Caesar's Women (27 page)

“My dear Publius, of course she can!” said Appius Claudius. “Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi procured a senatorial exemption from the lex Voconia for Sempronia, and Sempronia and Fulvius Bambalio procured another one for Fulvia. Why do you think Gaius Cornelius, the tribune of the plebs, tried so hard to strip the Senate of the right to grant personal exemptions from laws? One of his biggest grudges was against Sempronia and Fulvius Bambalio for asking the Senate to allow Fulvia to inherit.”

“Did he? Who?” asked Clodius, more and more bewildered.

“Oh, of course! You were in the East when it happened, and too busy to pay attention to Rome,” said Appius Claudius, beaming fatuously. “It happened two years ago.”

“So Fulvia inherits the lot,” said Clodius slowly.

“Fulvia inherits the lot. And you, dearest little brother, are going to inherit Fulvia.”

But was he going to inherit Fulvia? Dressing with careful attention to the way his toga was draped and his hair was combed, making sure his shave was perfect, Publius Clodius set off the next morning to the house of Sempronia and her husband, who was the last member of that clan of Fulvii who had so ardently supported Gaius Sempronius Gracchus. It was, Clodius discovered as an aged steward conducted him to the atrium, not a particularly large or expensive or even beautiful house, nor was it located in the best part of the Carinae. The temple of Tellus (a dingy old structure being let go to rack and ruin) excluded it from the view across the Palus Ceroliae toward the mount of the Aventine, and the insulae of the Esquiline reared not two streets away.

Marcus Fulvius Bambalio, the steward had informed him, was indisposed; the lady Sempronia would see him. Well aware of the adage that all women looked like their mothers, Clodius felt his heart sink at his first sight of the illustrious and elusive Sempronia. A typical Cornelian, plump and homely. Born not long before Gaius Sempronius Gracchus perished by his own hand, the only surviving child of that entire unlucky family had been given as a debt of honor to the only surviving child of Gaius Gracchus's Fulvian allies, for they had lost everything in the aftermath of that futile revolution. They were married during the fourth of Gaius Marius's consulships, and while Fulvius (who had preferred to assume a new cognomen, Bambalio) set out to make a new fortune, his wife set out to become invisible. She succeeded so well that even Juno Lucina had not been able to find her, for she was barren. Then in her thirty-ninth year she attended the Lupercalia, and was lucky enough to be struck by a piece of flayed goat skin as the priests of the College danced and ran naked through the city. This cure for infertility never failed, nor did it for Sempronia. Nine months later she bore her only child, Fulvia.

“Publius Clodius, welcome,” she said, indicating a chair.

“Lady Sempronia, this is a great honor,” said Clodius, on his very best behavior.

“I suppose Appius Claudius has informed you?'' she asked, eyes assessing him, but face giving nothing away.

“Yes.”

“And are you interested in marrying my daughter?”

“It is more than I could have hoped for.”

“The money, or the alliance?”

“Both,” he said, seeing no point in dissimulation; no one knew better than Sempronia that he had never seen her daughter.

She nodded, not displeased. “It is not the marriage I would have chosen for her, nor is Marcus Fulvius overjoyed.” A sigh, a shrug. “However, Fulvia is not the grandchild of Gaius Gracchus for nothing. In me, none of the Gracchan spirit and fire ever dwelled. My husband too did not inherit the Fulvian spirit and fire. Which must have angered the gods. Fulvia took both our shares. I do not know why her fancy alighted on you, Publius Clodius, but it did, and a full eight years ago. Her determination to marry you and no one else began then, and has never faded. Neither Marcus Fulvius nor I can deal with her, she is too strong for us. If you will have her, she is yours.”

“Of course he'll have me!” said a young voice from the open doorway to the peristyle garden.

And in came Fulvia, not walking but running; that was her character, a mad dash toward what she wanted, no time to ponder.

To Clodius's surprise, Sempronia got up immediately and left. No chaperon? How determined was Fulvia?

Speech was impossible for Clodius; he was too busy staring. Fulvia was beautiful! Her eyes were dark blue, her hair a funny streaky pale brown, her mouth well shaped, her nose perfectly aquiline, her height almost his own, and her figure quite voluptuous. Different, unusual, like no Famous Family in Rome. Where had she come from? He knew the story of Sempronia at the Lupercalia, of course, and thought now that Fulvia was a visitation.

“Well, what do you have to say?” this extraordinary creature demanded, seating herself where her mother had been.

“Only that you leave me breathless.”

She liked that, and smiled to reveal beautiful teeth, big and white and fierce. “That's good.”

“Why me, Fulvia?” he asked, his mind now fixing itself on the chief difficulty, his circumcision.

“You're not an orthodox person,” she said, “and nor am I. You feel. So do I. Things matter to you the way they did to my grandfather, Gaius Gracchus. I worship my ancestry! And when I saw you in court struggling against insuperable odds, with Pupius Piso and Cicero and the rest sneering at you, I wanted to kill everyone who ground you down. I admit I was only ten years old, but I knew I had found my own Gaius Gracchus.”

Clodius had never considered himself in the light of either of the Brothers Gracchi, but Fulvia now planted an intriguing seed: what if he embarked on that sort of career—an aristocratic demagogue out to vindicate the underprivileged? Didn't it blend beautifully with his own career to date? And how easy it would be for him, who had a talent for getting on with the lowly that neither of the Gracchi had owned!

“For you, I will try,” he said, and smiled delightfully.

Her breath caught, she gasped audibly. But what she said was strange. “I'm a very jealous person, Publius Clodius, and that will not make me an easy wife. If you so much as look at another woman, I'll tear your eyes out.”

“I won't be able to look at another woman,” he said soberly, switching from comedy to tragedy faster than an actor could change masks. “In fact, Fulvia, it may be that when you know my secret, you won't look at me either.”

This didn't dismay her in the least; instead she looked fascinated, and leaned forward. “Your secret?”

“My secret. And it is a secret. I won't ask you to swear to keep it, because there are only two kinds of women. Those who would swear and then tell happily, and those who would keep a secret without swearing. Which kind are you, Fulvia?”

“It depends,” she said, smiling a little. “I think I am both. So I won't swear. But, Publius Clodius, I am loyal. If your secret doesn't diminish you in my eyes, I will keep it. You are my chosen mate, and I am loyal. I would die for you.”

“Don't die for me, Fulvia, live for me!” cried Clodius, who was falling in love more rapidly than a child's cork ball could tumble down a cataract.

“Tell me!” she said, growling the words ferociously.

“While I was with my brother-in-law Rex in Syria,” Clodius began, “I was abducted by a group of Skenite Arabs. Do you know what they are?”

“No.”

“They're a race out of the Asian desert, and they had usurped many of the positions and properties the Greeks of Syria had owned before Tigranes transported the Greeks to Armenia. When these Greeks returned after Tigranes fell, they found themselves destitute. The Skenite Arabs controlled everything. And I thought that was terrible, so I began to work to have the Greeks restored and the Skenite Arabs returned to the desert.”

“Of course,” she said, nodding. “That is your nature, to fight for the dispossessed.”

“My reward,” said Clodius bitterly, “was to be abducted by these people of the desert, and subjected to something no Roman can abide—something so disgraceful and ludicrous that if it became known, I would never be able to live in Rome again.”

All sorts of somethings chased through that intense dark blue gaze as Fulvia reviewed the alternatives. “What could they have done?” she asked in the end, absolutely bewildered. “Not rape, sodomy, bestiality. Those would be understood, forgiven.”

“How do you know about sodomy and bestiality?”

She looked smug. “I know everything, Publius Clodius.”

“Well, it wasn't any of them. They circumcised me.”

“What did they do?”

“You don't know everything after all.”

“Not that word, anyway. What does it mean?”

“They cut off my foreskin.”

“Your what?” she asked, revealing deeper layers of ignorance.

Clodius sighed. “It would be better for Roman virgins if the wall paintings didn't concentrate on Priapus,” he said. “Men are not erect all the time.”

“I know that!”

“What you don't seem to know is that when men are not erect, the bulb on the end of their penis is covered by a sheath called the foreskin,” said Clodius, beads of sweat on his brow. “Some peoples cut it off, leaving the bulb on the end of the penis permanently exposed. That's called circumcision. The Jews and the Egyptians do it. So, it appears, do the Arabs. And that is what they did to me. They branded me an outcast, as un-Roman!”

Her face looked like a boiling sky, changing, turning. “Oh! Oh, my poor, poor Clodius!” she cried. Her tongue came out, wet her lips. “Let me look!” she said.

The very thought of that caused twitches and stirs; Clodius now discovered that circumcision did not produce impotence, a fate which permanent limpness since Antioch had seemed to promise. He also discovered that in some ways he was a prude. “No, you most definitely can't look!” he snapped.

But she was on her knees in front of his chair, and her hands were busy parting the folds of toga, pushing at his tunic. She looked up at him in mingled mischief, delight and disappointment, then waved at a bronze lamp of an impossibly enormous Priapus, the wick protruding from his erection. “You look like him,” she said, and giggled. “I want to see you down, not up!”

Clodius leaped out of the chair and rearranged his clothing, panicked eyes on the door in case Sempronia came back. But she did not, nor it seemed had anyone else witnessed the daughter of the house inspecting what were to be her goods.

“To see me down, you'll have to marry me,” he said.

“Oh, my darling Publius Clodius, of course I'll marry you!” she cried, getting to her feet. “Your secret is safe with me. If it really is such a disgrace, you'll never be able to look at another woman, will you?”

“I'm all yours,” said Publius Clodius, dashing away his tears. “I adore you, Fulvia! I worship the ground you walk on!”

Clodius and Fulvia were married late in Quinctilis, after the last of the elections. They had been full of surprises, starting with Catilina's application to stand in absentia for next year's consulship. But though Catilina's return from his province was delayed, other men from Africa had made it their business to be in Rome well before the elections. It seemed beyond any doubt that Catilina's governorship of Africa was distinguished only for its corruption; the African farmers—tax and otherwise—who had come to Rome were making no secret of their intention to have Catilina prosecuted for extortion the moment he arrived home. So the supervising consul of the curule elections, Volcatius Tullus, had prudently declined to accept Catilina's in absentia candidacy on the grounds that he was under the shadow of prosecution.

Then a worse scandal broke. The successful candidates for next year's consulships, Publius Sulla and his dear friend Publius Autronius, were discovered to have bribed massively. Gaius Piso's lex Calpurnia dealing with bribery might be a leaky vessel, but the evidence against Publius Sulla and Autronius was so ironclad that not even slipshod legislation could save them. Whereupon the guilty pair promptly pleaded guilty and offered to conclude a deal with the existing consuls and the new consuls-elect, Lucius Cotta and Lucius Manlius Torquatus. The upshot of this shrewd move was that the charges were dropped in return for payment of huge fines and an oath sworn by both men that neither of them would ever again stand for public office; that they got away with it was thanks to Gaius Piso's bribery law, which provided for such solutions. Lucius Cotta, who wanted a trial, was livid when his three colleagues voted that the miscreants could keep both citizenship and residency as well as the major portions of their immense fortunes.

None of which really concerned Clodius, whose target was, as eight years earlier, Catilina. Mind running riot with dreams of revenge at last, Clodius prevailed upon the African plaintiffs to commission him to prosecute Catilina. Wonderful, wonderful! Catilina's comeuppance was at hand just when he, Clodius, had married the most exciting girl in the world! All his rewards had come at once, not least because Fulvia turned out to be an ardent partisan and helper, not at all the demure little stay-at-home bride other men than Clodius might perhaps have preferred.

At first Clodius worked in a frenzy to assemble his evidence and witnesses, but the Catilina case was one of those maddening affairs wherein nothing happened quickly enough, from finding the evidence to locating the witnesses. A trip to Utica or Hadrumetum took two months, and the job needed many such trips to Africa. Clodius fretted and chafed, but then, said Fulvia, “Think a little, darling Publius. Why not drag the case out forever? If it isn't concluded before next Quinctilis, then for the second year in a row, Catilina won't be allowed to run for the consulship, will he?”

Clodius saw the point of this advice immediately, and slowed down to the pace of an African snail. He would secure Catilina's conviction, but not for many moons to come. Brilliant!

He then had time to think about Lucullus, whose career was ending in disaster. Through the lex Manilia, Pompey had been dowered with Lucullus's command against Mithridates and Tigranes, and had proceeded to exercise his rights. He and Lucullus had met at Danala, a remote Galatian citadel, and quarreled so bitterly that Pompey (who had until then been reluctant to squash Lucullus under the weight of his imperium maius) formally issued a decree outlawing Lucullus's actions, then banished him from Asia. After which Pompey re-enlisted the Fimbriani; free though they were at last to go home, the Fimbriani couldn't face such a major dislocation after all. Service in the legions of Pompey the Great sounded good.