2

Publius Vatinius was a Marsian from Alba Fucentia. His grandfather was a humble man who had made a very wise decision and emigrated from the lands of the Marsi well before the Italian War broke out. Which in turn meant that his son, a young man then, was not called upon to take up arms against Rome, and consequently upon the conclusion of hostilities could apply to the praetor peregrinus for the Roman citizenship. The grandfather died, and his son moved back to Alba Fucentia possessed of a citizenship so shabby it was hardly worth the paper it was written on. Then when Sulla became Dictator he distributed all these new citizens across the thirty-five tribes, and Vatinius Senior was admitted into the tribe Sergia, one of the very oldest. The family fortunes prospered mightily. What had been a small merchant business became a large landholding one, for the Marsian country around the Fucine Lake was rich and productive, and Rome close enough down the Via Valeria to provide a market for the fruits, vegetables and fat lambs the Vatinius properties produced. After which Vatinius Senior went in for growing grapes, and was shrewd enough to pay a huge sum for vine stock yielding a superb white wine. By the time Publius Vatinius was twenty, his father’s lands were worth many millions of sesterces, and produced nothing save this famous Fucentine nectar.

Publius Vatinius was the only child, and Fortune did not seem to favor him. When he was a lad he succumbed to what was called the Summer Disease, and emerged from it with the muscles below the knees of both legs so wasted that the only way he could walk was to pinch his thighs together tightly and fling his lower legs to each side; the resulting gait was reminiscent of a duck’s. He then developed swelling lumps in his neck which sometimes abscessed, burst, and left terrible scars. He was therefore not a pretty sight. However, what had been denied his physical appearance was given instead to his nature and his mind. The nature was truly delightful, for he was witty, joyous, and very hard to ruffle. The mind was so acute it had early perceived that his best defense was to draw attention to his unsightly diseases, so he made a joke of himself and allowed others to do the same.

Because Vatinius Senior was relatively young to have a grown son, Publius Vatinius was not really needed at home, nor would he ever be able to stride around the properties the way his father did; Vatinius Senior concentrated upon training more remote relatives to take over the business, and sent his son to Rome to become a gentleman.

The vast upheavals and dislocations which followed in the wake of the Italian War had created a before-and-after situation which saw these newly prosperous families—and there were many of them—patronless. Every enterprising senator and knight of the upper Eighteen was looking for clients, yet prospective clients aplenty went unnoticed. As had the Vatinius family. But not once Publius Vatinius, a little old at twenty-five, finally arrived in Rome. Having settled in and settled down in lodgings on the Palatine, he looked about for a patron. That his choice fell on Caesar said much about his inclinations and his intelligence. Lucius Caesar was actually the senior of the branch, but Publius Vatinius went to Gaius because his unerring nose said Gaius was going to be the one with the real clout.

Of course Caesar had liked him instantly, and admitted him as a client of great value, which meant Vatinius’s Forum career got under way in a most satisfactory manner. The next thing was to find Publius Vatinius a bride, since, as Vatinius said, “The legs don’t work too well, but there’s nothing wrong with what hangs between them.”

Caesar’s choice fell on the eldest child of his cousin Julia Antonia, her only daughter, Antonia Cretica. Of dowry she had none, but by birth she could guarantee her husband public prominence and admission to the ranks of the Famous Families. Unfortunately she was not a very prepossessing female creature, nor was she bright of intellect; her mother always forgot she existed, so wrapped up was she in her three sons, and perhaps too Antonia Cretica’s size and shape proved a maternal embarrassment. At six feet in height she had shoulders nearly as wide as her young brothers’, and while Nature gave her a barrel for a chest, Nature forgot to add breasts. Her nose and chin fought to meet across her mouth, and her neck was as thick as a gladiator’s.

Did any of this worry the crippled and diminutive Publius Vatinius? Not at all! He espoused Antonia Cretica with zest in the year of Caesar’s curule aedileship, and proceeded to sire a son and a daughter. He also loved her, his massive and ugly bride, and bore with perpetual good humor the opportunities this bizarre alliance offered to the Forum wits.

“You’re all green with envy,” he would say, laughing. “How many of you climb into your beds knowing you’re going to conquer Italia’s highest mountain? I tell you, when I reach the peak, I am as filled with triumph as she is with me!”

In the year of Cicero’s consulship he was elected a quaestor, and entered the Senate. Of the twenty successful candidates he had polled last, no surprise given his lack of ancestry, and drew the lot for duty supervising all the ports of Italy save for Ostia and Brundisium, which had their own quaestors. He had been sent to Puteoli to prevent the illegal export of gold and silver, and had acquitted himself very respectably. Thus the ex-praetor Gaius Cosconius, given Further Spain to govern, had personally asked for Publius Vatinius as his legate.

He was still in Rome waiting for Cosconius to leave for his province when Antonia Cretica was killed in a freak accident on the Via Valeria. She had taken the children to see their grandparents in Alba Fucentia, and was returning to Rome when her carriage ran off the road. Mules and vehicle rolled and tumbled down a steep slope, breaking everything.

“Try to see the good in it, Vatinius,” said Caesar, helpless before such genuine grief. “The children were in another carriage, you still have them.”

“But I don’t have her!” Vatinius wept desolately. “Oh, Caesar, how can I live?”

“By going to Spain and keeping busy,” said his patron. “It is Fate, Vatinius. I too went to Spain having lost my beloved wife, and it was the saving of me.” He got up to pour Vatinius another goblet of wine. “What do you want done with the children? Would you rather they went to their grandparents in Alba Fucentia, or stayed here in Rome?”

“I’d prefer Rome,” Vatinius said, mopping his eyes, “but they need to be cared for by a relative, and I have none in Rome.”

“There’s Julia Antonia, who is also their grandmother. Not a very wise mother, perhaps, but adequate for such young charges. It would give her something to do.”

“You advise it, then.”

“I think so—for the time being, while you’re in Further Spain. When you come home, I think you should marry again. No, no, I’m not insulting your grief, Vatinius. You won’t ever replace this wife, it doesn’t work that way. But your children need a mother, and it would be better for you to forge a new bond with a new wife by siring more. Luckily you can afford a large family.”

“You didn’t sire more with your second wife.”

“True. However, I’m not uxorious, whereas you are. You like a home life, I’ve noticed it. You also have the happy ability to get on with a woman who is not your mental equal. Most men are built so. I am not, I suppose.” Caesar patted Vatinius on the shoulder. “Go to Spain at once, and remain there until at least next winter. Fight a little war if you can—Cosconius isn’t up to that, which is why he’s taking a legate. And find out all you can about the situation in the northwest.”

“As you wish,” said Vatinius, hauling himself to his feet. “And you’re right, of course, I must marry again. Will you look out for someone for me?”

“I most certainly will.”

*

A letter came from Pompey, written after Metellus Nepos had arrived in the Pompeian fold.

Still having trouble with the Jews, Caesar! Last time I wrote to you I was planning to meet the old Queen’s two sons in Damascus, which I did last spring. Hyrcanus impressed me as more suitable than Aristobulus, but I didn’t want them to know whom I favored until I’d dealt with that old villain, King Aretas of Nabataea. So I sent the brothers back to Judaea under strict orders to keep the peace until they heard my decision—didn’t want the losing brother intriguing in my rear while I marched on Petra.

But Aristobulus worked out the right answer, that I was going to give the lot to Hyrcanus, so he decided to prepare for war. Not very smart, but still, I suppose he didn’t have my measure yet. I put the expedition against Petra off, and marched for Jerusalem. Went into camp all around the city, which is extremely well fortified and naturally well placed for defense—cliffy valleys around it and the like.

No sooner did Aristobulus see this terrific-looking Roman army camped on the hills around than he came running to offer surrender. Along with several asses loaded down with bags of gold coins. Very nice of him to offer them to me, I said, but didn’t he understand that he’d ruined my campaigning plans and cost Rome a much bigger sum of money than he had in his bags? But I’d forgive all if he agreed to pay for the expense of moving so many legions to Jerusalem. That, I said, would mean I wouldn’t have to sack the place to find the money to pay. He was only too happy to oblige.

I sent Aulus Gabinius to pick up the money and order the gates opened, but Aristobulus’s followers decided to resist. They wouldn’t open the gates to Gabinius, and did some pretty rude things on top of the walls as a way of saying they were going to defy me. I arrested Aristobulus, and moved the army up. That made the city surrender, but there’s a part of the place where this massive temple stands—a citadel, you’d have to call it. A few thousand of the die-hards barricaded themselves in and refused to come out. A hard place to take, and I never was enthusiastic about siege. However, they had to be shown, so I showed them. They held out for three months, then I got bored and took the place. Faustus Sulla was first over the walls—nice in a son of Sulla’s, eh? Good lad. I intend to marry him to my daughter when we get home, she’ll be old enough by then. Fancy having Sulla’s son as my son-in-law! I’ve moved up in the world nicely.

The temple was an interesting place, not like our temples at all. No statues or anything like that, and it sort of growls at you when you’re inside. Raised my hackles, I can tell you! Lenaeus and Theophanes (I miss Varro terribly) wanted to go behind this curtain into what they call their Holy of Holies. So did Gabinius and some of the others. It was bound to be full of gold, they said. Well, I thought about it, Caesar, but in the end I said no. Never set foot inside, wouldn’t let anyone else either. I’d got their measure by then, you see. Very strange people. Like us the religion is a part of the State, but it’s also different from us. I’d call them religious fanatics, really. So I issued orders that no one was to offend them religiously, from the rankers all the way up to my senior legates. Why stir up a nest of hornets when what I want from one end of Syria to the other is peace, good order, and client kings obedient to Rome, without turning the local customs and traditions upside down? Every place has a mos maiorum.

I put Hyrcanus in as both King and High Priest, and took Aristobulus prisoner. That’s because I met the Idumaean prince, Antipater, in Damascus. Very interesting fellow. Hyrcanus isn’t impressive, but I rely on Antipater to manipulate him—in Rome’s direction, of course. Oh yes, I didn’t neglect to inform Hyrcanus that he’s there not by the grace of his God but by the grace of Rome, that he’s Rome’s puppet and always under the thumb of the Governor of Syria. Antipater suggested that I sweeten this cup of vinegar by telling Hyrcanus that he ought to channel most of his energies into the High Priesthood—clever Antipater! I wonder does he know I know how much civil power he’s usurped without lifting a warring finger?

I didn’t leave Judaea quite as big as it was before the two silly brothers focused my attention on such a piddling spot. Anywhere that Jews were in a minority I drafted into Syria as an official part of the Roman province—Samaria, the coastal cities from Joppa to Gaza, and the Greek cities of the Decapolis all got their autonomy and became Syrian.

I’m still tidying up, but it begins to near the end at last. I’ll be home by the end of this year. Which leads me to the deplorable events of the last year and the beginning of this one. In Rome, I mean. Caesar, I can’t thank you enough for your help with Nepos. You tried. But why did we have to have that sanctimonious fart Cato in office? Ruined everything. And as you know, I haven’t got a tribune of the plebs left worth pissing on. Can’t even find one for next year!

I am bringing home mountains of loot, the Treasury won’t even begin to hold Rome’s share. There were sixteen thousand talents given in bonuses to my troops alone. Therefore I absolutely refuse to do what I’ve always done in the past, give my soldiers tenure of my own land. This time Rome can give them land. They deserve it, and Rome owes it to them. So if I die trying, I’ll see they get State land. I rely on you to do what you can, and if you happen to have a tribune of the plebs inclined to think your way, I would be happy to share the cost of his hire. Nepos says there’s going to be a big fight over land, not that I didn’t expect it. Too many powerful men leasing public land out for their latifundia. Very shortsighted of the Senate.

I heard a rumor, by the way, and wondered if you’d heard it too. That Mucia’s being a naughty girl. I asked Nepos, and he flew so high I wondered if he was ever going to come down again. Well, brothers and sisters do tend to stick together, so I suppose it’s natural he didn’t like the question. Anyway, I’m making enquiries. If there’s any truth in it, it’s bye-bye to Mucia. She’s been a good wife and mother, but I can’t say I’ve missed her much since I’ve been away.

“Oh, Pompeius,” said Caesar as he put the letter down, “you are in a league all of your own!”

He frowned, thinking of the last part of Pompey’s missive first. Titus Labienus had left Rome to return to Picenum soon after he relinquished office, and presumably had resumed his affair with Mucia Tertia. A pity. Ought he perhaps to write and warn Labienus what was coming? No. Letters were prone to be opened by the wrong people, and there were some who were past masters of the art of resealing them. If Mucia Tertia and Labienus were in danger, they would have to deal with it themselves. Pompey the Great was more important; Caesar was beginning to see all sorts of alluring possibilities after the Great Man came home with his mountains of loot. The land wasn’t going to be forthcoming; his soldiers would go unrewarded. But in less than three years’ time, Gaius Julius Caesar would be senior consul, and Publius Vatinius would be his tribune of the plebs. What an excellent way to put the Great Man in the debt of a far greater man!

*

Both Servilia and Marcus Crassus had been right; after that amazing day in the Forum, Caesar’s year as urban praetor became very peaceful. One by one the rest of Catilina’s adherents were tried and convicted, though Lucius Novius Niger was no longer the judge in the special court. After some debate the Senate decided to transfer the trials to Bibulus’s court once the first five had been sentenced to exile and confiscation of property.

And, as Caesar learned from Crassus, Cicero got his new house. The biggest Catilinarian fish of all had never been named by any of the informers—Publius Sulla. Most people knew, however, that if Autronius had been involved, so had Publius Sulla. The nephew of the Dictator and husband of Pompey’s sister, Publius Sulla had inherited enormous wealth, but not his uncle’s political acumen and certainly not his uncle’s sense of self-preservation. Unlike the rest, he had not entered the conspiracy to increase his fortune; it had been done to oblige his friends and alleviate his perpetual boredom.

“He’s asked Cicero to defend,” said Crassus, chuckling, “and that puts Cicero in a frightful predicament.”

“Only if he intends to consent, surely,” said Caesar.

“Oh, he’s already consented, Gaius.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Because our swan of an ex-consul has just been to see me. Suddenly he has the money to buy my house—or hopes he has.”

“Ah! How much are you asking?”

“Five million.”

Caesar leaned back in his chair, shaking his head dolefully. “You know, Marcus, you always remind me of a speculation builder. Every house you build for your wife and children you swear by all the Gods is going to stay theirs. Then along comes someone with more money than sense, offers you a fat profit, and—bang! Wife and children are homeless until the next house is built.”

“I paid a long price for it,” said Crassus defensively.

“Not nearly as long as five million!”

“Well, yes,” said Crassus, then brightened. “Tertulla has taken a dislike to the place, as a matter of fact, so she isn’t brokenhearted at the thought of moving. I’m going to buy on the Circus Maximus side of the Germalus this time—next door to that palace Hortensius maintains to house his fish ponds.”

“Why has Tertulla taken a dislike to it after all these years?” Caesar asked skeptically.

“Well, it belonged to Marcus Livius Drusus.”

“I know that. I also know he was murdered in its atrium.’’

“There’s something there!” Crassus whispered.

“And it’s welcome to gnaw at Cicero and Terentia, eh?” Caesar began to laugh. “I told you at the time that it was a mistake to use black marble inside—too many dark corners. And, knowing how little you pay your servants, Marcus, I’d be willing to bet some of them have a fine old time of it moaning and sighing out of the shadows. I would also be willing to bet that when you move, your evil presences will go with you—unless you cough up some solid wage rises, that is.”

Crassus brought the subject back to Cicero and Publius Sulla. “It appears,” he said, “that Publius Sulla is willing to ‘lend’ Cicero the entire sum if he defends.”

“And gets him off,” said Caesar gently.

“Oh, he’ll do that!” This time Crassus laughed, an extremely rare event. “You ought to have heard him! Busy rewriting the history of his consulship, no less. Do you remember all those meetings through September, October and November? When Publius Sulla sat beside Catilina supporting him loudly? Well, according to Cicero that wasn’t Publius Sulla sitting there, it was Spinther wearing his imago!”

“I hope you’re joking, Marcus.”

“Yes and no. Cicero now insists that Publius Sulla spent the bulk of those many nundinae looking after his interests in Pompeii! He was hardly in Rome, did you know that?”

“You’re right, it must have been Spinther wearing his imago.”

“He’ll convince the jury of it, anyway.”

At which moment Aurelia poked her head round the door. “When you have the time, Caesar, I would like a word with you,” she said.

Crassus rose. “I’m off, I have some people to see. Speaking of houses,” he said as he and Caesar walked to the front door, “I must say the Domus Publica is the best address in Rome. On the way to and from everywhere. Nice to pop in knowing there’s a friendly face and a good drop of wine.”

“You could afford the good drop of wine yourself, you old skinflint!”

“You know, I am getting old,” said Crassus, ignoring the noun. “What are you, thirty-seven?”

“Thirty-eight this year.”

“Brrr! I’ll be fifty-four.” He sighed wistfully. “You know, I did want a big campaign before I retired! Something to rival Pompeius Magnus.”

“According to him, there are no worlds left to conquer.”

“What about the Parthians?”

“What about Dacia, Boiohaemum, all the lands of the Danubius?”

“Is that where you’re going, is it, Caesar?”

“I’ve been thinking of it, yes.”

“The Parthians,” said Crassus positively, stepping through the door. “More gold that way than to the north.”

“Every race esteems gold most,” said Caesar, “so every race will yield gold.”

“You’ll need it to pay your debts.”

“Yes, I will. But gold isn’t the great lure, at least for me. In that respect Pompeius Magnus has things correct. The gold just appears. What’s more important is the length of Rome’s reach.”

Crassus’s answer was a wave; he turned in the direction of the Palatine and disappeared.

There was never any point in trying to avoid Aurelia when she wanted a word, so Caesar went straight from the front door to her quarters, now thoroughly imprinted with her hand: none of the handsome decor was visible anymore, covered with pigeonholes, scrolls, papers, book buckets, and a loom in the corner. Suburan accounts no longer interested her; she was helping the Vestals in their archiving.

“What is it, Mater?” he asked, standing in the doorway.

“It’s our new Virgin,” she said, indicating a chair.

He sat down, willing now to listen. “Cornelia Merula?”

“The very same.”

“She’s only seven, Mater. How much trouble can she make at that age? Unless she’s wild, and I didn’t think she was.”

“We have put a Cato in our midst,” said his mother.

“Oh!”

“Fabia can’t deal with her, nor can any of the others. Junia and Quinctilia loathe her, and are beginning to pinch and scratch.”

“Bring Fabia and Cornelia Merula to my office now, please.”

Not many moments later Aurelia ushered the Chief Vestal and the new little Vestal into Caesar’s office, an immaculate and most imposing setting glowing dully in crimson and purple.

There was a Cato look to Cornelia Merula, who reminded Caesar of that first time he had ever seen Cato, looking down from Marcus Livius Drusus’s house onto the loggia of Ahenobarbus’s house, where Sulla had been staying. A skinny, lonely little boy to whom he had waved sympathetically. She too was tall and thin; she too had that Catonian coloring, auburn hair and grey eyes. And she stood the way Cato always stood, legs apart, chin out, fists clenched.

“Mater, Fabia, you may sit down,” said the Pontifex Maximus formally. One hand went out to the child. “You may stand here,” he said, indicating a spot in front of his desk. “Now what’s the trouble, Chief Vestal?” he asked.

“A great deal, it seems!” said Fabia tartly. “We live too luxuriously—we have too much spare time—we are more interested in wills than Vesta—we have no right to drink water which hasn’t been fetched from the Well of Juturna—we don’t prepare the mola salsa the way it was done during the reigns of the kings—we don’t mince the October Horse’s parts properly—and more besides!”

“And how do you know what happens to the October Horse’s parts, little blackbird?” Caesar asked the child kindly, preferring to call her that (Merula meant a blackbird). “You haven’t been in the Atrium Vestae long enough to have seen an October Horse’s parts.” Oh, how hard it was not to laugh! The parts of the October Horse which were rushed first to the Regia to allow some blood to drip onto the altar, then to Vesta’s sacred hearth to allow the same, were the genitalia plus the tail complete with anal sphincter. After the ceremonies all of these were cut up, minced, mixed with the last of the blood, then burned; the ashes were used during a Vestal feast in April, the Parilia.

“My great-grandmother told me,” said Cornelia Merula in a voice which promised one day to be as loud as Cato’s.

“How does she know, since she isn’t a Vestal?”

“You,” said the little blackbird, “are in this house under false pretenses. That means I don’t have to answer you.”

“Do you want to be sent back to your great-grandmother?”

“You can’t do that, I’m a Vestal now.”

“I can do it, and I will if you don’t answer my questions.”

She was not at all cowed; instead, she thought about what he said carefully. “I can only be ejected from the Order if I am prosecuted in a court and convicted.”

“What a little lawyer! But you are wrong, Cornelia. The law is sensible, so it always makes provision for the occasional blackbird caged up with snow-white peahens. You can be sent home.” Caesar leaned forward, eyes chilly. “Please don’t try my patience, Cornelia! Just believe me. Your great-grandmother would not be amused if you were declared unsuitable and sent home in disgrace.”

“I don’t believe you,” Cornelia said stubbornly.

Caesar rose to his feet. “You’ll believe me after I’ve taken you home this very moment!” He turned to Fabia, listening fascinated. “Fabia, pack her things, then send them on.”

Which was the difference between seven and twenty-seven; Cornelia Merula gave in. “I’ll answer your questions, Pontifex Maximus,” she said heroically, eyes shining with tears, but no tears falling.

By this time Caesar just wanted to squash her with hugs and kisses, but of course one couldn’t do that, even were it not so important that she be, if not tamed, at least made tractable. Seven or twenty-seven, she was a Vestal Virgin and could not be squashed with hugs and kisses.

“You said I’m here under false pretenses, Cornelia. What did you mean by that?”

“Great-grandmother says so.”

“Is everything great-grandmother says true?’’

The grey eyes widened in horror. “Yes, of course!”

“Did great-grandmother tell you why I’m here under false pretenses, or was it simply a statement without facts to back it up?” he asked sternly.

“She just said so.”

“I am not here under false pretenses, I am the legally elected Pontifex Maximus.”

“You are the flamen Dialis,” Cornelia muttered.

“I was the flamen Dialis, but that was a very long time ago. I was appointed to take your great-grandfather’s place. But then some irregularities in the inauguration ceremonies were discovered, and all the priests and augurs decided I could not continue to serve as flamen Dialis.”

“You are still the flamen Dialis!”

“Domine,” he said gently. “I am your lord, little blackbird, which means you behave politely and call me domine.”

“Domine, then.”

“I am not still the flamen Dialis.”

“Yes you are! Domine.”

“Why?”

“Because,” said Cornelia Merula triumphantly, “there isn’t a flamen Dialis!”

“Another decision of the priestly and augural colleges, little blackbird. I am not the flamen Dialis, but it was decided not to appoint another man to the post until after my death. Just to make everything in our contract with the Great God absolutely legal.”

“Oh.”

“Come here, Cornelia.”

She came round the corner of his desk reluctantly, and stood where he pointed, two feet away from his chair.

“Hold out your hands.”

She flinched, paled; Caesar understood great-grandmother a great deal better when Cornelia Merula held out her hands as a child does to receive punishment.

His own hands went out, took hers in a firm warm clasp. “I think it’s time you forgot great-grandmother as the authority in your life, little blackbird. You have espoused the Order of Rome’s Vestal Virgins. You have passed out of great-grandmother’s hands and into mine. Feel them, Cornelia. Feel my hands.”

She did so, shyly and very timidly. How sad, he thought, that until her eighth year she has clearly never been hugged or kissed by the paterfamilias, and now her new paterfamilias is bound by solemn and sacred laws never to hug or kiss her, child that she is. Sometimes Rome is a cruel mistress.

“They’re strong, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“And much bigger than yours.”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel them shake or sweat?”

“No, domine.”

“Then there is no more to be said. You and your fate are in my hands, I am your father now. I will care for you as a father, the Great God and Vesta require it. But most of why I will care for you is because you are you, a little girl. You won’t be slapped or spanked, you won’t be shut in dark cupboards or sent to bed without your supper. That is not to say the Atrium Vestae is a place without punishment, only that punishments should be carefully thought out, and always made to fit the crime. If you break something, you will have to mend it. If you soil something, you will have to wash it. But the one crime for which there is no other punishment than being sent home as unsuitable is the crime of sitting in judgement on your seniors. It is not your place to say what the Order drinks, how that drink is obtained, nor which side of the cup is the side to sip from. It is not your place to define what exactly is Vestal tradition or custom. The mos maiorum is not a static thing, it doesn’t stay as it was during the reigns of the kings. Like everything else in the world, it changes to suit the times. So no more criticisms, no more sitting in judgement. Is that understood?’’

“Yes, domine.”

He let go her hands, never having put himself closer to her than those two feet. “You may go, Cornelia, but wait outside. I want to speak to Fabia.”

“Thank you, Pontifex Maximus,” sighed Fabia, beaming.

“Don’t thank me, Chief Vestal, just cope with these ups and downs sensibly,” said Caesar. “I think in future it might be wise if I take a more active part in the education of the three young girls. Classes once every eight days from an hour after dawn until noon. On, let us say, the third day after the nundinus.”

The interview was clearly at an end; Fabia rose, made an obeisance, and left.

“You handled that extremely well, Caesar,” said Aurelia.

“Poor little thing!”

“Too many spankings.”

“What an old horror great-grandmother must be.”

“Some people live to be too old, Caesar. I hope I do not.”

“The important thing is, have I banished Cato?”

“Oh, I think so. Especially if you tutor her. That’s an excellent idea. Not Fabia nor Arruntia nor Popillia has one grain of common sense, and I cannot interfere too much. I am a woman, not the paterfamilias.”

“How odd, Mater! In all my life I have never been paterfamilias to a male!”

Aurelia got to her feet, smiling. “For which I am very glad, my son. Look at Young Marius, poor fellow. The women in your hand are grateful for your strength and authority. If you had a son, he would have to live under your shadow. For greatness skips not one but usually many generations in all families, Caesar. You would see him as yourself, and he would despair.”

*

The Clodius Club was gathered in the big and beautiful house Fulvia’s money had bought for Clodius right next door to the expensive insula of luxury apartments that represented his most lucrative investment. Everyone of genuine importance was there: the two Clodias, Fulvia, Pompeia Sulla, Sempronia Tuditani, Palla, Decimus Brutus (Sempronia Tuditani’s son), Curio, young Poplicola (Palla’s son), Clodius, and an aggrieved Mark Antony.

“I wish I were Cicero,” he was saying gloomily, “then I’d have no need to get married.”

“That sounds like a non sequitur to me, Antonius,” said Curio, smiling. “Cicero’s married, and to a shrew at that.”

“Yes, but he’s so well known to be able to get people off at trial that they’re even willing to ‘lend’ him five million,” Antony persisted. “If I could get people off at trial, I’d have my five million without needing to marry.”

“Oho!” said Clodius, sitting up straighten “Who’s the lucky little bride, Antonius?”

“Uncle Lucius—he’s paterfamilias now because Uncle Hybrida won’t have anything to do with us—refuses to pay my debts. My stepfather’s estate is embarrassed, and there’s nothing left of what my father had. So I have to marry some awful girl who smells of the shop.”

“Who?” asked Clodius.

“Her name’s Fadia.”

“Fadia? I’ve never heard of a Fadia,” said Clodilla, a very contented divorcée these days. “Tell us more, Antonius, do!”

The massive shoulders lifted in a shrug. “That’s it, really. No one has ever heard of her.”

“Getting information out of you, Antonius, is like squeezing blood out of a stone,” said Celer’s wife, Clodia. “Who is Fadia?”

“Her father’s some filthy-rich merchant from Placentia.”

“You mean she’s a Gaul?” gasped Clodius.

Another man might have bridled defensively; Mark Antony merely grinned. “Uncle Lucius swears not. Impeccably Roman, he says. I suppose that means she is. The Caesars are experts on bloodlines.”

“Well, go on!” from Curio.

“There’s not much more to tell you. Old man Titus Fadius has a son and a daughter. He wants the son in the Senate, and decided the best way he can do that is to find a noble husband for the daughter. The son’s ghastly, apparently, no one would have him. So I’m it.” Antony flashed a smile at Curio, displaying surprisingly small but regular teeth. “You were nearly it, but your father said he’d prostitute his daughter before he’d consent.”

Curio collapsed, shrieking. “He should hope! Scribonia is so ugly only Appius Claudius the Blind would have been interested.”

“Oh, do shut up, Curio!” said Pompeia. “We all know about Scribonia, but we don’t know about Fadia. Is she pretty, Marcus?”

“Her dowry’s very pretty.”

“How much?” asked Decimus Brutus.

“Three hundred talents are the going price for the grandson of Antonius Orator!”

Curio whistled. “If Fadius asked my tata again, I’d be glad to sleep wearing a blindfold! That’s half as much again as Cicero’s five million! You’ll even have a bit left over after you’ve paid all your debts.”

“I’m not quite Cousin Gaius, Curio!” said Antony, chortling. “I don’t owe more than half a million.” He sobered. “Anyway, none of them are about to let me get my hands on ready cash. Uncle Lucius and Titus Fadius are drawing up the marriage agreements so that Fadia keeps control of her fortune.”

“Oh, Marcus, that’s dreadful!” cried Clodia.

“Yes, that’s what I said straight after I refused to marry her on those terms,” Antony said complacently.

“You refused?” asked Palla, raddled cheeks working like a squirrel nibbling nuts.

“Yes.”

“And what happened then?’’

“They backed down.”

“All the way?”

“Not all the way, but far enough. Titus Fadius agreed to pay my debts and give me a cash settlement of a million besides. So I’m getting married in ten days’ time, though none of you has been asked to the wedding. Uncle Lucius wants me to look pure.”

“No gall, no Gaul!” howled Curio.

Everyone fell about laughing.

The meeting proceeded merrily enough for some time, though nothing important was said. The only attendants in the room were poised behind the couch on which lay Pompeia together with Palla, and they both belonged to Pompeia. The younger was her own maid, Doris, and the elder was Aurelia’s valued watchdog, Polyxena. Not one member of the Clodius Club was unaware that everything Polyxena heard would be reported faithfully to Aurelia once Pompeia returned to the Domus Publica, an annoyance of major proportions. In fact, there were many meetings held without Pompeia, either because the mischief being plotted was not for dissemination to the mother of the Pontifex Maximus, or because someone was proposing yet again that Pompeia be ejected. One good reason, however, had permitted Pompeia continued admission: there were times when it was useful to know that a rigid old pillar of society with a great deal of influence in that society was being fed information.

Today Publius Clodius reached the end of his tether. “Pompeia,” he said, voice hard, “that old spy behind you is an abomination! There’s nothing going on here all of Rome can’t know, but I object to spies, and that means I have to object to you! Go home, and take your wretched spy with you!”

The luminous and amazingly green eyes filled with tears; Pompeia’s lip trembled. “Oh, please, Publius Clodius! Please!”

Clodius turned his back. “Go home,” he said.

An awkward silence fell while Pompeia bundled herself off her couch, into her shoes and out of the room, Polyxena following with her customary wooden expression, and Doris sniffling.

“That was unkind, Publius,” said Clodia after they had gone.

“Kindness is not a virtue I esteem!” Clodius snapped.

“She’s Sulla’s granddaughter!”

“I don’t care if she’s Jupiter’s granddaughter! I am sick to death of putting up with Polyxena!”

“Cousin Gaius,” said Antony, “is not a fool. You’ll gain no access to his wife without someone like Polyxena present, Clodius.”

“I know that, Antonius!”

“He’s had so much experience himself,” Antony explained with a grin. “I doubt there’s a trick he doesn’t know when it comes to cuckolding husbands.” He sighed happily. “He’s the north wind, but he does adorn our stuffy family! More conquests than Apollo.”

“I don’t want to cuckold Caesar, I just want to be free of Polyxena!” snarled Clodius.

Suddenly Clodia began to giggle. “Well, now that the Eyes and Ears of Rome have departed, I can tell you what happened at Atticus’s dinner party the other evening.”

“That must have been exciting for you, Clodia dear,” young Poplicola said. “Very prim and proper!”

“Oh, absolutely, especially with Terentia there.”

“So what makes it worth mentioning?” Clodius asked grumpily, still incensed over Polyxena.

Clodia’s voice dropped, became fraught with significance. “I was seated opposite Cicero!” she announced.

“How could you bear such ecstasy?” asked Sempronia Tuditani.

“How could he bear such ecstasy, you mean!”

All heads turned her way.

“Clodia, he didn’t!” cried Fulvia.

“He certainly did,” Clodia said smugly. “He fell for me as hard as an insula coming down in an earthquake.”

“In front of Terentia?’’

“Well, she was round the corner facing the lectus imus, so she had her back to us. Yes, thanks to my friend Atticus, Cicero slipped his leash.”

“What happened?’’ asked Curio, helpless with laughter.

“I flirted with him from one end of the dinner to the other, that’s what happened. I flirted outrageously, and he adored it! Not to mention me. Told me he didn’t know there was a woman in Rome so well read. That was after I quoted the new poet, Catullus.” She turned to Curio. “Have you read him? Glorious!”

Curio wiped his eyes. “Haven’t heard of him.”

“Brand new—published by Atticus, of course. Comes from Italian Gaul across the Padus. Atticus says he’s about to descend on Rome—I can’t wait to meet him!”

“Back to Cicero,” said Clodius, seeing Forum possibilities. “What’s he like in the throes of love? I didn’t think he had it in him, frankly.”

“Oh, very silly and kittenish,” said Clodia, sounding bored. She rolled over on her back and kicked her legs. “Everything about him changes. The pater patriae becomes a Plautus ponce. That was why it was so much fun. I just kept prodding him to make a bigger and bigger fool of himself.”

“You’re a wicked woman!” said Decimus Brutus.

“That’s what Terentia thought too.”

“Oho! So she did notice?”

“After a while the whole room noticed.” Clodia wrinkled up her nose and looked adorable. “The harder he fell for me, the louder and sillier he became. Atticus was almost paralyzed with laughter.” She shivered theatrically. “Terentia was almost paralyzed with rage. Poor old Cicero! Why do we think he’s old, by the way? To repeat, poor old Cicero! I don’t imagine they were more than a foot from Atticus’s door before Terentia was gnawing on his neck.”

“She wouldn’t have been gnawing on anything else,” purred Sempronia Tuditani.

The howl of mirth which went up made the servants in Fulvia’s kitchen at the far end of the garden smile—such a happy house!

Suddenly Clodia’s merriment changed tenor; she sat up very straight and looked gleefully at her brother. “Publius Clodius, are you game for some delicious mischief?”

“Is Caesar a Roman?’’

*

The next morning Clodia presented herself at the Pontifex Maximus’s front door accompanied by several other female members of the Clodius Club.

“Is Pompeia in?” she asked Eutychus.

“She is receiving, domina,” said the steward, bowing as he admitted them.

And off up the stairs the party went, while Eutychus hurried about his business. No need to summon Polyxena; young Quintus Pompeius Rufus was out of Rome, so there would be no men present.

It was evident that Pompeia had spent the night weeping; her eyes were puffed and reddened, her demeanor woebegone. When Clodia and the others bustled in, she leaped to her feet.

“Oh, Clodia, I was sure I’d never see you again!” she cried.

“My dear, I wouldn’t do that to you! But you can’t really blame my brother, now can you? Polyxena tells Aurelia everything.”

“I know, I know! I’m so sorry, but what can I do?”

“Nothing, dear one, nothing.” Clodia seated herself in the manner of a gorgeous bird settling, then smiled around the group she had brought with her: Fulvia, Clodilla, Sempronia Tuditani, Palla, and one other whom Pompeia didn’t recognize.

“This,” said Clodia demurely, “is my cousin Claudia from the country. She’s down on a holiday.”

“Ave, Claudia,” said Pompeia Sulla, smiling with her usual vacancy, and thinking that if Claudia was a rustic, she was very much in the mold of Palla and Sempronia Tuditani—wherever she came from must deem her racy indeed, with all that paint and lush bleached hair. Pompeia tried to be polite. “I can see the family likeness,” she said.

“I should hope so,” said cousin Claudia, pulling off that fantastic head of bright gold tresses.

For a moment Pompeia looked as if she was about to faint: her mouth dropped open, she gasped for air.

All of which was too much for Clodia and the others. They screamed with laughter.

“Sssssh!’’ hissed Publius Clodius, striding in a most unfeminine way to the outer door and slamming its latch home. He then returned to his seat, pursed up his mouth and fluttered his lashes. “My dear, what a divine apartment!” he fluted.

“Oh, oh, oh!” squeaked Pompeia. “Oh, you can’t!”

“I can, because here I am,” said Clodius in his normal voice. “And you’re right, Clodia. No Polyxena.”

“Please, please don’t stay!” said Pompeia in a whisper, face white, hands writhing. “My mother-in-law!”

“What, does she spy on you here too?”

“Not usually, but the Bona Dea is happening soon, and it’s being held here. I’m supposed to be organizing it.”

“You mean Aurelia’s organizing it, surely,” sneered Clodius.

“Well yes, of course she is! But she’s very meticulous about pretending to consult me because I’m the official hostess, the wife of the praetor in whose house Bona Dea is being held. Oh, Clodius, please go! She’s in and out all the time at the moment, and if she finds my door latched, she’ll complain to Caesar.”

“My poor baby!” crooned Clodius, enfolding Pompeia in a hug. “I’ll go, I promise.” He went to a magnificent polished silver mirror hanging on the wall, and with Fulvia’s assistance twitched his wig into place.

“I can’t say you’re pretty, Publius,” said his wife as she put the finishing touches to his coiffure, “but you make a passable woman”—she giggled—”if of somewhat dubious profession!”

“Come on, let’s go,” said Clodius to the rest of the visitors, “I only wanted to show Clodia that it could be done, and it can!”

The door latch flipped; the women went out in a cluster with Clodius in its middle.

Just in time. Aurelia appeared shortly thereafter, with her brows raised. “Who were they, hustling themselves off in a hurry?”

“Clodia and Clodilla and a few others,” said Pompeia vaguely.

“You’d better know what sort of milk we’re serving.”

“Milk?” asked Pompeia, astonished.

“Oh, Pompeia, honestly!” Aurelia stood just looking at her daughter-in-law. “Is there nothing inside that head except trinkets and clothes?’’

Whereupon Pompeia burst into tears. Aurelia emitted one of her extremely rare mild expletives (though in a muffled voice), and whisked herself away before she boxed Pompeia’s ears.

Outside on the Via Sacra the five genuine articles plus Clodius scurried up the road rather than down it toward the lower Forum; safer than encountering someone male they knew very well. Clodius was delighted with himself, and pranced along attracting quite a lot of attention from the well-to-do lady shoppers who frequented the area of the Porticus Margaritaria and the upper Forum. It was therefore with considerable relief that the women managed to get him home without someone’s penetrating his disguise.

“I’m going to be asked for days to come who was that strange creature with me this morning!” said Clodia wrathfully once the trappings were off and a washed, respectable Publius Clodius had disposed himself on a couch.

“It was all your idea!” he protested.

“Yes, but you didn’t have to make a public spectacle of yourself! The understanding was that you’d wrap up well there and back, not simper and wiggle for all the world to wonder at!”

“Shut up, Clodia, I’m thinking!”

“About what?”

“A little matter of revenge.”

Fulvia cuddled up to him, sensing the change. No one knew better than his wife that Clodius kept a list of victims inside his head, and no one was more prepared to help him than his wife. Of late the list had shrunk; Catilina was no more, and Arabs were probably permanently erased from it. So which one was it?

“Who?” she asked, sucking his earlobe.

“Aurelia,” he said between his teeth. “It’s high time someone cut her down to size.”

“And just how do you plan to do that?” Palla asked.

“It won’t do Fabia any good either,” he said thoughtfully, “and she’s another needing a lesson.”

“What are you up to, Clodius?” asked Clodilla, looking wary.

“Mischief!” he caroled, grabbed for Fulvia and began to tickle her unmercifully.

*

Bona Dea was the Good Goddess, as old as Rome herself and therefore owning neither face nor form; she was numen. She did have a name, but it was never uttered, so holy was it. What she meant to Roman women no man could understand, nor why she was called Good. Her worship lay quite outside the official State religion, and though the Treasury did give her a little money, she answered to no man or group of men. The Vestal Virgins cared for her because she had no priestesses of her own; they employed the women who tended her sacred medicinal garden, and they had custody of Bona Dea’s medicines, which were for Roman women only.

As she had no part in masculine Rome, her huge temple precinct lay outside the pomerium on the slope of the Aventine just beneath an outcropping rock, the Saxum Sacrum or sacred stone, and close to the Aventine water reservoir. No man dared come near, nor myrtle. A statue stood within the sanctuary, but it was not an effigy of Bona Dea, only something put there to trick the evil forces generated by men into thinking that was her. Nothing was what first it seemed in the world of Bona Dea, who loved women and snakes. Her precinct abounded in snakes. Men, it was said, were snakes. And owning so many snakes, what need had Bona Dea for men?

The medicines Bona Dea was famous for came from a garden all about the temple itself, beds of various herbs here, and elsewhere a sea of diseased rye planted each May Day and harvested under the supervision of the Vestals, who took its smutty ears of grain and made Bona Dea’s elixir from them—while thousands of snakes dozed or rustled amid the stalks, ignored and ignoring.

On May Day the women of Rome woke their Good Goddess from her six-month winter sleep amid flowers and festivities held in and around her temple. Roman citizen women from all walks of life flocked to attend the mysteries, which began at dawn and were ended by dusk. The exquisitely balanced duality of the Good Goddess was manifest in May birth and rye death, in wine and milk. For wine was taboo, yet had to be consumed in vast quantities. It was called milk and kept in precious silver vessels called honeypots, yet one more ruse to confound male things. Tired women wended their way home replete with milk poured from honeypots, still tingling from the voluptuous dry slither of snakes and remembering the powerful surge of snake muscle, the kiss of a forked tongue, earth broken open to receive the seed, a crown of vine leaves, the eternal female cycle of birth and death. But no man knew or wanted to know what happened at Bona Dea on May Day.

Then at the beginning of December Bona Dea went back to sleep, but not publicly, not while there was a sun in the sky or one ordinary Roman woman abroad. Because what she dreamed in winter was her secret, the rites were open only to the highest born of Rome’s women. All her daughters might witness her resurrection, but only the daughters of kings might watch her die. Death was sacred. Death was holy. Death was private.

That this year Bona Dea would be laid to rest in the house of the Pontifex Maximus was a foregone conclusion; the choice of venue was in the province of the Vestals, who were constrained by the fact that this venue had to be the house of an incumbent praetor or consul. Not since the time of Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus had there been an opportunity to celebrate the rites in the Domus Publica itself. This year there was. The urban praetor Caesar’s house was selected, and his wife Pompeia Sulla would be the official hostess. The date was to be the third night of December, and on that night no man or male child was permitted to remain in the Domus Publica, including slaves.

Naturally Caesar was delighted at the choice of his house, and happy to sleep in his rooms on the lower Vicus Patricii; he might perhaps have preferred to use the old apartment in Aurelia’s insula, except that it was at present occupied by Prince Masintha of Numidia, his client and the loser in a court case earlier in the year. That temper definitely frayed easier these days! At one stage he had become so incensed at the lies Prince Juba was busy telling that he had reached out and hauled Juba to his feet by seizing his beard. Not a citizen, Masintha faced flogging and strangling, but Caesar had whisked him away in the care of Lucius Decumius and was still hiding him. Perhaps, thought the Pontifex Maximus as he wandered uphill toward the Subura, just this night he could sample one of those deliciously earthy Suburan women time and the elevation of his fortunes had removed from his ken. Yes, what a terribly good idea! A meal with Lucius Decumius first, then a message to Gavia or Apronia or Scaptia…

Full darkness had fallen, but for once that part of the Via Sacra which meandered through the Forum Romanum was illuminated by torches; what seemed an endless parade of litters and lackeys converged on the main doors of the Domus Publica from all directions, and the smoky pall of light caught flashes of wondrously hued robes, sparks from fabulous jewelry, glimpses of eager faces. Cries of greeting, giggles, little snatches of conversation floated on the air as the women alighted and passed into the vestibule of the Domus Publica, shaking their trailing garments out, patting their hair, adjusting a brooch or an earring. Many a headache and many a temper tantrum had gone into the business of planning what to wear, for this was the best opportunity of the year to show one’s peers how fashionably one could dress, how expensive the treasures in the jewel box were. Men never noticed! Women always did.

The guest list was unusually large because the premises were so spacious; Caesar had tented over the main peristyle garden to exclude prying eyes on the Via Nova, which meant the women could congregate there as well as in the atrium temple, the Pontifex Maximus’s vast dining room, and his reception room. Lamps glimmered everywhere, tables were loaded with the most sumptuous and tasty food, the honeypots of milk were bottomless and the milk itself was a superb vintage. Coveys of women musicians sat or walked about playing pipes and flutes and lyres, little drums, castanets, tambourines, silvery rattles; servants passed constantly from one cluster of guests to another with plates of delicacies, more milk.

Before the solemn mysteries began the mood had to be correct, which meant the party had to have passed beyond its food, milk and chatty stage. No one was in a hurry; there was too much catching up to do as faces long unseen were recognized and hailed, and warm friends clumped to exchange the latest gossip.

Reptilian snakes had no part in putting the Bona Dea to sleep; her winter soporific was the snakelike whip, a wicked thing ending in a cluster of Medusa-like thongs which would curl as lovingly about a woman’s flesh as any reptile. But the flagellation would be later, after Bona Dea’s winter altar was lit and enough milk had been drunk to dull the pain, raise it instead to a special kind of ecstasy. Bona Dea was a hard mistress.

Aurelia had insisted that Pompeia Sulla stand alongside Fabia to do door duty and welcome the guests, profoundly glad that the ladies of the Clodius Club were among the last to arrive. Well, of course they would be! It must have taken hours for middle-aged tarts like Sempronia Tuditani and Palla to paint that many layers on their faces—though a mere sliver of time to insert their stringy bodies into so little! The Clodias, she had to admit, were both exquisite: lovely dresses, exactly the right jewelry (and not too much of it), touches only of stibium and carmine. Fulvia as always was a law unto herself, from her flame-colored gown to several ropes of blackish pearls; there was a son about two years old, but Fulvia’s figure had certainly not suffered.

“Yes, yes, you can go now!” her mother-in-law said to Pompeia after Fulvia had gushed her greetings, and smiled sourly to herself as Caesar’s flighty wife skipped off arm in arm with her friend, chattering happily.

Not long afterward Aurelia decided everyone was present and left the vestibule. Her anxiety to make sure things were going well would not let her rest, so she moved constantly from place to place and room to room, eyes darting hither and thither, counting servants, assessing the volume of food, cataloguing the guests and whereabouts they had settled. Even in the midst of such a controlled chaos her abacus of a mind told off this and that, facts clicking into place. Yet something kept nagging at her—what was it? Who was missing? Someone was missing!

Two musicians strolled past her, refreshing themselves between numbers. Their pipes were threaded round their wrists, leaving their hands to cope with milk and honey-cakes.

“Chryse, this is the best Bona Dea ever,” said the taller one.

“Isn’t it just?” agreed the other, mumbling through a full mouth. “I wish all our engagements were half as good, Doris.”

Doris! Doris! That’s who was missing, Pompeia’s maid Doris! The last time Aurelia had seen her was an hour ago. Where was she? What was she up to? Was she smuggling milk on the sly to the kitchen staff, or had she guzzled so much milk herself that she was somewhere in a corner sleeping or sicking up?

Off went Aurelia, oblivious to the greetings and invitations to join various groups, nose down on a trail only she could follow.

Not in the dining room, no. Nor anywhere in the peristyle. Definitely not in the atrium or the vestibule. Which left the reception room to search before starting into other territory.

Perhaps because Caesar’s saffron tent above the peristyle was such a novelty, most of the guests had decided to gather there, and those who remained were ensconced in the dining room or the atrium, both opening directly onto the garden. Which meant that the reception room, enormous and difficult to light because of its shape, was quite deserted. The Domus Publica had proved once more that two hundred visitors and a hundred servants couldn’t crowd it.

Aha! There was Doris! Standing at the Pontifex Maximus’s front door in the act of admitting a woman musician. But what a musician! An outlandish creature clad in the most expensive gold-threaded silk from Cos, fabulous jewels around her neck and woven through her startling yellow hair. Tucked into the crook of her left arm was a superb lyre of tortoiseshell inlaid with amber, its pegs made of gold. Did Rome own a female musician able to afford a dress or jewels or an instrument like this woman’s? Surely not, else she would have been famous!

Something was wrong with Doris too. The girl was posturing and simpering, covering her mouth with her hand and rolling her eyes at the musician, in an agony of conspiratorial glee. Making no sound, Aurelia inched her way toward the pair with her back to the wall where the shadows were thickest. And when she heard the musician speak in a man’s voice, she pounced.

The intruder was a slight fellow of no more than medium height, but he had a man’s strength and a young man’s agility; shrugging off an elderly woman like Caesar’s mother would be no difficulty. The old cunnus! This would teach her and Fabia to torment him! But this wasn’t an elderly woman! This was Proteus! No matter how he twisted and turned, Aurelia hung on.

Her mouth was open and she was shouting: “Help, help! We are defiled! Help, help! The mysteries are profaned! Help, help!”

Women came running from everywhere, automatically moving to obey Caesar’s mother as people had snapped to obey her all of her life. The musician’s lyre fell jangling to the floor, both the musician’s arms were pinioned, and sheer numbers defeated him. At which moment Aurelia let go, turned to face her audience.

“This,” she said harshly, “is a man.”

By now most of the guests were assembled to stand horror-struck as Aurelia pulled off the golden wig, ripped the flimsy and costly gown away to reveal a man’s hairy chest. Publius Clodius.

Someone began to scream sacrilege. Wails and cries and shrieks swelled to such a pitch that the entire Via Nova was soon craning from every window; women fled in all directions howling that the rites of Bona Dea were polluted and profaned while the slaves bolted to their quarters, the musicians prostrated themselves tearing out hair and scratching breasts, and the three adult Vestal Virgins flung their veils over their devastated faces to keen their grief and terror away from all eyes save those belonging to Bona Dea.

By now Aurelia was scrubbing at Clodius’s insanely laughing face with a part of her robe, smearing black and white and red into a streaky muddy brown.

“Witness this!” she roared in a voice she had never possessed. “I call upon all of you to bear witness that this male creature who violates the mysteries of Bona Dea is Publius Clodius!”

And suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore. Clodius stopped his cackling, stared at the stony and beautiful face so close to his own, and knew a terrible fear. He was back inside that anonymous room in Antioch, only this time it wasn’t his testicles he was afraid of losing; this time it was his life. Sacrilege was still punishable by death the old way, and not even an Olympus of every great advocate Rome had ever produced would get him off. Light broke on him in a paroxysm of horror: Aurelia was the Bona Dea!

He marshaled every vestige of strength he owned, tore free of the imprisoning arms, then bolted for the passageway which led between the Pontifex Maximus’s suite of rooms and the triclinium. Beyond lay the private peristyle garden, freedom beckoning from the far side of a high brick wall. Like a cat he leaped for its top, scrabbled and clawed his way up, twisted his body to follow his arms, and fell over the wall onto the vacant ground below.

“Bring me Pompeia Sulla, Fulvia, Clodia and Clodilla!” snapped Aurelia. “They are suspect, and I will see them!” She bundled up the gold-tissue dress and the wig and handed them to Polyxena. “Put those away safely, they’re evidence.”

The gigantic Gallic freedwoman Cardixa stood silently waiting for orders, and was instructed to see the ladies off the premises as expeditiously as possible. The rites could not continue, and Rome was plunged into a religious crisis more serious than any in living memory.

“Where is Fabia?”

Terentia appeared, wearing a look Publius Clodius would not have cared to see. “Fabia is gathering her wits, she’ll be better soon. Oh, Aurelia, Aurelia, this is shocking! What can we do?”

“We try to repair the damage, if not for our own sakes, for the sake of every Roman woman. Fabia is the Chief Vestal, the Good Goddess is in her hand. Kindly tell her to go to the Books and discover what we can do to avert disaster. How can we bury Bona Dea unless we expiate this sacrilege? And if Bona Dea is not buried, she will not rise again in May. The healing herbs will not come up, no babies will be born free of blemish, every snake creature will move away or die, the seed will perish, and black dogs will eat corpses in the gutters of this accursed city!”

This time the audience didn’t scream. Moans and sighs rose and whispered away into the blacknesses behind pillars, inside corners, within every heart. The city was accursed.

A hundred hands pushed Pompeia, Fulvia, Clodia and Clodilla to the front of the dwindling crowd, where they stood weeping and staring about in confusion; none of them had been anywhere near when Clodius was discovered, they knew only that Bona Dea had been violated by a man.

The mother of the Pontifex Maximus looked them over, as just as she was merciless. Had they been a part of the conspiracy? But every pair of eyes was wide, frightened, utterly bewildered. No, Aurelia decided, they had not been in on it. No woman above a silly Greek slave like Doris would consent to something so monstrous, so inconceivable. And what had Clodius promised that idiotic girl of Pompeia’s to obtain her co-operation?

Doris stood between Servilia and Cornelia Sulla, weeping so hard that nose and mouth ran faster than eyes, Her turn in a moment, but first the guests.

“Ladies, all of you except the four front rows please go outside. This house is unholy, your presence here unlucky. Wait in the street for your conveyances, or walk home in groups. Those at the front I need to bear witness, for if this girl is not put to the test now, she will have to wait to be questioned by men, and men are foolish when they question young women.”

Doris’s turn came.

“Wipe your face, girl!” barked Aurelia. “Go on, wipe your face and compose yourself! If you do not, I’ll have you whipped right here!”

The girl’s homespun gown came into play, the command obeyed because Aurelia’s word was absolute law.

“Who put you up to this, Doris?”

“He promised me a bag of gold and my freedom, domina!’’

“Publius Clodius?”

“Yes.”

“Was it only Publius Clodius, or was someone else involved?”

What could she say to lessen the coming punishment? How could she shrug off at least a part of the blame? Doris thought with the speed and cunning of one who had been sold into slavery after pirates had raided her Lycian fishing village; she had been twelve years old, ripe for rape and suitable for sale. Between that time and Pompeia Sulla she had endured two other mistresses, older and colder than the wife of the Pontifex Maximus. Life in service to Pompeia had turned out to be an Elysian Field, and the little chest beneath Doris’s cot in her very own bedroom within Pompeia’s quarters was full of presents; Pompeia was as generous as she was careless. But now nothing mattered to Doris except the prospect of the lash. If her skin was flayed off her, Astyanax would never look at her again! If men looked, they would shudder.

“There was one other, domina,” she whispered.

“Speak up so you can be heard, girl! Who else is involved?’’

“My mistress, domina. The lady Pompeia Sulla.”

“In what way?’’ asked Aurelia, ignoring a gasp from Pompeia and a huge murmur from the witnesses.

“If there are men present, domina, you never let the lady Pompeia out of Polyxena’s sight. I was to let Publius Clodius in and take him upstairs, where they could be alone together.”

“It’s not true!” wailed Pompeia. “Aurelia, I swear by all our Gods that it isn’t true! I swear it by Bona Dea! I swear it, I swear it, I swear it!”

But the slave girl clung stubbornly to her story of assignation; she would not be budged.

An hour later Aurelia gave up. “The witnesses may go home. Wife and sisters of Publius Clodius, you too may go. Be prepared to answer questions tomorrow when one of us will see you. This is a women’s affair; you will be dealt with by women.”

Pompeia Sulla had collapsed to the ground long since, where she lay sobbing.

“Polyxena, take the wife of the Pontifex Maximus to her own rooms and do not leave her side for one instant.”

“Mama!” cried Pompeia to Cornelia Sulla as Polyxena helped her to her feet. “Mama, help me! Please help me!”

Another beautiful but stony face. “No one can help you save Bona Dea. Go with Polyxena, Pompeia.”

Cardixa had returned from her duty at the great bronze doors; she had let the tearful guests out, their creased and wilting robes whipping about their bodies in a bitter wind, unable to walk from shock yet doomed to wait a long time for vanished litters and escorts certain they wouldn’t be needed until dawn. So they sat down on the verge of the Via Sacra and huddled together to keep out the cold, gazing through horrified eyes at a city accursed.

“Cardixa, lock Doris up.”

“What will happen to me?’’ the girl cried as she was marched away. “Domina, what will happen to me?”

“You will answer to Bona Dea.”

The hours of the night wore down toward the thin misery of cock-crow; there were left Aurelia, Servilia and Cornelia Sulla.

“Come to Caesar’s office and sit. We’ll drink some wine”—a sad laugh—”but we won’t call it milk.”

The wine, from Caesar’s stock on a console table, helped a little; Aurelia passed a trembling hand across her eyes, pulled her shoulders back and looked at Cornelia Sulla.

“What do you think, avia?” Pompeia’s mother asked.

“I think the girl Doris was lying.”

“So do I,” said Servilia.

“I’ve always known my poor daughter was very stupid, but I have never known her to be malicious or destructive. She just wouldn’t have the courage to assist a man to violate the Bona Dea, she really wouldn’t.”

“But that’s not what Rome is going to think,” said Servilia.

“You’re right, Rome will believe in assignations during a most holy ceremony, and gossip. Oh, it is a nightmare! Poor Caesar, poor Caesar! To have this happen in his house, with his wife! Ye gods, what a feast for his enemies!” cried Aurelia.

“The beast has two heads. The sacrilege is more terrifying, but the scandal may well prove more memorable,” from Servilia.

“I agree.” Cornelia Sulla shuddered. “Can you imagine what’s being said along the Via Nova this moment, between the uproar which went on here and the servants all dying to spread the tale as they hunt for litter bearers through the taverns? Aurelia, how can we show the Good Goddess that we love her?”

“I hope Fabia and Terentia—what an excellent and sensible woman she is!—are busy finding that out right now.”

“And Caesar? Does he know yet?” asked Servilia, whose mind never strayed far from Caesar.

“Cardixa has gone to tell him. They speak Arvernian Gallic together if there’s anyone else present.”

Cornelia Sulla rose to her feet, lifting her brows to Servilia in a signal that it was time to go. “Aurelia, you look so tired. There’s nothing more we can do. I’m going home to bed, and I hope you intend to do the same.”

*

Very correctly, Caesar did not return to the Domus Publica before dawn. He went instead first to the Regia, where he prayed and sacrificed upon the altar and lit a fire in the sacred hearth. After that he set himself up in the official domain of the Pontifex Maximus just behind the Regia, lit all the lamps, sent for the Regia priestlings, and made sure there were enough chairs for the pontifices at present in Rome. Then he summoned Aurelia, knowing – she would be waiting for that summons.

She looked old! His mother, old?

“Oh, Mater, I am so sorry,” he said, helping her into the most comfortable chair.

“Don’t be sorry for me, Caesar. Be sorry for Rome. It is a terrible curse.”

“Rome will mend, all her religious colleges will see to that. More importantly, you must mend. I know how much holding the Bona Dea meant to you. What a wretched, idiotic, bizarre business!”

“One might expect some rude fellow from the Subura to climb a wall out of drunken curiosity during the Bona Dea, but I cannot understand Publius Clodius! Oh yes, I know he was brought up by that doting fool Appius Claudius—and I am aware Clodius is a mischief-maker. But to disguise himself as a woman to violate Bona Dea? Consciously to commit sacrilege? He must be mad!”

Caesar shrugged. “Perhaps he is, Mater. It’s an old family, and much intermarried. The Claudii Pulchri do have their quirks! They’ve always been irreverent—look at the Claudius Pulcher who drowned the sacred chickens and then lost the battle of Drepana during our first war against Carthage—not to mention putting your daughter the Vestal in your illegal triumphal chariot! An odd lot, brilliant but unstable. As is Clodius, I think.”

“To violate Bona Dea is far worse than violating a Vestal.”

“Well, according to Fabia he tried to do that too. Then when he didn’t succeed he accused Catilina.” Caesar sighed, shrugged. “Unfortunately Clodius’s lunacy is of the sane kind. We can’t brand him a maniac and shut him up.”

“He will be tried at law?”

“Since you unmasked him in front of the wives and daughters of consulars, Mater, he will have to be tried.”

“And Pompeia?”

“Cardixa said you believed her innocent of complicity.”

“I do. So do Servilia and her mother.”

“Therefore it boils down to Pompeia’s word against a slave girl’s—unless, of course, Clodius too implicates her.”

“He won’t do that,” said Aurelia grimly.

“Why?”

“He would then have no choice but to admit that he committed sacrilege. Clodius will deny everything.”

“Too many of you saw him.”

“Caked in face paint. I rubbed at it, and revealed Clodius. But I think a parcel of Rome’s best advocates could make most of the witnesses doubt their eyes.”

“What you are actually saying, I think, is that it would be better for Rome if Clodius were acquitted.”

“Oh, yes. The Bona Dea belongs to women. She won’t thank Rome’s men for exacting punishment in her name.”

“He can’t be allowed to escape, Mater. Sacrilege is public.”

“He will never escape, Caesar. Bona Dea will find him and take him in her own good time.” Aurelia got up. “The pontifices will be arriving soon, I’ll go. When you need me, send for me.”

Catulus and Vatia Isauricus came in not long after, and Mamercus so quickly behind them that Caesar said nothing until all three were seated.

“I never cease to be amazed, Pontifex Maximus, at how much information you can fit into one sheet of paper,” said Catulus, “and always so logically expressed, so easy to assimilate.”

“But not,” said Caesar, “a pleasure to read.”

“No, not that, this time.”

Others were stepping through the door: Silanus, Acilius Glabrio, Varro Lucullus, next year’s consul Marcus Valerius Messala Niger, Metellus Scipio, and Lucius Claudius the Rex Sacrorum.

“There are no others at present in Rome. Do you agree we may start, Quintus Lutatius?’’ Caesar asked.

“We may start, Pontifex Maximus.”

“You already have an outline of the crisis in my note, but I will have my mother tell you exactly what happened. I am aware it ought to be Fabia, but at the moment she and the other adult Vestals are searching the Books for the proper rituals of expiation.”

“Aurelia will be satisfactory, Pontifex Maximus.”

So Aurelia came and told her story, crisply, succinctly, with eminent good sense and great composure. Such a relief! Caesar, men like Catulus were suddenly realizing, took after his mother.

“You will be prepared to testify in court that the man was Publius Clodius?” asked Catulus.

“Yes, but under protest. Let Bona Dea have him.”

They thanked her uneasily; Caesar dismissed her.

“Rex Sacrorum, I ask for your verdict first,” said Caesar then.

“Publius Clodius nefas esse.”

“Quintus Lutatius?”

“Nefas esse.’’

And so it went, every man declaring that Publius Clodius was guilty of sacrilege.

Today there were no undercurrents arising out of personal feuds or grudges. All the priests were absolutely united, and grateful for a firm hand like Caesar’s. Politics demanded enmity, but a religious crisis did not. It affected everyone equally, needed union.

“I will direct the Fifteen Custodians to look at the Prophetic Books immediately,” said Caesar, “and consult the College of Augurs for their opinion. The Senate will meet and ask us for an opinion, and we must be ready.”

“Clodius will have to be tried,” said Messala Niger, whose flesh crawled at the very thought of what Clodius had done.

“That will require a decree of recommendation from the Senate and a special bill in the Popular Assembly. The women are against it, but you’re right, Niger. He must be tried. However, the rest of this month will be expiatory, not retaliatory, which means the consuls of next year will inherit the business.”

“And what of Pompeia?” asked Catulus when no one else would.

“If Clodius does not implicate her—and my mother seems to think he will not—then her part in the sacrilege rests upon the testimony of a slave witness herself involved,” Caesar answered, voice clinical. “That means she cannot be publicly condemned.”

“Do you feel she was implicated, Pontifex Maximus?”

“No, I do not. Nor does my mother, who was there. The slave girl is anxious to save her skin, which is understandable. Bona Dea will demand her death—which she has not yet realized—but that is not in our hands. It’s women’s business.”

“What of Clodius’s wife and sisters?” asked Vatia Isauricus.

“My mother says they’re innocent.”

“Your mother is right,” said Catulus. “No Roman woman would profane the mysteries of Bona Dea, even Fulvia or Clodia.”

“However, I still have something to do about Pompeia,” said Caesar, beckoning to a priestling-scribe holding tablets. “Take this down: ‘To Pompeia Sulla, wife of Gaius Julius Caesar, Pontifex Maximus of Rome: I hereby divorce you and send you home to your brother. I make no claim on your dowry.’ ”

Nobody said a word, nor found the courage to speak even after the terse document was presented to Caesar for his seal.

Then as the bearer of the waxen note left to deliver it at the Domus Publica, Mamercus spoke.

“My wife is her mother, but she will not have Pompeia.”

“Nor should she be asked to,” said Caesar coolly. “That is why I have directed that she be sent to her elder brother, who is her paterfamilias. He’s governing Africa Province, but his wife is here. Whether they want her or not, they must take her.”

It was Silanus who finally asked the question everyone burned to. “Caesar, you say you believe Pompeia innocent of any complicity. Then why are you divorcing her?”

The fair brows rose; Caesar looked genuinely surprised. “Because Caesar’s wife, like all Caesar’s family, must be above suspicion,” he said.

And some days later when the question was repeated in the House, he gave exactly the same answer.

*

Fulvia slapped Publius Clodius from one side of his face to the other until his lip split and his nose bled.

“Fool!” she growled with every blow. “Fool! Fool! Fool!”

He didn’t attempt to fight back, nor to appeal to his sisters, who stood watching in anguished satisfaction.

“Why?” asked Clodia when Fulvia was done.

It was some time before he could answer, when the bleeding was staunched and the tears ceased to flow. Then he said, “I wanted to make Aurelia and Fabia suffer.”

“Clodius, you’ve blighted Rome! We are accursed!” cried Fulvia.

“Oh, what’s the matter with you?” he yelled. “A parcel of women getting rid of their resentment of men, what’s the sense in that? I saw the whips! I know about the snakes! It’s a lot of absolute nonsense!”

But that only made matters worse; all three women flew at him, Clodius was slapped and punched again.

“Bona Dea,” said Clodilla between her teeth, “is not a pretty Greek statue! Bona Dea is as old as Rome, she is ours, she is the Good Goddess. Every woman who was there to be a part of your defilement and who is pregnant will have to take the medicine.”

“And that,” said Fulvia, beginning to weep, “includes me!”

“No!”

“Yes, yes, yes!” cried Clodia, administering a kick. “Oh, Clodius, why? There must be thousands of ways to revenge yourself on Aurelia and Fabia! Why commit sacrilege? You’re doomed!”

“I didn’t think, it seemed so perfect!” He tried to take Fulvia’s hand. “Please don’t harm our child!”

“Don’t you understand yet?” she shrieked, wrenching away. “You harmed our child! It would be born deformed and monstrous, I must take the medicine! Clodius, you are accursed!”

“Get out!” Clodilla shouted. “On your belly like a snake!”

Clodius crawled away on his belly, snakelike.

*

“There will have to be another Bona Dea,” said Terentia to Caesar when she, Fabia and Aurelia came to see him in his study. “The rites will be the same, though with the addition of a piacular sacrifice. The girl Doris will be punished in a certain way no woman can reveal, even to the Pontifex Maximus.”

Thank all the Gods for that, thought Caesar, having no trouble in imagining who would constitute the piacular sacrifice. “So you need a law to make one of the coming comitial days nefasti, and you are asking the Pontifex Maximus to procure it from the Religious Assembly of seventeen tribes?”

“That is correct,” said Fabia, thinking she must speak if Caesar were not to deem her dependent upon two women outside the Vestal College. “Bona Dea must be held on dies nefasti, and there are no more until February.”

“You’re right, Bona Dea can’t remain awake until February. Shall I legislate for the sixth day before the Ides?”

“That would be excellent,” said Terentia, sighing.

“Bona Dea will go happily to sleep,” comforted Caesar. “I’m sorry that any woman at the feast who is newly pregnant will have to make a harder and a very special sacrifice. I say no more, it is women’s business. Remember too that no Roman woman was guilty of sacrilege. Bona Dea was profaned by a man and a non-Roman girl.”

“I hear,” Terentia announced, rising, “that Publius Clodius likes revenge. But he will not like Bona Dea’s revenge.”

Aurelia remained seated, though she did not speak until after the door had closed behind Terentia and Fabia.

“I’ve sent Pompeia packing,” she said then.

“And all her possessions too, I hope?”

“That’s being attended to this moment. Poor thing! She wept so, Caesar. Her sister-in-law doesn’t want to take her, Cornelia Sulla refuses—it’s so sad.”

“I know.”

” ‘Caesar’s wife, like all Caesar’s family, must be above suspicion,’ ” Aurelia quoted.

“Yes.”

“It seems wrong to me to punish her for something she knew nothing about, Caesar.”

“And wrong to me, Mater. Nevertheless, I had no choice.”

“I doubt your colleagues would have objected had you elected to keep her as your wife.”

“Probably not. But I objected.”

“You’re a hard man.”

“A man who isn’t hard, Mater, is under the thumb of some woman or other. Look at Cicero and Silanus.”

“They say,” said Aurelia, expanding the subject, “that Silanus is failing fast.”

“I believe it, if the Silanus I saw this morning is anything to go by.”

“You may have cause to regret that you will be divorced at the same moment as Servilia is widowed.”

“The time to worry about that is when my ring goes on her wedding finger.”

“In some ways it would be a very good match,” she said, dying to know what he really thought.

“In some ways,” he agreed, smiling inscrutably.

“Can you do nothing for Pompeia beyond sending her dowry and possessions with her?”

“Why should I?”

“No valid reason, except that her punishment is undeserved, and she will never find another husband. What man would espouse a woman whose husband suspects she connived at sacrilege?”

“That’s a slur on me, Mater.”

“No, Caesar, it is not! You know she isn’t guilty, but in divorcing her you have not indicated that to the rest of Rome.”

“Mater, you are fast outwearing your welcome,” he said gently.

She got up immediately. “Nothing?” she asked.

“I will find her another husband.”

“Who could be prevailed upon to marry her after this?”

“I imagine Publius Vatinius would be delighted to marry her. The granddaughter of Sulla is a great prize for one whose own grandparents were Italians.”

Aurelia turned this over in her mind, then nodded. “That,” she said, “is an excellent idea, Caesar. Vatinius was such a doting husband to Antonia Cretica, and she was at least as stupid as poor Pompeia. Oh, splendid! He will be an Italian husband, keep her close. She’ll be far too busy to have time for the Clodius Club.”

“Go away, Mater!” said Caesar with a sigh.

*

The second Bona Dea festival passed off without a hitch, but it took a long time for feminine Rome to settle down, and there were many newly pregnant women throughout the city who followed the example of those present at the first ceremony; the Vestals dispensed the rye medicine until their stocks were very low. The number of male babies abandoned on the shards of the Mons Testaceus was unprecedented, and for the first time in memory no barren couples took them to keep and rear; every last one died unwanted. The city ran with tears and put on mourning until May Day, made worse because the seasons were so out of kilter with the calendar that the snakes would not awaken until later, so who would know whether the Good Goddess had forgiven?

Publius Clodius, the perpetrator of all this misery and panic, was shunned and spat upon. Time alone would heal the religious crisis, but the sight of Publius Clodius was a perpetual reminder. Nor would he do the sensible thing, quit the city; he brazened it out, protesting that he was innocent, that he had never been there.

It also took time for Fulvia to forgive him, though she did after the ordeal of aborting her pregnancy had faded, but only because she saw for herself that he was as grief stricken about it as she. Then why?

“I didn’t think, I just didn’t think!” he wept into her lap. “It seemed such a lark.”

“You committed sacrilege!”

“I didn’t think of it like that, I just didn’t!” He lifted his head to gaze at her out of red-rimmed, swollen eyes. “I mean, it’s only some silly old women’s binge—everyone gets stinking drunk and makes love or masturbates or something—I just didn’t think, Fulvia!”

“Clodius, the Bona Dea isn’t like that. It’s sacred! I can’t tell you what exactly it is, I’d shrivel up and give birth to snakes for the rest of time if I did! Bona Dea is for us! All the other Gods of women are for men too, Juno Lucina and Juno Sospita and the rest, but Bona Dea is ours alone. She takes care of all those women’s things men can’t know, wouldn’t want to know. If she doesn’t go to sleep properly she can’t wake properly, and Rome is more than men, Clodius! Rome is women too!”

“They’ll try me and convict me, won’t they?”

“So it seems, though none of us wants that. It means men are sneaking in where men do not belong, they are usurping Bona Dea’s godhead.” Fulvia shivered uncontrollably. “It isn’t a trial at the hands of men terrifies me, Clodius. It’s what Bona Dea will do to you, and that can’t be bought off the way a jury can.”

“There’s not enough money in Rome to buy off this jury.”

But Fulvia simply smiled. “There will be enough money when the time comes. We women don’t want it. Perhaps if it can be averted, Bona Dea will forgive. What she won’t forgive is the world of men taking over her prerogatives.”

*

Just returned from his legateship in Spain, Publius Vatinius jumped at the chance to marry Pompeia.

“Caesar, I am very grateful,” he said, smiling. “Naturally you couldn’t keep her as your wife, I understand that. But I also know that you wouldn’t offer her to me if you thought her a party to the sacrilege.”

“Rome may not be so charitable, Vatinius. There are many who think I divorced her because she was intriguing with Clodius.”

“Rome doesn’t matter to me, your word does. My children will be Antonii and Cornelii! Only tell me how I can repay you.”

“That,” said Caesar, “will be easy, Vatinius. Next year I go to a province, and the year after I’ll be standing for consul. I want you to stand for the tribunate of the plebs at the same elections.” He sighed. “With Bibulus in my year, there is a strong possibility that I’ll have him as my consular colleague. The only other nobleman of any consequence in our year is Philippus, and I believe that for the time being the Epicurean will outweigh the politician in his case. He hasn’t enjoyed his praetorship. The men who have been praetor earlier are pathetic. Therefore I may well need a good tribune of the plebs, if Bibulus is to be consul too. And you, Vatinius,” Caesar ended cheerfully, “will be an extremely able tribune of the plebs.”

“A gnat versus a flea.”

“The nice thing about fleas,” said Caesar contentedly, “is that they crack when one applies a thumbnail. Gnats are far more elusive creatures.”

“They say Pompeius is about to land in Brundisium.”

“They do indeed.”

“And looking for land for his soldiers.”

“To no avail, I predict.”

“Mightn’t it be better if I ran for the tribunate of the plebs next year, Caesar? That way I could get land for Pompeius, and he would be very much in your debt. The only tribunes of the plebs he has this year are Aufidius Lurco and Cornelius Cornutus, neither of whom will prevail. One hears he’ll have Lucius Flavius the year after, but that won’t work either.”

“Oh no,” Caesar said softly, “let’s not make things too easy for Pompeius. The longer he waits the more heartfelt his gratitude will be. You’re my man corpus animusque, Vatinius, and I want our hero Magnus to understand that. He’s been a long time in the East, he’s used to sweating.”

The boni were sweating too, though they had a tribune of the plebs just entering office who was more satisfactory than Aufidius Lurco and Cornelius Cornutus. He was Quintus Fufius Calenus, who turned out to be more than a match for the other nine put together. At the start of his year, however, it was difficult to see that, which accounted for some of the despondency of the boni.

“Somehow we have to get Caesar,” said Gaius Piso to Bibulus, Catulus and Cato.

“Difficult, considering the Bona Dea,” said Catulus, shivering. “He behaved absolutely as he ought, and all of Rome knows it. He divorced Pompeia without claiming her dowry, and that remark about Caesar’s wife having to be above suspicion was so apt it’s passed into Forum lore already. A brilliant move! It says he thinks she’s innocent, yet protocol demands that she go. If you had a wife at home, Piso—or you, Bibulus!—you’d know there’s not a woman in Rome will hear Caesar criticized. Hortensia dins in my ear as hard as Lutatia dins in Hortensius’s. Quite why is beyond me, but the women don’t want Clodius sent for public trial, and they all know Caesar agrees with them. Women,” Catulus finished gloomily, “are an underestimated force in the scheme of things.”

“I’ll have another wife at home shortly,” said Bibulus.

“Who?”

“Another Domitia. Cato has fixed me up.”

“More like you’re fixing Caesar up,” snarled Gaius Piso. “If I were you, I’d stay single. That’s what I’m going to do.”

To all of which Cato vouchsafed no comment, simply sat with his chin on his hand looking depressed.

The year had not turned out to be a wonderful success for Cato, who had been compelled to learn yet another lesson the hard way: that to exhaust one’s competition early on left one with no adversaries to shine against. Once Metellus Nepos left to join Pompey the Great, Cato’s term as a tribune of the plebs dwindled to insignificance. The only subsequent action he took was not a popular one, especially with his closest friends among the boni; when the new harvest saw grain prices soar to a record high, he legislated to give grain to the populace at ten sesterces the modius—at a cost of well over a thousand talents to the Treasury. And Caesar had voted for it in the House, where Cato had most correctly first proposed it. With a very graceful speech suggesting a huge change of heart in Cato, and thanking him for his foresight. How galling to know that men like Caesar understood perfectly that what he had proposed was both sensible and ahead of events, whereas men like Gaius Piso and Ahenobarbus had squealed louder than pigs. They had even accused him of trying to become a bigger demagogue than Saturninus by wooing the Head Count!

“We’ll have to get Caesar attached for debt,” said Bibulus.

“We can’t do that with honor,” said Catulus.

“We can if we don’t have anything to do with it.”

“Daydreams, Bibulus!” from Gaius Piso. “The only way is to prevent the praetors of this year from having provinces, and when we attempted to prorogue the present governors we were howled down.”

“There is another way,” said Bibulus.

Cato lifted his chin from his hand. “How?”

“The lots for praetorian provinces will be drawn on New Year’s Day. I’ve spoken to Fufius Calenus, and he’s happy to veto the drawing of the lots on the grounds that nothing official can be decided until the matter of the Bona Dea sacrilege is dealt with. And,” said Bibulus contentedly, “since the women are nagging that no action be taken and at least half the Senate is highly susceptible to nagging women, that means Fufius Calenus can go on vetoing for months. All we have to do is whisper in a few moneylending ears that this year’s praetors will never go to provinces.”

“There’s one thing I have to say for Caesar,” Cato barked, “and that is that he’s sharpened your wits, Bibulus. In the old days you wouldn’t have managed.”

It was on the tip of Bibulus’s tongue to say something rude to Cato, but he didn’t; he just smiled sickly at Catulus.

Catulus reacted rather strangely. “I agree to the plan,” he said, “on one condition—that we don’t mention it to Metellus Scipio.”

“Whyever not?” asked Cato blankly.

“Because I couldn’t stand the eternal litany—destroy Caesar this and destroy Caesar that, but we never do!”

“This time,” said Bibulus, “we can’t possibly fail. Publius Clodius will never come to trial.”

“That means he’ll suffer too. He’s a newly elected quaestor who won’t get duties if the lots aren’t drawn,” said Gaius Piso.

*

The war in the Senate to try Publius Clodius broke out just after the New Year’s Day fiasco in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (much improved inside since last year—Catulus had taken Caesar’s warning seriously). Perhaps because business ground to a halt, it was decided to elect new censors; two conservatives in Gaius Scribonius Curio and Gaius Cassius Longinus were returned, which promised a fairly co-operative censorship—provided the tribunes of the plebs left them alone, which was not a foregone conclusion with Fufius Calenus in office.

The senior consul was a Piso Frugi adopted into the Pupius branch from the Calpurnius branch of the family, and he was one of those with a nagging wife. He therefore adamantly opposed any trial for Publius Clodius.

“The cult of Bona Dea is outside the province of the State,” he said flatly, “and I question the legality of anything beyond what has already been done—a pronouncement by the College of Pontifices that Publius Clodius did commit sacrilege. But his crime is not in the statutes. He did not molest a Vestal Virgin, nor attempt to tamper with the persons or rites of any official Roman God. Nothing can take away from the enormity of what he did, but I am one of those who agree with the city’s women—let Bona Dea exact retribution in her own way and her own time.”

A statement which did not sit at all well with his junior colleague, Messala Niger. “I will not rest until Publius Clodius is tried!” he declared, and sounded as if he meant it. “If there is no law on the tablets, then I suggest we draft one! It isn’t good enough to bleat that a guilty man can’t be tried because our laws don’t have a pigeonhole to fit his crime! It’s easy enough to make room for Publius Clodius, and I move that we do so now!”

Only Clodius, thought Caesar in wry amusement, could manage to sit on the back benches looking as if the subject concerned everyone save him, while the argument raged back and forth and Piso Frugi came close to blows with Messala Niger.

In the midst of which Pompey the Great took up residence on the Campus Martius, having disbanded his army because the Senate couldn’t discuss his triumph until the problem of the Bona Dea was solved. His bill of divorcement had preceded him by many days, though no one had seen Mucia Tertia. And rumor said Caesar was the culprit! It therefore gave Caesar great pleasure to attend a special contio in the Circus Flaminius, a venue permitting Pompey to speak. Very poorly, as Cicero was heard to say tartly.

At the end of January, Piso Frugi began to retreat when the new censors joined the fray, and agreed to draft a bill to enable the prosecution of Publius Clodius for a new kind of sacrilege.

“It’s a complete farce,” Piso Frugi said, “but farces are dear to every Roman heart, so I suppose it’s fitting. You’re fools, the lot of you! He’ll get off, and that puts him in a far better position than if he continued to exist under a cloud.”

A good legal draftsman, Piso Frugi prepared the bill himself, which was a severe one if looked at from the point of view of the penalty—exile for life and full forfeiture of all wealth—but also contained a curious clause to the effect that the praetor chosen to preside over the special court had to hand-pick the jury himself—meaning that the court president held Clodius’s fate in his hands. A pro-Clodian praetor meant a lenient jury. A pro-conviction praetor meant the harshest jury possible.

This put the boni in a cleft stick. On the one hand they didn’t want Clodius tried at all, because the moment it was put in train the praetorian provinces would be drawn; on the other hand they didn’t want Clodius convicted because Catulus thought the Bona Dea affair outside the realm of men and the State.

“Are Caesar’s creditors at all worried?” asked Catulus.

“Oh yes,” said Bibulus. “If we can manage to keep vetoing proceedings against Clodius until March, it will really look as if the lots won’t be drawn. Then they’ll act.”

“Can we keep going another month?”

“Easily.”

*

On the Kalends of February, Decimus Junius Silanus woke from a restless stupor vomiting blood. It was many moons since he had first put the little bronze bell beside his bed, though he used it so rarely that whenever it did ring the whole house woke.

“This is how Sulla died,” he said wearily to Servilia.

“No, Silanus,” she said in a bracing tone, “this is no more than an episode. Sulla’s plight was far worse. You’ll be all right. Who knows? It might be your body purging itself.”

“It’s my body disintegrating. I’m bleeding from the bowel as well, and soon there won’t be enough blood left.” He sighed, tried to smile. “At least I managed to be consul, my house has one more consular imago.”

Perhaps so many years of marriage did count for something; though she felt no grief, Servilia was stirred enough to reach for Silanus’s hand. “You were an excellent consul, Silanus.”

“I think so. It wasn’t an easy year, but I survived it.” He squeezed the warm dry fingers. “It’s you I didn’t manage to survive, Servilia.”

“You’ve been ill since before we married.”

He fell silent, his absurdly long fair lashes fanned against sunken cheeks. How handsome he is, thought his wife, and how I liked that when I first met him. I am going to be a widow for the second time.

“Is Brutus here?” he asked some time later, lifting tired lids. “I should like to speak to him.” And when Brutus came he looked beyond the dark unhappy face to Servilia. “Go outside, my dear, fetch the girls and wait. Brutus will bring you in.”

How she detested being dismissed! But she went, and Silanus made sure she was gone before he turned his head to see her son.

“Sit down on the foot of my bed, Brutus.”

Brutus obeyed, his black eyes in the flickering lamplight shining with tears.

“Is it me you weep for?” Silanus asked.

“Yes.”

“Weep for yourself, my son. When I’m gone she’ll be harder to deal with.”

“I don’t think,” said Brutus, suppressing a sob, “that that is possible, Father.”

“She’ll marry Caesar.”

“Oh yes.”

“Perhaps it will be good for her. He’s the strongest man I have ever met.”

“Then it will be war between them,” said Brutus.

“And Julia? How will the two of you fare if they marry?”

“About the same as we do now. We manage.”

Silanus plucked feebly at the bedclothes, seemed to shrink. “Oh, Brutus, my time is here!” he cried. “So much I had to say to you, but I’ve left it until too late. And isn’t that the story of my life?”

Weeping, Brutus fled to fetch his mother and sisters. Silanus managed to smile at them, then closed his eyes and died.

The funeral, though not held at State expense, was a huge affair not without its titillating side: the lover of the widow presided over the obsequies of the husband and gave a fine eulogy from the rostra as if he had never in his life met the widow, yet knew the husband enormously well.

“Who was responsible for Caesar’s giving the funeral oration?” asked Cicero of Catulus.

“Who do you think?”

“But it isn’t Servilia’s place!”

“Does Servilia have a place?”

“A pity Silanus had no sons.”

“A blessing, more like.”

They were trudging back from the Junius Silanus tomb, which lay to the south of the city alongside the Via Appia.

“Catulus, what are we going to do about Clodius’s sacrilege?”

“How does your wife feel about it, Cicero?”

“Torn. We men ought never to have stuck our noses in, but as we have, then Publius Clodius must be condemned.” Cicero stopped. “I must tell you, Quintus Lutatius, that I am placed in an extremely awkward and delicate situation.”

Catulus stopped. “You, Cicero? How?”

“Terentia thinks I’m having a love affair with Clodia.”

For a moment Catulus could do no more than gape; then he threw his head back and laughed until some of the other mourners stared at them curiously. They looked quite ridiculous, both in black mourning toga with the thin purple stripe of the knight on the right shoulder of the tunic, officially accoutred for a death; yet the one was howling with mirth, and the other stood in what was obviously furious indignation.

“And what’s so funny?” asked Cicero dangerously.

“You! Terentia!” gasped Catulus, wiping his eyes. “Cicero, she doesn’t—you—Clodia!”

“I’ll have you know that Clodia has been making sheep’s eyes at me for some time,” said Cicero stiffly.

“That lady,” Catulus said, resuming his walk, “is harder to get inside than Nola. Why do you think Celer puts up with her? He knows how she operates! Coos and giggles and flutters her eyelashes, makes a complete fool of some poor man, then retreats behind her walls and bolts the gates. Tell Terentia not to be so silly. Clodia is probably having fun at your expense.”

“You tell Terentia not to be so silly.”

“Thank you, Cicero, but no. Do your own dirty work. I have enough to contend with in Hortensia, I don’t need to cross swords with Terentia.”

“Nor do I,” said Cicero miserably. “Celer wrote to me, you know. Well, he’s been doing that ever since he went to govern Italian Gaul!”

“Accusing you of being Clodia’s lover?” asked Catulus.

“No, no! He wants me to help Pompeius get land for his men. It’s very difficult.”

“It will be if you enlist in that cause, my friend!” said Catulus grimly. “I can tell you right now that Pompeius will get land for his men over my dead body!”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Then what are you rambling about?”

Out went Cicero’s arms; he ground his teeth. “I am not in the habit of rambling! But doesn’t Celer know that all of Rome is talking about Clodia and that new poet fellow, Catullus?”

“Well,” said Catulus comfortably, “if all of Rome is talking about Clodia and some poet fellow, then it can’t take you and Clodia very seriously, can it? Tell Terentia that.”

“Grrr!” grumped Cicero, and decided to walk in silence.

*

Very properly, Servilia left a space of some days between the death of Silanus and a note to Caesar asking for an interview—in the rooms on the Vicus Patricii.

The Caesar who went to meet her was not the usual Caesar; if the knowledge that this was likely to be a troubled confrontation had not been sufficient to cause a change, then the knowledge that his creditors were suddenly pressing certainly would have. The word was up and down the Clivus Argentarius that there would be no praetorian provinces this year, a state of affairs which turned Caesar from a likely bet into an irretrievable loss. Catulus, Cato, Bibulus and the rest of the boni, of course. They had found a way to deny provinces to the praetors after all, and Fufius Calenus was a very good tribune of the plebs. And if matters could be made worse, the economic situation achieved that; when someone as conservative as Cato saw the need to lower the price of the grain dole, then Rome was in severe straits indeed. Luck, what had suddenly become of Caesar’s luck? Or was Goddess Fortuna simply testing him?

But it seemed Servilia was not in the mood to sort out her status; she greeted him fully clad and rather soberly, then sat in a chair and asked for wine.

“Missing Silanus?” he asked.

“Perhaps I am.” She began to turn the goblet between her hands, round and round. “Do you know anything about death, Caesar?”

“Only that it must come. I don’t worry about it as long as it’s quick. Were I to suffer Silanus’s fate, I’d fall on my sword.”

“Some of the Greeks say there is a life after it.”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Not in the conscious sense. Death is an eternal sleep, of that I’m sure. We don’t float away disembodied yet continue to be ourselves. But no substance perishes, and there are worlds of forces we neither see nor understand. Our Gods belong in one such world, and they’re tangible enough to conclude contracts and pacts with us. But we don’t ever belong to it, in life or in death. We balance it. Without us, their world would not exist. So if the Greeks see anything, they see that. And who knows that the Gods are eternal? How long does a force last? Do new ones form when the old ones dwindle? What happens to a force when it is no more? Eternity is a dreamless sleep, even for the Gods. That I believe.”

“And yet,” said Servilia slowly, “when Silanus died something went out of the room. I didn’t see it go, I didn’t hear it. But it went, Caesar. The room was empty.”

“I suppose what went was an idea.”

“An idea?”

“Isn’t that what all of us are, an idea?”

“To ourselves, or to others?”

“To both, though not necessarily the same idea.”

“I don’t know. I only know what I sensed. What made Silanus live went away.”

“Drink your wine.”

She drained the cup. “I feel very strange, but not the way I felt when I was a child and so many people died. Nor the way I felt when Pompeius Magnus sent me Brutus’s ashes from Mutina.”

“Your childhood was an abomination,” he said, got up and crossed to her side. “As for your first husband, you neither loved him nor chose him. He was just the man who made your son.”

She lifted her face for his kiss, never before so aware of what constituted Caesar’s kiss because always before she had wanted it too badly to savor and dissect it. A perfect fusion of senses and spirit, she thought, and slid her arms about his neck. His skin was weathered, a little rough, and he smelled faintly of some sacrificial fire, ashes on a darkening hearth. Perhaps, her wondering mind went on through touch and taste, what I try to do is have something of his force with me forever, and the only way I can get it is this way, my body against his, him inside me, the two of us spared for some few moments all knowledge of other things, existing only in each other . . .

Neither of them spoke then until both of them had slipped in and out of a little sleep; and there was the world again, babies howling, women shrieking, men hawking and spitting, the rumble of carts on the cobbles, the dull clunk of some machine in a nearby factory, the faint tremble which was Vulcan in the depths below.

“Nothing,” said Servilia, “lasts forever.”

“Including us, as I was telling you.”

“But we have our names, Caesar. If they are not forgotten, it is a kind of immortality.”

“The only one I’m aiming for.”

A sudden resentment filled her; she turned away from him. “You’re a man, you have a chance at that. But what about me?”

“What about you?” he asked, pulling her to face him.

“That,” she said, “was not a philosophical question.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

She sat up and linked her arms about her knees, the ridge of down along her spine hidden by a great mass of fallen black hair.

“How old are you, Servilia?”

“I’ll soon be forty-three.”

It was now or never; Caesar sat up too. “Do you want to marry again?” he asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“Who?”

She turned wide eyes to stare at him. “Who else, Caesar?”

“I can’t marry you, Servilia.”

Her shock was perceptible; she cringed. “Why?”

“For one thing, there are our children. It isn’t against the law for us to marry and for our children to marry each other. The degree of blood is permissible. But it would be too awkward, and I won’t do it to them.”

“That,” she said tightly, “is a prevarication.”

“No, it isn’t. To me it’s valid.”

“And what else?”

“Haven’t you heard what I said when I divorced Pompeia?” he asked. ” ‘Caesar’s wife, like all Caesar’s family, must be above suspicion.’ ”

“I am above suspicion.”

“No, Servilia, you’re not.”

“Caesar, that’s just not so! It’s said of me that I am too proud to ally myself with Jupiter Optimus Maximus.”

“But you weren’t too proud to ally yourself with me.”

“Of course not!”

He shrugged. “And there you have it.”

“Have what?”

“You’re not above suspicion. You’re an unfaithful wife.”

“I am not!”

“Rubbish! You’ve been unfaithful for years.”

“But with you, Caesar, with you! Never before with anyone, and never since with anyone else, even Silanus!”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Caesar indifferently, “that it was with me. You are an unfaithful wife.”

“Not to you!”

“How do I know that? You were unfaithful to Silanus. Why not later to me?”

It was a nightmare; Servilia drew a breath, fought to keep her mind on these incredible things he was saying. “Before you,” she said, “all men were insulsus. And after you, all other men are insulsus.”

“I won’t marry you, Servilia. You’re not above suspicion, and you’re not above reproach.”

“What I feel for you,” she said, struggling on, “cannot be measured in terms of the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. You are unique. Not for any other man—or for a god!—would I have beggared my pride or my good name. How can you use what I feel for you against me?’’

“I’m not using anything against you, Servilia, I’m simply telling you the truth. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.”

“I am above suspicion!”

“No, you’re not.”

“Oh, I don’t believe this!” she cried, shaking her head back and forth, hands wrung together. “You are unfair! Unjust!”

And clearly the interview was over; Caesar got off the bed. “You must see it that way, of course. But that doesn’t change it, Servilia. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.”

Time went by; she could hear Caesar in the bath, apparently at peace with his world. And finally she dragged herself out of the bed, dressed.

“No bath?” he asked, actually smiling at her when she went through to the balcony service room.

“Today I’ll go home to bathe.”

“Am I forgiven?”

“Do you want to be?”

“I am honored to have you as my mistress.”

“I believe you really do mean that!”

“I do,” he said sincerely.

Her shoulders went back, she pressed her lips together. “I will think about it, Caesar.”

“Good!”

Which she took to mean that he knew she’d be back.

And thank all the Gods for a long walk home. How did he manage to do that to me? So deftly, with such horrible civility! As if my feelings were of no moment—as if I, a patrician Servilia Caepionis, could not matter. He made me ask for marriage, then he threw it in my face like the contents of a chamber pot. He turned me down as if I had been the daughter of some rich hayseed from Gaul or Sicily. I reasoned! I begged! I lay down and let him wipe his feet on me! I, a patrician Servilia Caepionis! All these years I’ve held him in thrall when no other woman could—how then was I to know he would reject me? I genuinely thought he would marry me. And he knew I thought he would marry me. Oh, the pleasure he must have experienced while we played out that little farce! I thought I could be cold, but I am not cold the way he is cold. Why then do I love him so? Why in this very moment do I go on loving him? Insulsus. That is what he has done to me. After him all other men are utterly insipid. He’s won. But I will never forgive him for it. Never!

*

Having Pompey the Great living in a hired mansion above the Campus Martius was a little like knowing that the only barrier between the lion and the Senate was a sheet of paper. Sooner or later someone would cut a finger and the smell of blood would provoke an exploratory paw. For that reason and no other it was decided to hold a contio of the Popular Assembly in the Circus Flaminius to discuss Piso Frugi’s format for the prosecution of Publius Clodius. Bent on embarrassing Pompey because Pompey so clearly wanted no part of the Clodius scandal, Fufius Calenus promptly asked him what he thought of the clause instructing the judge himself to hand-pick the jury. The boni beamed; anything which embarrassed Pompey served to diminish the Great Man!

But when Pompey stepped to the edge of the speaker’s platform a huge cheer went up from thousands of throats; apart from the senators and a few senior knights of the Eighteen, everyone had come just to see Pompey the Great, Conqueror of the East. Who over the course of the next three hours managed so thoroughly to bore his audience that it went home.

“He could have said it all in a quarter of an hour,” whispered Cicero to Catulus. “The Senate is right as always and the Senate must be upheld—that’s all he actually said! Oh, so interminably‘!”

“He is one of the worst orators in Rome,” said Catulus. “My feet hurt!”

But the torture wasn’t done, though the senators could now sit down; Messala Niger called the Senate into session on the spot after Pompey concluded.

“Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus,” said Messala Niger in ringing tones, “would you please give this House a candid opinion on the sacrilege of Publius Clodius and the bill of Marcus Pupius Piso Frugi?”

So strong was fear of the lion that no one groaned at this request. Pompey was seated among the consulars and next to Cicero, who swallowed hard and retreated into a daydream about his new city house and its decor. This time the speech took a mere hour; at its end Pompey sat down on his chair with a thump loud enough to wake Cicero with a start.

Tanned face gone crimson with the effort of trying to remember the techniques of rhetoric, the Great Man ground his teeth. “Oh, surely I’ve said enough on the subject!”

“You surely have said enough,” Cicero answered, smiling sweetly.

The moment Crassus rose to speak, Pompey lost interest and began to quiz Cicero about the more gossipy events in Rome during his absence, but Crassus hadn’t got into stride before Cicero was sitting bolt upright and paying absolutely no attention to Pompey. How wonderful! The bliss! Crassus was praising him to the skies! What a terrific job he’d done when consul to bring the Orders much closer together; knights and senators ought to be happily entwined....

“What on earth made you do that?” Caesar asked Crassus as they walked along the Tiber towpath to avoid the vegetable vendors of the Forum Holitorium, clearing up at the end of a busy day.

“Extol Cicero’s virtues, you mean?”

“I wouldn’t have minded if you hadn’t provoked him into such a long-winded reply about concord among the Orders. Though I do admit he’s lovely to listen to after Pompeius.”

“That’s why I did it. I loathe the way everyone bows and scrapes to the odious Magnus. If he looks sideways at them, they cringe like dogs. And there was Cicero sitting next to our hero, utterly wilted. So I thought I’d annoy the Great Man.”

“You did. You managed to avoid him in Asia, I gather.”

“Assiduously.”

“Which might be why some people have been heard to say that you packed yourself and Publius off in an easterly direction to avoid being in Rome when Magnus got here.”

“People never cease to amaze me. I was in Rome when Magnus got here.”

“People never cease to amaze me. Did you know that I’m the cause of the Pompeius divorce?”

“What, aren’t you?”

“For once I am absolutely innocent. I haven’t been to Picenum in years and Mucia Tertia hasn’t been to Rome in years.”

“I was teasing. Pompeius honored you with his widest grin.” The Crassus throat produced a rumble, the signal that he was about to embark upon a touchy subject. “You’re not doing too well with the loan wolves, are you?”

“I’m keeping them at bay.”

“It’s being said in money circles that this year’s praetors will never go to provinces thanks to Clodius.”

“Yes. But not thanks to Clodius, the idiot. Thanks to Cato, Catulus and the rest of the boni faction.’’

“You’ve sharpened their wits, I’ll say that.”

“Have no fear, I’ll get my province,” said Caesar serenely. “Fortune hasn’t abandoned me yet.”

“I believe you, Caesar. Which is why I’m now going to say something to you that I’ve never said to any other man. Other men have to ask me—but if you find you can’t get out from under your creditors before that province comes along, apply to me for help, please. I’d be putting my money on a certain winner.”

“Without charging interest? Come, come, Marcus! How could I repay you when you’re powerful enough to obtain your own favors?’’

“So you’re too stiff-necked to ask.”

“I am that.”

“I’m aware how stiff a Julian neck is. Which is why I’ve offered, even said please. Other men fall on their knees to beg. You’d fall on your sword first, and that would be a shame. I won’t mention it again, but do remember. You won’t be asking, because I’ve offered with a please. There is a difference.”

*

At the end of February, Piso Frugi convoked the Popular Assembly and put his bill outlining the prosecution of Clodius to the vote. With disastrous consequences. Young Curio spoke from the floor of the Well to such telling effect that the entire gathering cheered him. Then the voting bridges and gangways were erected, only to be stormed by several dozen ardent young members of the Clodius Club led by Mark Antony. They seized possession of them and defied the lictors and Assembly officials so courageously that a full-scale riot threatened. It was Cato who took matters into his own hands by mounting the rostra and abusing Piso Frugi for holding a disorderly meeting. Hortensius spoke up in support of Cato; whereupon the senior consul dismissed the Assembly and called the Senate into session instead.

Inside the packed Curia Hostilia—every senator had turned up to vote—Quintus Hortensius proposed a compromise measure.

“From the censors to the junior consul, it’s clear to me that there is a significant segment in this House determined to hie Publius Clodius before a court to answer for the Bona Dea,” said Hortensius in his most reasonable and mellow tones. “Therefore those Conscript Fathers who do not favor trial for Publius Clodius ought to think again. We are about to conclude our second month without being able to do normal business, which is the best way I know to bring government down around our ears. All because of a mere quaestor and his band of youthful rowdies! It cannot be allowed to go on! There’s nothing in our learned senior consul’s law which can’t be adjusted to suit every taste. So if this House will permit me, I will undertake to spend the next few days redrafting it, in conjunction with the two men most implacably opposed to its present form—our junior consul Marcus Valerius Messala Niger and the tribune of the plebs Quintus Fufius Calenus. The next comitial day is the fourth day before the Nones of March. I suggest that Quintus Fufius present the new bill to the People as a lex Fufia. And that this House accompany it with a stern command to the People—put it to the vote, no nonsense!”

“I am opposed!” shouted Piso Frugi, white-faced with fury.

“Oh, oh, oh, so am I!” came a high wail from the back tier; down stumbled Clodius to fall to his knees in the middle of the Curia Hostilia floor, hands clasped beseechingly in front of him, groveling and howling. So extraordinary was this performance that the entire jam-packed Senate sat stunned. Was he serious? Was he playacting? Were the tears mirth or grief? No one knew.

Messala Niger, who held the fasces for February, beckoned to his lictors. “Remove this creature,” he said curtly.

Publius Clodius was carried out kicking and deposited in the Senate portico; what happened to him after that was a mystery, for the lictors shut the doors in his screaming face.

“Quintus Hortensius,” said Messala Niger, “I would add one thing to your proposal. That when the People meet on the fourth day before the Nones of March to vote, we call out the militia. Now I will see a division.”

There were four hundred and fifteen senators in the chamber. Four hundred voted for Hortensius’s proposal; among the fifteen who voted against it were Piso Frugi and Caesar.

The Popular Assembly took the hint as well, and passed the lex Fufia into law during a meeting distinguished for its calm—and the number of militia distributed about the lower Forum.

“Well,” said Gaius Piso as the meeting dispersed, “between Hortensius, Fufius Calenus and Messala Niger, Clodius shouldn’t have a great deal of trouble getting off.”

“They certainly took the iron out of the original bill,” said Catulus, not without satisfaction.

“Did you notice how careworn Caesar’s looking?” Bibulus asked.

“His creditors are dunning him unmercifully,” said Cato with glee. “I heard from a broker in the Basilica Porcia that their bailiffs are banging on the Domus Publica door every day, and that our Pontifex Maximus can’t go anywhere without them in attendance. We’ll have him yet!”

“So far he’s still a free man,” said Gaius Piso, less optimistic.

“Yes, but we now have censors far less kindly disposed toward Caesar than Uncle Lucius Cotta,” said Bibulus. “They’re aware of what’s going on, but they can’t act before they have proof at law. That won’t happen until Caesar’s creditor’s march up to the urban praetor’s tribunal and demand repayment. It can’t be too far in the future.”

Nor was it; unless the praetorian provinces were apportioned within the next few days, Caesar on the Nones of March saw his career in ruins. He said not a word to his mother, and assumed such a forbidding expression whenever she was in his vicinity that poor Aurelia dared say nothing which had not to do with Vestal Virgins, Julia or the Domus Publica. How thin he was growing! The weight seemed suddenly to melt away, those angular cheekbones jutted as sharp as knives and the skin of his neck sagged like an old man’s. Day after day Caesar’s mother went to the precinct of Bona Dea to give saucers of real milk to any insomniac snakes, weed the herb garden, leave offerings of eggs on the steps leading up to Bona Dea’s closed temple door. Not my son! Please, Good Goddess, not my son! I am yours, take me! Bona Dea, Bona Dea, be good to my son! Be good to my son!

The lots were cast.

Publius Clodius drew a quaestorship at Lilybaeum in western Sicily, yet could not leave Rome to take up his duties there until he had undergone trial.

It seemed at first as if Caesar’s luck had not deserted him after all. He drew Further Spain as his province, which meant he was endowed with a proconsular imperium and answered to no one except the consuls of the year.

With the new governor went his stipend, the sum of money the Treasury had set aside for one year of State disbursements to hold the province safe: to pay its legions and civil servants, to keep up its roads, bridges, aqueducts, drains and sewers, public buildings and facilities. The sum for Further Spain amounted to five million sesterces, and was given as a lump to the governor; it became his personal property as soon as it was paid over. Some men chose to invest it in Rome before they left for their province, trusting that the province could be squeezed of enough to fund itself while the stipend turned over nicely in Rome.

At the meeting of the Senate which included the drawing of the lots Piso Frugi, holding the fasces again, asked Caesar if he would give a deposition to the House concerning the events on the night of Bona Dea’s first festival.

“I would be happy to oblige you, senior consul, if I had anything to tell. I do not,” Caesar said firmly.

“Oh, come, Gaius Caesar!” Messala Niger snapped. “You’re being asked very properly for a deposition because you’ll be in your province by the time Publius Clodius is tried. If any man here knows what went on, you do.”

“My dear junior consul, you just uttered the significant word—man! I wasn’t at the Bona Dea. A deposition is a solemn statement made under oath. It must therefore contain the truth. And the truth is that I know absolutely nothing.”

“If you know nothing, why did you divorce your wife?”

This time the whole House answered Messala Niger: ” ‘Caesar’s wife, like all Caesar’s family, must be above suspicion!’ ”

*

The day after the lots were drawn the thirty lictors of the Curiae met in their archaic assembly and passed the leges Curiae which endowed each of the new governors with imperium.

And on the same day during the afternoon dinner hour a small group of important-looking men appeared before the tribunal of the praetor urbanus, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, just in time to prevent his leaving for an overdue meal. With them were a larger number of far seedier individuals who fanned out around the tribunal and politely but firmly ushered the curious out of listening range. Thus ensured privacy, the spokesman of the group demanded that the five million sesterces granted to Gaius Julius Caesar be attached on their behalf as part payment of his debts.

This particular Calpurnius Piso was not cut from the same cloth as his cousin Gaius Piso; the grandson and son of two men who had made colossal fortunes out of armaments for Rome’s legions, Lucius Piso was also a close relative of Caesar’s. His mother and his wife were both Rutilias, and Caesar’s mother’s mother had been a Rutilia of the same family. Until now Lucius Piso’s path had not crossed Caesar’s very often, but they usually voted the same way in the House, and they liked each other very well.

So Lucius Piso, now urban praetor, frowned direfully at the little group of creditors and postponed a decision until he had looked carefully through every one of the huge bundle of papers presented to him. A Lucius Piso direful frown was not easy to cope with, for he was one of the tallest and swarthiest men in noble Roman circles, with enormous and bristling black brows; and when he followed that direful frown with a grimace displaying his teeth—some black, some dirty yellow—a witness’s instinctive reaction was to back away in terror, as the urban praetor looked for all the world like a ferocious man-eating something.

Naturally the usuring creditors had expected a decision to garnish on the spot, but those among them whose mouths had opened to protest, even to insist that the urban praetor hustle himself because he was dealing with pretty influential men, now decided to say nothing and come back in two days’ time, as directed.

Lucius Piso was also clever, so he didn’t close his tribunal the moment the aggrieved plaintiffs went away; dinner would have to wait. He went on conducting business until the sun had set and his little staff was yawning. By this time there were hardly any people left in the lower Forum, but there were several rather suspicious characters lurking in the Comitia well with their noses poking above the top tier. Moneylenders’ bailiffs? Definitely.

After a short conversation with his six lictors, off went Lucius Piso up the Via Sacra in the direction of the Velia, his ushers moving with unusual speed; when he passed the Domus Publica he spared it not a glance. Opposite the entrance to the Porticus Margaritaria he paused, bent down to do something to his shoe, and all six lictors clustered around him, apparently to help. Then he got to his feet and proceeded on his way, still well ahead of those suspicious characters, who had stopped when he did.

What they couldn’t see from so far behind was that the tall figure in the purple-bordered toga was now preceded by five lictors only; Lucius Piso had changed togas with his loftiest lictor and nipped within the Porticus Margaritaria. There he located an exit in its Domus Publica side and emerged into the vacant ground which the shopkeepers used as a rubbish dump. The lictor’s plain white toga he rolled up and tucked into an empty box; scaling the wall of Caesar’s peristyle garden was not work suited to a toga.

“I hope,” he said, strolling into Caesar’s study clad only in a tunic, “that you keep some decent wine in that terrifically elegant flagon.”

Few people ever saw an amazed Caesar, but Lucius Piso did.

“How did you get in?” Caesar asked, pouring wine.

“The same way rumor says Publius Clodius got out.”

“Dodging irate husbands at your age, Piso? Shame on you!”

“No, moneylenders’ bailiffs,” said Piso, drinking thirstily.

“Ah!” Caesar sat down. “Help yourself, Piso, you’ve earned the entire contents of my cellar. What’s happened?’’

“Four hours ago I had some of your creditors—the less salubrious ones, I’d say—at my tribunal demanding to garnish your governor’s stipend, and very furtive they were about it too. Their henchmen shooed everyone else away, and they proceeded to state their case in complete privacy. From which I deduced that they didn’t want what they were doing to leak back to you—odd, to say the least.” Piso got up and poured another goblet of wine. “I was watched for the rest of the day, even followed home. So I changed places with my tallest lictor and got in through the shops next door. The Domus Publica is under supervision, I saw that lot as I passed by up the hill.”

“Then I go out the way you came in. I’ll cross the pomerium tonight and assume my imperium. Once I have my imperium no one can touch me.”

“Give me an authorization to withdraw your stipend first thing in the morning, and I’ll bring it to you on the Campus Martius. It would be better to invest it here, but who knows what the boni might think of next? They really are out to get you, Caesar.”

“I’m well aware of it.”

“I don’t suppose,” said Piso, that direful frown back, “that you could manage to pay the wretches something on account?”

“I’ll see Marcus Crassus on the way out tonight.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked Lucius Piso incredulously, “you can go to Marcus Crassus? If you can, why haven’t you done so months ago—years ago?”

“He’s a friend, I couldn’t ask.”

“Yes, I can see that, though I wouldn’t be so stiff-necked myself. But then again, I’m not a Julian. Conies very hard for a Julian to be beholden, doesn’t it?”

“That it does. However, he offered, which makes it easier.”

“Write out that authorization, Caesar. You can’t send for food, and I’m famished. So it’s home for me. Besides, Rutilia will be worried.”

“If you’re hungry, Piso, I can feed you,” said Caesar, already writing. “My own staff are completely trustworthy.”

“No, you’ve a lot to do.”

The letter was finished, furled, joined with hot melted wax and sealed with Caesar’s ring. “There’s no need to go out over a wall if you’d rather a more dignified exit. The Vestals will be in their own quarters, you can go out through their side door.”

“I can’t,” said Piso. “I left my lictor’s toga next door. You can give me a leg up.”

“I’m in your debt, Lucius,” said Caesar as they entered the garden. “Rest assured I won’t forget this.”

Piso chuckled softly. “Isn’t it just as well people like moneylenders don’t know the ins and outs of Roman nobility? We may fight like cocks between ourselves, but let an outsider try to pluck our feathers, and the ranks close up. As if I’d ever let a slimy lot like that get their hands on my cousin!”

*

Julia had gone to bed, so that was one fewer painful farewell Caesar had to make. His mother was difficult enough.

“We must be grateful to Lucius Piso,” she said. “My uncle Publius Rutilius would approve, were he alive to tell.”

“That he would, dear old man.”

“You’ll have to work terribly hard in Spain to clear yourself of debt, Caesar.”

“I know how to do it, Mater, so don’t worry. And in the meantime, you’ll be safe in case abominations like Bibulus try to pass some law or other permitting creditors to collect from a man’s relatives. I’m going to see Marcus Crassus tonight.”

She stared. “I thought you wouldn’t.”

“He offered.”

Oh, Bona Dea, Bona Dea, thank you! Your snakes will have eggs and milk all year round! But aloud all she said was “Then he is a true friend.”

“Mamercus will be acting Pontifex Maximus. Keep an eye on Fabia, and make sure the little blackbird doesn’t turn into Cato. Burgundus knows what to pack for me. I’ll be at Pompeius’s hired villa, he won’t mind a little company now he’s eating grass.”

“So it wasn’t you got at Mucia Tertia?”

“Mater! How many times have I been to Picenum? Look for a Picentine and you’ll be nearer the mark.”

“Titus Labienus? Ye gods!”

“You’re quick!” He took her face between his hands and kissed her mouth. “Look after yourself, please.”

He made lighter work of the wall than either Lucius Piso or Publius Clodius; Aurelia stood for quite a long time looking at it, then turned and went inside. It was cold.

Cold it was, but Marcus Licinius Crassus was exactly where Caesar thought he’d be: in his offices behind the Macellum Cuppedenis, toiling diligently away by the light of as few lamps as his fifty-four-year-old eyes would tolerate, a scarf round his neck and a shawl draped across his shoulders.

“You deserve every sestertius you make,” said Caesar, coming into the vast room so soundlessly that Crassus jumped when he spoke.

“How did you get in?”

“Exactly the same question I asked Lucius Piso earlier this evening. He climbed over my peristyle wall. I picked the lock.”

“Lucius Piso climbed your peristyle wall?”

“To avoid the bailiffs all around my house. That portion of my creditors who were not recommended either by you or by my Gadetanian friend Balbus went to Piso’s tribunal and petitioned to attach my gubernatorial stipend.”

Crassus leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “Your luck really is phenomenal, Gaius. You get the province you wanted, and your more dubious creditors petition your cousin. How much do you want?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“You must know!”

“It was the one question I forgot to ask Piso.”

“If that isn’t typical! Were you anyone else, I’d toss you in the Tiber as the worst bet in the world. But somehow I know in my bones that you’re going to be richer than Pompeius. No matter how far you fall, you land on your feet every time.”

“It must be more than five million, because they asked for the whole sum.”

“Twenty million,” said Crassus instantly.

“Explain.”

“A quarter of twenty million would see them make a worthwhile profit, since you’ve been on compound interest for at least three years. You probably borrowed three million all up.”

“You and I, Marcus, are in the wrong profession!” said Caesar, laughing. “We have to sail or march halfway round the globe, wave our eagles and swords at savage barbarians, squeeze the local plutocrats harder than a child a puppy, make ourselves thoroughly obnoxious to people who ought to be prospering under us, and then answer to People, Senate and Treasury the moment we get home. When all the time we could be making more right here in Rome.”

“I make plenty right here in Rome,” said Crassus.

“But you don’t lend money for interest.”

“I’m a Licinius Crassus!”

“Precisely.”

“You’re dressed for the road. Does that mean you’re off?”

“As far as the Campus Martius. Once I assume my imperium there’s not a thing my creditors can do. Piso will collect my stipend tomorrow morning and get it to me.”

“When is he seeing your creditors again?”

“The day after tomorrow, at noon.”

“Good. I’ll be at his tribunal when the moneylenders arrive. And don’t flog yourself too hard, Caesar. Very little of my money will go their way, if any at all. I’ll go guarantor for whatever sum Piso arrives at. With Crassus behind you, they’ll have to wait.”

“Then I’ll leave you in peace. I’m very grateful.”

“Think nothing of it. I may need you just as badly one day.” Crassus got up and escorted Caesar all the way down to the door, holding a lamp. “How did you see to get up here?” he asked.

“There’s always light, even in the darkest stairwell.”

“That only makes it more difficult.”

“What?”

“Well, you see,” said the imperturbable one imperturbably, “I thought that the day you become consul for the second time I’d erect a statue to you in a very public place. I was going to have the sculptor make a beast with the parts of a lion, a wolf, an eel, a weasel and a phoenix. But between landing on your feet, seeing in the dark and tomcatting around Rome, I’ll have to have the whole thing painted in tabby stripes.”

*

Since no one inside the Servian Walls kept a stable, Caesar walked out of Rome, though not by any route an enterprising usurer might have thought to watch. He ascended the Vicus Patricii to the Vicus ad Malum Punicum, turned onto the Vicus Longus and left the city through the Colline Gate. From there he struck off across the Pincian summit where a collection of wild animals amused the children in fine weather, and so came down to Pompey’s temporary dwelling place from above. It of course had stables beneath its lofty loggia; rather than wake the sleeping soldier, he made a nest for himself in some clean straw and lay wide awake until the sun came up.

His departures for provinces never seemed to be orthodox, he reflected with a slight smile. Further Spain the last time had been a mist of grief for Aunt Julia and Cinnilla, and Further Spain this time was as fugitive. A fugitive with a proconsular imperium, no less. He had it worked out in his mind already—Publius Vatinius had proven an assiduous scout for information, and Lucius Cornelius Balbus Major was waiting in Gades.

Balbus was bored, he had written to Caesar. Unlike Crassus, he did not find the making of money fulfilling in itself; Balbus hungered for some new challenge now that he and his nephew were the two wealthiest men in Spain. Let Balbus Minor mind the shop! Balbus Major was keen to study military logistics. So Caesar had nominated Balbus as his praefectus fabrum, a choice which surprised some in the Senate, though not those who knew Balbus Major. This appointee was, at least in Caesar’s eyes, far more important than a senior legate (he had asked for none), as the praefectus fabrum was a military commander’s most trusted assistant, responsible for the equipping and supplying of the army.

There were two legions in the further province, both of Roman veterans who had preferred not to come home when the war against Sertorius finally ended. They’d be in their thirties now, and very eager for a good campaign. However, two legions would not be quite enough; the first thing Caesar intended to do when he reached his domain was to enlist a full legion of auxiliaries—Spanish troops who had fought with Sertorius. Once they had his measure they’d fight for him just as happily as they had for Sertorius. And then it would be off into unexplored territory. After all, it was ridiculous to think that Rome claimed all of the Iberian Peninsula, yet hadn’t subdued a good third of it. But Caesar would.

When Caesar appeared at the top of the steps leading from the stables he found Pompey the Great sitting on his loggia admiring the view across the Tiber toward the Vatican Hill and the Janiculum.

“Well, well!” Pompey cried, leaping to his feet and seizing the unexpected visitor’s hand. “Riding?”

“No. I walked out too late to bother waking you, so it was a straw bed for me. It’s possible that I’ll have to borrow one or two horses from you when I leave, but only to take me to Ostia. Can you put me up for a few days, Magnus?”

“Delighted to, Caesar.”

“So you don’t believe I seduced Mucia?”

“I know who did that job,” Pompey said grimly. “Labienus, the ingrate! He can whistle!” Caesar was waved to a comfortable chair. “Is that why you haven’t been to see me? Or said no more than ave in the Circus Flaminius?’’

“Magnus, I’m a mere ex-praetor! You’re the hero of the age, one can’t get any closer than consulars four deep.”

“Yes, but at least I can talk to you, Caesar. You’re a real soldier, not a couch commander. When the time comes you’ll know how to die, face covered and thighs covered. Death will find nothing to expose in you that isn’t beautiful.”

“Homer. How well said, Magnus!”

“Did a lot of reading in the East, got to like it very much. Mind you, I had Theophanes of Mitylene with me.”

“A great scholar.”

“Yes, that was more important to me than the fact that he’s richer than Croesus. I took him to Lesbos with me, made him a Roman citizen in the agora at Mitylene in front of all the people. Then I freed Mitylene from tribute to Rome in his name. Went down very well with the locals.”

“As it ought. I believe Theophanes is a close relative of Lucius Balbus of Gades.”

“Their mothers were sisters. Know Balbus, do you?”

“Very well. We met while I was quaestor in Further Spain.”

“He served as my scout when I was fighting Sertorius. I gave him the citizenship—his nephew too—but there were so many I split them up between my legates so the Senate wouldn’t think I was personally enfranchising half of the Spains. Balbus Major and Balbus Minor got a Cornelius—Lentulus, I think, though not the one they’re calling Spinther these days.” He laughed joyously. “I do love clever nicknames! Fancy being called after an actor famous for playing second leads! Says what the world feels about a man, doesn’t it?”

“That it does. I’ve made Balbus Major my praefectus fabrum.”

The vivid blue eyes twinkled. “Astute!”

Caesar looked Pompey up and down blatantly. “You seem fit for an old man, Magnus,” he said with a grin.

“Forty-four,” said Pompey, patting his flat belly complacently.

He did indeed seem fit. The eastern sun had almost joined his freckles up and tried to bleach his mop of bright gold hair—as thick as ever, Caesar noted ruefully.

“You’ll have to give me a full account of what’s been going on in Rome while I’ve been away.”

“I would have thought your ears were deaf from the din of that kind of news.”

“What, from conceited squeakers like Cicero? Pah!”

“I thought you were good friends.”

“A man in politics has no real friends,” the Great Man said deliberately. “He cultivates what’s expedient.”

“Absolutely true,” said Caesar, chuckling. “You heard what I did to Cicero with Rabirius, of course.”

“I’m glad you stuck the knife in. Otherwise he’d be prating that banishing Catilina was more important than conquering the East! Mind you, Cicero has his uses. But he always seems to think that everyone else has as much time to write thousand-sheet letters as he does. He wrote to me last year, and I did manage to send him back a few lines in my own hand. So what does he do? Takes exception, accuses me of treating him coldly! He ought to go out to govern a province, then he’d learn how busy a man is. Instead, he lies comfortably on his couch in Rome and advises us military types how to conduct our business. After all, Caesar, what did he do? Gave a few speeches in the Senate and the Forum, and sent Marcus Petreius to crush Catilina.”

“Very succinctly put, Magnus.”

“Well, now that they’ve decided what to do with Clodius I should get a date for my triumph. At least this time I did the clever thing, and disbanded my army at Brundisium. They can’t say I’m sitting on the Campus Martius trying to blackmail them.”

“Don’t count on a date for your triumph.”

Pompey sat up straight. “Eh?”

“The boni are working against you, have been since they heard you were coming home. They intend to deny you everything—the ratification of your arrangements in the East, your awards of the citizenship, land for your veterans—and I suspect one of their tactics will be to keep you outside the pomerium for as long as possible. Once you can take your seat in the House you’ll be able to counter their moves more effectively. They have a brilliant tribune of the plebs in Fufius Calenus, and I believe he’s set to veto any proposals likely to please you.”

“Ye gods, they can’t! Oh, Caesar, what’s the matter with them? I’ve increased Rome’s tributes from the eastern provinces—and turned two into four!—from eight thousand talents a year to fourteen thousand! And do you know what the Treasury’s share of the booty is? Twenty thousand talents! It’s going to take two days for my triumphal parade to pass, that’s how much loot I’ve got, that’s how many campaigns I have to show on pageant floats! With this Asian triumph, I will have celebrated triumphs over all three continents, and no one has ever done that before! There are dozens of towns named after me or my victories—towns I founded! I have kings in my clientele!”

Eyes swimming with tears, Pompey leaned forward in his chair until they fell, hardly able to believe that what he had achieved was not going to be appreciated. “I’m not asking to be made King of Rome!” he said, dashing the tears away impatiently. “What I’m asking for is dog’s piss compared to what I’m giving!”

“Yes, I agree,” said Caesar. “The trouble is that they all know they couldn’t do it themselves, but they hate to give credit where credit’s due.”

“And I’m a Picentine.”

“That too.”

“So what do they want?”

“At the very least, Magnus, your balls,” Caesar said gently.

“To put where they’ve none of their own.”

“Exactly.”

This was no Cicero, thought Caesar as he watched the ruddy face harden and set. This was a man who could swat the boni into pulp with one swipe of a paw. But he wouldn’t do it. Not because he lacked the testicular endowments to do it. Time and time again he’d shown Rome that he’d dare—almost anything. But somewhere in a secret corner of his self there lurked an unacknowledged consciousness that he wasn’t quite a Roman. All those alliances with Sulla’s relatives said a lot, as did his patent pleasure in boasting of them. No, he wasn’t a Cicero. But they did have things in common. And I, who am Rome, what would I do if the boni pushed me as hard as they’re going to push Pompeius Magnus? Would I be Sulla or Magnus? What would stop me? Could anything?

*

On the Ides of March, Caesar finally left for Further Spain. Reduced to a few words and figures on a single sheet of parchment, his stipend came borne by Lucius Piso himself, and a merry visit ensued with Pompey, who was carefully brought by Caesar to see that Lucius Piso was worth cultivating. The faithful Burgundus, grizzled now, fetched the few belongings Caesar needed: a good sword, good armor, good boots, good wet-weather gear, good snow gear, good riding gear. Two sons of his old war-horse Toes, each with toes instead of uncloven hooves. Whetstones, razors, knives, tools, a shady hat like Sulla’s for the southern Spanish sun. No, not much, really. Three medium-sized chests held it all. There would be luxuries enough in the governor’s residences at Castulo and in Gades.

So with Burgundus, some valued servants and scribes, Fabius and eleven other lictors clad in crimson tunics and bearing the axes in their fasces, and Prince Masintha muffled inside a litter, Gaius Julius Caesar sailed from Ostia in a hired vessel large enough to accommodate the baggage, mules and horses his entourage made necessary. But this time he would encounter no pirates. Pompey the Great had swept them from the seas.

Pompey the Great… Caesar leaned on the stern rail between the two huge rudder oars and watched the coast of Italy slip below the horizon, his spirit soaring, his mind gradually letting the homeland and its people go. Pompey the Great. The time spent with him had proven useful and fruitful; liking for the man grew with the years, no doubt of that. Or was it Pompey had grown?

No, Caesar, don’t be grudging. He doesn’t deserve to be grudged anything. No matter how galling it might be to see a Pompey conquer far and wide, the fact remains that a Pompey has conquered far and wide. Give the man his due, admit that maybe it’s you has done the growing. But the trouble with growing is that one leaves the rest behind, just like the coast of Italia. So few people grow. Their roots reach bedrock and they stay as they are, content. But under me lies nothing I cannot thrust aside, and over me is infinity. The long wait is over. I go to Spain to command an army legally at last; I will put my hands on a living machine which in the right hands—my hands—cannot be stopped, warped, dislocated, ground down. I have yearned for a supreme military command since I sat, a boy, at old Gaius Marius’s knee and listened spellbound to a master of warfare telling stories. But until this moment I did not understand how passionately, how fiercely I have lusted for that military command.

I will lay my hands on a Roman army and conquer the world, for I believe in Rome, I believe in our Gods. And I believe in myself. I am the soul of a Roman army. I cannot be stopped, warped, dislocated, ground down.