The Princess and the Pirates (13 page)

She laid a warm hand on my arm. “Everyone says that you are a man of the world, Decius Caecilius. You are a friend of Caesar, and the old bores like Cato consider you degenerate.”

“I have been so complimented,” I admitted.

“Wonderful. The moralists are so tedious. I would appreciate it though if you would not bring up the subject of my nocturnal escapades when you speak with my husband.”

“Flavia, your pleasures are your own business and I will seek to advise neither you nor your husband, but he must be more than a bit obtuse if he does not know already.”

“Oh, he knows perfectly well how I amuse myself. It is something we have simply agreed not to discuss in the company of our peers. He has his own pastimes, and I do not interfere with them. It is a comfortable arrangement, don’t you think?”

“The world would be a happier place if other couples were so understanding,” I assured her. In truth, such liberal marital arrangements were not uncommon in Rome. Flavia was just more extreme than most in pursuit of gratification.

The house of Sergius Nobilior was only slightly less grand than that of Silvanus. Roman
equites
of that day, which is to say the wealthiest plebeian families, dominated banking, finance, and other businesses. Though most of them were perfectly happy to make money and stay out of the Senate, with its endless duties and burdensome military obligations, they formed a very influential power group and they dominated the Popular Assemblies. This was the class to which Sergius Nobilior belonged.

The man himself greeted me in his atrium.

“Senator! You do my house great honor. When we heard your ships had been sighted my wife swore that she would bring you back, and she usually catches her man.” He said this without seeming irony. “Please join us for some dinner. Living on ship’s food is tedious.”

“It wasn’t much of a voyage,” I told him, “but I gladly accept.” We went into the beautifully decorated triclinium and confined our talk to inconsequential things while we ate. There were no other guests, an uncommon thing in a wealthy man’s household, so I assumed he had
some sort of business he wished to discuss privately. I therefore drank cautiously. So, I noted, did the two of them.

“Was your voyage productive?” he asked, as the fruit was brought out. So I told them about the island we had visited with its devastated village and its few stunned survivors.

“How terrible!” Nobilior said. “What inhuman beasts they must be to do such a thing. I cannot believe this report that their leader is a Roman.” Flavia, on the other hand, sipped sweet Egyptian wine and did not seem unduly shocked by such goings-on.

“Well, if we Romans are nothing else, we are versatile. Personally, it seems to me that no one but a Roman could cause so much trouble with so few ships and men.”

He chuckled. “You are certainly right about that. Sometimes I think that the rest of the world makes it too easy for us. Have you heard how Ptolemy got his throne back?”

“I was in Gaul much of that time, but I heard rumors concerning the passing of heroic bribes.”

“More godlike than heroic,” he said. “It seems that his subjects thought him remiss in allowing us to annex Cyprus. When his brother committed suicide, the subjects drove Auletes from his throne. After all, he had taken the surname Philadelphus: ‘he who loves his brother.’ The Egyptians thought that a bitter irony. But they must have some sort of Ptolemy so they put his daughter Berenice on the throne. According to Ptolemaic custom, a queen cannot rule by herself, so she cast about for a royal husband and eventually chose Archelaus of Pontus.

“Auletes immediately fled to Rome, where he petitioned the Senate to restore him to his throne. Do you know by what right he made this petition?”

I thought back. “He’d been voted the status of ‘friend and ally’ a few years earlier, hadn’t he? I think it was during the consulship of Caesar and Bibulus.”

“He had. He paid handsomely to get that title, too. Pompey and Caesar guaranteed him the title, but they told him it would be expensive—no less than six thousand talents.”

“Six thousand!” Even by the standards of the time that was an enormous bribe.

He nodded. “Six thousand. That represents, roughly, half a year’s income for Egypt. But Auletes is a beggar and everyone knows it, so where do you suppose he came up with the sum?”

This was his story and I’d just eaten his dinner so I played along. “Where?”

“He borrowed it from Rabirius Postumus. Do you know him?” “I met him once, several years ago, at a party at the Egyptian embassy. He’d just been appointed Ptolemy’s financial advisor. Surely even Rabirius wasn’t rich enough to lend six thousand. Crassus couldn’t have come up with that much in one lump sum.”

“Rabirius is an old friend of mine,” Nobilior said complacently. “He took a number of us on as partners in this enterprise. Of course, that was just to have the title so that the Senate would have to back his claims. Getting Rome to provide him with the military force he needed was going to cost a further ten thousand. Mind you, at this time he still owed for part of the original six.”

“I think I see where this is going,” I said. “He agreed to pay, but first we had to restore his throne so he could start looting his own country to pay it off.”

Nobilior smiled. “Exactly. Caesar isn’t the only one who knows how to use indebtedness to his own advantage. Now, by this time, Caesar himself was busy in Gaul, and Pompey had affairs of his own to manage, but there was our friend Aulus Gabinius, waging war in Syria with a perfectly good army at his disposal. He couldn’t break off his war against the Parthians and go to Egypt with his whole force, but Caesar sent him a strong force of
auxilia,
Gabinius recruited others locally, and off he went, accompanied by Rabirius to keep an eye on everyone’s money.”

“I wonder,” I said, “how the voters would feel if they knew that so many of our wars are just business arrangements? A lot of them still think that things like the glory and honor of the Republic are involved.”

He shrugged. “Nobody objects to the heaps of loot and the cheap slaves our victorious generals bring back. That’s what they really care about. That and keeping the barbarians as far away as possible. There are plenty of voters now alive who remember the Cimbri and Teutones camped a few day’s march from Rome, before Marius crushed them. Remember, kings all over the world bankrupt their kingdoms through foolish wars even when they don’t suffer conquest themselves. Should the Roman people complain because our own wars are so profitable?”

“You have a point.” I wondered what other point he had but suspected that he would get around to it sooner or later.

“A versatile man, our Gabinius,” Flavia observed. She may have had multiple meanings here, but I had too little information to sort them out.

“A Roman statesman has to be versatile,” I pointed out. “Do you remember how Pompey got his extraordinary command against the pirates?” Nobilior asked.

I thought about it. “That was when Piso and Glabrio were consuls, wasn’t it? It was four years before my quaestorship. My family had me in Campania that whole year, administering a training camp for recruits to be sent to Crete for Metellus Creticus’s army there. I was out of touch with Roman politics that year and most of the next.”

“Pompey’s imperium was to last three years,” Nobilior said, “and it encompassed the entire sea and fifty miles inland, overriding the imperium of every provincial governor. And it was conferred by a
lex Gabinia.
”

“Gabinius was the tribune who got that law passed?” I had forgotten that.

“After a good deal of fighting, yes. The tribune Trebillius interposed his veto and was supported by Otho. There were weeks of brawling.”

“I’m sorry I missed it.”

“They were lively times. In the end the Senate had to bring in a whole rural voting bloc to break the deadlock. The country people were great supporters of Pompey, of course, so the law got passed.”

“Are you telling me that Gabinius is Pompey’s man?”

“I am telling you that war, politics, and business are very complicated in this part of the world. As to his current affiliation”—he made an eloquent gesture with his hands—“these things change. The
lex Gabinia
was many years ago, and Pompey’s sun is in eclipse.”

“Here in the East,” Flavia added, “the people have a different view of Rome. The current politics of the Forum mean little to them. In the West, Caesar is the man of the hour. Here he is all but unknown. The great names in the East are still Pompey, Gabinius, even Lucullus. Their paid-off veterans and mercenaries are settled all over the islands and seaboard, many of them active in the various armies of the region.”

“In Egypt,” Nobilior said, “a sizable contingent of the king’s forces bear the name ‘Gabinians.’ Some are Romans, but most are those
auxilia
sent by Caesar—Gauls and Germans, many of them.”

Here, it seemed, he was coming to the crux of the matter. “And not only those,” Flavia added. “He picked up recruits from a lot of settlements in Cilicia and Illyria.”

“Including,” I asked, “those settlements founded by Pompey to separate the erstwhile pirates from the sea?”

“That I could not say,” Nobilior asserted. “It would have been in violation of the surrender terms after all. These men were not to take up arms again. Still, few laws lack flexibility where power and ambition are concerned.”

“All too true. Well, then, it may be that this man Spurius is one of those paid-off veterans now set up in business for himself.”

“Quite likely.” Nobilior nodded. “Would you care for some of this excellent Lesbian?”

I left his house no more than pleasantly tipsy. Flavia saw me to the door personally.

“You must visit us again soon, Senator,” she said.

“I would not forego the pleasure,” I assured her. Her parting kiss was far more ardent than commonly sanctioned by the rules of etiquette, but at least she kept her clothes on.

As I walked away I reminded myself to steer a wide course around that woman. Julia would, after all, be here soon, Flavia was a deterrent to clear thinking, but I managed to draw my thoughts upward from my nether regions sufficiently to ponder what I had just heard.

Nobilior implied that these pirates were Gabinius’s men. But, if so, where did that leave me? Gabinius had no imperium, was no more than an exile like many others, awaiting his chance to go back to Rome and resume his Senate seat. If some of his veterans turned outlaw, that did not mean he had put them up to it, although the implication could not have been clearer.

When I reached my quarters at the governor’s mansion I sent Hermes to fetch Ariston.

“How do the accommodations here suit you?” I asked him when he arrived.

“Fine so far. The serving girls here have taken a shine to me. When you consider the quality of the men they usually have to put up with, that’s not too surprising. The food and wine and the room are all better than I can afford at most times.” He stretched his powerful arms. “It would get boring as a steady diet, but for now I like it just fine.”

“Good. Ariston, when you were in Spurius’s little fleet, did many of the men speak of serving with Gabinius on his Egyptian expedition?”

He nodded. “Several of them did, as I recall. They said his recruiters had come to the villages where they were settled and offered them
the chance to do something more congenial than trudge along behind an ox, and they’d jumped at it.”

“Did these recruiters say why their oath not to take up arms again had been suspended?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t there. But Rome is always raising
auxilia
from defeated people, right? And that oath specified that we never take up arms
against Rome.
If a Roman general wanted them to fight an enemy of Rome, what could be wrong with that? Anyway, Pompey was mainly concerned that we keep away from the sea.”

“Quite so. But did any of these men perhaps hint that he still served Gabinius in some fashion?”

Ariston’s gaze sharpened. “You mean you think he may be behind this?”

“It is one of many possibilities I am exploring.”

“Nobody said so. Anyway, if a man that highly placed wanted to do such a thing, he would treat with only one person, and that would be Spurius. Even then, he might not see the man personally. He’d probably use an emissary.”

“Yes, I know how it’s done.” I remembered innumerable dealings between prominent candidates and officeholders in Rome and the street-gang leaders whose support they needed. Some freedman always acted as go-between. “Go on back to your quarters. Mention to nobody what we’ve spoken about.”

“Come, Hermes,” I said, when he was gone, “let’s call upon Princess Cleopatra.”

We found her in a beautiful little nook of the formal garden, well illuminated by torches and braziers, accompanied by her scholars and listening to Alpheus, who stood before them declaiming a lengthy poem concerning the birth of Venus, which, according to the myth, had occurred not far from the spot we occupied. Upon coming ashore in her scallop shell, she founded her first temple right there in Paphos, where the ancient, rather modest structure remained the center of her cult.

Of course, the Greeks call her Aphrodite, “the foam-born.” Among the Greeks she is a gentle goddess, lacking the more alarming qualities of the Roman Venus. This does not keep us from identifying the two goddesses though. Among other advantages, it allows us to steal Greek statues of Aphrodite and set them up in our Temples of Venus without impropriety.

I am told that, in the old days before we came under Greek influence, our gods had no form, and we didn’t even know what they looked like. It is difficult now to think of Jupiter without picturing Zeus, or Mars lacking the image of Ares, but once this was so.

I waited in the shadows of the fruit trees until Alpheus had finished his song, and while I waited I noticed the man seated next to Cleopatra. He looked decidedly familiar—a pudgy, round-faced man with a bald head, wearing a great many Egyptian rings on his fat fingers. The Egyptian jewelry jogged my memory. It was Photinus, First Eunuch to the court of King Ptolemy. When I had seen him years before in Alexandria, he had worn the Egyptian dress, complete with wig and cosmetics, favored by that court’s functionaries. Despite that he was a Greek like the rest of them, and here he was dressing the part.