The Sixth Legion and the German cavalry had been sent from Pergamum to Ephesus to form the nucleus of Asia Province’s army, so when Caesar set foot on Italian soil on Pompey the Great’s birthday, he had only Decimus Carfulenus and a century of foot with him. As well as Aulus Hirtius, Gaius Cassius, his aide Gaius Trebatius, and a handful of other legates and tribunes all desirous of resuming their public careers. Carfulenus and his century were there to guard the gold, in need of an escort.
The winds had blown them around the heel to Tarentum, most vexatious! Had they landed as planned in Brundisium, Caesar could have seen Marcus Cicero with no inconvenience; as it was, he had to instruct the others to proceed up the Via Appia without him, and set out himself to backtrack to Brundisium in a fast gig.
As luck would have it, the four mules hadn’t covered very many miles when they encountered a litter ambling toward them; Caesar whooped in delight. Cicero, it had to be Cicero! Who else would use a conveyance as slow as a litter in this kind of early summer heat wave? The gig drew up with a clatter, Caesar down from it before it stopped moving. He strode to the litter to find Cicero hunched over a portable writing table. For a moment Cicero gaped, then squawked and scrambled out.
“Caesar!”
“Come, walk with me a little.”
The two old adversaries strolled off down the baking road in silence until they were out of earshot, then Caesar stopped to face Cicero, his eyes busy. Such terrible changes! Not so much to Cicero’s exterior, though that was much thinner, more lined; to the spirit, showing nakedly in the fine, intelligent brown eyes, gone a little rheumy. Here is another who simply wanted to be an eminent consular, an elder statesman, censor perhaps, asked for his opinion early in the House debates. Like me, it’s no longer possible. Too much water has flowed under the bridge.
“How has it been?” Caesar asked, throat tight.
“Ghastly,” said Cicero without prevarication. “I’ve been stuck in Brundisium for a year, Terentia won’t send me any money, Dolabella has dumped Tullia, and the poor girl had such a falling out with her mother that she fled to me. Her health is poor, and—why, I don’t know!—she still loves Dolabella.”
“Go to Rome, Marcus. In fact, I very much want you to take your seat in the Senate again. I need all the decent opposition I can get.”
Cicero bridled. “Oh, I couldn’t do that! I’d be seen as giving in to you.”
A huge rush of blood; lips tightening, Caesar reined his temper in. “Well, let us not discuss it at the moment. Just pack your things and take Tullia to a more salubrious climate. Stay in one of your beautiful Campanian villas. Write a little. Think about things. Patch up matters with Terentia.”
“Terentia? That’s beyond patching up,” Cicero said bitterly. “Would you believe that she’s threatening to leave all her money to strangers? When she has a son and a daughter to provide for?”
“Dogs, cats or a temple?” Caesar asked gravely.
Cicero spluttered. “To leave her money to any of those, she would need a heart! I believe that her choice has fallen on persons dedicated to the—er—‘wisdom of the East,’ or some such. Tchah!”
“Oh, dear. Has she espoused Isis?”
“Terentia, put a whip to her own back? Not likely!”
They talked a little longer, keeping the subject to nothing in particular. Caesar gave Cicero what news of the two Quintuses he had, rather surprised that neither had yet turned up in Italy. Cicero told him that Atticus and his wife, Pilia, were very well, their daughter growing heartbreakingly fast. They moved then to affairs in Rome, but Cicero was reluctant to speak of troubles he clearly blamed on Caesar.
“What besides debt has bitten Dolabella?” Caesar asked.
“How would I know? Except that he’s taken up with Aesopus’s son, and the fellow is a shockingly bad influence.”
“A tragic actor’s son? Dolabella keeps low company.”
“Aesopus,” said Cicero with dignity, “happens to be a good friend of mine. Dolabella’s company isn’t low, it’s just bad.”
Caesar gave up, returned to his gig, and headed for Rome.
His cousin and dearest friend, Lucius Julius Caesar, met him at Philippus’s villa near Misenum, not so very far from Rome. Seven years older than Caesar, Lucius looked a great deal like him in face and physique, though his eyes were a softer, kinder blue.
“You know, of course, that Dolabella has been agitating all year for a general cancellation of debts, and that an amazingly capable pair of tribunes of the plebs have opposed him adamantly?” Lucius asked as they settled to talk.
“Ever since I got out of Egypt. Asinius Pollio and Lucius Trebellius, two of my men.”
“Two very good men! Though they take their lives in their hands every time, they keep vetoing Dolabella’s bill in the Plebeian Assembly. Dolabella thought to cow them by reviving Publius Clodius’s street gangs, added some ex-gladiators, and began to terrorize the Forum. It made no difference to Pollio and Trebellius, who are still vetoing.”
“And your nephew and my cousin, Marcus Antonius, my Master of the Horse?” asked Caesar.
“Antonius is a wolfshead, Gaius. Indolent, gluttonous, bad-mannered, priapic, and a drunkard to boot.”
“I am aware of his history, Lucius. But I had thought, given his good behavior during the war against Magnus, that he’d grown out of his bad habits.”
“He will never grow out of his bad habits!” Lucius snapped. “Antonius’s answer to the mushrooming violence in Rome was to quit the city and go elsewhere to—how did he put it?—‘supervise affairs in Italy.’ His idea of supervision consists in litters full of mistresses, wagons full of wine, a chariot harnessed to a quartet of lionesses, a retinue of dwarves, mummers, magicians and dancers, and an orchestra of Thracian Pan pipers and pitty-pat drummers—he fancies himself the new Dionysus!”
“The fool! I warned him,” Caesar said softly.
“If you did, then he paid you no heed. Late in March word came from Capua that the legions camped there were restive, so Antonius set off with his circus to Capua, where, as far as I can gather, he’s still conferring with the legions six months later. No sooner had he left Rome than Dolabella stepped up the violence. Then Pollio and Trebellius sent Publius Sulla and plain Valerius Messala to see you in person—you haven’t seen them?”
“No. Continue, Lucius.”
“Matters grew steadily worse. Two nundinae ago the Senate passed its Senatus Consultum Ultimum and ordered Antonius to deal with the situation in Rome. He took his time about responding, but when he did, what he did was unspeakable. Four days ago he marched the Tenth Legion from Capua straight into the Forum and ordered them to attack the rioters. Gaius, they drew their swords and waded into men armed only with cudgels! Eight hundred of them were killed. Dolabella called off his demonstrations immediately, but Antonius ignored him. Instead, he left the Forum reeking and sent some of the Tenth to round up a few men he called the ringleaders—on whose say-so, I have no idea. About fifty altogether, including twenty Roman citizens. He flogged and beheaded the non-citizens, and threw the citizens off the Tarpeian Rock. Then, having added those bodies to the total, Antonius marched the Tenth back to Capua.”
Caesar’s face was white, his fists clenched. “I’ve heard none of this,” he said.
“I’m sure you haven’t, though the news of it is all over the entire country. But who would tell Caesar Dictator, except me?”
“Where is Dolabella?”
“Still in Rome, but lying low.”
“And Antonius?”
“Still in Capua. He says the legions are mutinous.”
“And government, apart from Pollio and Trebellius?”
“Nonexistent. You’ve been away too long, Gaius, and you did too little in Rome before you left. Eighteen months! While Vatia Isauricus was consul things rubbed along fairly well, but this has not been a year to leave Rome without consuls or praetors, and so I tell you straight! Neither Vatia nor Lepidus has any authority, and Lepidus is a weakling into the bargain. From the moment that Antonius brought the legions back from Macedonia, the trouble started. He and Dolabella—what bosom friends they used to be!—seem determined to wreck Rome so effectively that even you won’t be able to pick up the pieces—and if you can’t pick up the pieces, Gaius, they’ll fight it out to the finish to see which one of them will be the next dictator.”
“Is that what they’re after?” Caesar asked.
Lucius Caesar got to his feet and paced the room, his face grim. “Why,” he demanded, spinning suddenly to confront Caesar, still sitting, “have you been away so long, cousin? It’s unconscionable! Dallying in the arms of some Oriental temptress, boating down rivers, focusing your attention on the wrong end of Our Sea—Gaius, it is a year since Magnus died! Where have you been? Your place is in Rome!”
No one else could have said this to him, as Caesar well knew; no doubt Vatia, Lepidus, Philippus, Pollio, Trebellius and all those left in Rome had deliberately given the mission to the one man Caesar couldn’t lash back at. His friend and ally of many years, Lucius Julius Caesar, consular, Chief Augur, loyalest legate of the Gallic War. So he listened courteously until Lucius Caesar ran down, then lifted his hands in a gesture of defense.
“Even I can’t be in two places at one and the same moment,” he said, keeping his voice level and detached. “Of course I knew how much work I had to do in Rome, and of course I realized that Rome must come first. But I was faced with two alternatives, Lucius, and I still believe that I chose the correct one. Either I left the eastern end of Our Sea to become a hornet’s nest of intrigue, Republican resistance, barbarian conquests and absolute anarchy, or I remained there and tidied the place because I just happened to be there when it all erupted. I decided to stay in the East, believing that Rome would survive until I could get home. My mistake is obvious now: I trusted Marcus Antonius too much. He can be so competent, Lucius, that’s the most exasperating part of it! What did Julia Antonia do to those three boys, between her megrims and her vapors, her disastrous choice of husbands, and her inability to keep a properly Roman household? As you say, Marcus is a drunken, priapic wolfshead. Gaius is inept enough to qualify as a mental defective, and Lucius is so sly that he never lets his left hand know what his right is doing.”
Blue eyes looked into blue; both pairs crinkled up. Family! The curse of every man.
“However, I am here now, Lucius. This won’t happen again. Nor am I too late. If Antonius and Dolabella think to fight for the dictatorship over my corpse, they have another think coming. Caesar Dictator is not about to oblige them by dying.”
“I do see your point about the East,” Lucius said, a little mollified, “but don’t let Antonius charm you, Gaius. You have a soft spot for him, but he’s gone too far this time.” He frowned. “There’s something peculiar going on with the legions, and I know in my bones that my nephew is at the bottom of it. He won’t allow anyone else in their vicinity.”
“Have they reason to be discontented? Cicero hinted that they haven’t been paid.”
“I assume they have been, because I know Antonius took silver from the Treasury to mint into coin. Perhaps they’re bored? They are your Gallic veterans. Pompeius Magnus’s Spanish veterans are there too,” Lucius Caesar said. “Inaction can’t please them.”
“They’ll have work enough to do in Africa Province as soon as I’ve attended to Rome,” Caesar said, and got to his feet. “We start for Rome this moment, Lucius. I want to enter the Forum at the crack of dawn.”
“One other thing, Gaius,” Lucius said as they left the room. “Antonius has moved into Pompeius Magnus’s palace on the Carinae.”
Caesar stopped in his tracks. “On whose authority?”
“His own, as Master of the Horse. He said his old house was too small for his needs.”
“Did he now,” said Caesar, moving again. “How old is he?”
“Thirty-six.”
“Old enough to know better.”
* * *
Every time Caesar comes back, Rome looks shabbier. Is it that Caesar visits so many other cities, cities planned and built by architecturally sophisticated Greeks who aren’t afraid to rip things apart in the name of progress? Whereas we Romans revere antiquity and ancestors, cannot bear to demolish a public edifice simply because it’s outgrown its function. For all her great size, she’s not a glamorous lady, poor Roma. Her heart beats down in the bottom of a damp gulch that by rights should end in the swamps of the Palus Ceroliae, but doesn’t because the rocky ridge of the Velia cuts clear across from Esquiline to Palatine, thereby turning the heart into a pond of its own. Did the Cloaca Maxima not flow directly beneath it, a pond it definitely would be. The paint is peeling everywhere, the temples on the Capitol are dingy, even Jupiter Optimus Maximus. As for Juno Moneta—how many centuries is it since anyone has refurbished her? The vapors from the mint in her basement are wreaking havoc. Nothing is well planned or laid out, it’s an ancient jumble. Though Caesar is trying to improve it with his own privately funded projects! The truth is that Rome is exhausted from these decades of civil war. It cannot go on thus, it has to stop.
His eyes hadn’t the leisure to seek out the public works he had begun seven years ago: the Forum Julium next door to the Forum Romanum, the Basilica Julia in the lower Forum Romanum where the two old basilicas Opimia and Sempronia used to be, the new Curia for the Senate, the Senate offices next door.
No, his eyes were too busy taking in the rotting bodies, the fallen statues, wrecked altars, desecrated nooks and crannies. The Ficus Ruminalis was scarred, two other sacred trees had their lower limbs splintered, and the Pool of Curtius was fouled by blood. Above, on the first rise of the Capitol, the doors to Sulla’s Tabularium gaped wide, broken shards of stone littered around them.
“Did he make no attempt to clean up the mess?” Caesar asked.
“None,” said Lucius.
“Nor has anyone else, apparently.”
“The ordinary people have been too afraid to venture here, and the Senate didn’t want the public slaves to take the bodies away until relatives had had a chance to reclaim them,” Lucius said unhappily. “It’s one more symptom of lack of government, Gaius. Who takes charge when there’s no praetor urbanus or aediles?”
Caesar turned to his chief secretary, standing green-faced with a handkerchief plastered to his nose. “Faberius, go to the Port of Rome and offer a thousand sesterces to any man who’s willing to cart putrefying bodies,” he said curtly. “I want every corpse out of here by dusk, and they all go to the lime pits on the Campus Esquilinus. Though they were unjustifiably butchered, they were also rioters and malcontents. If their families haven’t claimed them yet, too bad.”
Desperately anxious to be elsewhere, Faberius hurried off.
“Coponius, find the superviser of the public slaves and tell him I want the entire Forum washed and scrubbed tomorrow,” Caesar ordered another secretary; he blew through his nose, a sound of disgust. “This is the worst kind of sacrilege—it’s senseless.”
He walked between the temple of Concord and the little old Senaculum, and bent to examine the fragments lying around the Tabularium doors. “Barbarians!” he snarled. “Look at these, for pity’s sake! Some of our oldest laws on stone, broken as fine as mosaic. Which is what we’ll have to do—hire workers in that art to put the tablets back together again. I’ll have Antonius’s balls for this! Where is he?”
“Here comes one who might be able to answer that,” Lucius said, watching the approach of a sturdy individual in a purple-bordered toga.
“Vatia!” Caesar cried, holding out his right hand.
Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus came from a great plebeian family of noblemen, and was the son of Sulla’s loyalest adherent; the father had prospered while ever Sulla’s constitution remained in place, and was so wily that he managed to continue to prosper after it fell; he was still alive, retired to a country villa. That the son should choose to follow Caesar was something of a mystery to those who assessed Roman noblemen according to their family’s political leanings—the Servilii Vatiae were extremely conservative, as indeed had Sulla been. This particular Vatia, however, had a gambling streak; he had fancied Caesar, the outside horse in the race for power, and was clever enough to know that Caesar was no demagogue, no political adventurer.
Grey eyes sparkling, lean face grinning, Vatia took Caesar’s hand in both his own, wrung it fervently. “Thank the gods that you’re back!”
“Come, walk with us. Where are Pollio and Trebellius?”
“On their way. We didn’t expect you half so early.”
“And Marcus Antonius?”
“He’s in Capua, but sent word that he’s coming to Rome.”
They ended their tour at the massive bronze doors in the side of the very tall podium supporting the temple of Saturn, wherein lay the Treasury. After a very long, pounding assault, one leaf of the door finally opened a crack to reveal the frightened face of Marcus Cuspius, tribunus aerarius.
“Answering in person, Cuspius?” Caesar asked.
“Caesar!” The door was flung wide. “Come in, come in!”
“I can’t see why you were so terrified, Cuspius,” Caesar said as he walked up the dimly lit passageway leading to the offices. “The place is as empty as a bowel after an enema.” He stuck his head into a small room, frowning. “Even the sixteen hundred pounds of laserpicium are gone. Who’s been busy with the clyster?”
Cuspius did not pretend to be dense. “Marcus Antonius, Caesar. He has the authority as Master of the Horse, and he said he had to pay the legions.”
“All I took to pay for a war were thirty million sesterces in minted coins and ten thousand silver talents in sows. That left twenty thousand talents of silver and fifteen thousand talents of gold,” Caesar said evenly. “Sufficient to tide Rome over, I would have thought, were there two hundred legions to pay. More to the point, I had some rough calculations in my head that took into account what I estimated would be in the Treasury when I inspected it. I did not expect it to be empty.”
“The gold is still here, Caesar,” Marcus Cuspius said nervously. “I shifted it to the other side. A thousand talents of the silver were commissioned as coin during the consulship of Publius Servilius Vatia.”
“Yes, I coined,” Vatia said, “but only four million were put into circulation. The bulk came back here.”
“I did try for some facts and figures, truly!”
“No one is blaming you, Cuspius. However, while the Dictator is in Italy, no one is to remove one sestertius unless he is present, is that clear?”
“Yes, Caesar, very clear!”
“You may expect a shipment of seven thousand talents of gold and a great many gold crowns the day after tomorrow. The gold is the property of the Treasury, and will be stamped thus. Hold the crowns against my Asian triumph. Good day to you.”
Cuspius shut the door and sagged against it, gasping.
“What is Antonius up to?” Vatia asked the Caesars.
“I intend to find out,” said Caesar Dictator.
Publius Cornelius Dolabella came from an old patrician family that had sunk into decay, a not uncommon story. Like another Cornelian, Sulla, Dolabella lived on his wits and little else. He had been a charter member of the old Clodius Club during the days when Clodius and his equally wild young cronies had set the more prudish elements of Rome by the ears with their scandalous goings-on. But almost seven years had elapsed since Milo had met Clodius on the Via Appia and murdered him, which had marked the disintegration of the club.
Some Clodius Clubbers went on to enjoy distinguished public careers: Gaius Scribonius Curio, for instance, had been Caesar’s brilliant tribune of the plebs and was killed in battle just when his star was in ascendancy; Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, always known as Decimus Brutus, had graduated from generaling Clodius’s street gangs to generaling for Caesar with even greater genius, and was at present governing Long-haired Gaul; and, of course, Mark Antony had done so splendidly under Caesar that he was now the second-ranking man in Rome, the Dictator’s Master of the Horse.
Whereas nothing grand had happened for Dolabella, who always seemed to be somewhere else when Caesar was handing the good jobs out, though he had declared for Caesar the moment the Rubicon was known to be a fact.
In many ways he and Mark Antony were very alike—big, burly, obnoxiously egotistical, loud-mouthed. Where they differed was in style; Dolabella was smoother. Both were chronically impoverished, both had married for money; Antony to the daughter of a rich provincial, and Dolabella to Fabia, the ex–Chief Vestal Virgin. The rich provincial died in an epidemic, Fabia proved too long a virgin to be a satisfactory wife, but the two men had emerged from their first essays into marriage considerably wealthier. Then Antony married Antonia, his own first cousin, daughter of the revolting Antonius Hybrida; she was as famous as her father for torturing slaves, but Antony soon beat it out of her. Whereas Dolabella had married the second time for love, to Cicero’s quite bewitching daughter, Tullia—and what a letdown that had been!
While Antony worked as a senior legate for Caesar, commanding the embarkation in Brundisium and then in the field in Macedonia and Greece, Dolabella commanded a fleet in the Adriatic and was defeated so ignominiously that Caesar never bothered with him again. In fairness to Dolabella, his ships had been tubs and the Republican fleet composed of Liburnians, the best combat ships of all. But did Caesar take that into account? No. So while Mark Antony soared ever upward, Publius Dolabella moped aimlessly.
His situation became desperate. Fabia’s fortune had long gone, and the dowry installments he had thus far received from Cicero never seemed to last one drip of the water clock. Living the same kind of life as Antony (if on a more modest scale), Dolabella’s debts piled up and up. The moneylenders to whom the thirty-six-year-old rake owed millions began to dun him so persistently and unpleasantly that he hardly dared show his face in the better parts of Rome.
Then, at about the moment that Caesar vanished from the face of the earth in Egypt, Dolabella realized that the answer to his woes had been staring at him for years; he would take an example from Publius Clodius, founder of the Clodius Club, and seek election as a tribune of the plebs. Like Clodius, Dolabella was a patrician, and therefore not eligible to stand for this most eye-and ear-catching of public offices. But Clodius had gotten around disbarment by having himself adopted by a plebeian. Dolabella found a lady named Livia, and proceeded to have her adopt him. Now a bona fide plebeian, he could run for election.
Dolabella wasn’t interested in using the office to cement political fame; he intended to legislate a general cancellation of debts. Given the current crisis, it wasn’t as straw-plucking as it sounded. Groaning under the privations a civil war always brought in its train, Rome was filled with debt-ridden individuals and companies only too anxious to find a way out of their predicament that did not involve the payment of money. Dolabella ran on a platform of the general cancellation of debts, and came in at the top of the poll. He had been given a mandate.
What he hadn’t taken into account were two other tribunes of the plebs, Gaius Asinius Pollio and Lucius Trebellius, who had the gall to veto him during the first contio he called to discuss his measure. Contio after contio, Pollio and Trebellius vetoed.
Dolabella reached into his grab bag of Clodian tricks and pulled out the street gang; the next thing the Forum Romanum was rocked by a wave of terror that ought to have driven Pollio and Trebellius into a self-imposed exile. It did not. They remained in the Forum, they remained on the rostra, they remained adamant. Veto, veto, veto. No general cancellation of debts.
March came, and the stalemate in the Plebeian Assembly continued. Until now Dolabella had kept his gangs under some degree of control, but clearly worse violence was needed. Knowing Mark Antony of old, Dolabella knew perfectly well that Antony was even more heavily in debt; it was very much in Antony’s interests to see the general cancellation of debts pass into law.
“But the thing is, my dear Antonius, that I can’t very well let my bully-boys loose in a serious way while the Dictator’s Master of the Horse is in the neighborhood,” Dolabella explained over a bucket or two of fortified wine.
Antony’s curly auburn head went down; he burped hugely and grinned. “Actually, Dolabella, the legions around Capua are restive, so I really ought to hie myself down there and do some investigating,” he said. He pursed his lips to touch the tip of his nose, an easy trick for Antony. “It may well be that I’ll find the situation so serious that I’ll be stuck in Capua for—um—as long as it takes for you to pass your legislation.”
And so it was arranged. Antony proceeded to Capua on his rightful business as Master of the Horse, while Dolabella unleashed havoc in the Forum Romanum. Trebellius and Pollio were physically mauled by the gangs, savagely manhandled, drubbed unmercifully; but, like other tribunes of the plebs before them, they refused to be intimidated. Every time Dolabella called a contio in the Plebeian Assembly, Pollio and Trebellius were there to veto, sporting black eyes and bandages, but also being cheered. The Forum frequenters loved courage, and the gangs were not made up of Forum frequenters.
Unfortunately for Dolabella, he couldn’t possibly allow his bully-boys to kill—or even half kill—Pollio and Trebellius. They were Caesar’s men, and Caesar would return. Nor would Caesar be in favor of a general cancellation of debts. Pollio in particular was dear to Caesar’s heart; he had been there when the old boy crossed the Rubicon, and was busy writing a history of the last twenty years.
What Dolabella hadn’t expected was a militant surge of strength on the part of the Senate, not populous enough these days to form a quorum. Knowing this, Dolabella had entirely dismissed the senior governing body from his calculations. And then what did Vatia Isauricus do? Called the Senate into session and forced it to pass the Senatus Consultum Ultimum! Tantamount to martial law. None other than Mark Antony was directed to end violence in the Forum. After waiting vainly for six months for the general cancellation of debts, Antony was fed up. Without bothering to warn Dolabella, he brought the Tenth into the Forum and set them loose on the gangs—and hapless Forum frequenters caught in the eye of the storm. Just who the men were Antony executed, Dolabella had no idea, and could only presume that Antony—typical!—simply grabbed the first fifty he saw in the alleyways of the Velabrum. Dolabella had always known that Antony was a butcher—and that he would never implicate one of his own class and inclinations.
Now here was Caesar back in Rome. Publius Cornelius Dolabella found himself summoned to the Domus Publica to see the Dictator.
It was Caesar’s position as Pontifex Maximus that entitled him to live in the closest public building to a palace that Rome owned. Improved and enhanced first by Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus and then by Caesar Pontifex Maximus, it was a huge structure at the very center of the Forum, and had a peculiar dichotomy: on one side lived the six Vestal Virgins, on the other side the Pontifex Maximus. One of Rome’s highest priest’s duties was to supervise the Vestals, who didn’t live an enclosed life, but whose intact hymens represented Rome’s public well-being—indeed, Rome’s luck. Inducted at six or seven years of age, a girl served for thirty years, then was free to go into the community at large, even marry if she so desired. As had Fabia, to Dolabella. Their religious duties were not onerous, but they also served as the custodians of Roman citizen wills, and at the time that Caesar returned to Rome, this meant that they had upward of three million documents on hand, all meticulously filed, numbered, regionalized. For even the poorest Roman citizens were prone to make a will, lodge it with the Vestals no matter whereabouts in the world they lived. Once the Vestals took your will, you knew it was sacrosanct, that no one would ever get their hands on it until came proof of death—and the person authorized to probate it.
Thus when Dolabella presented himself at the Domus Publica, he went not to the Vestal side, nor to the ornate main entrance with the new temple pediment Caesar had erected over it (the Domus Publica was an inaugurated temple), but to the private door of the Pontifex Maximus.
All the old folk from the days of Aurelia’s insula in the Subura were dead, including Burgundus and his wife, Cardixa, but their sons and daughters-in-law still administered Caesar’s many properties. The third of them, Gaius Julius Trogus, was in the steward’s quarters at the Domus Publica, and admitted Dolabella with a slight bow. This brought his head down to the visitor’s; a tall man, Dolabella wasn’t used to being made to feel small, but Trogus dwarfed him.
Caesar was in his study, clad in the glory of his pontifical robes, a significant fact, Dolabella knew, but why escaped him. Both toga and tunic were striped in alternating bands of purple and crimson; in this room, brightly lit from a window and myriad lamps, the magnificent raiment echoed the color scheme of crimson and purple, its plastered cornices and ceiling touched with gilt.
“Sit down,” Caesar said curtly, dropping the scroll he was reading to pin Dolabella on those awful eyes, cold, piercing, not quite human. “What have you to say for yourself, Publius Cornelius Dolabella?”
“That things got out of hand,” Dolabella said frankly.
“You recruited gangs to terrorize the city.”
“No, no!” Dolabella said earnestly, his blue eyes wide and innocent. “Truly, Caesar, the gangs were not my doing! I simply promulgated legislation for a general cancellation of debts, and the moment I did so, I discovered that most of Rome was so badly in debt people were desperate for it. My proposed bill gathered a following in much the same way as—as a snowball rolling down the Clivus Victoriae.”
“Had you not proposed this irresponsible legislation, Publius Dolabella, it would never have snowed,” said Caesar without humor. “Are your own debts so massive?”
“Yes.”
“So your measure was intrinsically selfish.”
“I suppose so. Yes.”
“Did it not occur to you, Publius Dolabella, that the two members of your tribunician college who opposed the measure were not about to let you legislate?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Then what was your tribunician duty?”
Dolabella blinked. “Tribunician duty?”
“I can see where your patrician birth must make it difficult for you to understand plebeian matters, Publius Dolabella, but you do have some small political experience. You must have known what your duty was once Gaius Pollio and Lucius Trebellius proved so obdurate in vetoing.”
“Er—no.”
The eyes never seemed to blink, they just kept boring into Dolabella’s mind like two painful drills. “Persistence is a most admirable virtue, Publius Dolabella, but it goes only so far. When two of your own college members veto your every contio for three months, the message is plain. You withdraw your proposed legislation as unacceptable. Whereas you kept it going for ten months! There’s not a scrap of use sitting there looking like a penitent child, either. Whether or not you were responsible for the organization of street gangs in the old Clodius manner or not, once they existed you were very happy to take full advantage of them—including standing by while they physically assaulted two men who are protected by the old plebeian tenets of inviolability and sacrosanctity. Marcus Antonius threw twenty of your fellow Roman citizens off the Tarpeian Rock, but not one of them was a hundredth as guilty as you are, Publius Dolabella. By rights I ought to order the same fate for you. So, for that matter, should Marcus Antonius, who had to know who was responsible. You and my Master of the Horse have been holding each other’s pricks to piss for twenty years.”
A silence fell; Dolabella sat with teeth clenched, feeling the sweat on his brow, praying the drops didn’t roll into his eyes and force him to wipe them away.
“As Pontifex Maximus, Publius Cornelius Dolabella, it is my duty to inform you that your adoption into the Plebs was illegal. It did not have my consent, and it must under the relevant lex Clodia. You will therefore lay down your tribunate of the plebs immediately, and withdraw entirely from all public life until the Bankruptcy Court is back in session and you can apply to it to sort your affairs out. The Law does have mechanisms for situations like yours, and since the jury will be your peers, you should get off more lightly than you deserve. Now go.” The head went down.
“That’s all?” Dolabella asked incredulously.
A scroll was already between Caesar’s hands. “That is all, Publius Dolabella. Do you think me stupid enough to apportion blame where it doesn’t belong? You’re not the prime mover in this, you’re a simple cat’s-paw.”
Smarting yet relieved, the simple cat’s-paw got up.
“One more thing,” Caesar said, busy reading.
“Yes, Caesar?”
“You are forbidden all congress with Marcus Antonius. I have my sources of information, Dolabella, so I suggest that you don’t try to infringe that prohibition. Vale.”
Two days later the Master of the Horse arrived in Rome. He came through the Capena Gate at the head of a squadron of German cavalry, riding the Antonian Public Horse, a big, showy beast as white as Pompey the Great’s old Public Horse. Antony had gone one further than Pompey’s scarlet leather tack; his mount wore leopard skin. As indeed did he, a short cloak slung around his neck on a golden chain, one side thrown back to reveal a scarlet lining the same as his tunic. His cuirass was gold, contoured to cuddle his magnificent pectoral muscles, and worked with a scene of Hercules (the Antonii traced their origins back to Hercules) slaying the Lion of Nemea; the scarlet leather straps of sleeves and kilt were emblazoned with gold medallions and bosses, and fringed with gold bullion. His gold Attic helmet with its dyed scarlet ostrich plumes (they had cost ten talents, for they were very rare in Rome) sat linked around the left posterior horn of his leopard skin saddle, for he wanted his head bare so that his gaping audience was in no doubt as to who was this powerful, godly figure. To add to his conceit, he had equipped his squadron of Germans with full scarlet tack for their uniformly black horses, and clad them in real silver with lion skins; the heads were draped over their helmets, the empty paws knotted across their chests.
Any woman in the crowd clustered to watch him ride through the Capena market square might have debated the question of his handsomeness: was he beautiful, or was he ugly? Opinions were usually evenly divided, for the body’s height and musculature were beautiful, whereas the face was ugly. Antony’s hair was very thick and curly, a good auburn in color, his face heavyset and roundish, his neck both short and so thick that it looked like an extension of his head. His eyes, the same auburn as his hair, were small, deep in their orbits and too close together. Nose and chin tried very hard to meet across his small, full-lipped mouth, one curving its beak downward, the other upward; women whom he had honored with his amorous attentions likened kissing him to being nipped by a turtle. What no one could deny was that he stood out in any crowd.
His fantasies were rich and fabulous; true of many men, but the difference between Antony and other men lay in the fact that Antony actually lived his fantasies in the real world. He saw himself as Hercules, as the new Dionysus, as Sampsiceramus the legendary eastern potentate, and he contrived to look and act like a combination of all three.
Though his riotously luxurious mode of living dominated his thoughts, he was neither stupid like his brother Gaius nor quite an oaf; inside Mark Antony was a shrewd streak of self-serving cunning which, when needed, had extricated him from many a precarious predicament, and he knew how to make his staggering masculinity work for him with other men, especially Caesar Dictator, who was his second cousin. Added to this, he possessed his family’s ability to orate—oh, not in Cicero’s or Caesar’s class, but very definitely superior to most of the Senate. He did not lack courage or bravery, and he could think on a battlefield. What he lacked most was a sense of morality, of ethical behavior, of respect for life and human beings, yet he could be outrageously generous and tremendously good company. Antony was a bull at a gate, a creature of impulse and the flesh. What he wanted out of the noble life he had been born into was two-headed: on the one hand, he wanted to be the First Man in Rome; on the other hand, he wanted palaces, bonhomie, sex, food, wine, comedy and perpetual entertainments.
Since returning to Italy with Caesar’s legions almost a year ago, he had been indulging himself in all these areas. As the Dictator’s Master of the Horse, he was constitutionally the most powerful of all men in the Dictator’s absence, and had been using that power in ways he knew very well Caesar would deplore. But he had also been living like an eastern potentate, and spending a great deal more money than he had. Nor had he cared about what a more prudent man would have understood right from the beginning—that the day would come when he would be called to account for his activities. To Antony, sufficient against the day. Except that now the day had arrived.
Politic, he decided, to leave his friends behind in Pompey’s villa at Herculaneum. No point in upsetting Cousin Gaius more than necessary. Men like Lucius Gellius Poplicola, Quintus Pompeius Rufus the Younger and Lucius Varius Cotyla were known to Cousin Gaius, but not liked by Cousin Gaius.
His first stop in Rome was not the Domus Publica, or even Pompey’s enormous mansion on the Carinae, now his abode; he went at once to Curio’s house on the Palatine, parked his Germans in the garden attached to Hortensius’s house, and strolled in asking to see the lady Fulvia.
She was the granddaughter of Gaius Sempronius Gracchus through her mother, Sempronia, who had married Marcus Fulvius Bambalio, an appropriate alliance considering that the Fulvii had been Gaius Gracchus’s most ardent supporters, and had crashed too. Sempronia had taken her grandmother’s huge fortune with her, despite the fact that women were forbidden to be major heirs under the lex Voconia. But Sempronia’s grandmother was Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi, powerful enough to procure a decree from the Senate waiving the lex Voconia. When Fulvius and Sempronia died, another senatorial waiver had allowed Fulvia to inherit from both her parents. She was the wealthiest woman in Rome. Not for Fulvia, the usual fate of heiresses! She chose her own husband, Publius Clodius the patrician rebel, founder of the Clodius Club. Why had she chosen Clodius? Because she was in love with her grandfather’s demagogic image, and saw in Clodius great demagogic potential. Her faith was not misplaced. Nor was she a stay-at-home Roman wife. Even swollen in late pregnancy, she could be found in the Forum screaming encouragement at Clodius, kissing him obscenely, generally behaving like a harlot. In private life she was a full member of the Clodius Club, knew Dolabella, Poplicola, Antony—and Curio.
When Clodius was murdered she was heartbroken, but her old friend Atticus persuaded her to live for her children, and in time the terrible wound healed over a little. Three years into her widowhood she married Curio, another brilliant demagogue. By him she had a naughty little red-haired son, but their life together was cut tragically short when Curio died in battle.
At the time that Antony strolled through her door she was thirty-seven years old, the mother of five children—four by Clodius, one by Curio—and looked no more than twenty-five.
Not that Antony had much chance to assess her with his keen connoisseur’s eye; she appeared in the atrium doorway, shrieked, and launched herself at him so enthusiastically that she bounced off his cuirass with a clang and fell on the floor laughing and crying together.
“Marcus, Marcus, Marcus! Oh, let me see you!” she said, his face between her hands, for he had followed her down. “You never seem to grow a single day older.”
“Nor do you,” he said appreciatively.
Yes, as desirable as ever. Seductively big breasts as firm as when she had been eighteeen, trim little waist—she was not one to conceal her sexual assets—no lines to mar that lovely clear-skinned face, with its black lashes and brows, its huge, dark-blue eyes. Her hair! Still that wonderful ice-brown. What a beauty! And all that money too.
“Marry me,” he said. “I love you.”
“And I love you, Antonius, but it’s too soon.” Her eyes filled with tears—not joy at Antony’s advent, but grief at Curio’s going. “Ask me again in a year.”
“Three years between husbands as usual, eh?”
“Yes, it seems so. But don’t make me a widow a third time, Marcus, I beg you! You constantly spoil for trouble, which is why I love you, but I want to grow old with someone I remember from my youth, and who is there left except you?” she asked.
He helped her up, but was too experienced to try to embrace her. “Decimus Brutus,” he said, grinning. “Poplicola?”
“Oh, Poplicola! A parasite,” she said scornfully. “If you marry me, you’ll have to drop Poplicola, I won’t receive him.”
“No comment about Decimus?”
“Decimus is a great man, but he’s—oh, I don’t know, I see a light of ineradicable unhappiness around him. And he’s too cold for me. Having Sempronia Tuditani for a mother ruined him, I think. She sucked cock better than anyone else in Rome, even the professionals.” Fulvia was not a mincer of words. “I confess I was pleased when she finally dieted herself to death. So was Decimus, I imagine. He never even wrote from Gaul.”
“I hear Poplicola’s mother died too, speaking of fellatrices.”
Fulvia pulled a face. “Last month. I had to hold her hand until it went stiff—ugh!”
They walked through to the peristyle garden, for it was a wonderful summer’s day; she sat on the side of the fountain pool and played with the water, while Antony sat on a stone seat and watched her. By Hercules, she was a beauty! Next year…
“You’re not popular with Caesar,” she said abruptly.
Antony blew a derisive noise. “Who, old Cousin Gaius? I can handle him with one hand tied behind my back. I’m his pet.”
“Don’t be too sure, Marcus. Well do I remember how he used to manipulate my darling Clodius! While ever Caesar was in Rome, there wasn’t one thing Clodius did that Caesar hadn’t planted in his mind first, from Cato’s trip to annex Cyprus to all those weird laws governing the religious colleges and religious law.” She sighed. “It was only after Caesar went to Gaul that my Clodius began to run amok. Caesar could control him. And he will insist on controlling you too.”
“He’s family,” Antony said, unperturbed. “I may get a tongue-lashing, but it won’t be anything worse.”
“You’d better offer to Hercules for that, Marcus.”
From Fulvia’s he went to Pompey’s palace and his second wife, Antonia Hybrida. Oh, she wasn’t too bad, though she had the Antonian face, poor thing. What looked good on a man definitely didn’t on a woman. A strapping girl he had tired of very quickly, though not as quickly as he spent her considerable fortune. She had borne him a daughter, Antonia, now five years old, but the matching of first cousins had not been felicitous when it came to offspring. Little Antonia was mentally dull as well as dismally ugly and grossly fat. From somewhere he’d have to find a gigantic dowry, or else marry the girl off to some foreign plutocrat who’d give half his fortune for the chance to acquire an Antonian bride.
“You’re in the boiling soup,” said Antonia Hybrida when he found her in her sitting room.
“I’ll emerge unscalded, Hibby.”
“Not this time, Marcus. Caesar’s livid.”
“Cacat!” he said violently, scowling, fist up.
She flinched, shrank away. “No, please!” she cried. “I’ve done nothing—nothing!”
“Oh, stop whining, you’re safe enough!” he snapped.
“Caesar sent a message,” she said, recovering.
“What?”
“To report to him at the Domus Publica immediately. In a toga, not in armor.”
“The Master of the Horse is armored all the time.”
“I’m just relaying the message.” Antonia Hybrida studied her husband, in a quandary; it might be months and months before she saw him again, even if he lived in this selfsame house. He had beaten her regularly when they were first married, but he had not broken her spirit, just broken her of her habit of torturing her slaves. “Marcus,” she said, “I would like another child.”
“You can like all you want, Hibby, but you’re not getting another child. One mental defective is one too many.”
“She was damaged in the birth process, not in the womb.”
He walked to the big silver mirror Pompey the Great had once gazed into hoping to see the ghost of his dead Julia vanish into its depths, eyed himself with head to one side. Yes, impressive! A toga! No one knew better than Mark Antony that men of his physique didn’t look impressive in a toga. Togas were for the Caesars of Rome’s world—it took height and grace to wear one well. Not, mind you, he had to admit, that the old boy didn’t wear armor with panache too. He simply looks what he is, royal. The family dictator. That’s what we used to call him among ourselves when we were boys, Gaius, Lucius and I. Ran the lot of us, even Uncle Lucius. And now he’s running Rome. As dictator.
“Don’t expect me for dinner,” he said, and clanked out.
“You look like Plautus’s miles gloriosus in that ridiculous getup” was Caesar’s opening remark. Seated behind his desk, he didn’t rise, didn’t attempt any kind of physical contact.
“The soldiers drink me up. They love to see their betters look their betters.”
“Like you, their taste is in their arse, Antonius. I asked you to wear a toga. Armor’s not appropriate inside the pomerium.”
“As Master of the Horse, I can wear armor inside the city.”
“As Master of the Horse, you do as the Dictator says.”
“Well, do I sit down or keep standing?” Antony demanded.
“Sit.”
“I’m sitting. What now?”
“An explanation of events in the Forum, I think.”
“Which events?”
“Don’t be obtuse, Antonius.”
“I just want the jawing over and done with.”
“So you know why I summoned you—to give you, as you so succinctly put it, a jawing.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Perhaps I object to your choice of words, Antonius. I was thinking along the lines of castration.”
“That’s not fair! What have I done, when it’s all boiled down?” Antony asked angrily. “Your bum-boy Vatia passed the Ultimate Decree and instructed me to deal with the violence. Well, I did just that! As I see it, I did the job properly. There hasn’t been a peep out of anyone since.”
“You brought professional soldiers into the Forum Romanum, then you ordered them to use their swords to cut down men armed with wood. You slaughtered wholesale! Slaughtered Roman citizens in their own meeting place! Not even Sulla had the temerity to do that! Is it because you’ve been called upon to take your sword to fellow Romans on a battlefield that you turn the Forum Romanum into a battlefield? The Forum Romanum, Antonius! You slimed the stones where Romulus stood with citizen blood! The Forum of Romulus—of Curtius—of Horatius Cocles—of Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator—of Appius Claudius Caecus—of Scipio Africanus—of Scipio Aemilianus—of a thousand Romans more noble than you, more capable, more revered! You committed sacrilege!” Caesar said, biting off his words slowly and distinctly, his tones freezing, cutting.
Antony leaped to his feet, fists clenched. “Oh, I hate it when you’re sarcastic! Don’t come the orator with me, Caesar! Just say what you want to say, and have done with it! Then I can get back to my job, which is trying to keep your legions calm! Because they’re not calm! They’re very, very unhappy!” he shouted, a little red light of cunning at the back of his eyes. That should sidetrack the old boy—very sensitive about his legions.
It did not.
“Sit down, you ignorant lump! Shut your insubordinate mouth, or I’ll cut your balls off here and now—and don’t think that I can’t! Fancy yourself a warrior, Antonius? Compared to me, you’re a tyro! Riding a pretty horse in the stage armor of the vainglorious soldier! You don’t stand and lay about in the front line, you never have! I could take your sword off you right now and chop you into cutlets!”
The temper was loose; Antony drew in a huge breath, shaken to the marrow. Oh, why had he forgotten Caesar’s temper?
“How dare you be insolent to me? How dare you forget who exactly you are? You, Antonius, are my creature—I made you, and I can unmake you! If it were not for our blood ties, I’d have passed you over in favor of a dozen more efficient and intelligent men! Was it too much to ask that you comport yourself with a meed of discretion, of simple common sense? Obviously I asked too much! You’re a butcher as well as a fool, and your conduct has made my task in Rome infinitely harder—I have inherited the mantle of your butchery! From the moment I crossed the Rubicon, my policy toward all Romans has been clemency, but what do you call this massacre? No, Caesar can’t trust his Master of the Horse to behave like a civilized, educated, genuine Roman! What do you think Cato will make of this massacre when he hears of it? Or Cicero? You’re an incubus suffocating my clemency, and I do not thank you for it!”
The Master of the Horse held up his hands in abject surrender. “Pax, pax, pax! I was in error! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
“Remorse is after the event, Antonius. There were at least half a hundred ways to deal with violence in the Forum without doing more than breaking one or two heads. Why didn’t you arm the Tenth with shields and staves, as Gaius Marius did when he took on Saturninus’s far vaster crowds? Hasn’t it occurred to you that in ordering the Tenth to kill, you transferred a share of your guilt to their spirits? How am I to explain matters to them, let alone to the civilian populace?” The eyes were glacial, but they also bore revulsion. “I will never forget or forgive your action. What’s more, it tells me that you enjoy wielding power in ways that might prove dangerous not only to the state, but to me.”
“Am I fired?” Antony asked, beginning to ease his bottom out of the chair. “Are you done?”
“No, you are not fired, and no, I am not done. Put your arse back on the seat,” Caesar said, still with that dislike. “What happened to the silver in the Treasury?”
“Oh, that!”
“Yes, that.”
“I took it to pay the legions, but I haven’t gotten around to coining it yet,” Antony said, shrugging.
“Then is it at Juno Moneta’s?”
“Um—no.”
“Where is it?”
“At my house. I thought it was safer.”
“Your house. You mean Pompeius Magnus’s house?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so.”
“What gave you to understand that you could move there?”
“I needed a bigger house, and Magnus’s was vacant.”
“I can see why you’d pick it—your taste is as vulgar as Magnus’s was. But kindly move back to your own house, Antonius. As soon as I have the leisure, Magnus’s house will be put up for auction to the highest bidder, as will the rest of his property,” said Caesar. “The property of those who remain unpardoned after I deal with the resistance in Africa Province will be garnished by the state, though some can be dealt with sooner. But it will not be sold to benefit my own men, or my hirelings. I’ll have no Chrysogonus in my service. If I find one, it won’t take Cicero and a court case to bring about his—or her—downfall. Be very careful that you do not try to steal from Rome. Put the silver back in the Treasury, where it belongs. You may go.” He let Antony get to the door, then spoke again. “By the way, how much back pay are my legions owed?”
Antony looked quite blank. “I don’t know, Caesar.”
“You don’t know, but you took the silver. All the silver. As Master of the Horse, I suggest that you tell the legion paymasters to present their books directly to me here in Rome. My instructions to you when you took them back to Italy were to pay them once they were in camp. Have they not been paid at all since they returned?”
“I don’t know,” said Antony again, and escaped.
“Why didn’t you fire him on the spot, Gaius?” Antony’s uncle asked his cousin over dinner.
“I would have liked to, very much. However, Lucius, it isn’t as simple as it looks, is it?”
Lucius Caesar’s eyes stilled, then went pensive. “Explain.”
“My mistake was in trusting Antonius in the first place, but to dismiss him out of hand would be an even bigger mistake,” said Caesar, munching on a stick of celery. “Think about it. For close to twelve months Antonius has had the run of Italy and sole command of the veteran legions. With whom he’s spent by far the major part of his time, especially since last March. I haven’t seen the legions, and he’s been mighty careful not to let any of my other representatives in Italy see them. There’s evidence that they haven’t been paid, so by now they’re owed two years’ money. Antonius pretended ignorance of the entire matter, yet eighteen thousand talents of silver were withdrawn from the Treasury and taken to Magnus’s house. Apparently to go to Juno Moneta’s for coining, though it hasn’t.”
“My heart’s knocking at my ribs, Gaius. Go on, do.”
“I don’t have an abacus to hand, but my arithmetic isn’t bad, even when I have to do the sums in my head. Fifteen legions times five thousand men times one thousand per capita per annum adds up to about seventy-five million sesterces. Which are three thousand talents of silver. Add another—say, three hundred talents to pay the noncombatants, and then double the figure to make it two years’ pay, and you have six thousand, six hundred talents of silver. That is far short of the eighteen thousand Antonius removed,” said Caesar.
“He’s been living mighty high,” said Lucius, sighing. “I know he’s not paying rent for using Magnus’s various residences, but that ghastly armor he’s wearing would have cost a fortune to start with. Then there’s the armor his sixty Germans wear. Plus the wine, the women, the entourage—my nephew, I think, is drowning in debt and decided he’d better empty the Treasury the moment he heard you were in Italy.”
“He should have emptied it months ago,” said Caesar.
“Do you think he’s been working on the legions to disaffect them by not paying them and blaming you?” Lucius asked.
“Undoubtedly. Were he as organized as Decimus Brutus or as cognizantly ambitious as Gaius Cassius, we’d be deeper in the shit than we are. Our Antonius has high ideas, but no method.”
“He’s a plotter, not a planner.”
“Indeed.” A thick white goat’s cheese looked appetizing; Caesar scooped some on to another stick of celery.
“When do you intend to pounce, Gaius?”
“I’ll know because my legions will tell me,” Caesar said. A spasm of pain crossed his face, he put the tidbit down quickly and pressed his hand against his chest.
“Gaius! Are you all right?”
How to tell a dear friend that the pain is not of the body? Not my legions! O Jupiter Optimus Maximus, not my legions! Two years ago it would not have occurred to me, but I learned from the mutiny of the Ninth. I trust none of them now, even the Tenth. Caesar trusts none of them now, even the Tenth.
“Just a touch of indigestion, Lucius.”
“Then if you feel up to it, elucidate.”
“I need the rest of this year to maneuver. Rome comes first, the legions second. I’ll have six thousand talents minted for pay, but I’m not going to pay anybody yet. I want to see just what Antonius has been saying, and that won’t happen until the legions tell me. If I went to Capua tomorrow, I could squash it in a day, but this is one boil that I think has to come to a head, and the best way to make it do that is to avoid seeing the legions in person.” Caesar picked up the celery stick and began to eat again. “Antonius is swimming in very deep water, and his eyes are fixed on a bobbing lump of cork that spells salvation. He’s not quite sure what form the salvation will take, but he’s swimming very hard. Perhaps he’s hoping I’ll die—stranger things have happened. Or else he’s hoping that I’ll dash off to Africa Province ahead of my troops, and leave him a clear field to do whatever comes to his mind. He’s a Fortuna man, he seizes his chance, he doesn’t make his chance. I want him even farther from the shore before I strike, and I want to know exactly what he’s been doing and saying to my men. Having to give the silver back is a blow, he’ll swim feverishly now. But I will be waiting behind the cork. Frankly, Lucius, I’m hoping that he’ll continue to swim for two or three more months. I need time for Rome before I deal with the legions and Antonius.”
“His actions are treasonable, Gaius.”
Caesar reached a hand out to pat Lucius’s arm. “Rest easy, there’ll be no treason trials within the family. I’ll cut our relative off from salvation, but I’ll leave him his head.” He chuckled. “Both his heads. After all, a great deal of his thinking is done with his prick.”