Caesar's Women (9 page)

His ancestry was mediocre, but by no means nonexistent, for his grandfather had been a member of the Senate and married into an impeccably Roman family, the Lucilii, and his father had been the famous Pompey Strabo, consul, victorious general of the Italian War, protector of the conservative elements in the Senate when Rome had been threatened by Marius and Cinna. But Marius and Cinna had won, and Pompey Strabo died of disease in camp outside the city. Blaming Pompey Strabo for the epidemic of enteric fever which had ravaged besieged Rome, the inhabitants of the Quirinal and Viminal had dragged his naked body through the streets tied behind an ass. To the young Pompey, an outrage he had never forgiven.

His chance had come when Sulla returned from exile and invaded the Italian Peninsula; only twenty-two years old, Pompey had enlisted three legions of his dead father's veterans and marched them to join Sulla in Campania. Well aware that Pompey had blackmailed him into a joint command, the crafty Sulla had used him for some of his more dubious enterprises as he maneuvered toward the dictatorship, then held it. Even after Sulla retired and died, he looked after this ambitious, cocksure sprig by introducing a law which allowed a man not in the Senate to be given command of Rome's armies. For Pompey had taken against the Senate, and refused to belong to it. There had followed the six years of Pompey's war against the rebel Quintus Sertorius in Spain, six years during which Pompey was obliged to reassess his military ability; he had gone to Spain utterly confident that he would beat Sertorius in no time flat, only to find himself pitted against one of the best generals in the history of Rome. In the end he simply wore Sertorius down. So the Pompey who returned to Italia was a much changed person: cunning, unscrupulous, bent on showing the Senate (which had kept him shockingly short of money and reinforcements in Spain) that he, who did not belong to it, could grind its face in the dust.

Pompey had proceeded to do so, with the connivance of two other men—Marcus Crassus, victor against Spartacus, and none other than Caesar. With the twenty-nine-year-old Caesar pulling their strings, Pompey and Crassus used the existence of their two armies to force the Senate into allowing them to stand for the consulship. No man had ever been elected to this most senior of all magistracies before he had been at the very least a member of the Senate, but Pompey became senior consul, Crassus his colleague. Thus this extraordinary, underaged man from Picenum attained his objective in the most unconstitutional way, though it had been Caesar, six years his junior, who showed him how to do it.

To compound the Senate's misery, the joint consulship of Pompey the Great and Marcus Crassus had been a triumph, a year of feasts, circuses, merriment and prosperity. And when it was over, both men declined to take provinces; instead, they retired into private life. The only significant law they had passed restored full powers to the tribunes of the plebs, whom Sulla had legislated into virtual impotence.

Now Pompey was in town to see next year's tribunes of the plebs elected, and that intrigued Caesar, who encountered him and his multitudes of clients at the corner of the Sacra Via and the Clivus Orbius, just entering the lower Forum.

“I didn't expect to see you in Rome,” said Caesar as they joined forces. He surveyed Pompey from head to foot openly, and grinned. “You're looking well, and very fit besides,” he said. “Keeping your figure into middle age, I see.”

“Middle age?” asked Pompey indignantly. “Just because I've already been consul doesn't mean I'm in my dotage! I won't turn thirty-eight until the end of September!”

“Whereas I,” said Caesar smugly, “have very recently turned thirty-two—at which age, Pompeius Magnus, you were not consul either.”

“Oh, you're pulling my leg,” said Pompey, calming down. “You're like Cicero, you'll joke your way onto the pyre.”

“That witty I wish I was. But you haven't answered my serious question, Magnus. What are you doing in Rome for no better reason than to see the tribunes of the plebs elected? I wouldn't have thought you'd need to employ tribunes of the plebs these days.”

“A man always needs a tribune of the plebs or two, Caesar.”

“Does he now? What are you up to, Magnus?”

The vivid blue eyes opened wide, and the glance Pompey gave Caesar was guileless. “I'm not up to anything.”

“Oh! Look!” cried Caesar, pointing at the sky. “Did you see it, Magnus?”

“See what?” asked Pompey, scanning the clouds.

“That bright pink pig flying like an eagle.”

“You don't believe me.”

“Correct, I don't believe you. Why not make a clean breast of it? I'm not your enemy, as you well know. In fact, I've been of enormous help to you in the past, and there's no reason why I oughtn't help your career along in the future. I'm not a bad orator, you have to admit that.”

“Well…” began Pompey, then fell silent.

“Well what?”

Pompey stopped, glanced behind at the crowd of clients who followed in their wake, shook his head, and detoured slightly to lean against one of the pretty marble columns which propped up the arcade outside the Basilica Aemilia's main chamber. Understanding that this was Pompey's way of avoiding eavesdroppers, Caesar ranged himself alongside the Great Man to listen while the horde of clients remained, eyes glistening and dying of curiosity, too far away to hear a word.

“What if one of them can read our lips?'' asked Caesar.

“You're joking again!”

“Not really. But we could always turn our backs on them and pretend we're pissing into Aemilia's front passage.”

That was too much; Pompey cried with laughter. However, when he sobered, noted Caesar, he did turn sufficiently away from their audience to present his profile to it, and moved his lips as furtively as a Forum vendor of pornography.

“As a matter of fact,” muttered Pompey, “I do have one good fellow among the candidates this year.”

“Aulus Gabinius?”

“How did you guess that?”

“He hails from Picenum, and he was one of your personal staff in Spain. Besides, he's a good friend of mine. We were junior military tribunes together at the siege of Mitylene.” Caesar pulled a wry face. “Gabinius didn't like Bibulus either, and the years haven't made him any fonder of the boni.”

“Gabinius is the best of good fellows,” said Pompey.

“And remarkably capable.”

“That too.”

“What's he going to legislate for you? Strip Lucullus's command off him and hand it to you on a golden salver?”

“No, no!” snapped Pompey. “It's too soon for that! First I need a short campaign to warm my muscles up.”

“The pirates,” said Caesar instantly.

“Right this time! The pirates it is.”

Caesar bent his right knee to tuck its leg against his column and looked as if nothing more was going on than a nice chat about old times. “I applaud you, Magnus. That's not only very clever, it's also very necessary.”

“You're not impressed with Metellus Little Goat in Crete?”

“The man's a pigheaded fool, and venal into the bargain. He wasn't brother-in-law to Verres for nothing—in more ways than one. With three good legions, he barely managed to win a land battle against twenty-four thousand motley and untrained Cretans who were led by sailors rather than soldiers.”

“Terrible,” said Pompey, shaking his head gloomily. “I ask you, Caesar, what's the point in fighting land battles when the pirates operate at sea? All very well to say that it's their land bases you need to eradicate, but unless you catch them at sea you can't destroy their livelihood— their ships. Modern naval warfare isn't like Troy, you can't burn their ships drawn up on the shore. While most of them are holding you off, the rest form skeleton crews and row the fleet elsewhere.”

“Yes,” said Caesar, nodding, “that's where everyone has made his mistake so far, from both Antonii to Vatia Isauricus. Burning villages and sacking towns. The task needs a man with a true talent for organization.”

“Exactly!” cried Pompey. “And I am that man, I promise you! If my self-inflicted inertia of the last couple of years has been good for nothing else, it has given me time to think. In Spain I just lowered my horns and charged blindly into the fray. What I ought to have done was work out how to win the war before I set one foot out of Mutina. I should have investigated everything beforehand, not merely how to blaze a new route across the Alps. Then I would have known how many legions I needed, how many horse troopers, how much money in my war chest—and I would have learned to understand my enemy. Quintus Sertorius was a brilliant tactician. But, Caesar, you don't win wars on tactics. Strategy is the thing, strategy!”

“So you've been doing your homework on the pirates, Magnus?”

“Indeed I have. Exhaustively. Every single aspect, from the largest to the smallest. Maps, spies, ships, money, men. I know how to do the job,” said Pompey, displaying a different kind of confidence than he used to own. Spain had been Kid Butcher's last campaign. In future he would be no butcher of any sort.

Thus Caesar watched the ten tribunes of the plebs elected with great interest. Aulus Gabinius was a certainty, and indeed came in at the top of the poll, which meant he would be president of the new College of Tribunes of the Plebs which would enter office on the tenth day of this coming December.

Because the tribunes of the plebs enacted most new laws and were traditionally the only legislators who liked to see change, every powerful faction in the Senate needed to “own” at least one tribune of the plebs. Including the boni, who used their men to block all new legislation; the most powerful weapon a tribune of the plebs had was the veto, which he could exercise against his fellows, against all other magistrates, and even against the Senate. That meant the tribunes of the plebs who belonged to the boni would not enact new laws, they would veto them. And of course the boni succeeded in having three men elected— Globulus, Trebellius and Otho. None was a brilliant man, but then a boni tribune of the plebs didn't need to be brilliant; he simply needed to be able to articulate the word “Veto!”

Pompey had two excellent men in the new College to pursue his ends. Aulus Gabinius might be relatively ancestorless and a poor man, but he would go far; Caesar had known that as far back as the siege of Mitylene. Naturally Pompey's other man was also from Picenum: a Gaius Cornelius who was not a patrician any more than he was a member of the venerable gens Cornelia. Perhaps he was not as tied to Pompey as Gabinius was, but he certainly would not veto any plebiscite Gabinius might propose to the Plebs.

Interesting though all of this was for Caesar, the one man elected who worried him the most was tied neither to the boni nor to Pompey the Great. He was Gaius Papirius Carbo, a radical sort of man with his own axe to grind. For some time he had been heard to say in the Forum that he intended to prosecute Caesar's uncle, Marcus Aurelius Cotta, for the illegal retention of booty taken from Heracleia during Marcus Cotta's campaign in Bithynia against Rome's old enemy, King Mithridates. Marcus Cotta had returned in triumph toward the end of that famous joint consulship of Pompey and Crassus, and no one had questioned his integrity then. Now this Carbo was busy muddying old waters, and as a tribune of the fully restored Plebs he would be empowered to try Marcus Cotta in a specially convened Plebeian Assembly court. Because Caesar loved and admired his Uncle Marcus, Carbo's election was a big worry.

The last ballot tile counted, the ten victorious men stood on the rostra acknowledging the cheers; Caesar turned away and plodded home. He was tired: too little sleep, too much Servilia. They had not met again until the day after the elections in the Popular Assembly some six days earlier, and, as predicted, both had something to celebrate. Caesar was curator of the Via Appia (“What on earth possessed you to take that job on?rdquo; Appius Claudius Pulcher had demanded, astonished. “It's my ancestor's road, but that big a fool I am not! You'll be poor in a year”), and Servilia's so-called full brother Caepio had been elected one of twenty quaestors. The lots had given him duty inside Rome as urban quaestor, which meant he didn't have to serve in a province.

So they had met in a mood of satisfaction as well as mutual anticipation, and had found their day in bed together so immensely pleasurable that neither of them was willing to postpone another. They met every day for a feast of lips, tongues, skin, and every day found something new to do, something fresh to explore. Until today, when more elections rendered a meeting impossible. Nor would they find time again until perhaps the Kalends of September, for Silanus was taking Servilia, Brutus and the girls to the seaside resort of Cumae, where he had a villa. Silanus too had been successful in this year's elections; he was to be urban praetor next year. That very important magistracy would raise Servilia's public profile too; among other things, she was hoping that her house would be chosen for the women-only rites of Bona Dea, when Rome's most illustrious matrons put the Good Goddess to sleep for the winter.

And it was time too that he told Julia that he had arranged her marriage. The formal ceremony of betrothal would not take place until after Brutus donned his toga virilis in December, but the legalities were done, Julia's fate was sealed. Why he had put the task off when such was never his custom niggled at the back of his mind; he had asked Aurelia to break the news, but Aurelia, a stickler for domestic protocol, had refused. He was the paterfamilias; he must do it. Women! Why did there have to be so many women in his life, and why did he think the future held even more of them? Not to mention more trouble because of them?

Julia had been playing with Matia, the daughter of his dear friend Gaius Matius, who occupied the other ground-floor apartment in Aurelia's insula. However, she came home sufficiently ahead of the dinner hour for him to find no further excuse for not telling her, dancing across the light-well garden like a young nymph, draperies floating around her immature figure in a mist of lavender blue. Aurelia always dressed her in soft pale blues or greens, and she was right to do so. How beautiful she will be, he thought, watching her; perhaps not the equal of Aurelia for Grecian purity of bones, but she had that magical Julia quality which Aurelia, so pragmatic and sensible and Cottan, did not. They always said of the Julias that they made their men happy, and he could believe that every time he saw his daughter. The adage was not infallible; his younger aunt (who had been Sulla's first wife) had committed suicide after a long affair with the wine flagon, and his cousin Julia Antonia was on her second ghastly husband amid increasing bouts of depression and hysterics. Yet Rome continued to say it, and he was not about to contradict it; every nobleman with sufficient wealth not to need a rich bride thought first of a Julia.