2

If anyone thought it significant that Caesar chose to ask Pompey to act as his augur during the night watch at the auguraculum on the Capitol before New Year’s Day dawned, no one was publicly heard to comment. From the middle dark hour until the first light pearled the eastern sky, Caesar and Pompey in their scarlet-and-purple-striped togas stood together but back to back, eyes fixed upon the heavens. Caesar’s luck that the New Year was four months in front of the seasonal year, for it meant that the shooting stars in the constellation Perseus were still tracing their dribbling sparkles down the black vault; of omens and auspices there were many, including a flash of lightning in a cloud off to the left. By rights Bibulus and his augural helper ought to have been present too, but even in that Bibulus took care to demonstrate that he would not co-operate with Caesar. Instead he took the auspices at his home—quite correct, yet not usual.

After which the senior consul and his friend repaired to their respective houses, there to don the day’s garments. For Pompey, triumphal regalia, this now being permitted him on all festive occasions rather than merely at the games; for Caesar, a newly woven and very white toga praetexta, its border not Tyrian purple but the same ordinary purple it had been in the early days of the Republic, when the Julii had been as prominent as they now were again five hundred years later. For Pompey it had to be a gold senatorial ring, but for Caesar the ring was iron, as it had been for the Julii in the old days. He wore his crown of oak leaves, and the scarlet-and-purple-striped tunic of the Pontifex Maximus.

No pleasure in walking up the Clivus Capitolinus side by side with Bibulus, who never stopped muttering under his breath that Caesar would get nothing done, that if he died for it he would see Caesar’s consulship a milestone for inactivity and mundanity. No pleasure either in having to seat himself on his ivory chair with Bibulus alongside while the crowd of senators and knights, family and friends hailed them and praised them. Caesar’s luck that his flawless white bull went consenting to the sacrifice, while Bibulus’s bull fell clumsily, tried to get to its feet and splattered the junior consul’s toga with blood. A bad omen.

In the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus afterward it was Caesar as senior consul who called the Senate into session, Caesar as senior consul who fixed the feriae Latinae, and Caesar as senior consul who cast the lots for the praetors’ provinces. No surprise perhaps that Lentulus Spinther received Nearer Spain.

“There are some other changes,” the senior consul said in his normal deep voice, as the cella where the statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus stood (facing to the east) was acoustically good enough for any kind of voice to carry. “This year I will return to the custom practised at the beginning of the Republic, and order my lictors to follow me rather than precede me during the months when I do not possess the fasces.”

A murmur of approval went up, transformed into a gasp of shocked disapproval when Bibulus said, snarling, “Do what you want, Caesar, I don’t care! Just don’t expect me to reciprocate!”

“I don’t, Marcus Calpurnius!” laughed Caesar, thus throwing the discourtesy of Bibulus’s use of his cognomen into prominence.

“Anything else?” Bibulus asked, hating his lack of height.

“Not directly concerning you, Marcus Calpurnius. I have had a very long career in this House, both Senate and service to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, in whose house this House is meeting at this very moment. As flamen Dialis I joined it in my sixteenth year, then after a gap of less than two years I returned to it because I won the corona civica. Do you remember those months before Mitylene, Marcus Calpurnius? You were there too, though you didn’t win a corona civica. Now at forty years of age I am senior consul. Which gives me a total of over twenty-three years as a member of the Senate of Rome.”

His tones became brisk and businesslike. “Throughout those twenty-three years, Conscript Fathers, I have seen some changes for the better in senatorial procedure, particularly the habit we now have of a permanent verbatim record of our proceedings. Not all of us make use of these records, but certainly I do, and so do other serious politicians. However, they disappear into the archives. I have also known occasions upon which they bore little resemblance to what was actually said.”

He stopped to look into the serried rows of faces; no one bothered with special wooden tiers for Jupiter Optimus Maximus on New Year’s Day because the meeting was always a short one, comments confined to the senior consul.

“Consider too the People. Most of our meetings are held with doors wide open, enabling a small number of interested persons gathered outside to listen to us. What happens is inevitable. He who hears best relays what he has heard to those who can’t hear, and as the ripple spreads outward on the Forum pond its accuracy declines. Annoying for the People, but also annoying for us.

“I now ask you to make two amendments to our records of the proceedings of this House. The first covers both kinds of session, open doors or closed doors. Namely that the scribes transpose their notes to paper, that both consuls and all praetors—if present at the meeting concerned, of course—peruse the written record, then sign it as correct. The second covers only those sessions held with open doors. Namely that the record of the proceedings be posted at a special bulletin area in the Forum Romanum, sheltered from inclement weather. My reasons are founded in concern for all of us, no matter which side of the political or factional fence we might happen to graze. It is as necessary for Marcus Calpurnius as it is for Gaius Julius. It is as necessary for Marcus Porcius as it is for Gnaeus Pompeius.”

“In fact,” said none other than Metellus Celer, “it is a very good idea, senior consul. I doubt I’ll back your laws, but I will back this, and I suggest the House look favorably upon the senior consul’s proposal.”

With the result that everyone present save Bibulus and Cato passed to the right when the division came. A little thing, yes, but the first thing, and it had succeeded.

“So did the banquet afterward,” said Caesar to his mother at the end of a very long day.

She was bursting with pride in him, naturally. All those years had been worth it. Here he was, seven months away from his forty-first birthday, and senior consul of the Senate and People of Rome. The Res Publica. The specter of debt had vanished when he came home from Further Spain with enough in his share to allow a settlement with his creditors which absolved him from future ruin. That dear little man Balbus had trotted from one office to another armed with buckets of papers and negotiated Caesar out of debt. How extraordinary. It had never occurred to Aurelia for a moment that Caesar wouldn’t have to pay back every last sestertius of years of accumulated compound interest, but Balbus knew how to strike a bargain.

There was nothing left over to ward off another attack of Caesar’s profligate spending, but at least he owed no money from past spending. And he did have a respectable income from the State, plus a wonderful house.

She rarely thought of her husband, dead for twenty-five years. Praetor, but never consul. That crown had gone in his generation to his older brother and to the other branch. Who could ever have known the danger in bending over to lace up a boot? Nor the shock of some messenger at the door thrusting a horrible little jar at her—his ashes. And she had not even known him dead. But perhaps if he had lived he would have equipped Caesar with brakes, though she had always been aware her son had none in his nature. Gaius Julius, dearly loved husband, our son is senior consul today, and he will make a mark for the Julii Caesares no other Julius Caesar ever has. And Sulla, what would Sulla have thought? The other man in her life, though they had come no closer to indiscretion than a kiss across a bowl of grapes. How I suffered for him, poor tormented man! I miss them both. Yet how good life has been to me. Two daughters well married, grandchildren, and this—this god for my son.

How lonely he is. Once I hoped that Gaius Matius in the other ground-floor apartment of my insula would be the friend and confidant he lacks. But Caesar moved on too far too fast. Will he always do that? Is there no one to whom he can turn as an equal? How I pray that one day he’ll find a true friend. Not in a wife, alas. We women don’t have the breadth of vision nor the experience of public life he needs in a true friend. Yet that slur on him about King Nicomedes has meant that he will admit no man as an intimate, he’s too aware of what people would say. In all these years, no other rumor. You’d think that would prove it. But the Forum always has a Bibulus in it. And he has Sulla there as a warning. No old age like Sulla’s for Caesar!

I understand at last that he’ll never marry Servilia. That he never would have at any time. She suffers, but she has Brutus to vent her frustrations upon. Poor Brutus. I wish Julia loved him, but she doesn’t. How can that marriage work? A thought which clicked a bead into place inside the abacus of her mind.

But all she said was “Did Bibulus attend the banquet?”

“Oh yes, he was there. So was Cato, so was Gaius Piso and the rest of the boni. But Jupiter Optimus Maximus is a big place, and they arranged themselves on couches as far from mine as they could. Cato’s dear friend Marcus Favonius was the center of the group, having got in as quaestor at last.” Caesar chuckled. “Cicero informed me that Favonius is now known around the Forum as Cato’s Ape, a delicious double pun. He apes Cato in every way he can, including going bare beneath his toga, but he’s also such a dullard that he shambles along like an ape. Nice, eh?”

“Apt, certainly. Did Cicero coin it?”

“I imagine so, but he was suffering from an attack of modesty today, probably due to the fact that Pompeius made him swear to be polite and friendly to me, and he hates it after Rabirius.”

“You sound desolate,” she said with some irony.

“I’d really rather have Cicero on my side, but somehow I can’t see that happening, Mater. So I’m prepared.”

“For what?”

“The day he decides to join his little faction to the boni.”

“Would he go that far? Pompeius Magnus wouldn’t like it.”

“I doubt he’d ever become an ardent member of the boni, they dislike his conceit as much as they dislike mine. But you know Cicero. He’s a grasshopper with an undisciplined tongue, if there is such an animal. Here, there, everywhere, and all the time busy talking himself into trouble. Witness Publius Clodius and the six inches. Terribly funny, but not to Clodius or Fulvia.”

“How will you deal with Cicero if he becomes an adversary?”

“Well, I haven’t told Publius Clodius, but I secured permission from the priestly Colleges to allow Clodius to become a plebeian.”

“Didn’t Celer object? He refused to let Clodius stand as a tribune of the plebs.”

“Correctly so. Celer is an excellent lawyer. But as to the actuality of Clodius’s status, he doesn’t care one way or the other. Why should he? The only object of Clodius’s nasty streak at the moment is Cicero, who has absolutely no clout with Celer or among the priestly colleges. It’s not frowned on for a patrician to want to become a plebeian. The tribunate of the plebs appeals to men with a streak of the demagogue in them, like Clodius.”

“Why haven’t you told Clodius you’ve secured permission?”

“I’m not sure I ever will. He’s unstable. However, if I have to deal with Cicero, I’ll slip Clodius’s leash.” Caesar yawned and stretched. “Oh, I’m tired! Is Julia here?”

“No, she’s at a girls’ dinner party, and as it’s being held at Servilia’s, I said she could stay the night. Girls of that age can spend days talking and giggling.”

“She’s seventeen on the Nones. Oh, Mater, how times flies! Her mother has been dead for ten years.”

“But not forgotten,” Aurelia said gruffly.

“No, never that.”

A silence fell, peaceful and warm. With no money troubles to worry her, Aurelia was a pleasure, reflected her son.

Suddenly she coughed, looked at him with a peculiar gleam in her eyes. “Caesar, the other day I had need to go to Julia’s room to look among her clothes. At seventeen, birthday presents should be clothes. You can give her jewelry—I suggest earrings and necklace in plain gold. But I’ll give her clothes. I know she ought to be weaving the fabric and making them herself—I did at her age—but unfortunately she’s bookish, she’d rather read than weave. I gave up trying to make her weave years ago, it wasn’t worth the energy. What she produced was disgraceful.”

“Mater, where are you going? I really don’t give a fig what Julia does provided it isn’t beneath a Julia.”

In answer Aurelia got up. “Wait here,” she ordered, and left Caesar’s study.

He could hear her mount the stairs to the upper storey, then nothing, then the sound of her footsteps descending again. In she came, both hands behind her back. Highly amused, Caesar tried to stare her out of countenance without success. Then she whipped her hands around and put something on his desk.

Fascinated, he found himself looking at a little bust of none other than Pompey. This one was considerably better made than the ones he had seen in the markets, but it was still mass-produced in that it was of plaster cast in a mold; the likeness was a more speaking one, and the paint quite delicately applied.

“I found it tucked among her children’s clothes in a chest she probably never thought anyone would invade. I confess I wouldn’t have myself, had it not occurred to me that there are any number of little girls in the Subura who would get so much wear out of things Julia has long grown out of. We’ve always kept her unspoiled in that she’s had to make do with old clothes when girls like Junia parade in something new every day, but we’ve never allowed her to look shabby. Anyway, I thought I’d empty the chest and send Cardixa off to the Subura with the contents. After finding that, I left well alone.”

“How much money does she get, Mater?” Caesar asked, picking up Pompey and turning him round between his hands, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth; he was thinking of all those young girls clustered around the stalls in the market, sighing and cooing over Pompey.

“Very little, as we both agreed when she came of an age to need some money in her purse.”

“How much do you think this would cost, Mater?”

“A hundred sesterces at least.”

“Yes, I’d say that was about right. So she saved her precious money to buy this.”

“She must have done.”

“And what do you deduce from it?”

“That she has a crush on Pompeius, like almost every other girl in her circle. I imagine right at this moment there are a dozen girls clustered around a similar likeness of the same person, Julia included, moaning and carrying on, while Servilia tries to sleep and Brutus toils away over the latest epitome.”

“For someone who has never in her entire life been indiscreet, Mater, your knowledge of human behavior is astonishing.”

“Just because I’ve always been too sensible to be silly myself, Caesar, does not mean that I am incapable of detecting silliness in others,” Aurelia said austerely.

“Why are you bothering to show me this?”

“Well,” said Aurelia, sitting down again, “on the whole I’d have to say that Julia is not silly. After all, I am her grandmother! When I found that”—pointing at Pompey—”I started to think about Julia in a way I hadn’t done before. We tend to forget that they’re almost grown up, Caesar, and that’s a fact. Next year at this time Julia will be eighteen, and marrying Brutus. However, the older she gets and the closer that wedding comes, the more misgivings I have about it.”

“Why?”

“She doesn’t love him.”

“Love isn’t a part of the contract, Mater,” Caesar said gently.

“I know that, nor am I prone to be sentimental. I am not being sentimental now. Your knowledge of Julia is superficial because it has to be superficial. You see her often enough, but with you she presents a different face than she does to me. She adores you, she really does. If you asked her to plunge a dagger into her breast, she probably would.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “Mater, truly!”

“No, I mean it. As far as Julia is concerned, if you asked her to do that, she would assume that it was necessary for your future welfare. She’s Iphigenia at Aulis. If her death could make the winds blow and fill the sails of your life, she’d go to it without counting the cost to herself. And such,” Aurelia said deliberately, “is her attitude to marrying Brutus, I am convinced of it. She will do it to please you, and be a perfect wife to him for fifty years if he lives that long. But she won’t ever be happy married to Brutus.”

“Oh, I couldn’t bear that!” he cried, and put the bust down.

“I didn’t think you could.”

“She’s never said a word to me.”

“Nor will she. Brutus is the head of a fabulously rich and ancient family. Marrying him will bring that family into your fold, she knows it well.”

“I’ll talk to her tomorrow,” he said with decision.

“No, Caesar, don’t do that. She’ll only assume you’ve seen her reluctance, and protest that you’re wrong.”

“Then what do I do?”

An expression of feline satisfaction came over Aurelia’s face; she smiled and purred in the back of her throat. “If I were you, my son, I’d invite poor lonely Pompeius Magnus to a nice little family dinner.”

Between the dropped jaw and the smile fighting to close it, Caesar looked as he had when a boy. Then the smile won, turned into a roar of laughter. “Mater, Mater,” he said when he was able, “what would I do without you? Julia and Magnus? Do you think it’s possible? I’ve racked myself hollow trying to find a way to bind him to me, but this is one way never crossed my mind! You’re right, we don’t see them grown up. I thought I did when I came home. But Brutus was there—I just took them for granted.”

“It will work if it’s a love match, but not otherwise,” said Aurelia, “so don’t be hasty and don’t betray by word or look to either of them what hangs upon their meeting.”

“I won’t, of course I won’t. When do you suggest?”

“Wait until the land bill is settled, whichever way it goes. And don’t push him, even after they meet.”

“She’s beautiful, she’s young, she’s a Julia. Magnus will be asking the moment dinner’s over.”

But Aurelia shook her head. “Magnus won’t ask at all.”

“Why not?”

“Something Sulla told me once. That Pompeius was always afraid to ask for the hand of a princess. For that is what Julia is, my son, a princess. The highest born in Rome. A foreign queen would not be her equal in Pompeius’s eyes. So he won’t ask because he is too afraid of being refused. That’s what Sulla said—Pompeius would rather remain a bachelor than risk the injury to his dignitas a refusal would mean. So he’s waiting for someone with a princess for a daughter to ask him. It’s you will have to do the asking, Caesar, not Pompeius. Let him grow very hungry first. He knows she’s engaged to Brutus. We will see what happens when they meet, but don’t allow them to meet too soon.” She rose and plucked the bust of Pompey from the desk. “I’ll put this back.”

“No, put it on a shelf near her bed and do what you intended to do. Give her clothes away,” said Caesar, leaning back and closing his eyes in content.

“She’ll be mortified that I’ve discovered her secret.”

“Not if you scold her for accepting presents from Junia, who has too much money. That way she can continue to gaze on Pompeius Magnus without losing her pride.”

“Go to bed,” said Aurelia at the door.

“I intend to. And thanks to you, I am going to sleep as soundly as a siren-struck sailor.”

“That, Caesar, is carrying alliteration too far.”

*

On the second day of January Caesar presented his land bill to the House for its consideration, and the House shuddered at the sight of almost thirty large book buckets distributed around the senior consul’s feet. What had been the normal length of a bill was now seen to be minute by comparison; the lex Iulia agraria ran to well over a hundred chapters.

As the chamber of the Curia Hostilia was not an acoustically satisfactory place, the senior consul pitched his voice high and proceeded to give the Senate of Rome an admirably concise and yet comprehensive dissection of this massive document bearing his name, and his name alone. A pity Bibulus was uncooperative; otherwise it might have been a lex Iulia Calpurnia agraria.

“My scribes have prepared three hundred copies of the bill; time prohibited more,” he said. “However, there are enough for a copy between every two senators, plus fifty for the People. I will set up a booth outside the Basilica Aemilia with a legal secretary and an assistant in attendance so that those members of the People who wish to peruse it or query it may do so. Attached to each copy is a summary equipped with useful references to pertinent clauses or chapters in case some readers or enquirers are more interested in some provisions than in others.”

“You’ve got to be joking!” sneered Bibulus. “No one will bother reading anything half that long!”

“I sincerely hope everyone reads it,” said Caesar, lifting his brows. “I want criticism, I want helpful suggestions, I want to know what’s wrong with it.” He looked stern. “Brevity may be the core of wit, but brevity in laws requiring length means bad laws. Every contingency must be examined, explored, explained. Watertight legislation is long legislation. You will see few nice short bills from me, Conscript Fathers. But every bill I intend to present to you will have been personally drafted according to a formula designed to cover every foreseeable possibility.”

He paused to allow comment, but nobody volunteered. “Italia is Rome, make no mistake about that. The public lands of Italia’s cities, towns, municipalities and shires belong to Rome, and thanks to wars and migrations there are many districts up and down this peninsula that have become as underused and underpopulated as any part of modern Greece. Whereas Rome the city has become overpopulated. The grain dole is a burden larger than the Treasury ought to be expected to bear, and in saying this I am not criticizing the law of Marcus Porcius Cato. In my opinion his was an excellent measure. Without it, we would have seen riots and general unrest. But the fact remains that instead of funding an ever-increasing grain dole, we ought to be relieving overpopulation within the city of Rome by offering Rome’s poor more than a chance to join the army.

“We also have some fifty thousand veteran soldiers wandering up and down the country—including inside this city!—without the wherewithal to settle down in middle age and become peaceful, productive citizens able to procreate legitimately and provide Rome with the soldiers of the future, rather than with fatherless brats hanging on the skirts of indigent women. If our conquests have taught us nothing else, they have surely taught us that it is Romans who fight best, Romans who give generals their victories, Romans who can look with equanimity upon the prospect of a siege ten years long, Romans who can pick up after their losses and begin to fight all over again.

“What I propose is a law which will distribute every iugerum of public land in this peninsula, save for the two hundred square miles of the Ager Campanus and the fifty square miles of public land attached to the city of Capua, our main training ground for the legions. It therefore includes the public lands attached to places like Volaterrae and Arretium. When I go to fix my boundary stones along Italia’s traveling stock routes, I want to know that they comprise the bulk of public land left in the peninsula outside of Campania. Why not the Campanian lands too? Simply because they have been under lease for a very long time, and it would be highly repugnant to those who lease them to have to do without them. That of course includes the maltreated knight Publius Servilius, who I hope by now has replanted his vines and applied as much manure as those delicate plants can tolerate.”

Not even that provoked a remark! Because Bibulus’s curule chair was actually a little behind his own, Caesar couldn’t see his face, but found it interesting that he remained silent. Silent too was Cato, back to wearing no tunic beneath his toga since his Ape, Favonius, had entered the House to imitate him. An urban quaestor, the Ape was able to attend every sitting of the Senate.

“Without dispossessing any person at present occupying our ager publicus under the terms of an earlier lex agraria, I have estimated that the available public lands will provide allotments of ten iugera each to perhaps thirty thousand eligible citizens. Which leaves us with the task of finding sufficient land at present privately owned for another fifty thousand beneficiaries. I am counting on accommodating fifty thousand veteran soldiers plus thirty thousand of Rome’s urban poor. Not including however many veterans are inside the city of Rome, thirty thousand urban poor removed to productive allotments in rural areas will provide relief for the Treasury of seven hundred and twenty talents per year of grain dole moneys. Add the twenty thousand-odd veterans in the city, and the relief approximates the additional burden Marcus Porcius Cato’s law put on public funds.

“But even accounting for the purchase of so much privately owned land, the Treasury can supply the finance necessary because of enormously increased revenues from the eastern provinces—even if, for example, the tax-farming contracts were to be reduced by, let us say, a third. I do not expect the twenty thousand talents of outright profit Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus added to the Treasury to stretch to buying land because of Quintus Metellus Nepos’s relaxation of duties and tariffs, a munificent gesture which has deprived Rome of revenue she actually needs badly.”

Did that get a response? No, it didn’t. Nepos himself was still governing Further Spain, though Celer sat among the consulars. Time he took himself to govern his province, Further Gaul.

“When you examine my lex agraria, you will find that it is not arrogant. No pressure of any kind can be exerted upon present owners of land to sell to the State, nor is there a built-in reduction in land prices. Land bought by the State must be paid for at the value put upon it by our esteemed censors Gaius Scribonius Curio and Gaius Cassius Longinus. Existing deeds of ownership will be accepted as completely legal, with no recourse at law to challenge them. In other words, if a man has shifted his boundary stones and no one has yet quarreled with his action, then they define the extent of his property at sale.

“No recipient of a grant of land will be able to sell it or move off it for twenty years.

“And finally, Conscript Fathers, the law proposes that the acquisition and allocation of land reside with a commission of twenty senior knights and senators. If this House gives me a consultum to take to the People, then this House will have the privilege of choosing the twenty knights and senators. If it does not give me a consultum, then the privilege goes to the People. There will also be a committee of five consulars to supervise the work of the commissioners. I, however, have no part in any of it. Neither commission nor committee. There must be no suspicion that Gaius Julius Caesar is out to enrich himself, or become the patron of those the lex Iulia agraria resettles.”

Caesar sighed, smiled, lifted his hands. “Enough for today, honored members of this House. I give you twelve days to read the bill and prepare for debate, which means that the next session to deal with the lex Iulia agraria will occur sixteen days before the Kalends of February. The House will, however, sit again five days from now, which is the seventh day before the Ides of January.” He looked mischievous. “As I would not like to think any of you is overburdened, I have arranged for the delivery of two hundred and fifty copies of my law to the houses of the two hundred and fifty most senior members of this body. Please don’t forget the more junior senators! Those of you who read swiftly, send your copy on when you’ve finished. Otherwise, may I suggest the junior men approach their seniors and ask to share?”

Whereupon he dismissed the meeting and went off in the company of Crassus; passing Pompey, he acknowledged the Great Man with a grave inclination of the head, nothing more.

Cato had more to say as he and Bibulus walked out together than he had during the meeting.

“I intend to read every line of every one of those innumerable scrolls looking for the catches,” he announced, “and I suggest you do the same, Bibulus, even if you do hate reading law. In fact, we must all read.”

“He hasn’t left much room to criticize the actual law if it’s as respectable as he makes out. There won’t be any catches.”

“Are you saying you’re in favor of it?” roared Cato.

“Of course I’m not!” Bibulus snapped. “What I’m saying is that our blocking it will look spiteful rather than constructive.”

Cato looked blank. “Do you care?”

“Not really, but I was hoping for a reworked version of Sulpicius or Rullus—something we could pick at. There’s no point in making ourselves more odious to the People than necessary.”

“He’s too good for us,” said Metellus Scipio gloomily.

“No, he isn’t!” yelled Bibulus. “He won’t win, he won’t!”

*

When the House met five days later the subject bruited was the Asian publicani; this time there were no buckets full of chapters, merely a single scroll Caesar held in his hand.

“This matter has been stalled for well over a year, during which a group of desperate tax-farming men has been destroying good Roman government in four eastern provinces—Asia, Cilicia, Syria and Bithynia-Pontus,” said Caesar, voice hard. “The sums the censors accepted on behalf of the Treasury have not been met even so. Every day this disgraceful state of affairs continues is one more day during which our friends the socii of the eastern provinces are squeezed remorselessly, one more day during which our friends the socii of the eastern provinces curse the name of Rome. The governors of these provinces spend their time on the one hand placating deputations of irate socii and on the other having to supply lictors and troops to assist the tax-farmers in squeezing.

“We have to cut our losses, Conscript Fathers. That simple. I have here a bill to present to the Popular Assembly asking it to reduce the tax revenues from the eastern provinces by one third. Give me a consultum today. Two thirds of something is infinitely preferable to three thirds of nothing.”

But of course Caesar didn’t get his consultum. Cato talked the meeting out with a discussion of the philosophy of Zeno and the adaptations Roman society had forced upon it.

Shortly after dawn the next day Caesar convoked the Popular Assembly, filled it with Crassus’s knights, and put the matter to the vote.

“For,” he said, “if seventeen months of contiones on this subject are not enough, then seventeen years of contiones will not suffice! Today we vote, and that means that release for the publicani need be no further away than seventeen days from now!”

One look at the faces filling the Well of the Comitia told the boni that opposition would be as perilous as fruitless; when Cato tried to speak he was booed, and when Bibulus tried to speak the fists came up. In one of the quickest votes on record, the Treasury’s revenues from the eastern provinces were reduced by one third, and the crowd of knights cheered Caesar and Marcus Crassus until they were hoarse.

“Oh, what a relief!” said Crassus, actually beaming.

“I wish they were all that easy,” said Caesar, sighing. “If I could act as quickly with the lex agraria it would be over before the boni could organize themselves. Yours was the only one I didn’t need to call contiones about. The silly boni didn’t understand that I’d just—do it!”

“One thing puzzles me, Caesar.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, the tribunes of the plebs have been in office for a month, yet you haven’t used Vatinius at all. Now here you are promulgating your own laws. I know Vatinius. A good client I’m sure, but you’ll be charged for every service.”

“We’ll be charged, Marcus,” Caesar said gently.

“The whole Forum is confused. A month of tribunes of the plebs without a single law or fuss.”

“I have plenty of work for Vatinius and Alfius, but not yet. I’m the real lawyer, Marcus, and I love it. Legislating consuls are rare. Why should I let Cicero have all the glory? No, I’ll wait until I’m having real trouble with the lex agraria, then I’ll unleash Vatinius and Alfius. Just to confuse the issue.”

“Do I really have to read all that paper?’’ asked Crassus.

“It would be good because you might have some bright ideas. There’s nothing wrong with it from your point of view, of course.”

“You can’t trick me, Gaius. There is just no way in the world that you can settle eighty thousand people on ten iugera each without using both the Ager Campanus and the Capuan land.”

“I never thought I would trick you. But I have no intention of pulling the curtain away from that beast’s cage yet.”

“Then I’m glad I got out of latifundia farming.”

“Why did you?”

‘ Too much trouble, not enough profit. All those iugera with some sheep and some shepherds, a lot of strife chaining up the work gangs—the men in it are fribbles, Gaius. Look at Atticus. Much and all as I detest the man, he’s too clever to graze half a million iugera in Italy. They like to say they graze half a million iugera, and that’s about what it amounts to. Lucullus is a perfect example. More money than sense. Or taste, though he’d dispute it. You’ll get no opposition from me, nor from the knights. Grazing the public land under lease from the State is a recreation for senators, not a business for knights. It might give a senator his million-sesterces census, but what are a million sesterces, Caesar? A piddling forty talents! I can make that in a day on”—he grinned, shrugged—”best not say. You might tell the censors.”

Caesar picked up the folds of his toga and started to run across the lower Forum in the direction of the Velabrum. “Gaius Curio! Gaius Cassius! Don’t go home, go to your censors’ booth! I have something to report!”

Under the fascinated gaze of several hundred knights and Forum frequenters, Crassus gathered the folds of his toga about him and set off in pursuit, shouting: “Don’t! Don’t!”

Then Caesar stopped, let Crassus catch up, and the two of them howled with laughter before setting off in the direction of the Domus Publica. How extraordinary! Two of the most famous men in Rome running all over the place? And the moon wasn’t even waxing, let alone full!

*

All through January the duel between Caesar and the boni over the land bill continued unabated. At every meeting set aside in the Senate to discuss it, Cato filibustered. Interested to see whether the technique could still work at all, Caesar finally had his lictors haul Cato out of his place and march him off to the Lautumiae, the boni following in his wake applauding, Cato with his head up and the look of a martyr on his horselike face. No, it wasn’t going to work. Caesar called off his lictors, Cato returned to his place, and the filibuster went on.

Nothing else for it than to take the matter to the People without that elusive senatorial decree. He would now have to run it in contio right through the month of February, when Bibulus had the fasces and could more legally oppose the consul without them. So would the vote be in February, or March? No one really knew.

“If you’re so against the law, Marcus Bibulus,” cried Caesar at that first contio in the Popular Assembly, “then tell me why! It isn’t enough to stand there baying that you’ll oppose it, you must tell this lawful assemblage of Roman People what is wrong with it! Here am I offering a chance to people without a chance, doing so without bankrupting the State and without cheating or coercing those who already own land! Yet all you can do is say you oppose, you oppose, you oppose! Tell us why!”

“I oppose because you’re promulgating it, Caesar, for no other reason! Whatever you do is cursed, unholy, evil!”

“You’re speaking in riddles, Marcus Bibulus! Be specific, not emotional; tell us why you oppose this absolutely necessary piece of legislation! Give us your criticisms, please!”

“I have no criticisms to make, yet still I oppose!”

Considering that several thousand men had packed into the Comitia well, noise from the crowd was minimal. There were new faces in it, it was not composed entirely of knights, nor of young men belonging to Clodius, nor of professional Forum frequenters; Pompey was bringing his veterans into Rome in preparation for a vote or a fight, no one knew which. These were hand-picked men, evenly numbered across the thirty-one rural tribes and therefore immensely valuable as voters. But also handy in a fight.

Caesar turned to Bibulus and held out his hands, pleading. “Marcus Bibulus, why do you obstruct a very good and very much needed law? Can’t you find it in yourself to help the People rather than hinder them? Can’t you see from all these men’s faces that this isn’t a law the People will refuse? It’s a law that the whole of Rome wants! Are you going to punish Rome because you don’t like me, one single man named Gaius Julius Caesar? Is that worthy of a consul? Is that worthy of a Calpurnius Bibulus?”

“Yes, it’s worthy of a Calpurnius Bibulus!” the junior consul cried from the rostra. “I am an augur, I know evil when I see it! You are evil, and everything you do is evil! No good can come of any law you pass! For that reason, I hereby declare that every comitial day for the rest of this year is feriae, a holiday, and that therefore no meeting of People or Plebs can be held for the rest of the year!” He drew himself up onto his toes, fists clenched by his sides, the massive pleats of toga upon his left arm beginning to unravel because his elbow was not crooked. “I do this because I know I am right to take recourse in religious prohibitions! For I tell you now, Gaius Julius Caesar, that I don’t care if every single benighted soul in the whole of Italia wants this law! They will not get it in my year as consul!”

The hatred was so palpable that those not politically attached to either of the consuls shivered, furtively tucked thumb under middle and ring finger to let index and little fingers stick up in two horns—the sign to ward off the Evil Eye.

“Rub around him like servile animals!” Bibulus screamed to the crowd. “Kiss him, pollute him, offer yourselves to him! If that’s how much you want this law, then go ahead and do it! But you will not get it in my year as consul! Never, never, never!”

The boos began, jeers, shouts, curses, catcalls, a rising wave of vocal violence so enormous and terrifying that Bibulus pulled what he could of his toga onto his left arm, turned and left the rostra. Though only far enough away to be safe; he and his lictors stood on the Curia Hostilia steps to listen.

Then magically the abuse changed to cheers which could be heard as far away as the Forum Holitorium; Caesar produced Pompey the Great and led him to the front of the rostra.

The Great Man was angry, and anger lent him words as well as power delivering them. What he said didn’t please Bibulus, nor Cato, now standing with him.

“Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, will you lend me your support against the opponents of this law?” cried Caesar.

“Let any man dare draw his sword against your law, Gaius Julius Caesar, and I will take up my shield!” Pompey bellowed.

Then Crassus was there on the rostra too. “I, Marcus Licinius Crassus, declare that this is the best land law Rome has ever seen!” he shouted. “To those of you assembled here who might be concerned over your property, I give you my word that no man’s property is in danger, and that all men interested can expect to see a profit!”

Shaken, Cato turned to Bibulus. “Ye gods, Marcus Bibulus, do you see what I see?” he breathed.

“The three of them together!”

“It isn’t Caesar at all, it’s Pompeius! We’ve been going for the wrong man!”

“No, Cato, not that. Caesar is the personification of evil. But I do see what you see. Pompeius is the prime mover. Of course he is! What does Caesar stand to gain except money? He’s working for Pompeius, he’s been working for Pompeius all along. Crassus is in it too. The three of them, with Pompeius the prime mover. Well, it’s his veterans stand to benefit, we knew that. But Caesar threw dust in our eyes with his urban poor—shades of the Gracchi and Sulpicius!”

The cheering was deafening; Bibulus drew Cato away, walked down the Curia Hostilia steps and into the Argiletum.

“We change our tactics a little, Cato,” he said as distance made it easier to hear. “From now on we aim first for Pompeius.”

“He’s easier to break than Caesar,” said Cato between his teeth.

“Anyone is easier to break than Caesar. But don’t worry, Cato. If we break Pompeius, we break up the coalition. Once Caesar has to fight alone, we’ll get him too.”

“That was a clever trick, to declare the rest of the year’s comitial days feriae, Marcus Bibulus.”

“I borrowed it from Sulla. But I intend to go a great deal further than Sulla, I assure you. If I can’t stop their passing laws, I can render those laws illegal,” said Bibulus.

*

“I begin to think Bibulus a little demented,” said Caesar to Servilia later that day. “This sudden talk of evil is quite hair-raising. Hatred is one thing, but this is something more. There’s no reason in it, no logic.” The pale eyes looked washed out: Sulla’s eyes. “The People felt it too, and they didn’t like it. Political smears are one thing, Servilia, we all have to cope with them. But the sort of things Bibulus came out with today put the differences between us on an inhuman plane. As if we were two forces, I for evil, he for good. Exactly how it came out that way is a puzzle to me, except that perhaps total lack of reason and logic must appear to the onlooker as a manifestation of good. Men assume evil needs to be reasonable, logical. So without realizing what he did, I believe Bibulus put me at a disadvantage. The fanatic must be a force for good; the thinking man, being detached, seems evil by comparison. Is this all just too preposterous?”

“No,” she said, standing over him as he lay upon the bed, her hands moving strongly and rhythmically over his back. “I do see what you mean, Caesar. Emotion is very powerful, and it lacks all logic. As if it existed in a separate compartment from reason. Bibulus wouldn’t bend when by all the rules of conduct he should have been embarrassed, disadvantaged, humiliated, forced to bend. He couldn’t tell anyone there why he opposed your bill. Yet he persisted in opposing it, and with such zeal, such strength! I think things are going to get worse for you.”

“Thank you for that,” he said, turning his head to look at her, and smiling.

“You’ll get no comfort from me if truth gets in the way.” She ceased, sat down on the edge of the bed until he moved over and made room for her to lie down beside him. Then she said, “Caesar, I realize that this land bill is partly to gratify our dear Pompeius—even a blind man can see that. But today when the three of you were standing side by side, it looked like much more than a disinterested attempt to solve one of Rome’s most persistent dilemmas—what to do with discharged veteran troops.”

He lifted his head. “You were there,” he said.

“I was. I have a very nice hiding place between the Curia Hostilia and the Basilica Porcia, so I don’t emulate Fulvia.”

“What did you think was going on, then? Among the three of us, I mean.”

Her chin felt a trifle hairy; she must begin to pluck it. That resolution tucked away, she turned her attention to Caesar’s question. “Perhaps when you produced Pompeius it wasn’t anything more than a shrewd political move. But Crassus made me stand up straight, I assure you. It reminded me of when he and Pompeius were consuls together, except that they arranged themselves one on either side of you. Without glaring at each other, without a flicker of discomfort. The three of you looked like three pieces of the same mountain. Very impressive! The crowd promptly forgot Bibulus, and that was a good thing. I confess I wondered. Caesar, you haven’t made a pact with Pompeius Magnus, have you?”

“Definitely not,” he said firmly. “My pact is with Crassus and a cohort of bankers. But Magnus isn’t a fool, even you admit that. He needs me to get land for his veterans and ratify his settlement of the East. On the other hand, my chief concern is to sort out the financial shambles his conquest of the East has brought to pass. In many ways Magnus has hindered Rome, not helped her. Everyone is spending too much and granting too many concessions to the voters. My policy for this year, Servilia, is to get enough poor out of Rome and the grain dole line to ease the Treasury’s grain burden, and put an end to the impasse over the tax-farming contracts. Both purely fiscal, I assure you. I also intend to go a lot further than Sulla in making it difficult for governors to run their provinces like private domains belonging to them rather than to Rome. All of which should make me a hero to the knights.”

She was somewhat mollified, for that answer made sense. Yet as Servilia walked home she was conscious still of unease. He was crafty, Caesar. And ruthless. If he thought it politic, he would lie to her. He was probably the most brilliant man Rome had ever produced; she had watched him over the months when he had drafted his lex agraria, and couldn’t believe the clarity of his perception. He had installed a hundred scribes upstairs in the Domus Publica, kept them toiling to make copies of what he dictated without faltering to a room full of them scribbling onto wax tablets. A law weighing a talent, not half a pound. So organized, so decisive.

Well, she loved him. Even the hideous insult of his rejection had not kept her away. Was there anything could? It was therefore necessary that she think him more brilliant, more gifted, more capable than any other man Rome had produced; to think that was to salve her pride. She, a Servilia Caepionis, to come crawling back to a man who wasn’t the best man Rome had ever produced? Impossible! No, a Caesar wouldn’t ally himself with an upstart Pompeius from Picenum! Particularly when Caesar’s daughter was betrothed to the son of a man Pompeius had murdered.

Brutus was waiting for her.

As she wasn’t in a mood for dealing with her son, formerly she would have dismissed him curtly. These days she bore him with more patience, not because Caesar had told her she was too hard on him, but because Caesar’s rejection of her had changed the situation in subtle ways. For once her reason (evil?) had not been able to dominate her emotions (good?), and when she had returned to her house from that awful interview she had let grief and rage and pain pour out of her. The household had been shaken to its bowels, servants fled, Brutus shut in his rooms. Listening. Then she had stormed into Brutus’s study and told him what she thought of Gaius Julius Caesar, who wouldn’t marry her because she had been an unfaithful wife.

“Unfaithful!” she screamed, hair torn out in clumps, face and chest above her gown scratched to ribbons from those terrible nails. “Unfaithful! With him, only with him! But that isn’t good enough for a Julius Caesar, whose wife must be above suspicion! Do you believe that? I am not good enough!”

The outburst had been a mistake, it didn’t take her long to discover that. For one thing, it put Brutus’s betrothal to Julia on a firmer footing, no danger now that society would frown at the union of the betrothed couple’s parents—a technical incest for all that no close blood links were involved. Rome’s laws were vague about the degree of consanguinity permissible to a married pair, and were—as so often—more a matter of the mos maiorum than a specific law on the tablets. Therefore a sister might not marry a brother. But when it came to a child marrying an aunt or uncle, only custom and tradition and social disapproval prevented it. First cousins married all the time. Thus no one could have legally or religiously condemned the marriage of Caesar and Servilia on the one hand and of Brutus and Julia on the other. But no doubt whatsoever that it would have been frowned upon! And Brutus was his mother’s son. He liked society to approve of what he did. An unofficial union of his mother and Julia’s father did not carry nearly the same degree of odium; Romans were pragmatic about such things because they happened.

The outburst had also made Brutus look at his mother as an ordinary woman rather than a personification of power. And implanted a tiny nucleus of contempt for her. He wasn’t shriven of his fear, but he could bear it with more equanimity.

So now she smiled at him, sat down and prepared to chat. Oh, if only his skin would clear up a little! The scars beneath that unsightly stubble must be frightful, and they at least would never go away even if the pustules eventually did.

“What is it, Brutus?” she asked nicely.

“Would you have any objection to my asking Caesar if Julia and I could marry next month?’’

She blinked. “What’s brought this on?”

“Nothing, except that we’ve been engaged for so many years, and Julia is seventeen now. Lots of girls marry at seventeen.”

“That’s true. Cicero let Tullia marry at sixteen—not that he’s any great example. However, seventeen is acceptable to true members of the nobility. Neither of you has wavered.” She smiled and blew him a kiss. “Why not?”

The old dominance asserted itself. “Would you prefer to ask, Mama, or ought it be me?’’

“You, definitely,” she said. “How delightful! A wedding next month. Who knows? Caesar and I might be grandparents soon.”

Off went Brutus to see his Julia.

“I asked my mother if she would object to us marrying next month,” he said, having kissed Julia tenderly and ushered her to a couch where they could sit side by side. “She thinks it will be delightful. So I’m going to ask your father at the first chance.”

Julia swallowed. Oh, she had so much counted on another year of freedom! But it was not to be. And, thinking about it, wasn’t it better the way he suggested? The more time went by, the more she would grow to hate the idea. Get it over and done with! So she said, voice soft, “That sounds wonderful, Brutus.”

“Do you think your father would see us now?” he asked eagerly.

“Well, it’s grown dark, but he never sleeps anyway. The law distributing land is finished, but he’s working on some other huge undertaking. The hundred scribes are still in residence. I wonder what Pompeia would say if she knew her old rooms have been turned into offices?”

“Isn’t your father ever going to marry again?”

“It doesn’t appear so. Mind you, I don’t think he wanted to marry Pompeia. He loved my mother.”

Brutus’s poor besmirched brow wrinkled. “It seems such a happy state to me, though I’m glad he didn’t marry Mama. Was she so lovely, your mother?”

“I do remember her, but not vividly. She wasn’t terribly pretty, and tata was away a lot. But I don’t think tata truly thought of her the way most men think of their wives. Perhaps he never will esteem a wife because she’s a wife. My mama was more his sister, I believe. They grew up together, it made a bond.” She rose to her feet. “Come, let’s find avia. I always send her in first, she’s not afraid to beard him.”

“Are you?”

“Oh, he’d never be rude to me, or even curt. But he’s so desperately busy, and I love him so much, Brutus! My little concerns must seem a nuisance, I always feel.”

Well, that gentle, wise sensitivity to the feelings of others was one of the reasons why he loved her so enormously. He was beginning to deal with Mama, and after he was married to Julia he knew it would become easier and easier to deal with Mama.

But Aurelia had a cold and had gone to bed already; Julia knocked on her father’s study door.

“Tata, can you see us?” she asked through it.

He opened it himself, smiling, kissing her cheek, hand out to shake Brutus’s hand. They entered the lamplit room blinking, it was filled with so many little flames, though Caesar used the very best oil and proper linen wicks, which meant no smoke and no overwhelming odor of burning oakum.

“This is a surprise,” he said. “Some wine?”

Brutus shook his head; Julia laughed.

“Tata,” she said, “I know how busy you are, so we won’t take up much of your time. We’d like to marry next month.”

How did he manage to do that? Absolutely no change came over his face, yet a change had happened. The eyes looking at them remained exactly the same.

“What’s provoked this?” he asked Brutus.

Who found himself stammering. “Well, Caesar, we’ve been betrothed for almost nine years, and Julia is seventeen. We haven’t changed our minds, and we love each other very much. A lot of girls marry at seventeen. Junia will, Mama says. And Junilla. Like Julia, they’re betrothed to men, not boys.”

“Have you been indiscreet?” Caesar asked levelly.

Even in the ruddy lamplight Julia’s blush was noticeable. “Oh, tata, no, of course not!” she cried.

“Are you saying then that unless you marry you will succumb to indiscretion?” the advocate pressed.

“No, tata, no!” Julia wrung her hands, tears gathering. “It isn’t like that!”

“No, it isn’t like that,” said Brutus, a little angrily. “I have come in all honor, Caesar. Why are you imputing dishonor?’’

“I’m not,” Caesar said, voice detached. “A father has to ask these things, Brutus. I’ve been a man a very long time, which is why most men are both protective and defensive about their girl children. I’m sorry if I’ve ruffled your feathers, I intended no insult. But it’s a foolish father who won’t ask.”

“Yes, I see that,” muttered Brutus.

“Then can we marry?” Julia persisted, anxious to have it fully settled, her fate decided.

“No,” said Caesar.

A silence fell during which Julia began to look as if a huge burden had been lifted from her shoulders; Caesar had wasted no time in looking at Brutus, he watched his daughter closely.

“Why not?” from Brutus.

“I said eighteen, Brutus, and I meant eighteen. My poor little first wife was married at seven. It matters not that she and I were happy when we did become man and wife. I vowed that any daughter of mine would have the luxury of living out her years as a child as a child. Eighteen, Brutus. Eighteen, Julia.”

“We tried,” she said when they were outside and the door was shut on Caesar. “Don’t mind too much, Brutus dear.”

“I do mind!” he said, broke down and wept.

And having let the devastated Brutus out to mourn all the way home, Julia went back upstairs to her rooms. There she went into her sleeping cubicle—too spacious really for that term—and picked up the bust of Pompey the Great from the shelf where it resided near her bed. She held it cheek to cheek, danced it out into her sitting room, almost unbearably happy. She was still his.

By the time he reached Decimus Silanus’s house on the Palatine, Brutus had composed himself.

“Thinking about it, I prefer your marriage this year to next,” Servilia announced from her sitting room as he tried to tiptoe past it.

He turned in. “Why?” he asked.

“Well, your wedding next year would take some of the gloss off Junia and Vatia Isaurieus,” she said.

“Then prepare yourself for a disappointment, Mama. Caesar said no. Eighteen it must be.”

Servilia stared, arrested. “What?”

“Caesar said no.”

She frowned, pursed her lips. “How odd! Now why?”

“Something to do with his first wife. She was only seven, he said. Therefore Julia must be a full eighteen.”

“What absolute rubbish!”

“He’s Julia’s paterfamilias, Mama, he can do as he wills.”

“Ah yes, but this paterfamilias does nothing from caprice. What’s he up to?”

“I believed what he said, Mama. Though at first he was quite unpleasant. He wanted to know if Julia and I had—had—”

“Did he?” The black eyes sparkled. “And have you?”

“No!”

“A yes would have knocked me off my chair, I admit it. You lack the gumption, Brutus. You ought to have said yes. Then he would have had no choice other than to let you marry now.”

“A marriage without honor is beneath us!” Brutus snapped.

Servilia turned her back. “Sometimes, my son, you remind me of Cato. Go away!”

*

In one way Bibulus’s declaration that every comitial day for the rest of the year was a holiday (holidays, however, did not forbid normal business, from market days to courts) was useful. Two years earlier the then consul Pupius Piso Frugi had passed a law, a lex Pupia, forbidding the Senate to meet on a comitial day. It had been done to reduce the power of the senior consul, enhanced by the law of Aulus Gabinius forbidding normal senatorial business during February, the junior consul’s month; most of January was made up of comitial days, which meant the Senate now couldn’t meet on them, thanks to Piso Frugi’s law.

Caesar needed the Assemblies. Neither he nor Vatinius could legislate from the Senate, which recommended laws, but could not pass them. How then to get around this frustrating edict of Bibulus’s making all comitial days holidays?

He called the College of Pontifices into session, and directed the quindecimviri sacris faciundis to search the sacred prophetic Books for evidence that this year warranted its comitial days’ being changed to holidays. At the same time the Chief Augur, Messala Rufus, called the College of Augurs into session. The result of all this was that Bibulus was deemed to have overstepped his authority as an augur; the comitial days could not be religiously abolished on one man’s say-so.

While contiones on the land bill progressed, Caesar decided to broach the matter of Pompey’s settlement of the East. By a neat bit of maneuvering he summoned the Senate to meet on a comitial day toward the end of January, perfectly legal unless an Assembly was meeting. When the four tribunes of the plebs belonging to the boni rushed to summon the Plebeian Assembly to foil Caesar’s ploy, they found themselves detained by members of the Clodius Club; Clodius was happy to oblige the man who had the power to plebeianize him.

“It is imperative that we ratify the settlements and agreements entered into by Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in the East,” Caesar said. “If tribute is to flow, it has to be sanctioned by the Roman Senate or one of the Roman Assemblies. Foreign affairs have never been the province of the Assemblies, which understand neither them nor how they are conducted. The Treasury has been severely inconvenienced by the two years of Senate inertia that I am now determined to end. Provincial tributes were set too high by the publicani, who contributed nothing in protest against having to contribute too much. That is now over and done with, but these revenues are by no means the only ones in question. There are kings and potentates all over Rome’s new territories or client states who have agreed to pay large sums to Rome in return for her protection. Take the tetrarch Deiotarus of Galatia, who concluded a treaty with Gnaeus Pompeius that when ratified will bring five hundred talents a year into the Treasury. In other words, by neglecting to ratify this agreement, Rome has so far lost a thousand talents of tribute money from Galatia alone. Then we have others: Sampsiceramus, Abgarus, Hyrcanus, Pharnaces, Tigranes, Ariobarzanes Philopator, plus a host of minor princelings up and down the Euphrates. All committed to large tributes as yet un-collected because the treaties concluded with them have not been ratified. Rome is very rich, but Rome ought to be much richer! In order to pacify and settle Italia alone, Rome needs more than Rome has. I have called you together to ask that we sit on this subject until all the treaties have been examined and the objections thrashed out.”

He drew a breath and looked straight at Cato. “A word of warning. If this House refuses to deal with the ratification of the East, I will see that the Plebs does so immediately. Nor will I, a patrician, interfere or offer any guidance to the Plebs! This is your only chance, Conscript Fathers. Either do the job now or watch the Plebs reduce it to a shambles. I don’t care either way, for one of these two ways will be implemented!”

“No!” shouted Lucullus from among the consulars. “No, no, no! “What about my arrangements in the East? Pompeius didn’t do the conquering, I did! All the vile Pompeius did was collect the glory! It was I who subjugated the East, and I had my own settlement ready to implement! I tell you plain, Gaius Caesar, that I will not allow this House to ratify any kind of treaty concluded in the name of Rome by an ancestorless bumpkin from Picenum! Lording it over us like a king! Prancing round Rome in fancy dress! No, no, no!”

The temper snapped. “Lucius Licinius Lucullus, come here!” Caesar roared. “Stand before this dais!”

They had never liked each other, though they ought: both great aristocrats, both committed to Sulla. And perhaps that had been the cause of it, jealousy on the part of Lucullus for the younger man, who was Sulla’s nephew by marriage. It was Lucullus who had first implied that Caesar was the catamite of old King Nicomedes, Lucullus who had broadcast it for toads like Bibulus to pick up.

In those days Lucullus had been a spare, trim, extremely capable and efficient governor and general, but time and a passion for ecstatic and soporific substances—not to mention wine and exotic foods—had wreaked a terrible havoc which showed in the paunchy slack body, the bloated face, the almost blind-looking grey eyes. The old Lucullus would never have responded to that bellowed command; this Lucullus tottered across the tessellated floor to stand looking up at Caesar, mouth agape.

“Lucius Licinius Lucullus,” said Caesar in a softer voice, though not a kinder, “I give you fair warning. Retract your words or I will have the Plebs do to you what the Plebs did to Servilius Caepio! I will have you arraigned on charges of failing in your commission from the Senate and People of Rome to subjugate the East and see an end of the two kings. I will have you arraigned, and I will see you sent into permanent exile on the meanest and most desolate dropping of land Our Sea possesses, without the wherewithal to so much as put a new tunic on your back! Is that clear? Do you understand? Don’t try me, Lucullus, because I mean what I say!”

The House was absolutely still. Neither Bibulus nor Cato moved. Somehow when Caesar looked like that it didn’t seem worth the risk. Though this Caesar pointed the way to what Caesar might become if he wasn’t stopped. More than an autocrat. A king. But a king needed armies. Therefore Caesar must never be given the opportunity to have armies. Neither Bibulus nor Cato was quite old enough to have participated in political life under Sulla, though Bibulus remembered him; it was easy these days to see him in Caesar, or what they believed he had been. Pompey was a nothing, he didn’t have the blood. Ye gods, but Caesar did!

Lucullus crumpled to the ground and wept, dribbling and drooling, begging forgiveness as a vassal might have begged King Mithridates or King Tigranes, while the Senate of Rome looked on the drama, appalled. It wasn’t appropriate; it was a humiliation for every senator present.

“Lictors, take him home,” said Caesar.

Still no one spoke; two of the senior consul’s lictors took Lucullus gently by the arms, lifted him to his feet, and assisted him, weeping and moaning, from the chamber.

“Very well,” said Caesar then, “what is it to be? Does this body wish to ratify the eastern settlement, or do I take it to the Plebs as leges Vatiniae?”

“Take it to the Plebs!” cried Bibulus.

“Take it to the Plebs!” howled Cato.

When Caesar called for a division, hardly anyone passed to the right; the Senate had decided that any alternative was preferable to giving Caesar his way. Let it go to the Plebs, where it would be shown up for what it was: one piece of arrogance authored by Pompey and another piece of arrogance to be laid at Caesar’s door. No one liked being ruled, and Caesar’s attitude that day smacked of sovereignty. Better to die than live under another dictator.

“They didn’t like that, and Pompeius is extremely unhappy,” said Crassus after what turned out to be a very short meeting.

“What choice do they give me, Marcus? What ought I to do? Nothing?” Caesar demanded, exasperated.

“Actually, yes,” said the good friend, in no expectation that his words would be heeded. “They know you love to work, they know you love to get things done. Your year is going to degenerate into a duel of wills. They hate being pushed. They hate being told they’re a lot of dithering old women. They hate any kind of strength that smacks of excessive authority. It’s not your fault you’re a born autocrat, Gaius, but what’s gradually happening is similar to two rams in a field butting head to head. The boni are your natural enemies. But somehow you’re turning the entire House into enemies. I was watching the faces while Lucullus groveled at your feet. He didn’t mean to set an example, he’s too far gone to be so cunning, but an example he was nevertheless. They were all seeing themselves down there begging your forgiveness, while you stood like a monarch.”

“That’s absolute rubbish!”

“To you, yes. To them, no. If you want my advice, Caesar, then do nothing for the rest of the year. Drop the ratification of the East, and drop the land bill. Sit back and smile, agree with them and lick their arses. Then they might forgive you.”

“I would rather,” said Caesar, teeth clenched, “join Lucullus on that dropping in Our Sea than lick their arses!”

Crassus sighed. “That’s what I thought you’d say. In which case, Caesar, be it on your own head.”

“Do you mean to desert me?”

“No, I’m too good a businessman for that. You mean profits for the business world, which is why you’ll get whatever you want from the Assemblies. But you’d better keep an eye on Pompeius, he’s more insecure than I am. He wants so badly to belong.”

*

Thus it was that Publius Vatinius took the ratification of the East to the Plebeian Assembly in a series of laws emerging from an initial general one which consented to Pompey’s settlement. The trouble was that the Plebs found this endless legislation very boring after the excitement wore off, and forced Vatinius to be quick. Nor, lacking direction from Caesar (as good as his word—he refused to offer any kind of guidance to Vatinius), did the son of a new Roman citizen from Alba Fucentia understand anything about setting tributes or defining the boundaries of kingdoms. So the Plebs blundered through act after act, consistently setting the tributes too low and defining the boundaries too cloudily. And for their part the boni allowed it all to happen by failing to veto one single aspect of Vatinius’s month-long activity. What they wanted was to complain loud and long after it was finished, and use it as an example of what happened when senatorial prerogatives were usurped by the legislating bodies.

But “Don’t come crying to me!” was what Caesar said. “You had your chance, you refused to take it. Complain to the Plebs. Or better still, having resigned from your proper duties, teach the Plebs how to frame treaties and set tributes. It seems they’ll be doing it from now on. The precedent has been set.”

All of which paled before the prospect of the vote in the Popular Assembly about Caesar’s land bill. Sufficient time and contiones having elapsed, Caesar convoked the voting meeting of the Popular Assembly on the eighteenth day of February, despite the fact that this meant Bibulus held the fasces.

By now Pompey’s hand-picked veterans had all arrived to vote, giving the lex Mia agraria the support it would need to pass. So great was the crowd which assembled that Caesar made no attempt to hold the vote in the Well of the Comitia; he set himself up on the platform attached to the temple of Castor and Pollux, and wasted no time on the preliminaries. With Pompey acting as augur and himself conducting the prayers, he called for the casting of lots to see the order in which the tribes would vote not long after the sun had risen above the Esquiline.

The moment the men of Cornelia were called to vote first, the boni struck. His fasces-bearing lictors preceding him, Bibulus forced his way through the mass of men around the platform with Cato, Ahenobarbus, Gaius Piso, Favonius and the four tribunes of the plebs he controlled surrounding him, Metellus Scipio in the lead. At the foot of the steps on Pollux’s side his lictors stopped; Bibulus pushed past them and stood on the bottom step.

“Gaius Julius Caesar, you do not possess the fasces!” he screamed. “This meeting is invalid because I, the officiating consul this month, did not consent to its being held! Disband it or I will have you prosecuted!”

The last word had scarcely left his mouth when the crowd bellowed and surged forward, too quickly for any of the four tribunes of the plebs to interpose a veto, or perhaps too loudly for a veto to be heard. A perfect target, Bibulus was pelted with filth, and when his lictors moved to protect him their sacred persons were seized; bruised and beaten, they had to watch as their fasces were smashed to pieces by a hundred pairs of bare and brawny hands. The same hands then turned to rend Bibulus, slapping rather than punching, with Cato coming in for the same treatment, and the rest retreating. After which someone emptied a huge basket of ordure on top of Bibulus’s head, though some was spared for Cato. While the mob howled with laughter, Bibulus, Cato and the lictors withdrew.

The lex Iulia agraria passed into law so positively that the first eighteen tribes all voted their assent, and the meeting then turned its attention to voting for the men Pompey suggested should fill the commission and the committee. An impeccable collection: among the commissioners were Varro, Caesar’s brother-in-law Marcus Atius Balbus, and that great authority on pig breeding Gnaeus Tremellius Scrofa; the five consular committeemen were Pompey, Crassus, Messala Niger, Lucius Caesar and Gaius Cosconius (who was not a consular, but needed to be thanked for his services).

Convinced they could win after this shocking demonstration of public violence during an illegally convoked meeting, the boni tried the following day to bring Caesar down. Bibulus called the Senate into a closed session and displayed his injuries to the House, together with the bruises and bandages his lictors and Cato sported as they walked slowly up and down the floor to let everyone see what had happened to them.

“I make no attempt to have Gaius Julius Caesar charged in the Violence Court for conducting a lawless assemblage!” cried Bibulus to the packed gathering. “To do so would be pointless, no one would convict him. What I ask is better and stronger! I want a Senatus Consultum Ultimum! But not in the form invented to deal with Gaius Gracchus! I want a state of emergency declared immediately, with myself appointed Dictator until public violence has been driven from our beloved Forum Romanum, and this mad dog Caesar driven out of Italia forever! I’ll have none of a half measure like the one we endured while Catilina occupied Etruria! I want it done the right way, the proper way! Myself as legally elected Dictator, with Marcus Porcius Cato as my master of the horse! Whatever steps are taken then fall to me—no one in this House can be accused of treason, nor can the Dictator be made to answer for what he does or his master of the horse deems necessary. I will see a division!”

“No doubt you will, Marcus Bibulus,” said Caesar, “though I wish you wouldn’t. Why embarrass yourself? The House won’t give you that kind of mandate unless you manage to grow a few inches. You wouldn’t be able to see over the heads of your military escort, though I suppose you could draft dwarves. The only violence which erupted you caused. Nor did a riot develop. The moment the People showed you what they thought of your trying to disrupt their legally convened proceedings, the meeting returned to normal and the vote was taken. You were manhandled, but not maimed. The chief insult was a basket of ordure, and that was treatment you richly deserved. The Senate is not sovereign, Marcus Bibulus. The People are sovereign. You tried to destroy that sovereignty in the name of less than five hundred men, most of whom are sitting here today. Most of whom I hope have the sense to deny you your request because it is an unreasonable and baseless request. Rome stands in no danger of civil unrest. Revolution isn’t even above the edge of the farthest horizon one can see from the top of the Capitol. You’re a spoiled and vindictive little man who wants your own way and can’t bear to be gainsaid. As for Marcus Cato, he’s a bigger fool than he is a prig. I noted that your other adherents didn’t linger yesterday to give you more excuse than this slender pretext on which you demand to be created Dictator. Dictator Bibulus! Ye gods, what a joke! I remember you from Mitylene far too well to blanch at the thought of Dictator Bibulus. You couldn’t organize an orgy in Venus Erucina’s or a brawl in a tavern. You’re an incompetent, vainglorious little maggot! Go ahead, take your division! In fact, I’ll move it for you!”

The eyes so like Sulla’s passed from face to face, lingered on Cicero with the ghost of a menace in them not only Cicero felt. What a power the man had! It radiated out of him, and hardly any senator there didn’t suddenly understand that what would work on anyone else, even Pompey, would never stop Caesar. If they called his bluff, they all knew it would turn out to be no bluff. He was more than merely dangerous. He was disaster.

When the division was called, only Cato stood to Bibulus’s right; Metellus Scipio and the rest gave in.

Whereupon Caesar went back to the People and demanded one additional clause for his lex agraria: that every senator be compelled to swear an oath to uphold it the moment it was ratified after the seventeen days’ wait was done. There were precedents, including the famous refusal of Metellus Numidicus which had resulted in an exile some years in duration.

But times had changed and the People were angry; the Senate was seen as deliberately obstructive, and Pompey’s veterans wanted their land badly. At first a number of senators refused to swear, but Caesar remained determined, and one by one they swore. Except for Metellus Celer, Cato and Bibulus. After Bibulus crumbled it went down to Celer and Cato, who would not, would not, would not.

“I suggest,” Caesar said to Cicero, “that you persuade that pair to take the oath.” He smiled sweetly. “I have permission from the priests and augurs to procure a lex Curiata allowing Publius Clodius to be adopted into the Plebs. So far I haven’t implemented it. I hope I never have to. But in the long run, Cicero, it depends on you.”

Terrified, Cicero went to work. “I’ve seen the Great Man,” he said to Celer and Cato, without realizing that he had applied that ironic term to someone other than Pompey, “and he’s out to skin you alive if you don’t swear.”

“I’d look quite good hanging in the Forum flayed,” said Celer.

“Celer, he’ll take everything off you! I mean it! If you don’t swear, it means political ruin. There’s no punishment attached for refusing to swear, he’s not so stupid. No one can say you’ve done anything particularly admirable in refusing, it won’t mean a fine or exile. What it will mean is such odium in the Forum that you won’t ever be able to show your face again. If you don’t swear, the People will damn you as obstructive for the sake of obstruction. They’ll take it personally, not as an insult to Caesar. Bibulus should never have shrieked to an entire meeting of the People that they’d never get the law no matter how badly they wanted it. They interpreted that as spite and malice. It put the boni in a very bad light. Don’t you understand that the knights are for it, that it isn’t simply Magnus’s soldiers?”

Celer was looking uncertain. “I can’t see why the knights are for it,” he said sulkily.

“Because they’re busy going round Italia buying up land to sell for a fat profit to the commissioners!” snapped Cicero.

“They’re disgusting!” Cato shouted, speaking for the first time. “I’m the great-grandson of Cato the Censor, I won’t bow down to one of these overbred aristocrats! Even if he does have the knights on his side! Rot the knights!”

Knowing that his dream of concord between the Orders was a thing of the past, Cicero sighed, held out both hands. “Cato, my dear fellow, swear! I see what you mean about the knights, I really do! They want everything their way, and they exert utterly unscrupulous pressures on us. But what can we do? We have to live with them because we can’t do without them. How many men are there in the Senate? Certainly not enough to stick one’s medicus up in a knightly direction, and that’s what refusal means. You’d be offering anal insult to the Ordo Equester, which is far too powerful to tolerate that.”

“I’d rather ride out the storm,” said Celer.

“So would I,” said Cato.

“Grow up!” cried Cicero. “Ride out the storm? You’ll sink to the bottom, both of you! Make up your minds to it. Swear and survive, or refuse to swear and accept political ruin.” He saw no sign of yielding in either face, girded his loins and went on. “Celer, Cato, swear, I beg of you! After all, what’s at stake if you look at it coldly? What’s more important, to oblige the Great Man this once in something which doesn’t affect you personally, or go down to permanent oblivion? If you kill yourselves politically, you won’t be there to continue the fight, will you? Don’t you see that it’s more important to remain in the arena than get carried out on a shield looking gorgeous in death?”

And more, and more. Even after Celer came round, it took the beleaguered Cicero another two hours of argument to make the very stubborn Cato give in. But he did give in. Celer and Cato took the oath, and, having taken it, would not forswear it; Caesar had learned from Cinna, and made sure neither man held a stone in his fist to render the swearing void.

“Oh, what an awful year this is!” Cicero said to Terentia with genuine pain in his voice. “It’s like watching a team of giants battering with hammers at a wall too thick to break! If only I wasn’t here to see it!”

She actually patted his hand. “Husband, you look absolutely worn down. Why are you staying? If you do, you’ll become ill. Why not set out with me for Antium and Formiae? We could make it a delightful vacation, not return until May or June. Think of the early roses! I know you love to be in Campania for the start of spring. And we could pop in at Arpinum, see how the cheeses and the wool are doing.”

It loomed deliciously before his gaze, but he shook his head. “Oh, Terentia, I’d give anything to go! It just isn’t possible. Hybrida is back from Macedonia, and half of Macedonia has come to Rome to accuse him of extortion. The poor fellow was a good colleague in my consulship, no matter what they say. Never gave me any real trouble. So I’m going to defend him. It’s the least I can do.”

“Then promise me that the moment your verdict is in, you’ll leave,” she said. “I’ll go on with Tullia and Piso Frugi—Tullia is keen to see the games in Antium. Besides, little Marcus isn’t well—he complains so of growing pains that I dread his inheriting my rheumatism. We all need a holiday. Please!”

Such a novelty was it to hear a beseeching Terentia that Cicero agreed. The moment Hybrida’s trial was done, he would join them.

The problem was that Caesar’s forcing him to remonstrate with Celer and Cato was still at the forefront of Cicero’s mind when he undertook the defense of Gaius Antonius Hybrida. To have acted as Caesar’s lackey smarted; it sat ill with someone whose courage and resolution had saved his country.

Not therefore so inexplicable that when the moment came to deliver his final speech before the jury found for or against his colleague Hybrida, Cicero found it beyond his control to stick to the subject. He did his habitual good job, lauded Hybrida to the skies and made it clear to the jury that this shining example of the Roman nobility had never pulled the wings off a fly as a child or maimed a considerable number of Greek citizens as a young man, let alone committed any of the crimes alleged by half of the province of Macedonia.

“Oh,” he sighed as he built up to his peroration, “how much I miss the days when Gaius Hybrida and I were consuls together! What a decent and honorable place Rome was! Yes, we had Catilina skulking in the background ready to demolish our fair city, but he and I coped with that, he and I saved our country! But for what, gentlemen of the jury? For what? I wish I knew! I wish I could tell you why Gaius Hybrida and I stuck by our posts and endured those shocking events! All for nothing, if one looks around Rome on this terrible day during the consulship of a man not fit to wear the toga praetexta! And no, I do not mean the great and good Marcus Bibulus! I mean that ravening wolf Caesar! He has destroyed the concord among the Orders, he has made a mockery of the Senate, he has polluted the consulship! He rubs our noses in the filth which issues from the Cloaca Maxima, he smears it from our tails to our toes, he dumps it on our heads! As soon as this trial is ended I am leaving Rome, and I do not intend to come back for a long time because I just cannot bear to watch Caesar defaecating on Rome! I am going to the seaside, then I am sailing away to see places like Alexandria, haven of learning and good government…”

The speech ended, the jury voted. CONDEMNO. Gaius Antonius Hybrida was off to exile in Cephallenia, a place he knew well—and that knew him too well. As for Cicero, he packed up and quit Rome that afternoon, Terentia having left already.

*

The trial had ended during the morning, and Caesar had been inconspicuously at the back of the crowd to hear Cicero. Before the jury had delivered its verdict he had gone, sending messengers flying in several directions.

It had been an interesting trial for Caesar in a number of ways, commencing with the fact that he himself had once tried to bring Hybrida down on charges of murder and maiming while the commander of a squadron of Sulla’s cavalry at Lake Orchomenus, in Greece. Caesar had also found himself fascinated by the young man prosecuting Hybrida this time, for he was a protégé of Cicero’s who now had the courage to face Cicero from the opposite side of the legal fence. Marcus Caelius Rufus, a very handsome and well-set-up fellow who had put together a brilliant case and quite cast Cicero into the shadows.

Within moments of Cicero’s opening his speech in Hybrida’s defense, Caesar knew Hybrida was done for. Hybrida’s reputation was just too well known for anyone to believe he hadn’t pulled the wings off flies when a boy.

Then came Cicero’s digression.

Caesar’s temper went completely. He sat in the study at the Domus Publica and chewed his lips as he waited for those he had summoned to appear. So Cicero thought himself immune, did he? So Cicero thought he could say precisely what he liked without fear of reprisal? Well, Marcus Tullius Cicero, you have another think coming! I am going to make life very difficult for you, and you deserve it. Every overture thrown in my face, even now your beloved Pompeius has indicated he would like you to support me. And the whole of Rome knows why you love Pompeius—he saved you from having to pick up a sword during the Italian War by throwing the mantle of his protection around you when you were both cadets serving under Pompeius’s father, the Butcher. Not even for Pompeius will you put your trust in me. So I will make sure I use Pompeius to help haul you down. I showed you up with Rabirius, but more than that—in trying Rabirius, I showed you that your own hide isn’t safe. Now you’re about to find out how it feels to look exile in the face.

Why do they all seem to believe they can insult me with total impunity? Well, perhaps what I am about to do to Cicero will make them see they can’t. I am not powerless to retaliate. The only reason I have not so far is that I fear I might not be able to stop.

Publius Clodius arrived first, agog with curiosity, took the goblet of wine Caesar handed him and sat down. He then sprang up, sat down again, wriggled.

“Can you never sit still, Clodius?’’ Caesar asked.

“Hate it.”

“Try.”

Sensing that some sort of good news was in the offing, Clodius tried, but when he managed to control the rest of his appendages, his goatee continued to wriggle as his chin worked at pushing his lower lip in and out. A sight which Caesar seemed to find intensely amusing, for he finally burst out laughing. The odd thing about Caesar and his merriment, however, was that it failed to annoy Clodius the way—for instance—Cicero’s did.

“Why,” asked Caesar when his mirth simmered down, “do you persist in wearing that ridiculous tuft?’’

“We’re all wearing them,” said Clodius, as if that explained it.

“I had noticed. Except for my cousin Antonius, that is.”

Clodius giggled. “It didn’t work for poor old Antonius, quite broke his spirit. Instead of sticking out, his goatee stuck up and kept tickling the end of his nose.”

“Am I allowed to guess why you are all growing hair on the ends of your faces?’’

“Oh, I think you know, Caesar.”

“To annoy the boni.”

“And anyone else who’s foolish enough to react.”

“I insist that you shave it off, Clodius. Immediately.”

“Give me one good reason why!” said Clodius aggressively.

“It might suit a patrician to be eccentric, but plebeians are not sufficiently antique. Plebeians have to obey the mos maiorum.”

A huge smile of delight spread over Clodius’s face. “You mean you’ve got the consent of the priests and augurs?”

“Oh, yes. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

“Even with Celer still here?”

“Celer behaved like a lamb.”

Down went the wine, Clodius leaped to his feet. “I’d better find Publius Fonteius—my adoptive father.”

“Sit down, Clodius! Your new father has been sent for.”

“Oh, I can be a tribune of the plebs! The greatest one in the history of Rome, Caesar!”

A goateed Publius Fonteius arrived on the echo of Clodius’s words, and grinned fatuously when informed that he, aged twenty, would become the father of a man aged thirty-two.

“Are you willing to release Publius Clodius from your paternal authority and will you shave off that thing?” asked Caesar of him.

“Anything, Gaius Julius, anything!”

“Excellent!” said Caesar heartily, and came round his desk to welcome Pompey.

“What’s amiss?” asked Pompey a trifle anxiously, then stared at the other two men present. “What is amiss?”

“Not a thing, Magnus, I assure you,” said Caesar, seating himself once more. “I need the services of an augur, is all, and I thought you might like to oblige me.”

“Anytime, Caesar. But for what?”

“Well, as I’m sure you know, Publius Clodius has been desirous of abrogating his patrician status for some time. This is his adoptive father, Publius Fonteius. I’d like to get the business done this afternoon, if you’d act as augur.”

No, Pompey was not a fool. Caesar hadn’t got it out before he understood the object of the exercise. He too had been in the Forum to listen to Cicero, and he had hurt more from it than Caesar had, for whatever insults were heaped on Caesar’s head reflected on him. For years he’d put up with Cicero’s vacillations; nor was he pleased with the way Cicero had shied on every occasion he had asked for help since his return from the East. Savior of his country indeed! Let the conceited nincompoop suffer a little for a change! Oh, how he’d cringe when he knew Clodius was on his tail!

“I’m happy to oblige,” said Pompey.

“Then let’s all meet in the Well of the Comitia in one hour’s time,” said Caesar. “I’ll have the thirty lictors of the curiae present, and we’ll get on with it. Minus the beards.”

Clodius lingered at the door. “Does it happen immediately, Caesar, or do I have to wait for seventeen days?”

“Since the tribunician elections are not due for some months yet, Clodius, what does it matter?” asked Caesar, laughing. “But to make absolutely sure, we’ll have another little ceremony after three nundinae have elapsed.” He paused. “I presume you’re sui iuris, not under the hand of Appius Claudius still?’’

“No, he ceased to be my paterfamilias when I married.”

“Then there is no impediment.”

Nor was there. Few of the men who mattered in Rome were there to witness the proceedings of adrogatio, with their prayers, chants, sacrifices and archaic rituals. Publius Clodius, formerly a member of the patrician gens Claudia, became a member of the plebeian gens Fonteia for a very few moments before assuming his own name again and continuing to be a member of the gens Claudia—but this time of a new plebeian branch, distinct from the Claudii Marcelli. He was, in effect, founding a new Famous Family. Unable to enter the religious circle, Fulvia watched from the closest spot she could, then joined Clodius afterward to whoop about the lower Forum telling everyone that Clodius was going to be a tribune of the plebs next year—and that Cicero’s days as a Roman citizen were numbered.

*

Cicero learned of it in the little crossroads settlement of Tres Tabernae, on his way to Antium; there he met young Curio.

“My dear fellow,” said Cicero warmly, drawing Curio into his private parlor at the best of the three inns, “the only thing which saddens me to meet you is that it means you haven’t yet resumed your brilliant attacks on Caesar. What happened? Last year so vocal, this year so silent.”

“1 got bored,” said Curio tersely; one of the penalties of flirting with the boni was that one had to put up with people like Cicero, who also flirted with the boni. He was certainly not about to tell Cicero now that he had stopped attacking Caesar because Clodius had helped him out of a financial embarrassment, and fixed as his price silence on the subject of Caesar. So, having a little venom of his own, he sat down companionably with Cicero and let the conversation flow wherever Cicero wished for some time. Then he asked, “How do you feel about Clodius’s new plebeian status?”

The effect was all he could have hoped for. Cicero went white, grabbed the edge of the table and hung on for dear life.

“What did you say?” the savior of his country whispered.

“Clodius is a plebeian.”

“When?”

“Not too many days ago—you will travel by litter, Cicero; you move at the pace of a snail. I didn’t see it myself, but I heard all about it from Clodius, very elated. He’s standing for the tribunate of the plebs, he tells me, though I’m not quite sure why aside from settling his score with you. One moment he was praising Caesar like a god because Caesar had procured him his lex Curiata, the next moment he was saying that as soon as he entered office he’d invalidate all Caesar’s laws. But that’s Clodius!”

The color now flooded into Cicero’s face, reddening it to the point whereat Curio wondered if he was about to have a stroke. “Caesar made him a plebeian?’’

“On the same day you let your tongue run away with you at the trial of Hybrida. At noon all was peace and quiet, three hours later there was Clodius screaming his new plebeian status from the rooftops. And that he’d be prosecuting you.”

“Free speech is dead!” groaned Cicero.

“You’re only just finding that out?” Curio asked, grinning.

“But if Caesar made him a plebeian, why is he threatening to invalidate all Caesar’s laws?”

“Oh, not because he’s vexed with Caesar,” Curio said. “It’s Pompeius he loathes. Caesar’s laws are designed to benefit Magnus, that simple. Clodius deems Magnus a tumor in Rome’s bowels.”

“Sometimes I agree with him,” Cicero muttered.

Which didn’t prevent his greeting Pompey with joy when he reached Antium to find the Great Man staying there on his way back to Rome after a quick trip to Campania as a land committeeman.

“Have you heard that Clodius is now a plebeian?” he asked as soon as he considered it polite to terminate the courtesies.

“I didn’t hear it, Cicero, I was a part of it,” said Pompey, bright blue eyes twinkling. “I took the auspices, and very fine they were too. The clearest liver! Classical.”

“Oh, what’s going to happen to me now?” moaned Cicero, his hands writhing.

“Nothing, Cicero, nothing!” said Pompey heartily. “Clodius is all talk, believe me. Neither Caesar nor I will let him harm a hair of your venerable head.”

“Venerable?” squawked Cicero. “You and I, Pompeius, are the same age!”

“Who said I wasn’t venerable too?”

“Oh, I’m doomed!”

“Nonsense!” said Pompey, reaching over to pat Cicero’s back between his huddled shoulders. “Give you my word he won’t harm you, truly!”

A promise Cicero wanted desperately to cling to; but could anyone keep Clodius in check once he had a target in sight?

“How do you know he won’t harm me?” he asked.

“Because I told him not to at the adoption ceremony. Time someone told him! He reminds me of a really bumptious and cocky junior military tribune who mistakes a little talent for a lot. Well, I’m used to dealing with those! He just needed smartening up by the man with the real talent—the general.”

That was it. Curio’s puzzle answered. Didn’t Pompey begin to understand? A man of respectable birth from rural parts didn’t presume to tell a patrician Roman how to behave. If Clodius had not already decided he loathed Pompey, to be treated like a junior military tribune by the likes of Pompeius Magnus at the very moment of his victory would surely have done it.

*

Rome during March buzzed, some of it arising from politics and some from the sensational death of Metellus Celer. Still dallying in Rome and leaving his province of Further Gaul to the ministrations of his legate Gaius Pomptinus, Celer seemed not to know what to do for the best. It had been bad enough when Clodia blazed a trail across Rome’s social sky in the throes of her wild affair with Catullus, but that was finished. The poet from Verona was crazed with grief; his howls and sobs could be heard from the Carinae to the Palatine—and his wonderful poems read from the same to the same. Erotic, passionate, heartfelt, luminous—if Catullus had searched forever for a suitable object of a great love, he could not have found a better than his adored Lesbia, Clodia. Her perfidy, cunning, heartlessness and rapacity coaxed words out of him he hadn’t known himself capable of producing.

She terminated Catullus when she discovered Caelius, about to commence his prosecution of Gaius Antonius Hybrida. What had attracted her to Catullus was present to some extent in Caelius, but in a more Roman mold; the poet was too intense, too volatile, too prone to gloomy depression. Whereas Caelius was sophisticated, witty, innately joyous. He came from good stock and had a rich father who was anxious that his brilliant son should snatch nobility for the Caelius family by attaining the consulship. Caelius was a New Man, yes, but not of the more obnoxious kind. The striking and stormy good looks of Catullus had ravished her, but the powerful thews and equally handsome face belonging to Caelius pleased Clodia more; it could become quite an ordeal to be a poet’s mistress.

In short, Catullus began to bore Clodia at precisely the moment she spied Caelius. So it was off with the old and on with the new. And how did a husband fit into this frenzied activity? The answer was, not very well. Clodia’s passion for Celer had lasted until she neared thirty, but that was the end of it. Time and increasing self-assurance had weaned her away from her first cousin and childhood companion, prompted her to seek whatever it was she looked for with Catullus, her second essay in illicit love—at least of a glaringly public kind. The incest scandal she, Clodius and Clodilla had provoked had whetted an appetite eventually grown too great not to be indulged. Clodia also found that she adored being despised by all the people she herself despised. Poor Celer was reduced to the role of helpless onlooker.

She was twelve years older than the twenty-three-year-old Marcus Caelius Rufus when she spied him, not that he had just arrived in Rome; Caelius had flitted in and out since he had come to study under Cicero three years before the consulship. He had flirted with Catilina, been sent in disgrace to assist the governor of Africa Province until the fuss died down because Caelius Senior happened to own a great deal of the wheatlands of the Bagradas River in that province. Recently Caelius had come home to start his Forum career in earnest, and with as much splash as possible. Thus he elected to prosecute the man even Gaius Caesar hadn’t been able to convict, Gaius Antonius Hybrida.

For Celer the misery just kept on waxing at the same rate as Clodia’s interest in him waned. And then, on top of being shown that he had no choice other than to swear the oath to uphold Caesar’s land bill, he learned that Clodia had a new lover, Marcus Caelius Rufus. The inhabitants of the houses around Celer’s residence had no trouble hearing the frightful quarrels which erupted out of Celer’s peristyle at all hours of day and night. Husband and wife specialized in shouting threats of murder at each other, and there were sounds of blows struck, missiles landing, breaking pottery or glass, frightened servants’ voices, shrieks which froze the blood. It couldn’t last, all the neighbors knew it, and speculated how it would eventually end.

But who could have predicted such an end? Unconscious, brain herniating out of the splintered depths of a shocking head wound, Celer was hauled naked from his bath by servants while Clodia stood screaming, robe soaked because she had climbed into the bath in an attempt to get him out herself, covered in blood because she had held his head out of the water. When the horrified Metellus Nepos was joined by Appius Claudius and Publius Clodius, she was able to tell them what had happened. Celer had been very drunk, she explained, but insisted on a bath after he vomited—who could ever reason with a drunken man or persuade him not to do what he was determined to do? Repeatedly telling him that he was too drunk to bathe, Clodia accompanied him to the bathroom, and continued to plead with him as he undressed. Then, poised on the top step and about to descend into the tepid water, her husband fell and struck his head on the rear parapet of the tub—sharp, projecting, lethal.

Sure enough, when the three men went to the bathroom to inspect the scene of the accident, there on the rear parapet were blood, bone, brain. The physicians and surgeons tenderly inserted a comatose Metellus Celer into his bed, and a weeping Clodia refused to leave his side for any reason.

Two days later he died, never having regained consciousness. Clodia was a widow, and Rome plunged into mourning for Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer. His brother, Nepos, was his principal heir, but Clodia had been left extremely comfortably off, and no agnate relative of Celer’s was about to invoke the lex Voconia.

Busy preparing his case for the defense of Hybrida, Cicero had listened fascinated when Publius Nigidius Figulus told him and Atticus (in Rome for the winter) the details Appius Claudius had told him in confidence.

When the story was done the thought popped into Cicero’s mind; he giggled. “Clytemnestra!” he said.

To which the other two said not one word, though they seemed distinctly uneasy. Nothing could be proved, there had been no witnesses aside from Clodia. But certainly Metellus Celer had borne the same kind of wound as King Agamemnon had after his wife, Queen Clytemnestra, had plied an axe to murder him in his bath so that she could continue her liaison with Aegisthus.

So who spread the new nickname of Clytemnestra? That was never established either. But from that time on Clodia was also known as Clytemnestra, and many people implicitly believed that she had murdered her husband in his bath.

The sensation did not die down after Celer’s funeral, for he left a vacancy in the College of Augurs, and every aspiring man in Rome wanted to contest the election. In the old days when men had been co-opted into the priestly colleges, the new augur would have been Metellus Nepos, the dead man’s brother. Nowadays, who knew? The boni had very vocal supporters, but they were not in the majority. Perhaps aware of this, Nepos was heard saying that he would probably not nominate himself, as he was so brokenhearted he intended to travel abroad for several years.

The squabbles over the augurship may not have attained the height of those frightful altercations heard from the house of Celer before he died, but they enlivened the Forum mightily. When the tribune of the plebs Publius Vatinius announced that he would stand, Bibulus and the Chief Augur, Messala Rufus, blocked his candidacy very simply. Vatinius had a disfiguring tumor on his forehead; he wasn’t perfect.

“At least,” Vatinius was heard to say loudly, though it seemed with great good humor, “my wen is where everyone can see it! Now Bibulus’s wen is on his arse, though Messala Rufus goes one better—he has two wens where his balls used to be. I am going to move in the Plebs that all future candidates for an augurship should be required to strip naked and parade up and down the Forum.”

*

In April the junior consul Bibulus could enjoy true possession of the fasces for the first time, given February’s foreign affairs. He entered his month well aware that all was not going well with the execution of the lex Iulia agraria: the commissioners were unusually zealous and the five committeemen enormously helpful, but every organized settlement in Italy still retaining public lands was being obstructive, and sale of private lands was tardy because even knightly acquisition of land for resale to the State took time. Oh, the act was so beautifully thought out that things would sort themselves out eventually! The trouble was that Pompey needed to settle more of his veterans at once than could be done.

“They have to see action,” said Bibulus to Cato, Gaius Piso, Ahenobarbus and Metellus Scipio, “but action isn’t on the horizon as yet. What they need is a very large tract of public land already surveyed and apportioned out in ten-iugera lots by some previous land legislator who didn’t live long enough to implement his law.”

Cato’s huge nose contracted, his eyes blazed. “They would never dare!” he said.

“Dare what?” asked Metellus Scipio.

“They will dare,” Bibulus insisted.

“Dare what?”

“Bring in a second land bill to use the Ager Campanus and the Capuan public lands. Two hundred and fifty square miles of land parceled up by almost everyone since Tiberius Gracchus, ready for seizure and settlement.”

“It will pass,” said Gaius Piso, lips peeled away from teeth.

“I agree,” said Bibulus, “it will pass.”

“But we have to stop it,” from Ahenobarbus.

“Yes, we have to stop it.”

“How?” asked Metellus Scipio.

“I had hoped,” said the junior consul, “that my ploy to make all comitial days feriae would answer, though I should have known that Caesar would use his authority as Pontifex Maximus. However, there is one religious ploy neither he nor the Colleges can counter. I may have exceeded my authority as a lone augur in the feriae business, but I will not exceed my authority as both augur and consul if I approach the problem in both roles.”

They were all leaning forward eagerly. Perhaps Cato was the most publicly prominent one among them, but there could be no doubt that Bibulus’s heroism in choosing to suggest a menial and very belittling proconsulship had given him the edge over Cato in all private meetings of the leaders of the boni. Nor did Cato resent this; Cato had no aspirations to lead.

“I intend to retire to my house to watch the skies until the end of my year as consul.”

No one spoke.

“Did you hear me?’’ asked Bibulus, smiling.

“We heard, Marcus Bibulus,” said Cato, “but will it work? How can it work?”

“It’s been done before, and it’s firmly established as a part of the mos maiorum. Besides which, I organized a secret little search of the Sacred Books, and found a prophecy which could easily be interpreted as meaning that this year the sky is going to produce an omen of extreme significance. Just what the sign is the prophecy didn’t say, and that’s what makes the whole ploy possible. Now when the consul retires to his house to watch the skies, all public business must be suspended until he emerges to take up his fasces again. Which I have no intention of doing!”

“It won’t be popular,” said Gaius Piso, looking worried.

“At first perhaps not, but we’re all going to have to work hard to make it look more popular than it actually will be. I intend to use Catullus—he’s so good at lampooning, and now that Clodia’s finished with him he can’t do enough to make her or her little brother unhappy. I just wish I could get Curio again, but he won’t oblige. However, we’re not going to concentrate on Caesar, he’s immune. We’re going to set Pompeius Magnus up as our chief target, and for the rest of the year we make absolutely sure that not a day goes by without as many of our adherents in the Forum as we can marshal. Numbers don’t actually mean much. Noise and numbers in the Forum are what count. The bulk of city and country want Caesar’s laws, but they’re hardly ever in the Forum unless there’s a vote or a vital contio.”

Bibulus looked at Cato. “You have a special job, Cato. On every possible occasion I want you to make yourself so obnoxious that Caesar loses his temper and orders you off to the Lautumiae. For some reason, he loses it more easily if it’s you or Cicero doing the agitating. One must assume both of you have the ability to get under his saddle like burrs. Whenever possible we’ll prearrange things so that we can have the Forum packed with people ready to support you and condemn the opposition. Pompeius is the weak link. Whatever we do has to be designed to make him feel vulnerable.”

“When do you intend to retire to your house?” Ahenobarbus asked.

“The second day before the Ides, the only day between the Megalesia and the Ceriala, when Rome will be full of people and the Forum full of sightseers. There’s no point in doing it without the biggest possible audience.”

“And do you think that all public business will cease when you retire to your house?” asked Metellus Scipio.

Bibulus raised his brows. “I sincerely hope not! The whole object of the ploy is to force Caesar and Vatinius to legislate in contraindication of the omens. It means that as soon as they’re out of office we can invalidate their laws. Not to mention have them prosecuted for maiestas. Doesn’t a conviction for treason sound wonderful?”

“What if Clodius becomes a tribune of the plebs?”

“I can’t see how that can change anything. Clodius has—why I don’t know!—conceived a dislike for Pompeius Magnus. He’ll be our ally next year if he’s elected, not our enemy.”

“He’s after Cicero too.”

“Again, what is that to us? Cicero isn’t boni, he’s an ulcer. Ye gods, I’d vote for any law which could shut him up when he begins to prate about how he saved his country! Anyone would think Catilina worse than a combination of Hannibal and Mithridates.”

“But if Clodius goes after Cicero he’ll also go after you, Cato,” said Gaius Piso.

“How can he?” Cato asked. “I merely gave my opinion in the House. I certainly wasn’t the senior consul, I hadn’t even gone into office as a tribune of the plebs. Free speech is becoming more perilous, but there’s no law on the tablets yet forbidding a man to say what he thinks during a meeting of the Senate.”

It was Ahenobarbus who thought of the major difficulty. “I see how we can invalidate any laws Caesar or Vatinius pass between now and the end of the year,” he said, “but first we have to get the numbers in the House. That means it will have to be our men sitting in the curule chairs next year. But whom can we succeed in getting elected as consuls, not to mention praetor urbanus! I understand Metellus Nepos intends to leave Rome to heal his grief, so he’s out. I’ll be praetor, and so will Gaius Memmius, who hates Uncle Pompeius Magnus terrifically. But who for consul? Philippus sits in Caesar’s lap. So does Gaius Octavius, married to Caesar’s niece. Lentulus Niger wouldn’t get in. Nor would Cicero’s little brother Quintus. And anyone who was praetor earlier than that lot can’t succeed either.”

“You’re right, Lucius, we have to get our own consuls in,” said Bibulus, frowning. “Aulus Gabinius will run, so will Lucius Piso. Both with a foot in the Popularist camp, and both with much electoral clout. We’ll just have to persuade Nepos to stay in Rome, run for augur and then for consul. And our other candidate had better be Messala Rufus. If we don’t have sympathetic curule magistrates next year, we won’t invalidate Caesar’s laws.”

“What about Arrius, who’s very annoyed with Caesar, I hear, because Caesar won’t back him as a consular candidate?” from Cato.

“Too old and not enough clout” was the scornful reply.

“I heard something else,” said Ahenobarbus, not pleased; no one had mentioned his name in connection with the augural vacancy.

“What?” asked Gaius Piso.

“That Caesar and Magnus are thinking of asking Cicero to take Cosconius’s place on the Committee of Five. Convenient that he dropped dead! Cicero would suit them better.”

“Cicero’s too big a fool to accept,” said Bibulus, sniffing.

“Not even if his darling Pompeius implores?”

“At the moment I hear Pompeius isn’t his darling,” said Gaius Piso, laughing. “He’s heard who auspicated at the adoption of Publius Clodius!”

“You’d think that would tell Cicero something about his actual importance in the scheme of things,” sneered Ahenobarbus.

“Well, there’s a rumor emanating from Atticus that Cicero says Rome is sick of him!”

“He isn’t wrong,” said Bibulus, sighing theatrically.

The meeting broke up with great hilarity; the boni were happy.

*

Though Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus made his speech announcing that he was retiring to his house to watch the skies publicly from the rostra, and to a large crowd of people mostly gathered in Rome for the spring Games, Caesar chose not to reply publicly. He called the Senate into session and conducted the meeting with doors firmly closed.

“Marcus Bibulus has most correctly sent his fasces to the temple of Venus Libitina, and there they will reside until the Kalends of May, when I will assume them as is my right. However, this cannot be allowed to descend into one of those years wherein all public business founders. It is my duty to Rome’s electors to fulfill the mandate they gave me—and Marcus Bibulus!—to govern. Therefore I intend to govern. The prophecy Marcus Bibulus quoted from the rostra is one I know, and I have two arguments as to Marcus Bibulus’s interpretation of it: the first, that the actual year is unclear; and the second, that it can be interpreted in at least four ways. So while the quindecimviri sacris faciundis examine the situation and conduct the proper enquiries, I must assume that Marcus Bibulus’s action is invalid. Once again he has taken it upon himself to interpret Rome’s religious mos maiorum to suit his own political ends. Like the Jews, we conduct our religion as a part of the State, and believe that the State cannot prosper if religious laws and customs are profaned. However, we are unique in having legal contracts with our Gods, with whom we retain bargaining power and dicker for concessions. What is important is that we keep divine forces properly channeled, and the best way to do that is to keep to our end of the bargain by doing what lies in our power to maintain Rome’s prosperity and well-being. Marcus Bibulus’s action accomplishes the opposite, and the Gods will not thank him. He will die away from Rome and in cold comfort.”

Oh, if only Pompey looked more at ease! After a career as long and glorious as his, you’d think he would know things don’t always go smoothly! Yet there’s still a lot of the spoiled baby in him. He wants everything to be perfect. He expects to get what he wants and have approval too.

“It is up to this House to decide what course I now adopt,” the senior consul went on. “I will call for a vote. Those who feel that all business must cease forthwith because the junior consul has retired to his house to watch the skies, please form on my left. Those who feel that, at least until the verdict of the Fifteen is in, government should continue as normal, please form on my right. I make no further plea for good sense and love of Rome. Conscript Fathers, divide the House.”

It was a calculated gamble which instinct told Caesar he ought not to postpone; the longer the senatorial sheep pondered Bibulus’s action, the more likely they were to become afraid of defying it. Strike now, and there was a chance.

But the results surprised everyone; almost the entire Senate passed to Caesar’s right, an indication of the anger men felt at Bibulus’s wanton determination to defeat Caesar, even at the cost of ruining Rome. The few boni on the left stood there stunned.

“I lodge a strong protest, Gaius Caesar!” Cato shouted as the senators returned to their places.

Pompey, mood soaring at this resounding victory for good sense and love of Rome, turned on Cato with claws out. “Sit down and shut up, you sanctimonious prig!” he roared. “Who do you think you are, to set yourself up as judge and jury? You’re nothing but an ex-tribune of the plebs who’ll never even make praetor!”

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” hollered Cato, staggering like a bad actor pierced by a paper dagger. “Listen to the great Pompeius, who was consul before he so much as qualified to stand as a mere tribune of the plebs! Who do you think you are? What, you don’t even know? Then allow me to tell you! An unconstitutional, unprincipled, un-Roman lump of arrogance and fancy, that’s what you are! As to who—you’re a Gaul who thinks like a Gaul—a butcher who is the son of a butcher—a pander who sucks up to patricians to be let negotiate marriages far above him—a ponce who adores to dress up prettily to hear the crowd goo and gush—an eastern potentate who loves to live in palaces—a king who queens it—an orator who could send a rutting ram to sleep—a politician who has to employ competent politicians—a radical worse than the Brothers Gracchi—a general who hasn’t fought a battle in twenty years without at least twice as many troops as the enemy—a general who prances in and picks up the laurels after other and better men have done all the real work—a consul who had to have a book of instructions to know how to act—AND A.MAN WHO EXECUTED ROMAN CITIZENS WITHOUT TRIAL, WITNESS MARCUS JUNIUS BRUTUS!”

The House just couldn’t help itself. It erupted into cheers, screeches, whistles, cries of joy; feet pounded the floor until the rafters shook, hands crashed together like drums. Only Caesar knew how hard he had to work to sit impassive, hands down at his sides and feet primly together. Oh, what a glorious diatribe! Oh, masterly! Oh, to have lived to hear it was a privilege!

Then he saw Pompey, and his heart sank. Ye gods, the foolish man was taking the hysterical applause personally! Didn’t he yet understand? No one there would have cared who the target was, or what the subject of the tirade was. It was just the best piece of extemporaneous invective in years! The Senate of Rome would applaud a Tingitanian ape excoriating a donkey if it did it half that well! But there sat Pompey looking more crushed than he must have looked after Quintus Sertorius ran rings round him in Spain. Defeated! Conquered by a tongue of brass. Not until that moment did Caesar realize the extent of the insecurity and hunger to be approved of inside Pompey the Great.

Time to act. After he dismissed the meeting he stood on the curule dais as the ecstatic senators rushed away talking together excitedly, most of them clustered about Cato patting him on the back, pouring praise on his head. The worst of it was that Pompey sitting on his chair with his head down meant he, Caesar, couldn’t do what he knew was the proper thing to do—congratulate Cato as warmly as if he had been a loyal political ally. Instead he had to look indifferent in case Pompey saw him.

“Did you see Crassus?” Pompey demanded when they were alone. “Did you see him?” His voice had risen to a squeak. “Lauding Cato to the skies! Which side is the man on?”

“Our side, Pompeius. You’re too thin-skinned, my friend, if you take the House’s reaction to Cato as a personal criticism. The applause was for a terrific little speech, nothing else. He is usually such a crashing bore, filibustering eternally. But that was so good of its kind.”

“It was aimed at me! Me!”

“I wish it had been aimed at me,” said Caesar, holding on to his temper. “Your mistake was not to join in the cheering. Then you could have come out of it looking a thoroughly good sport. Never show a weakness in politics, Magnus, no matter how you feel inside. He got beneath your armor, and you let everyone know it.”

“You’re on their team too!”

“No, Magnus, I’m not, any more than Crassus is. Let’s just say that while you were out winning victories for Rome, Crassus and I were serving our apprenticeships in the political arena.” He bent, put a hand beneath Pompey’s elbow, and hauled him to his feet with a strength Pompey had not expected from such a slender fellow. “Come, they’ll have gone.”

“I can’t show my face in the House ever again!”

“Rubbish. You’ll be there at the next meeting looking your usual sunny self, and you’ll go up to Cato and shake him by the hand and congratulate him. Just as I will.”

“No, no, I can’t do it!”

“Well, I won’t convene the Senate for several days. By the time you need to, you’ll be prepared. Come home with me now and share my dinner. Otherwise you’re going to go back to that huge empty house on the Carinae with no better company than three or four philosophers. You really ought to marry again, Magnus.”

“I’d quite like to, but I haven’t seen anyone I fancy. It’s not so urgent once a man has a brace of sons and a girl to round the family off. Besides, you’re a fine one to talk! No wife in the Domus Publica either, and you don’t even have a son.”

“A son would be nice, but not necessary. I’m lucky in my one chick, my daughter. I wouldn’t exchange her for Minerva and Venus rolled in one, and I do not mean that sacrilegiously.”

“Engaged to young Caepio Brutus, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

When they entered the Domus Publica his host saw Pompey put into the best chair in the study with wine at his fingertips, and excused himself to find his mother.

“We have a guest for dinner,” Caesar said, poking his head round Aurelia’s door. “Pompeius. Can you and Julia join us in the dining room?’’

Not a flicker of emotion crossed Aurelia’s face. She nodded and got up from her desk. “Certainly, Caesar.”

“Will you let us know when dinner’s ready?”

“Of course,” she said, and pattered away toward the stairs.

Julia was reading, and didn’t hear her grandmother enter; on principle Aurelia never knocked, as she belonged to that school of parent who considered young persons ought to have some training in continuing to do the proper thing even when they thought themselves alone. It taught self-discipline and caution. The world could be a cruel place; a child was best off when prepared for it.

“No Brutus today?”

Julia looked up, smiled, sighed. “No, avia, not today. He has some sort of meeting with his business managers, and I believe the three of them are to dine at Servilia’s afterward. She likes to know what’s going on, even now she’s allowed Brutus to take over his own affairs.”

“Well, that will please your father.”

“Oh? Why? I thought he liked Brutus.”

“He likes Brutus very well, but he has his own guest to eat with us today, and they may want to converse privately. We are banished as soon as the food is taken out, but they couldn’t do that to Brutus, now could they?”

“Who is it?” Julia asked, not really interested.

“I don’t really know, he didn’t say.” Hmm, this is difficult! thought Aurelia. How do I get her into her most flattering robe without giving the plot away? She cleared her throat. “Julia, has tata seen you in your new birthday dress?”

“No, I don’t think he has.”

“Then why not put it on now? And his silver jewelry? How clever he was to get you silver rather than gold! I have no idea who’s with him, but it’s someone important, so he’ll be pleased if we look our best.”

Apparently all of that didn’t sound too forced; Julia simply smiled and nodded. “How long before dinner?”

“Half an hour.”

*

“What exactly does Bibulus’s retiring to his house to watch the skies mean to us, Caesar?” Pompey asked. “For instance, could our laws be invalidated next year?’’

“Not the ones which were ratified before today, Magnus, so you and Crassus are safe enough. It’s my province will be at greatest peril, since I’ll have to use Vatinius and the Plebs—though the Plebs are not religiously constrained, so I very much doubt that Bibulus’s watching the skies can make plebiscites and the activities of tribunes of the plebs look sacrilegious. However, we’d have to fight it in court, and depend upon the urban praetor.”

The wine, Caesar’s very best (and strongest), was beginning to restore Pompey’s equilibrium, even if his spirits were still low. The Domus Publica suited Caesar, he reflected, all rich dark colors and sumptuous gilt. We fair men look best against such backgrounds.

“You know of course that we’ll have to legislate another land bill,” Pompey said abruptly. “I’m in and out of Rome constantly, so I’ve seen for myself what it’s like for the commissioners. We need the Ager Campanus.”

“And the Capuan public lands. Yes, I know.”

“But Bibulus makes it invalid.”

“Perhaps not, Magnus,” Caesar said tranquilly. “If I draft it as a supplementary bill attached to the original act, it’s less vulnerable. The commissioners and committeemen wouldn’t change, but that’s not a problem. It will mean that twenty thousand of your veterans can be accommodated there well within the year, plus five thousand Roman Head Count to leaven the new settler bread. We should be able to put twenty thousand more veterans on other lands almost as quickly. Which leaves us with sufficient time to prise places like Arretium free of their lands, and puts far less pressure on the Treasury to buy private land. That’s our argument for taking the Campanian ager publicus, the fact that it’s already in State ownership.”

“But the rents will cease,” said Pompey.

“True. Though you and I both know that the rents are not as lucrative as they ought to be. Senators are reluctant to pay up.”

“So are senators’ wives with fortunes of their own,” Pompey said with a grin.

“Oh?”

“Terentia. Won’t pay a sestertius in rent, though she leases whole forests, oak for pigs. Very profitable. Hard as marble, that woman! Ye gods, I feel sorry for Cicero!”

“How does she get away with it?”

“Reckons there’s a sacred grove in it somewhere.”

“Clever fowl!” laughed Caesar.

“That’s all right, the Treasury isn’t being nice to brother Quintus now he’s returning from Asia Province.”

“In what way?”

“Insists on paying him his last stipend in cistophori.”

“What’s wrong with that? They’re good silver, and worth four denarii each.”

“Provided you can get anyone to accept them,” Pompey chuckled. “I brought back bags and bags and bags of the things, but I never intended them to be given to people in payment. You know how suspicious people are of foreign coins! I suggested the Treasury melt them down and turn them into bullion.”

“That means the Treasury doesn’t like Quintus Cicero.”

“I wonder why.”

At which point Eutychus knocked to say that dinner was being served, and the two men walked the short distance to the dining room. Unless employed to accommodate a larger party, five of the couches were pushed out of the way; the remaining couch, with two chairs facing its length across a long and narrow table of knee height, sat in the prettiest part of the room, looking out at the colonnade and main peristyle.

When Caesar and Pompey entered two servants helped them remove their togas, so huge and clumsy that it was quite impossible to recline in them. These were carefully folded and put aside while the men walked to the back edge of the couch, sat upon it, took off their senatorial shoes with the consular crescent buckles, and let the same two servants wash their feet. Pompey of course occupied the locus consularis end of the couch, this being the place of honor. They lay half on their stomachs and half on their left hips, with the left arm and elbow supported by a round bolster. As their feet were at the back edge of the couch, their faces hovered near the table, whatever was upon it well within reach. Bowls were presented for them to wash their hands, cloths to dry them.

Pompey was feeling much better, didn’t hurt the way he had. He gazed approvingly at the peristyle outside, with its fabulous frescoes of Vestal Virgins and magnificent marble pool and fountains. A pity it didn’t get more sun. Then he began to track the frescoes adorning the dining room walls, which unfolded the story of the battle at Lake Regillus when Castor and Pollux saved Rome.

And just as he took in the doorway, the Goddess Diana came into the room. She had to be Diana! Goddess of the moonlit night, half not there, moving with such grace and silver beauty that she made no sound. The maiden Goddess unknown by men, who looked upon her and pined away, so chaste and indifferent was she. But this Diana, now halfway across the room, saw him staring and stumbled slightly, blue eyes widening.

“Magnus, this is my daughter, Julia.” Caesar indicated the chair opposite Pompey’s end of the couch. “Sit there, Julia, and keep our guest company. Ah, here’s my mother!”

Aurelia seated herself opposite Caesar, while some of the servants began to bring food in, and others set down goblets, poured wine and water. The women, Pompey noted, drank water only.

How beautiful she was! How delicious, how delightful! And after that little stumble she behaved as a dream creature might, pointing out the dishes their cooks did best, suggesting that he try this or that with a smile containing no hint of shyness, but not sensuously inviting either. He ventured a question about what she did with her days (who cared about her days—what did she do with her nights when the moon rode high and her chariot took her to the stars?) and she answered that she read books or went for walks or visited the Vestals or her friends, an answer given in a deep soft voice like black wings against a luminous sky. When she leaned forward he could see how tender and delicate her chest was, though sight of her breasts eluded him. Her arms were frail yet round, with a tiny dimple in each elbow, and her eyes were set in skin faintly shadowed with violet, a sheen of the moon’s silver on each eyelid. Such long, transparent lashes! And brows so fair they could scarcely be seen. She wore no paint, and her pale pink mouth drove him mad to kiss it, so full and folded was it, with creases at the corners promising laughter.

For all that either of them noticed, Caesar and Aurelia might not have existed. They spoke of Homer and Hesiod, Xenophon and Pindar, and of his travels in the East; she hung on his words as if his tongue was as gifted as Cicero’s, and plied him with all kinds of questions about everything from the Albanians to the crawlies near the Caspian Sea. Had he seen Ararat? What was the Jewish temple like? Did people really walk on the waters of the Palus Asphaltites? Had he ever seen a black person? What did King Tigranes look like? Was it true that the Amazons had once lived in Pontus at the mouth of the river Thermodon? Had he ever seen an Amazon? Alexander the Great was supposed to have met their Queen somewhere along the river Jaxartes. Oh, what wonderful names they were, Oxus and Araxes and Jaxartes—how did human tongues manage to invent such alien sounds?

And terse pragmatic Pompey with his laconic style and his scant education was profoundly glad that life in the East and Theophanes had introduced him to reading; he produced words he hadn’t realized his mind had absorbed, and thoughts he hadn’t understood he could think. He would have died rather than disappoint this exquisite young thing watching his face as if it was the fount of all knowledge and the most wonderful sight she had ever beheld.

The food stayed on the table much longer than busy impatient Caesar usually tolerated, but as day began to turn to night outside in the peristyle he nodded imperceptibly to Eutychus, and the servants reappeared. Aurelia got up.

“Julia, it’s time we went,” she said.

Deep in a conversation about Aeschylus, Julia jumped, came back to reality.

“Oh, avia, is it?” she asked. “Where did the time go?”

But, noted Pompey, neither by word nor look did she convey any impression that she was unwilling to leave, or resented her grandmother’s termination of what she had told him was a special treat; when her father had guests she was not usually allowed to be in the dining room, as she was not yet eighteen.

She rose to her feet and held out her hand to Pompey in a friendly way, expecting him to shake it. But though Pompey was not prone to do such things, he took the hand as if it might fall to fragments, raised it to his lips and lightly kissed it.

“Thank you for your company, Julia,” he said, smiling into her eyes. “Brutus is a very lucky fellow.” And to Caesar after the women had gone, “Brutus really is a very lucky fellow.”

“I think so,” said Caesar, smiling at a thought of his own.

“I’ve never met anyone like her!”

“Julia is a pearl beyond price.”

After which there didn’t seem to be very much left to say. Pompey took his leave.

“Come again soon, Magnus,” said Caesar at the door.

“Tomorrow if you like! I have to go to Campania the day after, and I’ll be away a market interval at least. You were right. It’s not a satisfactory way to live, just three or four philosophers for company. Why do you suppose we house them at all?”

“For intelligent masculine company not likely to appeal to the women of the house as lovers. And to keep our Greek pure, though I hear Lucullus was careful to pop a few grammatical solecisms in the Greek version of his memoirs to satisfy the Greek literati who will not believe any Roman speaks and writes perfect Greek. For myself, the habit of housing philosophers is not one I’ve ever been tempted to adopt. They’re such parasites.”

“Rubbish! You don’t house them because you’re a forest cat. You prefer to live and hunt alone.”

“Oh no,” said Caesar softly. “I don’t live alone. I am one of the most fortunate men in Rome, I live with a Julia.”

Who went up to her rooms exalted and exhausted, her hand alive with the feel of his kiss. There on the shelf was the bust of Pompey; she walked across to it, took it off the shelf and dropped it into the refuse jar which lived in a corner. The statue was nothing, unneeded now she had seen and met and talked to the real man. Not as tall as tata, yet quite tall enough. Very broad-shouldered and muscular, and when he lay on the couch his belly stayed taut, no middle-aged spread to spoil him. A wonderful face, with the bluest eyes she had ever seen. And that hair! Pure gold, masses of it. The way it stood up from his brow in a quiff. So handsome! Not like tata, who was classically Roman, but more interesting because more unusual. As Julia liked small noses, she found nothing to criticize in that organ. He had nice legs too!

The next stop was her mirror, a gift from tata that avia did not approve of, for it was mounted on a pivoted stand and its highly polished silver surface reflected the viewer from head to foot. She took off all her clothes and considered herself. Too thin! Hardly any breasts! No dimples! Whereupon she burst into tears, cast herself upon her bed and wept herself to sleep, the hand he had kissed tucked against her cheek.

*

“She threw Pompeius’s bust out,” said Aurelia to Caesar the next morning.

“Edepol! I really thought she liked him.”

“Nonsense, Caesar, it’s an excellent sign! She is no longer satisfied with a replica, she wants the real man.”

“You relieve me.” Caesar picked up his beaker of hot water and lemon juice, sipped it with what looked like enjoyment. “He’s coming to dinner again today, used a trip to Campania tomorrow as an excuse for coming back so soon.”

“Today will complete the conquest,” said Aurelia.

Caesar grinned. “I think the conquest was complete the moment she walked into the dining room. I’ve known Pompeius for years, and he’s hooked so thoroughly he hasn’t even felt the barb. Don’t you remember the day he arrived at Aunt Julia’s to claim Mucia?”

“Yes, I do. Vividly. Reeking of attar of roses and as silly as a foal in a field. He wasn’t at all like that yesterday.”

“He’s grown up a bit. Mucia was older than he. The attraction isn’t the same. Julia is seventeen, he’s now forty-six.” Caesar shuddered. “Mater, that’s nearly thirty years’ difference in ages! Am I being too coldblooded? I wouldn’t have her unhappy.”

“She won’t be. Pompeius seems to have the knack of pleasing his wives as long as he remains in love with them. He’ll never fall out of love with Julia, she’s his vanished youth.” Aurelia cleared her throat, went a little red. “I am sure you are a splendid lover, Caesar, but living with a woman not of your own family bores you. Pompeius enjoys married life—provided the woman is suitable for his ambitions. He can look no higher than a Julia.”

He didn’t seem to want to look any higher than a Julia. If anything saved Pompey’s reputation after Cato’s attack, it was the daze Julia induced in him as he went round the Forum that morning, having quite forgotten that he had resolved never to appear in public again. As it was, he drifted here and there to talk to anyone who appeared, and was so transparently unconcerned about the Cato diatribe that many decided yesterday’s reaction had been pure shock. Today there was no resentment and no embarrassment.

She filled the inside of his eyes; her image transposed itself on every face he looked at. Child and woman all at one. Goddess too. So feminine, so beautifully mannered, so unaffected! Had she liked him? She seemed to, yet nothing in her behavior could he interpret as a signal, a lure. But she was betrothed. To Brutus. Not only callow, but downright ugly. How could a creature so pure and untainted bear all those disgusting pimples? Of course they’d been contracted for years, so the match wasn’t of her asking. In social and political terms it was an excellent union. There were also the fruits of the Gold of Tolosa.

And after dinner in the Domus Publica that afternoon it was on the tip of Pompey’s tongue to ask for her, Brutus notwithstanding. What held him back? That old dread of lowering himself in the eyes of a nobleman as patrician as Gaius Julius Caesar. Who could give his daughter to anyone in Rome. Had given her to an aristocrat of clout and wealth and ancestry. Men like Caesar didn’t stop to think how the girl might feel, or consider her wishes. Any more, he supposed, than he did himself. His own daughter was promised to Faustus Sulla for one reason only: Faustus Sulla was the product of a union between a patrician Cornelius Sulla—the greatest ever of his family—and the granddaughter of Metellus Calvus the Bald, daughter of Metellus Dalmaticus—who had first been wife to Scaurus Princeps Senatus.

No, Caesar would have no wish to break off a legal contract with a Junius Brutus adopted into the Servilii Caepiones in order to give his only child to a Pompeius from Picenum! Dying to ask, Pompey would never ask. So oceans deep in love and unable to banish this goddess from the forefront of his mind, Pompey went off to Campania on land committee business and accomplished almost nothing. He burned for her; he wanted her as he had never wanted in his life before. And went back to the Domus Publica for yet another dinner the day after he returned to Rome.

Yes, she was glad to see him! By this third meeting they had reached a stage whereat she held out her hand expecting him to kiss it lightly, and plunged immediately into a conversation which excluded Caesar and his mother, left to avoid each other’s eyes in case they fell about laughing. The meal proceeded to its end.

“When do you marry Brutus?” Pompey asked her then, low-voiced.

“In January or February of next year. Brutus wanted to marry this year, but tata said no. I must be eighteen.”

“And when are you eighteen?”

“On the Nones of January.”

“It’s the beginning of May, so that’s eight months off.”

Her face changed, a look of distress crept into her eyes. Yet she answered with absolute composure. “Not very long.”

“Do you love Brutus?”

That question provoked a tiny inward panic, it reflected itself in her gaze, for she would not—could not?—look away. “He and I have been friends since I was little. I will learn to love him.”

“What if you fall in love with someone else?’’

She blinked away what looked suspiciously like moisture. “I can’t let that happen, Gnaeus Pompeius.”

“Don’t you think it might happen in spite of resolutions?”

“Yes, I think it might,” she said gravely.

“What would you do then?”

“Endeavor to forget.”

He smiled. “That seems a shame.”

“It would not be honorable, Gnaeus Pompeius, so I would have to forget. If love can grow, it can also die.”

He looked very sad. “I’ve seen a lot of death in my time, Julia. Battlefields, my mother, my poor father, my first wife. But it’s never something I can view with dispassion. At least,” he added honestly, “not from where I stand now. I’d hate to see anything that grew in you have to die.”

The tears were too close, she would have to leave. “Will you excuse me, tata?” she asked of her father.

“Are you feeling well, Julia?” Caesar asked.

“A little headache, that’s all.”

“I think you must excuse me as well, Caesar,” said Aurelia, rising. “If she has a headache, she’ll need some syrup of poppies.”

Which left Caesar and Pompey alone. An inclination of the head, and Eutychus supervised the clearing away of the dishes. Caesar poured Pompey unwatered wine.

“You and Julia get on well together,” he said.

“It would be a stupid man who didn’t get on well with her,” Pompey said gruffly. “She’s unique.”

“I like her too.” Caesar smiled. “In all her little life she’s never caused a trouble, never given me an argument, never committed a peccatum.”

“She doesn’t love that awkward, shambling fellow Brutus.”

“I am aware of it,” Caesar said tranquilly.

“Then how can you let her marry him?” Pompey demanded, irate.

“How can you let Pompeia marry Faustus Sulla?”

“That’s different.”

“In what way?”

“Pompeia and Faustus Sulla are in love!”

“Were they not, would you break the engagement off?”

“Of course not!”

“Then there you are.” Caesar refilled the goblet.

“Still,” Pompey said after a pause, gazing into the rosy depths of his wine, “it seems a special shame with Julia. My Pompeia is a lusty, strapping girl, always roaring round the house. She’ll be able to look after herself. Whereas Julia’s so frail.”

“An illusion,” said Caesar. “Julia’s actually very strong.”

“Oh yes, that she is. But every bruise will show.”

Startled, Caesar turned his head to look into Pompey’s eyes. “That was a very perceptive remark, Magnus. It’s out of character.”

“Maybe I just see her more clearly than I do other people.”

“Why should you do that?”

“Oh, I don’t know….”

“Are you in love with her, Magnus?”

Pompey looked away. “What man wouldn’t be?” he muttered.

“Would you like to marry her?”

The stem of the goblet, solid silver, snapped; wine went on the table and floor, but Pompey never even noticed. He shuddered, threw the bowl of the vessel down, “I would give everything I am and have to marry her!”

“Well then,” Caesar said placidly, “I had better get moving.”

Two enormous eyes fixed themselves on Caesar’s face; Pompey drew a deep breath. “You mean you’d give her to me?”

“It would be an honor.”

“Oh!” gasped Pompey, flung himself backward on the couch and nearly fell off it. “Oh, Caesar!—whatever you want, whenever you want it—I’ll take care of her, you’ll never regret it, she’ll be better treated than the Queen of Egypt!”

“I sincerely hope so!” said Caesar, laughing. “One hears that the Queen of Egypt has been supplanted by her husband’s half sister from an Idumaean concubine.”

But all and any answers were wasted on Pompey, who continued to lie gazing ecstatically at the ceiling. Then he rolled over. “May I see her?” he asked.

“I think not, Magnus. Go home like a good fellow and leave me to disentangle the threads this day has woven. The Servilius Caepio cum Junius Silanus household will be in an uproar.”

“I’ll pay her dowry to Brutus,” Pompey said instantly.

“You will not,” said Caesar, holding out his hand. “Get up, man, get up!” He grinned. “I confess I never thought to have a son-in-law six years older than I am!”

“Am I too old for her? I mean, in ten years’ time—”

“Women,” said Caesar as he guided Pompey in the direction of the door, “are very strange, Magnus. I have often noticed that they don’t seem prone to look elsewhere if they’re happy at home.”

“Mucia, you’re hinting.”

“You left her alone for so long, that was the trouble. Don’t do it to my daughter, who wouldn’t betray you if you stayed away for twenty years, but would definitely not thrive.”

“My military days are done,” said Pompey. He stopped, wet his lips nervously. “When can we marry? She said you wouldn’t let her marry Brutus until she turned eighteen.”

“What’s suitable for Brutus and suitable for Pompeius Magnus are two different things. May is unlucky for weddings, but if it’s within the next three days the omens aren’t too bad. Two days hence, then.”

“I’ll come round tomorrow.”

“You won’t come round again until the wedding day—and don’t chatter about it to anyone, even your philosophers,” said Caesar, shutting the door firmly in Pompey’s face.

“Mater! Mater!” the prospective father-in-law shouted from the bottom of the front stairs.

Down came his mother at a clip not appropriate for a respected Roman matron of her years. “Is it?” she asked, hands clasped about his right forearm, her eyes shining.

“It is. We’ve done it, Mater, we’ve done it! He’s gone home somewhere up in the aether, and looking like a schoolboy.”

“Oh, Caesar! He’s yours now no matter what!”

“And that is no exaggeration. How about Julia?”

“She’ll leave us for the moon when she knows. I’ve been upstairs listening patiently to a weepy jumble of apologies for falling in love with Pompeius Magnus and protests at having to marry a dreary bore like Brutus. It all came out because Pompeius pressed his suit over dinner.” Aurelia sighed through the midst of a huge smile. “How lovely, my son! We’ve succeeded in getting what we want, yet we’ve also made two other people extremely happy. A good day’s work!”

“A better day’s work than tomorrow will bring.”

Aurelia’s face fell. “Servilia.”

“I was going to say, Brutus.”

“Oh yes, poor young man! But it isn’t Brutus who’ll plunge the dagger in. I’d watch Servilia.”

Eutychus coughed delicately, slyly concealing his pleasure; trust the senior servants of a household to know which way the wind blew!

“What is it?” Caesar asked.

“Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus is at the outside door, Caesar, but he refuses to come in. He said he’d like a quick word with you.”

“I’ve had a brilliant idea!” cried Pompey, feverishly wringing Caesar’s hand.

“No more visits today, Magnus, please! What idea?”

“Tell Brutus I’d be delighted to give him Pompeia in exchange for Julia. I’ll dower her with whatever he asks—five hundred, a thousand—makes no difference to me. More important to keep him happy than oblige Faustus Sulla, eh?”

By an Herculean effort Caesar kept his face straight. “Why, thank you, Magnus. I’ll relay the offer, but don’t do anything rash. Brutus mightn’t feel like marrying anyone for a while.”

Off went Pompey for the second time, waving cheerfully.

“What was all that about?” asked Aurelia.

“He wants to give Brutus his own daughter in exchange for Julia. Faustus Sulla can’t compete with the Gold of Tolosa, it seems. Still, it’s good to see Magnus back in character. I was beginning to wonder at his newfound sensitivity and perception.”

“You surely won’t mention his offer to Brutus and Servilia?”

“I’ll have to. But at least I have time to compose a tactful reply to deliver to my future son-in-law. Mind you, it’s as well he lives on the Carinae. Any closer to the Palatine and he’d hear what Servilia said for himself.”

“When is the wedding to be? May and June are so unlucky!”

“Two days from now. Make offerings, Mater. So will I. I’d rather it was an accomplished thing before Rome gets to know.” He bent to kiss his mother’s cheek. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be off to see Marcus Crassus.”

As she knew perfectly well why he was seeking Crassus without needing to ask, Caesar’s mother went off to swear Eutychus to silence and plan the wedding feast. What a pity secrecy meant no guests. Still, Cardixa and Burgundus could act as witnesses, and the Vestal Virgins help the Pontifex Maximus officiate.

“Burning the midnight oil as usual?” Caesar asked.

Crassus jumped, splattering ink across his neat rows of Ms, Cs, Ls and Xs. “Will you please stop picking the lock on my door?”

“You don’t leave me an alternative, though if you like I’ll rig up a bell and cord for you. I’m quite deedy at that sort of thing,” said Caesar, strolling up the room.

“I wish you would, it costs money to repair locks.”

“Consider it done. I’ll be round with a hammer, a bell, some cord and staples tomorrow. You can boast that you have the only Pontifex Maximus-installed bell in Rome.” Caesar pulled a chair around and sat down with a sigh of sheer content.

“You look like the cat that snatched the dinner quail for his own dinner, Gaius.”

“Oh, I snatched more than a quail. I made off with a whole peacock.”

“I’m consumed with curiosity.”

“Will you lend me two hundred talents, payable as soon as I make my province payable?”

“Now you’re being sensible! Yes, of course.”

“Don’t you want to know why?”

“I told you, I’m consumed with curiosity.”

Suddenly Caesar frowned. “Actually you mightn’t approve.”

“If I don’t, I’ll tell you. But I can’t until I know.”

“I need one hundred talents to pay Brutus for breaking his engagement to Julia, and another hundred talents to give Magnus as Julia’s dowry.”

Crassus put his pen down slowly and precisely, no expression on his face. The shrewd grey eyes looked sideways at a lamp flame, then turned to rest on Caesar’s face. “I have always believed,” the plutocrat said, “that one’s children are an investment only fully realized if they can bring their father what he cannot have otherwise. I am sorry for you, Gaius, because I know you would prefer that Julia marry someone of better blood. But I applaud your courage and your foresight. Little though I like the man, Pompeius is necessary for both of us. If I had a daughter, I might have done the same thing. Brutus is a little too young to serve your ends, nor will his mother let him fulfill his potential. If Pompeius is married to your Julia, we can have no doubt of him, no matter how the boni prey upon his nerves.” Crassus grunted. “She is, besides, a treasure. She’ll make the Great Man idyllically happy. In fact, were I younger, I’d envy him.”

“Tertulla would murder you,” Caesar chuckled. He looked at Crassus inquisitively. “What of your sons? Have you decided who will have them yet?”

“Publius is going to Metellus Scipio’s daughter, Cornelia Metella, so he has to wait a few more years. Not a bad little thing considering tata’s stupidity. Scipio’s mother was Crassus Orator’s elder daughter, so it’s very suitable. As for Marcus, I’ve been thinking of Metellus Creticus’s daughter.”

“A foot in the camp of the boni is a foot well placed,” said Caesar sententiously.

“So I believe. I’m getting too old for all this fighting.”

“Keep the wedding to yourself, Marcus,” said Caesar, rising.

“On one condition.”

“Which is?”

“That I’m there when Cato finds out.”

“A pity we won’t see Bibulus’s face.”

“No, but we could always send him a flask of hemlock. He’s going to feel quite suicidal.”

*

Having very correctly sent a message ahead to make sure he was expected, Caesar walked early the next morning up to the Palatine to the house of the late Decimus Junius Silanus.

“An unusual pleasure, Caesar,” purred Servilia, inclining her cheek to receive a kiss.

Watching this, Brutus said nothing, did not smile. Since the day after Bibulus had retired to his house to watch the skies, Brutus had sensed something wrong. For one thing, he had succeeded in seeing Julia only twice between then and now, and on each occasion she hadn’t really been there at all. For another, he was used to dining at the Domus Publica regularly several times in a market interval, yet of late when he had suggested it, he had been put off on the excuse of important confidential dinner guests. And Julia had looked radiant, so beautiful, so aloof; not exactly uninterested, more as if her interest lay elsewhere, a region inside her mind she had never opened to him. Oh, she had pretended to listen! Yet she hadn’t heard a single word, just gazed into space with a sweet and secret half smile. Nor would she let him kiss her. On the first visit, it had been a headache. On the second, she hadn’t felt like a kiss. Caring and apologetic, but no kiss was no kiss. Had he not known better, he would have thought someone else was kissing her.

Now here was her father on a formal embassage, heralded by a messenger, and clad in the regalia of the Pontifex Maximus. Had he ruined things by asking to marry Julia a year earlier than arranged? Oh, why did he feel this was all to do with Julia? And why didn’t he look like Caesar? No flaw in that face. No flaw in that body. If there had been, Mama would have lost interest in Caesar long ago.

The Pontifex Maximus didn’t sit down, but nor did he pace, or seem discomposed.

“Brutus,” he said, “I know of no way to give bad news that can soften the blow, so I’ll be blunt. I’m breaking your contract of betrothal to Julia.” A slender scroll was placed on the table. “This is a draft on my bankers for the sum of one hundred talents, in accordance with the agreement. I am very sorry.”

Shock sent Brutus sagging into a chair, where he sat with his poor mouth agape on no word of protest, his large and haunting eyes fixed on Caesar’s face with the same expression in them an old dog has when it realizes that its beloved master is going to have it killed because it is no longer useful. His mouth closed, worked upon speech, but no word emerged. Then the light in his eyes went out as clearly and quickly as a snuffed candle.

“I am very sorry,” Caesar said again, more emotionally.

Shock had brought Servilia to her feet, nor for long moments could she find speech either. Her eyes went to Brutus in time to witness the dying of his light, but she had no idea what was really happening to him, for she was as far from Brutus in temperament as Antioch was from Olisippo.

Thus it was Caesar felt Brutus’s pain, not Servilia. Never conquered by a woman as Julia had conquered Brutus, he could yet understand exactly what Julia had meant to Brutus, and he found himself wondering whether if he had known he would have had the courage to kill like this. But yes, Caesar, you would have. You’ve killed before and you’ll kill again. Yet rarely eye to eye, as now. The poor, poor fellow! He won’t recover. He first wanted my daughter when he was fourteen years old, and he has never changed or wavered. I have killed him—or at least killed what his mother has left alive. How awful to be the rag doll between two savages like Servilia and me. Silanus also, but not as terribly as Brutus. Yes, we’ve killed him. From now on he’s one of the lemures.

“Why?” rasped Servilia, beginning to pant.

“I’m afraid I need Julia to form another alliance.”

“A better alliance than a Caepio Brutus? There’s isn’t one!”

“Not in terms of eligibility, that’s true. Nor in terms of niceness, tenderness, honor, integrity. It’s been a privilege to have your son in my family for so many years. But the fact remains that I need Julia to form another alliance.”

“Do you mean you’d sacrifice my son to feather your own political nest, Caesar?” she asked, teeth bared.

“Yes. Just as you’d sacrifice my daughter to serve your ends, Servilia. We produce children to inherit the fame and enhancement we bring the family, and the price our children pay is to be there to serve our needs and the needs of our families. They never know want. They never know hardship. They never lack literacy and numeracy. But it is a foolish parent who does not bring a child up to understand the price for high birth, ease, wealth and education. The Head Count can love and spoil their children freely. But our children are the servants of the family, and in their turn they will expect from their children what we expect from them. The family is perpetual. We and our children are but a small part of it. Romans create their own Gods, Servilia, and all the truly Roman Gods are Gods of the family. Hearth, storage cupboards, the household, ancestors, parents and children. My daughter understands her function as a part of the Julian family. Just as I did.”

“I refuse to believe there’s anyone in Rome could offer you more politically than Brutus!”

“That might be true ten years from now. In twenty years, definitely. But I need additional political clout at this very moment. If Brutus’s father were alive, things would be different. But the head of your family is twenty-four years old, and that applies to Servilius Caepio as much as to Junius Brutus. I need the help of a man in my own age group.”

Brutus hadn’t moved, nor closed his eyes, nor wept. He even heard all the words exchanged between Caesar and his mother, though he didn’t actually feel them. They were just there, and they meant things he understood. He would remember them. Only why wasn’t his mother angrier?

In fact Servilia was furiously angry, but time had taught her that Caesar could best her in every encounter if she pitted herself directly against him. After all, nothing he could say could make her angrier. Be controlled, be ready to find the chink, be ready to slip inside and strike.

“Which man?” she asked, chin up, eyes watchful.

Caesar, there’s something wrong with you. You’re actually enjoying this. Or you would be if it were not for that poor broken young man over there. In the amount of time it will take you to speak the name, you will see a better sight than the day you told her you wouldn’t marry her. Blighted love can’t kill Servilia. But the insult I’m going to offer her just might….

“Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus,” he said.

“Who?”

“You heard me.”

“You wouldn’t!” Her head shook. “You wouldn’t!” Her eyes protruded. “You wouldn’t!” Her legs gave way, she tottered to a chair as far from Brutus as she could get. “You wouldn’t!”

“Why not?” he asked coolly. “Tell me a better political ally than Magnus, and I’ll break the engagement between him and Julia just as readily as I’ve broken this one.”

“He’s an—an—an upstart! A nobody! An ignoramus!”

“As to the first, I agree with you. As to the second and third descriptions, I can’t. Magnus is far from a nobody. He’s the First Man in Rome. Nor is he an ignoramus. Whether we like it or not, Servilia, Kid Butcher from Picenum has carved a wider path through Rome’s forest than Sulla managed to. His wealth is astronomical, and his power greater. We should thank our luck that he’d never go as far as Sulla because he doesn’t dare. All he really wants is to be accepted as one of us.”

“He’ll never be one of us!” she cried, fists clenched.

“Marrying a Julia is a step in the right direction.”

“You ought to be flogged, Caesar! There’s thirty years of age between them—he’s an old man and she’s hardly a woman yet!”

“Oh, shut up!” he said wearily. “I can tolerate you in most of your moods, domina, but not in righteous indignation. Here.”

He tossed a small object into her lap, then walked over to Brutus. “I really am very sorry, lad,” he said, gently touching the still-hunched shoulder. Brutus didn’t shrug him off; his eyes lifted to Caesar’s face, but the light was gone.

Ought he to say what he had fully intended to say, that Julia was in love with Pompeius? No. That would be too cruel. There wasn’t enough of Servilia in him to make it worth the pain. Then he thought of saying Brutus would find someone else. But no.

There was a swirl of scarlet and purple; the door closed behind the Pontifex Maximus.

The thing in Servilia’s lap was a large strawberry-pink pebble. In the act of pitching it through the open window into the garden, she saw the light catch it alluringly, and stopped. No, not a pebble. Its plump heart shape was not unlike the strawberry of its color, but it was luminous, brilliant, sheened as subtly as a pearl. A pearl? Yes, a pearl! The thing Caesar had tossed in her lap was a pearl as big as the biggest strawberry in any Campanian glade, a wonder of the world.

Servilia liked jewelry very much, loved ocean pearls most of all. Her rage trickled away as if the rich pink-red pearl sucked it up and fed on it. How sensational it felt! Smooth, cool, voluptuous.

A sound intruded; Servilia looked up. Brutus had fallen to the floor, unconscious.

After a semisenseless and wandering Brutus was put into his bed and briskly dosed with a soporific herbal potion, Servilia put on a cloak and went to visit Fabricius the pearl merchant in the Porticus Margaritaria. Who remembered the pearl well, knew exactly where it had come from, secretly marveled at a man who could give this beauty away to a woman neither outstandingly lovely nor even young. He valued it at six million sesterces, and agreed to set it for her in a cage of finest gold wire attached to a heavy gold chain. Neither Fabricius nor Servilia wanted to pierce the dimple at its top; a wonder of the world should be unmarred.

From the Porticus Margaritaria it was only a step or two to the Domus Publica, where Servilia asked to see Aurelia.

“Of course you’re on his side!” she said aggressively to Caesar’s mother.

Aurelia’s finely feathered black brows rose, which made her look very much like her son. “Naturally,” she said calmly.

“But Pompeius Magnus? Caesar’s a traitor to his own class!”

“Come now, Servilia, you know Caesar better than that! Caesar will cut his losses, not cut off his nose to spite his face. He does what he wants to do because what he wants to do is what he ought to do. If custom and tradition suffer, too bad. He needs Pompeius, you’re politically acute enough to see that. And politically acute enough to see how perilous it would be to depend on Pompeius without tethering him by an anchor so firm no storm can pry him loose.” Aurelia grimaced. “Breaking the engagement cost Caesar dearly, from what he said when he came home after telling Brutus. Your son’s plight moved him deeply.”

It hadn’t occurred to Servilia to think of Brutus’s plight because she viewed him as a mortally insulted possession, not as a person. She loved Brutus as much as she loved Caesar, but she saw her son inside her own skin, assumed he felt what she felt, yet could never work out why his behavior over the years was not her behavior. Fancy falling over in a fainting fit!

“Poor Julia!” she said, mind on her pearl.

That provoked a laugh from Julia’s grandmother. “Poor Julia, nothing! She’s absolutely ecstatic.”

The blood drained from Servilia’s face, the pearl vanished. “You surely don’t mean—?”

“What, didn’t Caesar tell you? He must have felt sorry for Brutus! It’s a love match, Servilia.”

“It can’t be!”

“I assure you it is. Julia and Pompeius are in love.”

“But she loves Brutus!”

“No, she never loved Brutus, that’s the tragedy of it for him. She was marrying him because her father said she must. Because we all wanted it, and she’s a dear, obedient child.”

“She’s searching for her father,” Servilia said flatly.

“Perhaps so.”

“But Pompeius isn’t Caesar in any way. She’ll rue it.”

“I believe she’ll be very happy. She understands that Pompeius is very different from Caesar, but the similarities are also there. They’re both soldiers, both brave, both heroic. Julia has never been particularly conscious of her status, she doesn’t worship the Patriciate. What you would find utterly repugnant in Pompeius will not dismay Julia in the least. I imagine she’ll refine him a little, but she’s actually well satisfied with him the way he is.”

“I’m disappointed in her,” Servilia muttered.

“Then be glad for Brutus, that he’s free.” Aurelia got up because Eutychus himself brought the sweet wine and little cakes. “Fluid finds its own level, don’t you think?” she asked, pouring wine and water into precious vessels. “If Pompeius pleases Julia—and he does!—then Brutus would not have pleased her. And that is no slur upon Brutus. Look on the business positively, Servilia, and persuade Brutus to do the same. He’ll find someone else.”

*

The marriage between Pompey the Great and Caesar’s daughter took place the next day in the temple atrium of the Domus Publica. Because it was an unlucky time for weddings Caesar offered for his daughter everywhere he could think might help her, while his mother had gone the rounds of female deities making offerings too. Though it had long gone out of fashion to marry confarreatio, even among patricians, when Caesar suggested to Pompey that this union be confarreatio, Pompey agreed eagerly.

“I don’t insist, Magnus, but I would like it.”

“Oh, so would I! This is the last time for me, Caesar.”

“I hope so. Divorce from a confarreatio marriage is well-nigh impossible.”

“There won’t be any divorce,” Pompey said confidently.

Julia wore the wedding clothes her grandmother had woven herself for her own wedding forty-six years before, and thought them finer and softer than anything to be bought in the Street of the Weavers. Her hair—thick, fine, straight and so long she could sit on it—was divided into six locks and pinned up beneath a tiara identical to those worn by the Vestal Virgins, of seven rolled woolen sausages. The gown was saffron, the shoes and fine veil of vivid flame.

Both bride and groom had to produce ten witnesses, a difficulty when the ceremony was supposed to be secret.

Pompey solved his dilemma by enlisting ten Picentine clients visiting the city, and Caesar by drafting Cardixa, Burgundus, Eutychus (all Roman citizens for many years), and the six Vestal Virgins. Because the rite was confarreatio a special seat had to be made by joining two separate chairs and covering them with a sheepskin; both the flamen Dialis and the Pontifex Maximus had to be present, not a trouble because Caesar was Pontifex Maximus and had been flamen Dialis (none other could exist until after his death). Aurelia, who was Caesar’s tenth witness, acted as the pronuba, the matron of honor.

When Pompey arrived dressed in his gold-embroidered purple triumphal toga, the palm-embroidered triumphal tunic beneath it, the little group sighed sentimentally and escorted him to the sheepskin seat, where Julia already sat, face hidden by her veil. Ensconced beside her, Pompey suffered the folds of an enormous flame-colored veil now draped by Caesar and Aurelia across both their heads; Aurelia took their right hands and bound them together with a flame-colored leather strap, which was the actual joining. From that moment they were married. But one of the sacred cakes made from spelt had to be broken, eaten half by bride and half by groom, while the witnesses solemnly testified that all was in order, they were now man and wife.

After which Caesar sacrificed a pig on the altar and dedicated all of its succulent parts to Jupiter Farreus, who was that aspect of Jupiter responsible for the fruitful growth of the oldest wheat, emmer, and thereby, since the marriage cake of spelt had been made from emmer, also that aspect of Jupiter responsible for fruitful marriages. To offer all of the beast would please the God, take away the bad luck of marrying in May. Never had priest or father worked as hard as Caesar did to dispel the omens of marriage in May.

The feast was merry, the little group of guests happy because the happiness of bride and groom was so obvious; Pompey beamed, wouldn’t let his Julia’s hand go. Then they walked from the Domus Publica to Pompey’s vast and dazzling house on the Carinae, Pompey hurrying ahead to make all ready while three small boys escorted Julia and the wedding guests. And there was Pompey waiting on the threshold to carry his new wife across it; inside were the pans of fire and water to which he led her, watched as she passed her right hand through the flames, then through the water, and was unharmed. She was now the mistress of the house, commander of its fire and water. Aurelia and Cardixa, each married only once, took her to the bedchamber, undressed her and put her into the bed.

After the two old women left, the room was very quiet; Julia sat up in the bed and linked her hands around her knees, a curtain of hair falling forward to hide either side of her face. This was no sleeping cubicle! It was bigger than the Domus Publica dining room. And so very grand! Hardly a surface was untouched by gilt, the color scheme was red and black, the wall paintings a series of panels depicting various Gods and heroes in sexual mode. There was Hercules (who needed to be strong to carry the weight of his erect penis) with Queen Omphale; Theseus with Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons (though she had two breasts); Peleus with the sea goddess Thetis (he was making love to a female bottom half topped by a cuttlefish); Zeus assaulting a distressed-looking cow (Io); Venus and Mars colliding like warships; Apollo about to enter a tree with a knot resembling female parts (Daphne?).

Aurelia was too strict to have permitted such pictorial activity in her house, but Julia, a young woman of Rome, was neither unfamiliar with nor dismayed by this erotic decor. In some of the houses she visited, erotica was by no means limited to bedrooms. As a child it used to make her giggle, then later it became quite impossible to relate in any way to her and Brutus; being virgin, such art interested and intrigued her without having genuine reality.

Pompey entered the room in tunica palmata, his feet bare.

“How are you?” he asked anxiously, approaching the bed as warily as a dog a cat.

“Very well,” Julia said gravely.

“Urn—is everything all right?”

“Oh, yes. I was just admiring the pictures.”

He blushed, waved his hands about. “Didn’t have time to do anything about it. Sorry,” he muttered.

“I don’t honestly mind.”

“Mucia liked them.” He sat down on his side of the bed.

“Do you have to redecorate your bedroom every time you change wives?” she asked, smiling.

That seemed to reassure him, for he smiled back. “It’s wise. Women like to put their own touch on things.”

“So shall I.” She reached out her hand. “Don’t be nervous, Gnaeus—do I call you Gnaeus?”

The hand was clasped tightly. “I like Magnus better.”

Her fingers moved in his. “I like it too.” She turned a little toward him. “Why are you nervous?”

“Because everyone else was just a woman,” he said, pushing the other hand through his hair. “You’re a goddess.”

To which she made no reply, too filled with first awareness of power; she had just married a very great and famous Roman, and he was afraid of her. That was very reassuring. And very nice. Anticipation began to work in her deliciously, so she lay back upon the pillows and did nothing more than look at him.

Which meant he had to do something. Oh, this was so important! Caesar’s daughter, directly descended from Venus. How had King Anchises managed when Love manifested herself before him and said he pleased her? Had he trembled like a leaf too? Had he wondered if he was up to the task? But then he remembered Diana walking into the room, and forgot about Venus. Still trembling, he leaned over and pulled the tapestry cover back, the linen sheet below it. And looked at her, white as marble faintly veined with blue, slender limbs and hips, little waist. How beautiful!

“I love you, Magnus,” she said in that husky voice he found so attractive, “but I’m too thin! I’ll disappoint you.”

“Disappoint?” Pompey stared now at her face, his own terror of disappointing her vanishing. So vulnerable.

So young! Well, she would see the quality of his disappointment.

The outside of one thigh was nearest; he put his lips to it, felt her skin leap and shudder, the touch of her hand in his hair. Eyes closed, he laid his cheek against her flank and inched himself fully onto the bed. A goddess, a goddess… He would kiss every bit of her with reverence, with a delight almost unbearable, this unstained flower, this perfect jewel. The silver tresses were everywhere, hiding her breasts. Tendril by tendril he picked them off, lay them down around her and gazed, ravished, at smooth little nipples so pale a pink that they fused into her skin.

“Oh, Julia, Julia, I love you!” he cried. “My goddess, Diana of the moon, Diana of the night!”

Time enough to deal with virginity. Today she should know nothing save pleasure. Yes, pleasure first, all the pleasure he could give her from lips and mouth and tongue, from hands and his own skin. Let her know what marriage to Pompey the Great would always bring her, pleasure and pleasure and pleasure.

*

“We have passed a milestone,” said Cato to Bibulus that night in the peristyle garden of Bibulus’s house, where the junior consul sat gazing at the sky. “Not only have they divided up Campania and Italia like eastern potentates, now they seal their unholy bonds with virgin daughters.”

“Shooting star, left lower quadrant!” rapped Bibulus to the scribe who sat some distance away, patiently waiting to write down the stellar phenomena his master saw, the light of his tiny lamp focused on his wax tablet. Then Bibulus rose, said the prayers which concluded a session of watching the skies, and led Cato inside.

“Why are you surprised that Caesar should sell his daughter?’’ he asked, not bothering to ascertain of one of the hardest drinkers in Rome whether he wanted water in his wine. “I had wondered how he’d manage to bind Pompeius. I knew he would! But this is the best and cleverest way. One hears she’s absolutely exquisite.”

“You’ve not seen her either?”

“No one has, though no doubt that will change. Pompeius will parade her like a prize ewe. What is she, all of sixteen?”

“Seventeen.”

“Servilia can’t have been pleased.”

“Oh, he dealt with her very cleverly too,” said Cato, getting up to replenish his goblet. “He gave her a pearl worth six million sesterces—and paid Brutus the girl’s hundred-talent dowry.”

“Where did you hear all this?”

“From Brutus when he came to see me today. At least that’s one good turn Caesar has done the boni. From now on we have Brutus firmly in our camp. He’s even announcing that in future he’ll not be known as Caepio Brutus, simply as Brutus.”

“Brutus won’t be nearly as much use to us as a marital alliance will be to Caesar,” Bibulus said grimly.

“For the moment, no. But I have hopes for Brutus now he’s worked free of his mother. The pity of it is that he won’t hear a word against the girl. I offered him my Porcia once she’s of an age to marry, but he declined. Says he’s never going to marry.” Down went the rest of his wine; Cato swung about, hands clenched around the goblet. “Marcus, I could vomit! This is the most coldblooded, loathsome piece of political maneuvering I’ve ever heard of! Ever since Brutus came to see me I’ve been trying to keep a level head, trying to talk in a rational manner—I can’t one moment longer! Nothing we’ve ever done equals this! And it will work for Caesar, that’s the worst of it!”

“Sit down, Cato, please! I’ve already said it will work for Caesar. Be calm! We won’t beat him by ranting, or by showing our disgust at this marriage. Continue as you started, rationally.”

Cato did sit down, but not before he poured himself more wine. Bibulus frowned. Why did Cato drink so much? Not that it ever seemed to impair him; perhaps it was his way to maintain strength.

“Do you remember Lucius Vettius?” Bibulus asked.

“The knight Caesar had beaten with the rods, then gave away his furniture to scum?”

“The very one. He came to see me yesterday.”

“And?”

“He loathes Caesar,” Bibulus said contemplatively.

“I’m not surprised. The incident made him a laughingstock.”

“He offered me his services.”

“That doesn’t surprise me either. But how can you use him?”

“To drive a wedge between Caesar and his new son-in-law.”

Cato stared. “Impossible.”

“I agree the marriage makes it harder, but it’s not impossible. Pompeius is so suspicious of everybody, including Caesar. Julia notwithstanding,” said Bibulus. “After all, the girl is far too young to be dangerous in herself. She’ll tire the Great Man out, between her physical demands and the tantrums immature females can never resist throwing. Particularly if we can encourage Pompeius to mistrust his father-in-law.”

“The only way to do that,” said Cato, refilling his goblet, “is to make Pompeius think that Caesar intends to assassinate him.”

It was Bibulus’s turn to stare. “That we’d never do! I had political rivalry in mind.”

“We could, you know,” said Cato, nodding. “Pompeius’s sons aren’t old enough to succeed to his position, but Caesar is. With Caesar’s daughter married to him, a great many of Pompeius’s clients and adherents would gravitate to Caesar once Pompeius died.”

“Yes, they probably would. But how do you propose to put the thought into Pompeius’s mind?”

“Through Vettius,” Cato said, sipping more slowly; the wine was beginning to do its work, he was thinking lucidly. “And you.”

“I don’t know where you’re going,” said the junior consul.

“Before Pompeius and his new bride leave town, I suggest you send for him and warn him that there’s a plot afoot to kill him.”

“I can do that, yes. But why? To frighten him?”

“No, to divert suspicion from you when the plot comes out,” said Cato, smiling savagely. “A warning won’t frighten Pompeius, but it will predispose him to believe that there’s a plot.”

“Enlighten me, Cato. I like the sound of this,” said Bibulus.

*

An idyllically happy Pompey proposed to take Julia to Antium for the rest of May and part of June.

“She’s busy with the decorators right at this moment,” he said to Caesar, beaming fatuously. “While we’re away they’ll transform my house on the Carinae.” He sighed explosively. “What taste she has, Caesar! All light and airy, she says, no vulgar Tyrian purple and a lot less gilt. Birds, flowers and butterflies. I can’t work out why I didn’t think of it for myself! Though I’m insisting that our bedroom be done like a moonlit forest.”

How to keep a straight face? Caesar managed, though it took considerable effort. “When are you off?” he asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Then we need to have a council of war today.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“With Marcus Crassus.”

Pompey’s face fell. “Oh, do we have to have him?”

“We do. Come back after dinner.”

By which time Caesar had managed to prevail upon Crassus to leave a series of important meetings to his inferiors.

They sat outside in the main peristyle, for it was a warm day and this location prevented anyone’s overhearing what was said.

“The second land bill will go through, despite Cato’s tactics and Bibulus’s sky watch,” Caesar announced.

“With you as patron of Capua, I note,” said Pompey, nuptial bliss evaporated now there was some hard talking to do.

“Only in that the bill is a lex Iulia, and I as its author am giving Capua full Roman-citizen status. However, Magnus, it’s you will be down there handing out the deeds to the lucky recipients, and you parading round the town. Capua will consider itself in your clientele, not in mine.”

“And I’ll be in the eastern parts of the Ager Campanus, which will regard me as patron,” said Crassus contentedly.

“What we have to discuss today isn’t the second land bill,” said Caesar. “My province for next year needs some talk, as I do not intend to be a proconsular surveyor. Also, we have to own next year’s senior magistrates. If we don’t, a lot of what I’ve passed into law this year will be invalidated next year.”

“Aulus Gabinius,” said Pompey instantly.

“I agree. The voters like him because his tribunate of the plebs produced some very useful measures, not to mention enabled you to clean up Our Sea. If all three of us work to that end, we ought to get him in as senior consul. But who for junior?’’

“What about your cousin, Caesar? Lucius Piso,” said Crassus.

“We’d have to buy him,” from Pompey. “He’s a businessman.”

“Good provinces for both of them, then,” said Caesar. “Syria and Macedonia.”

“But for longer than a year,” Pompey advised. “Gabinius would be happy with that, I know.”

“I’m not so sure about Lucius Piso,” said Crassus, frowning.

“Why are Epicureans so expensive?” Pompey demanded.

“Because they dine on gold and off gold,” said Crassus.

Caesar grinned. “How about a marriage? Cousin Lucius has a daughter almost eighteen, but she’s not highly sought. No dowry.”

“Pretty girl, as I remember,” said Pompey. “No sign of Piso’s eyebrows or teeth. Don’t understand the lack of a dowry, though.”

“At the moment Piso’s suffering,” Crassus contributed. “No wars worth speaking of, and all his money’s tied up in armaments. He had to use Calpurnia’s dowry to keep himself afloat. However, Caesar, I refuse to give up either of my sons.”

“And if Brutus is to marry my girl, I can’t afford to give up either of my boys!” cried Pompey, bristling.

Caesar caught his breath, almost choked. Ye gods, he’d been so upset he hadn’t remembered to mention that alliance to Brutus!

“Is Brutus to marry your girl?’’ asked Crassus skeptically.

“Probably not,” Caesar interjected coolly. “Brutus wasn’t in a fit state for questions or offers, so don’t count on it, Magnus.”

“All right, I won’t. But who can marry Calpurnia?”

“Why not me?” asked Caesar, brows raised.

Both men stared at him, delighted smiles dawning.

“That,” said Crassus, “would answer perfectly.”

“Very well then, Lucius Piso is our other consul.” Caesar sighed. “We won’t do as well among the praetors, alas.”

“With both consuls we don’t need praetors,” said Pompey. “The best thing about Lucius Piso and Gabinius is that they’re strong men. The boni won’t intimidate them—or bluff them.”

“There remains,” said Caesar pensively, “the matter of getting me the province I want. Italian Gaul and Illyricum.”

“You’ll have Vatinius legislate it in the Plebeian Assembly,” said Pompey. “The boni never dreamed they’d be standing against the three of us when they gave you Italy’s traveling stock routes, did they?” He grinned. “You’re right, Caesar. With the three of us united, we can get anything we want from the Assemblies!”

“Don’t forget Bibulus is watching the skies,” growled Crassus. “Whatever acts you pass are bound to be challenged, even if years from now. Besides, Magnus, your man Afranius has been prorogued in Italian Gaul. It won’t look good to your clients if you connive to take it off him and give it to Caesar.”

Skin a dull red, Pompey glared at Crassus. “Very beautifully put, Crassus!” he snapped. “Afranius will do as he’s told, he’ll step aside for Caesar voluntarily. It cost me millions to buy him the junior consulship, and he knows he didn’t give value for money! Don’t worry about Afranius, you might have a stroke!”

“You wish,” said Crassus with a broad smile.

“I’m going to ask more of you than that, Magnus,” said Caesar, butting in. “I want Italian Gaul from the moment Vatinius’s law is ratified, not from next New Year’s Day. There are things I have to do there, the sooner the better.”

The lion felt no chill on his hide, too warm from the attentions of Caesar’s daughter; Pompey merely nodded and smiled, never even thought to enquire what things Caesar wanted to do. “Eager to start, eh? I don’t see why not, Caesar.” He began to shift on his seat. “Is that all? I really should get home to Julia, don’t want her thinking I’ve got a girlfriend!” And off he went, chuckling at his own joke.

“There’s no fool like an old fool,” said Crassus.

“Be kind, Marcus! He’s in love.”

“With himself.” Crassus turned his mind from Pompey to Caesar. “What are you up to, Gaius? Why do you need Italian Gaul at once?”

“I need to enlist more legions, among other things.”

“Does Magnus have any idea that you’re determined to supplant him as Rome’s greatest conqueror?”

“No, I’ve managed to conceal that very nicely.”

“Well, you do certainly have luck, I admit it. Another man’s daughter would have looked and sounded like Terentia, but yours is as lovely inside as she is out. She’ll keep him in thrall for years. And one day he’s going to wake up to find you’ve eclipsed him.”

“That he will,” said Caesar, no doubt in his voice.

“Julia or no, he’ll turn into your enemy then.”

“I’ll deal with that when it happens, Marcus.”

Crassus emitted a snort. “So you say! But I know you, Gaius. True, you don’t attempt to leap hurdles before they appear. However, there are no contingencies you haven’t thought about years ahead of their happening. You’re canny, crafty, creative and courageous.”

“Very nicely put!” said Caesar, eyes twinkling.

“I understand what you plan when you’re proconsul,” Crassus said. “You’ll conquer all the lands and tribes to the north and east of Italia by marching all the way down the Danubius to the Euxine Sea. However, the Senate controls the public purse! Vatinius can have the Plebeian Assembly grant you Italian Gaul together with Illyricum, but you still have to go to the Senate for funds. It won’t be disposed to give them to you, Caesar. Even if the boni didn’t scream in outrage, the Senate traditionally refuses to pay for aggressive wars. That’s where Magnus was unimpeachable. His wars have all been fought against official Roman enemies—Carbo, Brutus, Sertorius, the pirates, the two kings. Whereas you’re proposing to strike first, be the aggressor. The Senate won’t condone it, including many of your own adherents. Wars cost money. The Senate owns the money. And you won’t get it.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know, Marcus. I don’t plan to apply to the Senate for funds. I’ll find my own.”

“Out of your campaigns? Very risky!”

Caesar’s reply was odd. “Are you still determined to annex Egypt?” he asked. “I’m curious.”

Crassus blinked at the change of subject. “I’d love to, but I can’t. The boni would die to the last man before they’d let me.”

“Good! Then I have my funds,” said Caesar, smiling.

“I’m mystified.”

“All will be revealed in due time.”

*

When Caesar called to see Brutus the next morning he found only Servilia, who glowered at him more, he was quick to note, because she felt it called for than because her feelings were permanently injured. Around her neck was a thick gold chain, and depending from it in a cage of gold was the huge strawberry-pink pearl. Her dress was slightly paler, but of the same hue.

“Where’s Brutus?” he asked, having kissed her.

“Around at his Uncle Cato’s,” she said. “You did me no good turn there, Caesar.”

“According to Julia, the attraction has always been present,” he said, sitting down. “Your pearl looks magnificent.”

“I’m the envy of every woman in Rome. And how is Julia?” she asked sweetly.

“Well, I haven’t seen her, but if Pompeius is anything to go by, she’s very pleased with herself. Count yourself and Brutus lucky to be out of it, Servilia. My daughter has found her niche, which means a marriage to Brutus wouldn’t have lasted.”

“That’s what Aurelia said. Oh, I could kill you, Caesar, but Julia was always his idea, not mine. After you and I became lovers I saw their betrothal as a way to keep you, but it was also quite uncomfortable once the news of us got out. Technical incest is not my ambition.” She pulled a face. “Belittling.”

“Things do tend to happen for the best.”

“Platitudes,” she said, “do not suit you, Caesar.”

“They don’t suit anyone.”

“What brings you here so soon? A prudent man would have stayed away for some time.”

“I forgot to relay a message from Pompeius,” he said, eyes twinkling wickedly.

“What message?”

“That if Brutus liked, Pompeius would be happy to give him his daughter in exchange for my daughter. He was quite sincere.”

She reared up like an Egyptian asp. “Sincere!” she hissed. “Sincere? You may tell him that Brutus would open his veins first! My son marry the daughter of the man who executed his father?”

“I shall relay your answer, but somewhat more tactfully, as he is my son-in-law.” He extended his arm to her, a look in his eyes which informed her he was in a mood for dalliance.

Servilia rose to her feet. “It’s quite humid for this time of year,” she said.

“Yes, it is. Less clothes would help.”

“At least with Brutus not here the house is ours,” she said, lying with him in the bed she had not shared with Silanus.

“You have the loveliest flower,” he remarked idly.

“Do I? I’ve never seen it,” she said. “Besides, one needs a standard of comparison. Though I am flattered. You must have sniffed at most of Rome’s in your time.”

“I have gathered many posies,” he said gravely, fingers busy. “But yours is the best, not to mention the most sniffable. So dark it’s almost Tyrian purple, with the same ability to change as the light shifts. And your black fur is so soft. I don’t like you as a person, but I adore your flower.’’

She spread her legs wider and pushed his head down. “Then worship it, Caesar, worship it!” she cried. “Ecastor, but you’re wonderful!”