The Grass Crown (6 page)

But Julia’s sympathy was wasted; Aurelia was well satisfied with her lot, and scarcely missed her husband at all. This was not from any lack of love or dereliction of wifely duty; it lay in the fact that while he was away she could do her own work without fearing his disapproval, criticism, or—may it never happen!—his forbidding her to continue.

When they had married and moved into the larger of the two ground floor apartments within the insula apartment building that was her dowry, Aurelia had discovered that her husband expected her to lead exactly the kind of life she would have led had they lived in a private domus on the Palatine. Gracious, elite, and rather pointless. The kind of life she had criticized so tellingly in talking to Lucius Cornelius Sulla. So boring and devoid of challenge that a love affair became irresistible. Appalled and frustrated, Aurelia had learned that Caesar disapproved of her having anything to do with the many tenants who occupied her nine floors of apartments, preferred her to use agents to collect the rents, and expected her to dwell exclusively within the walls of a rather cramped domain.

But Gaius Julius Caesar was a nobleman of an ancient and aristocratic house, and had his own duties. Tied to Gaius Marius by marriage and lack of money, Caesar had begun his public career in Gaius Marius’s service, as a tribune of the soldiers and then a military tribune in his armies, and finally, after a quaestorship and admission to the Senate, as the land commissioner deputed to settle Gaius Marius’s African Head Count veterans on the island of Cercina in the African Lesser Syrtis. All of these duties had taken him away from Rome, the first of them not long after his marriage to Aurelia. It had been a love match and was blessed by two daughters and a son, none of whom their father had seen born, or progress through infancy. A quick visit home that resulted in a pregnancy, then he was off again for months, sometimes years.

At the time the great Gaius Marius had married Caesar’s sister Julia, the house of Julius Caesar had arrived at the end of its money. A providential adoption of the eldest son had given the other and senior branch the funds to ensure its remaining two sons could reach the consulship; that had been the adoption of the son whose new name was Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar. But Caesar’s father (Caesar Grandfather as he was known these days, long after his death) had two sons and two daughters to provide for, and money enough to provide for only one son out of the four. Until, that is, he had a brainwave and invited the enormously rich, disgracefully lowborn Gaius Marius to take his choice of the two daughters. It had been Gaius Marius’s money which dowered the girls and gave Caesar his six hundred iugera of land near Bovillae, more than enough income to qualify for the senatorial census. It had been Gaius Marius’s money which smoothed every obstacle from the path of the junior branch—Caesar Grandfather’s branch—of the house of Julius Caesar.

Caesar himself had summoned up the grace and fairness of mind to be sincerely grateful, though his older brother Sextus had writhed, and moved slowly away from the rest of the family after he married. Without Marius’s money, Caesar knew well that he would not even have been eligible for the Senate, and could have hoped for little for his children when they arrived. Indeed, had it not been for Gaius Marius’s money, Caesar would never have been permitted to marry the beautiful Aurelia, daughter of a noble and wealthy house, desired by many.

Undoubtedly had Marius been pressed, a private dwelling on the Palatine or Carinae would have been forthcoming for Caesar and his wife; indeed, Aurelia’s uncle and stepfather Marcus Aurelius Cotta had begged to use some of her large dowry to purchase this private dwelling. But the young couple had elected to follow Caesar Grandfather’s advice, and abandon the luxury of living in complete seclusion. Aurelia’s dowry had been invested in an insula, an apartment building in which the young couple could live until Caesar’s advancing career enabled him to buy a domus in a better part of town. A better part of town would not have been hard to find, for Aurelia’s insula lay in the heart of the Subura, Rome’s most heavily populated and poorest district, wedged into the declivity between the Esquiline Mount and the Viminal Hill—a seething mass of people of all races and creeds, with Romans of the Fourth and Fifth Classes and the Head Count mingled among it.

Yet Aurelia had found her metier, there in the Suburan insula. And the moment Caesar was gone and her first pregnancy over, she plunged with heart and mind into the business of being a landlady. The agents were dismissed, the books her own to keep, the tenants soon friends as well as clients. She dealt competently, sensibly and fearlessly with everything from murder to vandalism, and even compelled the crossroads college housed within her premises to behave itself. This club, formed of local men, was supposed—with the official sanction of the urban praetor—to care for the religious welfare and facilities of the big crossroads which lay beyond the apex of Aurelia’s triangular apartment building—its fountain, its roadbed and sidewalks, its shrine to the Lares of the Crossroads.

Aurelia’s Insula

The custodian of the college and the leader of its denizens was one Lucius Decumius, a Roman of the Romans, though only of the Fourth Class. When Aurelia took over the management of her insula, she discovered that Lucius Decumius and his minions ran a protection agency on the side, terrorizing shopkeepers and caretakers for a mile around. But that she put a stop to; and in the process made a friend of Lucius Decumius.

Lacking milk, she had farmed out her children to the women of her insula, and opened the doors of a world to those impeccably aristocratic little patricians that under more normal circumstances they would never have dreamed existed. With the result that long before they could be expected to commence their formal schooling, the three of them spoke several different grades of Greek, Hebrew, Syrian, several Gallics, and three kinds of Latin—that of their ancestors, that of the lower Classes, and the argot peculiar only to the Subura. They had seen with their own eyes how the people of Rome’s stews lived and eaten all sorts of meals foreigners called good food, and were on first-name terms with the evil fellows of Lucius Decumius’s crossroads college tavern and officially sanctioned sodality.

All of which, Aurelia was convinced, could do them no real harm. She was not, however, an iconoclast or a reformer, and she held sternly to the tenets of her origins. But alongside all that, there lay in her a genuine love of proper work, and an abiding curiosity about and interest in humanity. Whereas in her sheltered youth she had clung to the example of Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi, deeming that heroic and star-crossed lady the greatest Roman woman who ever lived, now in her growing maturity she clung to something more tangible and valuable—her mine of good sound common sense. So she saw nothing wrong in the polyglot chatter of her three little impeccably aristocratic patricians, and thought it excellent training for them to have to learn to cope with the fact that those they mixed with could never know or hope to know the heights of distinction theirs by birthright.

What Aurelia dreaded was the return of Gaius Julius Caesar, the husband and father who had never actually been either husband or father. Familiarity would have bred some degree of expertise in these two roles, but Gaius Julius Caesar had never grown at ease, let alone familiar. A Roman of her class, Aurelia neither knew nor much cared about the women he undoubtedly used from time to time to rid himself of his more basic needs, though she did know from her exposure to the lives of her tenants that women of other walks could be driven to screaming fits and murder for love of or jealousy of their men. To Aurelia, rather inexplicable. But a fact nonetheless. She just thanked the gods that she had been brought up to know better, and discipline her emotions better; it did not occur to her that there were many women of her own class who also suffered terrible torments of jealousy or frustration.

No, when Caesar came home for good there was going to be trouble. Aurelia had no doubt of it. But put it aside for the day when it happened, and in the meantime enjoyed herself thoroughly, and didn’t worry about her three little impeccably aristocratic patricians, or which language they fancied speaking today. After all, didn’t the same sort of thing occur on the Palatine and the Carinae, when women gave their children into the charge of nurserymaids from every part of the globe? Only then the results were ignored, swept under the edge of some piece of furniture; even the children became conspirators at the art, and concealed what they felt for the girls and women they knew far better than they did their mothers.

Baby Gaius Julius, however, was a special case, and a very difficult one; even the capable Aurelia felt the breath of some unknown menace upon the back of her neck whenever she stopped long enough to think about this only son, about his qualities and his future. That he drove her to the brink of madness she had admitted to Julia and Aelia at Julia’s dinner party, and now was glad she had displayed this weakness, for out of it had come a suggestion from Aelia that Young Caesar be placed in the charge of a pedagogue.

Aurelia had heard of extremely bright children, naturally, but had long ago assumed that they came from poorer, humbler circumstances than the senatorial order; it was Marcus Aurelius Cotta, her uncle and stepfather, their parents had come to see, to solicit from him the wherewithal to give their extremely bright child a better start in life than they could afford—and in return to pledge themselves and their child as clients in his service for the rest of their lives. Cotta had always been pleased to oblige them, happy to think that when the child grew up, he and his sons would be able to avail themselves of the services of someone superlatively gifted. However, Cotta was also a practical and sensible man, so, as Aurelia had heard him say to his wife, Rutilia, one day,

“Unfortunately they don’t always live up to their promise, these children. Either their early flame burns too brightly, and they grow dark and cold and inert, or else they become too conceited or too confident, and come crashing down. But a few turn out to be of great use. And when they’re useful, they’re great treasures. that’s why I always agree to help the parents.”

What Cotta and Rutilia (who was Aurelia’s mother) thought of their extremely gifted grandchild Young Caesar, Aurelia didn’t know, for she had hidden her son’s precociousness from them as much as she could by not exposing him to them. In fact, she tried to hide Young Caesar from everyone. On one level his brilliance thrilled her, inspired her with all kinds of dreams for his future. But on most levels he depressed her deeply. Had she known his weaknesses and his flaws, she could have coped with him more easily; but who—even a mother—could possibly know the innate character weaknesses and flaws of a child not yet two years old? Before she held him up to satisfy the curiosity of the world, she wanted to feel more securely informed about him, more comfortable with him. And ever at the back of her mind there loomed the dread that he would not contain the strength and the detachment to deal with what a freak of nature had given him.

He was sensitive, she knew that; to crush him was easy. But he bounced back, possessed of some alien and therefore incomprehensible joyousness of being that she herself had never known. His enthusiasm was boundless, his mental processes so thirsty for information that he gobbled up knowledge like some vast fish the contents of its sea. What worried her most was his trustfulness, his anxiety to make friends of everyone, his impatience with her cautions to stop and think, that he not take it for granted that the whole world was there to serve his ends, that he understand the world contained many destructive people.

Yet—how ridiculous, such heart searchings on behalf of a baby! Just because the mental processes were huge did not mean the experience matched it. For the moment, Young Caesar was simply a sponge soaking up whatever he found fluid enough to sink in, and what was not fluid enough, he proceeded to squeeze and pound to make it so. There were weaknesses and flaws, but his mother did not know whether they were permanent, or merely the passing phases of an enormous learning process. He was—for instance—utterly charming, and knew it, and played upon it, and bent people to his will. As he did with his Aunt Julia, peculiarly prone to fall for his ploys.

She didn’t want to raise a boy who relied upon such dark techniques as charm. Aurelia herself had no charm at all and despised those who had it, for she had seen how easily they got what they wanted, and how little they valued it once they had it. Charm was the mark of a lightweight, not a leader of men. Young Caesar would have to abandon it, for it would do him no good with those men and in those areas where seriousness and all the proper Roman virtues mattered most. He was also very pretty—another undesirable quality. Only how could one iron beauty out of a face, especially when both his parents had plenty of it?

As a result of all this worry nothing but time would answer, she had got into the habit of being hard on the little boy, of finding far less excuse for his mistakes than for the transgressions of his sisters, of rubbing salt into his wounds instead of balm, of being very quick to criticize or scold him. As everyone else he knew tended to make much of him, and his sisters and cousins downright spoiled him, his mother felt someone had to play the role of Nasty Stepsister. If it had to be her, his mother, so be it. Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi would not have hesitated.

The finding of a pedagogue suitable to take charge of a child who ought by rights to have been in the hands of women for years to come was not a task to daunt Aurelia, but rather, just the sort of thing she enjoyed. Sulla’s wife Aelia had advised strongly against buying a slave pedagogue, which did make Aurelia’s task harder. Not caring much for Sextus Caesar’s wife, Claudia, she did not think of going there for advice. Had Julia’s son been in the care of a pedagogue she would certainly have gone to Julia, but Young Marius, an only child, went to school so that he could enjoy the companionship of boys his own age. As, indeed, had been Aurelia’s intention with Young Caesar when the time came; she now realized the school alternative was out of the question. Her son would have oscillated between being everyone’s butt and everyone’s idol, and neither state would be good for him.