Caesar's Women (105 page)

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Authors: Colleen McCullough

Tags: #Ancient, #Historical Fiction, #Caesar; Julius, #Fiction, #Romance, #Women, #Rome, #Women - Rome, #Rome - History - Republic; 265-30 B.C, #Historical, #General, #History

BOOK: Caesar's Women
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“You will be.”

Crassus changed the subject. “Have you settled on your full list of legates and tribunes for Gaul yet?” he asked.

“More or less, though not firmly.”

“Then would you take my Publius with you? I'd like him to learn the art of war under you.”

“I'd be delighted to put his name down.”

“Your choice of legate with magisterial status rather stunned me—Titus Labienus? He's never done a thing.”

“Except be my tribune of the plebs, you're inferring,” said Caesar, eyes twinkling. “Acquit me of that kind of stupidity, my dear Marcus! I knew Labienus in Cilicia when Vatia Isauricus was governor. He likes horses, rare in a Roman. I need a really able cavalry commander because so many of the tribes where I'm going are horsed. Labienus will be a very good cavalry commander.”

“Still planning on marching down the Danubius to the Euxine?”

“By the time I'm finished, Marcus, the provinces of Rome will marry Egypt. If you win against the Parthians when you're consul for the second time, Rome will own the world from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indus River.” He sighed. “I suppose that means I'll also have to subdue Further Gaul somewhere along the way.”

Crassus looked thunderstruck. “Gaius, what you're talking about would take ten years, not five!”

“I know.”

“The Senate and the People would crucify you! Pursue a war of aggression for ten years? No one has!”

While they stood talking the crowd swirled around them in an ever-changing mass, quite a few among it with cheery greetings for Caesar, who answered with a smile and sometimes asked a question about a member of the family, or a job, or a marriage. That had never ceased to fascinate Crassus: how many people in Rome did Caesar know? Nor were they always Romans. Liberty-capped freedmen, skullcapped Jews, turbaned Phrygians, longhaired Gauls, shaven Syrians. If they had votes, Caesar would never go out of office. Yet Caesar always worked within the traditional forms. Do the boni know how much of Rome lies in the palm of Caesar's hand? No, they do not have the slightest idea. If they did, it wouldn't have been a sky watch. That dagger Bibulus sent to Vettius would have been used. Caesar would be dead. Pompeius Magnus? Never!

“I've had enough of Rome!” Caesar cried. “For almost ten years I've been incarcerated here—I can't wait to get away! Ten years in the field? Oh, Marcus, what a glorious prospect that is! Doing something which comes more naturally to me than anything else, reaping a harvest for Rome, enhancing my dignitas, and never having to suffer the boni carping and criticizing. In the field I'm the man with the authority, no one can gainsay me. Wonderful!”

Crassus chuckled. “What an autocrat you are.”

“So are you.”

“Yes, but the difference is that I don't want to run the whole world, just the financial side of it. Figures are so concrete and exact that men shy away from them unless they have a genuine talent for them. Whereas politics and war are vague. Every man thinks if he has luck he can be the best at them. I don't upset the mos maiorum and two thirds of the Senate with my brand of autocracy, it's as simple as that.”

 

Pompey and Julia returned more or less permanently to Rome in time to help Aulus Gabinius and Lucius Calpurnius Piso campaign for the curule elections on the eighteenth day of October. Not having set eyes on his daughter since her marriage, Caesar found himself a little shocked. This was a confident, vital, sparkling and witty young matron, not the sweet and gentle adolescent of his imagination. Her rapport with Pompey was astonishing, though who was responsible for it he could not tell. The old Pompey had vanished; the new Pompey was well read, entranced by literature, spoke learnedly of this painter or that sculptor, and displayed absolutely no interest in quizzing Caesar about his military aims for the next five years. On top of which, Julia ruled! Apparently totally unembarrassed, Pompey had yielded himself to feminine domination. No imprisonment in frowning Picentine bastions for Julia! If Pompey went somewhere, Julia went too. Shades of Fulvia and Clodius!

“I'm going to build a stone theater for Rome,” the Great Man said, “on land I bought out between the saepta and the chariot stables. This business of erecting temporary wooden theaters five or six times a year whenever there are major games is absolute insanity, Caesar. I don't care if the mos maiorum says theater is decadent and immoral, the fact remains that Rome falls over itself to attend the plays, and the ruder, the better. Julia says that the best memorial of my conquests I could leave Rome would be a huge stone theater with a lovely peristyle and colonnade attached, and a chamber big enough to house the Senate on its far end. That way, she says, I can get around the mos maiorum—an inaugurated temple for the Senate at one end, and right up the top of the auditorium a delicious little temple to Venus Victrix. Well, it has to be Venus, as Julia is directly descended from Venus, but she suggested we make her Victorious Venus to honor my conquests. Clever chicken!” Pompey ended lovingly, stroking the fashionably arranged mass of hair belonging to his wife. Who looked, thought a tickled Caesar, insufferably smug.

“Sounds ideal,” said Caesar, sure they wouldn't listen.

Nor did they. Julia spoke. “We've struck a bargain, my lion and I,” she said, smiling at Pompey as if they shared many thousands of secrets. “I am to have the choice of materials and decorations for the theater, and my lion has the peristyle, the colonnade and the new Curia.”

“And we're going to build a modest little villa behind it, alongside the four temples,” Pompey contributed, “just in case I ever get stranded on the Campus Martius again for nine months. I'm thinking of standing for consul a second time one of these days.”

“Great minds think alike,” said Caesar.

“Eh?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, tata, you should see my lion's Alban palace!” cried Julia, hand tucked in Pompey's. “It's truly amazing, just like the summer residence of the King of the Parthians, he says.” She turned to her grandmother. “Avia, when are you going to come and stay with us there? You never leave Rome!”

“Her lion, if you please!” snorted Aurelia to Caesar after the blissful couple had departed for the newly decorated palace on the Carinae. “She flatters him shamelessly!”

“Her technique,” Caesar said gravely, “is certainly not like yours, Mater. I doubt I ever heard you address my father by any name other than his proper one, Gaius Julius. Not even Caesar.”

“Love talk is silly.”

“I'm tempted to nickname her Leo Domitrix.”

“The lion tamer.” That brought a smile at last. “Well, she is obviously wielding the whip and the chair!”

“Very lightly, Mater. There's Caesar in her, her blatancy is actually quite subtle. He's enslaved.”

“That was a good day's work when we introduced them. He'll guard your back well while you're away on campaign.”

“So I hope. I also hope he manages to convince the electors that Lucius Piso and Gabinius ought to be consuls next year.”

The electors were convinced; Aulus Gabinius was returned as senior consul, and Lucius Calpurnius Piso as his junior colleague. The boni had worked desperately to avert disaster, but Caesar had been right. So firmly boni in Quinctilis, public opinion was now on the side of the triumvirs. Not all the canards in the world about marriages of virgin daughters to men old enough to be their grandfathers could sway the voters, who preferred triumviral consuls to bribes, probably because Rome was empty of rural voters, who tended to rely on bribes for extra spending money at the games.

Even lacking hard evidence, Cato decided to prosecute Aulus Gabinius for electoral corruption. This time, however, he did not succeed; though he approached every praetor sympathetic to his cause, not one would agree to try the case. Metellus Scipio suggested that he should take it directly to the Plebs, and convened an Assembly to procure a law charging Gabinius with bribery.

“As no court or praetor is willing to charge Aulus Gabinius, it becomes the duty of the Comitia to do so!” shouted Metellus Scipio to the crowd clustered in the Comitia well.

Perhaps because the day was chill and drizzling rain, it was a small turnout, but what neither Metellus Scipio nor Cato realized was that Publius Clodius intended to use this meeting as a tryout for his rapidly fruiting organization of the crossroads colleges into Clodian troops. The plan was to use only those members who had that day off work, and to limit their number to less than two hundred. A decision which meant that Clodius and Decimus Brutus had needed to avail themselves of two colleges only, the one tended by Lucius Decumius and the one tended by his closest affiliate.

When Cato stepped forward to address the Assembly, Clodius yawned and stretched out his arms, a gesture which those who noticed him at all took to mean that Clodius was reveling in the fact that he was now a member of the Plebs and could stand in the Comitia well during a meeting of the Plebs.

It meant nothing of the kind. As soon as Clodius had finished yawning, some one hundred and eighty men leaped for the rostra and tore Cato from it, dragged him down into the well and began to beat him unmercifully. The rest of the seven hundred Plebs took the hint and disappeared, leaving an appalled Metellus Scipio on the rostra with the three other tribunes of the plebs dedicated to the cause of the boni. No tribune of the plebs possessed lictors or any other kind of official bodyguard; horrified and helpless, the four of them could only watch.

The orders were to punish Cato but leave him in one piece, and orders were obeyed. The men vanished into the soft rain, job well done; Cato lay unconscious and bleeding, but unbroken.

“Ye gods, I thought you were done for!” said Metellus Scipio when he and Ancharius managed to bring Cato round.

“What did I do?” asked Cato, head ringing.

“You challenged Gabinius and the triumvirs without owning our tribunician inviolability. There's a message in it, Cato—leave the triumvirs and their puppets alone,” said Ancharius grimly.

A message which Cicero received too. The closer the time came to Clodius's stepping into office, the more terrified Cicero grew. Clodius's constant threats to prosecute were regularly reported to him, but all his appeals to Pompey met with nothing more than absent assurances that Clodius wasn't serious. Deprived of Atticus (who had gone to Epirus and Greece), Cicero could find no one interested enough to help. So when Cato was attacked in the Well of the Comitia and word got out that Clodius was responsible, poor Cicero despaired.

“The Beauty is going to have me, and Sampsiceramus doesn't even care!” he moaned to Terentia, whose patience was wearing so thin that she was tempted to pick up the nearest heavy object and crown him with it. “I don't begin to understand Sampsiceramus! Whenever I talk to him privately he tells me how depressed he is— then I see him in the Forum with his child bride hanging on his arm, and he's wreathed in smiles!”

“Why don't you try calling him Pompeius Magnus instead of that ridiculous name?” Terentia demanded. “Keep it up, and with that tongue in your mouth, you're bound to slip.”

“What can it matter? I'm done for, Terentia, done for! The Beauty will send me into exile!”

“I'm surprised you haven't gone down on your knees to kiss that trollop Clodia's feet.”

“I had Atticus do it for me, to no avail. Clodia says she has no power over her little brother.''

“She'd prefer you to kiss her feet, that's why.”

“Terentia, I am not and never have been engaged in an affair with the Medea of the Palatine! You're usually so sensible—why do you persist in carrying on about a nonsense? Look at her boyfriends! All young enough to be her sons—my dearest Caelius! The nicest lad! Now he moons and drools over Clodia the way half of female Rome moons and drools over Caesar! Caesar! Another patrician ingrate!”

“He probably has more influence with Clodius than Pompeius does,” she offered. “Why not appeal to him?”

The savior of his country drew himself up. “I would rather,” he said between his teeth, “spend the rest of my life in exile!”

 

When Publius Clodius entered office on the tenth day of December, the whole of Rome waited with bated breath. So too did the members of the inner circle of the Clodius Club, particularly Decimus Brutus, who was Clodius's general of crossroads college troops. The Well of the Comitia was too small to contain the huge crowd which assembled in the Forum on that first day to see what Clodius was going to do, so he transferred the meeting to Castor's platform and announced that he would legislate to provide every male Roman citizen with five modii of free wheat per month. Only that part of the crowd—a minute part— belonging to the crossroads colleges Clodius had enlisted knew what was coming; the news broke on most of the listening ears as an utter surprise.

The roar which went up was heard as far away as the Colline and Capena Gates, deafened those senators standing on the steps of the Curia Hostilia even as their eyes took in the extraordinary sight of thousands of objects shooting into the air—Caps of Liberty, shoes, belts, bits of food, anything people could toss up in exultation. And the cheering went on and on and on, never seemed likely to stop. From somewhere flowers appeared in every hand; Clodius and his nine dazed fellow tribunes of the plebs stood on Castor's platform smothered in them, Clodius beaming and clasping his hands together over his head. Suddenly he bent and began to throw the flowers back at the crowd, laughing wildly.

Still bearing the marks of his brutal beating, Cato wept. “It is the beginning of the end,” he said through his tears. “We can't afford to pay for all that wheat! Rome will be bankrupt.”

“Bibulus is watching the skies,” said Ahenobarbus. “This new grain law of Clodius's will be as invalid as everything else passed this year.”

“Oh, learn sense!” said Caesar, standing close enough to hear. “Clodius isn't one-tenth as stupid as you are, Lucius Domitius. He'll keep everything in contio until New Year's Day. Nothing will go to the vote until December is over. Besides, I still have my doubts about Bibulus's tactics in relation to the Plebs. Their meetings are not held under the auspices.”

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