Caesar's Women

CAESAR'S WOMEN

Colleen McCullough

“Brutus, I don't like the look of your skin. Come here to the light, please.”

The fifteen-year-old made no sign that he had heard, simply remained hunched over a single sheet of Fannian paper with his reed pen, its ink long since dried, poised in midair.

“Come here, Brutus. At once,” said his mother placidly.

He knew her, so down went the pen; though he wasn't mortally afraid of her, he wasn't about to court her displeasure. One summons might be safely ignored, but a second summons meant she expected to be obeyed, even by him. Rising, he walked across to where Servilia stood by the window, its shutters wide because Rome was sweltering in an unseasonably early heatwave.

Though she was short and Brutus had recently begun to grow into what she hoped was going to be tallness, his head was not very far above hers; she put up one hand to clutch his chin, and peered closely at several angry red lumps welling under the skin around his mouth. Her hand released him, moved to push the loose dark curls away from his brow: more eruptions!

“How I wish you'd keep your hair cut!” she said, tugging at a lock which threatened to obscure his sight— and tugging hard enough to make his eyes water.

“Mama, short hair is unintellectual,” he protested.

“Short hair is practical. It stays off your face and doesn't irritate your skin. Oh, Brutus, what a trial you're becoming!”

“If you wanted a crop-skulled warrior son, Mama, you should have had more boys with Silanus instead of a couple of girls.”

“One son is affordable. Two sons stretch the money further than it wants to go. Besides, if I'd given Silanus a son, you wouldn't be his heir as well as your father's.” She strode across to the desk where he had been working and stirred the various scrolls upon it with impatient fingers. “Look at this mess! No wonder your shoulders are round and you're swaybacked. Get out onto the Campus Martius with Cassius and the other boys from school, don't waste your time trying to condense the whole of Thucydides onto one sheet of paper.”

“I happen to write the best epitomes in Rome,” said her son, his tone lofty.

Servilia eyed him ironically. “Thucydides,” she said, “was no profligate with words, yet it took him many books to tell the story of the conflict between Athens and Sparta. What advantage is there in destroying his beautiful Greek so that lazy Romans can crib a bare outline, then congratulate themselves that they know all about the Peloponnesian War?''

“Literature,” Brutus persevered, “is becoming too vast for any man to encompass without resorting to summaries.”

“Your skin is breaking down,” said Servilia, returning to what really interested her.

“That's common enough in boys my age.”

“But not in my plans for you.”

“And may the Gods help anyone or anything not in your plans for me!” he shouted, suddenly angry.

“Get dressed, we're going out” was all she answered, and left the room.

When he entered the atrium of Silanus's commodious house, Brutus was wearing the purple-bordered toga of childhood, for he would not officially become a man until December and the feast of Juventas arrived. His mother was already waiting, and watched him critically as he came toward her.

Yes, he definitely was round-shouldered, sway-backed. Such a lovely little boy he had been! Lovely even last January, when she had commissioned a bust of him from Antenor, the best portrait sculptor in all Italia. But now puberty was asserting itself more aggressively, his early beauty was fading, even to her prejudiced gaze. His eyes were still large and dark and dreamy, interestingly heavy-lidded, but his nose wasn't growing into the imposing Roman edifice she had hoped for, remaining stubbornly short and bulb-tipped like her own. And the skin which had been so exquisitely olive-colored, smooth and flawless, now filled her with dread—what if he was going to be one of the horribly unlucky ones and produced such noxious pustules that he scarred? Fifteen was too soon! Fifteen meant a protracted infestation. Pimples! How disgusting and mundane. Well, beginning tomorrow she would make enquiries among the physicians and herbalists—and whether he liked it or not, he was going to the Campus Martius every day for proper exercise and tutoring in the martial skills he would need when he turned seventeen and had to enrol in Rome's legions. As a contubernalis, of course, not as a mere ranker soldier; he would be a cadet on the personal staff of some consular commander who would ask for him by name. His birth and status assured it.

The steward let them out into the narrow Palatine street; Servilia turned toward the Forum and began to walk briskly, her son hurrying to keep up.

“Where are we going?” he asked, still chafing because she had dragged him away from epitomizing Thucydides.

“To Aurelia's.”

Had his mind not been wrestling with the problem of how to pack a mine of information into a single sentence—and had the day been more clement—his heart would have leaped joyously; instead he groaned. “Oh, not up into the slums today!”

“Yes.”

“It's such a long way, and such a dismal address!”

“The address may be dismal, my son, but the lady herself is impeccably connected. Everyone will be there.” She paused, her eyes sliding slyly sideways. “Everyone, Brutus, everyone.”

To which he answered not a word.

Her progress rendered easier by two ushering slaves, Servilia clattered down the Kingmakers' Steps into the pandemonium of the Forum Romanum, where all the world adored to gather, listen, watch, wander, rub shoulders with the Mighty. Neither Senate nor one of the Assemblies was meeting today and the courts were on a short vacation, but some of the Mighty were out and about nonetheless, distinguished by the bobbing red-thonged bundles of rods their lictors carried shoulder-high to proclaim their imperium.

“It's so hilly, Mama! Can't you slow down?” panted Brutus as his mother marched up the Clivus Orbius on the far side of the Forum; he was sweating profusely.

“If you exercised more, you wouldn't need to complain,” said Servilia, unimpressed.

Nauseating smells of foetor and decay assailed Brutus's nostrils as the towering tenements of the Subura pressed in and shut out the light of the sun; peeling walls oozed slime, the gutters guided dark and syrupy trickles into gratings, tiny unlit caverns that were shops passed by unnumbered. At least the dank shade made it cooler, but this was a side of Rome young Brutus could happily have done without, “everyone” notwithstanding.

Eventually they arrived outside a quite presentable door of seasoned oak, well carved into panels and owning a brightly polished orichalcum knocker in the form of a lion's head with gaping jaws. One of Servilia's attendants plied it vigorously, and the door opened at once. There stood an elderly, rather plump Greek freedman, bowing deeply as he let them in.

It was a gathering of women, of course; had Brutus only been old enough to put on his plain white toga virilis, graduate into the ranks of men, he would not have been allowed to accompany his mother. That thought provoked panic—Mama must succeed in her petition, he must be able to continue to see his darling love after December and manhood! But betraying none of this, he abandoned Servilia's skirts the moment the gushing greetings began and slunk off into a quiet corner of the squeal-filled room, there to do his best to blend into the unpretentious decor.

“Brutus, ave,” said a light yet husky voice.

He turned his head, looked down, felt his chest cave in. “ave, Julia.”

“Here, sit with me,” the daughter of the house commanded, leading him to a pair of small chairs right in the corner. She settled in one while he lowered himself awkwardly into the other, herself as graceful and composed as a nesting swan.

Only eight years old—how could she already be so beautiful? wondered the dazzled Brutus, who knew her well because his mother was a great friend of her grandmother's. Fair like ice and snow, chin pointed, cheekbones arched, faintly pink lips as delicious as a strawberry, a pair of widely opened blue eyes that gazed with gentle liveliness on all that they beheld; if Brutus had dipped into the poetry of love, it was because of her whom he had loved for—oh, years! Not truly understanding that it was love until quite recently, when she had turned her gaze on him with such a sweet smile that realization had dawned with the shock of a thunderclap.

He had gone to his mother that very evening, and informed her that he wished to marry Julia when she grew up.

Servilia had stared, astonished. “My dear Brutus, she's a mere child! You'd have to wait nine or ten years for her.”

“She'll be betrothed long before she's old enough to marry,” he had answered, his anguish plain. “Please, Mama, as soon as her father returns home, petition for her hand in marriage!”

“You may well change your mind.”

“Never, never!”

“Her dowry is minute.”

“But her birth is everything you could want in my wife.”

“True.” The black eyes which could grow so hard rested on his face not unsympathetically; Servilia appreciated the strength of that argument. So she had turned it over in her mind for a moment, then nodded. “Very well, Brutus, when her father is next in Rome, I'll ask. You don't need a rich bride, but it is essential that her birth match your own, and a Julia would be ideal. Especially this Julia. Patrician on both sides.”

And so they had left it to wait until Julia's father returned from his post as quaestor in Further Spain. The most junior of the important magistracies, quaestor. But trust Servilia to know that Julia's father had filled it extremely well. Odd that she had never met him, considering how small a group the true aristocrats of Rome were. She was one; he was another. But, feminine rumor had it, he was something of an outsider among his own kind, too busy for the social round most of his peers cultivated whenever they were in Rome. It would have been easier to sue for his daughter's hand on Brutus's behalf did she know him already, though she had little doubt what his answer would be. Brutus was highly eligible, even in the eyes of a Julian.

Aurelia's reception room could not compare to a Palatine atrium, but it was quite large enough comfortably to hold the dozen or so women who had invaded it. Open shutters looked out onto what was commonly regarded as a lovely garden, thanks to Gaius Matius in the other ground-floor apartment; his was the hand had found roses able to bloom in the shade, coaxed grapevines into scaling the twelve storeys of latticed walls and balconies, trimmed box bushes into perfect globes, and rigged a cunning gravity feed to the chaste marble pool that allowed a rearing two-tailed dolphin to spout water from its fearsome mouth.

The walls of the reception room were well kept up and painted in the red style, the floor of cheap terrazzo had been burnished to an appealing reddish-pink glow, and the ceiling had been painted to simulate a cloud-fluffed noon sky, though it could claim no expensive gilding. Not the residence of one of the Mighty, but adequate for a junior senator, Brutus supposed as he sat watching Julia, watching the women; Julia caught him, so he looked too.

His mother had seated herself next to Aurelia on a couch, where she managed to display herself to good advantage despite the fact that her hostess was, even at the age of fifty-five, still held one of Rome's great beauties. Aurelia's figure was elegantly slim and it suited her to be in repose, for one didn't notice then that when she moved it was too briskly for grace. No hint of grey marred her ice-brown hair, and her skin was smooth, creamy. It was she who had recommended Brutus's school to Servilia, for she was Servilia's chief confidante.

From that thought Brutus's mind skipped to school, a typical digression for a mind which did tend to wander. His mother had not wished to send Brutus to school, afraid her little boy would be exposed to children of inferior rank and wealth, and worried that his studious nature would be laughed at. Better that Brutus have his own tutor at home. But then Brutus's stepfather had insisted that this only son needed the stimulus and competition of a school. “Some healthy activity and ordinary playmates'' was how Silanus had put it, not precisely jealous of the first place Brutus held in Servilia's heart, more concerned that when Brutus matured he should at least have learned to associate with various kinds of people. Naturally the school Aurelia recommended was an exclusive one, but pedagogues who ran schools had a distressingly independent turn of mind that led them to accept bright boys from less rarefied backgrounds than a Marcus Junius Brutus, not to mention two or three bright girls.

With Servilia for mother, it was inevitable that Brutus should hate school, though Gaius Cassius Longinus, the fellow pupil of whom Servilia approved most, was from quite as good a family as a Junius Brutus. Brutus, however, tolerated Cassius only because to do so kept his mother happy. What had he in common with a loud and turbulent boy like Cassius, enamored of war, strife, deeds of great daring? Only the fact that he had quickly become teacher's pet had managed to reconcile Brutus to the awful ordeal of school. And fellows like Cassius.

Unfortunately the person Brutus most yearned to call friend was his Uncle Cato; but Servilia refused to hear of his establishing any kind of intimacy with her despised half brother. Uncle Cato was descended, she never tired of reminding her son, from a Tusculan peasant and a Celtiberian slave, whereas in Brutus were united two separate lines of exalted antiquity, one from Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Republic (who had deposed the last King of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus), and the other from Gaius Servilius Ahala (who had killed Maelius when Maelius had attempted to make himself King of Rome some decades into the new Republic). Therefore a Junius Brutus who was through his mother also a patrician Servilius could not possibly associate with upstart trash like Uncle Cato.

“But your mother married Uncle Cato's father and had two children by him, Aunt Porcia and Uncle Cato!” Brutus had protested on one occasion.

“And thereby disgraced herself forever!” snarled Servilia. “I do not acknowledge either that union or its progeny—and neither, my lad, will you!”