The First Man in Rome (108 page)

Of those who fled up the Vale of the Salassi and got away to Gaul-across-the-Alps through the Lugdunum Pass, few succeeded in running the gauntlet of the Celts. The Allobroges assailed them with fierce delight, as did the Sequani. Perhaps two thousand Cimbri finally rejoined the six thousand warriors left among the Atuatuci; and there where the Mosa received the Sabis, the last remnants of a great migration settled down for good, and in time came to call themselves Atuatuci. Only the vast accumulation of treasure reminded them that they had once been a German host more than three quarters of a million strong; but the treasure was not theirs to spend, only theirs to guard against the coming of other Romans.

Catulus Caesar came to the council Marius called after Vercellae girt for war of a different kind, and found a mellow, affable Marius only too happy to grant his every request.

"My dear fellow, of
course
you shall have a triumph!" said Marius, clapping him on the back.

"My dear fellow, take
two thirds of
the spoils! After all, my men have the spoils from Aquae Sextiae as well, and I donated the proceeds from sale of slaves to them, so they'll come out of the campaign far ahead of your fellows, I imagine—unless you too intend to donate the slave money—? No?
Perfectly
understandable, my dear Quintus Lutatius!" said Marius, pushing a plate of food into his hands.

"My dear fellow, I wouldn't
dream
of taking all the credit! Why should I, when your soldiers fought with equal skill and enthusiasm?" said Marius, taking the plate of food off him and replacing it with a brimming goblet of wine. "Sit down, sit down! A great day! I can sleep in peace."

"Boiorix is dead," said Sulla, smiling contentedly. "It is all over, Gaius Marius. Definitely, definitely over."

"And your woman and child, Quintus Sertorius?" asked Marius.

"Safe."

"Good. Good!" Marius looked around the crowded general's tent, even his eyebrows seeming to beam. "And who wants to bring the news of Vercellae to Rome?" he asked.

Two dozen voices answered; several dozen more said nothing but put eager expressions on their faces. Marius looked them over one by one, and finally let his eyes rest where he had already made up his mind.

"Gaius Julius," he said, "you shall have the job. You are my quaestor, but I have even better grounds. In you is vested a part of all of us in senior command. We must stay in Italian Gaul until everything is properly tidied up. But you are the brother-in-law of Lucius Cornelius and myself; our children have your family's blood in their veins. And Quintus Lutatius here is a Julius Caesar by birth. So it's fitting that a Julius Caesar should bring the news of victory to Rome." He turned to look at everyone present. "Is that fair?" he asked.

"It's fair," everyone said in chorus.

2

'' What a lovely way to enter the Senate,'' said Aurelia, unable to take her eyes off Caesar's In face; how brown he was, how very much a man! "I'm glad now that the censors didn't admit you before you left to serve Gaius Marius."

He was still elated, still half-living those glorious moments when, after handing Marius's letter to the Leader of the House, he had actually seen with his own eyes the Senate of Rome receive the news that the threat of the Germans was no more. The applause, the cheers, the senators who danced and the senators who wept, the sight of Gaius Servilius Glaucia, head of the College of Tribunes of the Plebs, running with toga hugged about himself from the Curia to the Comitia to scream the news from the rostra, august presences like Metellus Numidicus and Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus solemnly shaking each other's hands and trying to be more dignified than excited.

"It's an omen," he said to his wife, eyes dwelling upon her in besotted admiration. How beautiful she was, how unmarked by her more than four years of living in the Subura and acting as the landlady of an insula.

"You'll be consul one day," she said confidently. "Whenever they think of our victory at Vercellae, they'll remember that it was you who brought the news to Rome."

"No," he said fairly, "they'll think of Gaius Marius."

"And you," the doting wife insisted. "Yours was the face they saw; you were his quaestor.''

He sighed, snuggled down on the dining couch, and patted the vacant space next to himself. "Come here," he said.

Sitting correctly on her straight chair, Aurelia looked toward the door of the
triclinium.
"Gaius Julius!" she said.

"We're alone, my darling wife, and I'm not such a stickler that on my first evening home I like being separated from you by the width of a table." Another pat for the couch. "Here, woman! Immediately!"

When the young couple had first made their home in the Subura, their arrival was sufficiently remarkable to have made them the object of ongoing curiosity to everyone who lived within several streets of Aurelia's insula. Aristocratic landlords were common enough, but not resident aristocratic landlords; Gaius Julius Caesar and his wife were rare birds, and as such came in for more than the usual amount of attention. In spite of its mammoth size, the Subura was really a teeming, gossipy village which liked nothing better than a new sensation.

All the predictions were that the young couple would never last; the Subura, that great leveler of pretensions and pride, would soon show them up for what they were, Palatine people. What hysterical seizures milady was going to throw! What sniffy tantrums milord was going to throw! Ha, ha. So said the hard cases of the Subura. And waited gleefully.

None of it ever happened. Milady, they discovered, was not above doing her own marketing—nor above being explicitly obnoxious to any leering fellow who tried to proposition her—nor frightened when a group of local women surrounded her as she crossed the Vicus Patricii and tried to tell her to go back to the Palatine where she belonged. As for milord, he was—and there could be no other word applied to him—a true gentleman: unruffled, polite, interested in everything said to him by every element in the community, helpful about wills and leases and contracts.

Very soon they were respected. Eventually they were loved. Many of their qualities were novelties, like their tendency to mind their own business and not inquire into everyone else's business; they never complained or criticized, and they never held themselves better than those around them. Speak to them, and you could be sure of a ready and genuine smile, true interest, courtesy, and sensitivity. Though at first this was deemed an act, in the end the residents of their part of the Subura came to understand that Caesar and Aurelia were exactly what they seemed to be.

For Aurelia this local acceptance was more important by far than for Caesar; she was the one engaged in Suburan affairs, and she was the landlady of a populous apartment building. It hadn't been easy in the beginning, though it wasn't until after Caesar left Rome that she fully understood why. At first she deemed her difficulties the result of un-familiarity and lack of experience. The agents who had sold the insula offered to act on her behalf when it came to collecting the rents and dealing with the tenants, and Caesar had thought this a good idea, so the obedient new wife agreed. Nor did Caesar grasp the unconscious message she relayed to him a month after they had moved in, when she told him all about their tenants.

"It's the variety I find hardest to believe," she said, face animated, her customary composure not so noticeable.

He humored her by asking, "Variety?"

"Well, the two top floors are mostly freedmen—Greek in the main—who all seem to eke out a living running after their ex-masters, and have terrific worry lines on their faces, and more boyfriends than wives. On the main floors there are all sorts—a fuller and his family—Roman; a potter and his family—Roman; a shepherd and his family—did you realize there were shepherds in
Rome
?
He looks after the sheep out on the Campus Lanatarius while they wait to be sold for slaughter, isn't that fascinating? I asked him why he didn't live closer to his job, but he said he and his wife were both Suburans, and couldn't think of living anywhere else, and he doesn't mind the walk at all," said Aurelia, becoming more animated still.

But Caesar frowned. "I am not a snob, Aurelia, yet I'm not sure it's a good thing to strike up conversations with any of your tenants. You're the wife of a Julius, and you have certain standards of conduct. One must never be peremptory or uncivil to these people, nor above being interested in them, but I'll be going away soon, and I don't want my wife making friends out of acquaintances. You must keep yourself a little aloof from the people who rent living accommodation from you. That's why I'm glad the agents are acting as your rent collectors and business consultants."

Her face had dropped, she was staring at him in dismay, and stammered, "I—I'm sorry, Gaius Julius, I—I didn't think. Truly I've made no real advances; I just thought it would be interesting to find out what everyone did."

"Of course it is," he soothed, aware that in some way he had blighted her. "Tell me more."

"There's a Greek rhetor and his family, and a Roman schoolteacher and his family—he's interested in renting the two rooms next door to his apartment when they fall vacant, so he can conduct his school on the premises." She shot Caesar a quick look, and added, "The agents told me," thereby telling her first lie to her husband.

"That sounds satisfactory," he said. "Who else have we got, my love?"

"The next floor up from us is very odd. There's a spice merchant with a frightfully superior wife, and an
inventor
!
He's a bachelor, and his flat is absolutely stuffed with all these amazing little working models of cranes and pumps and mills," she said, her tongue getting the better of her again.

"Do you mean to say, Aurelia, that you have been inside the apartment of a bachelor?" asked Caesar.

She told her second lie, heart beating uncomfortably. "No, Gaius Julius, truly! The agent thought it would be a good thing if I accompanied him on his rounds, and inspected the tenants as well as how they live."

Caesar relaxed. "Oh, I see! Of course. What does our inventor invent?''

"Brakes and pulleys mostly, I gathered. He did show me how they work on a model of a crane, but I don't have a technical mind, he said, so I'm afraid it didn't make any sense to me."

"His inventing obviously pays him well, if he can afford to live on the next floor up," said Caesar, uncomfortably aware that his wife had lost a great deal of her original animation, but having insufficient intuition to see whose fault that was.

"For his pulleys he has a deal with a foundry that does a lot of work for big building contractors, where his brakes he manufactures in tiny premises of his own somewhere down the street from here." She drew a rather shaky breath, and passed on to her most unusual tenants. "And we have a whole floor of Jews, Gaius Julius! They like to live surrounded by other Jews, they were telling me, because they have so many rules and regulations—which, incidentally, they seem to have inflicted upon themselves. Very
religious
people! I can understand the xenophobia—they make the rest of us look a shabby lot morally. They're all self-employed, chiefly because they rest every seventh day. Isn't that a strange system? With Rome having a market holiday every eighth day, and then the feasts and festivals, they can't fit in with non-Jewish employers. So they contract themselves out, rather than take regular jobs."

"How extraordinary!" said Caesar.

"They're all artisans and scholars," said Aurelia, careful to keep her voice disinterested. "One of the men—his name's Shimon, I think—is the most exquisite scribe. Beautiful work, Gaius Julius, truly beautiful! He works in Greek only. None of them has a very good grasp of Latin. Whenever a publisher or an author has a special edition of a work to put out at a higher than normal price, he goes to Shimon, who has four-sons all learning to be scribes too. They're going to school with our Roman teacher as well as to their own religious school, because Shimon wants them to be as fluent in Latin as in Greek and Aramaic and—Hebrew, I think he said. Then they'll have plenty of work in Rome forever."

"Are all the Jews scribes?"

"Oh, no, only Shimon. There's one who works with gold, and contracts himself out to some of the shops in the Porticus Margaritaria. And we have a portrait sculptor—a tailor— an armorer—a textile maker—a mason—and the last one is a balsam merchant."

"Surely not all working upstairs?" asked Caesar, alarmed.

"Only the scribe and the goldsmith, Gaius Julius. The armorer has a workshop at the top of the Alta Semita, the sculptor rents space from a big firm in the Velabrum, and the mason has a yard near the marble wharves in the Port
of
Rome." In spite of herself, Aurelia's purple eyes began to shine. "They sing a lot. Religious, I gather. It's a very
strange
sort of singing—you know, Oriental and tuneless? But it's a nice change from crying babies."

Caesar reached out a hand to tuck back a strand of hair which had fallen forward onto her face; she was all of eighteen years old, this wife of his. "I take it our Jews like living here?" he asked.

"Actually everyone seems to like living here," she said.

That night after Caesar had fallen asleep, Aurelia lay beside him and sprinkled her pillows with a very few tears. It hadn't occurred to her that Caesar would expect the same sort of conduct from her here in an insula of the Subura as he would have from a Palatine wife; didn't he understand that in these cramped quarters there were not the diversions or hobbies available to a woman of the Palatine? No, of course he didn't. His time was taken up with his burgeoning public career, so his days were spent between the law courts, important senators like Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, the mint, the Treasury, the various arcades and colonnades where an incipient senator went to learn his profession. A gentler, more kindly disposed and considerate husband did not live; but Gaius Julius Caesar still regarded his wife as a special case.