Caesar's Women (56 page)

He would have to watch Crassus, decided Cicero. But he would have to watch Caesar even more closely. Look at Caesar's debts—who stood to gain more than Caesar by a general cancellation of debt? Wasn't that reason enough to back Catilina? How else could he hope to extricate himself from an otherwise inevitable ruin? He would need to conquer vast tracts as yet untouched by Rome, and Cicero for one deemed that impossible. Caesar was no Pompey; he had never commanded armies. Nor would Rome be tempted to endow him with special commissions! In fact, the more Cicero thought about Caesar, the more convinced he became that Caesar had been a part of the Catilinarian conspiracy, if only because victory for Catilina meant that his burden of debt would be removed.

Then as he was returning to the Forum with Lentulus Sura (whom again he led by the hand like a child), another Caesar intruded. Neither as gifted nor as dangerous as Gaius, Lucius Caesar was still a formidable man: consul the year before, an augur, and likely to be elected censor at some time in the future. He and Gaius were close cousins, and they liked each other.

But Lucius Caesar had stopped in his tracks, incredulity written on his face as his eyes took in the sight of Cicero leading Lentulus Sura by the hand.

“Now?” he asked Cicero.

“Now,” said Cicero firmly.

“Without preparation? Without mercy? Without a bath, clean clothes, the right frame of mind? Are we barbarians?”

“It has to be now,” Cicero said miserably, “before the sun sets. Don't try to obstruct me, please.”

Lucius Caesar stepped out of the way ostentatiously. “Oh, the Gods preserve me from obstructing Roman justice!” he said, sneering. “Have you broken the news to my sister that her husband is to die without a bath, without clean clothes?”

“I haven't the time!” cried Cicero for something to say. Oh, this was awful! He was only doing his duty! But he couldn't say that to Lucius Caesar, could he? What could he say?

“Then I had better go to her house while it's still in Sura's name!” Lucius Caesar snapped. “No doubt you'll be convening the Senate tomorrow to dispose of all the property.”

“No, no!” Cicero said, almost weeping. “I've given your cousin Gaius my solemn word that there will be no confiscation of property.”

“Big of you,” said Lucius Caesar. He looked at his brother-in-law Lentulus Sura, lips parted as if to say something; then he shut them firmly, shook his head, and turned away. Nothing could help, nor did he think Lentulus Sura capable of hearing. Shock had parted him from his wits.

Trembling from that encounter, Cicero proceeded down the Vestal Steps into the lower Forum, which was jammed with people—and not all of them professional Forum frequenters, either. As his lictors pushed a path through those masses of people, Cicero fancied he caught glimpses of faces he knew. Was that young Decimus Brutus Albinus? Surely that wasn't Publius Clodius! Gellius Poplicola's outcast son? Why would any of them be mingling cheek by jowl with the ordinary folk of Rome's back streets?

There was a feeling in the air, and its nature frightened the already shaken Cicero. People were growling, their eyes were dark, their faces sullen, their bodies hard to move aside for Rome's senior consul and the victim he led by the hand. A frisson of terror flashed up Cicero's spine, almost caused him to turn about and run. But he couldn't. This was his doing. He had to see it through now. He was the father of his country; he had single-handedly saved Rome from a nest of patricians.

On the far side of the Gemonian Steps, which led up onto the Arx of the Capitol, lay Rome's ramshackle, tumbledown (and only) prison, the Lautumiae; its first and most ancient building was the Tullianum, a tiny, three-sided relic of the days of the kings. In the wall facing onto the Clivus Argentarius and the Basilica Porcia was its only door, a thick wooden ugliness always kept closed and locked.

But this evening it stood wide open, its aperture filled by half-naked men, six of them. Rome's public executioners. They were slaves, of course, and lived in barracks on the Via Recta outside the pomerium together with Rome's other public slaves. Where their lot differed from the other tenants of that barracks lay in the fact that Rome's public executioners did not cross the pomerium into the city except to perform their duty. A duty normally confined to putting their big, brawny hands around foreign necks only, snapping them; a duty normally occurring only once or twice in any year, during a triumphal parade. It was a very long time since the necks they would break had belonged to Romans. Sulla had killed many Romans, but never officially inside the Tullianum. Marius had killed many Romans, but never officially inside the Tullianum.

Luckily the physical location of the execution chamber did not permit the entire front of that crowd to witness what happened, and by the time Cicero had assembled his five wretched condemned and placed a solid wall of lictors and militia between them and the masses, there was little indeed to see.

When Cicero mounted the few steps to stand outside the door, the smell hit him. Fierce, foetid, an overwhelming stench of decay. For no one ever cleaned out the execution chamber. A man went in; he approached a hole in the middle of the floor, and descended into the depths below. There some feet down his executioners waited to break his neck. After which his body simply lay there and rotted. The next time the chamber was needed, the executioners shoved the moldering remains into an open conduit which joined the sewers.

Gorge rising, Cicero stood ashen-faced as the five men filed inside, Lentulus Sura first, Caeparius last. None of them so much as spared him a glance, for which he was very grateful. The inertia of shock held them fast.

It took no more than a few moments. One of the executioners emerged from the door and nodded to him. I can leave now, thought Cicero, and walked behind his lictors and militia to the rostra.

From its top he gazed down on the crowd stretching away to the limit of his vision, and wet his lips. He was within the pomerium, Rome's sacred boundary, and that meant he could not use the word “dead” as part of an official pronunciation.

What could he say instead of “dead”? After a pause he threw his arms wide and shouted, “Vivere!” “They have lived!” Past perfect, over and done with, finished.

No one cheered. No one booed. Cicero climbed down and began to walk in the direction of the Palatine while the crowd dispersed mostly toward the Esquiline, the Subura, the Viminal. When he reached the little round House of Vesta a large group of knights of the Eighteen led by Atticus appeared, torches kindled because it was growing quite dark. And they hailed him as the savior of his country, as pater patriae, as a hero straight out of myth. Balm to his animus! The conspiracy of Lucius Sergius Catilina was no more, and he alone had exposed it, killed it.

Caesar stalked home to the Domus Publica in a towering rage, Titus Labienus almost running to keep up with him. A peremptory jerk of Caesar's head had summoned Pompey's tame tribune of the plebs to accompany him, for what reason Labienus didn't know; he went because in Pompey's absence Caesar was his controller.

The invitation to help himself to liquid refreshments was given by another jerk of Caesar's head; Labienus poured wine, sat down, and watched Caesar pace the confines of his study.

Finally Caesar spoke. “I will make Cicero wish he had never been born! How dared he presume to interpret Roman law! And how did we ever elect such a swan senior consul?”

“What, didn't you vote for him?”

“Neither for him nor for Hybrida.”

“You voted for Catilina?” Labienus asked, surprised.

“And Silanus. Candidly, there was no one I really wanted to vote for, but one can't not vote, that's to avoid the issue.” The red spots still burned in Caesar's cheeks, and the eyes were, thought Labienus with unusual imagination, frozen yet on fire.

“Sit down, man, do! I know you don't touch wine, but tonight is exceptional. A drink will do you good.”

“A drink never does any good,” Caesar said emphatically; he did, however, sit down. “If I am not in error, Titus, your uncle Quintus Labienus perished under a tile in the Curia Hostilia thirty-seven years ago.”

“Together with Saturninus, Lucius Equitius and the rest, yes.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

“How else than that it was as unforgivable as unconstitutional? They were Roman citizens, and they had not been tried.”

“True. However, they were not officially executed. They were murdered to avoid keeping them alive to undergo a trial process neither Marius nor Scaurus could be sure would not cause far worse violence. Naturally it was Sulla who solved the dilemma by murder. He was Marius's right hand in those days—very quick, very clever, very ruthless. So fifteen men died, there were no incendiary treason trials, the grain fleet arrived, Marius distributed it dirt-cheap, Rome settled down full-bellied, and later on Scaeva the slave got all the credit for murdering those fifteen men.”

Labienus frowned, added more water to his wine. “I wish I knew where you're going.”

“I know where, Labienus, which is what matters,” said Caesar, smiling to reveal clenched teeth. “Consider if you will that dubious piece of relatively recent Republican expedience, the senatus consultum de re publica defendenda—or, as Cicero so cutely renamed it, the Senatus Consultum Ultimum. Invented by the Senate when no one wanted a dictator appointed to make the decisions. And it did serve the Senate's purpose in the aftermath of Gaius Gracchus, not to mention Saturninus, Lepidus and some others.”

“I still don't know where you're going,” said Labienus.

Caesar drew a breath. “Now here is the Senatus Consultum Ultimum again, Labienus. But look what's happened to it! In Cicero's mind for one it has become respectable, inevitable, and highly convenient. Seduce the Senate into passing it, and then beneath its shelter proceed to flout both constitution and mos maiorum! Without altering it at law in any way, Cicero has employed his Senatus Consultum Ultimum to crush Roman windpipes and snap Roman necks without trial—without ceremony— without even common decency! Those men went to their deaths faster than soldiers are cut down in a lost battle! Not unofficially beneath a rain of tiles from a roof, but with the full sanction of the Senate of Rome! Which at Cicero's urging took upon itself the functions of judge and jury! How do you think it must have looked to that crowd in the Forum this evening, Labienus? I will tell you how it looked. As if from this day forward, no Roman citizen can ever again be sure that he will be accorded his absolutely inalienable right to a trial before any condemnation. And that so-called brilliant man, that conceited and feckless fool Cicero, actually thinks he has extricated the Senate from a very difficult situation in the best and most suitable way! I will grant him that for the Senate it was the easy way. But for the vast majority of Roman citizens of every kind from the First Class to the Head Count, what Cicero engineered today spells the death of an inalienable right should the Senate decide under a future Senatus Consultum Ultimum that Roman men must die without a trial, without due process of the law! What's to stop its happening again, Labienus? Tell me what?”

Suddenly short of breath, Labienus managed to put his goblet down on the desk without spilling its contents, then stared at Caesar as if he had never seen him before. Why did Caesar see so many ramifications when no one else had? Why hadn't he, Titus Labienus, understood better what Cicero was actually doing? Ye gods, Cicero hadn't understood! Only Caesar had. Those who voted against execution had done so because their hearts could not approve, or else had groped after the truth like blind men debating the nature of an elephant.

“When I spoke this morning I made a terrible mistake,” Caesar went on angrily. “I chose to be ironic, I didn't think it right to inflame feelings. I decided to be clever, to point out the insanity of Cicero's proposal by talking of the time of the kings and saying that Cicero was abrogating the Republic by dragging us back to the time of the kings. It wasn't simple enough. I ought to have been down on a child's level, slowly spelling out manifest truths. But I deemed them grown and educated men of some little intelligence, so I chose to be ironic. Never realizing that they wouldn't fully follow where my argument was going, why I was taking that tack. I ought to have been blunter then than I am now to you, but I didn't want to set their backs up because I thought rage would blind them! They were already blind, I had nothing to lose! I don't often make mistakes, but I made one this morning, Labienus. Look at Cato! The one man I felt sure would support me, little though he likes me. What he said made absolutely no sense. But they chose to follow him like a lot of eunuchs after Magna Mater.”

“Cato is a yapping dog.”

“No, Labienus, he's just the worst kind of fool there is. He thinks he's not a fool.”

“That's true of most of us.”

Up went Caesar's brows. “I am not a fool, Titus.”

Then Titus was to soften it, of course. “Granted.” Why was it that when one was in the company of a man who did not drink wine, wine lost its allure? Labienus poured himself water. “No point in going over lost ground now, Caesar. I believe you when you say you'll make Cicero wish he'd never been born, but how?”

“Simple. I will ram his Senatus Consultum Ultimum somewhere down around his golden tonsils,” said Caesar dreamily, his smile not reaching his eyes.

“But how? How, how, how?”

“You have four days left of your year as a tribune of the plebs, Labienus, and they are just enough if we act quickly. We can allow tomorrow to organize ourselves and refine our roles. The day after will see the first phase. The two days following that are for the final phase. The business won't have finished by then, but it will have gone far enough. And you, my dear Titus Labienus, will quit your tribunate in an absolute blaze of glory! If nothing else recommends your name to posterity, I promise you that the events of the next four days surely will!”

“What do I have to do?”

“Nothing this evening, except perhaps—do you have access to—no, you wouldn't. I'll frame it differently. Can you manage to get hold of a bust or a statue of Saturninus? Or of your uncle Quintus Labienus?''

“I can go one better than that,” said Labienus promptly. “I know where there's an imago of Saturninus.”

“An imago! But he was never praetor!”

“True,” said Labienus, grinning. “The trouble with being a great nobleman, Caesar, is that you can have no idea how our minds work, we ambitious up-and-coming Picentines, Samnites, New Men from Arpinum and the like. We just can't wait to see our features exquisitely formed and tinted like life in beeswax, with real hair of exactly the right color and style! So as soon as we have the money in our purses we sneak off to one of the craftsmen in the Velabrum, and we commission an imago. I know men who will never even belong to the Senate who have imagines. How else do you think Magius of the Velabrum got so rich?''

“Well, in this situation I'm very pleased you up-and-coming men of Picenum commission imagines,” Caesar said briskly. “Get Saturninus's likeness, and find an actor to wear it to good effect.”

“Uncle Quintus had an imago too, so I'll hire an actor to wear his. I can also get busts of both men.”

“In which case I have nothing further for you until dawn tomorrow, Labienus. Then I promise I'll work you remorselessly until the time comes to depart your tribunate.”

“Is it to be just you and me?”

“No, there will be four of us,” said Caesar, rising to escort Labienus to the front door. “What I plan needs you, me, Metellus Celer and my cousin Lucius Caesar.”

Which didn't help elucidate matters for Titus Labienus, who left the Domus Publica intrigued, baffled, and wondering how his curiosity and excitement were ever going to let him sleep.

Caesar had abandoned all idea of sleep. He returned to his study so immersed in thought that Eutychus, his steward, had to clear his throat several times in the doorway before his presence was noticed.

“Ah, excellent!” said the Pontifex Maximus. “I am at home to no one, Eutychus, even my mother. Is that understood?''

“Edepol!” cried the steward, plump hands going to plumper face. “Domine, Julia is most anxious to speak to you at once.”

“Tell her I know what she wants to speak to me about, and that I will be happy to see her for as long as she likes on the first day of the new tribunate of the plebs. But not a moment before.”

“Caesar, that's five days off! Truly, I don't think the poor little girl can wait five days!”

“If I say she must wait twenty years, Eutychus, then she must wait twenty years,” was Caesar's reply, coldly given. “Five days are not twenty years. All family and domestic matters must wait for five days. Julia has a grandmother, she is not dependent upon me. Is that absolutely clear?”

“Yes, domine,” whispered the steward, carefully shutting the door and creeping away down the passage to where Julia stood, face pale, hands locked in each other. “I'm sorry, Julia, he says he will see no one until the day the new tribunes of the plebs enter office.”

“Eutychus, he didn't!”

“He did. He refuses to see even the lady Aurelia.”

Who appeared at that moment from the direction of the Atrium Vestae, eyes hard, mouth thin. “Come,” she said to Julia, drawing her into the suite belonging to the mother of the Pontifex Maximus.

“You've heard,” said Aurelia, pushing Julia into a chair.

“I don't know quite what I've heard,” said Julia distractedly. “I asked to speak to tata, and he said no!”

That gave Aurelia pause. “Did he? How odd! It is not like Caesar to refuse to face facts or people.”

“Eutychus says he won't see anyone, even you, until five days from now, avia. He was quite specific, we must all wait until the day the new tribunes of the plebs enter office.”

Frowning, Aurelia began to pace the room; nor did she answer for some time. Eyes misted but tears held back resolutely, Julia watched her grandmother. The trouble is, she thought, that the three of us are so dauntingly different from each other!

Julia's mother had died when she was barely seven years old, which meant Aurelia had been mother as well as grandmother for most of her formative years. Not very approachable, perpetually busy, strict and unsparing, Aurelia had nonetheless given Julia what all children need most, an unshakable sense of security and belonging. Though she laughed but little, she had an acute wit which could pop out at the most disconcerting moments, and she thought no less of Julia because Julia loved to laugh. Every care had been lavished upon the child's upbringing, from guidance in such matters as tasteful dress to merciless training in good manners. Not to mention the unsentimental and unvarnished way Aurelia had taught Julia to accept her lot—and to accept it gracefully, with pride, without developing a sense of injury or resentment.

“There is no point in wishing for a different or a better world” was Aurelia's perpetual moral. “For whatever reason, this world is the only one we have, and we must live in it as happily and pleasantly as we can. We cannot fight Fortune or Fate, Julia.”

Caesar was not at all like his mother except in his steel, nor was Julia unaware of the friction which could scratch into being between them on sometimes scant provocation. But for his daughter he was the beginning and the end of that world Aurelia had disciplined her into accepting: not a god, but definitely a hero. To Julia, no one was as perfect as her father, as brilliant, as educated, as witty, as handsome, as ideal, as Roman. Oh, she was well acquainted with his failings (though he never visited them upon her), from that terrifying temper to what she thought of as his besetting sin, which was to play with people the way a cat played with a mouse in every sense—pitiless and cool, a smile of sheer pleasure on his face.

“There is a compelling reason for Caesar's withdrawal from us,” said Aurelia suddenly, ceasing to pace. “It is not that he is afraid to confront us, of that I am now absolutely sure. I can only assume that his motives have nothing to do with us.”

“Nor probably,” said Julia, enlightened, “anything to do with what is preying on our minds.”

Aurelia's beautiful smile flashed. “You grow more perceptive every day, Julia. Quite so, quite so.”

“Then, avia, until he has time to see us, I will have to talk to you. Is it true, what I heard in the Porticus Margaritaria?''

“About your father and Servilia?''

“Is that it? Oh!”

“What did you think it was, Julia?”

“I couldn't catch it all, because as soon as people saw me they stopped talking. What I gathered was that tata is involved in some great scandal with a woman, and that it all came out in the Senate today.”

Aurelia grunted. “It certainly did.” And without mincing matters she told Julia of the events in the temple of Concord.

“My father and Brutus's mother,” said Julia slowly. “What a muddle!” She laughed. “But how close he is, avia! All this time, and neither Brutus nor I has ever suspected. What on earth does he see in her?”