Caesar's Women (39 page)

“One or the other of them ought to have stepped down. Two of them split their vote,” said Caesar, beginning to feel that he could face a room jammed with people. “Besides which, I was Jupiter Optimus Maximus's own priest when I was young, and Sulla stripped me of it. The Pontifex Maximus belongs to the Great God too. My clients did a lot of talking in the Well of the Comitia before the vote was taken, and right up until the last tribe polled.” He grinned. “I told you, Mater, that there is more to electioneering than mere bribery. Hardly a man who voted wasn't convinced I would be lucky for Rome because I have always belonged to Jupiter Optimus Maximus.”

“It could as easily have gone against you. They might have concluded that a man who had been flamen Dialis would be unlucky for Rome.”

“No! Men always wait for someone to tell them how they ought to feel about the Gods. I just made sure I got in before the opposition thought of that tack. Needless to say, they didn't.”

* * *

Metellus Scipio had not lived in the Domus Publica of the Pontifex Maximus since his marriage to Aemilia Lepida some years before, and the Piglet's barren Licinia had died before him. The State residence of the Pontifex Maximus was vacant.

Naturally no one at the Piglet's funeral had thought it in good taste to remark on the fact that this one un-elected Pontifex Maximus had been inflicted upon Rome by Sulla as a wicked joke because Metellus Pius stammered dreadfully whenever he was under stress. This tendency to stammer had led to every ceremony's being fraught with the additional tension of wondering whether the Pontifex Maximus would get all the words out properly. For every ceremony had to be perfect, in word as well as in execution; were it not perfect, it had to begin all over again.

The new Pontifex Maximus was hardly likely to stumble over a word, the more so as it was well known that he drank no wine. Yet another of Caesar's little electoral ploys, to have that morsel of information well bruited about during the pontifical election. And to have comments made about old men like Vatia Isauricus and Catulus beginning to wander. After nearly twenty years of having to worry about stammers, Rome was delighted to see a Pontifex Maximus in office who would give none but flawless performances.

Hordes of clients and enthusiastic supporters came to offer their help in moving Caesar and his family to the Domus Publica in the Forum Romanum, though the Subura was desolate at the prospect of losing its most prestigious inhabitant. Especially old Lucius Decumius, who had worked indefatigably to see the thing done, yet knew his life would never be the same again with Caesar gone.

“You're always welcome, Lucius Decumius,” said Aurelia.

“Won't be the same,” said the old man gloomily. “I always knew you was here next door, that you was all right. But down there in the Forum among the temples and the Vestals! Ugh!”

“Cheer up, dear friend,” said the lady in her sixties with whom Lucius Decumius had fallen in love during her nineteenth year. “He doesn't intend to rent this apartment or give up his rooms down the Vicus Patricii. He says he still needs his bolt-holes.”

That was the best news Lucius Decumius had heard in days! Off he went to tell his Crossroads Brethren that Caesar would still be a part of the Subura, skipping like a little boy.

It worried Caesar not a scrap that he now stood firmly and legally at the head of an institution filled mostly with men who detested him. His investiture in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus concluded, he summoned the priests of his own College to a meeting which he held then and there. This he chaired with such efficiency and detachment that priests like Sextus Sulpicius Galba and Publius Mucius Scaevola breathed sighs of delighted relief, and wondered if perhaps the State religion would benefit from Caesar's elevation to Pontifex Maximus, obnoxious and all as he was politically. Uncle Mamercus, getting old and wheezy, just smiled; none knew better than he how good Caesar was at getting things done.

Each second year was supposed to see twenty extra days inserted into the calendar to keep it in step with the seasons, but a series of Pontifices Maximi like Ahenobarbus and Metellus Pius had neglected this duty, within the sphere of the College. In future these extra twenty days would be intercalated without fail, Caesar announced firmly. No excuses or religious quibbles would be tolerated. He then went on to say that he would promulgate a law in the Comitia which would intercalate an extra hundred days and finally bring the calendar and the seasons into perfect step. At the moment the season of summer was just beginning when the calendar said that autumn was just about over. This scheme caused mutters of outrage from some, but no violent opposition; all present (including Caesar) knew that he would have to wait until he was consul to have any chance of passing the law at all.

During a lull in the proceedings Caesar gazed about at the interior of Jupiter Optimus Maximus with a frown.

Catulus was still struggling to complete its rebuilding, and the work had fallen far behind schedule once the shell was up. The temple was habitable but uninspiring, and quite lacked the splendor of the old structure. Many of the walls were plastered and painted but not adorned with frescoes or suitably elaborate moldings, and clearly Catulus did not have the enterprise—or perhaps the turn of mind—to badger foreign states and princes into donating wonderful objects of art to Jupiter Optimus Maximus as a part of their homage to Rome. No solid or even skinned gold statues, no glorious Victories driving four-horsed chariots, no Zeuxis paintings—not even as yet an image of the Great God to replace the ancient terracotta giant sculpted by Vulca before Rome was more than an infant crawling onto the world stage. But for the moment Caesar held his peace. Pontifex Maximus was a lifetime job, and he was not yet thirty-seven years old.

After the meeting concluded with his announcement that he would hold his inaugural feast in the temple of the Domus Publica in eight days' time, he began the short downhill walk from the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to the Domus Publica. Long used to the inevitable crowd of clients who accompanied him everywhere and thus able to shut out their chatter, he moved more slowly than his wont, deep in thought. That he did in truth belong to the Great God was inarguable, which meant he had won this election at the Great God's behest. Yes, he would have to administer a public kick to Catulus's backside, and bend his own mind to the urgent problem of how to fill the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus with beauty and treasures in a day and age wherein the best of everything went into private houses and peristyle gardens instead of into Rome's temples, and wherein the best artists and artisans obtained far greater incomes working in private employment than for the pittance the State was prepared to pay them for working on public buildings.

He had left the most important interview until last, deeming it better to establish his authority within the College of Pontifices before he saw the Vestal Virgins. All the priestly and augural Colleges were a part of his responsibility as titular and actual head of Roman religion, but the College of Vestal Virgins enjoyed a unique relationship with the Pontifex Maximus. Not only was he their paterfamilias; he also shared a house with them.

The Domus Publica was extremely old and had endured no fires. Generations of wealthy Pontifices Maximi had poured money and care into it, even knowing that whatever portable they gave, from chryselephantine tables to inlaid Egyptian couches, could not later be removed for the benefit of family heirs.

Like all the very early Republican Forum buildings, the Domus Publica lay at an odd angle to the vertical axis of the Forum itself, for in the days when it had been built all sacred or public structures had to be oriented between north and south; the Forum, a natural declivity, was oriented from northeast to southwest. Later buildings were erected on the Forum line, which made for a tidier, more attractive overall landscape. As one of the Forum's largest edifices, the Domus Publica was also rather glaringly obvious to the eye, and did not gladden it. Partly obscured by the Regia and the offices of the Pontifex Maximus, the tall facade on its ground floor was built of unrendered tufa blocks with rectangular windows; the top floor, added by that quirky Pontifex Maximus Ahenobarbus, was opus incertum brickwork with arched windows. An unhappy combination which would—at least from the front aspect of the Sacra Via—be vastly improved by the addition of a proper and imposing temple portico and pediment. Or so thought Caesar, deciding in that moment what his contribution to the Domus Publica would be. It was an inaugurated temple, therefore no law existed to prevent his doing this.

In shape the building was more or less square, though it had a jog on either side which widened it. Behind it was the little thirty-foot-high cliff forming the lowest tier of the Palatine. On top of that cliff was the Via Nova, a busy street of taverns, shops and insulae; an alley ran behind the Domus Publica and gave access to the substructure of the Via Nova buildings. All these premises reared high above the level of the cliff, so that their back windows had a wonderful view of what went on inside the Domus Publica courtyards. They also completely blocked any afternoon sun the residence of the Pontifex Maximus and the Vestal Virgins might have received, which meant that the Domus Publica, already handicapped by its low-lying location, was sure to be a cold place to live in. The Porticus Margaritaria, a gigantic rectangular shopping arcade just uphill from it and oriented on the Forum axis, actually abutted onto its rear end, and sliced off a corner of it.

However, no Roman—even one as logical as Caesar—found anything odd in peculiarly shaped buildings, missing a corner here, sprouting an excrescence there; what could be built on a straight line was, and what had to go around adjacent structures already there, or boundaries so ancient the priests who had defined them had probably followed the track of a hopping bird, went around them. If one looked at the Domus Publica from that point of view, it really wasn't very irregular. Just huge and ugly and cold and damp.

His escort of clients hung back in awe when Caesar strode up to the main doors, which were of bronze cast in sculpted panels telling the story of Cloelia. Under normal circumstances they were not used, as both sides of the building had entrances. Today, however, was not a normal day. Today the new Pontifex Maximus took possession of his domain, and that was an act of great formality. Caesar pounded three times with the flat of his right hand upon the right-hand leaf of the door, which opened immediately. The Chief Vestal admitted him with a low reverence, then closed it upon the sighing, teary-eyed horde of clients, who now reconciled themselves to a long wait outside, and started thinking of snacks and gossip.

Perpennia and Fonteia had been retired for some years; the woman who was now the Chief Vestal was Licinia, close cousin of Murena and remoter cousin of Crassus.

“But,” she said as she led Caesar up the curving central ramp of the vestibule to another set of beautiful bronze doors at its top, “I intend to retire as soon as possible. My cousin Murena is standing for consul this year, and begged me to remain Chief Vestal long enough to assist him in his canvassing.”

A plain and pleasant woman, Licinia, though not nearly strong enough to fill her position adequately, Caesar knew. As a pontifex he had had dealings with the adult Vestals over the years, and as a pontifex he had deplored their fate since the day Metellus Pius the Piglet had become their paterfamilias. First Metellus Pius had spent ten years fighting Sertorius in Spain, then he had returned aged beyond his years and in no mood to worry about the six female creatures whom he was supposed to care for, supervise, instruct, advise. Nor had his doleful, negative wife been of much help. And, in the way things usually did happen, none of the three women who had in turn become Chief Vestal could cope without firm guidance. As a consequence the College of Vestal Virgins was in decline. Oh, the sacred fire was rigorously tended and the various festivals and ceremonies conducted as was proper. But the scandal of Publius Clodius's accusations of unchastity still hung like a pall over the six women thought to be a personification of Rome's good luck, and none of them old enough to have been in the College when it had occurred had emerged from it without terrible scars.

Licinia struck the right-hand door three times with the flat of her right hand, and Fabia admitted them to the temple with a low reverence. Here within these hallowed portals the Vestal Virgins had assembled to greet their new paterfamilias on the only ground within the Domus Publica which was common to both lots of tenants.

So what did their new paterfamilias do? Why, he gave them a cheerful, unreligious smile and walked straight through their midst in the direction of a third set of double doors at the far end of the dimly lit hall!

“Outside, girls!” he said over his shoulder.

In the chilly precinct of the peristyle garden he found a sheltered spot where three stone benches lay alongside each other in the colonnade, then—effortlessly, it seemed—he lifted one around to face the other two. He sat upon it in his gorgeous scarlet-and-purple-striped toga, now wearing the scarlet-and-purple-striped tunic of the Pontifex Maximus beneath it, and with a casual flap of his hand indicated that they were to sit. A terrified silence fell, during which Caesar looked his new women over.

Object of the amorous intentions of both Catilina and Clodius, Fabia was held to be the prettiest Vestal Virgin in generations. Second in seniority, she would succeed Licinia when that lady retired soon. Not a very satisfactory prospect as Chief Vestal; had the College been inundated with candidates when she had been admitted to it, she would never have been admitted at all. But Scaevola, who had been Pontifex Maximus at the time, had no other alternative than to stifle his wish that a plain girl child would be offered, and take this ravishing scion of Rome's oldest (albeit now entirely adoptive) Famous Family, the Fabii. Odd. She and Cicero's wife, Terentia, shared the same mother. Yet Terentia possessed none of Fabia's beauty or sweetness of nature—though she was very much the more intelligent of the two. At the present moment Fabia was twenty-eight years old, which meant that the College would keep her for another eight to ten years.