The Grass Crown (73 page)

“There’s no point in getting down in the dumps about it,” said Pompey briskly. “For all he or I know, you might be a lion with sword and buckler! that’s the way to his heart!”

“I am not a lion with sword and buckler,” said Cicero, voice squeaking. “I am not a mouse either, you understand. The truth is that I’m absolutely useless with my hands and feet, and it isn’t anything I can control or improve.”

“You’re all right when you’re posturing up and down the Forum,” said Pompey.

Cicero gasped. “You know who I am?”

“Certainly.” The dense lashes fanned down demurely over the lustrous eyes. “I’m no good at that speechifying stuff, and that too is the truth. My tutors have been beating me senseless for years and got nowhere. To me it’s just a waste of time. I can’t be bothered learning the difference between sententia and epigramma, let alone fiddle with color and descriptio!”

“But how can you hope to be cognominated Great if you don’t know how to speak?” asked Cicero.

“How can you hope to be called great if you can’t use a sword?”

“Oh, I see! You’re going to become another Gaius Marius.”

But the comparison did not please Pompey, who scowled. “Not another Gaius Marius!” he snarled. ” I shall be myself. And I’ll make Gaius Marius look like a tyro!”

Cicero giggled, his heavy-lidded dark eyes suddenly sparkling. “Oh, Gnaeus Pompeius, I’d like that!” he exclaimed.

A presence loomed; both lads looked round. And there stood Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, so strongly built he looked square, though he lacked imposing height. In looks he was not unlike his son, save that his eyes were not so blue, and were so badly crossed they did indeed seem to see nothing except the bridge of his own nose. They gave him an enigmatic as well as an ugly quality, for no one could assess what lay in them, so odd and off-putting was their configuration.

“Who’s this?” he asked his son.

And Young Pompey did something so wonderful that Cicero was never, never able to forget it or cease to be grateful for it—he threw his muscular arm around Cicero’s shoulders, and squeezed them.

And he said cheerfully, as if it were of no consequence, “This is my friend Marcus Tullius Cicero Junior. He’s been posted to your staff, Father, but you needn’t worry about him in the least. I’ll look after him.”

“Huh!” grunted Pompey Strabo. “Who wished you on me?”

“Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus,” said Cicero in a very small voice.

The senior consul nodded. “Oh, he would, the sarcastic cunnus! Sitting at home laughing his head off, I’ll bet.” He turned away indifferently. “As well for you, citocacia, that you’re a friend of my son’s. Otherwise I’d feed you to my pigs.”

Cicero’s face burned. He came from a family which had always deplored salty language, his father deeming it unacceptably vulgar; to hear the senior consul say such words was a rude shock.

“You really are a lady, Marcus Tullius, aren’t you?” asked Pompey, grinning.

“There are better and more picturesque ways of using our great Latin tongue than coarse imprecations,” said Cicero with dignity.

But his new friend stiffened dangerously. “Are you actually criticizing my father?” he demanded.

Cicero retreated hastily. “No, Gnaeus Pompeius, no! I was reacting to your calling me a lady!”

Pompey relaxed, began to smile again. “Just as well for you! I don’t like anyone finding fault with my father.” He glanced at Cicero curiously. “Bad language is everywhere, Marcus Tullius. Even our poets use it from time to time. It’s written on the city’s buildings, especially around the brothels and the public latrines. And if a general doesn’t call the troops cunni and mentulae—and a lot worse!—they think he’s a stuck-up Vestal.”

“I shut my eyes and my ears,” said Cicero, then changed the subject. “Thank you for offering me your protection.”

“Think nothing of it, Marcus Tullius! Between us we make a decent pair, I think. You help me with my reports and letters, and I’ll help you with your sword and buckler.”

“It’s a deal,” said Cicero, lingering in the same spot.

Pompey, who had begun to move away, turned back. “Now what?”

“I haven’t given your father my orders.”

“Throw them away,” said Pompey casually. “From today you belong to me. My father won’t even notice you.”

This time Cicero followed him when he strolled off in the direction of the peristyle-garden. They found a seat in the chilly sun, and Pompey proceeded to demonstrate that though he disavowed any liking for rhetoric, he was yet a talker—and a gossip.

“Did you hear about Gaius Vettienus?”

“No,” said Cicero.

“He chopped off the fingers of his right hand to avoid doing his military duty. The urban praetor Cinna sentenced him to lifelong residence as a servant in the Capuan barracks.”

A shiver ran down Cicero’s spine. “A peculiar sentence, don’t you think?” he asked, his forensic interest stirred.

“Well, they had to make some sort of example of him!

He could not be let escape with an exile and a fine. We’re not like eastern kings, we don’t throw people into prison until they die or they grow old. We don’t even throw people into prison for a month! I thought Cinna’s solution was quite neat, actually,” said Pompey with a grin. “Those fellows in Capua will make Vettienus’s life a misery for absolutely ever!”

“I daresay they will,” said Cicero, gulping.

“Well, come on, it’s your turn!”

“My turn to what?”

“Say something.”

“I can’t think of anything, Gnaeus Pompeius.”

“What’s the name of Appius Claudius Pulcher’s wife?”

Cicero blinked. “I don’t know.”

“For such a brain, you don’t know anything, do you? I suppose I’ll have to tell you. Caecilia Metella Balearica. Isn’t that a mouthful of a name?”

“It’s a very august family.”

“Not as famous as my family will be!”

“What about her?” Cicero asked.

“She died the other day.”

“Oh.”

“She had a dream just after Lucius Julius returned to Rome to hold the elections,” Pompey went on chattily, “and she went to Lucius Julius the next morning, told him Juno Sospita appeared to her and complained about the disgusting mess in her temple. Some woman apparently crawled in there and died in childbirth, and all they did was take her body away, they didn’t wash the floor. So Lucius Julius and Caecilia Metella Balearica got some rags and buckets and went and scrubbed the temple out on their hands and knees. Can you imagine it? Lucius Julius got his toga filthy because he wouldn’t remove it, he said he must do the goddess full honor. Then he went straight to the Curia Hostilia and promulgated his law about the Italians—and gave the House a nasty tongue-lashing about neglecting the temples and how did Rome expect to win the war when the gods weren’t receiving their proper measure of respect? So the next day the whole House went off with rags and buckets and cleaned all the temples.” Pompey stopped. “What’s the matter?”

“How do you know all this, Gnaeus Pompeius?”

“I listen when people talk, even slaves. What do you do all day, read Homer?” Pompey countered.

“I finished with Homer years ago,” said Cicero complacently. “Nowadays I read the great orators.”

“And don’t have an idea what’s going on in the city.”

“Now I know you, I’m sure I’m going to learn. I take it that, having had her dream and cleaned up the temple of Juno Sospita, Appius Claudius Pulcher’s wife drove home the lesson by expiring?”

“Died very suddenly. A great disaster, Lucius Julius thinks. She was one of Rome’s most honored matrons—six children, all a year apart in age, and the youngest just a year old.”

“Seven is a lucky number,” said Cicero, who had a sharp wit.

“Not for her,” said Pompey, the irony escaping him. “No one can understand it, after six safe childbirths. Lucius Julius says the gods are angry.”

“Does he think his new law will appease divine displeasure?”

Pompey shrugged. “I don’t know. Nor does anybody else. All I know is that my father’s in favor, so I’m in favor. My father intends to legislate the full citizenship for every Latin Rights community in Italian Gaul.”

“And Marcus Plautius Silvanus will soon legislate to extend the citizenship to any man with his name on an Italian municipal roll if he applies in person to a praetor inside Rome within sixty days of the passing of the law,” said Cicero.

“Silvanus, yes. But together with his friend Gaius Papirius Carbo,” Pompey corrected.

“Now this is more like it!” beamed Cicero, looking animated. “Laws and lawmaking—I love them!”

“I’m glad someone does,” said Pompey. “I think laws are a nuisance myself. They’re always leveled at superior men of superior ability distinguishing themselves, especially at an early age.”

“Men cannot live without a system of laws!”

“Superior men can.”

Pompey Strabo made no attempt to leave Rome, though he kept telling people that they wouldn’t miss him or Lucius Cato because the urban praetor, Aulus Sempronius Asellio, was a very capable man. It soon became apparent, however, that the real reason he lingered was to keep an eye on the spate of legislation which followed the lex Julia. Lucius Porcius Cato Licinianus, the junior consul, left Pompey Strabo to it; this was one pair of consuls who were not amicable. Off Lucius Cato went to Campania, only to change his mind and locate himself in the central theater after all. Pompey Strabo had made no secret of his intention to continue the war in Picenum; yet it was Sextus Julius Caesar he sent to the siege of Asculum Picentum, though Sextus Caesar’s chest was bad and the winter was the coldest anyone could remember. News came not long after Sextus Caesar set out that he had killed eight thousand rebel Picentines he caught changing from a fouled camp to a fresh one outside Camerinum. Pompey Strabo huffed, but remained in Rome.

His lex Pompeia was going through the Comitia uneventfully. It granted the full Roman citizenship to every Latin Rights town south of the Padus River in Italian Gaul, and gave the Latin Rights to the towns of Aquileia, Patavium, and Mediolanum north of the Padus. All the people of these many large and prosperous communities now entered into his clientele, the reason why he had legislated in the first place. No true champion of citizen rights, Pompey Strabo then permitted Piso Frugi to handicap those benefiting from the three enfranchisement laws. At first Piso Frugi enacted a bill creating two new tribes into which all the new citizens everywhere would be placed, keeping the thirty-five tribes exclusively for old Romans. But when Etruria and Umbria began to rumble at the unfairness of being treated no better than Roman freedmen, Piso Frugi altered his law to put all the new citizens into eight of the old tribes plus the two freshly invented ones.

The senior consul then held the censors’ elections; Lucius Julius Caesar and Publius Licinius Crassus became censors. Even before he let the sacerdotal contracts, Lucius Caesar announced that in honor of his ancestor Aeneas he would remit all taxes levied upon the town of Troy, his beloved Ilium. As Troy was no more than a small village, he was let have his way without opposition. Scaurus Princeps Senatus—who might have objected—was being driven to distraction by the two refugee kings, Nicomedes of Bithynia and Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia, who wailed and bribed with equal fervor, finding it impossible to understand why Rome was more concerned with her war against the Italians than the coming war with Mithridates.

The chief opponent of Lucius Caesar’s enfranchisement bill had been Quintus Varius, fearing that he would turn out to be the law’s first victim. The new tribunes of the plebs fell on him like wolves, Marcus Plautius Silvanus in the lead; a quick lex Plautia, and the Varian Commission—hitherto prosecuting all those who had supported citizenship for the Italians—became the Plautian Commission, prosecuting all those who had tried to stop citizenship for the Italians. It was Lucius Caesar’s younger brother, the crosseyed Caesar Strabo, who drew the lucky straw and prepared the first case in the Plautian Commission—the prosecution of Quintus Varius Severus Hybrida Sucronensis.

Caesar Strabo’s technique was—as always—brilliant. The verdict was a foregone conclusion long before the last day of Quintus Varius’s trial, especially because the lex Plautia had taken the Commission off the knights and given it to citizens of all and any classes across the thirty-five tribes. Quintus Varius elected not to wait for the verdict. Much to the grief and chagrin of his close friends, Lucius Marcius Philippus and young Gaius Flavius Fimbria, Quintus Varius took poison. Unfortunately he chose his medicine badly, and lingered in agony for several days before expiring. Only his few friends came to his funeral, during which Fimbria swore an oath that he would revenge himself upon Caesar Strabo.

“Ask me if I’m frightened,” said Caesar Strabo to his brothers, Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar and Lucius Julius Caesar, who had not attended the funeral, but had lingered with Scaurus Princeps Senatus on the Senate steps to see what happened.

“You’d dare Hercules or Hades,” said Scaurus, eyes dancing.

“I tell you what I would dare—to run for consul without first being praetor,” said Caesar Strabo quickly.

“Now why would you want to do that?” asked Scaurus.

“To test a point of law.”

“Aaaaah, you advocates!” cried Catulus Caesar.

“You’re all the same. You’d test a point of law on what constitutes virginity in a Vestal, I swear you would.”

“I think we have already!” laughed Caesar Strabo.

“Well,” said Scaurus, “I’m off to see how Gaius Marius is, then I’m going home to work on my speech.” He looked at Catulus Caesar. “When are you leaving for Capua?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Don’t, Quintus Lutatius, I beg of you! Stay until the end of the market interval and hear my speech! It’s probably the most important one of my career.”

“Now that is saying something,” said Catulus Caesar, who had come up from Capua to witness his brother Lucius Caesar’s lifting of the tribute from Troy. “May I ask the subject?”

“Oh, certainly. Readying ourselves for war with King Mithridates of Pontus,” said Scaurus affably.

All the Caesars stared.