous dose of poison. But it wouldn’t work; he’d been too successful all those years of deliberately poisoning himself to become immune. The deed was done by one of the Gauls in his bodyguard. Ran the old man through with a sword. I buried him in Sinope.

In the meantime, I was marching into Syria, getting it tidied up so Rome can inherit. No more kings of Syria. I for one am tired of eastern potentates. Syria will become a Roman province, much safer. I also like the idea of putting good Roman troops against the Euphrates—ought to make the Parthians think a bit. I also settled the strife between the Greeks displaced by Tigranes and the Arabs displaced by Tigranes. The Arabs will be quite handy, I think, so I did send some of them back to the desert. But I made it worth their while. Abgarus—I hear he made life so hard in Antioch for young Publius Clodius that Clodius fled, though exactly what Abgarus did I can’t find out—is the King of the Skenites, then I put someone with the terrific name of Sampsiceramus in charge of another lot, and so forth. This sort of thing is really enjoyable work, Caesar; it gives a lot of satisfaction. No one out here is very practical, and they squabble and quarrel with each other endlessly. Silly. It’s such a rich place you’d think they’d learn to get on, but they don’t. Still, I can’t repine. It does mean that Gnaeus Pompeius from Picenum has kings in his clientele! I have earned that Magnus, I tell you. The worst part of it all turns out to be the Jews. A very strange lot. They were fairly reasonable until the old Queen, Alexandra, died a couple of years ago. But she left two sons to fight out the succession, complicated by the fact that their religion is as important to them as their state. So one son has to be High Priest, as far as I can gather. The other one wanted to be King of the Jews, but the High Priest one, Hyrcanus, thought it would be nice to combine both offices. They had a bit of a war, and Hyrcanus was defeated by brother Aristobulus. Then along comes an Idumaean prince named Antipater, who whispered in Hyrcanus’s ear and then persuaded Hyrcanus to ally himself with King Aretas of the Nabataeans. The deal was that Hyrcanus would hand over twelve Arab cities to Aretas that the Jews were ruling. They then laid siege to Aristobulus in Jerusalem, which is their name for Hierosolyma.

I sent my quaestor, young Scaurus, to sort the mess out. Ought to have known better. He picked Aristobulus as the one in the right, and ordered Aretas back to Nabataea. Then Aristobulus ambushed him at Papyron or some such place, and Aretas lost. I got to Antioch to find that Aristobulus was the King of the Jews, and Scaurus didn’t know what to do. The next thing, I’m getting presents from both sides. You should see the present Aristobulus sent me—well, you will at my triumph. A magical thing, Caesar, a grapevine made of pure gold, with golden bunches of grapes all over it.

Anyway, I’ve ordered both camps to meet me in Damascus next spring. I believe Damascus has a lovely climate, so I think I’ll winter there and finish sorting out the mess between Tigranes and the King of the Parthians. The one I’m interested to meet is the Idumaean, Antipater. Sounds like a clever sort of fellow. Probably circumcised. They almost all are, the Semites. Peculiar practice. I’m attached to my foreskin, literally as well as metaphorically. There! That came out quite well. That’s because I’ve still got Varro with me, as well as Lenaeus and Theophanes of Mitylene. I hear Lucullus is crowing because he brought back this fabulous fruit called a cherry to Italia, but I’m bringing back all sorts of plants, including this sweet and succulent sort of lemon I found in Media—an orange lemon, isn’t that strange? Ought to grow well in Italia, likes a dry summer, fruits in winter.

Well, enough prattle. Time to get down to business and tell you why I’m writing. You’re a very subtle and clever chap, Caesar, and it hasn’t escaped my notice that you always speak up for me in the Senate, and to good effect. No one else did over the pirates. I think I’ll be another two years in the East, ought to fetch up at home about the time you’ll be leaving office as praetor, if you’re going to take advantage of Sulla’s law letting patricians stand two years early.

But I’m making it my policy to have at least one tribune of the plebs in my Roman camp until after I get home. The next one is Titus Labienus, and I know you know him because you were both on Vatia Isauricus’s staff in Cilicia ten or twelve years ago. He’s a very good man, comes from Cingulum, right in the middle of my patch. Clever too. He tells me the pair of you got on well together. I know you won’t be holding a magistracy, but it might be that you can lend Titus Labienus a hand occasionally. Or he might be able to lend you a hand—feel free. I’ve told him all this. The year after—the year of your praetorship, I imagine—my man will be Mucia’s younger brother, Metellus Nepos. I ought to arrive home just after he finishes his term, though I can’t be sure.

So what I’d like you to do, Caesar, is hold a watch for me and mine. You’re going to go far, even if I haven’t left you much of the world to conquer! I’ve never forgotten that it was you who showed me how to be consul, while corrupt old Philippus couldn’t be bothered.

Your friend from Mitylene, Aulus Gabinius, sends you his warm regards.

Well, I might as well say it. Do what you can to help me get land for my troops. It’s too early for Labienus to try, the job will go to Nepos. I’m sending him home in style well before next year’s elections. A pity you can’t be consul when the fight to get my land is on, a bit too early for you. Still, it might drag out until you’re consul-elect, and then you can be a real help. It isn’t going to be easy.

Caesar laid the long letter down and put his chin in his hand, having much to think about. Though he found it naive, he enjoyed Pompey’s bald prose and casual asides; they brought Magnus into the room in a way that the polished essays Varro wrote for Pompey’s senatorial dispatches never did.

When he had first met Pompey on that memorable day Pompey had turned up to claim Mucia Tertia at Aunt Julia’s, Caesar had detested him. And in some ways he probably never would warmly like the man. However, the years and exposure had somewhat softened his attitude, which now, he decided, contained more like than dislike. Oh, one had to deplore the conceit and the rustic in him, and his patent disregard for due process of the law. Nonetheless he was gifted and so eminently capable. He hadn’t put a foot wrong very often, and the older he became, the more unerring his step. Crassus loathed him of course, which was a difficulty. That left him, Caesar, to steer a course between the two.

Titus Labienus. A cruel and barbarous man. Tall, muscular, curly-headed, hook-nosed, snapping black eyes. Absolutely at home on a horse. Quite what his remote ancestry was had flummoxed more Romans than merely Caesar; even Pompey had been heard to say that he thought Mormolyce had snatched the mother’s newborn babe out of its cradle and substituted one of her own to be brought up as Titus Labienus’s heir. Interesting that Labienus had informed Pompey how well he had gotten on with Caesar in the old days. And it was true enough. Two born riders, they had shared many a gallop through the countryside around Tarsus, and talked endlessly about cavalry tactics in battle. Yet Caesar couldn’t warm to him, despite the man’s undeniable brilliance. Labienus was someone to be used but never trusted.

Caesar quite understood why Pompey was concerned enough about Labienus’s fate as a tribune of the plebs to enlist Caesar in a support role; the new College was a particularly weird mixture of independent individuals who would probably fly off in ten tangents and spend more time vetoing each other than anything else. Though in one respect Pompey had erred; if Caesar had been planning his assortment of tame tribunes of the plebs, then Labienus would have been saved for the year Pompey started to press for land for his veterans. What Caesar knew of Metellus Nepos indicated that he was too Caecilian; he wouldn’t have the necessary steel. For that kind of work, a fiery Picentine without ancestors and nowhere to go save up yielded the best results.

Mucia Tertia. Widow of Young Marius, wife of Pompey the Great. Mother of Pompey’s children, boy, girl, boy. Why had he never got round to her? Perhaps because he still felt about her the way he had about Bibulus’s wife, Domitia: the prospect of cuckolding Pompey was so alluring he kept postponing the actual deed. Domitia (the cousin of Cato’s brother-in-law, Ahenobarbus) was now an accomplished fact, though Bibulus hadn’t heard about it yet. He would! What fun! Only—did Caesar really want to annoy Pompey in a way he understood Pompey particularly would loathe? He might need Pompey, just as Pompey might need him. What a pity. Of all the women on his list, Caesar fancied Mucia Tertia most. And that she fancied him he had known for years. Now… was it worth it? Probably not. Probably not. Conscious of a twinge of regret, Caesar mentally erased Mucia Tertia’s name from his list.

Which turned out to be just as well. With the year drawing to its close, Labienus returned from his estates in Picenum and moved into the very modest house he had recently bought on the Palatium, which was the less settled and more unfashionable side of the Palatine. And the very next day hied himself off to see Caesar just sufficiently too late for anyone left in Aurelia’s apartment to assume he was Caesar’s client.

“But let’s not talk here, Titus Labienus,” said Caesar, and drew him back toward the door. “I have rooms down the street.”

“This is very nice,” said Labienus, ensconced in a comfortable chair and with weak watered wine at his elbow.

“Considerably quieter,” said Caesar, sitting in another chair but not with the desk between them; he did not wish to give this man the impression that business was the order of the day. “I am interested to know,” he said, sipping water, “why Pompeius didn’t conserve you for the year after next.”

“Because he didn’t expect to be in the East for so long,” said Labienus. “Until he decided he couldn’t abandon Syria with the Jewish question unsettled, he really thought he’d be home by next spring. Didn’t he tell you that in his letter?”

So Labienus knew all about the letter. Caesar grinned. “You know him at least as well as I do, Labienus. He did ask me to give you any assistance I could, and he also told me about the Jewish difficulties. What he neglected to mention was that he had planned to be home earlier than he said he was going to be.”

The black eyes flashed, but not with laughter; Labienus had little sense of humor. “Well, that’s it, that’s the reason. So instead of a brilliant tribunate of the plebs, I’m going to have no more to do than legislate to allow Magnus to wear full triumphal regalia at the games.”

“With or without minim all over his face?”

That did provoke a short laugh. “You know Magnus, Caesar! He wouldn’t wear minim even during his triumph itself.”

Caesar was beginning to understand the situation a little better. “Are you Magnus’s client?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. What man from Picenum isn’t?”

“Yet you didn’t go east with him.”

“He wouldn’t even use Afranius and Petreius when he cleaned up the pirates, though he did manage to slip them in after some of the big names when he went to war against the kings. And Lollius Palicanus, Aulus Gabinius. Mind you, I didn’t have a senatorial census, which is why I couldn’t stand as quaestor. A poor man’s only way into the Senate is to become tribune of the plebs and then hope he makes enough money before the next lot of censors to qualify to stay in the Senate,” said Labienus harshly.

“I always thought Magnus was very open-handed. Hasn’t he offered to assist you?”

“He saves his largesse for those in a position to do great things for him. You might say that under his original plans, I was on a promise.”

“And it isn’t a very big promise now that triumphal regalia is the most important thing on his tribunician schedule.”

“Exactly.”

Caesar sighed, stretched his legs out. “I take it,” he said, “that you would like to leave a name behind you after your year in the College is over.”

“I would.”

“It’s a long time since we were both junior military tribunes under Vatia Isauricus, and I’m sorry the years since haven’t been kind to you. Unfortunately my own finances don’t permit of a trifling loan, and I do understand that I can’t function as your patron. However, Titus Labienus, in four years I will be consul, which means that in five years I will be going to a province. I do not intend to be a tame governor in a tame province. Wherever I go, there will be plenty of military work to do, and I will need some excellent people to work as my legates. In particular, I will need one legate who will have propraetorian status whom I can trust to campaign as well without me as with me. What I remember about you is your military sense. So I’ll make a pact with you here and now. Number one, that I’ll find something for you to do during your tribunate of the plebs that will make your year a memorable one. And number two, that when I go as proconsul to my province, I’ll make sure you come with me as my chief legate with propraetorian status,” said Caesar.

Labienus drew a breath. “What I remember about you, Caesar, is your military sense. How odd! Mucia said you were worth watching. She spoke of you, I thought, with more respect than she ever does of Magnus.”

“Mucia?”

The black gaze was very level. “That’s right.”

“Well, well! How many people know?” asked Caesar.

“None, I hope.”

“Doesn’t he lock her up in his stronghold while he’s away? That’s what he used to do.”

“She’s not a child anymore—if she ever was,” said Titus Labienus, eyes flashing again. “She’s like me, she’s had a hard life. You learn from a hard life. We find ways.”

“Next time you see her, tell her that the secret is safe with me,” said Caesar, smiling. “If Magnus finds out, you’ll get no help from that quarter. So are you interested in my proposition?”

“I most certainly am.”

After Labienus departed Caesar continued to sit without moving. Mucia Tertia had a lover, and she hadn’t needed to venture outside Picenum to find him. What an extraordinary choice! He couldn’t think of three men more different from each other than Young Marius, Pompeius Magnus and Titus Labienus. That was a searching lady. Did Labienus please her more than the other two, or was he simply a diversion brought about by loneliness and lack of a wide field to choose from?

Nothing surer than that Pompey would find out. The lovers might delude themselves no one knew, but if the affair had been going on in Picenum, discovery was inevitable. Pompey’s letter did not indicate anyone had tattled yet, but it was only a matter of time. And then Titus Labienus stood to lose everything Pompey might have given him, though clearly his hopes of Pompey’s favor had already waned. Maybe his intriguing with Mucia Tertia had arisen out of disillusionment with Pompey? Very possible.

All of which scarcely mattered; what occupied Caesar’s mind was how to make Labienus’s year as a tribune of the plebs a memorable one. Difficult if not impossible in this present climate of political torpor and uninspiring curule magistrates. About the only thing capable of kindling a fire beneath the rear ends of these slugs was a fearsomely radical land bill suggesting that every last iugerum of Rome’s ager publicus be given away to the poor, and that wouldn’t please Pompey at all—Pompey needed Rome’s public lands as a gift for his troops.

When the new tribunes of the plebs entered office on the tenth day of December, the diversity among its members became glaringly obvious. Caecilius Rufus actually had the temerity to propose that the disgraced ex-consuls-elect Publius Sulla and Publius Autronius be allowed to stand for the consulship in the future; that all nine of his colleagues vetoed Caecilius’s bill came as no surprise. No surprise either was the response to Labienus’s bill giving Pompey the right to wear full triumphal regalia at all public games; it swept into law.

The surprise came from Publius Servilius Rullus when he said that every last iugerum of Rome’s ager publicus both in Italy and abroad be given away to the poor. Shades of the Gracchi! Rullus lit the fire turning senatorial slugs into ravening wolves.

“If Rullus succeeds, when Magnus comes home there’ll be no State land left for his veterans,” said Labienus to Caesar.

“Ah, but Rullus neglected to mention that fact,” replied Caesar, unruffled. “As he chose to present his bill in the House before taking it to the Comitia, he really ought to have made mention of Magnus’s soldiers.”

“He didn’t have to mention them. Everyone knows.”

“True. But if there’s one thing every man of substance detests, it’s land bills. The ager publicus is sacred. Too many senatorial families of enormous influence rent it and make money out of it. Bad enough to propose giving some of it away to a victorious general’s troops, but to demand that all of it be given away to Head Count vermin? Anathema! If Rullus had only come out and said directly that what Rome no longer owns cannot be awarded to Magnus’s troops, he might have gained support from some very peculiar quarters. As it is, the bill will die.”

“You’ll oppose it?” asked Labienus.

“No, no, certainly not! I shall support it vociferously,” said Caesar, smiling. “If I support it, quite a lot of the fence-sitters will jump down to oppose it, if for no other reason than that they don’t like what I like. Cicero is an excellent example. What’s his new name for men like Rullus? Popularis—for the People rather than for the Senate. That rather appeals to me. I shall endeavor to be labeled a Popularis.”

“You’ll annoy Magnus if you speak up for it.”

“Not once he reads the covering letter I’ll send him together with a copy of my speech. Magnus knows a ewe from a ram.”

Labienus scowled. “All of this is going to take a lot of time, Caesar, yet none of it involves me. Where am I going?”

“You’ve passed your bill to award Magnus triumphal regalia at the games, so now you’ll sit on your hands and whistle until the fuss over Rullus abates. It will! Remember that it’s best to be the last man left on his feet.”

“You have an idea.”

“No,” said Caesar.

“Oh, come!”

Caesar smiled. “Rest easy, Labienus. Something will occur to me. It always does.”

*

When he went home Caesar sought out his mother. Her minute office was one room Pompeia never invaded; if nothing else about her mother-in-law frightened her, Aurelia’s affinity for the lightning totting up of figures certainly did. Besides, it had been a clever idea to give his study over for Pompeia’s use (Caesar had his other apartment in which to work). Tenure of the study and the master sleeping cubicle beyond it kept Pompeia out of the other parts of Aurelia’s domain. Sounds of feminine laughter and chatter emanated from the study, but no one appeared from that direction to hinder Caesar’s progress.

“Who’s with her?” he asked, seating himself in the chair on the far side of Aurelia’s desk.

The room was indeed so small that a stouter man than Caesar could not have squeezed into the space this chair occupied, but the hand of Aurelia was very evident in the economy and logic with which she had organized herself: shelves for scrolls and papers where she wouldn’t hit her head on them as she rose from her own chair, tiered wooden trays on those parts of her desk not needed for her actual work, and leather book buckets relegated to the room’s remote corners.

“Who’s with her?” he repeated when she didn’t answer.

Down went her pen. His mother looked up reluctantly, flexed her right hand, sighed. “A very silly lot,” she said.

“That I do not need to be told. Silliness attracts more silliness. But who?”

“Both the Clodias. And Fulvia.”

“Oh! Racy as well as vacant. Is Pompeia intriguing with men, Mater?”

“Definitely not. I don’t permit her to entertain men here, and when she goes out I send Polyxena with her. Polyxena is my own woman, quite impossible to bribe or suborn. Of course Pompeia takes her own idiotic girl with her too, but both of them combined are no match for Polyxena, I assure you.”

Caesar looked, his mother thought, very tired. His year as president of the Murder Court had been an extremely busy one, and acquitted with all the thoroughness and energy for which he was becoming famous. Other court presidents might dally and take protracted vacations, but not Caesar. Naturally she knew he was in debt—and for how much—though time had taught her that money was a subject sure to create tension between them. So while she burned to quiz him about money matters, she bit her tongue and managed not to say a word. It was true that he did not allow himself to become depressed over a debt now mounting rapidly because he could not afford to pay back the principal; that some inexplicable part of him genuinely believed the money would be found; yet she also knew that money could lie like a grey shadow at the back of the most sanguine and optimistic of minds. As it lay like a grey shadow at the back of his mind, she was certain.

And he was still heavily involved with Servilia. That was a relationship nothing seemed able to destroy. Besides which, Julia, menstruating regularly now that her thirteenth birthday was a month away, was displaying less and less enthusiasm for Brutus. Oh, nothing could provoke the girl into rudeness or even covert discourtesy, but instead of becoming more enamored of Brutus now that her womanhood was upon her, she was unmistakably cooling, the child’s affection and pity replaced by—boredom? Yes, boredom. The one emotion no marriage could survive.

All these were problems which gnawed at Aurelia, while others merely niggled. For instance, this apartment had become far too small for a man of Caesar’s status. His clients could no longer gather all at once, and the address was a bad one for a man who would be senior consul within five years. Of that last fact Aurelia harbored no doubts whatsoever. Between the name, the ancestry, the manner, the looks, the charm, the ease and the intellectual ability, whatever election Caesar contested would see him returned at the top of the poll. He had enemies galore, but none capable of destroying his power base among the First and the Second Classes, vital for success in the Centuries. Not to mention that among the Classes too low to count in the Centuries he stood high above all his peers. Caesar moved among the Head Count as readily as among the consulars. However, it was not possible to broach the subject of a suitable house without money’s raising its ugly face. So would she, or would she not? Ought she, or ought she not?

Aurelia drew a deep breath, folded her hands one over the other on the table in front of her. “Caesar, next year you will be standing for praetor,” she said, “and I foresee one very severe difficulty.”

“My address,” he said instantly.

Her smile was wry. “One thing I can never complain about—your astuteness.”

“Is this the prelude to another argument about money?”

“No, it is not. Or perhaps it would be better to say, I hope not. Over the years I have managed to save a fair amount, and I could certainly borrow against this insula comfortably. Between the two, I could give you enough to purchase a good house on the Palatine or the Carinae.”

His mouth went thin. “That is most generous of you, Mater, but I will not accept money from you any more than I will from my friends. Understood?”

Amazing to think she was in her sixty-second year. Not one single wrinkle marred the skin of face or neck, perhaps because she had plumped out a trifle; where age showed at all was in the creases which ran down either side of her nostrils to meet the corners of her mouth.

“I thought you’d say that,” she said, composure intact. Then she remarked, apropos it seemed of nothing, “I hear that Metellus Pius Pontifex Maximus is ailing.”

That startled him. “Who told you so?”

“Clodia, for one. Her husband, Celer, says the whole family is desperately worried. And Aemilia Lepida, for another. Metellus Scipio is very cast down by the state of his father’s health. He hasn’t been well since his wife died.”

“It’s certainly true that the old boy hasn’t been attending any meetings of late,” said Caesar.

“Nor will he in the future. When I said he is ailing, I really meant he is dying.”

“And?” asked Caesar, for once baffled.

“When he dies, the College of Pontifices will have to co-opt another Pontifex Maximus.” The large and lustrous eyes which were Aurelia’s best feature gleamed and narrowed. “If you were to be appointed Pontifex Maximus, Caesar, it would solve several of your most pressing problems. First and foremost, it would demonstrate to your creditors that you are going to be consul beyond any doubt. That would mean your creditors would be more willing to carry your debts beyond your praetorship if necessary. I mean, if you draw Sardinia or Africa as your province in the praetor’s lots, you won’t be able to recoup your losses as a praetor governor. Should that happen, I would think your creditors will grow very restless indeed.”

The ghost of a smile kindled his eyes, but he kept his face straight. “Admirably summed up, Mater,” he said.

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Secondly, Pontifex Maximus would endow you with a splendid residence at the expense of the State, and as it is a lifetime position, the Domus Publica would be yours for life. It is within the Forum itself, very large and eminently suitable. So,” his mother ended, her voice as level and unexcited as ever, “I have begun to canvass on your behalf among the wives of your fellow priests.”

Caesar sighed. “It’s an admirable plan, Mater, but one which you cannot bring to fruition any more than I can. Between Catulus and Vatia Isauricus—not to mention at least half the others in the College!—I don’t stand a chance. For one thing, the post normally goes to someone who has already been consul. For another, all the most conservative elements in the Senate adorn this College. They do not fancy me.”

“Nevertheless I shall go to work,” said Aurelia.

At which precise moment Caesar realized how it could be done. He threw his head back and roared with laughter. “Yes, Mater, by all means go to work!” he said, wiping away tears of mirth. “I know the answer—oh, what a furor it’s bound to create!”

“And the answer is?”

“I came to see you about Titus Labienus, who is—as I’m sure you know—Pompeius Magnus’s tame tribune of the plebs this year. Just to air my thoughts aloud. You’re so clever that I find you a most useful wall for bouncing ideas off,” he said.

One thin black brow flew up, the corners of her mouth quivered. “Why, thank you! Am I a better wall to bounce off than Servilia?’’

Again he cried with laughter. It was rare for Aurelia to succumb to innuendo, but when she did she was as witty as Cicero. “Seriously,” he said when he could, “I know how you feel about that liaison, but acquit me of stupidity, please. Servilia is politically acute. She is also in love with me. However, she is not of my family, nor is she entirely to be trusted. When I use her as a wall, I make very sure I’m in complete Control of the balls.”

“You ease my mind enormously,” said Aurelia blandly. “What is this brilliant inspiration, then?”

“When Sulla nullified the lex Domitia de sacerdotiis, he went one step further than custom and tradition dictated by also removing the office of Pontifex Maximus from tribal election by the People. Until Sulla, the Pontifex Maximus had always been elected, he was never co-opted by his fellow priests. I’ll have Labienus legislate to return the choice of priests and augurs to the People in their tribes. Including the office of Pontifex Maximus. The People will love the idea.”

“They love anything which ablates a law of Sulla’s.”

“Precisely. Then all I have to do,” said Caesar, rising, “is get myself elected Pontifex Maximus.”

“Have Titus Labienus enact the law now, Caesar. Don’t put it off! No one can be sure how much longer Metellus Pius has to live. He’s lonely without his Licinia.”

Caesar took his mother’s hand and raised it to his lips. “Mater, I thank you. The matter will be expedited, because it’s a law can benefit Pompeius Magnus. He’s dying to be a priest or an augur, but he knows he’ll never be co-opted. Whereas at an election he’ll bolt in.”

*

The volume of laughter and chatter from the study had risen, Caesar noticed as he entered the reception room; he had intended to leave immediately, but on the spur of the moment decided to visit his wife instead.

Quite a gathering, he thought, standing unobserved in the doorway from the dining room. Pompeia had completely redecorated the once-austere room, which was now overfilled with couches mattressed in goose down, a plethora of purple cushions and coverlets, many precious yet commonplace knick-knacks, paintings and statues. What had been an equally austere sleeping cubicle, he noted gazing through its open door, now bore the same cloyingly tasteless touch.

Pompeia was reclining on the best couch, though not alone; Aurelia might forbid her to entertain men, but could not prevent visits from Pompeia’s full brother, Quintus Pompeius Rufus Junior. Now in his early twenties, he was a wild blade of increasingly unsavory reputation. No doubt it was through his offices that she had come to know ladies of the Claudian clan, for Pompeius Rufus was the best friend of none other than Publius Clodius, three years older but no less wild.

Aurelia’s ban forbade the presence of Clodius himself, but not of his two younger sisters, Clodia and Clodilla. A pity, thought Caesar clinically, that the undisciplined natures of these two young matrons were fueled by a considerable degree of good looks. Clodia, married to Metellus Celer (the elder of Mucia Tertia’s two half brothers) was marginally more beautiful than her younger sister, Clodilla, now divorced from Lucullus amid shock waves of scandal. Like all the Claudii Pulchri they were very dark, with large and luminous black eyes, long and curling black lashes, a profusion of waving black hair, and faintly olive—but perfect—skins. Despite the fact that neither was tall, both had excellent figures and dress sense, moved with grace. And they were quite well read, again especially Clodia, who had a taste for poetry of high order. They sat side by side on a couch facing Pompeia and her brother, each with her robe falling away from gleaming shoulders to give more than a hint of deliciously shaped plump breasts.

Fulvia was not unlike them physically, though her coloring was paler and reminded Caesar of his mother’s ice-brown hair, purplish eyes, dark brows and lashes. A very positive and dogmatic young lady, imbued with a lot of rather silly ideas stemming from her romantic attachment to the Brothers Gracchi—grandfather Gaius and great uncle Tiberius. Her marriage to Publius Clodius had not met with her parents’ approval, Caesar knew. Which had not stopped Fulvia, determined to have her way. Since her marriage she had become intimate with Clodius’s sisters, to the detriment of all three.

None of these young women, however, worried Caesar as much as the two ripe and shady ladies who together occupied a third couch: Sempronia Tuditani, wife of one Decimus Junius Brutus and mother of another (an odd choice of friend for Fulvia—the Sempronii Tuditani had been obdurate enemies of both the Gracchi, as had the family of Decimus Junius Brutus Callaicus, grandfather of Sempronia Tuditani’s husband); and Palla, who had been wife to both the censor Philippus and the censor Poplicola, and had borne each of them a son. Sempronia Tuditani and Palla had to be fifty years old, though they employed every artifice known to the cosmetics industry to disguise the fact, from painted and powdered complexions to stibium around the eyes and carmine on their cheeks and mouths. Nor had they been content to allow the bodily subsidence of middle age; they starved themselves assiduously to be stick-thin, and wore flimsy, floating robes they fancied brought back their long-vanished youth. The result of all this tampering with the ageing process, reflected Caesar with an inward grin, was as unsuccessful as it was ludicrous. His own mother, the merciless onlooker decided, was far more attractive, though at least ten years their senior. Aurelia, however, did not court the company of men, whereas Sempronia Tuditani and Palla were aristocratic whores who never lacked for masculine attention because they were famous for giving by far the best fellatio in Rome, including that obtainable from professionals of both sexes.

Their presence meant, Caesar concluded, that Decimus Brutus and young Poplicola also frequented the vicinity of Pompeia. Of Decimus Brutus perhaps no more was to be said than that he was young, bored, high-spirited and up to the usual mischief, from too much wine and too many women to the dice box and the gaming table. But young Poplicola had seduced his stepmother and tried to murder his father the censor, and had been formally relegated to penury and obscurity. He would never be permitted to enter the Senate, but since Publius Clodius’s marriage to Fulvia and Clodius’s subsequent access to almost unlimited money, young Poplicola was starting to be seen again in high circles.

It was Clodia who noticed Caesar first. She sat up much straighter on her couch, thrust out her breasts and gave him an alluring smile.

“Caesar, how absolutely divine to see you!” she purred.

“I return the compliment, of course.”

“Do come in!” said Clodia, patting her couch.

“I’d love to, but I’m afraid I’m on my way out.”

And that, Caesar decided as he let himself out the front door, was a room full of trouble.

*

Labienus beckoned, but first he would have to see Servilia, who had probably been waiting in his apartment down the road for some time, he realized. Women! Today was a day of women, and mostly women with nuisance value. Except for Aurelia, of course. Now there was a woman! A pity, thought Caesar, bounding up the stairs to his apartment, that none other measures up to her.

Servilia was waiting, though she was far too sensible to reproach Caesar for his tardiness, and far too pragmatic to expect an apology. If the world belonged to men—and it did—then undoubtedly it was Caesar’s oyster.

No word was exchanged between them for some time. First came several luxurious and languorous kisses, then a sighing subsidence into each other’s arms on the bed, freed from clothing and care. She was so delicious, so intelligent and untrammeled in her ministrations, so inventive. And he was so perfect, so receptive and powerful in his attentions, so unerring. Thus, absolutely content with each other and fascinated by the fact that familiarity had bred not contempt but additional pleasure, Caesar and Servilia forgot their worlds until the level of water in the chronometer had dripped away quite a lot of time.

Of Labienus he would not speak; of Pompeia he would, so he said as they lay entwined, “My wife is keeping odd company.”

The memory of those frenzied months of wasted jealousy had not yet faded from Servilia’s mind, so she loved to hear any word from Caesar that indicated dissatisfaction. Oh, it was only scant moments after they were reconciled following the birth of Junia Tertia that Servilia understood Caesar’s marriage was a sham. Still and all, the minx was delectable, and proximity was her ally; no woman of Servilia’s age could rest in perfect surety when her rival was almost twenty years her junior.

“Odd company?” she asked, stroking voluptuously.

“The Clodias and Fulvia.”

“That’s to be expected, considering the circles Brother Pompeius moves in.”

“Ah, but today there were additions to the menagerie!”

“Who?”

“Sempronia Tuditani and Palla.”

“Oh!” Servilia sat up, the delight of Caesar’s skin evaporating. She frowned, thought, then said, “Actually that shouldn’t have surprised me.”

“Nor me, considering who Publius Clodius’s friends are.”

“No, I didn’t mean through that connection, Caesar. You know of course that my younger sister, Servililla, has been divorced by Drusus Nero for infidelity.”

“I had heard.”

“What you don’t know is that she’s going to marry Lucullus.”

Caesar sat up too. “That’s to exchange a dunderhead for an imbecile in the making! He conducts all manner of experiments with substances which distort reality, has done for years. I believe one of his freedmen has no duty other than to procure every kind of soporific and ecstatic for him—syrup of poppies, mushrooms, brews concocted from leaves, berries, roots.”

“Servililla says he likes the effect of wine, but dislikes its aftereffects intensely. Those other substances apparently don’t produce the same painful aftereffects.” Servilia shrugged. “Anyway, it seems Servililla isn’t complaining. She thinks she’ll get to enjoy all that money and taste without a watchful husband to cramp her style.”

“He divorced Clodilla for adultery—and incest.”

“That was Clodius’s doing.”

“Well, I wish your sister the best of luck,” said Caesar. “Lucullus is still stuck on the Campus Martius demanding the triumph the Senate keeps refusing him, so she won’t see much of Rome from the inside of the walls.”

“He’ll get his triumph soon,” said Servilia confidently. “My spies tell me that Pompeius Magnus doesn’t want to have to share the Campus Martius with his old enemy when he comes home from the East positively covered in glory.” She snorted. “Oh, what a poseur! Anyone with any sense can see that Lucullus did all the hard work! Magnus just had to harvest the results of that hard work.”

“I agree, little though I care for Lucullus.” Caesar cupped a hand around one breast. “It is not like you to digress, my love. What has this to do with Pompeia’s friends?’’

“They call it the Clodius Club,” said Servilia, stretching. “Servililla told me all about it. Publius Clodius, of course, is its president. The chief—indeed, I suppose one would have to call it the only—aim of the Clodius Club is to shock our world. That’s how the members entertain themselves. They’re all bored, idle, averse to work, and possessed of far too much money. Drinking and wenching and gambling are tame. Shocks and scandals are the Club’s sole purpose. Hence raffish women like Sempronia Tuditani and Palla, allegations of incest, and the cultivation of such peerless specimens as young Poplicola. The male members of the Club include some very young men who ought to know better—like Curio Junior and your cousin Marcus Antonius. I hear one of their favorite pastimes is to pretend they’re lovers.”

It was Caesar’s turn to snort. “I’d believe almost anything of Marcus Antonius, but not that! How old is he now, nineteen or twenty? Yet he’s got more bastards littered through every stratum of Roman society than anyone else I know.”

“Conceded. But littering Rome with bastards isn’t nearly shocking enough. A homosexual affair—particularly between the sons of such pillars of the conservative establishment!—adds a certain luster.”

“So this is the institution to which my wife belongs!” Caesar sighed. “How am I to wean her away, I wonder?’’

That was not an idea which appealed to Servilia, who got out of bed in a hurry. “I fail to see how you can, Caesar, without provoking exactly the kind of scandal the Clodius Club adores. Unless you divorce yourself by divorcing her.”

But this suggestion offended his sense of fair play; he shook his head emphatically. “No, I’ll not do that without more cause than idle friendships she can’t turn into anything worse because my mother keeps too sharp an eye on her. I pity the poor girl. She hasn’t a scrap of intelligence or sense.”

The bath beckoned (Caesar had given in and installed a small furnace to provide hot water); Servilia decided to hold her peace on the subject of Pompeia.

*

Titus Labienus had to wait until the morrow, when he saw Caesar in Caesar’s apartment.

“Two items,” said Caesar, leaning back in his chair.

Labienus looked alert.

“The first is bound to win you considerable approval in knight circles, and will sit very well with Magnus.”

“It is?”

“To legislate the return of selection of priests and augurs to the tribes in the Comitia.”

“Including, no doubt,” said Labienus smoothly, “election of the Pontifex Maximus.”

“Edepol, you’re quick!”

“I heard Metellus Pius is likely to qualify for a State funeral any time.”

“Quite so. And it is true that I have a fancy to become Pontifex Maximus. However, I do not think my fellow priests want to see me at the head of their College. The electors, on the other hand, may not agree with them. Therefore, why not give the electors the chance to decide who the next Pontifex Maximus will be?”

“Why not, indeed?” Labienus watched Caesar closely. There was much about the man appealed to him strongly, yet that streak of levity which could rise to his surface on scant provocation was, in Labienus’s opinion, a flaw. One never really knew just how serious Caesar was. Oh, the ambition was boundless, but like Cicero he could sometimes give off strong signals that his sense of the ridiculous might intervene. However, at the moment Caesar’s face seemed serious enough, and Labienus knew as well as most that Caesar’s debts were appalling. To be elected Pontifex Maximus would enhance his credit with the usurers. Labienus said, “I imagine you want a lex Labiena de sacerdotiis enacted as soon as possible.”

“I do. If Metellus Pius should die before the law is changed, the People might decide not to change it. We’ll have to be quick, Labienus.”

‘‘Ampius will be glad to be of assistance. So will the rest of the tribunician College, I predict. It’s a law in absolute accord with the mos maiorum, a great advantage.” The dark eyes flashed. “What else do you have in mind?”

A frown came. “Nothing earthshaking, unfortunately. If Magnus came home it would be easy. The only thing I can think of sure to create a stir within the Senate is to propose a bill restoring the rights of the sons and grandsons of Sulla’s proscribed. You won’t get it through, but the debates will be noisy and well attended.”

This idea obviously appealed; Labienus was grinning broadly as he rose to his feet. “I like it, Caesar. It’s a chance to pull Cicero’s jauntily waving tail!”

“It isn’t the tail matters in Cicero’s anatomy,” said Caesar. “The tongue is the appendage needs amputation. Be warned, he’ll make mincemeat of you. But if you introduce the two bills together, you’ll divert attention from the one you really want to get through. And if you prepare yourself with great care, you might even be able to make some political capital out of Cicero’s tongue.”