The Grass Crown (7 page)

So Aurelia went to her mother, Rutilia, and her mother’s only brother, Publius Rutilius Rufus. Many times had Uncle Publius been of help to her, even including the subject of her marriage; for it had been he, when the list of her suitors became dauntingly long and august, who had advocated that she be allowed to marry whomsoever she liked. In that way, he had explained, only Aurelia could be blamed for choosing the wrong husband, and perhaps future enmity for her younger brothers could be avoided.

She packed all three of her children off upstairs to the Jewish floor, their favorite asylum in that crowded, noisy home of theirs, and betook herself to her stepfather’s house in a litter, accompanied by her Arvernian Gallic maid, Cardixa. Naturally Lucius Decumius and some of his followers would be waiting for her when she emerged from Cotta’s house on the Palatine; it would then be coming on for darkness, and the Suburan predators would be prowling.

So successfully had Aurelia’s secretiveness hidden her son’s extraordinary talents that she found it difficult to convince Cotta, Rutilia and Publius Rutilius Rufus that her little son, not yet two years old, was in urgent need of a pedagogue. But after many patient answers to many incredulous questions, her relatives began to believe her predicament.

“I don’t know of a suitable fellow,” said Cotta, ruffling his thinning hair. “Your half brothers Gaius and Marcus are in the hands of the rhetors now, and young Lucius goes to school. I would have thought that the best thing to do would be to go to one of the really good vendors of slave pedagogues—Mamilius Malchus or Duronius Postumus. However, you’re set against any but a free man, so I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Uncle Publius, you’ve been sitting there saying nothing for the last many moments,” said Aurelia.

“So I have!” exclaimed that remarkable man guilelessly.

“Does that mean you know of someone?”

“Perhaps. But first I want to see Young Caesar for myself, and in circumstances where I can form my own opinion. You’ve kept him mighty dark, niece; and I can’t fathom why.”

“He’s a dear little fellow,” said Rutilia sentimentally.

“He’s a problem,” said his mother without any sentiment.

“Well, I think it’s more than time we all went round to see Young Caesar for ourselves,” said Cotta, who was growing a little stout, and in consequence breathed noisily.

But Aurelia struck her hands together in dismay, looking from one interested face to another with such trouble and pain in her own that the other three paused, shocked. They had known her since birth, and never before had seen her dealing with a situation she clearly felt beyond, her.

“Oh, please!” she cried. “No! Don’t you understand? What you propose to do is exactly what I cannot allow to happen! My son must think of himself as ordinary! How can he do that if three people descend on him to quiz him—and gush over his answers!—and fill him with false ideas of his own importance?”

A red spot burgeoned in each of Rutilia’s cheeks. “My dear girl, he is my grandson!” she said, tight-lipped.

“Yes, Mama, I know, and you shall see him and ask him whatever you wish—but not yet! Not as-part of a crowd! He—is—so—clever! What any other child of his age wouldn’t think to question, he knows the answers to! Let Uncle Publius come on his own for the moment, please!”

Cotta nudged his wife. “Good idea, Aurelia,” he said with great affability. “After all, he has his second birthday soon—halfway through Quinctilis, isn’t it? Aurelia can invite us to his birthday party, Rutilia, and we’ll be able to see for ourselves without the child’s suspecting a special motive for our presence.”

Swallowing her ire, Rutilia nodded. “As you wish, Marcus Aurelius. Is that all right with you, daughter?”

“Yes,” said Aurelia gruffly.

Of course Publius Rutilius Rufus succumbed to Young Caesar’s ever-increasing mastery of charm, and thought him wonderful, and could hardly wait to tell his mother so.

“I don’t know when I’ve taken such a fancy to anyone since you rejected every servant girl your parents chose for you, and came home yourself with Cardixa,” he said, smiling. “I thought then what a pearl beyond price you were! And now I find my pearl has produced—oh, not a moonbeam, but a slice of the sun.”

“Stop waxing lyrical, Uncle Publius! This sort of thing is not why I asked you here to see him,” said the mother, edgy.

But Publius Rutilius Rufus thought it imperative that she should understand, and sat down with her on a bench in the courtyard at the bottom of the light-well which pierced the center of the insula. It was a delightful spot, as the other ground-floor tenant, the knight Gaius Matius, had a flair for gardening that bordered on perfection. Aurelia called the light-well her hanging gardens of Babylon, for plants trailed over the balconies on every floor, and creepers rooted in the earth of the courtyard had over the years grown all the way to the very top of the shaft. This being summer, the garden itself was redolent with the perfume of roses and wallflowers and violets, and blossoms drooped and reared in every shade of blue, pink, lilac, the year’s color scheme.

“My dear little niece,” said Publius Rutilius Rufus very seriously, taking both her hands in his, and making her turn to look into his eyes, “you must try to see what I see. Rome is no longer young, though by that I do not mean to imply that Rome is in her dotage. Only consider… Two hundred and forty-four years of the kings, then four hundred and eleven years of the Republic. Rome has been in existence now for six hundred and fifty-five years, growing ever mightier. But how many of the old families are still producing consuls, Aurelia? The Cornelii. The Servilii. The Valerii. The Postumii. The Claudii. The Aemilii. The Sulpicii. The Julii haven’t produced a consul in nearly four hundred years—though I think there will be several Julii in the curule chair in this generation. The Sergii are so poor they’ve been reduced to finding money by farming oysters. And the Pinarii are so poor they’ll do virtually anything to enrich themselves. Among the plebeian nobility matters are better than among the patricians. Yet it seems to me that if we are not careful, Rome will eventually belong to New Men—men without ancestors, men who can claim no connection to Rome’s beginnings, and therefore will be indifferent to what kind of place Rome becomes.”

The grip on her hands tightened. “Aurelia, your son is of the oldest and most illustrious lineage. Among the patrician families still surviving, only the Fabii can compare with the Julii, and the Fabii have had to adopt for three generations to fill the curule chair. Those among them who are genuine Fabii are so odd that they hide themselves away. Yet here in Young Caesar is a member of the old patriciate with all the energy and intelligence of a New Man. He is a hope for Rome of a kind I never thought to see. For I do believe that to grow even greater, Rome must be governed by those of the blood. I could never say this to Gaius Marius—whom I love, but whom I deplore. In the course of his phenomenal career Gaius Marius has done Rome more harm than half a hundred German invasions. The laws that he has tumbled, the traditions he has destroyed, the precedents he has created—the Brothers Gracchi at least were of the old nobility, and tackled what they saw as Rome’s troubles with some vestige of respect for the mos maiorum, the unwritten tenets of our ancestors. Whereas Gaius Marius has eroded the mos maiorum and left Rome prey to many kinds of wolves, creatures bearing no relationship whatsoever to the kind old wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus.”

So arresting and unusual, her wide and lucent eyes were fixed on Publius Rutilius Rufus’s face almost painfully, and she did not notice how strongly he held on to her hands. For here at last she was being offered something to seize hold of, a guidance through the shadowy realm she trod with Young Caesar.

“You must appreciate Young Caesar’s significance, and do everything in your power to put his feet firmly on the path to pre-eminence. You must fill him with a purpose no one save he can accomplish—to preserve the mos maiorum and renew the vigor of the old ways, the old blood.”

“I understand, Uncle Publius,” said Aurelia gravely.

“Good!” He rose to his feet, drawing her up with him.

“I shall bring a man to see you tomorrow, at the third hour of the day. Have the boy here.”

And so it was that the child Gaius Julius Caesar Junior passed into the care of one Marcus Antonius Gnipho. A Gaul from Nemausus, his grandfather had been of the tribe Salluvii, and hunted heads with great relish during constant raids upon the settled Hellenized folk of coastal Gaul-across-the-Alps until he and his small son were captured by a determined party of Massiliotes. Sold into slavery, the grandfather soon died, whereas the son had been young enough to survive the transition from headhunting barbarian to domestic servant in a Greek household. He had turned out to be a clever fellow, and was still young enough to marry and raise a family when he managed to save enough to buy his freedom. His choice of a bride had fallen upon a Massiliote Greek girl of modest background, and he met with her father’s approval despite his alien hugeness and his bright red hair. Thus his son, Gnipho, had grown up in a free man environment, and soon demonstrated that he shared his father’s scholarly bent.

When Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had carved a Roman province along the coast of Gaul-across-the-Alps lapped by the Middle Sea, he had taken a Marcus Antonius with him as one of his senior legates, and that Marcus Antonius had used the services of Gnipho’s father as interpreter and scribe. So when the war against the Arverni was successfully concluded, Marcus Antonius had secured the Roman citizenship for Gnipho’s father as no mean token of his thanks; the generosity of the Antonii was always lavish. A freedman at the time Marcus Antonius had employed him, Gnipho’s father therefore could be absorbed into Antonius’s own rural tribe.

The boy Gnipho had early evinced a desire to teach, as well as having an interest in geography, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and engineering. So after he assumed the toga of manhood his father put him on a ship and sent him to Alexandria, the intellectual hub of the world. There in the cloisters of the museum library he had studied under the Librarian himself, Diokles.

But the heyday of the library was over, its librarians no longer of the quality of Eratosthenes; and so when Marcus Antonius Gnipho turned twenty-six, he decided to settle in Rome, and there to teach. At first he had taken on the role of grammaticus, taught rhetoric to young men; then, a little wearied by the posturings of noble Roman youths, he opened a school for younger boys. From the very first it was a success, and soon he was able to ask the highest fees without discomfort. He had no worries about paying the rent upon two large rooms on the quiet sixth floor of an insula far from the crowded squalor of the Subura, and was also able to afford four rooms one floor higher up in the same Palatine palace for his private living quarters and the housing of his four expensive slaves, two of whom attended to his personal needs, and two of whom assisted him in his dual classrooms.

When Publius Rutilius Rufus had called to see him, he laughed, assuring his visitor that he had no intention of giving up his profitable little venture in order to pander to a baby. Rutilius Rufus then offered him a properly drawn-up contract which included a luxurious apartment in an even better Palatine insula, and more money than his school brought in. Still Marcus Antonius Gnipho laughed a refusal.

“At least come and see the child,” said Rutilius Rufus. “If someone dangles a bait the size of this one under your nose, you’d be a fool if you declined to look.”

When he met Young Caesar, the teacher changed his mind.

“Not,” he said to Publius Rutilius Rufus, “because he is who he is, or even because of his amazing intelligence. I am committing myself to Young Caesar as his tutor because I like him enormously—and I fear for his future.”

“That wretched child!” Aurelia said to Lucius Cornelius Sulla when he called in late September to see her. “The family clubbed together to find the money to hire him a magnificent pedagogue, and what happens? The pedagogue has fallen for his charm!”

“Huh,” said Sulla, who hadn’t called to hear a litany—even of complaint—about any of Aurelia’s offspring. Children bored him, no matter how bright and charming; that his own did not bore him was a source of mystery. No, he had called to tell Aurelia he was going away.

“So you’re deserting me too,” she said, offering him grapes from her courtyard garden.

“Very soon, I’m afraid. Titus Didius wants to ship his troops to Spain by sea, and early winter’s the best time of year. However, I’m going ahead by land to prepare for their arrival.”

“Tired of Rome?”

“Wouldn’t you be, in my shoes?”

“Oh, yes.”

He moved restlessly, clenched his fists in frustration. “I am never going to get there, Aurelia!”

But that only provoked a laugh. “Pooh! You’ve got October Horse written all over you, Lucius Cornelius. One day it will come, you wait and see.”

“Not entirely, I hope,” he said, laughing too. “I’d like to keep my head on my shoulders—which is more than the poor October Horse ever does! Why is that, I wonder? The trouble with all our rituals is that they’re so old we don’t even understand the language in which we rattle off the prayers, let alone know why we harness war-horses in pairs to chariots, and race them, and then sacrifice the right-hand beast of the winning team. As for fighting over its head—!” So bright was the light that his pupils had contracted to pinpoints and gave him the look of a blinded seer; the eyes he turned on her were filled with a seer’s pain—not a pain of past or present, but doomed by knowledge of the future. And he cried out, “Aurelia, Aurelia! Why is it that I never manage to be happy?”

Her heart squeezed itself up, she pressed her nails into her palms. “I don’t know, Lucius Cornelius.”

“Nor do I.”

How horrible to offer him good sense, yet what else could she do? “I think you need to be busy.”

He answered her dryly. “Oh, definitely! When I’m busy, I have no time to think.”

“So I find it,” she said huskily, and then said, “There ought to be more to life than that.”