Caesar stalked home to the Domus Publica in a towering rage, Titus Labienus almost running to keep up with him. A peremptory jerk of Caesar’s head had summoned Pompey’s tame tribune of the plebs to accompany him, for what reason Labienus didn’t know; he went because in Pompey’s absence Caesar was his controller.
The invitation to help himself to liquid refreshments was given by another jerk of Caesar’s head; Labienus poured wine, sat down, and watched Caesar pace the confines of his study.
Finally Caesar spoke. “I will make Cicero wish he had never been born! How dared he presume to interpret Roman law! And how did we ever elect such a swan senior consul?”
“What, didn’t you vote for him?”
“Neither for him nor for Hybrida.”
“You voted for Catilina?” Labienus asked, surprised.
“And Silanus. Candidly, there was no one I really wanted to vote for, but one can’t not vote, that’s to avoid the issue.” The red spots still burned in Caesar’s cheeks, and the eyes were, thought Labienus with unusual imagination, frozen yet on fire.
“Sit down, man, do! I know you don’t touch wine, but tonight is exceptional. A drink will do you good.”
“A drink never does any good,” Caesar said emphatically; he did, however, sit down. “If I am not in error, Titus, your uncle Quintus Labienus perished under a tile in the Curia Hostilia thirty-seven years ago.”
“Together with Saturninus, Lucius Equitius and the rest, yes.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“How else than that it was as unforgivable as unconstitutional? They were Roman citizens, and they had not been tried.”
“True. However, they were not officially executed. They were murdered to avoid keeping them alive to undergo a trial process neither Marius nor Scaurus could be sure would not cause far worse violence. Naturally it was Sulla who solved the dilemma by murder. He was Marius’s right hand in those days—very quick, very clever, very ruthless. So fifteen men died, there were no incendiary treason trials, the grain fleet arrived, Marius distributed it dirt-cheap, Rome settled down full-bellied, and later on Scaeva the slave got all the credit for murdering those fifteen men.”
Labienus frowned, added more water to his wine. “I wish I knew where you’re going.”
“I know where, Labienus, which is what matters,” said Caesar, smiling to reveal clenched teeth. “Consider if you will that dubious piece of relatively recent Republican expedience, the senatus consultum de re publica defendenda—or, as Cicero so cutely renamed it, the Senatus Consultum Ultimum. Invented by the Senate when no one wanted a dictator appointed to make the decisions. And it did serve the Senate’s purpose in the aftermath of Gaius Gracchus, not to mention Saturninus, Lepidus and some others.”
“I still don’t know where you’re going,” said Labienus.
Caesar drew a breath. “Now here is the Senatus Consultum Ultimum again, Labienus. But look what’s happened to it! In Cicero’s mind for one it has become respectable, inevitable, and highly convenient. Seduce the Senate into passing it, and then beneath its shelter proceed to flout both constitution and mos maiorum! Without altering it at law in any way, Cicero has employed his Senatus Consultum Ultimum to crush Roman windpipes and snap Roman necks without trial—without ceremony—without even common decency! Those men went to their deaths faster than soldiers are cut down in a lost battle! Not unofficially beneath a rain of tiles from a roof, but with the full sanction of the Senate of Rome! Which at Cicero’s urging took upon itself the functions of judge and jury! How do you think it must have looked to that crowd in the Forum this evening, Labienus? I will tell you how it looked. As if from this day forward, no Roman citizen can ever again be sure that he will be accorded his absolutely inalienable right to a trial before any condemnation. And that so-called brilliant man, that conceited and feckless fool Cicero, actually thinks he has extricated the Senate from a very difficult situation in the best and most suitable way! I will grant him that for the Senate it was the easy way. But for the vast majority of Roman citizens of every kind from the First Class to the Head Count, what Cicero engineered today spells the death of an inalienable right should the Senate decide under a future Senatus Consultum Ultimum that Roman men must die without a trial, without due process of the law! What’s to stop its happening again, Labienus? Tell me what?”
Suddenly short of breath, Labienus managed to put his goblet down on the desk without spilling its contents, then stared at Caesar as if he had never seen him before. Why did Caesar see so many ramifications when no one else had? Why hadn’t he, Titus Labienus, understood better what Cicero was actually doing? Ye gods, Cicero hadn’t understood! Only Caesar had. Those who voted against execution had done so because their hearts could not approve, or else had groped after the truth like blind men debating the nature of an elephant.
“When I spoke this morning I made a terrible mistake,” Caesar went on angrily. “I chose to be ironic, I didn’t think it right to inflame feelings. I decided to be clever, to point out the insanity of Cicero’s proposal by talking of the time of the kings and saying that Cicero was abrogating the Republic by dragging us back to the time of the kings. It wasn’t simple enough. I ought to have been down on a child’s level, slowly spelling out manifest truths. But I deemed them grown and educated men of some little intelligence, so I chose to be ironic. Never realizing that they wouldn’t fully follow where my argument was going, why I was taking that tack. I ought to have been blunter then than I am now to you, but I didn’t want to set their backs up because I thought rage would blind them! They were already blind, I had nothing to lose! I don’t often make mistakes, but I made one this morning, Labienus. Look at Cato! The one man I felt sure would support me, little though he likes me. What he said made absolutely no sense. But they chose to follow him like a lot of eunuchs after Magna Mater.”
“Cato is a yapping dog.”
“No, Labienus, he’s just the worst kind of fool there is. He thinks he’s not a fool.”
“That’s true of most of us.”
Up went Caesar’s brows. “I am not a fool, Titus.”
Then Titus was to soften it, of course. “Granted.” Why was it that when one was in the company of a man who did not drink wine, wine lost its allure? Labienus poured himself water. “No point in going over lost ground now, Caesar. I believe you when you say you’ll make Cicero wish he’d never been born, but how?”
“Simple. I will ram his Senatus Consultum Ultimum somewhere down around his golden tonsils,” said Caesar dreamily, his smile not reaching his eyes.
“But how? How, how, how?”
“You have four days left of your year as a tribune of the plebs, Labienus, and they are just enough if we act quickly. We can allow tomorrow to organize ourselves and refine our roles. The day after will see the first phase. The two days following that are for the final phase. The business won’t have finished by then, but it will have gone far enough. And you, my dear Titus Labienus, will quit your tribunate in an absolute blaze of glory! If nothing else recommends your name to posterity, I promise you that the events of the next four days surely will!”
“What do I have to do?”
“Nothing this evening, except perhaps—do you have access to—no, you wouldn’t. I’ll frame it differently. Can you manage to get hold of a bust or a statue of Saturninus? Or of your uncle Quintus Labienus?’’
“I can go one better than that,” said Labienus promptly. “I know where there’s an imago of Saturninus.”
“An imago! But he was never praetor!”
“True,” said Labienus, grinning. “The trouble with being a great nobleman, Caesar, is that you can have no idea how our minds work, we ambitious up-and-coming Picentines, Samnites, New Men from Arpinum and the like. We just can’t wait to see our features exquisitely formed and tinted like life in beeswax, with real hair of exactly the right color and style! So as soon as we have the money in our purses we sneak off to one of the craftsmen in the Velabrum, and we commission an imago. I know men who will never even belong to the Senate who have imagines. How else do you think Magius of the Velabrum got so rich?’’
“Well, in this situation I’m very pleased you up-and-coming men of Picenum commission imagines,” Caesar said briskly. “Get Saturninus’s likeness, and find an actor to wear it to good effect.”
“Uncle Quintus had an imago too, so I’ll hire an actor to wear his. I can also get busts of both men.”
“In which case I have nothing further for you until dawn tomorrow, Labienus. Then I promise I’ll work you remorselessly until the time comes to depart your tribunate.”
“Is it to be just you and me?”
“No, there will be four of us,” said Caesar, rising to escort Labienus to the front door. “What I plan needs you, me, Metellus Celer and my cousin Lucius Caesar.”
Which didn’t help elucidate matters for Titus Labienus, who left the Domus Publica intrigued, baffled, and wondering how his curiosity and excitement were ever going to let him sleep.
*
Caesar had abandoned all idea of sleep. He returned to his study so immersed in thought that Eutychus, his steward, had to clear his throat several times in the doorway before his presence was noticed.
“Ah, excellent!” said the Pontifex Maximus. “I am at home to no one, Eutychus, even my mother. Is that understood?’’
“Edepol!” cried the steward, plump hands going to plumper face. “Domine, Julia is most anxious to speak to you at once.”
“Tell her I know what she wants to speak to me about, and that I will be happy to see her for as long as she likes on the first day of the new tribunate of the plebs. But not a moment before.”
“Caesar, that’s five days off! Truly, I don’t think the poor little girl can wait five days!”
“If I say she must wait twenty years, Eutychus, then she must wait twenty years,” was Caesar’s reply, coldly given. “Five days are not twenty years. All family and domestic matters must wait for five days. Julia has a grandmother, she is not dependent upon me. Is that absolutely clear?”
“Yes, domine,” whispered the steward, carefully shutting the door and creeping away down the passage to where Julia stood, face pale, hands locked in each other. “I’m sorry, Julia, he says he will see no one until the day the new tribunes of the plebs enter office.”
“Eutychus, he didn’t!”
“He did. He refuses to see even the lady Aurelia.”
Who appeared at that moment from the direction of the Atrium Vestae, eyes hard, mouth thin. “Come,” she said to Julia, drawing her into the suite belonging to the mother of the Pontifex Maximus.
“You’ve heard,” said Aurelia, pushing Julia into a chair.
“I don’t know quite what I’ve heard,” said Julia distractedly. “I asked to speak to tata, and he said no!”
That gave Aurelia pause. “Did he? How odd! It is not like Caesar to refuse to face facts or people.”
“Eutychus says he won’t see anyone, even you, until five days from now, avia. He was quite specific, we must all wait until the day the new tribunes of the plebs enter office.”
Frowning, Aurelia began to pace the room; nor did she answer for some time. Eyes misted but tears held back resolutely, Julia watched her grandmother. The trouble is, she thought, that the three of us are so dauntingly different from each other!
Julia’s mother had died when she was barely seven years old, which meant Aurelia had been mother as well as grandmother for most of her formative years. Not very approachable, perpetually busy, strict and unsparing, Aurelia had nonetheless given Julia what all children need most, an unshakable sense of security and belonging. Though she laughed but little, she had an acute wit which could pop out at the most disconcerting moments, and she thought no less of Julia because Julia loved to laugh. Every care had been lavished upon the child’s upbringing, from guidance in such matters as tasteful dress to merciless training in good manners. Not to mention the unsentimental and unvarnished way Aurelia had taught Julia to accept her lot—and to accept it gracefully, with pride, without developing a sense of injury or resentment.
“There is no point in wishing for a different or a better world” was Aurelia’s perpetual moral. “For whatever reason, this world is the only one we have, and we must live in it as happily and pleasantly as we can. We cannot fight Fortune or Fate, Julia.”
Caesar was not at all like his mother except in his steel, nor was Julia unaware of the friction which could scratch into being between them on sometimes scant provocation. But for his daughter he was the beginning and the end of that world Aurelia had disciplined her into accepting: not a god, but definitely a hero. To Julia, no one was as perfect as her father, as brilliant, as educated, as witty, as handsome, as ideal, as Roman. Oh, she was well acquainted with his failings (though he never visited them upon her), from that terrifying temper to what she thought of as his besetting sin, which was to play with people the way a cat played with a mouse in every sense—pitiless and cool, a smile of sheer pleasure on his face.
“There is a compelling reason for Caesar’s withdrawal from us,” said Aurelia suddenly, ceasing to pace. “It is not that he is afraid to confront us, of that I am now absolutely sure. I can only assume that his motives have nothing to do with us.”
“Nor probably,” said Julia, enlightened, “anything to do with what is preying on our minds.”
Aurelia’s beautiful smile flashed. “You grow more perceptive every day, Julia. Quite so, quite so.”
“Then, avia, until he has time to see us, I will have to talk to you. Is it true, what I heard in the Porticus Margaritaria?’’
“About your father and Servilia?’’
“Is that it? Oh!”
“What did you think it was, Julia?”
“I couldn’t catch it all, because as soon as people saw me they stopped talking. What I gathered was that tata is involved in some great scandal with a woman, and that it all came out in the Senate today.”
Aurelia grunted. “It certainly did.” And without mincing matters she told Julia of the events in the temple of Concord.
“My father and Brutus’s mother,” said Julia slowly. “What a muddle!” She laughed. “But how close he is, avia! All this time, and neither Brutus nor I has ever suspected. What on earth does he see in her?”
“You’ve never liked her.”
“No, indeed!”
“Well, that’s understandable. You’re so much on Brutus’s side you couldn’t like her.”
“Do you?”
“For what she is, I like her very well.”
“Yet tata told me he didn’t like her, and he doesn’t lie.”
“He definitely does not like her. I have no idea—nor, frankly, do I want to have any idea!—what holds him to her, except that it is very strong.”
“I imagine she’s excellent in bed.”
“Julia!”
“I’m not a child anymore,” said Julia with a chuckle. “And I do have ears.”
“For what’s bruited about the shops of the Porticus Margaritaria?’’
“No, for what’s said in my stepmother’s rooms.”
Aurelia stiffened dangerously. “I’ll soon put a stop to that!”
“Don’t avia, please!” cried Julia, putting her hand on her grandmother’s arm. “You mustn’t blame poor Pompeia, and it isn’t her, anyway. It’s her friends. I know I’m not grown up yet, but I always think of myself as much older and wiser than Pompeia. She’s like a pretty puppy, she sits there wagging her tail and grinning all over her face as the conversation wafts far above her head, so terribly anxious to please and belong. They torment her dreadfully, the Clodias and Fulvia, and she never can see how cruel they are.” Julia looked thoughtful. “I love tata to death and I’ll hear no word against him, but he’s cruel to her too. Oh, I know why! She’s far too stupid for him. They ought never to have married, you know.”
“I was responsible for that marriage.”
“And for the best of reasons, I’m sure,” said Julia warmly. Then she sighed. “Oh, but I do wish you’d picked someone a great deal cleverer than Pompeia Sulla!”
“I picked her,” said Aurelia grimly, “because she was offered to me as a bride for Caesar, and because I thought the only way I could make sure Caesar didn’t marry Servilia was to get in first.”
*
After comparing notes in later days, a goodly number of the members of the Senate discovered that they had preferred not to linger in the lower Forum to witness the execution of Lentulus Sura and the others.
One such was the senior consul-elect, Decimus Junius Silanus; another was the tribune of the plebs-elect, Marcus Porcius Cato.
Silanus reached his house some time ahead of Cato, whose progress was retarded by people wishful of congratulating him for his speech and his stand against Caesar’s blandishments.
The fact that he was obliged to let himself in the front door prepared Silanus for what he found inside: a deserted atrium with nary a servant in sight or sound. Which meant everyone servile already knew what had happened during the debate. But did Servilia? Did Brutus? Face drawn because the pain in his gut was gnawing and griping, Silanus forced his legs to hold him up and went immediately to his wife’s sitting room. ‘
She was there, poring over some of Brutus’s accounts, and looked up with an expression of simple irritation.
“Yes, yes, what is it?” she growled.
“Then you don’t know,” he said.
“Don’t know what?”
“That your message to Caesar fell into the wrong hands.”
Her eyes widened. “What do you mean?”
“The precious fellow you so love to have run your errands because he sucks up to you so cleverly isn’t clever enough,” said Silanus with more iron in his voice than Servilia had ever heard. “He came prancing into Concord and didn’t have the sense to wait. So he handed your note to Caesar at the worst possible moment, which was the moment your esteemed half brother Cato had reserved to accuse Caesar of masterminding Catilina’s conspiracy. And when in the midst of this drama Cato saw that Caesar was anxious to read the piece of paper he had been handed, Cato demanded that Caesar read it out to the whole House. He assumed it contained evidence of Caesar’s treason, you see.”
“And Caesar read it out,” said Servilia tonelessly.
“Come, come, my dear, is that all you know about Caesar after so much intimacy with the man?’’ asked Silanus, lip curling. “He’s not so unsubtle, nor so little in command of himself. No, if anyone came out of the affair looking the victor, it was Caesar. Of course it was Caesar! He simply smiled at Cato and said that he rather thought Cato would prefer that the contents of the note remain private. He got up and gave Cato the note so courteously, so pleasantly—oh, it was well done!”
“Then how was I exposed?” whispered Servilia.
“Cato just couldn’t believe what his eyes saw. It took him ages to decipher those few words, while we all waited with bated breath. Then he crushed your message into a ball and threw it at Caesar like a missile. But of course the distance was too great. Philippus grabbed it from the floor and read it. Then he passed it along the praetors-elect until it reached the curule dais.”
“And they roared with laughter,” said Servilia between her teeth. “Oh, they would!”
“Pipinna,’’ he mocked.
Another woman would have flinched, but not Servilia, who snarled. “Fools!”
“The hilarity made it hard for Cicero to make himself heard when he demanded a division.”
Even in the midst of her travail her avidity for politics showed. “A division? For what?”
“To decide the fate of our captive conspirators, poor souls. Execution or exile. I voted to execute, that’s what your note forced me to do. Caesar had advocated exile, and had the House on his side until Cato spoke up for execution. Cato swung everyone around. The division went for execution. Thanks to you, Servilia. If your note hadn’t silenced Cato he would have filibustered until sunset, and the vote wouldn’t have been taken until tomorrow. My feeling is that by tomorrow the House would have seen the sense of Caesar’s argument. If I were Caesar, my dear, I’d cut you up and feed you to the wolves.”
That disconcerted her, but her contempt for Silanus eventually made her dismiss this opinion. “When are the executions to take place?”
“They’re taking place right at this moment. I deemed it best to come home and warn you before Cato could arrive.”
She leaped to her feet. “Brutus!”
But Silanus, not without satisfaction, had cocked his ear in the direction of the atrium, and now smiled sourly. “Too late, my dear, far too late. Cato is upon us.”
Still Servilia made a move toward the door, only to stop short of it when Cato erupted through it, the first finger and thumb of his right hand pincered agonizingly into Brutus’s earlobe.
“Get in here and look at her, your strumpet of a mother!” bellowed Cato, releasing Brutus’s ear and pushing him so hard in the small of the back that he staggered and would have fallen were it not for Silanus, who steadied him. The lad looked so appalled and bewildered that he probably had not even begun to understand what was happening, thought Silanus as he moved away.
Why do I feel so strange? then asked Silanus of himself. Why am I in some secret corner so delighted by this, so vindicated? Today my world has learned that I am a cuckold, and yet I find that of much less moment than I find this delicious retribution, my wife’s hugely deserved comeuppance. I hardly find it in me to blame Caesar. It was her, I know it was her. He doesn’t bother with the wives of men who haven’t irritated him politically, and until today I have never irritated him politically. It was her, I know it was her. She wanted him, she went after him. That’s why she gave Brutus to his daughter! To keep Caesar in the family. He wouldn’t marry her, so she beggared her pride. Quite a feat for Servilia, that! And now Cato, the man she loathes most in all the world, is privy to both her passions—Brutus and Caesar. Her days of peace and self-satisfaction are over. From now on there will be a hideous war, just as in her childhood. Oh, she’ll win! But how many of them will live to see her triumph? I for one will not, for which I am profoundly glad. I pray I am the first to go.
“Look at her, your strumpet of a mother!” Cato bellowed again, slapping Brutus viciously about the head.
“Mama, Mama, what is it?” Brutus whimpered, ears ringing and eyes watering.
” ‘Mama, Mama!’ ” Cato mimicked, sneering. ” ‘Mama, Mama!’ What a dimwit you are, Brutus, what a lapdog, what an apology for a man! Brutus the baby, Brutus the booby! ‘Mama, Mama!’ ” Slapping Brutus’s head viciously.
Servilia moved with the speed and style of a striking snake, straight for Cato, and so suddenly that she was upon him before he could swing his attention away from Brutus. Between them she went with both hands up, fingers crooked into claws, took Cato’s face in their embrace and dug her nails into his flesh until they sank like grapples. Had he not instinctively screwed his eyes shut she would have blinded him, but her talons raked him from brow to jawline on right side and on left side, gouged down to muscle and then kept on going along his neck and into his shoulders.
Even a warrior like Cato retreated, thin howls of terrible pain dying away as his opening eyes took in the sight of a Servilia more frightful than anything except dead Caepio’s face, a Servilia whose lips were peeled back from her teeth and whose eyes blazed murder. Then under the distended gaze of her son, her husband and her half brother she lifted her dripping fingers to her mouth and luxuriously sucked Cato’s flesh from them. Silanus gagged and fled. Brutus fainted. Which left Cato glaring at her between rivers of blood.
“Get out and don’t ever come back,” she said softly.
“I will end in owning your son, never doubt it!”
“If you so much as try, Cato, what I’ve done to you today will look like the kiss of a butterfly.”
“You are monstrous!”
“Just get out, Cato.”
Cato got out, holding folds of toga against his face and neck.
“Now why didn’t I think to tell him that it was I sent Caepio to his death?’’ she wondered as she squatted down beside the inanimate form of her son. “Never mind,” she went on, wiping Cato from her fingers before she began to minister to Brutus, “I have that little item saved for another time.”
He came to full consciousness slowly, perhaps because inside his mind there now dwelled an absolute terror of his mother, who could eat Cato’s flesh with relish. But eventually he had no other choice than to open his eyes and stare up at her.
“Get up and sit on the couch.”
Brutus got up and sat on the couch.
“Do you know what all that was about?”
“No, Mama,” he whispered.
“Not even when Cato called me a strumpet?”
“No, Mama,” he whispered.
“I am not a strumpet, Brutus.”
“No, Mama.”
“However,” said Servilia, disposing herself in a chair from which she could move quickly to Brutus’s side if she needed, “you are definitely old enough to understand the ways of the world, so it is time I enlightened you about certain matters anyway. What all that was about,” she went on in conversational tones, “is the fact that for some years Julia’s father has been my lover.”
He leaned forward and dropped his head into his hands, quite unable to put two thoughts together, a hapless mass of misery and bewildered pain. First, all that in Concord while he stood at its doors listening—then, reporting to his mother—then, a blissful interval of wrestling with the writings of Fabius Pictor—then, Uncle Cato charging in and seizing his ear—then, Uncle Cato shouting at his mother—then, Mama attacking Uncle Cato, and—and—The full horror of what his mother had done after that struck Brutus afresh; he shivered and shuddered, wept desolately behind his hands.
Now this. Mama and Caesar were lovers, had been lovers for years. How did he feel about this? How was he supposed to feel about this? Brutus liked guidance; he hated the rudderless sensation of having to make a decision—especially a decision about emotions—without having first learned how people like Plato and Aristotle regarded these unruly, illogical and mystifying entities. Somehow he didn’t seem able to feel anything about this. All that between Mama and Uncle Cato over this! But why? Mama was a law unto herself; surely Uncle Cato realized that. If Mama had a lover, there would be good reason. And if Caesar was Mama’s lover, there would be good reason. Mama did nothing without good reason. Nothing!
Further than that he hadn’t managed to get when Servilia, tired of his silent weeping, spoke. “Cato,” she said, “is not all there, Brutus. He never was, even as a baby. Mormolyce got at him. He hasn’t improved with the passage of time. He’s thick, narrow, bigoted and unbelievably complacent. It is none of his business what I do with my life, any more than you are his business.”
“I never realized how much you hate him,” said Brutus, lifting his hands from his face to look at her. “Mama, you’ve scarred him for life! For life!”
“Good!” she said, looking genuinely pleased. Then her eyes fully assimilated the picture her son presented, and she winced. Because of the pimples he couldn’t shave, had to content himself with a close clipping of his dense black beard; between the huge pimples and the snot smeared everywhere, he was more than merely ugly. He was ghastly. Her hand scrabbled behind her until it located a small soft cloth near the wine and water flagons; she tossed it to him. “Wipe your face and blow your nose, Brutus, please! I do not acknowledge Cato’s criticisms of you, but there are certainly times when you disappoint me dreadfully.”
“I know,” he whispered, “I know.”
“Oh well, never mind!” she said bracingly, got up and went to stand behind him, her arm about his bent shoulders. “You have birth, wealth, education and clout. And you are not yet twenty-one years old. Time is bound to improve you, my son, but time will not do the same for Cato. Nothing can improve Cato.”
Her arm felt like a cylinder of hot lead, but he didn’t dare shrug it off. He straightened a little. “May I go, Mama?”
“Yes, provided that you understand my position.”
“I understand it, Mama.”
“What I do is my affair, Brutus, nor am I about to offer you one single excuse for the relationship between Caesar and me. Silanus knows. He has known for a very long time. That Caesar, Silanus and I have preferred to keep our secret is logical.”
Light broke on Brutus. “Tertia!” he gasped. “Tertia is Caesar’s daughter, not Silanus’s! She looks like Julia.”
Servilia regarded her son with some admiration. “How very perspicacious of you, Brutus. Yes, Tertia belongs to Caesar.”
“And Silanus knows.”
“From the beginning.”
“Poor Silanus!”
“Don’t waste your pity on undeserving objects.”
A tiny spark of courage crept into Brutus’s breast. “And what of Caesar?” he asked. “Do you love him?”
“More than anyone in this world except for you.”
“Oh, poor Caesar!” said Brutus, and escaped before she could say another word, his heart pounding at his temerity.
Silanus had made sure that this only male child had a large and comfortable suite of rooms for himself, with a pleasant outlook onto the peristyle. Here Brutus fled, but not for long. After washing his face, trimming his beard back to a minimal stubble, combing his hair and summoning his servant to assist him into his toga, he left Silanus’s brooding house. He did not walk Rome’s streets alone, however. As darkness had fallen, he went escorted by two slaves bearing torches.
“May I see Julia, Eutychus?” he asked at Caesar’s door.
“It is very late, domine, but I will find out if she is up,” said the steward respectfully, admitting him into the house.
Of course she would see him; Brutus trod up the stairs and knocked upon her door.
When she opened it she took him into her arms and just held him, her cheek against his hair. And the most exquisite feelings of utter peace and infinite warmth seeped through him from skin to bones; Brutus finally understood what some people meant when they said there was nothing lovelier than coming home. Home was Julia. His love for her welled up and up and up; the tears slid from beneath his lowered lids in healing bliss; he clung to her and inhaled the smell of her, delicate as all else about her. Julia, Julia, Julia…
Without conscious volition his hands slid around her back, he lifted his head from her shoulder and groped for her mouth with his own, so fumbling and inexpert that she did not understand his intention until it was too late to draw away without hurting his feelings. So Julia experienced her first kiss at least filled with pity for its giver, and found it not nearly as unpleasant as she had feared. His lips felt quite nice, soft and dry, and with her eyes closed she could not see his face. Nor did he attempt further intimacies. Two more of the same kind of kisses, then he released her.
“Oh, Julia, I love you so!”
What could she say except, “I love you too, Brutus”? ‘ Then she drew him inside and seated him on a couch, though she very properly went to a chair some distance away, and left the door a little ajar.
Her sitting room was large and, at least in Brutus’s eyes, especially beautiful. Her hand had been upon it, and her hand was not ordinary. The frescoes were of airy birds and frail flowers in pale clear colors, the furniture was slender and graceful, and there was not one touch of Tyrian purple to be seen, nor any gilt.
“Your mother and my father,” she said.
“What does it mean?”
“For them, or for us?”
“For us. How can we know what it means for them?”
“I suppose,” she said slowly, “it can do us no harm. There are no laws forbidding them love because of us, though I imagine it will be frowned upon.”
“My mother’s virtue is above reproach, and this doesn’t change that!” snapped Brutus, sounding truculently defensive.
“Of course it doesn’t change that. My father represents a unique circumstance in your mother’s life. Servilia is no Palla or Sempronia Tuditani.”
“Oh, Julia, it’s so wonderful that you always understand!”
“Understanding them is easy, Brutus. My father can’t be lumped in with other men, just as your mother is a singularity among women.” She shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps their relationship was inevitable, given the sort of people they are.”
“You and I have a half sister in common,” said Brutus abruptly. “Tertia is your father’s, not Silanus’s.”
Julia stilled, then gasped, then laughed in delight. “Oh, I have a sister! How lovely!”
“Don’t, Julia, please don’t! Neither of us can ever admit to that, even within our families.”
Her smile wobbled, faded. “Oh. Yes, of course you’re right, Brutus.” Tears gathered but did not fall. “I must never show it to her. All the same,” she said more brightly, “I know.”
“Though she does look like you, she’s not a bit like you, Julia. In nature Tertia takes after my mother.”
“Oh, rubbish! How can you tell at four years of age?”
“Easily,” said Brutus grimly. “She’s going to be betrothed to Gaius Cassius because his mother and my mother compared our horoscopes. Our lives are closely linked, apparently through Tertia.”
“And Cassius must never know.”
That provoked a derisive snort from Brutus. “Oh, come now, Julia! Do you think someone won’t tell him? Though it can’t matter to him. Caesar’s blood is better than Silanus’s.”
And there, thought Julia, was his mother talking! She went back to the original subject. “About our parents,” she said.
“You think what lies between them cannot affect us?”
“Oh, it must affect us. But I think we ought to ignore it.”
“Then that,” he said, rising to his feet, “is what we will do. I must go, it’s very late.” At her door he lifted her hand and kissed it. “In four more years we will be married. It’s hard to wait, but Plato says the waiting will enhance our union.”
“Does he?’’ asked Julia, looking blank. “I must have missed that bit.”
“Well, I’m interpreting between the lines.”
“Of course. Men have a superior ability to do that, I’ve noticed it quite often.”
*
Night was just beginning to yield to day when Titus Labienus, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer and Lucius Julius Caesar arrived at the Domus Publica to find Caesar wide awake and apparently none the worse for lack of sleep. Water, mild sweet wine, new-baked bread, virgin oil and an excellent honey from Hymettos had been placed on a console table at the back of the room, and Caesar waited patiently until his guests had helped themselves. He himself sipped something steaming from a carved stone cup, though he ate nothing.
“What’s that you’re drinking?” asked Metellus Celer, curious.
“Very hot water with a little vinegar.”
“Ye gods, how vile!”
“One gets used to it,” said Caesar tranquilly.
“Why would one want to?”
“Two reasons. The first, that I believe it is good for my health, which I intend to keep in rude excellence until I am an old man, and the second, that it inures my palate to all manner of insults from rancid oil to sour bread.”
“I’ll grant you the first reason, but what’s the virtue in the second unless you’ve espoused Stoicism? Why should you ever have to put up with poor food?”
“On campaign one often has to—at least, the way I campaign. Does Pompeius Magnus do you prouder, does he, Celer?”
“I should hope so! And every other general I’ve served under! Remind me not to campaign with you!”
“Well, in winter and spring the drink isn’t quite so vile. I replace the vinegar with lemon juice.”
Celer rolled his eyes; Labienus and Lucius Caesar laughed.
“All right, time to get down to business,” said Caesar as he seated himself behind his desk. “Please forgive my patron’s pose, but it seems more logical for me to sit where I can see all of you, and all of you can see me.”
“You are forgiven,” said Lucius Caesar gravely.
“Titus Labienus was here last night, so I have his reasons for voting with me yesterday,” Caesar said, “and I understand completely why you voted with me, Lucius. However, I am not entirely privy to your motives, Celer. Tell me now.”
The long-suffering husband of his own first cousin, Clodia, Metellus Celer was also the brother-in-law of Pompey the Great, as the mother of Celer and his younger brother, Metellus Nepos, was also Mucia Tertia’s mother. Devoted to each other, Celer and Nepos were liked and esteemed, for they were charming and convivial men.
To Caesar, Celer had never seemed particularly radical in his political leanings, until now respectably conservative. How he answered was critical to success; Caesar could not hope to carry out what he planned unless Celer was prepared to back him to the hilt.
Handsome face grim, Celer leaned forward, hands clenched into fists. “To begin with, Caesar, I disapprove of mushrooms like Cicero dictating policy to genuine Romans. Nor for one single moment will I condone the execution of Roman citizens without a trial! It does not escape me that Cicero’s ally turned out to be another quasi-Roman, Cato of the Saloniani. What are we coming to when those who presume to interpret our laws are descended from slaves or ancestorless bumpkins?”
An answer which—did Celer realize it?—also dismissed his relative by marriage Pompey the Great. However, provided no one was crass enough to mention this fact, it might conveniently be ignored.
“What can you do, Gaius?” asked Lucius Caesar.
“Quite a lot. Labienus, you will excuse me if I recapitulate what I said to you last night. Namely, exactly what it was Cicero did. The execution of citizens without trial is not the crux of the issue, but rather a by-product of it. The real crime lies in Cicero’s interpretation of the senatus consultum de re publica defendenda. I do not believe that this ultimate decree was ever intended as a blanket protection enabling the Senate or any other body of Roman men to do precisely as it likes. That is Cicero’s own interpretation.
“The ultimate decree was invented to deal with a civil disturbance of short duration, that of Gaius Gracchus. The same can be said of its employment during the revolution of Saturninus, though its shortcomings were more obvious then than when it was first used. It was invoked by Carbo against Sulla when he landed in Italia, and against Lepidus too. In the case of Lepidus, it was reinforced by Sulla’s constitution, which gave the Senate full and clear powers in all matters relating to war, if not to civil disturbances. The Senate chose to call Lepidus a war.
“That is not so today,” Caesar continued sternly. “The Senate is once more constrained by the three Comitia. Nor did any of the five men who were executed last night lead armed troops against Rome. In fact, none so much as picked up a weapon against any Roman, unless you count Caeparius’s resisting what he might have thought a simple attack on the Mulvian Bridge in the middle of the night. They were not declared public enemies. And, no matter how many arguments are advanced to prove their treasonous intentions, even now they are dead their intentions remain just that—no more and no less than intentions. Intentions, not concrete deeds! The letters were letters of intent, written before the fact.
“Who can say what the arrival of Catilina outside Rome might have done to their intentions? And with Catilina gone from the city, what happened to their intention to kill the consuls and praetors? Two men—neither of them among last night’s five dead men!—are said to have tried to enter Cicero’s house to murder him. Yet our consuls and our praetors are hale and hearty to this day! There’s not a scratch on them! Are we now to be executed without trial because of our intentions?”
“Oh, I wish you’d said that yesterday!” sighed Celer.
“So do I. However, I very much doubt that any argument had the power to move them once Cato got into stride. For all his fine words about keeping our speeches short, Cicero never even tried to stop his talking. I wish he’d continued until sunset.”
“Blame Servilia that he didn’t,” said Lucius Caesar, mentioning the unmentionable.
“Don’t worry, I do,” said Caesar, tight-lipped.
“Well, if you plan to murder her, just make sure you don’t tell her so in a letter,” Celer contributed, grinning. “Intent is all you need these days.”
“That is precisely my point. Cicero has converted the Senatus Consultum Ultimum into a monster which can turn on any of us.”
“I fail to see what we can do in hindsight,” said Labienus.
“We can turn the monster against Cicero, who undoubtedly at this moment is scheming to have the Senate ratify his claim to the title pater patriae,” said Caesar, curling his lip. “He says he’s saved his country, whereas I maintain that his country is in no real danger, Catilina and his army notwithstanding. If ever a revolution was doomed to fail, this one is it. Lepidus was dismal enough. I’d call Catilina an outright joke, except that some good Roman soldiers will have to die putting him down.”
“What do you intend?” asked Labienus. “What can you?”
“I mean to cast the whole concept of the Senatus Consultum Ultimum into disrepute. You see, I intend to try someone for high treason who acted under its protection,” Caesar said.
Lucius Caesar gasped. “Cicero?”
“Certainly not Cicero—or Cato, for that matter. It’s far too soon to attempt retaliation against any of the men involved in this latest version. Were we to try, we’d find our own necks throttled. The time for that will come, cousin, but not yet. No, we’ll go after someone well known to have acted criminally under a far earlier Senatus Consultum Ultimum. Cicero was thoughtful enough to name our quarry in the House. Gaius Rabirius.”
Three pairs of eyes widened, but no one spoke for some time.
“Murder, you mean, surely,” said Celer eventually. “Gaius Rabirius was inarguably one of those on the Curia Hostilia roof, but that wasn’t treason. It was murder.”
“That’s not what the law says, Celer. Think about it. Murder becomes treason when it is done to usurp the legal prerogatives of the State. Therefore the murder of a Roman citizen being held for trial on charges of high treason is itself treasonous.”
“I begin to see where you’re going,” said Labienus, eyes glittering, “but you’d never succeed in getting into court.”
“Perduellio is not a court offense, Labienus. It must be tried in the Centuriate Assembly,” said Caesar.
“You’d never get it there either, even with Celer as urban praetor.”
“I disagree. There is a way to get it before the Centuries. We begin with a trial process far older than the Republic, yet no less Roman law than any law of the Republic. It’s all in the ancient documents, my friend. Even Cicero will not be able to contest the legality of what we do. He’ll be able to counter it by sending it to the Centuries, is all.”
“Enlighten me, Caesar, I’m no student of ancient law,” said Celer, beginning to smile.
“You are renowned as an urban praetor who has scrupulously adhered to his edicts,” said Caesar, choosing to keep his audience on tenterhooks a little longer. “One of your edicts says that you will agree to try any man if his accusator acts within the law. At dawn on the morrow Titus Labienus will appear at your tribunal and demand that Gaius Rabirius be tried perduellionis for the murders of Saturninus and Quintus Labienus in the form outlined during the reign of King Tullus Hostilius. You will inspect his case, and—how perspicacious of you!—you will just happen to have a copy of my dissertation on ancient procedures for high treason under your elbow. This will confirm that Labienus’s application to charge Rabirius perduellionis for these two murders is within the letter of the law.”
His audience sat fascinated; Caesar drained what was left of his water and vinegar, now tepid, and continued.
“The procedure for the only trial which has come down to us during the reign of Tullus Hostilius—that of Horatius for the murder of his sister—calls for a hearing before two judges only. Now there are only four men in today’s Rome who qualify as judges because they come from families installed among the Fathers at the time the trial took place. I am one and you are another, Lucius. The third is Catilina, officially a public enemy. And the fourth is Fabius Sanga, at present well on his way to the lands of the Allobroges in the company of his clients. You, Celer, will therefore appoint me and Lucius as the judges, and direct that the trial take place immediately on the Campus Martius.”
“Are you sure about your facts?’’ asked Celer, brow wrinkling. ‘ The Valerii are attested at that time, and certainly the Servilii and Quinctilii came from Alba Longa after its destruction, just as the Julii did.”
Lucius Caesar chose to answer. “The trial of Horatius took place well before Alba Longa was sacked, Celer, which disqualifies the Servilii and the Quinctilii. The Julii emigrated to Rome when Numa Pompilius was still on the throne. They were banished from Alba by Cluilius, who usurped the Alban kingship from them. As for the Valerii”—Lucius Caesar shrugged—”they were Rome’s military priests, which disqualifies them too.”
“I stand corrected,” chuckled Celer, vastly diverted, “but can only plead that I am, after all, a mere Caecilius!”
“Sometimes,” said Caesar, acknowledging this hit, “it pays to choose your ancestors, Quintus. Caesar’s luck that no one from Cicero to Cato will be able to dispute your choice of judges.”
“It will provoke a furor,” said Labienus with satisfaction.
“That it will, Titus.”
“And Rabirius will follow Horatius’s example by appealing.”
“Of course. But first we’ll put on a wonderful show with all the ancient trappings on full display—the cross fashioned out of an unlucky tree—the forked stake for the flogging—three lictors bearing the rods and axes to represent the original three Roman tribes—the veil for Rabirius’s head and the ritual bindings for his wrists—superb theater! Spinther will die of envy.”
“But,” said Labienus, reverting to gloom, “they’ll keep on finding excuses to delay Rabirius’s appeal in the Centuries until public resentment dies down. Rabirius’s case won’t be heard while anyone remembers the fate of Lentulus Sura and the others.”
“They can’t do that,” said Caesar. “The ancient law prevails, so an appeal has to be held immediately, just as Horatius’s appeal was held immediately.”
“I take it that we damn Rabirius,” said Lucius Caesar, “but I’m out of my depth, cousin. What’s the point?”
“First of all, our trial is very different from a modern trial as set up by Glaucia. In modern eyes it will seem a farce. The judges decide what evidence they want to hear, and they also decide when they’ve heard enough. Which we will after Labienus has presented his case to us. We will decline to allow the accused to present any evidence in his own defense. It is vital that justice be seen not to be done! For what justice did those five men executed yesterday receive?”
“And secondly?” asked Lucius Caesar.
“Secondly, the appeal goes on straightaway, which means the Centuries will still be boiling. And Cicero is going to panic. If the Centuries damn Rabirius, his own neck is at risk. Cicero isn’t stupid, you know, just a trifle obtuse when his conceit and his certainty that he’s right get the better of his judgement. The moment he hears what we’re doing, he’ll understand exactly why we’re doing it.”
“In which case,” said Celer, “if he has any sense he’ll go straight to the Popular Assembly and procure a law invalidating the ancient procedure.”
“Yes, I believe that’s how he’ll approach it.” Caesar looked at Labienus. “I noted that Ampius and Rullus voted with us in Concord yesterday. Do you think they’d co-operate with us? I need a veto in the Popular Assembly, but you’ll be busy on the Campus Martius with Rabirius. Would Ampius or Rullus be prepared to exercise his veto on our behalf?”
“Ampius certainly, because he’s tied to me and we’re both tied to Pompeius Magnus. But I think Rullus would co-operate too. He’d do anything he fancied might make Cicero and Cato suffer. He blames them for the death of his land bill.”
“Rullus then, with Ampius in support. Cicero will ask the Popular Assembly for a lex rogata plus quam perfecta so that he can legally punish us for instituting the ancient procedure. I add that he’ll have to invoke his precious Senatus Consultum Ultimum to hurry it into law at once—thereby focusing public attention on the ultimate decree just when he’ll be wishing it burned and forgotten. Whereupon Rullus and Ampius will interpose their vetoes. After which I want Rullus to take Cicero to one side and propose a compromise. Our senior consul is such a timid soul that he’ll grasp at any proposal likely to avoid violence in the Forum—provided it allows him to get half of what he’s after.”
“You ought to hear Magnus on the subject of Cicero during the Italian War,” said Labienus contemptuously. “Our heroic senior consul fainted at the sight of a sword.”
“What’s Rullus’s deal to be?” asked Lucius Caesar, frowning at Labienus, whom he deemed a necessary evil.
“First, that the law Cicero procures not render us liable for prosecution later. Secondly, that Rabirius’s appeal to the Centuries take place the following day so that Labienus can continue as prosecutor while still a tribune of the plebs. Thirdly, that the appeal be conducted according to the rules of Glaucia. Fourthly, that the death sentence be replaced by exile and a fine.” Caesar sighed luxuriously. “And fifthly, that I am appointed the appeal judge in the Centuries, with Celer as my personal custos.”
Celer burst out laughing. “Jupiter, Caesar, that’s clever!”
“Why bother to change the sentence?” asked Labienus, still disposed to be gloomy. “The Centuries haven’t convicted a man on a charge of perduellio since Romulus was a boy.”
“You’re unduly pessimistic, Titus.” Caesar folded his hands loosely together on the desk top. “What we have to do is fan the feelings already simmering inside most of those who watched the Senate deny a Roman’s inalienable right to trial. This is one issue wherein the First and Second Classes will not consent to follow the example of the Senate, even among the ranks of the Eighteen. The Senatus Consultum Ultimum gives the Senate too much power, and there’s not a knight or a moderately affluent man out there who doesn’t understand that. It’s been war between the Orders since the Brothers Gracchi. Rabirius isn’t at all liked, he’s an old villain. Therefore his fate won’t matter nearly as much to the Centuriate voters as their own threatened right to trial. I think there’s a very good chance indeed that the Centuries will choose to damn Gaius Rabirius.”
“And send him into exile,” said Celer a little unhappily. “I know he’s an old villain, Caesar, but he is old. Exile would kill him.”
“Not if the verdict is never delivered,” said Caesar.
“How can it not be delivered?”
“That rests entirely with you, Celer,” Caesar said, smiling wickedly. “As urban praetor, you’re in charge of protocol for meetings on the Campus Martius. Including keeping an eye on the red flag you have to hoist atop the Janiculum when the Centuries are outside the walls. Just in case invaders are sighted.”
Celer began to laugh again. “Caesar, no!”
“My dear fellow, we’re under a Senatus Consultum Ultimum because Catilina is in Etruria with an army! The wretched decree wouldn’t exist if Catilina didn’t have an army, and five men would be alive today. Under more normal conditions no one even bothers to look at the Janiculum, least of all the urban praetor—he’s quite busy down at ground level, not up on a tribunal. But with Catilina and an army expected to descend on Rome any day, the moment that red flag comes down panic will ensue. The Centuries will abandon the vote and flee home to arm against the invaders, just as in the days of the Etrusci and the Volsci. I suggest,” Caesar went on demurely, “that you have someone on the Janiculum ready to lower the red flag, and arrange some sort of signal system—a fire, perhaps, if the sun isn’t far enough west, or a flashing mirror if it is.”
“All very well,” said Lucius Caesar, “but what will such a tortuous sequence of events accomplish if Rabirius is not to be convicted and the Senatus Consultum Ultimum continues to be in effect until Catilina and his army are defeated? What lesson do you really think to teach Cicero? Cato is a lost cause, he’s too thick to learn from anything.”
“About Cato you’re right, Lucius. But Cicero is different. As I’ve already said, he’s a timid soul. At present he’s carried away by the floodwaters of success. He wanted a crisis during his term as consul, and he got one. It hasn’t yet occurred to him that there’s any possibility of personal disaster involved. But if we drive it home to him that the Centuries would have convicted Rabirius, he will understand the message, believe me.”
“But what exactly is the message, Gaius?”
“That no man who acts under the shelter of a Senatus Consultum Ultimum is safe from retribution at some time in the future. That no senior consul can hoodwink a body of men as important as the Senate of Rome into sanctioning the execution of Roman citizens without a trial, let alone an appeal. Cicero will get the message, Lucius. Every man in the Centuries who votes to damn Rabirius will be telling Cicero that he and the Senate are not the arbiters of a Roman’s fate. They will also be telling him that in executing Lentulus Sura and the others without trial, he has lost their confidence as well as their admiration. And that last, to Cicero, will be worse by far than any other aspect of the whole business,” said Caesar.
“He’ll hate you for this!” cried Celer.
Up went both fair brows; Caesar looked haughty. “What can that be to me?” he asked.
*
The praetor Lucius Roscius Otho had been a tribune of the plebs in the service of Catulus and the boni, and had earned the dislike of nearly all Roman men by returning the fourteen rows of theater seats just behind the senatorial seats to the knights of the Eighteen. But his affection had been given to Cicero on the day when a theater full of people had whistled and booed him viciously for reserving those delectable seats at law, and Cicero had talked the angry crowd of lesser beings around.
Praetor responsible for foreign litigation, Otho was in the lower Forum when he saw that savage-looking fellow Titus Labienus stride up to Metellus Celer’s tribunal and start talking very insistently. Curiosity piqued, Otho strolled over in time to hear the last part of Labienus’s demand that Gaius Rabirius be tried for high treason according to the law during the reign of King Tullus Hostilius. When Celer produced Caesar’s fat dissertation on ancient laws and started checking the validity of Labienus’s contentions, Otho decided it was time he repaid a part of his debt to Cicero by informing him what was going on.
As it happened Cicero had slept late, for on the night after the execution of the conspirators he had not been able to sleep at all; then yesterday’s day had been stuffed full of people calling round to compliment him, a kind of excitement more conducive to sleep by far.
Thus he had not emerged from his sleeping cubicle when Otho came banging on his front door, though he came quickly enough into the atrium when he heard the racket—such a small house!
“Otho, my dear fellow, I’m so sorry!” Cicero cried, beaming at the praetor while he ran his hands through his tousled hair to smooth it. “Blame the events of the past few days—last night I finally had a really good rest.” His bubbling sense of well-being began to fade a little when he took in Otho’s perturbed expression. “Is Catilina on his way? Has there been a battle? Have our armies been defeated?”
“No, no, nothing to do with Catilina,” said Otho, shaking his head. “It’s Titus Labienus.”
“What about Titus Labienus?’’
“He’s down in the Forum at Metellus Celer’s tribunal asking that he be allowed to prosecute old Gaius Rabirius perduellionis for the murders of Saturninus and Quintus Labienus.”
“He’s what!”
Otho repeated his statement.
Cicero’s mouth went dry; he could feel the blood drain from his face, feel his heart begin to trip and stammer while his chest emptied of air. One hand went out, grasped Otho by the arm. “I don’t believe it!”
“You had better, because it’s happening, and Metellus Celer was looking as if he was going to approve the case. I wish I could say I understood what exactly was going on, but I didn’t. Labienus kept quoting King Tullus Hostilius, something about an ancient trial process, and Metellus Celer got busy poring over a huge scroll he said was something to do with ancient laws. I don’t quite know why my left thumb started to prick, but it did. That’s terrible trouble coming! I thought I’d better run and tell you at once.”
But he ended talking to vacant space; Cicero had vanished shouting for his valet. Within no time he was back, clad in all the majesty of his purple-bordered toga.
“Did you see my lictors outside?”
“They’re there, playing dice.”
“Then we’re off.”
Normally Cicero liked to amble behind his twelve white-clad lictors; it enabled everybody to see him properly and admire. But this morning his escort was exhorted to move at the double, not merely once, but every time it slackened its pace. The distance to the lower Forum was not great, but to Cicero it seemed as far as Rome to Capua. He itched to abandon majesty and run, though he preserved enough sense not to do so. Well he remembered that it was he who had introduced the name Gaius Rabirius into his speech opening the debate in Concord; he also remembered that he had done so in order to illustrate any individual’s immunity from the consequences of any actions performed while a Senatus Consultum Ultimum was in force. Now here was Titus Labienus—Caesar’s tame tribune of the plebs, not Pompey’s!—applying to prosecute Gaius Rabirius for the murders of Quintus Labienus and Saturninus! But not on a charge of murder. On an antique charge of perduellio, the same perduellio Caesar had described during his speech in Concord.
By the time Cicero’s entourage streamed hastily across the space between Castor’s temple and the urban praetor’s tribunal, a small crowd had gathered about the tribunal to listen avidly. Not that anything important was being discussed as Cicero arrived; Labienus and Metellus Celer were speaking of some woman or other.
“What is it? What’s going on?” demanded Cicero breathlessly.
Celer raised his brows in surprise. “The normal business of this tribunal, senior consul.”
“Which is?”
“To adjudicate in civil disputes and decide whether criminal charges merit trial,” said Celer, emphasizing the word “trial.”
Cicero flushed. “Don’t play games with me!” he said nastily. “I want to know what’s going on!”
“My dear Cicero,” drawled Celer, “I can assure you that you are the last person in the world I’d choose to play games with.”
“WHAT IS GOING ON?”
“The good tribune of the plebs Titus Labienus here has brought a charge of perduellio against Gaius Rabirius for the murders of his uncle Quintus Labienus and Lucius Appuleius Saturninus thirty-seven years ago. He wishes to prosecute under the procedure in force during the reign of King Tullus Hostilius, and after perusing the relevant documents, I have decided according to my own edicts published at the beginning of my term as urban praetor that Gaius Rabirius may be so tried,” said Celer without drawing a breath. “At the moment we are waiting for Gaius Rabirius to appear before me. As soon as he comes I will charge him and appoint the judges for his trial, which I will set in motion immediately.”
“This is ridiculous! You can’t!”
“Nothing in the relevant documents or my own edicts says I can’t, Marcus Cicero.”
“This is aimed at me!”
Celer’s face registered stagy astonishment. “What, Cicero, were you on the Curia Hostilia roof pelting tiles thirty-seven years ago?”
“Will you stop being deliberately obtuse, Celer? You’re acting as Caesar’s puppet, and I had thought better of you than that you could be bought by the likes of Caesar!”
“Senior consul, if we had a law on our tablets which forbade baseless allegations under pain of a large fine, you’d be paying up right now!” said Celer fiercely. “I am urban praetor of the Senate and People of Rome, and I will do my job! Which is exactly what I was trying to do until you barged in telling me how to do my job!” He turned to one of his four remaining lictors, listening to this exchange with grins on their faces because they esteemed Celer and enjoyed working for him.
“Lictor, pray summon Lucius Julius Caesar and Gaius Julius Caesar to this tribunal.”
At which moment his two missing lictors appeared from the direction of the Cannae. Between them shuffled a little man who looked ten years older than the seventy he acknowledged, wizened and unappealing of mien, scrawny of body. Ordinarily he wore an expression of sour and furtive satisfaction, but as he approached Celer’s tribunal under official escort his face betrayed nothing beyond fuddled bewilderment. Not a nice man, Gaius Rabirius, but something of a Roman institution even so.
Shortly afterward the two Caesars appeared with suspicious promptness, looking so magnificent together that the growing crowd oohed its admiration. Both were tall, fair and handsome; both were dressed in the purple-and-scarlet-striped toga of the major religious Colleges; but whereas Gaius wore the purple-and-scarlet-striped tunic of the Pontifex Maximus, Lucius carried the lituus of an augur—a curved staff crowned by a curlicue. They looked sumptuous. And while Metellus Celer formally charged the stupefied Gaius Rabirius with the murders of Quintus Labienus and Saturninus under the perduellio of King Tullus Hostilius, the two Caesars stood to one side watching impassively.
“There are only four men who may act as judges in this trial,” cried Celer in a ringing voice, “and I will summon them in turn! Lucius Sergius Catilina, step forward!”
“Lucius Sergius Catilina is under interdiction,” answered the urban praetor’s chief lictor.
“Quintus Fabius Maximus Sanga, step forward!”
“Quintus Fabius Maximus Sanga is out of the country.”
“Lucius Julius Caesar, step forward!”
Lucius Caesar stepped forward.
“Gaius Julius Caesar, step forward!”
Caesar stepped forward.
“Fathers,” said Celer solemnly, “you are hereby directed to try Gaius Rabirius for the murders of Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Quintus Labienus according to the lex regia de perduellionis of King Tullus Hostilius. I further direct that the trial take place two hours from now on the Campus Martius in the grounds adjacent to the saepta.
“Lictor, I hereby direct that you summon from your College three of your colleagues to act as the representatives of the three original tribes of Roman men, one for Tities, one for Ramnes, and one for Luceres. I further direct that they shall attend the court as its servants.”
Cicero tried again more sweetly. “Quintus Caecilius,” he said very formally to Celer, “you cannot do this! A trial perduellionis this actual day? In two hours? The accused must have time to assemble his defense! He must choose his advocates and find the witnesses who will testify for him.”
“Under the lex regia de perduellionis of King Tullus Hostilius there are no such provisions,” said Celer. “I am merely the instrument of the law, Marcus Tullius, not its originator. All I am allowed to do is to follow procedure, and procedure in this case is clearly defined in the documents of the period.”
Without a word Cicero turned on his heel and quit the vicinity of the urban praetor’s tribunal, though whereabouts he was going from there he had absolutely no idea. They were serious! They intended to try that pathetic old man under an archaic law Rome typically had never expunged from the tablets! Oh, why was it that in Rome everything archaic was reverenced, nothing archaic tampered with? From rude thatched huts to laws dating back to the earliest kings to obstructing columns within the Basilica Porcia, it was ever the same: what had always been there must always be there.
Caesar was at back of it, of course. It had been he who had discovered the missing pieces which made sense not only of the trial of Horatius—the oldest known trial in Rome’s history—but also of his appeal. And cited both in the House the day before yesterday. But what exactly did he hope to accomplish? And why was a man of the boni like Celer aiding and abetting him? Titus Labienus was understandable, so too Lucius Caesar. Metellus Celer was inexplicable.
His footsteps had taken him in the direction of Castor’s, so he decided to go home, shut himself up and think, think, think. Normally the organ which produced Cicero’s thought had no difficulty with the process, but now Cicero wished he knew exactly where that organ was—head, chest, belly? If he knew, he might be able to shock it into functioning by beating it, or fomenting it, or purging it….
At which precise moment he almost collided with Catulus, Bibulus, Gaius Piso and Metellus Scipio, hastening down from the Palatine. He hadn’t even noticed their approach! What was the matter with him?
While they climbed the endless steps to Catulus’s house, the closest, Cicero told the other four his story, and when at last they were settled in Catulus’s spacious study he did something he rarely did, drank off a whole beaker of unwatered wine. Eyes starting to focus then, he realized one person was missing.
“Where’s Cato?”
The other four looked rather uncomfortable, then exchanged resigned glances which indicated to Cicero that he was about to be informed of something the rest would much rather have kept to themselves.
“I suppose you’d have to classify him as walking wounded,” said Bibulus. “Someone scratched his face to ribbons.”
“Cato?”
“It’s not what you’re thinking, Cicero.”
“What is it, then?”
“He had an altercation with Servilia over Caesar, and she went for him like a lioness.”
“Ye gods!”
“Don’t gossip about it, Cicero,” said Bibulus sternly. “It will be hard enough for the poor fellow when he does appear in public without all of Rome knowing who and why.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It’s worse.”
Catulus smacked his hand down on the desk so loudly everyone jumped. “We are not here to exchange news about Cato!” he snapped. “What we’re here for is to stop Caesar.”
“That,” said Metellus Scipio, “is becoming a refrain. Stop Caesar this, stop Caesar that—but we never do stop him.”
“What’s he after?” asked Gaius Piso. “I mean, why try an old fellow under some antique law on a trumped-up charge he won’t have any trouble refuting?”
“It’s Caesar’s way of getting Rabirius before the Centuries,” said Cicero. “Caesar and his cousin will damn Rabirius, and he’ll appeal to the Centuries.”
“I don’t see the point of any of it,” said Metellus Scipio.
“They’re charging Rabirius with high treason because he was one of the men who killed Saturninus and his confederates and was indemnified from the consequences under the Senatus Consultum Ultimum of that time,” said Cicero patiently. “In other words, Caesar is attempting to show the People that a man isn’t safe from any action he took under a Senatus Consultum Ultimum, even after thirty-seven years. It’s his way to tell me that one day he’ll prosecute me for the murder of Lentulus Sura and the others.”
That produced a silence which hung so heavily Catulus broke it by getting up from his chair and beginning to pace.
“He’ll never succeed.”
“In the Centuries, I agree. But it will produce a lot of interest, Rabirius’s appeal will be crowded,” said Cicero, looking miserable. “Oh, I wish Hortensius was in Rome!”
“He’s on his way back, as a matter of fact,” said Catulus. “Someone in Misenum started a rumor that there was going to be a slave uprising in Campania, so he packed up two days ago. I’ll send a messenger to find him on the road and tell him to hurry.”
“Then he’ll be with me to defend Rabirius when he appeals.”
“We’ll just have to stall the appeal,” said Piso.
Cicero’s superior knowledge of the ancient documents provoked him into throwing Piso a contemptuous glare. “We can’t postpone anything!” he growled. “It has to be held immediately after the trial before the two Caesars is finished.”
“Well, it all sounds like a tempest in a bottle to me,” said Metellus Scipio, whose ancestry was far greater than his intellect.
“It’s far from that,” said Bibulus soberly. “I know you generally don’t see anything even when it’s rammed under your snooty nose, Scipio, but surely you’ve noticed the mood of the People since we executed the conspirators? They don’t like it! We’re senators, we’re on the inside, we understand all the nuances of situations like Catilina. But even a lot of the knights of the Eighteen are grumbling that the Senate has usurped powers that the courts and the Assemblies no longer have. This trumped-up trial of Caesar’s gives the People the opportunity to congregate in a public place and voice their displeasure very loudly.”
“By damning Rabirius at appeal?” asked Lutatius Catulus, a little blankly. “Bibulus, they’d never do that! The two Caesars can—and no doubt will—pronounce a death sentence on Rabirius, but the Centuries absolutely refuse to damn, always have. Yes, they’ll grumble, perhaps, but the thing will die a natural death. Caesar won’t succeed in the Centuries.”
“1 agree he shouldn’t,” said Cicero unhappily, “yet why am I haunted by a feeling that he will? He’s got another trick in the sinus of his toga, and I can’t work out what it is.”
“Die a natural death or not, Quintus Catulus, are you inferring that we just have to sit tamely on the side of the battlefield and watch Caesar stir up trouble?” asked Metellus Scipio.
Cicero answered. “Of course not!” he said testily; Metellus Scipio really was thick! “I agree with Bibulus that the People aren’t happy at the moment. Therefore we can’t allow Rabirius’s appeal to proceed immediately. The only way to prevent that is to nullify the lex regia de perduellionis of King Tullus Hostilius. So this morning I’ll call the Senate together and ask for a decree directing the Popular Assembly to nullify. It won’t take long to procure the decree, I’ll make sure of that. Then I’ll convoke the Popular Assembly at once.” He closed his eyes, shivered. “I am afraid, however, that I’ll have to use the Senatus Consultum Ultimum in order to bypass the Didian Law. We just can’t wait seventeen days for ratification. Nor can we allow contiones.”
Bibulus frowned. “I don’t pretend to have your knowledge of the law, Cicero, but surely the Senatus Consultum Ultimum doesn’t extend to the Popular Assembly unless the Popular Assembly is meeting to do something about Catilina. I mean, we know the trial of Rabirius is all to do with Catilina, but the only Popular Assembly voters who share our knowledge are senators, and there won’t be enough of them in the Comitia to carry the vote.”
“The Senatus Consultum Ultimum functions in the same way as a dictator,” said Cicero firmly. “It replaces all normal comitial and public activities.”
“The tribunes of the plebs will veto you,” said Bibulus.
Cicero looked smug. “Under a Senatus Consultum Ultimum, they can’t veto.”
*
“What do you mean, Marcus Tullius, I can’t veto?” asked Publius Servilius Rullus three hours later in the Popular Assembly.
“My dear Publius Servilius, Rome lies under a Senatus Consultum Ultimum, which means the tribunician veto is suspended,” said Cicero.
Attendance was mediocre, as many of the Forum frequenters had preferred to rush out to the Campus Martius to see what the Caesars were doing to Gaius Rabirius. But those who had remained within the pomerium to see how Cicero was going to handle the Caesar attack were not limited to senators and the clients of Catulus’s faction. Perhaps more than half of the gathering, seven hundred strong, belonged to the opposing side. And among them, Cicero noted, were the likes of Mark Antony and his hulking brothers, young Poplicola, Decimus Brutus, and none other than Publius Clodius. Very busy talking to anyone prepared to listen. Restlessness followed in their wake, and darkling looks, and audible growls.
“Now just a moment, Cicero,” said Rullus, dropping formality, “what’s all this about a Senatus Consultum Ultimum? There is one, yes, but it is purely concerned with revolt in Etruria and the activities of Catilina. It is not meant to obstruct the normal functioning of the Popular Assembly! We are here to consider the passing of a law to nullify the lex regia de perduellionis of King Tullus Hostilius—a matter having nothing to do with revolt in Etruria or with Catilina! First you inform us that you intend to invoke your Senatus Consultum Ultimum to overturn normal comitial procedure! You want to waive contiones, you want to bypass the Didian Law. And now you inform us that legally elected tribunes of the plebs cannot exercise their power of veto!”
“Precisely,” said Cicero, chin up.
From the floor of the Comitia well the rostra was an imposing edifice rising some ten feet above the level of the Forum. Its top was large enough to accommodate forty standing men, and this morning the space was occupied by Cicero and his twelve lictors, by the urban praetor Metellus Celer and his six lictors, by the praetors Otho and Cosconius and their twelve-lictors, and by three tribunes of the plebs—Rullus, Ampius and one man from the Catulus faction, Lucius Caecilius Rufus.
One of those cold winds confined to the Forum was blowing, which might have accounted for the fact that Cicero looked quite small huddled inside the massive folds of his purple-bordered toga; though he was held the greatest orator Rome had ever produced, the rostra didn’t suit his style nearly as well as the more intimate theaters of Senate chamber and court, and he was miserably aware of it. The florid and exhibitionistic style of Hortensius suited the rostra far better, but Cicero could not be comfortable in widening his performance to a Hortensian scale. Nor was there time to orate properly. He would just have to battle on.
“Praetor urbanus,” cried Rullus to Metellus Celer, “do you agree with the senior consul’s interpretation of the Senatus Consultum Ultimum at present in force to deal with revolt in Etruria and conspiracy in Rome?”
“No, tribune, I do not,” said Celer with weighty conviction.
“Why?”
“I cannot agree with anything that prevents a tribune of the plebs from exercising the rights given to him by the Roman Plebs!”
When Celer said this, Caesar’s supporters roared approval.
“Then, praetor urbanus,” Rullus went on, “is it your opinion that the Senatus Consultum Ultimum at present in force cannot forbid a tribunician veto in this Assembly on this morning?”
“Yes, that is my opinion!” Celer cried.
As the crowd’s restlessness increased, Otho came closer to Rullus and Metellus Celer. “It’s Marcus Cicero who is right!” he shouted. “Marcus Cicero is the greatest lawyer of our day!’’
“Marcus Cicero is a turd!” someone called.
“Dictator Turd!” called someone else. “Dictator Turd!”
“Cicero’s a tur-urd! Cicero’s a tur-urd! Cicero’s a tur-urd!”
“Order! I will have order!” yelled Cicero, beginning to be afraid of the crowd.
“Cicero’s a tur-urd, Cicero’s a tur-urd, Dic-a-tator Tur-urd!”
“Order! Order!”
“Order,” cried Rullus, “will be restored when the tribunes of the plebs are allowed to exercise their rights without interference from the senior consul!” He walked to the edge of the rostra and looked down into the well. “Quirites, I hereby propose that we enact a law to investigate the nature of the Senatus Consultum Ultimum our senior consul has used to such telling effect for the last few days! Men have died because of it! Now we are told that tribunes of the plebs are not allowed to veto because of it! Now we are told that tribunes of the plebs are once again the ciphers they were under Sulla’s constitution! Is today’s debacle the prelude to another Sulla in the person of this spouter and touter of the Senatus Consultum Ultimum? He flourishes it like a magic wand! Whoosh! and impediments vanish into nothing! Bring in a Senatus Consultum Ultimum—chain and gag the men you haven’t done to death—end the right of Romans to assemble in their tribes to enact laws or veto them—and forbid the trial process entirely! Five men have died without a trial, another man is on trial at the Campus Martius right now, and our Dictator Turd the senior consul is using his putrefied Senatus Consultum Ultimum to subvert justice and turn all of us into slaves! We rule the world, but Dictator Turd is out to rule us! It is my right to exercise the veto I was given by a true congress of Roman men, but Dictator Turd says I can’t!” He swung round on Cicero viciously. “What’s your next move, Dictator Turd? Am I to be sent to the Tullianum to have my neck squashed to pulp without a trial? Without a trial, without a trial, without a trial, WITHOUT A TRIAL!”
Someone in the Comitia well took the chant up, and before Cicero’s appalled eyes even the Catulus faction joined in: “Without a trial! Without a trial! Without a trial!’’ over and over and over.
Yet there was no violence. Owning volatile tempers, Gaius Piso and Ahenobarbus ought by rights to have assaulted someone by now, but instead they stood transfixed. Quintus Lutatius Catulus looked at them and at Bibulus in sick horror, finally understanding the full extent of opposition to the execution of the conspirators. Hardly realizing that he did so, he put his right arm up to Cicero on the rostra in a mute command to cease, to back down immediately.
Cicero stepped forward so quickly he almost tripped, hands held with palms out to implore calm and quiet.
When the noise died enough for him to be heard, he visibly licked his lips and swallowed. “Praetor urbanus,” he cried, “I accede to your superior position as interpreter of law! Let your opinion be adopted! The Senatus Consultum Ultimum does not extend to the tribunician right to veto in a matter having nothing to do with revolt in Etruria or conspiracy in Rome!”
Though as long as he lived he would never cease to fight, in that moment Cicero knew he had lost.
Numbed and perished, he accepted the proposal Caesar had instructed Rullus to put forward, not sure why he was apparently being let off so lightly. Rullus even agreed to the waiving of preliminary discussions and the seventeen-day waiting period stipulated by the lex Caecilia Didia! But couldn’t the idiots in the crowd see that if the Senatus Consultum Ultimum could not forbid the tribunician veto, it also could not waive contiones or the waiting period of the Didian Law? Oh yes, of course the hand of Caesar was in it—why else was Caesar to be the judge at Rabirius’s appeal? But what exactly was Caesar after?
“Not everyone is against you, Marcus,” said Atticus as they walked up the Alta Semita to Atticus’s magnificent house right on top of the Quirinal heights.
“But too many are,” said Cicero miserably. “Oh, Titus, we had to get rid of those wretched conspirators!”
“I know.” Atticus stopped at a place where a large expanse of vacant ground permitted a wonderful view of the Campus Martius, the sinuous curve of the Tiber, the Vatican plain and hill beyond. “If Rabirius’s trial is still on, we’ll see it from here.”
But the grassy space adjacent to the saepta was quite deserted; whatever old Rabirius’s fate, it was already decided.
“Who did you send to hear the two Caesars?” asked Atticus.
“Tiro in a toga.”
“Risky for Tiro.”
“Yes, but I can trust him to give me an exact account, and I can’t say that of anyone else other than you. You, I needed in the Popular Assembly.” Cicero gave a grunt of what might have been laughter or pain. “The Popular Assembly! What a travesty.”
“You have to admit Caesar’s clever.”
“I do that! But what makes you say it now, Titus?”
“His condition that the penalty in the Centuries be altered from death to exile and a fine. Now that they don’t have to see Rabirius flogged and beheaded, I think the Centuries will vote to convict him.”
It was Cicero’s turn to stop. “They wouldn’t!”
“They will. Trial, Marcus, trial! Men outside the Senate don’t possess real political forethought, they see politics as it affects their own hides! So they have no idea how dangerous it would have been for Rome to keep those men alive to undergo trial in the full glare of the Forum. All they see is how their own hides are threatened when citizens are executed—even self-confessed traitors!—without benefit of trial or appeal.”
“My actions saved Rome! I saved my country!”
“And there are plenty who agree with you, Marcus, believe me. Wait until feelings die down and you’ll see. At the moment those feelings are being worked on by some genuine experts, from Caesar to Publius Clodius.”
“Publius Clodius?”
“Oh yes, very much so. He’s collecting quite a following, didn’t you know it? Of course he specializes in attracting the lowly, but he also has quite a bit of influence among the more minor businessmen. Entertains them lavishly and gives them a lot of custom—presents for the lowly, for instance,” said Atticus.
“But he’s not even in the Senate yet!”
“He will be in twelve months.”
“Fulvia’s money must be a help.”
“It is.”
“How do you know so much about Publius Clodius? Through your friendship with Clodia? And why are you friends with Clodia?”
“Clodia,” said Atticus deliberately, “is one of those women I like to call professional virgins. They pant and palpitate and pout at every man they meet, but let a man try to assault their virtue and they run screaming, usually to a besotted husband. So they prefer to mix intimately with men who are no danger to their virtue—homosexuals like me.”
Cicero swallowed, tried vainly not to blush, didn’t know where to look. This was the first time he had ever heard Atticus speak that word, let alone admit it applied to him.
“Don’t be embarrassed, Marcus,” said Atticus with a laugh. “Today isn’t an ordinary day, is all. Forget I said it.”
*
Terentia did not mince matters, but the words she used were all of a variety permitted to women of her quality.
“You saved your country,” she said harshly at the end of it.
“Not until Catilina is defeated in the field.”
“How can you think he won’t be?”
“Well, my armies certainly don’t seem to be doing much at the moment! Hybrida’s gout is still the chief thing on his mind, Rex has found a comfortable billet in Umbria, the Gods only know what Metellus Creticus is doing in Apulia, and Metellus Celer is intent on fueling Caesar’s fire here in Rome.”
“It will be finished by the New Year, wait and see.”
What Cicero most wanted to do was to pillow his head on his wife’s very nice breast and weep until his eyes were sore, but that, he understood, would not be permitted. So he stilled his wobbling lip and drew a long breath, unable to look at Terentia for fear she’d comment on the glisten of tears.
“Tiro has reported?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. The two Caesars pronounced a sentence of death on Rabirius after the most disgraceful display of partisan bigotry in the history of Rome. Labienus was allowed to run rampant—he even had actors there wearing the masks of Saturninus and Uncle Quintus, who came out of it looking like Vestals rather than the traitors they were. And he had Quintus’s two sons—both over forty!—there weeping like little children because Gaius Rabirius deprived them of their tata! The audience howled in sympathy and threw flowers. Not surprising, it was a scintillating performance. The two Caesars had the cant down pat—’Go, lictor, tie his hands! Go, lictor, attach him to the stake and scourge him! Go, lictor, transfix him on a barren tree!’ Tchah!”
“But Rabirius appealed.”
“Of course.”
“And it is to be tomorrow in the Centuries. According to Glaucia, I hear, but limited to one hearing only because of the lack of witnesses and evidence.” Terentia snorted. “If that in itself can’t tell the jury what a lot of nonsense the charge is, then I despair of Roman intellect!”
“I despaired of it some time ago,” said Cicero wryly. He got to his feet, feeling very old. “If you’ll excuse me, my dear, I won’t eat. I’m not hungry. It’s getting toward sunset, so I’d better go and see Gaius Rabirius. I’ll be defending him.”
“With Hortensius?”
“And Lucius Cotta, I hope. He makes a useful first man up, and he works particularly well with Hortensius.”
“You’ll speak last, naturally.”
“Naturally. An hour and a half should be ample, if Lucius Cotta and Hortensius will agree to less than an hour each.”
*
But when Cicero saw the condemned man at his very luxurious and fortresslike residence on the Carinae, he discovered that Gaius Rabirius had other ideas for his defense.
The day had taken it out of the old man; he shook and blinked rheumily as he settled Cicero in a comfortable chair in his big and dazzling atrium. The senior consul gazed about like a rustic on his first visit to Rome, wondering whether he would be able to afford to adopt this kind of decor in his new house when he found the money to buy one; the room cried out to be copied in a consular’s residence, though perhaps not so ostentatiously. Its ceiling was awash with glittering gem-studded golden stars, its walls had been sheeted in real gold, its pillars had been gold-sheathed too, and even the long shallow impluvium pool was tiled with gold squares.
“Like my atrium, eh?” asked Gaius Rabirius, looking lizardlike.
“Very much,” said Cicero.
“Pity I don’t entertain, eh?”
“A great pity. Though I see why you live in a fortress.”
“Waste of money, entertaining. I put my fortune on my walls, safer than a bank if you live in a fortress.”
“Don’t the slaves try to peel it off?”
“Only if they fancy crucifixion.”
“Yes, that would deter them.”
The old man clenched both hands around the lion’s head ends on the gilded arms of his gilded chair. “I love gold,” he said. “Such a pretty color.”
“Yes, it is.”
“So you want to lead my defense, eh?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And how much are you going to cost me?”
It was on the tip of Cicero’s tongue to say a sheet of gold ten by ten would do nicely, thank you, but he smiled instead. “I regard your case as so important for the future of the Republic, Gaius Rabirius, that I will defend you for nothing.”
“So you should, too.”
And thus much for gratitude at obtaining the services of Rome’s greatest advocate free of charge. Cicero swallowed. “Like all my fellow senators, Gaius Rabirius, I’ve known you for years, but I don’t know a great deal about you aside from”—he cleared his throat—”er, what might be called common gossip. I shall need to ask you some questions now in order to prepare my speech.”
“Won’t give you any answers, so save your breath. Make it up.”
“Out of common gossip?”
“Like my being in on Oppianicus’s activities in Larinum, you mean? You did defend Cluentius.”
“But never mentioned you, Gaius Rabirius.”
“Good thing you didn’t. Oppianicus died long before Cluentius was tried, how would anyone know the true story? You did a lovely bit of embroidering lies, Cicero, which is why I don’t mind your leading my defense. No, no, don’t mind at all! You managed to imply that Oppianicus murdered more of his relations than rumor says Catilina has. All for gain! Yet Oppianicus didn’t have walls of gold in his house. Interesting, eh?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Cicero feebly. “I never saw his house.”
“I own half of Apulia and I’m a hard man, but I don’t deserve to be sent into exile for something Sulla put me and fifty other fellows up to. Lots of more important fish than me were on the Curia Hostilia roof. Lots of names like Servilius Caepio and Caecilius Metellus. Front bench most of them were, or would be in the future.”
“Yes, I realize that.”
“You want to go last before the jury votes.”
“I always do. I thought Lucius Cotta first, then Quintus Hortensius, with me last.”
But the old horror reared back, outraged. “Only three!” he gasped. “Oh no you don’t! Want to grab all the glory, eh? I’m having seven of you. Seven’s my lucky number.”
“The judge in your case,” said Cicero slowly and clearly, “will be Gaius Caesar, and the Glaucian format one actio only—no witnesses are willing to come forward to testify, so there’s no point in two actiones, Gaius Caesar says. Caesar will allow the prosecution two hours, and the defense three hours. But if seven defense advocates are to speak, each of us will hardly get into stride before it’s time to stop!”
“More likely less time will sharpen your presentation,” said Gaius Rabirius adamantly. “That’s the trouble with all you would-be-if-you-could-be fellows! Love to hear the sound of your voice. Two thirds of the words you dribble would be better not uttered at all—and that goes for you too, Marcus Cicero. Waffle, waffle.”
I want to get out of here! thought Cicero wildly. I want to spit in his eye and tell him to go hire Apollo! Why did I ever ever ever put the idea into Caesar’s head by using this awful old mentula as my example?
“Gaius Rabirius, please reconsider!”
“Won’t. Absolutely won’t, so there! I’m going to have Lucius Lucceius and the boy Curio, Aemilius Paullus, Publius Clodius, Lucius Cotta, Quintus Hortensius and you. Like it or lump it, Marcus Cicero, that is how it’s going to be. Seven is my lucky number. Everyone says I’ll go down, but I know I won’t if I have seven on my team.” He snorted with laughter. “Even better if each of you only spoke for one seventh of an hour! Hee hee!”
Cicero got up and left without another word.
*
But seven was indeed his lucky number. It suited Caesar to be the perfect iudex, scrupulous to a fault in accommodating the defense in all agreed Glaucian respects. They got their three hours to speak, Lucceius and young Curio nobly sacrificing enough of their time to permit both Hortensius and Cicero a full half hour each. But on the first day the trial commenced late and then ended early, which left Hortensius and Cicero to conclude Gaius Rabirius’s defense on the ninth day of that awful December, the last day of Titus Labienus’s tribunate of the plebs.
Meetings in the Centuries were at the mercy of the weather, as there was no kind of roofed structure to protect the Quirites from sun or rain or wind. Sun was by far the least tolerable, but in December, summer though the season actually was, a fine day might be bearable. Postponement was at the discretion of the presiding magistrate; some insisted upon holding elections (trials in the Centuries were extremely rare) no matter how hard the rain was pelting down, which may have been why Sulla had transferred the election month from November, more likely to be rainy, to July and the full heat of summer, traditionally dry.
Both days of Gaius Rabirius’s trial turned out to be perfect: a clear sunny sky and a slightly chill breeze. Which ought to have predisposed the jury, four thousand strong, toward charity. Especially since the appellant was such a pitiful object as he stood huddled inside his toga producing a wonderful imitation of a tremulous palsy, both clawlike hands fastened around a support one of the lictors had rigged up for him. But the mood of the jury was ominous from the beginning, and Titus Labienus brilliant as he single-handedly ran his case for the allocated two hours, complete with actors wearing the masks of Saturninus and Quintus Labienus, and his two cousins sitting on full view weeping loudly throughout. There were also many voices whispering through the crush, perpetually reminding the First and Second Classes that their right to trial was at peril, that the conviction of Rabirius would teach men like Cicero and Cato to tread warily in future, and teach bodies like the Senate to stick to finance, wrangling and foreign affairs.
The defense fought hard, but had no trouble in seeing that the jury was not prepared to listen, let alone weep at the sight of poor little old Gaius Rabirius clinging to his perch. When the second day’s proceedings commenced on time, Hortensius and Cicero knew they would have to be at the top of their form if Rabirius was to be exonerated. Unfortunately neither man was. The gout, which plagued a great many of those fish-fancying individuals addicted to the pleasures of the dining couch and the wine flagon, refused to leave Hortensius alone; he had besides been forced to complete his journey from Misenum at a pace not beneficial to the well-being of an exquisitely painful big toe. He spoke for his half hour glued to the same spot and leaning heavily on a stick, which didn’t suit his oratory at all. After which Cicero delivered one of the limpest speeches of his career, constrained by the time limit and his consciousness that some at least of what he said would have to defend his own reputation rather than Rabirius’s—in a carefully engineered way, of course.
Thus most of the day was still in reserve when Caesar cast the lots to see which Century of Juniors in the First Class would take the prerogative and vote first; only the thirty-one rural tribes could participate in this draw, and whichever tribe drew the lot was called upon to vote before the normal routine began. All activity was suspended then until the votes of this Century having praerogativa were counted and the result announced to the waiting Assembly. Tradition had it that whichever way the Juniors of the chosen rural tribe voted would reflect the outcome of the election. Or the trial. Therefore much depended upon which tribe drew the lot and set the precedent. Were it Cicero’s tribe of Cornelia or Cato’s tribe of Papiria, trouble was afoot.
“Clustumina iuniorum!” The Juniors of the tribus Clustumina.
The tribe of Pompey the Great—a good omen, thought Caesar as he left his tribunal to proceed inside the saepta and take his stand at the end of the right-hand bridge connecting voters with the baskets wherein their little wax-coated wooden tablets were deposited.
Nicknamed the Sheepfold because it bore a strong resemblance to the structure farmers used for culling and sorting their sheep, the saepta were a roofless maze of portable wooden palisades and corridors moved to suit the functions of a particular Assembly. The Centuries always voted in the saepta and sometimes the tribes held their elections there too, if the presiding magistrate felt that the Well of the Comitia was too small to handle the number of voters, and disliked using Castor’s temple instead.
And here I approach my fate, thought Caesar soberly as he drew near the entrance of the odd-looking compound; the verdict will go whichever way the Clustumina Juniors poll, I know it in my very bones. LIBERO for acquittal, DAMNO for conviction. DAMNO, it must be DAMNO!
At which portentous moment he encountered Crassus lingering alongside the entrance looking less impassive than usual. Good! If this business did not move the immovable Crassus, then it would surely fail in its purpose. But he was moved, clearly moved.
“One day,” said Crassus as Caesar paused, “I expect some yokel shepherd with a dye-stick in his hand to daub a spot of vermilion on my toga and tell me I can’t go in to vote a second time when I try. They mark sheep, why not Romans?’’
“Is that what you were just thinking?”
A tiny spasm passed across the Crassus face, an indication of surprise. “Yes. But then I decided marking us wasn’t Roman.”
“You’re quite right,” said Caesar, needing to exert every ounce of will he owned in order not to laugh, “though it might prevent the tribes from trotting through several times, especially those rascally urbanites from Esquilina and Suburana.”
“What difference does it make?” asked Crassus, bored. “Sheep, Caesar, sheep. Voters are sheep. Baaaa!”
Caesar rushed inside still dying to laugh; that would teach him to believe men—even close friends like Crassus—appreciated the solemnity of this occasion!
The verdict of the Clustumina Juniors was DAMNO, and tradition indicated they were right as two by two the Centuries filed through the palisaded corridors, up over the two bridges, to deposit tablets bearing the letter D. Caesar’s associate in the scrutineering was his custos, Metellus Celer; when both men were sure that the eventual verdict would indeed be DAMNO, Celer relinquished his bridge to Cosconius and left.
There followed a dangerously long wait—had Celer forgotten his mirror, had the sun gone behind a cloud, was his accomplice on the Janiculan Hill dozing? Come on, Celer, hurry up!
“ARM! ARM! INVADERS ARE UPON US! ARM! ARM! INVADERS ARE UPON US! ARM! ARM!”
Barely in the nick of time.
Thus ended the trial and appeal of old Gaius Rabirius, in a mad scramble of fleeing voters back behind the safety of the Servian Walls, there to arm and disperse in military Centuries to the places where the duty roster put them.
But Catilina and his army never came.
*
If Cicero plodded rather than ran back to the Palatine, he had every excuse. Hortensius had departed the moment his speech was done, carried moaning to his litter, but pride forbade the less secure and far less wellborn Cicero that luxury. Face sternly composed, he waited for his Century to vote, his tablet firmly marked with an L for LIBERO—not too many Ls among the voters on this terrible day! Not even in his own Century could he persuade its members to vote for acquittal. And was forced, face sternly composed, to witness the opinion of the men of the First Class: that thirty-seven years were not long enough to prevent damnation.
The clarion call to arms had burst upon him as a miracle, though like everyone else he half-expected Catilina to bypass the armies in the field against him, swoop on Rome. Despite which, he plodded. Death seemed suddenly preferable to the fate he now understood Caesar had in store for him. One day when Caesar or some tribune of the plebs minion deemed the time right, Marcus Tullius Cicero would stand where Gaius Rabirius stood, accused of treason; the most he could hope for was that it would be maiestas, not perduellio. Exile and the confiscation of all his property, the removal of his name from the roll of Roman citizens, his son and daughter branded as of a tarnished family. He had lost more than a battle; he had lost the war. He was Carbo, not Sulla.
But, he said to himself as finally he climbed those endless steps up to the Palatine, I must never admit it. I must never allow Caesar or anyone else to believe that I am a broken man. I saved my country, and I will maintain that until I die! Life goes on. I will behave as if nothing whatsoever threatens me, even in my mind.
Thus he greeted Catulus in the Forum the next day cheerfully; they were there to see the first performance of the new tribunes of the plebs. “I thank all the Gods for Celer!” he said, smiling.
“I wonder,” said Catulus, “whether Celer lowered the red flag on his own initiative, or whether Caesar ordered it?”
“Caesar ordered it?” asked Cicero blankly.
“Grow up, Cicero! It can’t have been any part of Caesar’s intentions to convict Rabirius, that would have spoiled a sweet victory.” Face pinched and drawn, Catulus looked very ill and very old. “I am so terribly afraid! He’s like Ulysses, his life strand is so strong that it frays all those it rubs against. I am losing my auctoritas, and when it’s finally gone I’ll have nowhere to go except into death.”
“Rubbish!” Cicero exclaimed warmly.
“Not rubbish, just unpalatable fact. You know, I think I could forgive the man if only he wasn’t so sure of himself, so arrogant, so insufferably confident! My father was a full Caesar, and there are echoes of him in this one. But only echoes.” He shivered. “This one has a far better mind, and no brakes. No brakes at all. I am afraid.”
“A pity Cato won’t be here today,” said Cicero to change the subject. “Metellus Nepos will have no competition on the rostra. Odd how those brothers have suddenly espoused Popularist ideas.”
“Blame Pompeius Magnus,” said Catulus contemptuously.
As he had cherished a soft spot for Pompey ever since their joint service under Pompey Strabo during the Italian War, Cicero might have taken up cudgels in the absent conqueror’s defense; instead, he gasped in shock. “Look!”
Catulus turned to see Marcus Porcius Cato marching across the open space between the Pool of Curtius and the Well of the Comitia, wearing a tunic beneath his toga. Everyone who had noticed him was gaping, and not because of the tunic. From the top of his brow to where his neck merged into his shoulders, there ran on right and left sides ragged crimson stripes, puckered and oozing.
“Jupiter!” squawked Cicero.
“Oh, how I love him!” cried Catulus, almost running to meet Cato, and taking his right hand. “Cato, Cato, why did you come?”
“Because I am a tribune of the plebs and today is the first day of my term,” said Cato in his normal stentorian tones.
“But your face!” Cicero protested.
“Faces mend, wrong acts don’t. Were I not on the rostra to contend with Nepos, he’d run riot.” And to the sound of applause he ascended the rostra to take his place with the other nine men about to enter office. Not that he acknowledged the acclamation; he was too busy glaring at Metellus Nepos. Pompey’s man. Scum!
Because the whole People (patricians as well as plebeians) did not elect the tribunes of the plebs and because they served only the interests of the plebeian part, meetings of the Plebeian Assembly were not “official” in the same way as meetings of the Popular or the Centuriate Assembly. Therefore they began and ended with scant ceremony; the auspices were not taken, nor the ritual prayers said. These omissions added considerably to the popularity of the Plebeian Assembly. Things got off to a rousing start, no boring litanies and clucking augurs to put up with.
Today’s convocation of the Plebeian Assembly was extremely well attended, between the festering sore of executions without trial and the balm of knowing sparks were going to fly. The old tribunes of the plebs exited quite gracefully, Labienus and Rullus getting all the cheers. After which the meeting proper began.
Metellus Nepos got in first, which surprised no one; Cato was a retaliator rather than an initiator. Nepos’s subject was juicy—the execution of citizens without trial—and his presentation of it splendid from irony to metaphor to hyperbole.
“Therefore I propose a plebiscite so gentle, so merciful, so unobtrusive that no man present can possibly do other than agree to vote it into law!” Nepos said at the end of a long speech which had reduced its audience now to tears, now to laughter, now to deep thought. “No death sentences, no exile, no fines. Fellow members of the Plebs, all I propose is that any man who has executed Roman citizens without trial be forbidden ever to speak in public again! Isn’t that sweet justice? A voice forever stilled, a power to move masses rendered impotent! Will you join me? Will you muzzle megalomaniacs and monsters?”
It was Mark Antony who led the cheering, which rolled down upon Cicero and Catulus like an avalanche. Only Cato’s voice could have surmounted it; only Cato’s voice did.
“I interpose my veto!” he howled.
“To protect your own neck!” said Nepos scornfully as the roar died away so everyone could hear what followed. He looked Cato up and down with ostentatious surprise. “Not that there’s too much left of your neck, Cato! What happened? Did you forget to pay the whore before you left, or did you need her to do that to you before anything happened below your navel?’’
“How can you call yourself a noble Caecilius Metellus?” Cato asked. “Go home, Nepos, go home and wash the excrement from your mouth! Why should we be forced to listen to putrid innuendo in a holy assemblage of Roman men?’’
“Why should we be forced to lie down under a flimsy senatorial decree which gives the men in power the right to execute men more Roman by far than they are themselves? 1 never heard that Lentulus Sura had a slave for a great-grandam, or that Gaius Cethegus’s father still had pig shit behind his ears!”
“I refuse to engage in a slanging match, Nepos, and that is that! You can rant and rave from here until next December, and it won’t make a scrap of difference!” bellowed Cato, the stripes on his face standing out like dark red ropes. “I interpose my veto, and there is nothing you can say will alter that!”
“Of course you interpose your veto! If you neglect to, Cato, you’ll never speak in public again! It was you and no one else who talked the Senate of Rome around from clemency to barbarism! Not terribly surprising, really. Your great-grandam was a moist barbarian morsel, so they say. Very tasty for a silly old man from Tusculum who ought to have stayed in Tusculum and tickled his pigs, not gone to Rome to tickle a barbarian piggy-wiggy!”
And if that can’t cause a fight, thought Nepos, nothing on earth can! If I were he, I’d be insisting on daggers at close quarters. The Plebs are lapping the insults up as dogs do vomit, and that means I’m winning. Hit me, Cato, punch me in the eye!
Cato did nothing of the kind. With an heroically Stoic effort only he knew the cost of, he turned and retreated to the back of the rostra. For a moment the crowd was tempted to boo this craven act, but Ahenobarbus got in before Mark Antony and began to cheer madly at this magnificent display of self-control and contempt.
Lucius Calpurnius Bestia saved the day and the victory for Nepos by beginning to attack Cicero and his Senatus Consultum Ultimum in the most savagely witty way. The Plebs sighed ecstatically, and the meeting proceeded with plenty of vim and vigor.
When Nepos thought the audience had had enough of citizen execution, he changed his tack.
“Speaking of a certain Lucius Sergius Catilina,” said he in a conversational tone, “it has not escaped my attention that absolutely nothing is happening on the war front. There they are scattered around Etruria, Apulia and Picenum, beautifully separated by many lusciously safe miles, Catilina and his so-called adversaries. Who have we got, now?” he asked, and held up his right hand with fingers splayed wide. “Well, there’s Hybrida and his throbbing toe.” He tucked one finger away. “There’s the second Man of Chalk, Metellus of the goaty branch.” Away with another finger. “And there’s a King up there, Rex the doughty foe of—who? Who? Oh, petunias, I can’t seem to remember!” The only digits left were thumb and little finger. At which point he abandoned his count and used the hand to slap his forehead loudly. “Oh! Oh! How could I forget my own big brother? He’s supposed to be there, but he came to Rome to participate in a right act! I daresay I will just have to forgive him, the naughty fellow.”
This sally brought Quintus Minucius Thermus forward. “Where are you going, Nepos?” he asked. “What’s the mischief this time?”
“Mischief? I?” Nepos recoiled theatrically. “Thermus, Thermus, don’t let the fire under your big arse bring you to the boil, please! With a name like that, tepid suits you, my darling one!” he fluted, fluttering his eyelashes at Thermus outrageously while the Plebs howled with laughter. “No, sweetheart, I was just trying to remind our excellent fellow plebeians here that we do have some armies in the field to fight Catilina—when they find him, that is. The north of our peninsula is a big place, easy to get lost in. Especially considering the morning fog on Father Tiber—makes it hard for them to find a place to empty their porphyry chamber pots!’’
“Do you have any suggestions?” asked Thermus dangerously. He was striving valiantly to follow Cato’s example, but Nepos was now blowing him kisses, and the crowd was hysterical.
“Well, piggykins, as a matter of fact I do!” said Nepos brightly. “I was just standing watching the patterns on Cato’s face—pipinna, pipinna!—when another face swam before my eyes—no, dear one, not yours! See over there? That soldierly man on the plinth fourth from the end among the busts of the consuls? Lovely face, I always think! So fair, such beautiful blue eyes! Not as gorgeous as yours, of course, but not bad all the same.” Nepos cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered. “Ho there, Quiris—yes, you, right at the back near the busts of the consuls! Can you read the name on that one? Yes, that’s right, the one with the gold hair and the big blue eyes! What’s that? Pompeius? Which Pompeius? Manus, did you say? Magus, is it? Oh, Magnus! Thank you, Quiris, thank you! The name is Pompeius Magnus!”
Thermus clenched his fists. “Don’t you dare!” he snarled.
“Dare what?” asked Nepos innocently. “Though I do admit that Pompeius Magnus dares anything. Does he have any peers on a battlefield? I think not. And he’s over in Syria getting ready to come home, all his battles finished. The East is conquered, and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus did the conquering. Which is more than you can say for the goaty Metellus and the kingly Rex! I wish I had gone to war with either of them rather than with Pompeius Magnus! What piddling foes they must have encountered to qualify for triumphs! I could have been a genuine hero if I’d gone to war with them, I could have been like Gaius Caesar and hidden my thinning hair with a chaplet of oak leaves!”
Nepos paused to salute Caesar, standing on the Curia Hostilia steps wearing his chaplet of oak leaves.
“I suggest, Quirites, that we bring in a small plebiscite to fetch Pompeius Magnus home, and give him a special command to crush the reason why we’re still enduring a never-ending Senatus Consultum Ultimum! I say, bring Pompeius Magnus home to finish what the gouty one can’t even begin—Catilina!”
And the cheering started again until Cato, Thermus, Fabricius and Lucius Marius interposed their vetoes.
President of the College and therefore convener of the meeting, Metellus Nepos decided enough had been done. He closed it well satisfied with what he had accomplished, and went off arm in arm with his brother, Celer, cheerfully acknowledging the plaudits of the overjoyed Plebs.
“How would you,” said Caesar as he joined them, “like to be going bald when your cognomen means a fine thick head of hair?’’
“Your tata shouldn’t have married an Aurelia Cottae,” said Nepos unrepentantly. “Never met an Aurelius Cotta yet who didn’t look like an egg on top by the time he was forty.”
“You know, Nepos, until today I never realized that you had such a talent for demagoguery. Up there on the rostra you had style. They ate out of your hand. And I loved your performance so much I have forgiven you for the slap at my hair.”
“I thoroughly enjoyed myself, I must confess. However, I’ll never get a thing done with Cato bawling out his veto.”
“I agree. You’ll have an utterly frustrating year of it. But at least when it comes time to stand for higher office, the electors will remember you with great affection. I might even give you my vote.”
The Brothers Metelli were going to the Palatine, but strolled the short distance up the Via Sacra to the Domus Publica to keep Caesar company.
“I take it you’re returning to the fray in Etruria?” Caesar asked Celer.
“Off tomorrow at the crack of dawn. I’d like to think I’ll get a chance to fight Catilina, but our commander-in-chief Hybrida wants me to maintain a holding action on the borders of Picenum. Too far for Catilina to march without stumbling over someone else first.” Celer squeezed his brother’s wrist fondly. “The bit about morning fog on Father Tiber was wonderful, Nepos.”
“Are you serious about bringing Pompeius home?” asked Caesar.
“In practical terms there’s not much sense in it,” said Nepos seriously, “and I’m prepared to admit to you that I mostly said it to watch the rump react. However, if he left his army behind and came home alone he could make the trip in a month or two, depending upon how quickly he got the summons.”
“In two months even Hybrida will have brought Catilina to battle,” Caesar said.
“You’re right, of course. But after listening to Cato today, I’m not sure I want to spend a whole year in Rome being vetoed. You summed it up when you said I’d have an utterly frustrating time of it.” Nepos sighed. “One cannot reason with Cato! He won’t be talked round to anyone else’s point of view no matter how much sense it makes, and no one can intimidate him either.”
“They say,” from Celer, “that he even had good training for the day when his fellow tribunes of the plebs get so incensed with him that they hold him out over the end of the Tarpeian Rock. When Cato was two years old the Marsian leader Silo used to hold him out over a cluster of sharp rocks and threaten to drop him, but the little monster just hung there and defied him.”
“Yes, that’s Cato,” said Caesar grinning. “It’s a true story, so Servilia vows. Now back to your tribunate, Nepos. Do I read you alright? Are you thinking of resigning?”
“More of creating a terrific fuss, forcing the Senate to invoke the Senatus Consultum Ultimum against me.”
“By harping on bringing Pompeius home.”
“Oh, I don’t think that would boot Catulus’s rump over the edge, Caesar!”
“Exactly.”
“However,” said Nepos demurely, “if I were to propose a bill to the full People to fire Hybrida for incompetence and bring our Magnus home with the same imperium and dispositions as he’s had in the East, that would start them rumbling. Then if I added a little extra to the bill—say that Magnus be permitted to keep his imperium and his armies in Etruria and stand for the consulship next year in absentia—do you think that would be enough to cause a major eruption?”
Caesar began to laugh. “I’d say the whole of Italia would be covered in fiery clouds!”
“You’re known as a meticulous lawyer, Pontifex Maximus. Would you be willing to help me work out the details?”
“I might.”
“Let’s keep it in mind just in case January rolls round to find Hybrida still unable to close with Catilina. I’d love to exit from the tribunician stage under interdiction!”
“You’ll stink worse than the inside of a legionary’s helmet, Nepos, but only to people like Catulus and Metellus Scipio.”
“Bear in mind too, Caesar, that it will have to be the whole People, which means I can’t convoke the meeting. I’ll need at least a praetor for that:”
“I wonder,” Caesar asked Celer, “which praetor your brother could be thinking of?’’
“No idea,” said Celer solemnly.
“And after you’re forced to flee under interdiction, Nepos, you’ll go east to join Pompeius Magnus.”
“East to join Pompeius Magnus,” Nepos agreed. “That way they won’t have the courage to enforce the interdiction when I come home with the selfsame Pompeius Magnus.”
The Brothers Metelli saluted Caesar affectionately and went their way, leaving Caesar staring after them. Excellent allies! The trouble was, he thought with a sigh as he let himself inside his front door, that one never knew when things might change. The allies of this month could turn out to be the enemies of next month. One never knew.
*
Julia was easy. When Caesar sent for her, she hurled herself at him and hugged him.
“Tata, I understand everything, even why you couldn’t see me for five days. How brilliant you are! You’ve put Cicero in his place for good and all.”
“Do you think so? I find most people don’t know their place well enough to find it when someone like me puts them in it.”
“Oh,” said Julia doubtfully.
“And what about Servilia?”
She sat on his lap and began to kiss his white fans. “What is there to say, tata! Speaking of places, it isn’t my place to stand in judgement on you, and I at least do know where my place is. Brutus feels as I do. We intend to go on as if nothing has changed.” She shrugged. “Really, nothing has.”
“What a wise little bird I have in my nest!” Caesar’s arms tightened; he squeezed her so hard she had to gasp for breath. “Julia, no father could ever have asked for such a daughter! I am blessed. I wouldn’t accept Minerva and Venus rolled in one as a replacement for you.”
In all her life she had never been as happy as she was at that moment, but was a wise enough little bird not to weep. Men disliked women who wept; men liked women who laughed and made them laugh. To be a man was so very difficult—all that public strife, forced to fight tooth and nail for everything, enemies lurking everywhere. A woman who gave the men in her life more joy than anguish would never lack for love, and Julia knew now that she would never lack for love. She was not Caesar’s daughter for nothing; some things Aurelia could not teach her, but they were things she had learned for herself.
“I take it then,” said Caesar, cheek on her hair, “that our Brutus won’t punch me in the eye when we next meet?”
“Of course he won’t! If Brutus thought the worse of you for it, he would have to think the worse of his mother.”
“Very true.”
“Have you seen Servilia during the past five days, tata?’’
“No.”
A little silence fell; Julia stirred, screwed up her courage to speak.
“Junia Tertia is your daughter.”
“I believe so.”
“I wish I could know her!”
“It isn’t possible, Julia. I don’t know her.”
“Brutus says she’s like her mother in nature.”
“If that is the case,” said Caesar, tipping Julia off his lap and getting to his feet, “it’s better that you don’t know her.”
“How can you be together with someone you dislike?”
“Servilia?”
“Yes.”
His wonderful smile bloomed for her, his eyes creased up at their corners and obliterated those white fans. “If I knew that, little bird, I would be as good a father as you are a daughter. Who knows? I don’t. Sometimes I think even the Gods don’t begin to understand. It may be that all of us search for some kind of emotional completion in another person, though I believe we never find it. And our bodies make demands at loggerheads with our minds, just to complicate things. As for Servilia”—he shrugged wryly—”she’s my disease.”
And he was gone. Julia stood for a moment very still, her heart full. Today she had crossed a bridge, the bridge between girlhood and adulthood. Caesar had held out his hand to her, and helped her to his side of it. He had opened his innermost self to her, and somehow she knew he had never done that with anyone before, even with her mother. When she did move she danced, and was still dancing when she reached the hall outside Aurelia’s rooms.
“Julia! Dancing is vulgar!”
And that, thought Julia, was avia. Suddenly she felt so sorry for her grandmother that she flung both arms about Aurelia’s stiffening form and kissed her smackingly on both cheeks. Poor, poor avia! How much in life she must have missed, and no wonder she and tata quarreled with such regularity!
*
“It would be more convenient for me if you came to my house in future,” said Servilia to Caesar as she marched into his rooms on the lower Vicus Patricii.
“It isn’t your house, Servilia, it’s Silanus’s, and the poor wretch has enough trouble looming without having to watch me invade his house to copulate with his wife!” snapped Caesar. “I enjoyed doing that to Cato, but I won’t do it to Silanus. For a great patrician lady, you sometimes have the ethics of a brat from the Suburan gutter!”
“Have it your own way,” said Servilia, sitting down.
To Caesar this reaction was significant; dislike Servilia he might, but by now he knew her very well, and the fact that she chose to sit fully clad rather than automatically stood to disrobe herself told him she was not nearly as sure of her ground as her attitude suggested. So he sat down too, in a chair from which he could watch her and in which she could see him from head to toe. His pose was graceful and curule, left foot back, right extended, left arm draped along the chair back, right hand lying in his lap, head level but chin up.
“By rights I ought to strangle you,” he said after a pause.
“Silanus thought you’d chop me into pieces and feed me to the wolves.”
“Did he now? That’s interesting.”
“Oh, he was all on your side! How you men do stick together! He actually had the temerity to be angry with me because—though I fail to see why!—my letter to you forced him to vote to execute the conspirators. A nonsense if ever I heard one!”
“You fancy yourself a political expert, my dear, but the truth is that you’re a political ignoramus. You can never watch senatorial politics in action, and there’s a vast difference between senatorial politics and comitial politics. I suppose men go about their public life armed with the knowledge that sooner or later they’ll wear a pair of horns, but no man expects to have to don his horns in the Senate during a critical debate,” said Caesar harshly. “Of course you forced him to vote for execution! Had he voted with me, the whole House would have assumed that he was my pander. Silanus is not a well man, but he is a proud one. Why else do you think he kept silent after he was informed what was occurring between us? A note read by half the Senate, and that the important half? You really did rub his nose in it, didn’t you?”
“I see you’re on his side as much as he’s on yours.”
He gave an explosive sigh and rolled his eyes ceilingward. “The only side I’m on, Servilia, is my own.”
“You would be!”
A silence fell; he broke it.
“Our children surpass us for maturity. They’ve taken it very well, and very sensibly.”
“Have they?” she asked indifferently.
“You’ve not spoken to Brutus about it?”
“Not since the day it happened and Cato arrived to inform Brutus that his mother is a slut. ‘Strumpet’ is the word he used, actually.” She smiled reminiscently. “I made mincemeat of his face.”
“Ah, so that’s the answer! Next time I see Cato I must tell him that I feel for him. I too have sampled your claws.”
“Only where the marks are not on public display.”
“I see I must be thankful for small mercies.”
She leaned forward eagerly. “Did he look frightful? Did I scar him badly?”
“Shockingly. He looked as if a harpy had been at him.” A grin came. “Come to think of it, ‘harpy’ is a better word for you than ‘slut’ or ‘strumpet.’ However, don’t congratulate yourself too much. Cato has good skin, so in time the marks will disappear.”
“You don’t scar easily either.”
“Because Cato and I have the same kind of skin. War experience teaches a man what will stay and what will go.” Another explosive sigh. “What am I going to do with you, Servilia?”
“Perhaps to ask that question is putting your left shoe on your right foot, Caesar. The initiative might belong to me, not to you.”
That provoked a chuckle. “Rubbish,” he said gently.
She went pale. “You mean I love you more than you love me.”
“I don’t love you at all.”
“Then why are we together?”
“You please me in bed, which is rare in women of your class. I like the combination. And you have more between your ears than most women, even though you’re a harpy.”
“Is that where you think it is?” she asked, desperate to get him away from her failings.
“What?”
“Our thinking apparatus.”
“Ask any army surgeon or soldier and he’ll tell you. It’s blows to the head damage our thinking apparatus. Cerebrum, the brain. What all the philosophers argue about isn’t cerebrum, it’s animus. The animating spirit, the soul. The part which can conceive ideas bearing no relation to our senses, from music to geometry. The part which soars. That’s in a place we do not know. Head, chest, belly…” He smiled. “It might even live in our big toes. Logical, when you think of how gout can destroy Hortensius.”
“I believe you have answered my question. I now know why we are together.”
“Why?”
“Because of that. I am your hone. You sharpen your wits on me, Caesar.”
She got out of the chair and began to remove her clothing. Suddenly Caesar wanted her badly, but not to cradle her or treat her tenderly. One didn’t tame a harpy by kindness. A harpy was a grotesque one took on the floor with teeth in her neck and her claws locked behind her back, then took again, and again.
Rough usage always did tame her; she became soft and slightly kittenish after he transferred her from the floor to the bed.
“Have you ever loved any woman?” she asked then.
“Cinnilla,” he said abruptly, and closed his eyes on tears.
“Why?” asked the harpy. “There was nothing special about her, she wasn’t witty or intelligent. Though she was patrician.”
In answer he turned on his side away from her, and pretended to nap. Talk to Servilia about Cinnilla? Never!
Why did I love her so, if that is what it was I felt? Cinnilla was mine from the time I took her hand and led her home from the house of Gaius Marius in the days when he had become a demented shadow of himself. How old was I, thirteen? And she was all of seven, the adorable little thing. So dark and plump and sweet… The way her upper lip folded under when she smiled, and she smiled a lot. Gentleness personified. No cause of her own, unless her cause was I. Did I love her so much because we were children together first? Or was it that in chaining me to a priesthood and marrying me to a child he didn’t know, old Gaius Marius gifted me with something so precious I will never meet it again?
He sat up convulsively and slapped Servilia so hard on the behind that she wore the mark for the rest of the day.
“Time to go,” he said. “Go on, Servilia, go! Go now!”
She went without a word, and she hurried, something in his face filling her with the same kind of terror she inspired in Brutus. As soon as she had gone Caesar turned his head into the pillow and wept as he had not wept since Cinnilla died.
*
The Senate didn’t meet again that year. Not an unusual state of affairs, as no formal schedule of meetings existed; they were called by a magistrate, and usually by the consul with the fasces for that month. It being December, Antonius Hybrida was supposed to be in the chair, but Cicero was filling in for him, and Cicero had had his fill. Nor was there any news from Etruria worth ferreting the senators out of their burrows. The craven lot! Besides, the senior consul just couldn’t be sure what else Caesar might do if given half a chance. Every comitial day Metellus Nepos kept trying to fire Hybrida, and Cato kept vetoing him. Atticus and Cicero’s other knightly adherents in the Eighteen were working hard to bring people around to the Senate’s point of view, yet there were many dark faces and darker looks on all sides.
The one factor Cicero had not counted on was the young men; deprived of their beloved stepfather, the Antonii had enlisted the members of the Clodius Club. Under normal circumstances no one of Cicero’s age and standing would have noticed them, but the conspiracy of Catilina and its outcome had pushed them out of the shadows their youth created. And what huge clout they had! Oh, not among the First Class, but at all levels below that, certainly.
Young Curio was a case in point. Wild to a fault, he had even been imprisoned in his room by the elder Curio, at his wits’ end to cope with the consequences of Curio’s drinking, gambling and sexual exploits. That hadn’t worked. Mark Antony had broken him out and the two of them had been seen in a low tavern losing at dice, drinking, and kissing voluptuously. Now young Curio had a cause, and suddenly he displayed a side not associated with idle vice. Young Curio was cleverer by far than his father, and a brilliant orator. Every day he was in the Forum making trouble.
Then there was Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, son and heir of a family bound by tradition to oppose every Popularist cause; Decimus Brutus Callaicus had been one of the most obdurate enemies of the Brothers Gracchi, allied to the non-Gracchan branch of the clan Sempronius, cognominated Tuditanus. Amicitia persisted from one generation to the next, which meant that young Decimus Brutus should have been supporting men like Catulus, not destructive agitators like Gaius Caesar. Instead, there was Decimus Brutus in the Forum egging Metellus Nepos on, cheering Caesar when he appeared, and making himself absolutely charming to all sorts of people from freedmen to the Fourth Class. Another extremely intelligent and capable young man who apparently was lost to the principles upheld by the boni—and kept low company!
As for Publius Clodius—well… Since the trial of the Vestals a full ten years earlier, everyone had known Clodius to be Catilina’s most vocal enemy. Yet here he was, complete with hordes and hordes of clients (how did he come to have more clients than his oldest brother, Appius Claudius?), stirring up trouble for Catilina’s enemies! Usually squiring his wretched wife on his arm, in itself a colossal affront! Women didn’t frequent the Forum; women didn’t listen to comitial meetings from a prominent place; women didn’t raise their voices to shout encouragement and bawdy abuse. Fulvia did all of those—and the crowd apparently loved it, if for no other reason than that she was the granddaughter of Gaius Gracchus, who had left no male progeny.
Until the execution of their stepfather, no one had ever taken the Antonii seriously. Or was it that men looked no further than the scandals trailing in their wake? None of the three owned the ability or brilliance of young Curio or Decimus Brutus or Clodius, but they had something in its way more appealing to the crowd, the same fascination exerted by outstanding gladiators or charioteers: sheer physical power, a dominance arising out of brute strength. Mark Antony was in the habit of appearing clad only in a tunic, which garb allowed people to see the massive calves and biceps, the width of the shoulders, the flatness of the belly, the vault of the chest, the forearms like oak; he also pulled that tunic very tightly across his front, thereby displaying the outline of his penis so revealingly that the whole world knew it was not looking at padding. Women sighed and swooned; men swallowed miserably and wished they were dead. He was very ugly in the face, with a big beaky nose which strove to meet a huge and aggressive chin across a small but thick-lipped mouth; his eyes were too close together and his cheeks fleshy. But the auburn hair was thick, crisp and curling, and women joked that it was terrific fun to find his mouth for a kiss without being turtle-nipped by his nose and chin. In short, Mark Antony (and his brothers, though to a lesser extent) didn’t have to be a great orator or a courtroom eel; he simply rolled along like the awesome monster he was.
Several very good reasons why Cicero chose not to convene the Senate for the rest of his year—had Caesar himself not been sufficient cause to lie low.
However, on the last day of December as the sun neared its rest, the senior consul went to meet the People in the Popular Assembly and lay down his insignia of office. He had worked long and hard on his valediction, intending to exit from the consular stage with a speech the like of which Rome had never heard. His honor demanded it; so did his self-esteem. Even if Antonius Hybrida had been in Rome he would have presented no competition, but as it was, Cicero had the stage to himself. How lovely!
“Quirites,” he began in his most mellifluous voice, “this has been a momentous year for Rome—”
“Veto, veto!” shouted Metellus Nepos from the Comitia well. “I veto any speeches, Cicero! No man who executed Roman citizen men without a trial can be allowed the opportunity to justify what he did! Shut your mouth, Cicero! Take the oath and get off the rostra!”
For a long moment there was absolute silence. Of course the senior consul had hoped that the turnout would be large enough to warrant transferring the venue from the Well of the Comitia to the rostra of Castor’s temple, but it was not. Atticus had worked to some effect; all those knightly supporters of Cicero were present, and looked to outnumber the opposition. But that Metellus Nepos would veto something as traditional as the outgoing consul’s right to speak had not occurred to Cicero. And there could be no way around it, numbers or not. For the second time in a short period, Cicero wished with all his heart that Sulla’s law forbidding the tribunician veto was still in effect. But it was not. How then could he say something? Anything? Everything!
In the end he began to swear his oath according to the age-old formula, then as it concluded: “I also swear that by my single-handed efforts I saved my country, that I, Marcus Tullius Cicero, consul of the Senate and People of Rome, have ensured the maintenance of legal government and preserved Rome from her enemies!”
Whereupon Atticus began to cheer, and his followers took it up resoundingly. Nor were the young men present to boo and bay; it was New Year’s Eve, apparently they had better things to do than watch Cicero relinquish office. Some sort of win, thought Marcus Tullius Cicero as he descended the rostral steps and held out his arms to Atticus. The next thing he was shoulder-high, a wreath of laurel sat on his head, and the crowd chaired him all the way to the Kingmakers’ Stairs. A pity Caesar wasn’t there to witness it. But, like all the incoming magistrates, Caesar could not attend. Tomorrow was his day, when he and the new magistrates would be sworn into office in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and begin what (in Caesar’s case, anyway) Cicero very much feared would be a calamitous year for the boni.
The morrow confirmed that foreboding. No sooner was the formal swearing-in ceremony concluded and the calendar adjusted than the new praetor urbanus, Gaius Julius Caesar, left that first meeting of the Senate to hurry to the Well of the Comitia and call the Popular Assembly into session. That it was prearranged was obvious; only those of Popularist view were waiting for him, from the young men to his senatorial adherents and the inevitable throng of men little better than Head Count, relics of all those years in the Subura—skullcapped Jews with the citizenship who with Caesar’s connivance had managed to get themselves enrolled in a rural tribe, freedmen, a multitude of small tradesmen and businessmen also inserted into rural tribes, and on the fringes wives and sisters and daughters and aunts.
The naturally deep voice vanished; Caesar adopted that high, clear tenor tone which carried so well as far as the crowd extended. “People of Rome, I have called you here today to witness my protest against an insult to Rome of such magnitude that the Gods are weeping! Over twenty years ago the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus burned down. In my youth I was flamen Dialis, the special priest of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and now in my prime I am the Pontifex Maximus, dedicated to the service of the Great God once again. Today I have had to swear my oath of office inside the new premises Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix commissioned Quintus Lutatius Catulus to build eighteen years ago. And, People of Rome, I was ashamed! Ashamed! I abased myself before the Great God, I wept beneath the shelter of my toga praetexta, I could not look up at the face of the Great God’s exquisite new statue—commissioned and paid for by my uncle Lucius Aurelius Cotta and his colleague in the consulship, Lucius Manlius Torquatus! Yes, until scant days ago the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus even lacked its effigy of the Great God!”
Never insignificant even in the midst of the largest crush of people, Caesar now that he was urban praetor seemed nonetheless to have grown both in stature and magnificence; the sheer force which lived within him poured out of him, caught hold of every listener, dominated, enthralled.
“How can this be?” he asked the crowd. “Why is the guiding spirit of Rome so neglected, so insulted, so denigrated! Why are the temple walls devoid of the greatest art our times can offer? Why are there no gorgeous gifts from foreign kings and princes? Why do Minerva and Juno exist as air, as numina, as nothings? No statue of either one, even in cheap baked clay! Where is the gilt? Where are the golden chariots? Where the glorious moldings, the fabulous floors?”
He paused, drew a breath, looked like thunder. “I can tell you, Quirites! The money for them resides in Catulus’s purse! All the millions of sesterces the Treasury of Rome has supplied to Quintus Lutatius Catulus have never left his personal bank account! I have been to the Treasury and asked for the records, and there are none! None, that is, describing the fate of the many, many sums paid out to Catulus over the years! Sacrilege! That is what it amounts to! The man entrusted with re-creating the house of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in greater beauty and glory than ever before has scuttled off with the funds!”
The diatribe went on while the audience grew more indignant; what Caesar said was true, hadn’t everyone seen it for himself?
Down from the Capitol came Quintus Lutatius Catulus at a run, followed by Cato, Bibulus and the rest of the boni.
“There he is!” shouted Caesar, pointing. “Look at him! Oh, the gall! The temerity of the man! However, Quirites, you have to grant him courage, don’t you? Look at the barefaced swindler run! How can he move so fast with all that State money dragging him down? Quintus Lutatius Peculatus the embezzler! Embezzler!”
“What is the meaning of this, praetor urbanus?” Catulus demanded, breathless. “Today is feriae, you can’t call a meeting!”
“As Pontifex Maximus I am at perfect liberty to convene the People to discuss a religious topic at any time on any day! And this is definitely a religious topic. I am explaining to the People why Jupiter Optimus Maximus lacks a fit home, Catulus.”
Catulus had heard that derisive “Embezzler!” and needed no further information to draw the correct conclusions. “Caesar, I will have your skin for this!” he cried, shaking a fist.
“Oh!” gasped Caesar, shrinking back in mock alarm. “Do you hear him, Quirites! I expose him as a sacrilegious wolfer-down of Rome’s public moneys, and he threatens to flay me! Come, Catulus, why not admit what everyone in Rome knows for a fact? The proof is there for all the world to see—more proof by far than you had to offer when you accused me of treason in the House! All any man has to do is look at the walls, the floors, the empty plinths and the absence of gifts to see what humiliation you have inflicted on Jupiter Optimus Maximus!”
Catulus stood bereft of words, for in truth he had no idea how in an angry public meeting he could possibly explain his position—the position Sulla had put him in! People never had any real concept of the horrifying expense involved in building an edifice as huge and eternal as the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Whatever he tried to say in his own defense would come out sounding like a tissue of laughably feeble lies.
“People of Rome,” said Caesar to the glowering crowd, “I move that we take up in contio the consideration of two laws, one to impeach Quintus Lutatius Catulus for the embezzlement of State funds, and another to try him for sacrilege!”
“I veto any discussion of either matter!” roared Cato.
Whereupon Caesar shrugged, held out his hands in a gesture which clearly asked what any man could do once Cato started to veto, and cried loudly, “I dismiss this meeting! Go home, Quirites, and offer sacrifices to the Great God—pray that he allows Rome to continue standing when men steal his funds and break the sacred contracts!”
He came down from the rostra lightly, gave the boni a happy grin, and walked away up the Sacra Via surrounded by hundreds of indignant people, all obviously pleading with him not to close the matter, to go ahead and prosecute Catulus.
Bibulus became aware that Catulus was breathing jerkily and in great gasps, and moved to support him. “Quickly!” he snapped to Cato and Ahenobarbus, shrugging himself out of his toga. The three of them made a stretcher of it, forced the protesting Catulus to lie down, and with Metellus Scipio on the fourth corner carried Catulus home. His face was more grey than blue, a good sign perhaps, but it was with relief that they got the leader of the boni home and into his bed, wife Hortensia fluttering distractedly. He would be all right—this time.
“But how much more can poor Quintus Catulus take?’’ Bibulus asked as they emerged into the Clivus Victoriae.
“Somehow,” said Ahenobarbus between his teeth, “we have to shut that irrumator Caesar up for good! If there’s no other way, then let it be murder!”
“Don’t you mean fellator?” asked Gaius Piso, so afraid of the look, on Ahenobarbus’s face that he groped for anything to lighten the atmosphere. Not normally a prudent man, he sensed disaster now, and had a thought for his own fate.
“Caesar on the giving end?” asked Bibulus scornfully. “Not he! Uncrowned kings don’t give, they take!”
“Here we go again,” sighed Metellus Scipio. “Stop Caesar this, and stop Caesar that. But we never do.”
“We can, and we will,” said silvery, diminutive Bibulus. “A little bird told me that very shortly Metellus Nepos is going to propose that we bring Pompeius back from the East to deal with Catilina—and that he should be given imperium maius. Imagine that, if you can! A general inside Italia owning a degree of imperium never before given to anyone save a dictator!”
“How does that help us with Caesar?” asked Metellus Scipio.
“Nepos can’t bring a bill like that before the Plebs, he’ll have to go to the People. Do you think for a moment that Silanus or Murena would consent to convoke a meeting designed to award Pompeius an imperium maius? No, it will be Caesar.”
“So?”
“So we’ll make sure the meeting is a violent one. Then, as Caesar will be responsible at law for any violence, we’ll charge him under the lex Plautia de vi. In case you’ve forgotten, Scipio, I am the praetor in charge of the Violence Court! Not only am I willing to pervert justice in any way I can to get Caesar sent down, I’d even walk up to Cerberus and give each head a pat!”
“Bibulus, that’s brilliant!” said Gaius Piso.
“And for once,” said Cato, “there will be no protestations from me that justice is not being done. If Caesar is convicted, justice will be done!”
“Catulus is dying,” said Cicero abruptly. He had hung on the outskirts of the group, painfully aware that no member of it considered him of sufficient moment to include him in their plotting. He, the lodger from Arpinum. Savior of his country, yet forgotten the day after leaving office.
The rest turned to look at him, startled.
“Rubbish!” barked Cato. “He’ll recover.”
“I daresay he will this time. But he’s dying,” maintained Cicero stubbornly. “Not long ago he said to me that Caesar was fraying his life strand like tough string a gossamer thread.”
“Then we must get rid of Caesar!” cried Ahenobarbus. “The higher he goes, the more insufferable he becomes.”
“The higher he goes, the further he has to fall,” said Cato. “For as long as I am alive and he is alive, I will be shoving at my lever to bring about that fall, and so I solemnly swear it by all our Gods.”
*
Oblivious to this massive amount of ill will the boni were directing at his person, Caesar went home to a dinner party. Licinia had given up her vows, and Fabia was now the Chief Vestal. The changeover had been marked by ceremonies and an official banquet for all the priestly colleges, but on this New Year’s Day the Pontifex Maximus was giving a much smaller dinner: just the five Vestals; Aurelia; Julia; and Fabia’s half sister, Cicero’s wife, Terentia. Cicero had been invited, but declined. So too did Pompeia Sulla decline; like Cicero, she pleaded a prior commitment. The Clodius Club was celebrating. However, Caesar had good reason to know that she could not imperil her good name. Polyxena and Cardixa were stuck to her more firmly than burrs to an ox.
My little harem, thought Caesar in some amusement, though his mind quailed when his eyes rested on the sour, forbidding Terentia. Impossible to think of Terentia in that context, whimsy or no!
Enough time had gone by for the Vestals to have lost their shyness. This was especially true of the two children, Quinctilia and Junia, who obviously worshiped him. He teased them, laughed and joked with them, was never on his dignity with them, and seemed to understand a great deal of what went on in their girlish minds. Even the two dour ones, Popillia and Arruntia, now had good cause to know that with Gaius Caesar in the other half of the Domus Publica, there would be no lawsuits alleging unchastity.
Astonishing, thought Terentia as the meal progressed merrily, that a man with such a shocking reputation for philandering could handle this clutch of extremely vulnerable women so deftly. On the one hand he was approachable, even affectionate; on the other hand he gave them absolutely no hope. They would all spend the rest of their lives in love with him, no doubt, but not in a tortured sense. He gave them absolutely no hope. And interesting that not even Bibulus had produced a canard about Caesar and his clutch of Vestal women. Not in more than a century had there been a Pontifex Maximus so punctilious, so devoted to the job; he had enjoyed the position for less than a year so far, but already his reputation in it was unassailable. Including his reputation anent Rome’s most precious possession, her consecrated virgins.
Naturally Terentia’s chief loyalty was to Cicero, and no one had suffered for him more through the Catilina business than his wife. Since the night of the fifth day of December she had woken to listen to his mumbling nightmares, heard him repeat Caesar’s name over and over, and never without anger or pain. It was Caesar and no one else who had ruined Cicero’s triumph; it was Caesar who had fanned the smoldering resentment of the People. Metellus Nepos was a gnat grown fangs because of Caesar. And yet from Fabia came another view of Caesar, and Terentia was too cool a woman not to appreciate its justice, its authenticity. Cicero was a far nicer man, a more worthy man. Ardent and sincere, he brought boundless enthusiasm and energy into everything he did, and no one could impugn his honesty. However, Terentia decided with a sigh, not even a mind as huge as Cicero’s could outthink a mind like Caesar’s. Why was it that these incredibly old families could still throw up a Sulla or a Caesar? They ought to have been worn out centuries ago.
Terentia came out of her reverie when Caesar ordered the two little girls to bed.
“It’s up with the sparrows in the morning, no more holidays.” He nodded to the hovering Eutychus. “See the ladies safely home, and make sure the servants are awake to take charge of them at the Atrium Vestae door.”
Off they went, lissome Junia several feet in front of the waddling Quinctilia. Aurelia watched them go with a mental sigh: that child ought to be put on a diet! But when she had issued instructions to this effect some months earlier, Caesar had grown angry and forbidden it.
“Let her be, Mater. You are not Quinctilia, and Quinctilia is not you. If the poor little puppy is happy eating, then she shall eat. For she is happy! There are no husbands waiting in the wings, and I would have her continue to like being a Vestal.”
“She’ll die of overeating!”
“Then so be it. I will only approve when Quinctilia herself elects to starve.”
What could one do with a man like that? Aurelia had shut her mouth tightly and desisted.
“No doubt,” she said now with a touch of acid in her voice, “you are going to choose Minucia from among the candidates to fill Licinia’s place.”
The fair brows rose. “What leads you to that conclusion?”
“You seem to have a soft spot for fat children.”
Which didn’t have the desired effect; Caesar laughed. “I have a soft spot for children, Mater. Tall, short, thin, fat—it makes little difference. However, since you’ve brought the subject up, I’m pleased to say that the Vestal slough is over. So far I’ve had five offers of very suitable children, all of the right blood, and all furnished with excellent dowries.”
“Five?” Aurelia blinked. “I had thought there were three.”
“Are we permitted to know their names?” asked Fabia.
“I don’t see why not. The choice is mine, but I don’t move in a feminine world, and I certainly don’t pretend to know everything about the domestic situations within families. Two of them, however, don’t matter; I’m not seriously considering them. And one of them is Minucia, as it happens,” said Caesar, quizzing his mother wickedly.
“Then who are you considering?”
“An Octavia of the branch using Gnaeus as a praenomen.”
“That would be the grandchild of the consul who died in the Janiculan fortress when Marius and Cinna besieged Rome.”
“Yes. Does anyone have any information to offer?”
No one did. Caesar produced the next name, a Postumia.
Aurelia frowned; so did Fabia and Terentia.
“Ah! What’s wrong with Postumia?”
“It’s a patrician family,” said Terentia, “but am I correct in assuming this girl is of the Albinus branch, last consul over forty years ago?’’
“Yes.”
“And she is turned eight?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t take her. It’s a household much addicted to the wine flagon, and all the children—far too many of them! I really can’t think what the mother was about!—are allowed to lap unwatered wine from the time they’re weaned. This girl has already drunk herself senseless on several occasions.”
“Dear me!”
“So who’s left, tata?” asked Julia, smiling.
“Cornelia Merula, the great-granddaughter of the flamen Dialis Lucius Cornelius Merula,” said Caesar solemnly.
Every pair of eyes looked at him accusingly, but it was Julia who answered.
“You’ve been teasing us!” she chuckled. “I thought you were!”
“Oh?” asked Caesar, lips twitching.
“Why would you look any further, tata?”
“Excellent, excellent!” said Aurelia, beaming. “The great-grandmother still rules that family, and every generation has been brought up in the most religious way. Cornelia Merula will come willingly, and adorn the College.”
“So I think, Mater,” said Caesar.
Whereupon Julia rose. “I thank you for your hospitality, Pontifex Maximus,” she said gravely, “but I ask your leave to go.”
“Brutus coming round?’’
She blushed. “Not at this hour, tata!”
“Julia,” said Aurelia when she had gone, “will be fourteen in five days’ time.”
“Pearls,” said Caesar promptly. “At fourteen she can wear pearls, Mater, is that right?”
“Provided they’re small.”
He looked wry. “Small is all they can be.” Sighing, he got up. “Ladies, thank you for your company. There’s no need to go, but I must. I have work to do.”
“Well! A Cornelia Merula for the College!” Terentia was saying as Caesar shut the door.
Outside in the corridor he leaned against the wall and for several moments laughed silently. What a tiny world they lived in! Was that good or bad? At least they were a pleasant group, even if Mater was growing a little curmudgeonly, and Terentia always had been. But thank the Gods he didn’t have to do that often! More fun by far to engineer Metellus Nepos’s move to get himself banished than to make small talk with women.
*
Though when Caesar convened the Popular Assembly early in the morning of the fourth day of January, he had no idea that Bibulus and Cato intended to use the meeting to bring about a worse fall from grace than Metellus Nepos’s: his own fall.
Even when he and his lictors arrived in the lower Forum very early, it was evident that the Well of the Comitia was not going to hold the crowd; Caesar turned immediately in the direction of the temple of Castor and Pollux and issued orders to the small group of public slaves who waited nearby in case they were needed.
Many thought Castor’s the most imposing temple in the Forum, for it had been rebuilt less than sixty years ago by Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus, and he had built in the grand style. Large enough inside for the full Senate to hold a meeting there very comfortably, the floor of its single chamber stood twenty-five feet above the ground, and within its podium lay a warren of rooms. A stone tribunal had once stood in front of the original temple, but when Metellus Dalmaticus tore it down and started again he incorporated this structure into the whole, thus creating a platform almost as large as the rostra some ten feet off the ground. Instead of bringing the wonderful flight of shallow marble steps all the way from the entrance to the temple itself to the level of the Forum, he had stopped them at the platform. Access from the Forum to the platform was via two narrow sets of steps, one on either side. This allowed the platform to serve as a rostrum, and Castor’s to serve as a voting place; the assembled People or Plebs stood below in the Forum and looked up.
The temple itself was completely surrounded by fluted stone columns painted red, each surmounted by an Ionic capital painted in shades of rich blue with gilded edges to the volutes. Nor had Metellus Dalmaticus enclosed the chamber by walls within the columns; one could look straight through Castor’s, it soared airy and free as the two young Gods to whom it was dedicated.
As Caesar stood watching the public slaves deposit the big, heavy tribunician bench on the platform, someone touched his arm.
“A word to the wise,” said Publius Clodius, dark eyes very bright. “There’s going to be trouble.”
Caesar’s own eyes had already absorbed the fact that there were many in the idling crowd whose faces were not familiar save in one way: they belonged to Rome’s multitude of bully-boys, the ex-gladiators who upon being liberated drifted from places like Capua to find seedy employment in Rome as bouncers, bailiffs, bodyguards.
“They’re not my men,” said Clodius.
“Whose, then?”
“I’m not sure because they’re too cagey to say. But they all have suspicious bulges beneath their togas—cudgels, most likely. If I were you, Caesar, I’d have someone call out the militia in a hurry. Don’t hold your meeting until it’s guarded.”
“Many thanks, Publius Clodius,” said Caesar, and turned away to speak to his chief lictor.
Not long afterward the new consuls appeared. Silanus’s lictors bore the fasces, whereas Murena’s dozen walked with left shoulders unburdened. Neither man was happy, for this meeting, the second of the year, was also the second one called into being by a mere praetor; Caesar had got in before the consuls, a great insult, and Silanus had not yet had an opportunity to address the People in his laudatory contio. Even Cicero had fared better! Thus both waited stony-faced as far from Caesar as they could, while their servants placed their slender ivory chairs to one side of the platform’s center, occupied by the curule chair belonging to Caesar and—ominous presence!—the tribunician bench.
One by one the other magistrates trickled in and found a spot to sit. Metellus Nepos when he came perched on the very end of the tribunician bench adjacent to Caesar’s chair, winking at Caesar and nourishing the scroll containing his bill to summon Pompey home. Eyes everywhere, the urban praetor told off the clotting groups in the crowd, now three or four thousand strong. Though the very front area was reserved for senators, those just behind and to either side were ex-gladiators. Elsewhere were groups he thought belonged to Clodius, including the three Antonii and the rest of the young blades who belonged to the Clodius Club. Also Fulvia.
His chief lictor approached and bent down to Caesar’s chair. “The militia are beginning to arrive, Caesar. As you directed, I’ve put them out of sight behind the temple.”
“Good. Use your own initiative, don’t wait for my command.”
“It’s all right, Caesar!” said Metellus Nepos cheerfully. “I heard that the crowd was full of strange tough faces, so I’ve got a few tough faces of my own out there.”
“I don’t think, Nepos,” said Caesar, sighing, “that’s a very clever idea. The last thing I want is another war in the Forum.”
“Isn’t it high time?” asked Nepos, unimpressed. “We haven’t had a good brawl in more years than I’ve been out of diapers.”
“You’re just determined to go out of office with a roar.”
“That I am! Though I would love to wallop Cato before I go!”
Last to arrive, Cato and Thermus ascended the steps on the side where Pollux sat his painted marble horse, picked their way between the praetors with a grin for Bibulus, and attained the bench. Before Metellus Nepos knew what had happened, the two newcomers had each lifted him beneath an elbow and whisked him to the middle of the bench. They then sat down between him and Caesar, with Cato next to Caesar and Thermus next to Nepos. When Bestia tried to flank Nepos on his other side, Lucius Marius shoved his way between them. Metellus Nepos thus sat alone amid his enemies, as did Caesar when Bibulus suddenly shifted his ivory seat to Caesar’s side of a startled Philippus.
Alarm was spreading; the two consuls were looking uneasy, and the uninvolved praetors were clearly wishing the platform stood three times farther off the ground than it did.
But the meeting got under way at last with the prayers and auguries. All was in order. Caesar spoke briefly to the effect that the tribune of the plebs Quintus Caecilius Metellus Nepos wished to present a bill for discussion by the People.
Metellus Nepos rose, pulling the ends of his scroll apart. “Quirites, it is the fourth day of January in the year of the consulship of Decimus Junius Silanus and Lucius Licinius Murena! To the north of Rome lies the great district of Etruria, where the outlaw Catilina struts with an army of rebels! In the field against him is Gaius Antonius Hybrida, commander-in-chief of a force at least twice the size of Catilina’s! But nothing happens! It is now almost two months since Hybrida left Rome to deal with this pathetic collection of veteran soldiers so old their knees creak, but nothing has happened! Rome continues to exist under a Senatus Consultum Ultimum while the ex-consul in charge of her legions bandages his toe!”
The scroll came into play, but seriously; Nepos was not foolish enough to think that this assemblage would appreciate a clown. He cleared his throat and launched immediately into the details. “I hereby propose that the People of Rome relieve Gaius Antonius Hybrida of his imperium and his command! I hereby ask the People of Rome to install Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in his place as commander-in-chief of the armies! I hereby direct that the People of Rome endow Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus with an imperium maius effective within all Italia except the city of Rome herself! I further direct that Gnaeus Pompeius be given whatever moneys, troops, equipment and legates he requires, and that his special command together with his imperium maius not be terminated until he thinks the time right to lay them down!”
Cato and Thermus were on their feet as the last word left Nepos’s mouth. “Veto! Veto! I interpose my veto!” cried both men in unison.
A rain of stones came out of nowhere, whizzing viciously at the assembled magistrates, and the bully-boys charged through the ranks of the senators in the direction of both sets of steps. Curule chairs overturned as consuls, praetors and aediles fled up the broad marble stairs into the temple, with all the tribunes of the plebs except for Cato and Metellus Nepos after them. Clubs and cudgels were out; Caesar wrapped his toga about his right arm and retreated between his lictors, dragging Nepos with him.
But Cato hung on longer, it seemed miraculously preserved, still shouting that he vetoed with every higher step he took until Murena dashed out from among the columns and pulled him forcibly inside. The militia waded into the fray with shields round and staves thudding, and gradually those louts who had attained the platform were driven down again. Senators now scurried up the two flights of steps, making for the shelter of the temple. And. below in the Forum a full-scale riot broke out as a whooping Mark Antony and his boon companion Curio fell together on some twenty opponents, their friends piling in after them.
“Well, this is a good start to the year!” said Caesar as he walked into the center of the light-filled temple, carefully redraping his toga.
“It is a disgraceful start to the year!” snapped Silanus, his blood coursing fast enough through his veins to banish belly pain. “Lictor, I command you to quell the riot!”
“Oh, rubbish!” said Caesar wearily. “I have the militia here, I marshaled them when I saw some of the faces in the crowd. The trouble won’t amount to much now we’re off the rostra.”
“This is your doing, Caesar!” snarled Bibulus.
“To hear you talk, Flea, it’s always my doing.”
“Will you please come to order?” Silanus shouted. “I have summoned the Senate into session, and I will have order!”
“Hadn’t you better invoke the Senatus Consultum Ultimum, Silanus?” asked Nepos, looking down to find that he still held his scroll. “Better still, as soon as the fuss dies down outside, let me finish my proper business before the People.”
“Silence!” Silanus tried to roar; it came out more like a bleat. The Senatus Consultum Ultimum empowers me as the consul with the fasces to take all the measures I deem necessary to protect the Res Publica of Rome!” He gulped, suddenly needing his chair. But it lay on the platform below, he had to send a servant to fetch it. When someone unfolded it and set it down for him, he collapsed into it, grey and sweating.
“Conscript Fathers, I will see an end to this appalling affair at once!” he said then. “Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, you have the floor. Kindly explain the remark you made to Gaius Julius Caesar.”
“I don’t have to explain it, Decimus Silanus, it’s manifest,” said Bibulus, pointing to a darkening swelling on his left cheek. “I accuse Gaius Caesar and Quintus Metellus Nepos of public violence! Who else stands to gain from rioting in the Forum? Who else would want to see chaos? Whose ends does it serve except theirs?”
“Bibulus is right!” yelled Cato, so elated by the brief crisis that for once he forgot the protocol of names. “Who else stood to gain? Who else needs a Forum running with blood? It’s back to the good old days of Gaius Gracchus, Livius Drusus, that filthy demagogue Saturninus! You’re both Pompeius’s minions!”
Growls and rumbles came from all sides, for there were none among the hundred-odd senators inside the temple who had voted with Caesar during that fateful division on the fifth day of December when five men were condemned to death without trial.
“Neither the tribune of the plebs Nepos nor I as urban praetor had anything to gain from violence,” said Caesar, “nor were those who threw the stones known to us.” He looked derisively at Marcus Bibulus. “Had the meeting I convoked progressed peacefully, Flea, the outcome would have been a resounding victory for Nepos. Do you genuinely think the serious voters who came today would want a dolt like Hybrida in charge of their legions if they were offered Pompeius Magnus? The violence began when Cato and Thermus vetoed, not before. To use the power of the tribunician veto to prevent the People from discussing laws in contio or registering their votes is in absolute violation of everything Rome stands for! I don’t blame the People for starting to shell us! It’s months since they’ve been acknowledged to have any rights at all!”
“Speaking of rights, every tribune of the plebs has the right to exercise his veto at his discretion!” bellowed Cato.
“What a fool you are, Cato!” cried Caesar. “Why do you think Sulla took the veto off the likes of you? Because the veto was never intended to serve the interests of a few men who control the Senate! Every time you yap another veto, you insult the intelligence of all those thousands out there in the Forum cheated by you of their right to listen—calmly!—to laws presented to them—calmly!—then to vote—calmly!—one way or the other!”
“Calm? Calm? It wasn’t my veto disturbed the calm, Caesar, it was your bully-boys!”
“I wouldn’t soil my hands on such rabble!”
“You didn’t have to! All you had to do was issue orders.”
“Cato, the People are sovereign,” said Caesar, striving to be more patient, “not the Senate’s rump and its few tribunician mouthpieces. You don’t serve the interests of the People, you serve the interests of a handful of senators who think they own and rule an empire of millions! You strip the People of their rights and this city of her dignitas! You shame me, Cato! You shame Rome! You shame the People! You even shame your boni masters, who use your naïveté and sneer at your ancestry behind your back! You call me a minion of Pompeius Magnus? I am not! But you, Cato, are no more and no less than a minion of the boni!”
“Caesar,” said Cato, striding to stand with his face only inches from Caesar’s, “you are a cancer in the body of Roman men! You are everything I abominate!” He turned to the stunned group of senators and held out his hands to them, the healing stripes on his face giving him in that filtered light the savagery of a fierce cat. “Conscript Fathers, this Caesar will ruin us all! He will destroy the Republic, I know it in my bones! Don’t listen to him prate of the People and the People’s rights! Instead, listen to me! Drive him and his catamite Nepos out of Rome, forbid them fire and water within the bounds of Italia! I will see Caesar and Nepos charged with violent crime, I will see them outlawed!”
“Listening to you, Cato,” said Metellus Nepos, “only reminds me that any violence in the Forum is better than letting you run rampant vetoing every single meeting, every single proposal, every single word!”
And for the second time in a month someone took Cato off-guard to do things to his face. Metellus Nepos simply walked up to him, threw every ounce of himself into his hand, and slapped Cato so hard that Servilia’s scratches burst and bled anew.
“I don’t care what you do to me with your precious piddling Senatus Consultum Ultimum!” Nepos yelled at Silanus. “It’s worth dying in the Tullianum to know I’ve walloped Cato!”
“Get out of Rome, go to your master Pompeius!” panted Silanus, helpless to control the meeting, his own feelings, or the pain.
“Oh, I intend to!” said Nepos scornfully, turned on his heel and walked out. “You’ll see me again!” he called as he clattered down the steps. “I’ll be back with brother-in-law Pompeius at my side! Who knows? It might be Catilina ruling Rome by then, and you’ll all be deservedly dead, you shit-arsed sheep!”
Even Cato was silenced, another of his scant supply of togas rapidly bloodying beyond redemption.
“Do you need me further, senior consul?” asked Caesar of Silanus in conversational tones. ‘The sounds of strife appear to be dying away outside, and there’s nothing more to be said here, is there?” He smiled coldly. “Too much has been said already.”
“You are under suspicion of inciting public violence, Caesar,” said Silanus faintly. “While ever the Senatus Consultum Ultimum remains in effect, you are disbarred from all meetings and all magisterial business.” He looked at Bibulus. “I suggest, Marcus Bibulus, that you start preparing your case to prosecute this man de vi today.”
Which set Caesar laughing. “Silanus, Silanus, get your facts correct! How can this flea prosecute me in his own court? He’ll have to get Cato to do his dirty work for him. And do you know something, Cato?” asked Caesar softly of the furious grey eyes glaring at him between folds of toga. “You don’t stand a chance. I have more intelligence in my battering ram than you do in your citadel!” He pulled his tunic away from his chest and bent his head to address the space created. “Isn’t that right, O battering ram?” A sweet smile for the assembled refugees, then: “He says that’s right. Conscript Fathers, good day.”
*
“That,” said Publius Clodius, who had been eavesdropping just outside, “was a stunning performance, Caesar! I had no idea you could get so angry.”
“Wait until you enter the Senate next year, Clodius, and you will see more. Between Cato and Bibulus, I may never be whole of temper again.” He stood on the platform amid a shambles of broken ivory chairs and gazed across the Forum, almost deserted. “I see the villains have all gone home.”
“Once the militia entered the scene, they lost most of their enthusiasm.” Clodius led the way down the side steps beneath the equestrian statue of Castor. “I did find out one thing. They’d been hired by Bibulus. He’s a rank amateur at it too.”
“The news doesn’t surprise me.”
“He planned it to compromise you and Nepos. You’ll go down in Bibulus’s court for inciting public violence, wait and see,” said Clodius, waving at Mark Antony and Fulvia, who were sitting together on the bottom tier of Gaius Marius’s plinth, Fulvia busy patting Antony’s right knuckles with her handkerchief.
“Oh, wasn’t that terrific?” asked Antony, one eye puffed up so badly he couldn’t see out of it.
“No, Antonius, it wasn’t terrific!” said Caesar tartly.
“Bibulus intends to have Caesar prosecuted under the lex Plautia de vi—his own court, no less,” said Clodius. “Caesar and Nepos got the blame.” He grinned. “No surprise, really, with Silanus holding the fasces. I don’t imagine you’re very popular in that quarter, all considered.” And he began to hum a well-known ditty about a wronged and broken-hearted husband.
“Oh, come home with me, the lot of you!” Caesar chuckled, slapping at Antony’s knuckles and Fulvia’s hand. “You can’t sit here like alley thieves until the militia sweep you up, and any moment now those heroes still drifting around the inside of Castor’s are going to poke their noses out to sniff the air. I’m already accused of fraternizing with ruffians, but if they see me with you, they’ll send me packing immediately. Not being Pompeius’s brother-in-law, I’ll have to join Catilina.”
And of course during the short walk to the residence of the Pontifex Maximus—a matter of moments only—Caesar’s equilibrium returned. By the time he had ushered his raffish guests into a part of the Domus Publica Fulvia didn’t know nearly as well as she did Pompeia’s suite upstairs, he was ready to deal with disaster and upset all Bibulus’s plans.
*
The next morning at dawn the new praetor urbanus took up position on his tribunal, his six lictors (who already thought him the best and most generous of magistrates) standing off to one side with fasces grounded like spears, his table and curule chair arranged to his liking, and a small staff of scribes and messengers waiting for orders. Since the urban praetor dealt with the preliminaries of all civil litigation as well as heard applications for prosecutions on criminal charges, a number of potential litigants and advocates were already clustered about the tribunal; the moment Caesar indicated he was open for business, a dozen people surged forward to do battle for first served, Rome not being a place where people lined up in an orderly fashion and were content to take their turn. Nor did Caesar try to regulate the insistent clamor. He selected the loudest voice, beckoned, and prepared to listen.
Before more than a few words had tumbled out, the consular lictors appeared with the fasces but without the consul.
“Gaius Julius Caesar,” said the chief of Silanus’s lictors as his eleven companions shoved the little crowd away from the vicinity of the tribunal, “you have been disbarred under the Senatus Consultum Ultimum still in effect. Please desist this moment from all praetorian business.”
“What do you mean?” asked the advocate who had been about to lay his case before Caesar—not a prominent lawyer, simply one of the hundreds who haunted the lower Forum touting for business. “I need the urban praetor!”
“The senior consul has deputed Quintus Tullius Cicero to take over the urban praetor’s duties,” said the lictor, not pleased at this interruption.
“But I don’t want Quintus Cicero, I want Gaius Caesar! He’s urban praetor, and he doesn’t dally and dither the way most of Rome’s praetors do! I want my case sorted out this morning, not next month or next year!”
The cluster about the tribunal was growing now in leaps and bounds, the Forum frequenters attracted by the sudden presence of so many lictors and an angry individual protesting.
Without a word Caesar rose from his chair, signed to his personal servant to fold it and pick it up, and turned to the six lictors he called his own. Smiling, he went to each of them in turn and dropped a handful of denarii into each right palm.
“Pick up your fasces, my friends, and take them to the temple of Venus Libitina. Lie them where they belong when the man who should be preceded by them is deprived of his office by death or disbarment. I’m sorry our time together has been so short, and I thank you most sincerely for your kind attentions.”
From his lictors he proceeded to his scribes and messengers, giving each man a sum of money and a word of thanks.
After which he drew the folds of his purple-bordered toga praetexta off his left arm and shoulder, rolling the vast garment into a loose ball as he stripped it away; not as much as one corner of it touched the ground, so handily was the disrobing done. The servant holding the chair received the bundle; Caesar nodded to him to go.
“Your pardon,” he said then to the swelling throng, “it seems I am not to be permitted to perform the duties I was elected by you to do.” The knife went in: “You must content yourselves with half a praetor, Quintus Cicero.”
Lurking some distance away with his own lictors, Quintus Cicero gasped in outrage.
“What’s the meaning of this?” shouted Publius Clodius from the rear of the crowd, pushing his way to the front as Caesar prepared to leave his tribunal.
“I am disbarred, Publius Clodius.”
“For what?”
“Being under suspicion of inciting violence during a meeting of the People I had convened.”
“They can’t do that!” cried Clodius theatrically. “First you have to be tried, and then you have to be convicted!”
“There is a Senatus Consultum Ultimum in effect.”
“What’s that got to do with yesterday’s meeting?”
“It came in handy,” said Caesar, leaving his tribunal.
And as he walked in his tunic in the direction of the Domus Publica, the entire gathering turned to escort him. Quintus Cicero took his place on the urban praetor’s tribunal to find he had no customers; nor did he all day.
But all day the crowd in the Forum grew, and as it grew became ugly. This time there were no ex-gladiators to be seen, just many respectable inhabitants of the city liberally interspersed with men like Clodius, the Antonii, Curio, Decimus Brutus—and Lucius Decumius and his crossroads brethren of all walks from the Second Class to the Head Count. Two praetors beginning to try criminal cases looked across a sea of faces and decided the omens were not auspicious; Quintus Cicero packed up and went home early.
Most unnerving of all, no one left the Forum during the night, which was lit by many little fires to keep out the chill; from the houses on the Germalus of the Palatine the effect was eerily reminiscent of a camping army, and for the first time since the empty-bellied masses had filled the Forum during the days which led to the rebellion of Saturninus, those in power understood how many ordinary people there were in Rome—and how few the men in power were by comparison.
At dawn Silanus, Murena, Cicero, Bibulus and Lucius Ahenobarbus clustered at the top of the Vestal Steps and gazed at what looked like fifteen thousand people. Then someone below in that horrifying gathering saw them, shouted, pointed; the whole ocean of people turned as if beginning the first great encirclement of a whirlpool, and the little group of men stepped back instinctively, realizing that what they saw was a potential dance of death. Then as every face fixed on them, every right arm went up to shake a fist at them, seaweed oscillating in the swell.
“All that for Caesar!” whispered Silanus, shivering.
“No,” said the praetor Philippus, joining them. “All that for the Senatus Consultum Ultimum and the execution of citizens without trial. Caesar’s just the final blow.” He gave Bibulus a scorching glare. “What fools you are! Don’t you know who Caesar is? I’m his friend, I know! Caesar is the one person in Rome you daren’t attempt to destroy publicly! All your lives you’ve spent up here on the heights looking down on Rome like gods on a seething pestilence, but all his life he’s spent among them and been thought of as one of them. There’s hardly a person in this enormous city that man doesn’t know—or maybe it would be better to say that everyone in this enormous city thinks Caesar knows them. It’s a smile and a wave and a cheerful greeting wherever he goes—and to the whole world, not merely to valuable voters. They love him! Caesar’s not a demagogue—he doesn’t need to be a demagogue! In Libya they tie men down and let ants kill them. Yet you’re stupid enough to stir up Rome’s ants! Rest assured, it’s not Caesar they’ll kill!”
“I’ll order out the militia,” said Silanus.
“Oh, rubbish, Silanus! The militia are down there with the carpenters and bricklayers!”
“Then what do we do? Bring the army home from Etruria?’’
“By all means, if you want Catilina in hot pursuit!”
“What can we do?”
“Go home and bar your doors, Conscript Fathers,” Philippus said, turning away. “That at least is what I intend to do.”
But before anyone could find the strength to take this advice, a huge roar went up; the faces and fists aimed at the top of the Vestal stairs swung away.
“Look!” squeaked Murena. “It’s Caesar!”
The crowd was somehow compressing itself to create an empty corridor which began at the Domus Publica and opened before Caesar as he walked clad in a plain white toga in the direction of the rostra. He made no acknowledgment of the deafening ovation, nor looked to either side, and when he reached the top of the speaker’s platform he made no movement of the body nor gesture of the hand which the watchers on the Palatine could classify as encouragement to the masses now turned to see him.
When he began to speak the noise died utterly away, though what he said was inaudible to Silanus and the rest, now standing with twenty magistrates and at least a hundred senators. He talked for perhaps an hour, and as he talked the crowd seemed to grow ever calmer. Then he dismissed them with a wave of his hand and a smile so wide his teeth flashed. Limp with relief and amazement, the audience at the top of the Vestal Steps watched that enormous crowd begin to disperse, to stream into the Argiletum and the area around the Markets, up the Via Sacra to the Velia and those parts of Rome beyond. Everyone obviously discussing Caesar’s speech, but no one angry anymore.
“As Princeps Senatus,” said Mamercus stiffly, “I hereby call the Senate into session in the temple of Jupiter Stator. An appropriate location, for what Caesar has done is to stay open revolt. At once!” he snapped, rounding on a shrinking Silanus. “Senior consul, send your lictors to fetch Gaius Caesar, since you sent them to strip him of his office.”
When Caesar entered the temple of Jupiter Stator, Gaius Octavius and Lucius Caesar began to applaud; one by one others joined in, until even Bibulus and Ahenobarbus had at least to pretend they were clapping. Of Cato there was no sign.
Silanus rose from his seat. “Gaius Julius Caesar, on behalf of this House I wish to thank you for ending a most dangerous situation. You have acted with perfect correctness, and you are to be commended.”
“What a bore you are, Silanus!” cried Gaius Octavius. “Ask the man how he did it, or we’ll all die of curiosity!”
“The House wishes to know what you said, Gaius Caesar.”
Still in his plain white toga, Caesar shrugged. “I simply told them to go home and be about their business. Did they want to be deemed disloyal? Uncontrollable? Who did they think they were, to gather in such numbers all because of a mere praetor who had been disciplined? I told them that Rome is well governed, and everything would turn out to their satisfaction if they had a little patience.”
“And there,” whispered Bibulus to Ahenobarbus, “is the threat beneath the fair words!”
“Gaius Julius Caesar,” said Silanus very formally, “assume your toga praetexta and return to your tribunal as praetor urbanus. It is clear to this House that you have acted in all ways as you ought, and that you did so at the meeting of the People the day before yesterday by noting the malcontents in that assembly and having the militia ready to act. There will be no trial under the lex Plautia de vi for the events of that day.”
Nor did one voice in the temple of Jupiter Stator raise itself to protest.
“What did I tell you?” said Metellus Scipio to Bibulus as they left the senatorial session. “He beat us again! All we did was spend a lot of money hiring ex-gladiators!”
Cato rushed up, breathless and looking very much the worse for wear. “What is it? What happened?” he asked.
“What happened to you?’’ asked Metellus Scipio.
“I was ill,” said Cato briefly, which Bibulus and Metellus Scipio interpreted correctly as a long night with Athenodorus Cordylion and the wine flagon.
“Caesar beat us as usual,” said Metellus Scipio. “He sent the crowd home and Silanus has reinstated him. There will be no trial in Bibulus’s court.”
Cato literally screamed, so loudly that the last of the senators flinched, turned to one of the pillars outside Jupiter Stator and punched it until the others managed to hold his arm down and pull him away.
“I will not rest, I will not rest, I will not rest,” he kept saying as they led him up the Clivus Palatinus and through the lichen-whiskered Porta Mugonia. “If I have to die to do it, I will ruin him!”
“He’s like the phoenix,” said Ahenobarbus gloomily. “Rises out of the ashes of every funeral pyre we put him on.”
“One day he won’t rise again. I’m with Cato, I’ll never rest until he’s ruined,” vowed Bibulus.
“You know,” said Metellus Scipio thoughtfully, eyeing Cato’s swelling hand and freshly opened face, “at this stage you must bear more wounds due to Caesar than to Spartacus.”
“And you, Scipio,” said Gaius Piso savagely, “are asking for a drubbing!”
*
January was almost done when word came at last from the north. Since early December Catilina had been moving steadily into the Apennines, only to discover that Metellus Celer and Marcius Rex lay between him and the Adriatic coast. There was no escape from Italy, he would have to stand and fight—or surrender. Surrender was inconceivable, so he staked his all on a single battle within a narrow valley near the town of Pistoria. But Gaius Antonius Hybrida did not take the field against him; that honor was reserved for the Military Man, Marcus Petreius. Oh, the pain in his toe! Hybrida never left the safety of his cozy command tent. Catilina’s soldiers fought desperately, over three thousand of them electing to die where they stood. As did Catilina, killed holding the silver eagle which had once belonged to Gaius Marius. Men said that when he was found among the bodies he wore the same glittering smile he had turned on everyone from Catulus to Cicero.
No more excuses: the Senatus Consultum Ultimum was finally lifted. Not even Cicero could summon up the courage to advocate that it be kept in force until the rest of the conspirators were dealt with. Some of the praetors were sent to mop up pockets of resistance, including Bibulus to the lands of the Paeligni in mountainous Samnium, and Quintus Cicero to equally craggy Bruttium.
Then in February the trials began. This time there would be no executions, nor any men condemned to exile out of hand; the Senate decided to set up a special court.
An ex-aedile, Lucius Novius Niger, was appointed its president after no one else could be found willing to take the job; those praetors remaining in Rome gleefully pleaded huge loads of work in their own courts, from Caesar to Philippus. That Novius Niger was willing lay in his nature and his circumstances, for he was one of those irritating creatures possessed of far more ambition than talent, and he saw the job as a certain way to attain the consulship. His edicts when he published them were most imposing: no one would be uninspected, no one would be cosseted, no one would buy his way out with bribery, the jury roster would smell sweeter than a bank of violets in Campania. His last edict did not find as much favor. He announced that he would pay a two-talent reward for information leading to a conviction—the reward to be paid out of the fine and property confiscation, of course. No cost to the Treasury! But, most people thought, this was too uncomfortably close to the techniques of Sulla’s proscriptions. Thus when the president of the special court opened it, the professional Forum frequenters tended to think poorly of him.
Five men went on trial first, all certain to be condemned: the Brothers Sulla, Marcus Porcius Laeca, and the two who had tried to assassinate Cicero, Gaius Cornelius and Lucius Vargunteius. To assist the court, the Senate went into session with Quintus Curius, Cicero’s secret agent, timing their cross-examination of Curius to coincide with Novius Niger’s opening his hearings. Naturally Novius Niger attracted a far larger congregation, as he set himself up in the largest area of vacant Forum space.
One Lucius Vettius was the first—and last—informer. A minor knight of bare tribunus aerarius status, he went to Novius Niger and announced that he had more than enough information to earn that tidy fifty thousand sesterces of reward money. Testifying before the court, he confessed that in the early stages of the conspiracy he had toyed with the idea of joining it, but, “I knew where my allegiance belonged,” he said, sighing. “I am a Roman, I couldn’t harm Rome. Rome means too much to me.”
After a great deal more of the same, he dictated a list of men he swore had been involved beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Novius Niger sighed too. “Lucius Vettius, not one of these names is very inspiring! It seems to me that this court’s chances of securing sufficient evidence to start proceedings are slim. Is there no one against whom you can produce really concrete evidence? Like a letter, or unimpeachable witnesses other than yourself?”
“Well…” said Vettius slowly, then suddenly shivered and shook his head emphatically. “No, no one!” he said loudly.
“Come now, you’re under the full protection of my court,” said Novius Niger, scenting prey. “Nothing can happen to you, Lucius Vettius, I give you my word! If you do know of any concrete evidence, you must tell me!”
“Big, big fish,” muttered Lucius Vettius.
“No fish is too big for me and my court.”
“Well…”
“Lucius Vettius, spit it out!”
“I do have a letter.”
“From whom?”
“From Gaius Caesar.”
The jury sat up straight, the onlookers began to buzz.
“From Gaius Caesar, but to whom?”
“Catilina. It’s in Gaius Caesar’s own handwriting.”
Whereupon a small group of Catulus’s clients in the crowd began to cheer, only to be drowned by boos, jeers, invective. Some time elapsed before the court’s lictors could establish order and allow Novius Niger to resume his cross-examination.
“Why have we heard nothing of this before, Lucius Vettius?”
“Because I’m afraid, that’s why!” the informer snapped. “I don’t fancy the thought of being responsible for incriminating a big fish like Gaius Caesar.”
“In this court, Lucius Vettius, I am the big fish, not Gaius Caesar,” said Novius Niger, “and you have incriminated Gaius Caesar. You are in no danger. Please go on.”
“With what?” asked Vettius. “I said I had a letter.”
“Then you must produce it before this court.”
“He’ll say it’s a forgery.”
“Only the court can say that. Produce the letter.”
“Well…”
By now almost everybody in the lower Forum was either around Novius Niger’s court or hurrying to it; the word was flying that as usual Caesar was in trouble.
“Lucius Vettius, I command you to produce that letter!” said Novius Niger in a goaded voice; he then went on to say something extremely foolish. “Do you think that men like Gaius Caesar are above the power of this court because they have an ancestry a thousand years old and multitudes of clients? Well, they are not! If Gaius Caesar wrote a letter to Catilina in his own hand, I will try him in this court and convict him!”
“Then I’ll go home and get it,” said Lucius Vettius, convinced.
While Vettius went on his errand, Novius Niger declared a recess. Everyone not busy talking excitedly (Caesar watching was becoming the best entertainment in years) rushed off to buy a little something to eat or drink, the jury sat at ease being waited on by the court servants, and Novius Niger strolled over to chat with the jury foreman, tremendously pleased with his idea to pay for information.
Publius Clodius was somewhat more purposeful. He hied himself across the Forum to the Curia Hostilia, where the Senate was sitting, and talked his way inside. Not a very difficult business for one who next year would be strolling through its portals as of right.
Just inside the doors he paused, discovering that Vettius’s alto in court was keeping perfect harmony with Curius’s baritone in the Senate.
“I tell you I heard it from Catilina’s own lips!” Curius was saying to Cato. “Gaius Caesar was a central figure in the whole conspiracy, from its beginning right up to its end!”
Seated on the curule dais to one side of the presiding consul, Silanus, and slightly behind him, Caesar rose to his feet.
“You’re lying, Curius,” he said very calmly. “We all know which men in this revered body will stop at nothing to see me permanently ejected from it. But, Conscript Fathers, I give leave to tell you that I never was and never would have been a part of such a hole-in-the-corner, appallingly bungled affair! Anyone who credits this pathetic fool’s story is a bigger fool than he is! I, Gaius Julius Caesar, willingly to consort with a raggle-taggle lot of wine bibbers and gossips? I, so scrupulous in my attention to duty and to my own dignitas, to stoop to plotting with the likes of Curius here? I, the Pontifex Maximus, to connive at handing Rome to Catilina! I, a Julian descended from the founders of Rome, to consent to Rome’s being governed by worms like Curius and tarts like Fulvia Nobilioris?”
The words came out with the crack of a whip, and no one tried to interrupt.
“I am well used to the mud-slinging of politics,” he went on, still in that calm but punishing voice, “but I am not going to stand idly by while someone pays the likes of Curius to bandy my name about in connection with a business I wouldn’t be caught dead participating in! For someone is paying him! And when I find out who, senators, they will pay me! Here you all sit, as brilliant and wondrous as a collection of hens in a roost listening to the sordid details of a so-called conspiracy, while there are some hens here conspiring far more viciously to destroy me and my good name! To destroy my dignitas!” He drew a breath. “Without my dignitas, I am nothing. And I give every last one of you a solemn warning---do not tamper with my dignitas! To defend it, I would tear this venerable chamber down around your ears! I would pile Pelion on top of Ossa and steal Zeus’s thunder to strike every last one of you dead! Don’t try my patience, Conscript Fathers, for I tell you now that I am no Catilina! If I conspired to unseat you, down you’d go!”
He turned to Cicero. “Marcus Tullius Cicero, this is the last time I will ask this question: did I or did I not furnish you with assistance in the uncovering of this conspiracy?”
Cicero swallowed; the House sat in absolute silence. No one had ever seen or heard anything quite like that speech, and no one wanted to draw attention to himself. Even Cato.
“Yes, Gaius Julius, you did assist me,” said Cicero.
“Then,” said Caesar in a less steely voice, “I demand that this House forthwith refuse to pay Quintus Curius one sestertius of the reward money he was promised. Quintus Curius has lied. He deserves no consideration.”
And such was the fear inside every senator that the House agreed unanimously not to pay Quintus Curius one sestertius of the promised reward.
Clodius stepped forward. “Noble Fathers,” he said in a loud voice, “I crave your pardon for intruding, but I must ask the noble Gaius Julius to accompany me to the court of Lucius Novius Niger as soon as he can do so.”
About to seat himself, Caesar looked instead at a dumbstruck Silanus. “Senior consul, it seems I am wanted elsewhere, I suspect on the same kind of business. In which case, remember what I have said. Remember every word! Pray excuse me.”
“You are excused,” whispered Silanus, “and so are you all.”
Thus it was that when Caesar left the Curia Hostilia with Clodius trotting alongside him, the entire company of senators streamed in their wake.
“That,” said Clodius, panting a little, “was absolutely the best wigging I have ever heard! There must be shit all over the Senate House floor.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Clodius, tell me what’s happening in Niger’s court,” said Caesar curtly.
Clodius obliged. Caesar stopped walking.
“Lictor Fabius!” he called to his chief lictor, hurrying his five companions to keep ahead of Caesar in the mood for war.
The three pairs of men stopped, received orders.
Then down on Novius Niger’s court Caesar descended, scattering the onlookers in every direction, straight through the ranks of the jury to where Lucius Vettius stood with a letter in his hand.
“Lictors, arrest this man!”
Letter and all, Lucius Vettius was taken into custody and marched out of Novius Niger’s court in the direction of the urban praetor’s tribunal.
Novius Niger got to his feet so quickly that his much-prized ivory chair fell over. “What is the meaning of this?” he shrilled.
“WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” roared Caesar.
Everyone backed away; the jury shifted uneasily, shivered.
“Who do you think are?” Caesar repeated more softly, but in a voice which could be heard halfway across the Forum. “How dare you, a magistrate of mere aedilician rank, admit evidence into your court concerning your senior in the hierarchy? Evidence, what is more, from the mouth of a paid informer? Who do you think you are? If you don’t know, Novius, then I will tell you. You are a legal ignoramus who has no more right to preside over a Roman court than the dirtiest trollop hawking her fork outside Venus Erucina’s! Don’t you understand that it is absolutely unheard of for a junior magistrate to act in a way which could result in the trial of his senior? What you were stupid enough to say to that piece of sewer refuse Vettius deserves impeachment! That you, a mere aedilician magistrate, would attempt to convict me, the urban praetor, in your court? Brave words, Novius, but impossible to fulfill. If you have cause to believe that a magistrate senior to yourself is criminally implicated in proceedings going on in your court, then you suspend your court immediately and you take the whole matter to that senior magistrate’s peers. And since I am the praetor urbanus, you go to the consul with the fasces. This month, Lucius Licinius Murena; but today, Decimus Junius Silanus.”
The avid crowd hung on every word while Novius Niger stood, face ashen, his hopes for a future consulship tumbling down about his incredulous ears.
“You take the whole matter to your senior’s peers, Novius, you do not dare to continue the business of your court! You do not dare to continue to admit evidence about your senior, grinning all over your face! You have held me up before this body of men as if you have the right to do so! You do not. Hear me? You do not! How glorious a precedent you set! Is this what senior magistrates are to expect from their juniors in the future?’’
One hand went out, pleading; Novius Niger wet his lips and tried to speak.
“Tace, inepte!” cried Caesar. “Lucius Novius Niger, in order to remind you and every other junior magistrate of his place in Rome’s scheme of public duties, I, Gaius Julius Caesar, praetor urbanus, do hereby sentence you to one market interval of eight days in the cells of the Lautumiae. That should prove long enough to think about what is your rightful place, and to think of how you will manage to convince the Senate of Rome that you should be allowed to continue as iudex in this special court. You will not leave your cell for one moment. You will not be allowed to bring in food, or have your family visit you. You will not be let have reading or writing materials. And while I am aware that no cell in the Lautumiae has a door of any kind, let alone one which locks, you will do as you are told. When the lictors are not watching you, half of Rome will be.” He nodded to the court lictors abruptly. “Take your master to the Lautumiae, and put him in the most uncomfortable cell you can find. You will stay on guard until I send lictors to relieve you. Bread and water, nothing else, and no light after dark.”
Then without a backward glance it was across to the tribunal belonging to the urban praetor, where Lucius Vettius waited atop its platform, a lictor on either side. Caesar and the four lictors still attending him mounted the steps, now avidly trailed by all the members of Novius Niger’s court, from the jury to the scribes to the accused. Oh, what fun! But what could Caesar do to Lucius Vettius save put him in the next cell to Novius Niger?
“Lictor,” he said to Fabius, “unbind your rods.”
And to Vettius, still clutching the letter, “Lucius Vettius, you have conspired against me. Whose client are you?”
The crowd twittered and fluttered, amazed, awestruck, torn between watching Caesar deal with Vettius and watching Fabius the lictor squatting down to dismember the bundle of birch rods tied in a ritual crisscross pattern with red leather thongs. Thin and slightly whippy, thirty for the thirty Curiae lay within the neat circular bundle, for they had been trimmed and turned until each one was as round as the whole cylinder called the fasces.
Vettius’s eyes had widened; he couldn’t seem to tear them from Fabius and the rods.
“Whose client are you, Vettius?” Caesar repeated sharply.
It came out in an agony of fear. “Gaius Calpurnius Piso’s.”
“Thank you, that is all I need to know.” Caesar turned to face the men assembled below him, front ranks filled with senators and knights. “Fellow Romans,” he said, pitching his voice high, “this man on my tribunal has borne false witness against me in the court of a judge who had no right to admit his evidence. Vettius is a tribunus aerarius, he knows the law. He knows he ought not to have done that, but he was hungry to put the sum of two talents in his bank account—plus whatever his patron Gaius Piso promised him in addition, of course. I do not see Gaius Piso here to answer, which is just as well for Gaius Piso. Were he here, he would join Lucius Novius in the Lautumiae. It is my right as the praetor urbanus to exercise the power of coercitio upon this Roman citizen Lucius Vettius. I hereby do so. He cannot be flogged with a lash, but he can be beaten with a rod. Lictor, are you ready?”
“Yes, praetor urbanus,” said Fabius, who in all his long career as one of the ten prefects of the College of Lictors had never before been called upon to untie his fasces.
“Choose your rod.”
Because ravenous animalcules chewed through the rods no matter how carefully they were tended—and these were among the most revered objects Rome owned—the fasces were regularly retired amid great ceremony to be ritually burned, and were replaced by new bundles. Thus Fabius had no difficulty unlashing his rods, nor needed to sort through them to find one sturdier than the rest. He simply picked the one closest to his trembling hand, and stood up slowly.
“Hold him,” said Caesar to two others, “and remove his toga.”
“Where? How many?” whispered Fabius urgently.
Caesar ignored him. “Because this man is a Roman citizen, I will not diminish his standing by stripping away his tunic or baring his backside. Lictor, six strokes to his left calf, and six strokes to his right calf.” His voice dropped to ape Fabius’s whisper. “And make them hard or it’ll be your turn, Fabius!” He twitched the letter from Vettius’s slack grasp, glanced briefly at its contents, then walked to the edge of the tribunal and held it out to Silanus, who was substituting this day for Murena (and wishing he too had had the sense to come down with a blinding headache). “Senior consul, I give this evidence to you for your perusal. The handwriting is not mine.” Caesar looked contemptuous. “Nor is it written in my style—vastly inferior! It reminds me of Gaius Piso, who never could string four words together.”
The beating was administered to yelps and skips from Vettius; the chief lictor Fabius had liked Caesar enormously from the days when he had served him as curule aedile and then as judge in the Murder Court. He had thought he knew Caesar. Today was a revelation, so Fabius hit hard.
While it went on Caesar strolled down from the tribunal and went into the back of the crowd, where those of humble origin stood enthralled. Anyone wearing a shabby or homespun toga to the number of twenty individuals he tapped on the right shoulder, then brought the group back to wait just below his platform.
The chastisement was over; Vettius stood dancing and sniffling from pain of two kinds, one for the bruises on his calves, the other for the bruises on his self-esteem. Quite a number of those who had witnessed his humiliation knew him, and had cheered Fabius on deliriously.
“I understand that Lucius Vettius is something of a furniture fancier!” Caesar said then. “To be beaten with a rod leaves no lasting memory of wrongdoing, and Lucius Vettius must be made to remember today for a long time to come! I therefore order that a part of his property be confiscated. Those twenty Quirites I touched on the shoulder are authorized to accompany Lucius Vettius back to his house, and there to select one item of furniture each. Nothing else is to be touched—not slaves nor plate nor gilding nor statuary. Lictors, escort this man to his house, and see that my orders are carried out.”
Off went the hobbling and howling Vettius under guard, followed by twenty delighted beneficiaries, already chortling among themselves and dividing the spoils—who needed a bed, who a couch, who a table, who a chair, who had the room to fit in a desk?
One of the twenty turned back as Caesar came down off his tribunal. “Do we get mattresses for the beds?” he yelled.
“A bed’s no use without a mattress, no one knows that better than I, Quiris!” laughed Caesar. “Mattresses go with beds and bolsters go with couches, but no cloths to cover them, understand?”
Caesar went home, though only to attend to his person; it had been an eventful day, the time had gone nowhere, and he had an assignation with Servilia.
*
An ecstatic Servilia was an exhausting experience. She licked and kissed and sucked in a frenzy, opened herself and tried to open him, drained him dry then demanded more.
It was, thought Caesar as he lay flat on his back, mind cooling into sleep, the best and only way to eliminate the kind of driving tension days like today provoked.
But though temporarily sated, Servilia had no intention of letting Caesar sleep. Annoying that he had no pubic hair to tweak; she pinched the loose skin of his scrotum instead.
“That woke you up!”
“You’re a barbarian, Servilia.”
“I want to talk.”
“I want to sleep.”
“Later, later!”
Sighing, he rolled onto his side and threw his leg over her to keep his spine straight. “Talk away.”
“I think you’ve beaten them,” she said, paused, then added, “for the time being, anyway.”
“For the time being is correct. They’ll never let up.”
“They would if you’d grant them room for their dignitas too.”
“Why should I? They don’t know the meaning of the word. If they want to preserve their own dignitas, they should leave mine alone.” He made a noise both scornful and exasperated. “It’s one thing after another, and the older I get, the faster I have to run. My temper is fraying too easily.”
“So I gather. Can you mend it?”
“I’m not sure I want to. My mother used to say that that and my lack of patience were my two worst faults. She was a merciless critic, and a strict disciplinarian. By the time I went to the East I thought I’d beaten both faults. But I hadn’t met Bibulus or Cato then, though I did encounter Bibulus very quickly after. On his own I could deal with him. Allied to Cato, he’s a thousand times more intolerable.”
“Cato needs killing.”
“Leaving me with no formidable enemies? My dear Servilia, I am not wishing either Cato or Bibulus dead! The more opposition a man has, the better his mind works. I like opposition. No, what worries me is inside myself. That temper.”
“I think,” said Servilia, stroking his leg, “that you have a very peculiar sort of temper, Caesar. Most men are blinded by rage, whereas you seem to think more lucidly. It’s one of the reasons why I love you. I am the same.”
“Rubbish!” he said, laughing. “You’re coldblooded, Servilia, but your emotions are strong. You think you’re planning lucidly when your temper is provoked, but those emotions get in the way. One day you’ll plot and plan and scheme to achieve some end or other, only to find that having attained it, the consequences are disastrous. The knack is in going exactly as far as is necessary, and not one fraction of an inch further. Make the whole world tremble in fear of you, then show it mercy as well as justice. A hard act for one’s enemies to follow.”
“I wish you had been Brutus’s father.”
“Had I been, he would not be Brutus.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Leave him alone, Servilia. Let go of him a little more. When you appear he palpitates like a rabbit, yet he’s not all weakling, you know. Oh, there’s no lion in him, but I think he has some wolf and some fox. Why see him as a rabbit because in your company he is a rabbit?’’
“Julia is fourteen now,” she said, going off at a tangent.
“True. I must send Brutus a note to thank him for his gift to her. She loved it, you know.”
Servilia sat up, astonished. “A Plato manuscript?”
“What, you thought it an unsuitable present?” He grinned and pinched her as hard as she had pinched him. “I gave her pearls, and she liked them very well. But not as much as Brutus’s Plato.”
“Jealous?”
That made him laugh outright. “Jealousy,” he said, sobering, “is a curse. It eats, it corrodes. No, Servilia, I am many, many things, but I am not jealous. I was delighted for her, and very grateful to him. Next year I’ll give her a philosopher.” His eyes quizzed her wickedly. “Much cheaper than pearls too.”
“Brutus both fosters and harbors his fortune.”
“An excellent thing in Rome’s wealthiest young man,” agreed Caesar gravely.
*
Marcus Crassus returned to Rome after a long absence overseeing his various business enterprises just after that memorable day in the Forum, and eyed Caesar with new respect.
“Though I can’t say that I’m sorry I found good excuse to absent myself after Tarquinius accused me in the House,” he said. “I agree it’s been an interesting interlude, but my tactics are very different from yours, Caesar. You go for the throat. I prefer to amble off and plough my furrows like the ox I’m always said to resemble.”
“Hay tied well in place.”
“Naturally.”
“Well, as a technique it certainly works. It’s a fool tries to bring you down, Marcus.”
“And a fool tries to bring you down, Gaius.” Crassus coughed. “How far in debt are you?”
Caesar frowned. “If anyone other than my mother knows, you do. But if you insist upon hearing the figure aloud, about two thousand talents. That’s fifty million sesterces.”
“I know that you know that I know how many sesterces there are in two thousand talents,” said Crassus with a grin.
“What are you getting at, Marcus?”
“You’re going to need a really lucrative province next year, is what I’m getting at. They won’t let you fix the lots, you’re too controversial. Not to mention that Cato will be hovering like a vulture above your carcass.” Crassus wrinkled his brow. “Quite frankly, Gaius, I can’t see how you’ll do it even if the lots are favorable. Everywhere is pacified! Magnus has cowed the East, Africa hasn’t been a danger since—oh, Jugurtha. Both the Spains are still suffering from Sertorius. The Gauls have nothing much to offer either.”
“And Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica aren’t worth mentioning,” said Caesar, eyes dancing.
“Absolutely.”
“Have you heard I’m going to be dunned at law?”
“No. What I do hear is that Catulus—he’s much better, so they say, he’ll be back making a nuisance of himself in Senate and Comitia shortly—is organizing a campaign to prorogue all the current governors next year, leaving this year’s praetors with no provinces at all.”
“Oh, I see!” Caesar looked thoughtful. “Yes, I should have taken a move like that into consideration.”
“It might go through.”
“It might, though I doubt it. There are a few of my fellow praetors who wouldn’t take at all kindly to being deprived of a province, particularly Philippus, who might be a bit of an indolent Epicurean, but knows his worth too. Not to mention me.”
“Be warned, is all.”
“I am, and I thank you.”
“Which doesn’t take away from your difficulties, Caesar. I don’t see how you can begin to pay your debts from a province.”
“I do. My luck will provide, Marcus,” said Caesar tranquilly. “I want Further Spain because I was quaestor there, and I know it well. The Lusitani and the Callaici are all I need! Decimus Brutus Callaicus—how easily they award those empty titles!—barely touched the fringes of northwestern Iberia. And northwestern Iberia, in case you’ve forgotten—you shouldn’t, you were in Spain—is where all the gold comes from. Salamantica has been stripped, but places like Brigantium haven’t even seen a Roman yet. But they’ll see this Roman, so much I promise!”
“So you’ll stake your chances on your luck in the lots.” Crassus shook his head. “What a strange fellow you are, Caesar! I don’t believe in luck. In all my life I’ve never offered a gift to Goddess Fortuna. A man makes his own luck.”
“I agree unconditionally. But I also believe that Goddess Fortuna has her favorites among Roman men. She loved Sulla. And she loves me. Some men, Marcus, have Goddess-given luck as well as what they make for themselves. But none have Caesar’s luck.”
“Does your luck include Servilia?”
“Come as a surprise, did it?”
“You hinted at it once. That’s playing with a firebrand.”
“Ah, Crassus, she’s marvelous in bed!”
“Huh!” grunted Crassus. He propped his feet up on a nearby chair and scowled at Caesar. “I suppose one can expect nothing else from a man who publicly talks to his battering ram. Still and all, you’ll have more latitude to exercise your battering ram in the months to come. I predict people like Bibulus, Cato, Gaius Piso and Catulus will be licking their wounds for a long time.”
“That,” said Caesar, eyes twinkling, “is what Servilia says.”