New Year’s Day dawned without any magistrates entering office; Rome existed at the whim of the Senate and the ten tribunes of the plebs. Cato had been true to his word and blocked last year’s elections until Pompey’s nephew, Gaius Memmius, stepped down as a consular candidate. But it was not until the end of Quinctilis that Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus and Messala Rufus the augur were returned as consuls for the five months of the year remaining. Once in office, they held no elections for this year’s men, their reason being the street war which broke out between Publius Clodius and Titus Annius Milo. One, Milo, wanted to be consul, and the other, Clodius, wanted to be praetor; but neither man could condone the presence of his enemy as a fellow senior magistrate. Both Clodius and Milo marshaled their gangs, and Rome erupted into constant violence. Which was not to say that everyday life in most of the city was inconvenienced; the terror was confined to the Forum Romanum and the streets nearest it. So remorseless was the urban conflict that the Senate gave up meeting in its own hallowed chamber, the Curia Hostilia, and meetings of the People and the Plebs in their tribal assemblies were not held at all.
This state of affairs seriously hampered the career of one of Clodius’s greatest friends, Mark Antony. He was turned thirty and should already have gone into office as a quaestor, which carried automatic elevation to the Senate among its benefits and offered an enterprising man many opportunities to plump out his purse. If he was appointed quaestor to a province, he managed the governor’s finances, usually without supervision; he could fiddle the books, sell tax exemptions, adjust contracts. It was also possible to profit from appointment as one of the three quaestors who remained inside Rome to manage the Treasury’s finances; he could (for a price) alter the records to wipe out someone’s debt, or make sure someone else received sums from the Treasury to which he was not entitled. Therefore Mark Antony, always in debt, was hungry to assume his quaestor ship.
No one had asked for him by name among the governors, which rather annoyed him when he summoned up the energy to think about it. Caesar, the most open-handed of all governors, was his close cousin and should have asked for him by name. He’d asked for the sons of Marcus Crassus by name, yet the only claim they had on him was the great friendship between their father and Caesar. Then this year Caesar had asked for Servilia’s son, Brutus, by name! And been turned down for his pains, a fact which Brutus’s uncle Cato had trumpeted from one end of Rome to the other. While Brutus’s monster of a mother, who reveled in being Caesar’s mistress, tormented her half brother by feeding the gossip network with delicious little titbits about Cato’s selling of his wife to silly old Hortensius!
Antony’s uncle Lucius Caesar (invited to Gaul this year as one of Caesar’s senior legates) had refused to ask Caesar to name him as quaestor, so Antony’s mother (who was Lucius Caesar’s only sister) had written instead. Caesar’s reply was cool and abrupt: it would do Marcus Antonius a great deal of good to take his chances in the lots, so no, Julia Antonia, I will not request your precious oldest son.
“After all,” said Antony discontentedly to Clodius, “I did very well out in Syria with Gabinius! Led his cavalry like a real expert. Gabinius never moved without me.”
“The new Labienus,” said Clodius, grinning.
The Clodius Club still met, despite the defection of Marcus Caelius Rufus and those two famous fellatrices Sempronia Tuditani and Palla. The trial and acquittal of Caelius on the charge of attempting to poison Clodius’s favorite sister, Clodia, had aged that pair of repulsive sexual acrobats so strikingly that they preferred to stay at home and avoid mirrors.
While the Clodius Club flourished regardless. The members were meeting, as always, in Clodius’s house on the Palatine, the new one he had bought from Scaurus for fourteen and a half million sesterces. A lovely place, spacious and exquisitely furnished. The dining room, where they all lolled at the moment on Tyrian purple couches, was adorned with startlingly three-dimensional panels of black-and-white cubes sandwiched between softly dreamy Arcadian landscapes. Since the season was early autumn, the big doors onto the peristyle colonnade were flung open, allowing the Clodius Club to gaze at a long marble pool decked with tritons and dolphins, and, atop the fountain in the pool’s center, a stunning sculpture of the merman Amphitryon driving a scallop shell drawn by horses with fish’s tails, superbly painted to lifelike animation.
Curio the Younger was there; Pompeius Rufus, full brother of Caesar’s abysmally stupid ex-wife, Pompeia Sulla; Decimus Brutus, son of Sempronia Tuditani; and a newer member, Plancus Bursa. Plus the three women, of course. All of them belonged to Publius Clodius: his sisters, Clodia and Clodilla, and his wife, Fulvia, to whom Clodius was so devoted he never moved without her.
“Well, Caesar’s asked me to come back to him in Gaul, and I’m tempted to go,” said Decimus Brutus, unconsciously rubbing salt into Antony’s wounds.
Antony stared at him resentfully. Not much to look at aside from a certain air of ruthless competence—slight, of average height, so white-blond that he had earned the cognomen of Albinus. Yet Caesar loved him, esteemed him so much he had been given jobs more properly in the purlieus of senior legates. Why wouldn’t Caesar love his cousin Marcus Antonius? Why?
*
The pivot around whom all these people turned, Publius Clodius, was a slight man of average height too, but as dark as Decimus Brutus was fair. His face was impish, with a slightly anxious expression when it wasn’t smiling, and his life had been extraordinarily eventful in a way which perhaps could not have happened to anyone other than a member of that highly unorthodox patrician clan the Claudii Pulchri. Among many other things, he had provoked the Arabs of Syria into circumcising him, Cicero into mercilessly ridiculing him in public, Caesar into permitting him to be adopted into the Plebs, Pompey into paying Milo to start up rival street gangs, and all of noble Rome into believing that he had enjoyed incestuous relations with his sisters, Clodia and Clodilla.
His greatest failing was an insatiable thirst for revenge. Once a person insulted or injured his dignitas, he put that person’s name on his revenge list and waited for the perfect opportunity to pay the score in full. Among these persons were Cicero, whom he had succeeded in legally banishing for a time; Ptolemy the Cyprian, whom he had pushed into suicide by annexing Cyprus; Lucullus, his dead brother-in-law, whose career as one of Rome’s greatest generals Clodius had sent crashing by instigating a mutiny; and Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, whose celebration of the winter feast of Bona Dea, the Good Goddess of Women, he had mocked and ruined. Though this last revenge still haunted him whenever his enormous self-confidence suffered a check, for he had committed a terrible sacrilege against Bona Dea. Tried in a court of law for it, Clodius was acquitted because his wife and other women bought the jury—Fulvia because she loved him, the other women because they wanted him preserved for Bona Dea’s own revenge. It would come, it would come… and that was what haunted Clodius.
His latest act of revenge was founded in a very old grudge. Over twenty years ago, aged eighteen, he had charged the beautiful young Vestal Virgin Fabia with unchastity, a crime punishable by death. He lost the case. Fabia’s name went immediately onto his list of victims; the years passed, Clodius waited patiently while others involved, like Catilina, bit the dust. Then, aged thirty-seven and still a beautiful woman, Fabia (who, to add to her score, was the half sister of Cicero’s wife, Terentia) retired. Having served her thirty years, she removed from the Domus Publica to a snug little house on the upper Quirinal, where she intended to live out the rest of her life as an honored ex-Chief Vestal. Her father had been a patrician Fabius Maximus (it was a mother she shared with Terentia), and he had dowered her richly when she had entered the Order at seven years of age. As Terentia, extremely shrewd in all money matters, had always administered Fabia’s dowry with the same efficiency and acumen she brought to the management of her own large fortune (she never let Cicero get his hands on one sestertius of it), Fabia left the Order a very wealthy woman.
It was this last fact which started the seed germinating in Clodius’s fertile mind. The longer he waited, the sweeter revenge became. And after a whole twenty years he suddenly saw how to crush Fabia completely. Though it was perfectly acceptable for an ex-Vestal to marry, few ever did; it was thought to be unlucky. On the other hand, few ex-Vestals were as attractive as Fabia. Or as wealthy. Clodius cast round in his mind for someone who was as penurious as he was handsome and wellborn, and came up with Publius Cornelius Dolabella. A part-time member of the Clodius Club. And of much the same kind as that other brute, Mark Antony: big, burly, bullish, bad.
When Clodius suggested that he woo Fabia, Dolabella leaped at the idea. Patrician of impeccable ancestry though he was, every father whose daughter he eyed whisked her out of sight and said a firm no to any proposal of marriage. Like another patrician Cornelius, Sulla, Dolabella had no choice other than to live on his wits. Ex-Vestals were sui iuris-— they answered to no man; they were entirely in charge of their own lives. How fortuitous! A bride of blood as good as his own, still young enough to bear children, very rich—and no paterfamilias to thwart him.
But where Dolabella differed from that other brute, Antony, lay in his personality. Mark Antony was by no means unintelligent, but he utterly lacked charm; his attractions were of the flesh. Dolabella, to the contrary, possessed an easy, happy, light manner and a great talent for conversation. Antony’s amours were of the “I love you, lie down!” variety, whereas Dolabella’s were more “Let me drink in the sight of your dear, sweet face!”
The outcome was a marriage. Not only had the ingratiating Dolabella swept Fabia off her feet, he had also swept the female members of Cicero’s household off their feet. That Cicero’s daughter, Tullia (unhappily married to Furius Crassipes), should deem him divine was perhaps not surprising, but that the sour, ugly Terentia should also deem him divine rocked Rome of the gossips to its foundations. Thus Dolabella wooed Fabia with her sister’s fervent blessing; poor Tullia cried.
Clodius was still enjoying his revenge, for the marriage was a disaster from its first day. A late-thirties virgin cloistered among women for thirty years required a kind of sexual initiation Dolabella was not qualified—or interested enough—to pursue. Though the rupture of Fabia’s hymen could not be classified as a rape, neither was it an ecstasy. Exasperated and bored, Fabia’s money safely his, Dolabella went back to women who knew how to do it and were willing at least to pretend ecstasy. Fabia sat at home and wept desolately, while Terentia kept yapping that she was a fool who didn’t know how to handle a man. Tullia, on the other hand, cheered up enormously and began thinking of divorce from Furius Crassipes.
However, Clodius’s genuine glee at this latest successful revenge was already beginning to pall; politics were always his first priority.
He was determined to be the First Man in Rome, but would not go about achieving this end in the usual fashion—the highest political office allied to a degree of military prowess bordering on legendary. Mainly because Clodius’s talents were not martial. His method was demagoguery; he intended to rule through the Plebeian Assembly, dominated by Rome’s knight-businessmen. Others had taken that path, but never the way Clodius intended to.
Where Clodius differed was in his grand strategy. He did not woo these powerful, plutocratic knight-businessmen. He intimidated them. And in order to intimidate them he employed a section of Roman society which all other men ignored as totally valueless—the proletarii, the Head Count who were the Roman citizen lowly. No money, no votes worth the tablets they were written on, no influence with the mighty, no other reason for existence beyond giving Rome children and enlisting as rankers in Rome’s legions. Even this latter entitlement was relatively recent, for until Gaius Marius had thrown the legions open to men who had no property, Rome’s armies had consisted solely of propertied men. The Head Count were not political people. Far from it. Provided their bellies were full and they were offered regular free entertainment at the games, they had no interest whatsoever in the political machinations of their betters.
Nor was it Clodius’s intention to turn them into political people. He needed their numbers, that was all; it was no part of his purpose to fill them with ideas of their own worth, or draw their attention to the power their sheer numbers potentially wielded. Very simply, they were Clodius’s clients. They owed him cliental loyalty as the patron who had obtained huge benefits for them: a free issue of grain once a month; complete liberty to congregate in their sodalities, colleges or clubs; and a bit of extra money once a year or so. With the assistance of Decimus Brutus and some lesser lights, Clodius had organized the thousands upon thousands of lowly men who frequented the crossroads colleges which littered Rome. On any one day when he scheduled gangs to appear in the Forum and the streets adjacent to it, he needed at most a mere one thousand men. Due to Decimus Brutus, he had a system of rosters and a set of books enabling him to distribute the load and share out the five-hundred-sestertius fee paid for a sortie among the whole of the crossroads colleges lowly; months would go by before the same man was called again to run riot in the Forum and intimidate the influential Plebs. In that way the faces of his gang members remained anonymous.
After Pompey the Great had paid Milo to set up rival gangs composed of ex-gladiators and bully-boys, the violence became complicated. Not only did it have to achieve Clodius’s objective, intimidation of the Plebs, it now also had to contend with Milo and his professional thugs. Then after Caesar concluded his pact with Pompey and Marcus Crassus at Luca, Clodius was brought to heel. This had been accomplished by awarding him an all-expenses-paid embassage to Anatolia, which afforded him the chance to make a lot of money during the year he was away. Even after he returned, he was quiet. Until Calvinus and Messala Rufus were elected the consuls at the end of last Quinctilis. At this time the war between Clodius and Milo had broken out afresh.
*
Curio was watching Fulvia, but he had been doing that for so many years that no one noticed. Admittedly she was eminently watchable, with her ice-brown hair, her black brows and lashes, her huge dark blue eyes. Several children had only added to her charms, as did a good instinct for what clothing became her. The granddaughter of the great demagogue aristocrat Gaius Gracchus, she was so sure of her place in the highest stratum of society that she felt free to attend meetings in the Forum and barrack in the most unladylike way for Clodius, whom she adored.
“I hear,” said Curio, wrenching his eyes away from his best friend’s wife, “that the moment you’re elected praetor you intend to distribute Rome’s freedmen across the thirty-five tribes. Is that really true, Clodius?”
“Yes, it’s really true,” said Clodius complacently.
Curio frowned, an expression which didn’t suit him. Of an old and noble plebeian family, Scribonius, at thirty-two Curio still had the face of a naughty little boy. His eyes were brown and gleamed wickedly, his skin was smothered in freckles, and his bright red hair stood up on end no matter what his barber did to smooth it down. The urchin look was strengthened when he smiled, for he was missing a front tooth. An exterior very much at odds with Curio’s interior, which was tough, mature, sometimes scandalously courageous, and ruled by a first-class mind. When he and Antony, always boon companions, had been ten years younger, they had tormented Curio’s ultra-conservative consular father unmercifully by pretending to be lovers, and between them had fathered more bastards than, said rumor, anyone else in history.
But now Curio frowned, so the gap in his teeth didn’t show and the mischief in his eyes was quite missing. “Clodius, to distribute the freedmen across all thirty-five tribes would skew the whole of the tribal electoral system,” he said slowly. “The man who owned their votes—that’s you, if you do it—would be unstoppable. All he’d have to do to secure the election of the men he wanted would be to postpone the elections until there were no country voters in town. At the moment the freedmen can vote in only two urban tribes. But there are half a million of them living inside Rome! If they’re put in equal numbers into all thirty-five tribes, they’ll have the numbers to outvote the few permanent residents of Rome who belong to the thirty-one rural tribes—the senators and knights of the First Class. The true Roman Head Count are confined to the four urban tribes—they don’t vote across all thirty-five tribes! Why, you’d be handing over control of Rome’s tribal elections to a pack of non-Romans! Greeks, Gauls, Syrians, ex-pirates, the detritus of the world, all of them slaves in their own lifetimes! I don’t grudge them their freedom, nor do I grudge them our citizenship. But I do bitterly grudge them control of a congress of true Roman men!” He shook his head, looked fierce. “Clodius, Clodius! They’ll never let you get away with it! Nor, for that matter, will I let you get away with it!”
“Neither they nor you will be able to prevent me,” Clodius said with insufferable smugness.
A dour and silent man who had recently entered office as a tribune of the plebs, Plancus Bursa spoke up in his passionless way. “To do that is to play with fire, Clodius,” he said.
“The whole First Class will unite against you,” Pompeius Rufus, another new tribune of the plebs, said in a voice of doom.
“But you intend to do it anyway,” said Decimus Brutus.
“I intend to do it anyway. I’d be a fool if I didn’t.”
“And a fool my little brother is not,” mumbled Clodia, sucking her fingers lasciviously as she ogled Antony.
Antony scratched his groin, shifted its formidable contents with the same hand, then blew Clodia a kiss; they were old bedmates. “If you do succeed, Clodius, you’ll own every freedman in Rome,” he said thoughtfully. “They’ll vote for whomever you say. Except that owning the tribal elections won’t procure you consuls in the centuriate elections.”
“Consuls? Who needs consuls?” asked Clodius loftily. “All I need are ten tribunes of the plebs year after year after year. With ten tribunes of the plebs doing whatever I command them to, consuls aren’t worth a fava bean to a Pythagorean. And praetors will simply be judges in their own courts; they won’t have any legislative powers. The Senate and the First Class think they own Rome. The truth is that anyone can own Rome if he just finds the right way to go about it. Sulla owned Rome. And so will I, Antonius. Through freedmen distributed across the thirty-five tribes and the ten tame tribunes of the plebs they’ll return—because I’ll never let the elections be held while the country bumpkins are in Rome for the games. Why do you think Sulla fixed Quinctilis during the games as the time to hold elections? He wanted the rural tribes—which means the First Class—to control the Plebeian Assembly and the tribunes of the plebs. That way, everybody with clout can own one or two tribunes of the plebs. My way, I’ll own all ten.”
Curio was staring at Clodius as if he’d never seen him before. “I’ve always known that you’re not quite right in the head, Clodius, but this is absolute insanity! Don’t try!”
The women, who respected Curio’s opinions greatly, began to shrink together on the couch they shared, Fulvia’s beautiful brown skin paler by the moment. Then she gulped, tried to giggle, thrust out her chin pugnaciously.
“Clodius always knows what he’s doing!” she cried. “He’s got it all worked out.”
Curio shrugged. “Be it on your own head, then, Clodius. I still think you’re mad. And I’m warning you, I’ll oppose you.”
Back came the overindulged, atrociously spoiled youth Clodius had been; he gave Curio a look of burning scorn, sneered, slid off the couch he shared with Decimus Brutus, and flounced out of the room, Fulvia flying after him.
“They’ve left their shoes behind,” said Pompeius Rufus, whose intellect was on a par with his sister’s.
“I’d better find him,” said Plancus Bursa, departing too.
“Take your shoes, Bursa!” cried Pompeius Rufus.
Which struck Curio, Antony and Decimus Brutus as exquisitely funny; they lay flat out and howled with laughter.
“You shouldn’t irritate Publius,” said Clodilla to Curio. “He’ll sulk for days.”
“I wish he’d think!” growled Decimus Brutus.
Clodia, not as young as she once had been but still a most alluring woman, gazed at the three men with dark eyes wide. “I know you’re all fond of him,” she said, “which means that you really do fear for him. But should you? He’s bounced from one mad scheme to another all his life, and somehow they work to his advantage.”
“Not this time,” said Curio, sighing.
“He’s insane,” said Decimus Brutus.
But Antony had had enough. “I don’t care if they brand the mad sign on Clodius’s forehead,” he growled. “I need to be elected quaestor! I’m scratching for every sestertius I can find, but all I do is get poorer.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve run through Fadia’s money already, Marcus,” said Clodilla.
“Fadia’s been dead for four years!” cried Antony indignantly.
“Rubbish, Marcus,” said Clodia, licking her fingers. “Rome is full of ugly daughters with plutocrat fathers scrambling up the social ladder. Find yourself another Fadia.”
“At the moment it’s probably going to be my first cousin, Antonia Hybrida.”
They all sat up to stare, including Pompeius Rufus.
“Lots of money,” said Curio, head to one side.
“That’s why I’ll probably marry her. Uncle Hybrida can’t abide me, but he’d rather Antonia married me than a mushroom.” He looked thoughtful. “They say she tortures her slaves, but I’ll soon beat that out of her.”
“Like father, like daughter,” said Decimus Brutus, grinning.
“Cornelia Metella is a widow,” Clodilla suggested. “Old, old family. Many thousands of talents.”
“But what if she’s like dear old tata Metellus Scipio?” asked Antony, red-brown eyes twinkling. “It’s no trouble dealing with someone who tortures her slaves, but pornographic pageants?”
More laughter, though it was hollow. How could they protect Publius Clodius from himself if he persisted in this scheme?
*
Though his beloved Julia had been dead now for sixteen months and his grief had worn itself out to the point whereat he could speak her name without dissolving immediately into tears, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus had not thought of remarriage. There was actually nothing to prevent his relocating himself in his provinces, Nearer and Further Spain, which he would be governing for another three years. Yet he had not moved from his villa on the Campus Martius, still left his provinces to the care of his legates Afranius and Petreius. He was also, of course, curator of Rome’s grain supply, a job which he could use as an excuse for remaining in the vicinity of Rome; but in spite of Clodius’s free grain dole and a recent drought, he had brought the grain supply so tidily into running itself that little was required of him. Like all publicly conducted enterprises, what it had needed was someone with a genius for organization and the clout to ride roughshod over those ghastly ditherers the civil servants.
The truth was that the situation in Rome fascinated him, and he couldn’t bear to leave until he had sorted out his own desires, his own priorities. Namely, did he want to be appointed Dictator? Ever since Caesar had departed for Gaul, the political arena of Rome’s Forum had become steadily more undisciplined. Yet what that had to do with Caesar, he didn’t honestly know. Certainly it wasn’t Caesar causing it. But sometimes in the midst of a white night he found himself wondering whether, were Caesar still here, it would have come to pass. And that was an enormous worry.
When he had married Caesar’s daughter he hadn’t thought very much about her father, except as a consummately clever politician who knew how to get his own way. There were many Caesars in the public eye, tremendously wellborn, canny, ambitious, competent. How exactly Caesar had outstripped them all escaped him. The man was some kind of magician; one moment he was standing in front of you, the next moment he was on the far side of a stone wall. You never saw how he did it, it was so fast. Nor how he managed to rise, a phoenix from its ashes, every time his formidable coterie of enemies thought they had burned him for good.
Take Luca, that funny little timber town on the Auser River just on the Italian Gaul side of the border, where three years ago he had found himself huddled with Caesar and Marcus Crassus and more or less divided the world. But why had he gone? Why did he need to go? Oh, at the time the reasons had seemed mountainous! But now, looking back, they seemed as small as ants’ nests. What he, Pompey the Great, had gained from the conference at Luca he could have achieved unaided. And look at poor Marcus Crassus, dead, degraded, unburied. Whereas Caesar had gone from strength to strength. How did he do that? All through their association, which extended back to before his own campaign against the pirates, it had always seemed that Caesar was his servant. No one gave a better speech, even Cicero, and there had been times when Caesar’s voice had been alone in supporting him. But he had never thought of Caesar as a man who intended to rival him. After all, Caesar had done things the proper way, everything in its time. He had not led legions and forced a partnership with the greatest man in Rome at a mere twenty-two years of age! He had not compelled the Senate to allow him to be consul before he so much as had membership in that august body! He had not wiped Our Sea clean of pirates in a single summer! He had not conquered the East and doubled Rome’s tributes!
So why now did Pompey’s skin prickle? Why now did he feel the cold wind of Caesar’s breath on the back of his neck? How had Caesar managed to make all of Rome adore him? Once it had been Caesar who drew his attention to the fact that there were stalls in the market devoted to selling little plaster busts of Pompey the Great. Now those selfsame stalls were selling busts of Caesar. Caesar was breaking new ground for Rome; all Pompey had done was plough a fresh furrow in the same old field, the East. Of course Caesar’s remarkable dispatches to the Senate had helped—why hadn’t it occurred to Pompey to keep his short, riveting, a kind of chronicle of events shorn of the slightest excess verbiage? Unapologetic? Full of mentions of other men’s deeds, centurions and junior legates? Caesar’s swept through the Senate like a briskly invigorating wind. They earned him thanksgivings! There were myths about the man. The speed with which he traveled, the way he dictated to several secretaries at once, the ease with which he bridged great rivers and plucked hapless legates from the jaws of death. All so personal!
Well, Pompey wouldn’t be going to war again just to put Caesar in his place. He’d have to do it from Rome, and before Caesar’s second five years governing the Gauls and Illyricum was over. He, Pompey the Great, was the First Man in Rome. And he was going to remain the First Man in Rome for the rest of his life, Caesar or no Caesar.
They had been begging him for months to let himself be made Dictator. No one else could deal with the violence, the anarchy, the utter absence of proper procedure. Oh, it always went back to the abominable Publius Clodius! Worse than a parasite under the skin. Imagine it! Dictator of Rome. Elevated above the Law, not answerable for any measures he took as Dictator after he ceased to be Dictator.
From a practical aspect Pompey had no doubt that he could remedy what ailed Rome; it was simply a question of the proper organization, sensible measures, a light hand on government. No, execution of dictatorial powers did not dismay Pompey in the least. What dismayed him was what being Dictator might do to his reputation in the history books, his status as a popular hero. Sulla had been Dictator. And how they hated him still! Not that he’d cared. Like Caesar (that name again!), his birth was so august that he hadn’t needed to care. A patrician Cornelius could do precisely what he pleased without diminishing his prominence in the history books of the future. Whether they portrayed him as a monster or a hero mattered not to Sulla. Only that he had mattered to Rome.
But a Pompeius from Picenum who looked far more a Gaul than a true Roman had to be very, very careful. Not for him the glory of patrician ancestry. Not for him automatic election at the top of the polls just because of the family name he bore. All that he was, Pompey had had to carve out for himself, and in the teeth of a father who had been a considerable force in Rome, yet was loathed by all of Rome. Not quite a New Man, but certainly not a Julian or a Cornelian. And on the whole, Pompey felt vindicated. His wives had all been of the very best: an Aemilia Scaura (patrician), a Mucia Scaevola (ancient plebeian), and a Julia Caesaris (top-of-the-tree patrician). Antistia he didn’t count; he’d married her only because her father was the judge in a trial he hadn’t wanted to take place.
But how would Rome regard him if he consented to be Dictator? The dictatorship was an ancient solution to administrative woes, designed originally to free up the consuls of the year to pursue a war, and the men who had been Dictator down the centuries had mostly been patricians. Its official duration was six months—the length of the old campaign season—though Sulla had remained Dictator for two and a half years, and had not been appointed to free up the consuls. He had forced the Senate to appoint him instead of consuls, then proceeded to have tame consuls elected.
Nor was it senatorial custom to appoint a dictator to deal with civil woes; for that, the Senate had invented the senatus consultum de re publica defendenda when Gaius Gracchus had tried to overthrow the State in the Forum rather than on the battlefield. Cicero had given it an easier name, the Senatus Consultum Ultimum. Infinitely preferable to a dictator because it did not, theoretically at any rate, empower one single man to do as he liked. For the trouble with a dictator was that the law indemnified him against all his actions while dictator; he could not afterward be brought to trial to answer for some action his fellow senators found odious.
Oh, why had people put the idea of becoming Dictator in his head? It had been running round there now for a year, and though before Calvinus and Messala Rufus had finally been elected consuls last Quinctilis he had firmly declined, he hadn’t forgotten that the offer had been made. Now the offers were being renewed, and part of him was enormously attracted to the prospect of yet another extraordinary command. He’d piled up so many, all obtained in the teeth of bitter opposition from the senatorial ultra-conservatives. Why not another one? And it the most important one? But he was a Pompeius from Picenum who looked far more a Gaul than a true Roman.
The diehard sticklers for the mos maiorum were adamantly against the very idea—Cato, Bibulus, Lucius Ahenobarbus, Metellus Scipio, old Curio, Messala Niger, all the Claudii Marcelli, all the Lentuli. Formidable. Top-heavy with clout, though none of them could lay claim to the title of the First Man in Rome, who was a Pompeius from Picenum.
Should he do it? Could he do it? Would it be a disastrous mistake or the final accolade to crown a remarkable career?
All this irresolution occurred in his bedchamber, too grand to be termed a sleeping cubicle. Where reposed a huge, highly polished silver mirror he had taken for himself after Julia died because he had hoped to catch a glimpse of her vanishing into its swimming surface. He never had. Now, pacing up and down, he caught sight of himself, saw himself. Stopped, gazed, wept a little. For Julia he had taken care to remain the Pompey of her dreams—slim, lithe, well built. And perhaps he hadn’t ever looked at himself again until this moment.
Julia’s Pompey had gone. In his place stood a man in his middle fifties, overweight enough to have acquired a second chin, a sagging belly, a lower back creased by rolls of fat. His famously vivid blue eyes had disappeared into the flesh of his face, and the nose he had broken in a fall from a horse scant months ago was spread sideways. Only the hair remained as thick and lustrous as ever, but what had once been gold was now silver.
His valet coughed from the door.
“Yes?” asked Pompey, wiping his eyes.
“A visitor, Gnaeus Pompeius. Titus Munatius Plancus Bursa.”
“Quickly, my toga!”
Plancus Bursa was waiting in the study.
“Good evening, good evening!” cried Pompey, bustling in. He seated himself behind his desk and folded his hands together on its surface, then looked at Bursa with the perky, enquiring gaze he had found a useful tool for thirty years.
“You’re late. How did it go?” he asked.
Plancus Bursa cleared his throat loudly; he was not a natural raconteur. “Well, there was no feast following the inaugural session of the Senate, you see. In the absence of consuls, no one thought about the feast. So I went to Clodius’s for dinner afterward.”
“Yes, yes, but finish with the Senate first, Bursa! How did it go, man?”
“Lollius suggested that you be appointed Dictator, but just as men started agreeing with him, Bibulus launched into a speech rejecting the proposal. A good speech. He was followed by Lentulus Spinther, then Lucius Ahenobarbus. Over their dead bodies would you be made Dictator—you know the sort of thing. Cicero spoke in favor of you—another good speech. But before anyone could speak in support of Cicero, Cato began a filibuster. Messala Rufus was in the chair, and terminated the meeting.”
“When’s the next session?” asked Pompey, frowning.
“Tomorrow morning. Messala Rufus has convened it with the intention of choosing the first Interrex.”
“Aha. And Clodius? What did you learn from him over dinner?”
“That he’s going to distribute the freedmen across all thirty-five tribes the moment he’s elected a praetor,” said Bursa.
“Thereby controlling Rome through the tribunate of the plebs.”
“Yes.”
“Who was there at dinner? How did they react?”
“Curio spoke out against it very strongly. Marcus Antonius said very little. Or Decimus Brutus. Or Pompeius Rufus.”
“You mean everyone except Curio was for the idea?”
“Oh, no. Everyone was against it. But Curio summed it up so well all the rest of us could add was that Clodius is insane.”
“Does Clodius suspect that you’re working for me, Bursa?”
“None of them has any inkling, Magnus. I’m trusted.”
Pompey chewed his lower lip. “Hmmm…” He heaved a sigh. “Then we’ll have to think of a way to keep Clodius from suspecting who you work for after the Senate session tomorrow. You’re not going to make life any easier for Clodius at that meeting.”
Bursa never looked curious, nor did he now. “What do you want me to do, Magnus?”
“When Messala Rufus has the lots brought out to draw for an interrex, I want you to veto the proceedings.”
“Veto the appointment of an interrex?” Bursa asked blankly.
“That’s correct, veto the appointment of an interrex.”
“May I ask why?”
Pompey grinned. “Certainly! But I won’t tell you.”
“Clodius will be furious. He wants an election badly.”
“Even if Milo runs for consul?”
“Yes, because he’s convinced Milo won’t get in, Magnus. He knows you’re backing Plautius, and he knows how much money has gone out in bribes for Plautius. And Metellus Scipio, who might have backed Milo with some of his money because he’s so tied to Bibulus and Cato, is running himself. He’s spending his money on his own candidacy. Clodius believes Plautius will be junior consul. The senior consul is bound to be Metellus Scipio,” said Bursa.
“Then I suggest that you tell Clodius after the meeting that you used your tribunician veto because you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’m backing Milo, not Plautius.”
“Oh, clever!” Bursa exclaimed, animated for once. He thought about it, then nodded. “Clodius will accept that.”
“Excellent!” beamed Pompey, rising to his feet.
Plancus Bursa got up too, but before Pompey could move round his desk, the steward knocked and entered.
“Gnaeus Pompeius, an urgent letter,” he said, bowing.
Pompey took it, making sure Bursa had no chance to see its seal. After nodding absently to his tame tribune of the plebs, he went back to his desk.
Bursa cleared his throat again.
“Yes?” asked Pompey, looking up.
“A small financial embarrassment, Magnus…”
“After the Senate meets tomorrow.”
Satisfied, Plancus Bursa departed in the wake of the steward, while Pompey broke the seal on Caesar’s letter.
I write this from Aquileia, having dealt with Illyricum. From now on I move westward through Italian Gaul. The cases have piled up in the local assizes; not surprising, since I was obliged to remain on the far side of the Alps last winter.
Enough chatter. You’re as busy as I am, I know.
Magnus, my informants in Rome are insisting that our old friend Publius Clodius intends to distribute the freedmen across all thirty-five tribes of Roman men once he is elected praetor. This cannot be allowed to happen, as I am sure you agree. Were it to happen, Rome would be delivered into Clodius’s hands for the rest of his days. Neither you nor I nor any other man from Cato to Cicero would be able to withstand Clodius short of a revolution.
Were it to happen, there would indeed be a revolution. Clodius would be overpowered, executed, and the freedmen put back where they belong. However, I doubt you want this sort of solution any more than I do. Far better—and far simpler—if Clodius never becomes praetor at all.
I do not presume to tell you what to do. Only rest assured that I am as much against Clodius’s being elected a praetor as you and all other Roman men.
I send you greetings and felicitations.
Pompey went to bed a contented man.
*
The following morning brought the news that Plancus Bursa had done precisely as instructed, and used the veto his office as a tribune of the plebs gave him; when Messala Rufus tried to cast the lots to see which of the patrician prefects of each decury of ten senators would become the first Interrex, Bursa vetoed. The whole House howled its outrage, Clodius and Milo loudest of all, but Bursa could not be prevailed upon to withdraw his veto.
Red with anger, Cato began to shout. “We must have elections! When there are no consuls to enter office on New Year’s Day, this House appoints a patrician senator to serve as interrex for five days. And when his term as first Interrex is over, a second patrician is appointed to serve for five days. It is the duty of this second Interrex to organize the election of our magistrates. What is Rome coming to when any idiot calling himself a tribune of the plebs can stop something as necessary and constitutional as the appointment of an interrex? Condone the appointment of a dictator I will not, but that does not mean I condone a man’s blocking the traditional machinery of the State!”
“Hear, hear!” shouted Bibulus to thunderous applause.
None of which made any difference to Plancus Bursa. He refused to withdraw his veto.
“Why?” demanded Clodius of him after the meeting ended.
Eyes shifting rapidly from side to side to make sure that no one could hear, Bursa made himself look conspiratorially furtive. “I’ve just discovered that Pompeius Magnus is backing Milo for consul after all,” he whispered.
Which appeased Publius Clodius, but had no effect on Milo, who knew very well that Pompey was not backing him. Milo marched out to the Campus Martius to ask Clodius’s question of Pompey.
‘“Why?” he demanded.
“Why what?” asked Pompey innocently.
“Magnus, you can’t fool me! I know whose creature Bursa is—yours! He didn’t dream up a veto out of his own imagination, he was acting under orders—yours! Why?”
“My dear Milo, I assure you that Bursa wasn’t acting on any orders of mine,” said Pompey rather tartly. “I suggest you ask your why of someone else with whom Bursa associates.”
“You mean Clodius?” asked Milo warily.
“I might mean Clodius.”
A big, brawny man with the face of an ex-gladiator (though he had never been anything as ignoble as a gladiator), Milo tensed his muscles and grew even larger. A display of aggression quite wasted on Pompey— which Milo knew, but did from force of habit. “Rubbish!” he snorted. “Clodius thinks I won’t get in as consul, so he’s all for holding the curule elections as soon as possible.”
“I think you won’t get in as consul, Milo. But you might find Clodius doesn’t share my opinion. You’ve managed to ingratiate yourself very nicely with the faction of Bibulus and Cato. I’ve heard that Metellus Scipio is reconciled to having you as his junior colleague. I’ve also heard that he’s about to announce this fact to all his many supporters, including knights as prominent as Atticus and Oppius.”
“So it’s Clodius behind Bursa?”
“It might be,” said Pompey cautiously. “Bursa’s certainly not acting for me, of that you can be sure. What would I have to gain by it?”
Milo sneered. “The dictatorship?” he suggested.
“I’ve already refused the dictatorship, Milo. I don’t think Rome would like me as Dictator. You’re thick with Bibulus and Cato these days so you tell me I’m wrong.”
Milo, too large a man for a room stuffed with precious relics of Pompey’s various campaigns—golden wreaths, a golden grapevine with golden grapes, golden urns, delicately painted porphyry bowls—took a turn about Pompey’s study. He stopped to look at Pompey, still sitting tranquilly behind his gold and ivory desk.
“They say Clodius is going to distribute the freedmen across the thirty-five tribes,” he said.
“I’ve heard the rumor, yes.”
“He’d own Rome.”
“True.”
“What if he didn’t stand for election as a praetor?”
“Better for Rome, definitely.”
“A pestilence on Rome! Would it be better for me?”
Pompey smiled sweetly, got up. “It couldn’t help but be a great deal better for you, Milo, now could it?” he asked, walking to the door.
Milo took the hint and moved doorward too. “Could that be construed as a promise, Magnus?” he asked.
“You might be pardoned for thinking so,” said Pompey, and clapped for the steward.
But no sooner had Milo gone than the steward announced yet another visitor.
“My, my, I am popular!” cried Pompey, shaking Metellus Scipio warmly by the hand and tenderly depositing him in the best chair. This time he didn’t retreat behind his desk; one wouldn’t treat Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica like that! Instead, Pompey drew up the second-best chair and seated himself only after pouring wine from the flagon containing a Chian vintage so fine that Hortensius had wept in frustration when Pompey beat him to it.
Unfortunately the man with the grandest name in Rome did not have a mind to match its breathtaking sweep, though he looked what he was: a patrician Cornelius Scipio adopted into the powerful plebeian house of Caecilius Metellus. Haughty, cool, arrogant. Very plain, which was true of every Cornelius Scipio. His adopted father, Metellus Pius Pontifex Maximus, had had no sons; sadly, Metellus Scipio had no sons either. His only child was a daughter whom he had married to Crassus’s son Publius three years before. Though properly a Caecilia Metella, she was always known as Cornelia Metella, and Pompey remembered her vividly because he and Julia had attended the reception following her wedding. The most disdainful-looking female he had ever seen, he had remarked to Julia, who had giggled and said Cornelia Metella always reminded her of a camel, and that she ought really to have married Brutus, who had the same sort of pedantic, intellectually pretentious mind.
The trouble was, however, that Pompey never quite knew what someone like Metellus Scipio wanted to hear—should he be jovial, distantly courteous, or crisp? Well, he had started out jovial, so it might as well be jovial.
“Not a bad drop of wine, eh?” he asked, smacking his lips.
Metellus Scipio produced a faint moue, of pleasure or pain was impossible to tell. “Very good,” he said.
“What brings you all the way out here?”
“Publius Clodius,” Metellus Scipio said.
Pompey nodded. “A bad business, if it’s true.”
“Oh, it’s true enough. Young Curio heard it from Clodius’s own lips, and went home to tell his father.”
“Not well, old Curio, they tell me,” said Pompey.
“Cancer,” said Metellus Scipio briefly.
“Tch!” clucked Pompey, and waited.
Metellus Scipio waited too.
“Why come to see me?” Pompey asked in the end, tired of so little progress.
“The others didn’t want me to” from Metellus Scipio.
“What others?”
“Bibulus, Cato, Ahenobarbus.”
“That’s because they don’t know who’s the First Man in Rome.”
The aristocratic nose managed to turn up a trifle. “Nor do I, Pompeius.”
Pompey winced. Oh, if only one of them would accord him an occasional “Magnus”! It was so wonderful to hear himself addressed as “Great” by his peers! Caesar called him Magnus. But would Cato or Bibulus or Ahenobarbus or this stiff-rumped dullard? No! It was always plain Pompeius.
“We’re not getting anywhere yet, Metellus,” he said.
“I’ve had an idea.”
“They’re excellent things, Metellus.” Plebeian name again.
Metellus Scipio cast him a suspicious glance, but Pompey was sitting back in his chair, sipping soberly at his translucent rock-crystal goblet.
“I’m a very wealthy man,” he said, “and so are you, Pompeius. It occurred to me that between the two of us we might be able to buy Clodius off.”
Pompey nodded. “Yes, I’ve had the same idea,” he said, and sighed lugubriously. “Unfortunately Clodius isn’t short of money. His wife is one of the wealthiest women in Rome, and when her mother dies she’ll come into a great deal more. He also profited hugely from his embassage to Galatia. Right at this moment he’s building the most expensive villa the world has ever seen, and it’s going ahead in leaps and bounds. Near my little place in the Alban Hills, that’s how I know. Built on hundred-foot-high columns at its front, jutting over the edge of a hundred-foot cliff. The most stunning view across Lake Nemi and the Latin Plain all the way to the sea. He got the land for next to nothing because everyone thought the site unbuildable, then he commissioned Cyrus and now it’s almost finished.” Pompey shook his head emphatically. “No, Scipio, it won’t work.”
“Then what can we do?” asked Metellus Scipio, crushed.
“Make a lot of offerings to every God we can think of” was Pompey’s advice. Then he grinned. “As a matter of fact, I sent an anonymous donation of half a million to the Vestals for Bona Dea. That’s one lady doesn’t like Clodius.”
Metellus Scipio looked scandalized. “Pompeius, the Bona Dea is not in the province of men! A man can’t give Bona Dea gifts!”
“A man didn’t,” said Pompey cheerfully. “I sent it in the name of my late mother-in-law, Aurelia.”
Metellus Scipio drained his rock-crystal goblet and got up. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “I could send a donation in the name of my poor daughter.”
Concern being called for, Pompey displayed it. “How is she? A terrible thing, Scipio, just terrible! To be widowed so young!”
“She’s as well as can be expected,” he said, walking to the door, where he waited for Pompey to open it for him. “You’re recently widowed too, Pompeius,” he went on as Pompey ushered him through to the front door. “Perhaps you should come and dine with us one afternoon. Just the three of us.”
Pompey’s face lit up. An invitation to dine with Metellus Scipio! Oh, he’d been to formal dinners there in that rather awful and too-small house, but never with the family! “Delighted any time, Scipio,” he said, and opened the front door himself.
But Metellus Scipio didn’t go home. Instead, he went to the small and drab house wherein lived Marcus Porcius Cato, who was the enemy of all ostentation. Bibulus was keeping Cato company.
“Well, I did it,” Metellus Scipio said, sitting down heavily.
The other two exchanged glances.
“Did he believe you’d come to discuss Clodius?” asked Bibulus.
“Yes.”
“Did he take the bait on your real purpose?”
“I think so.”
Stifling a sigh, Bibulus studied Metellus Scipio for a moment, then leaned forward and patted him on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, Scipio,” he said.
“It’s a right act,” said Cato, draining his plain pottery cup at a gulp. Since he kept the plain pottery flagon close by his elbow on the desk, it was an easy matter to refill it. “Little though any one of us loves the man, we’ve got to nail Pompeius to us as firmly as Caesar did to himself.”
“Must it be through my daughter?” asked Metellus Scipio.
“Well, he wouldn’t have my daughter!” said Cato, neighing with laughter. “Pompeius likes patricians, make him feel terribly important. Look at Caesar.”
“She’ll hate it,” said Metellus Scipio miserably. “Publius Crassus was of the noblest stock; she liked that. And she quite liked Publius Crassus, though she didn’t know him for very long. Off to Caesar almost straight after the wedding, then off to Syria with his father.” He shivered. “I don’t even know how to break the news to her that I want her to marry a Pompeius from Picenum. Strabo’s son!”
“Be honest, tell her the truth,” advised Bibulus. “She’s needed for the cause.”
“I don’t really see why, Bibulus,” said Metellus Scipio.
“Then I’ll go through it again for you, Scipio. We have to swing Pompeius onto our side. You do see that, don’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“All right, I’ll explain that too. It goes back to Luca and the conference Caesar held there with Pompeius and Marcus Crassus. Almost four years ago. April. Because Caesar’s daughter held Pompeius in thrall, Caesar was able to persuade Pompeius to help legislate a second five-year command in Gaul for him. If Pompeius hadn’t done that, Caesar would now be in permanent exile, stripped of everything he owns. And you’d be Pontifex Maximus, Scipio. Do remember that. He also persuaded Pompeius—and Crassus, though that was never as hard—to bring in a law which forbids the Senate to discuss Caesar’s second five-year command before March of two years’ time, let alone remove his command from him! Caesar bribed Pompeius and Crassus with their second consulship, but he couldn’t have done that without Julia to help things along. What was to stop Pompeius’s running for a second consulship anyway?”
“But Julia’s dead,” objected Metellus Scipio.
“Yes, but Caesar still holds Pompeius! And as long as Caesar does hold Pompeius, there’s the chance that he’ll manage to prolong his Gallic command beyond its present end. Until, in fact, he steps straight into a second consulship. Which he can do legally in less than four years.”
“But why do you always harp on Caesar?” asked Metellus Scipio. “Isn’t it Clodius who’s the danger at the moment?”
Cato banged his empty cup down on the desk so suddenly that Metellus Scipio jumped. “Clodius!” he said contemptuously. “It isn’t Clodius who will bring the Republic down, for all his fine plans! Someone will stop Clodius. But only we boni can stop the real enemy of the boni, Caesar.”
Bibulus tried again. “Scipio,” he said, “if Caesar manages to survive unprosecuted until he’s consul for the second time, we will never bring him down! He’ll force laws through the Assemblies that will make it impossible for us to arraign him in any court! Because now Caesar is a hero. A fabulously wealthy hero! When he was consul the first time, he had the name and little else. Ten years later, he’ll be let do whatever he likes, because the whole of Rome is full of his creatures and the whole of Rome deems him the greatest Roman who ever lived. He’ll get away with everything he’s done—even the Gods will hear him laughing at us!”
“Yes, I do see all of that, Bibulus, but I also remember how hard we worked to stop him when he was consul the first time,” said Metellus Scipio stubbornly. “We’d hatch a plot, it usually cost us a lot of money, and every time you’d say the same thing—it would be the end of Caesar. But it never was the end of Caesar!”
“That’s because,” said Bibulus, hanging on to his patience grimly, “we didn’t have quite enough clout. Why? Because we despised Pompeius too much to make him our ally. But Caesar didn’t make that mistake. I don’t say he doesn’t despise Pompeius to this day—who with Caesar’s ancestry wouldn’t?—but he uses Pompeius. Who has a huge amount of clout. Who even presumes to call himself the First Man in Rome, if you please! Pah! Caesar presented him with his daughter, a girl who could have married anyone, she was so highborn. A Cornelian and a Julian combined. Who was betrothed to Brutus, quite the richest and best-connected nobleman in Rome. Caesar broke that engagement. Enraged Servilia. Horrified everyone who mattered. But did he care? No! He caught Pompeius in his toils, he became unbeatable. Well, if we catch Pompeius in our toils, we’ll become unbeatable! That’s why you’re going to offer him Cornelia Metella.”
Cato listened, eyes fixed on Bibulus’s face. The best, the most enduring of friends. A very tiny fellow, so silver of hair, brows and lashes that he seemed peculiarly bald. Silver eyes too. Sharp-faced, sharp-minded. Though he could thank Caesar for honing the razor edge on his mind.
“All right,” said Metellus Scipio with a sigh, “I’ll go home and talk to Cornelia Metella. I won’t promise, but if she says she’s willing, then I’ll offer her to Pompeius.”
“And that,” said Bibulus when Cato returned from escorting Metellus Scipio off the premises, “is that.” Cato lifted the plain pottery cup to his lips and drank again; Bibulus looked dismayed.
“Cato, must you?” he asked. “I used to think the wine never went to your head, but that isn’t true anymore. You drink far too much. It will kill you.”
Indeed Cato never looked well these days, though he was one of those men whose figure hadn’t suffered; he was as tall, as straight, as beautifully built as ever. But his face, which used to be so bright, so innocent, had sunk to ashen planes and fine wrinkles, despite the fact that he was only forty-one years old. The nose, so large that it was famous in a city of large noses, dominated the face completely; in the old days his eyes had done that, for they were widely opened, luminously grey.
And the short-cut, slightly waving hair was no longer auburn—more a speckled beige.
He drank and he drank. Especially since he had given Marcia to Hortensius. Bibulus knew why, of course, though Cato had never discussed it. Love was not an emotion Cato could cope with, particularly a love as ardent and passionate as the love he still felt for Marcia. It tormented him, it ate at him. Every day he worried about her; every day he wondered how he could live were she to die, as his beloved brother Caepio had died. So when the addled Hortensius had asked, he saw a way out. Be strong, belong to himself again! Give her away. Get rid of her.
But it hadn’t worked. He just buried himself with his pair of live-in philosophers, Athenodorus Cordylion and Statyllus, and the three of them spent each night plundering the wine flagons. Weeping over the pompous, priggish words of Cato the Censor as if Homer had written them. Falling into a stuporous sleep when other men were getting out of bed. Not a sensitive man, Bibulus had no idea of the depth of Cato’s pain, but he did love Cato, chiefly for that unswerving strength in the face of all adversity, from Caesar to Marcia. Cato never gave up, never gave in.
“Porcia will be eighteen soon,” said Cato abruptly.
“I know,” said Bibulus, blinking.
“I haven’t got a husband for her.”
“Well, you had hoped for her cousin Brutus….”
“He’ll be home from Cilicia by the end of the month.”
“Do you intend to try for him again? He doesn’t need Appius Claudius, so he could divorce Claudia.”
Came that neighing laugh. “Not I, Bibulus! Brutus had his chance. He married Claudia and he can stay married to Claudia.”
“How about Ahenobarbus’s son?”
The flagon tipped; a thin stream of red wine trickled into the plain pottery cup. The permanently haemorrhage-pinkened eyes looked at Bibulus over the rim of the cup. “How about you, old friend?” he asked.
Bibulus gasped. “Me?”
“Yes, you. Domitia’s dead, so why not?”
“I—I—I never thought—ye Gods, Cato! Me?”
“Don’t you want her, Bibulus? I admit Porcia doesn’t have a hundred-talent dowry, but she’s not poor. She’s well enough born and very highly educated. And I can vouch for her loyalty.” Down went some of the wine. “Pity, in fact, that she’s the girl and not the boy. She’s worth a thousand of him.”
Eyes filling with tears, Bibulus reached out a hand across the desk. “Marcus, of course I’ll have her! I’m honored.”
But Cato ignored the hand. “Good,” he said, and drank until the cup was empty.