Caesar's Women (83 page)

“Certainly I will.” Caesar turned in his chair. “Burgundus, it's time you saw Cardixa and your sons. Go to the Domus Publica and stay there. Give my mother two messages: that I'll be home tomorrow evening, and pack up my toga Candida and send it to me here tonight. At dawn tomorrow I'll cross the pomerium into Rome.”

“Caesar, it's too great a sacrifice!” moaned Crassus, on the verge of tears.

“Nonsense! What sacrifice? I'll have more triumphs—I do not intend to go to a tame province after my consulship, I assure you. You ought to know me by now, Marcus. If I went ahead and triumphed on the Ides, what sort of show would it be? Anything but worthy of me. There's some pretty stiff competition in Magnus, who took two days to parade. No, when I triumph, it will be at my leisure and without parallel. I am Gaius Julius Caesar, not Metellus Little Goat Creticus. Rome must talk about my parade for generations. I will never consent to being an also-ran.”

“I don't believe I'm hearing this! To give up your triumph? Gaius, Gaius, that's the height of a man's glory! Look at me! All my life a triumph has eluded me, and it's the one thing I want before I die!”

“Then we'll have to make sure you triumph. Cheer up, Marcus, do. Sit down and drink a beaker of Minicius's best wine, then let's have some supper. Rowing twelve hours a day for twelve days gives a man a huge appetite, I've found.”

“I could kill Cato!” said Crassus as he seated himself.

“As I keep saying to largely deaf ears, death is no fitting punishment, even for Cato. Death cheats one of the best victory, which is to spare one's enemies the sight of defeat. I love to pit myself against the Catos and Bibuluses. They'll never win.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Simple,” said Caesar, surprised. “They don't want to win as badly as I do.”

The rage was gone, but Crassus had not yet managed to put on his normal impassive mien when he said, a little uncomfortably, “I have something less important to tell you, but perhaps you'll not see it in that light.”

“Oh?”

Whereupon Crassus actually quailed. “Later will do. Here we've been talking as if your friend over there doesn't exist.”

“Ye gods! Balbus, forgive me!” cried Caesar. “Come here and meet a plutocrat more bloated by far than you. Lucius Cornelius Balbus Major, this is Marcus Licinius Crassus.”

And that, thought Caesar, is a handshake between equals if ever I saw one. I don't know what pleasure they get out of making money, but between them they could probably buy and sell the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. And how delighted they are finally to meet. Not so odd that they haven't met before. Crassus's days in Spain were finished while Balbus was still unknown there. And this is Balbus's first trip to Rome, where I very much hope he will take up residence.

The three men made a merry meal, for it seemed that once the imperturbable one was catapulted out of his imperturbability he found it difficult to regain that state of mind. Not until the dishes were removed and the lamps trimmed did Crassus refer again to his other news for Caesar.

“I have to tell you, Gaius, but you won't like it,” he said.

“Like what?''

“Nepos made a short speech in the House about your petition.”

“Not in my favor.”

“Anything but.” Crassus stopped.

“What did he say? Come, Marcus, it can't be that bad!”

“Worse.”

“Then you'd best tell me.”

“He said he wouldn't grant any kind of favor to a notorious homosexual like you. That was the polite bit. You know Nepos, very salty indeed. The rest was extremely graphic and concerned King Nicomedes of Bithynia.” Crassus stopped again, but when Caesar said nothing he hurried on. “Afranius ordered the scribes to strike the statement from the records, and forbade Nepos to attend any more meetings of the Senate if he's holding the fasces. He handled the situation quite well, really.”

Of course Caesar wasn't staring at either Crassus or Balbus, and the light was dim. He didn't move, there was no look on his face to cause alarm. Yet why did the temperature of the room seem suddenly so much colder?

The pause wasn't long enough to qualify as a silence before Caesar said, voice normal, “That was foolish of Nepos. He'd do the boni more good in the House than barred from it. He must be in on all the boni councils— and very thick with Bibulus. I've been waiting years for that canard to be remembered. Bibulus made much of it almost half a lifetime ago, then it seemed to die.” His smile flashed, but there was no amusement in it. “My friends, I predict this is going to be a very dirty election.”

“It didn't sit well with the House,” said Crassus. “You could have heard a moth land on a toga. Nepos must have realized he'd harmed himself more than he'd managed to harm you, because when Afranius pronounced sentence he said something equally rude to Afranius—the old 'son of Aulus' jibe—and walked out.”

“I'm disappointed in Nepos, I thought he had more finesse.”

“Or perhaps he's cherishing a tendency that way himself,” rumbled Crassus. “It was very funny at the time, but thinking about how he used to carry on during meetings of the Plebs when he was a tribune, he always made much of fluttering his eyelashes and blowing kisses at hulking lumps like Thermus.”

“All of which,” said Caesar, rising to his feet as Crassus did, “is beside the point. Nepos has eroded my dignitas. That means I'll have to erode Nepos.”

When he returned to the parlor after ushering Crassus out, he found Balbus wiping away tears.

“Grief over something as trite as Nepos?'' he asked.

“I know your pride, so I know how it hurts.”

“Yes,” said Caesar, sighing, “it does hurt, Balbus, though I'd not admit that to any Roman of my own class. One thing were it true, but it isn't. And in Rome an accusation of homosexuality is very damaging. Dignitas suffers.”

“I think Rome is wrong,” Balbus said gently.

“So do I, as a matter of fact. But it's irrelevant. What matters is the mos maiorum, our centuries of traditions and customs. For whatever reason—and I do not know the reason—homosexuality is not approved of. Never was approved of. Why do you think there was such resistance in Rome to things Greek two hundred years ago?”

“But it must be here in Rome too.”

'' Wagonloads of it, Balbus, and not only among those who don't belong to the Senate. It was said of Scipio Africanus by Cato the Censor, and it was certainly true of Sulla. Never mind, never mind! If life were easy, how bored we'd be!”

Senior consul and electoral officer, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer had set up his booth in the lower Forum fairly close to the urban praetor's tribunal, and there presided to consider the many applications put to him by those desirous of standing for election as praetor or consul. His duties also embraced the other two sets of elections, held later in Quinctilis, which had provided the excuse for Cato to bring the closing date for curule men forward. That way, said Cato, the electoral officer could devote the proper care and consideration to his curule candidates before he needed to cope with the People and the Plebs.

The man putting himself up as a candidate for any magistracy donned the toga Candida, a garment of blinding whiteness achieved by long days of bleaching in the sun and a final rubbing with chalk. In his train went all his clients and friends, the more important the better. Those of poor memory employed a nomenclator, whose duty it was to whisper the name of every man he met in the candidate's permanently cocked ear—more awkward these days, as nomenclatores had been officially outlawed.

The clever candidate mustered his last ounce of patience and prepared himself to listen to anyone and everyone who wanted to talk to him, no matter how long-winded or prolix. If he happened to find a mother and babe, he smiled at the mother and kissed the babe— no votes there, of course, but she might well persuade her husband to vote for him. He laughed loudly when it was called for, he wept copiously at tales of woe, he looked grave and serious when grave and serious subjects were broached; but he never looked bored or uninterested, and he made sure he didn't say the wrong thing to the wrong person. He shook so many hands that he had to soak his own right hand in cold water every evening. He persuaded his friends famous for their oratory to mount the rostra or Castor's platform and address the Forum frequenters about what a superb fellow he was, what a pillar of the establishment he was, how many generations of imagines crowded out his atrium—and what a dismal, reprehensible, dishonest, corrupt, unpatriotic, vile, sodomizing, faeces-eating, child-molesting, incestuous, bestial, depraved, fish-fancying, idle, gluttonous, alcoholic lot his opponents were. He promised everything to everybody, no matter how impossible it would prove to deliver those promises.

Many were the laws Rome had put on her tablets to constrain him: he wasn't supposed to hire that necessary nomenclator, he couldn't give gladiatorial shows, he was forbidden to entertain all save his most intimate friends and relatives, he couldn't hand out presents—and he certainly couldn't pay out bribe money. So what had happened was that some of the prohibited items (the nomenclator, for example) were winked at, and the ones like gladiatorial shows and banquets had gone by the board, the money they would have cost channeled instead into cash bribery.

The interesting thing about a Roman was that if he consented to be bought, he stayed bought. There was honor in it, and a man known to have reneged on a bribe was shunned. Hardly anyone below the level of a knight of the Eighteen was impervious to bribes, which provided a handy little sum of much-needed cash. The chief beneficiaries were men of the First Class below the level of the Eighteen senior Centuries, and to a lesser extent the men of the Second Class. The Third, Fourth and Fifth Classes were not worth the expenditure, as they were rarely called upon to vote in the centuriate elections. A man who carried every Century had no real need to bribe the Second Class, so heavily weighted were the Centuries in favor of First Class voters—who were also the richest, as the Centuries were classified on the basis of financial means.

Tribal elections were more difficult to influence by bribes, but not impossible. No candidate for aedile or tribune of the plebs bothered bribing the members of the four vast urban tribes; he concentrated instead on rural tribes having few members inside Rome at polling time.

How much a man offered was up to him. It might be a thousand sesterces to each of two thousand voters, or fifty thousand to each of forty voters owning sufficient clout to influence hordes of other men. Clients were obliged to vote for their patrons, but a gift of cash helped there too. A total outlay of two million sesterces was the sum an extremely rich man might contemplate spending, if that; some elections were equally famous for stingy bribers, and spoken of scathingly by those who expected to be bribed.

The bribes were mostly distributed before polling day, though most candidates who had outlaid vast sums to bribe made sure they had scrutineers as close to the baskets as possible to check what a voter had inscribed on his little tablet. And the danger lay in bribing the wrong person; Cato was famous for rounding up a good number of men to take bribes and then using them to testify in the Bribery Court. This was not dishonorable, as the bribed man would indeed vote the proper way, but then feel no pangs about giving evidence at a prosecution because he had been recruited to do just that before he took the money. For which reason most of the men prosecuted for electoral bribery had succeeded in being elected, from Publius Sulla and Autronius to Murena. Court time was not prone to be wasted on failures.

Normally there were anything up to ten consular candidates, with six or seven the usual number, and at least half of them from the Famous Families. The electorate usually had a fairly rich and varied choice. But in the year Caesar stood for consul Fortune favored Bibulus and the boni. Most of the praetors in Caesar's year had been prorogued in their provinces, so were not in Rome to contest an election so heavily weighted in one man's direction: every political Roman knew Caesar couldn't lose. And that fact reduced the chances of everyone else. Only one man other than Caesar could become consul, and he would be the junior consul at that. Caesar was certain to come in at the top of the poll, which would make him senior consul. Therefore many men aspiring to be consul decided not to run in Caesar's year. A defeat was damaging.

In consequence, the boni decided to stake everything on one man, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, and went round persuading all the potential candidates of old or noble family not to run against Bibulus. He had to be the junior consul! As junior consul, he would be in a position to make Caesar's life as senior consul a very difficult and frustrating one.

The result was that there were only four candidates, only two of whom came from noble families—Caesar and Bibulus. The two other candidates were both New Men, and of those two, only one stood any chance at all—Lucius Lucceius, a famous court advocate and loyal adherent of Pompey's. Naturally Lucceius would bribe, having Pompey's wealth behind him as well as a considerable fortune of his own. The amount of money tendered as bribes gave Lucceius a chance, but it was an outside one only. Bibulus was a Calpurnius, he had the boni behind him, and he too would undoubtedly bribe.

Caesar crossed the pomerium into Rome as dawn was breaking.

Accompanied only by Balbus, he walked down the Via Lata to the Hill of the Bankers, entered the city through the Fontinalis Gate, and came down to the Forum with the Lautumiae prison on his right hand and the Basilica Porcia to his left. He caught Metellus Celer neatly, for the curule electoral officer was seated at his booth and staring raptly at an eagle perched on Castor's roof, oblivious to any traffic from the direction of the prison.

“An interesting omen,” Caesar said.

Celer gasped, choked, swept all his papers into a heap and bounded to his feet. “You're too late, I'm closed!” he cried.

“Come now, Celer, that unconstitutional you dare not be. I am here to declare my candidacy for the consulship by the Nones of June. Today you are open, the Senate has decreed it. When I arrived before you, you were seated for business. You will therefore accept my candidacy. No impediment exists.”