Caesar's Women (80 page)

So with Burgundus, some valued servants and scribes, Fabius and eleven other lictors clad in crimson tunics and bearing the axes in their fasces, and Prince Masintha muffled inside a litter, Gaius Julius Caesar sailed from Ostia in a hired vessel large enough to accommodate the baggage, mules and horses his entourage made necessary. But this time he would encounter no pirates. Pompey the Great had swept them from the seas.

Pompey the Great… Caesar leaned on the stern rail between the two huge rudder oars and watched the coast of Italy slip below the horizon, his spirit soaring, his mind gradually letting the homeland and its people go. Pompey the Great. The time spent with him had proven useful and fruitful; liking for the man grew with the years, no doubt of that. Or was it Pompey had grown?

No, Caesar, don't be grudging. He doesn't deserve to be grudged anything. No matter how galling it might be to see a Pompey conquer far and wide, the fact remains that a Pompey has conquered far and wide. Give the man his due, admit that maybe it's you has done the growing. But the trouble with growing is that one leaves the rest behind, just like the coast of Italia. So few people grow. Their roots reach bedrock and they stay as they are, content. But under me lies nothing I cannot thrust aside, and over me is infinity. The long wait is over. I go to Spain to command an army legally at last; I will put my hands on a living machine which in the right hands—my hands— cannot be stopped, warped, dislocated, ground down. I have yearned for a supreme military command since I sat, a boy, at old Gaius Marius's knee and listened spellbound to a master of warfare telling stories. But until this moment I did not understand how passionately, how fiercely I have lusted for that military command.

I will lay my hands on a Roman army and conquer the world, for I believe in Rome, I believe in our Gods. And I believe in myself. I am the soul of a Roman army. I cannot be stopped, warped, dislocated, ground down.

To Gaius Julius Caesar, proconsul in Further Spain, from Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, triumphator; written in Rome on the Ides of May in the consulship of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer and Lucius Afranius:

Well, Caesar, I am consigning this to the Gods and the winds in the hope that the first can endow the second with enough speed to give you a chance. Others are writing, but I am the only one prepared to outlay the money to hire the fastest ship I can find just to carry one letter.

The boni are in the saddle and our city is disintegrating. I could live with a boni-dominated government if it actually did anything, but a boni government is dedicated to only one end—do absolutely nothing, and block any other faction when it tries to alter that.

They managed to delay my triumph until the last two days in September, and they did it smoothly too. Announced that I'd done so much for Rome I deserved to triumph on my birthday! So I kicked my heels on the Campus Martius for nine months. Though the reason for their attitude baffles me, I gather their chief objection to me is that I've had so many special commands in my lifetime that I am conclusively proven to be a danger to the State. According to them, I'm aiming at being the King of Rome. That is total rubbish! However, the fact that they know it's total rubbish doesn't stop their saying it.

I scratch my head, Caesar; I can't work them out. If ever there was a pillar of the establishment, it's surely Marcus Crassus. I mean, I understand that they call me a Picentine upstart, the would-be King of Rome and all the rest of it, but Marcus Crassus? Why make him their target? He's no danger to the boni; he's next door to being one himself. Terrifically well born, terrifically rich, and certainly no demagogue. Crassus is harmless! And I say that as a man who doesn't like him, never did like him, never will like him. Sharing a consulship with him was like lying down in the same bed as Hannibal, Jugurtha and Mithridates. All he did was work to destroy my image in the people's eyes. Despite which, Marcus Crassus is no threat to the State.

So what have the boni done to Marcus Crassus to provoke me, of all men, into sticking up for him? They've created a real crisis, that's what. It started when the censors let out the contracts to farm the taxes of my four eastern provinces. Oh, a lot of the blame rests with the publicani themselves! They looked at how much loot I'd brought back from the East, totted up the figures, and decided the East was better than a gold mine. So they submitted tenders for these contracts that were completely unrealistic. Promised the Treasury untold millions, and thought they could so do as well as make a fat profit for themselves. Naturally the censors accepted the highest tenders. It's their duty to do so. But it wasn't very long before Atticus and the other publicani plutocrats realized that the sums they had undertaken to pay the Treasury were not feasible. My four eastern provinces couldn't possibly pay what they were being asked to pay, no matter how hard the publicani squeezed.

Anyway, Atticus, Oppius and some others went to Marcus Crassus and asked him to petition the Senate to cancel the tax-gathering contracts for the East, then instruct the censors to let out new contracts calling for two thirds of the sums originally agreed on. Well, Crassus petitioned. Never so much as dreaming that the boni would—or could!—persuade the whole House to say a resounding NO. But that is what happened. The Senate said a resounding NO.

At that stage I confess I chuckled; it was such a pleasure to see Marcus Crassus flattened—oh, he was flattened! All that hay wrapped round both horns, yet Crassus the ox stood there stunned and defeated. But then I saw what a stupid move it was on the part of the boni, and stopped chuckling. It seems they have decided it's high time the knights were shown for once and for all that the Senate is supreme, that the Senate runs Rome and the knights can't dictate to it. Well, the Senate may flatter itself that it runs Rome, but you and I know it doesn't. If Rome's businessmen are not allowed to do profitable business, then Rome is finished.

After the House said NO to Marcus Crassus, the publicani retaliated by refusing to pay the Treasury one sestertius. Oh, what a storm that caused! I daresay the knights hoped this would force the Senate to instruct the censors to cancel the contracts because they weren't being honored—and of course when new tenders were called, the sums tendered would have been much lower. Only the boni control the House, and the House in consequence won't cancel the contracts. It's an impasse.

The blow to Crassus's standing was colossal, both in the House and among the knights. He's been their spokesman for so long and with such success that it never occurred to him or them that he wouldn't get what he asked for. Particularly as his request to reduce the Asian contracts was so reasonable.

And who do you think the boni had managed to recruit as their chief spokesman in the House? Why, none other than my ex-brother-in-law, Metellus Celer! For years Celer and his little brother Nepos were my loyalest adherents. But ever since I divorced Mucia they've been my worst enemies. Honestly, Caesar, you'd think that Mucia was the only wife ever divorced in the history of Rome! I had every right to divorce her, didn't I? She was an adultress, spent the time I was away in conducting an affair with Titus Labienus, my own client! What was I supposed to do? Close my eyes and pretend I never heard about it because Mucia's mother is also the mother of Celer and Nepos? Well, I wasn't about to close my eyes. But the way Celer and Nepos carried on, you'd think it was I committed the adultery! Their precious sister divorced? Ye gods, what an intolerable insult!

They've been making trouble for me ever since. I don't know how they did it, but they've even managed to find another husband for Mucia of sufficiently exalted birth and rank to infer that she was the wronged party! My quaestor Scaurus, if you please. She's old enough to be his mother. Well, almost. He's thirty-four and she's forty-seven. What a match. Though I do think they suit for intelligence, as neither of them has any. I understand Labienus wanted to marry her, but the Brothers Metelli took terrible exception to that idea. So it's Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, who embroiled me in all that business with the Jews. Rumor has it that Mucia is pregnant, another slur on me. I hope she dies having the brat.

I have a theory as to why the boni have suddenly become so unbelievably obtuse and destructive. The death of Catulus. Once he was gone, the senatorial rump fell totally into the clutches of Bibulus and Cato. Fancy turning up your toes and dying because you weren't asked to speak first or second among the consulars during a House debate! But that's what Catulus did. Leaving his faction to Bibulus and Cato, who don't have his saving grace, namely the ability to distinguish between mere negativity and political suicide.

I also have a theory as to why Bibulus and Cato turned on Crassus. Catulus left a priesthood vacant, and Cato's brother-in-law Lucius Ahenobarbus wanted it. But Crassus nipped in first and got it for his son, Marcus. A mortal insult to Ahenobarbus, as there isn't a Domitius Ahenobarbus in the College. How picayune. I, by the way, am now an augur. I'm tickled, I can tell you. But I didn't endear myself to Cato, Bibulus or Ahenobarbus in being elected an augur! It was the second election in a very short space of time that Ahenobarbus lost.

My own affairs—land for my veterans, ratification of my settlements in the East, and so forth—have foundered. It cost me millions to bribe Afranius into the junior consul's chair— money wasted, I can tell you! Afranius has turned out to be a better soldier than he is a politician, but Cicero goes around telling everyone he's a better dancer than he is a politician. This because Afranius got disgustingly drunk at his inauguration banquet on New Year's Day and pirouetted all over Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Embarrassing for me, as everyone knows I bought him the job in an attempt to control Metellus Celer, who as senior consul has walked over Afranius as if he didn't exist.

When Afranius did manage to have my affairs discussed in the House during February, Celer, Cato and Bibulus among them ruined it. They dragged Lucullus out of his retirement, almost imbecilic with mushrooms and the like, and used him to stall me. Oh, I could kill the lot of them! Every day I wish I hadn't done the right thing and disbanded my army, not to mention paid my troops their share of the spoils while we were still in Asia. Of course that's being criticized too. Cato said it wasn't my place to dole out the spoils minus the consent of the Treasury—that is, the Senate—and when I reminded him that I had an imperium maius empowering me to do just about anything I wanted in Rome's name, he said that my imperium maius had been obtained illegally in the Plebeian Assembly, that it hadn't been bestowed on me by the People. Arrant nonsense, but the House applauded him!

Then in March the discussion of my affairs ended. Cato put forward a division in the Senate proposing that no business be discussed until the tax-farming problem is solved—and the idiots voted for it! Knowing that Cato was simultaneously blocking any solution to the tax-farming problem! The result is that nothing whatsoever has been discussed. The moment Crassus brings up the tax-farming problem, Cato filibusters. And the Conscript Fathers think Cato is terrific!

I can't work it out, Caesar, I just can't. What has Cato ever done? He's only thirty-four years old, he's held no senior magistracy, he's a shocking speaker and a prig of the first order. But somewhere along the way the Conscript Fathers have become convinced that he's utterly incorruptible, and that makes him wonderful. Why can't they see that incorruptibility is disastrous when it's allied to a mentality like Cato's? As for Bibulus—well, he's incorruptible too, they say. And both never cease to prate that they're the avowed enemies of all men who stand one fraction of an inch higher than their peers. A laudable objective. Except that some men simply can't help standing higher than their peers because they're better. If we were all meant to be equal, we'd all be created exactly the same. We're not, and that's a fact there's no getting around.

Whichever way I turn, Caesar, I'm howled at by a pack of enemies. Don't the fools understand that my army might be disbanded, yet its members are right here in Italia? All I have to do is stamp my foot for soldiers to spring up eager to do my bidding. I can tell you, I am sorely tempted. I conquered the East, I just about doubled Rome's income, and I did everything the right way. So why are they against me?

Anyway, enough of me and my troubles. This letter is really to warn you that you're in for trouble too.

It all started with those terrific reports you keep sending to the Senate—a perfect campaign against the Lusitani and the Callaici; heaps of gold and treasures; proper disposition of the province's resources and functions; the mines producing more silver, lead and iron than in half a century; relief for the towns Metellus Pius punished—the boni must have spent a fortune sending spies to Further Spain to catch you out. But they haven't caught you out, and rumor says they never will. Not a whiff of extortion or peculation anywhere near your vicinity, buckets of letters from grateful residents of Further Spain, the guilty punished and the innocent exonerated. Old Mamercus Princeps Senatus—he's failing badly, by the way—got up in the House and said that your conduct as governor had provided a manual of gubernatorial conduct, and the boni couldn't refute a word of what he said. How that hurt!

All of Rome knows you'll be senior consul. Even if we leave aside the fact that you always come in at the top of the polls, your popularity is growing in leaps and bounds. Marcus Crassus is going around telling every knight in the Eighteen that when you're senior consul the tax-farming business will soon be sotted out. From which I gather that he knows he's going to need your services—and knows he'll get them.

Well, I need your services too, Caesar. Far more than Marcus Crassus does! All he has at stake is his damaged clout, whereas I need land for my veterans and treaties ratifying my settlements in the East.

There's a good chance of course that you're already on your way home—Cicero certainly seems to think so—but my bones tell me you're like me, prone to stay until the very last moment so that every thread is woven into place and every tangle combed away.

The boni have just struck, Caesar, and extremely cunning they have been. All candidates for the consular elections have to declare themselves by the Nones of June at the latest, even though the elections will not take place until the usual five days before the Ides of Quinctilis. Egged on by Celer, Gaius Piso, Bibulus (a candidate himself, of course, but safely inside Rome because he's like Cicero, never wants to govern a province) and the rest of the boni, Cato succeeded in passing a consultum putting the closing date at the Nones of June. Over five nundinae before the elections instead of the three nundinae custom and tradition have laid down.

Someone must have whispered that you travel like the wind, because they then produced another ploy to frustrate you—this one in case you arrive in Rome before the Nones of June. Celer asked the House to set a date for your triumph. Very affable he was, full of praise for the splendid job you've done as governor. After which he suggested that the date of your triumph be set as the Ides of June! Everyone thought that a splendid idea, so the motion was carried. Yes, you are to triumph eight days later than the closing of the consular candidates' booth. Wonderful, eh?

So, Caesar, if you do manage to reach Rome before the Nones of June, you will have to petition the Senate to run for consul in absentia. You can't cross the pomerium into the city to lodge your candidacy in person without giving up your imperium and thereby your right to triumph. I add that Celer was very careful to point out to the House that Cicero had passed a law forbidding consular candidates to stand in absentia. A gentle reminder I took to mean that the boni intend to oppose your petition to run in absentia. They have got you by the balls, just as you said—with perfect truth!—they've got me. I will be working to persuade our senatorial sheep—why do they let themselves be led by a mere handful of men who are not even anything special?—to have you allowed to stand in absentia. So will Crassus, Mamercus Princeps Senatus and many others, I know.