Caesar's Women (63 page)

Metellus Nepos got in first, which surprised no one; Cato was a retaliator rather than an initiator. Nepos's subject was juicy—the execution of citizens without trial— and his presentation of it splendid from irony to metaphor to hyperbole.

“Therefore I propose a plebiscite so gentle, so merciful, so unobtrusive that no man present can possibly do other than agree to vote it into law!” Nepos said at the end of a long speech which had reduced its audience now to tears, now to laughter, now to deep thought. “No death sentences, no exile, no fines. Fellow members of the Plebs, all I propose is that any man who has executed Roman citizens without trial be forbidden ever to speak in public again! Isn't that sweet justice? A voice forever stilled, a power to move masses rendered impotent! Will you join me? Will you muzzle megalomaniacs and monsters?”

It was Mark Antony who led the cheering, which rolled down upon Cicero and Catulus like an avalanche. Only Cato's voice could have surmounted it; only Cato's voice did.

“I interpose my veto!” he howled.

“To protect your own neck!” said Nepos scornfully as the roar died away so everyone could hear what followed. He looked Cato up and down with ostentatious surprise. “Not that there's too much left of your neck, Cato! What happened? Did you forget to pay the whore before you left, or did you need her to do that to you before anything happened below your navel?''

“How can you call yourself a noble Caecilius Metellus?” Cato asked. “Go home, Nepos, go home and wash the excrement from your mouth! Why should we be forced to listen to putrid innuendo in a holy assemblage of Roman men?''

“Why should we be forced to lie down under a flimsy senatorial decree which gives the men in power the right to execute men more Roman by far than they are themselves? I never heard that Lentulus Sura had a slave for a great-grandam, or that Gaius Cethegus's father still had pig shit behind his ears!”

“I refuse to engage in a slanging match, Nepos, and that is that! You can rant and rave from here until next December, and it won't make a scrap of difference!” bellowed Cato, the stripes on his face standing out like dark red ropes. “I interpose my veto, and there is nothing you can say will alter that!”

“Of course you interpose your veto! If you neglect to, Cato, you'll never speak in public again! It was you and no one else who talked the Senate of Rome around from clemency to barbarism! Not terribly surprising, really. Your great-grandam was a moist barbarian morsel, so they say. Very tasty for a silly old man from Tusculum who ought to have stayed in Tusculum and tickled his pigs, not gone to Rome to tickle a barbarian piggy-wiggy!”

And if that can't cause a fight, thought Nepos, nothing on earth can! If I were he, I'd be insisting on daggers at close quarters. The Plebs are lapping the insults up as dogs do vomit, and that means I'm winning. Hit me, Cato, punch me in the eye!

Cato did nothing of the kind. With an heroically Stoic effort only he knew the cost of, he turned and retreated to the back of the rostra. For a moment the crowd was tempted to boo this craven act, but Ahenobarbus got in before Mark Antony and began to cheer madly at this magnificent display of self-control and contempt.

Lucius Calpurnius Bestia saved the day and the victory for Nepos by beginning to attack Cicero and his Senatus Consultum Ultimum in the most savagely witty way. The Plebs sighed ecstatically, and the meeting proceeded with plenty of vim and vigor.

When Nepos thought the audience had had enough of citizen execution, he changed his tack.

“Speaking of a certain Lucius Sergius Catilina,” said he in a conversational tone, “it has not escaped my attention that absolutely nothing is happening on the war front. There they are scattered around Etruria, Apulia and Picenum, beautifully separated by many lusciously safe miles, Catilina and his so-called adversaries. Who have we got, now?” he asked, and held up his right hand with fingers splayed wide. “Well, there's Hybrida and his throbbing toe.” He tucked one finger away. “There's the second Man of Chalk, Metellus of the goaty branch.” Away with another finger. “And there's a King up there, Rex the doughty foe of—who? Who? Oh, petunias, I can't seem to remember!” The only digits left were thumb and little finger. At which point he abandoned his count and used the hand to slap his forehead loudly. “Oh! Oh! How could I forget my own big brother? He's supposed to be there, but he came to Rome to participate in a right act! I daresay I will just have to forgive him, the naughty fellow.”

This sally brought Quintus Minucius Thermus forward. “Where are you going, Nepos?” he asked. “What's the mischief this time?”

“Mischief? I?” Nepos recoiled theatrically. “Thermus, Thermus, don't let the fire under your big arse bring you to the boil, please! With a name like that, tepid suits you, my darling one!” he fluted, fluttering his eyelashes at Thermus outrageously while the Plebs howled with laughter. “No, sweetheart, I was just trying to remind our excellent fellow plebeians here that we do have some armies in the field to fight Catilina—when they find him, that is. The north of our peninsula is a big place, easy to get lost in. Especially considering the morning fog on Father Tiber—makes it hard for them to find a place to empty their porphyry chamber pots!''

“Do you have any suggestions?” asked Thermus dangerously. He was striving valiantly to follow Cato's example, but Nepos was now blowing him kisses, and the crowd was hysterical.

“Well, piggykins, as a matter of fact I do!” said Nepos brightly. “I was just standing watching the patterns on Cato's face—pipinna, pipinna!—when another face swam before my eyes—no, dear one, not yours! See over there? That soldierly man on the plinth fourth from the end among the busts of the consuls? Lovely face, I always think! So fair, such beautiful blue eyes! Not as gorgeous as yours, of course, but not bad all the same.” Nepos cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered. “Ho there, Quiris—yes, you, right at the back near the busts of the consuls! Can you read the name on that one? Yes, that's right, the one with the gold hair and the big blue eyes! What's that? Pompeius? Which Pompeius? Manus, did you say? Magus, is it? Oh, Magnus! Thank you, Quiris, thank you! The name is Pompeius Magnus!”

Thermus clenched his fists. “Don't you dare!” he snarled.

“Dare what?” asked Nepos innocently. “Though I do admit that Pompeius Magnus dares anything. Does he have any peers on a battlefield? I think not. And he's over in Syria getting ready to come home, all his battles finished. The East is conquered, and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus did the conquering. Which is more than you can say for the goaty Metellus and the kingly Rex! I wish I had gone to war with either of them rather than with Pompeius Magnus! What piddling foes they must have encountered to qualify for triumphs! I could have been a genuine hero if I'd gone to war with them, I could have been like Gaius Caesar and hidden my thinning hair with a chaplet of oak leaves!”

Nepos paused to salute Caesar, standing on the Curia Hostilia steps wearing his chaplet of oak leaves.

“I suggest, Quirites, that we bring in a small plebiscite to fetch Pompeius Magnus home, and give him a special command to crush the reason why we're still enduring a never-ending Senatus Consultum Ultimum! I say, bring Pompeius Magnus home to finish what the gouty one can't even begin—Catilina!”

And the cheering started again until Cato, Thermus, Fabricius and Lucius Marius interposed their vetoes.

President of the College and therefore convener of the meeting, Metellus Nepos decided enough had been done. He closed it well satisfied with what he had accomplished, and went off arm in arm with his brother, Celer, cheerfully acknowledging the plaudits of the overjoyed Plebs.

“How would you,” said Caesar as he joined them, “like to be going bald when your cognomen means a fine thick head of hair?''

“Your tata shouldn't have married an Aurelia Cottae,” said Nepos unrepentantly. “Never met an Aurelius Cotta yet who didn't look like an egg on top by the time he was forty.”

“You know, Nepos, until today I never realized that you had such a talent for demagoguery. Up there on the rostra you had style. They ate out of your hand. And I loved your performance so much I have forgiven you for the slap at my hair.”

“I thoroughly enjoyed myself, I must confess. However, I'll never get a thing done with Cato bawling out his veto.”

“I agree. You'll have an utterly frustrating year of it. But at least when it comes time to stand for higher office, the electors will remember you with great affection. I might even give you my vote.”

The Brothers Metelli were going to the Palatine, but strolled the short distance up the Via Sacra to the Domus Publica to keep Caesar company.

“I take it you're returning to the fray in Etruria?” Caesar asked Celer.

“Off tomorrow at the crack of dawn. I'd like to think I'll get a chance to fight Catilina, but our commander-in-chief Hybrida wants me to maintain a holding action on the borders of Picenum. Too far for Catilina to march without stumbling over someone else first.” Celer squeezed his brother's wrist fondly. “The bit about morning fog on Father Tiber was wonderful, Nepos.”

“Are you serious about bringing Pompeius home?” asked Caesar.

“In practical terms there's not much sense in it,” said Nepos seriously, “and I'm prepared to admit to you that I mostly said it to watch the rump react. However, if he left his army behind and came home alone he could make the trip in a month or two, depending upon how quickly he got the summons.”

“In two months even Hybrida will have brought Catilina to battle,” Caesar said.

“You're right, of course. But after listening to Cato today, I'm not sure I want to spend a whole year in Rome being vetoed. You summed it up when you said I'd have an utterly frustrating time of it.” Nepos sighed. “One cannot reason with Cato! He won't be talked round to anyone else's point of view no matter how much sense it makes, and no one can intimidate him either.”

“They say,” from Celer, “that he even had good training for the day when his fellow tribunes of the plebs get so incensed with him that they hold him out over the end of the Tarpeian Rock. When Cato was two years old the Marsian leader Silo used to hold him out over a cluster of sharp rocks and threaten to drop him, but the little monster just hung there and defied him.”

“Yes, that's Cato,” said Caesar grinning. “It's a true story, so Servilia vows. Now back to your tribunate, Nepos. Do I read you alright? Are you thinking of resigning?”

“More of creating a terrific fuss, forcing the Senate to invoke the Senatus Consultum Ultimum against me.”

“By harping on bringing Pompeius home.”

“Oh, I don't think that would boot Catulus's rump over the edge, Caesar!”

“Exactly.”

“However,” said Nepos demurely, “if I were to propose a bill to the full People to fire Hybrida for incompetence and bring our Magnus home with the same imperium and dispositions as he's had in the East, that would start them rumbling. Then if I added a little extra to the bill—say that Magnus be permitted to keep his imperium and his armies in Etruria and stand for the consulship next year in absentia—do you think that would be enough to cause a major eruption?”

Caesar began to laugh. “I'd say the whole of Italia would be covered in fiery clouds!”

“You're known as a meticulous lawyer, Pontifex Maximus. Would you be willing to help me work out the details?”

“I might.”

“Let's keep it in mind just in case January rolls round to find Hybrida still unable to close with Catilina. I'd love to exit from the tribunician stage under interdiction!”

“You'll stink worse than the inside of a legionary's helmet, Nepos, but only to people like Catulus and Metellus Scipio.”

“Bear in mind too, Caesar, that it will have to be the whole People, which means I can't convoke the meeting. I'll need at least a praetor for that:”

“I wonder,” Caesar asked Celer, “which praetor your brother could be thinking of?''

“No idea,” said Celer solemnly.

“And after you're forced to flee under interdiction, Nepos, you'll go east to join Pompeius Magnus.”

“East to join Pompeius Magnus,” Nepos agreed. “That way they won't have the courage to enforce the interdiction when I come home with the selfsame Pompeius Magnus.”

The Brothers Metelli saluted Caesar affectionately and went their way, leaving Caesar staring after them. Excellent allies! The trouble was, he thought with a sigh as he let himself inside his front door, that one never knew when things might change. The allies of this month could turn out to be the enemies of next month. One never knew.

* * *

Julia was easy. When Caesar sent for her, she hurled herself at him and hugged him.

“Tata, I understand everything, even why you couldn't see me for five days. How brilliant you are! You've put Cicero in his place for good and all.”

“Do you think so? I find most people don't know their place well enough to find it when someone like me puts them in it.”

“Oh,” said Julia doubtfully.

“And what about Servilia?”

She sat on his lap and began to kiss his white fans. “What is there to say, tata! Speaking of places, it isn't my place to stand in judgement on you, and I at least do know where my place is. Brutus feels as I do. We intend to go on as if nothing has changed.” She shrugged. “Really, nothing has.”

“What a wise little bird I have in my nest!” Caesar's arms tightened; he squeezed her so hard she had to gasp for breath. “Julia, no father could ever have asked for such a daughter! I am blessed. I wouldn't accept Minerva and Venus rolled in one as a replacement for you.”

In all her life she had never been as happy as she was at that moment, but was a wise enough little bird not to weep. Men disliked women who wept; men liked women who laughed and made them laugh. To be a man was so very difficult—all that public strife, forced to fight tooth and nail for everything, enemies lurking everywhere. A woman who gave the men in her life more joy than anguish would never lack for love, and Julia knew now that she would never lack for love. She was not Caesar's daughter for nothing; some things Aurelia could not teach her, but they were things she had learned for herself.