Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar

by Colleen McCullough

  That remark provoked a fresh flood of tears in Servilia Caepionis, who so far had not managed to become pregnant, though she wanted a baby desperately. “Why haven’t I conceived?” she asked Livia Drusa. “You’re so lucky! Marcus Livius says you’re going to have a second baby, and I haven’t even managed to start my first one!”

  “There’s plenty of time,” Livia Drusa comforted. “They were away for months after we were married, don’t forget, and Marcus Livius is much busier than my Quintus Servilius. It’s commonly said that the busier the husband is, the harder his wife finds it to conceive.”

  “No, I’m barren,” Servilia Caepionis whispered. “I know I’m barren; I can feel it in my bones! And Marcus Livius is so kind, so forgiving!” She broke down again.

  “There, there, don’t fret about it so,” said Livia Drusa, who had managed to get her sister-in-law as far as the atrium, where she looked about her for help. “You won’t make it any easier to conceive by becoming distraught, you know. Babies like to burrow into placid wombs.”

  Cratippus appeared.

  “Oh, thank the gods!” cried Livia Drusa. “Cratippus, fetch my sister’s maid, would you? And perhaps you could show me whereabouts I am to sleep, and whereabouts little Servilia is?”

  In such an enormous house, the accommodation of several additional important people was not a problem; Cratippus had given Caepio Junior and his wife one of the suites of rooms opening off the peristyle-garden, and Caepio the father another, while baby Servilia had been located in the vacant nursery along the far colonnade.

  “What shall I do about dinner?” the steward came to ask Livia Drusa as she began to direct the unpacking.

  “That’s up to my sister, Cratippus, surely! I’d much rather not do anything to usurp her authority.”

  “She’s lying down in some distress, dominilla.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, best have dinner ready in an hour— the men might want to eat. But be prepared to postpone it.”

  There was a stir outside in the garden; Livia Drusa went out to see, and found her brother Drusus supporting Caepio Junior along the colonnade.

  “What is it?” she asked. “How may I help?” She looked at Drusus. “What is it?” she repeated.

  “Quintus Servilius our father-in-law is condemned. Exile no closer than eight hundred miles from Rome, a fine of fifteen thousand talents of gold—which means confiscation of every lamp wick and dead leaf the whole of his family owns—and imprisonment in the Lautumiae until Quintus Servilius can be deported,” said Drusus.

  “But everything Father owns won’t amount to a hundred talents of gold!” said Livia Drusa, aghast.

  “Of course. So he’ll never be able to come home again.’’

  Servilia Caepionis came running, looking, thought Livia Drusa, like Cassandra flying from the conquering Greeks, hair wild, eyes huge and blurred with tears, mouth agape.

  “What is it, what is it?” she cried,

  Drusus coped with her firmly but kindly, dried her tears, forbade her to cast herself on her brother’s chest. And under this treatment she calmed with magical swiftness.

  “Come, let’s all go to your study, Marcus Livius,” she said, and actually led the way.

  Livia Drusa hung back, terrified.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked Servilia Caepionis.

  “We can’t sit in the study with the men!”

  “Of course we can!’’ said Servilia Caepionis impatiently. “This is no time to keep the women of the family in ignorance, as Marcus Livius well knows. We stand together, or we fall together. A strong man must have strong women around him.”

  Head spinning, Livia Drusa tried to assimilate all the mood twists of the previous moments, and understood at last what a mouse she had been all her life. Drusus had expected a wildly disturbed wife to greet him, but then expected her to calm down and become extremely practical and supportive; and Servilia Caepionis had behaved exactly as he expected.

  So Livia Drusa followed Servilia Caepionis and the men into the study, and managed not to look horrified when Servilia Caepionis poured unwatered wine for the whole company. Sitting sipping the first undiluted liquor she had ever tasted, Livia Drusa hid her storm of thoughts. And her anger.

  At the end of the tenth hour Lucius Antistius Reginus brought Quintus Servilius Caepio to Drusus’s house. Caepio looked exhausted, but more annoyed than depressed.

  “I took him out of the Lautumiae,” said Antistius, tight-lipped. “No Roman consular is going to be incarcerated while I’m a tribune of the plebs! It’s an affront to Romulus and Quirinus as much as it is to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. How dare they!”

  “They dared because the People encouraged them, and so did all those neck-craning refugees from the games,” said Caepio, downing his wine at a gulp. “More,” he said to his son, who leaped to obey, happy now his father was safe. “I’m done for in Rome,” he said then, and stared with black snapping eyes first at Drusus, only second at his son. “It is up to you young men from now on to defend the right of my family to enjoy its ancient privileges and its natural pre-eminence. With your last breaths, if necessary. The Mariuses and the Saturninuses and the Norbanuses must be exterminated—by the knife if that is the only way, do you understand?”

  Caepio Junior was nodding obediently, but Drusus sat with his wine goblet in his hand and a rather wooden look on his face.

  “I swear to you, Father, that our family will never suffer the loss of its dignitas while I am paterfamilias,” said Caepio Junior solemnly; he appeared more tranquil now.

  And, thought Livia Drusa, loathing him, more like his detestable father than ever! Why do I hate him so much? Why did my brother make me marry him?

  Then her own plight faded, for she saw an expression on Drusus’s face which fascinated her, puzzled her. It wasn’t that he disagreed with anything their father-in-law said, more as if he qualified it, filed it away inside his mind along with a lot of other things, not all of which made sense to him. And, Livia Drusa decided suddenly, my brother dislikes our father-in-law intensely! Oh, he had changed, had Drusus! Where Caepio Junior would never change, only become more what he had always been.

  “What do you intend to do, Father?” Drusus asked.

  A curious smile blossomed on Caepio’s face; the irritation died out of his eyes, and was replaced by a most complex meld of triumph, slyness, pain, hatred. “Why, my dear boy, I shall go into exile as directed by the Plebeian Assembly,” he said.

  “But where, Father?” asked Caepio Junior.

  “Smyrna.”

  “How will we manage for money?” Caepio Junior asked. “Not so much me—Marcus Livius will help me out—but you yourself. How will you be able to afford to live comfortably in exile?”

  “I have money on deposit in Smyrna, more than enough for my needs. As for you, my son, there is no need to worry. Your mother left a great fortune, which I have held in trust for you. It will sustain you more than adequately,” said Caepio.

  “But won’t it be confiscated?”

  “No, for two reasons. First of all, it’s already in your name, not in mine. And secondly, it’s not on deposit in Rome. It’s in Smyrna, with my own money.” The smile grew. “You must live here in Marcus Livius’s house with him for several years, after which I’ll begin to send your fortune home. And if anything should happen to me, my bankers will carry on the good work. In the meantime, son-in-law, keep an account of all the monies you expend on my son’s behalf. In time he will repay you every last sestertius.”

  A silence fraught with so much energy and emotion it was almost visible fell upon the entire group, while each member of it realized what Quintus Servilius Caepio was not saying; that he had stolen the Gold of Tolosa, that the Gold of Tolosa was in Smyrna, and that the Gold of Tolosa was now the property of Quintus Servilius Caepio, free and clear, safe and sound. That Quintus Servilius Caepio was very nearly as rich as Rome.

  Caepio turned to Antistius, silent as the rest. “Have yo
u considered what I asked you on the way here?”

  Antistius cleared his throat loudly. “I have, Quintus Servilius. And I’d like to accept.”

  “Good!” Caepio looked at his son and his son-in-law. “My dear friend Lucius Antistius has agreed to escort me to Smyrna, to give me both the pleasure of his company and the protection of a tribune of the plebs. When we reach Smyrna, I shall endeavor to persuade Lucius Antistius to remain there with me.”

  “I haven’t decided about that yet,” said Antistius.

  “There’s no hurry, no hurry at all,” said Caepio smoothly. He rubbed his hands together as if to warm them. “I do declare, I’m hungry enough to eat a baby! Is there any dinner?”

  “Of course, Father,” said Servilia Caepionis. “If you men go into the dining room, Livia Drusa and I will see to things in the kitchen.”

  That, of course, was a gross inaccuracy; Cratippus saw to things in the kitchen. But the two women did search for him, and finally found him on the loggia squinting down into the Forum Romanum, where the shadows of dusk were growing.

  “Look at that! Did you ever see such a mess?” the steward asked indignantly, pointing. “Litter every where! Shoes, rags, sticks, half-eaten food, wine flagons—it’s a disgrace!”

  And there he was, her red-haired Odysseus, standing with Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus on the balcony of the house below; like Cratippus, the two of them seemed to be waxing in anger about the litter.

  Livia Drusa shivered, licked her lips, stared in starved anguish at the young man so near to her—and yet so far. The steward rushed away toward the kitchen stairs; now was her chance, now while it would seem a casual inquiry.

  “Sister,” she asked, “who is that red-haired man on the terrace with Gnaeus Domitius? He’s been visiting there for years, but I don’t know who he is, I just can’t place him. Do you know? Can you tell me?”

  Servilia Caepionis snorted. “Oh, him! That’s Marcus Porcius Cato,” she said, voice ringing contemptuously.

  “Cato? As in Cato the Censor?”

  “The same. Upstarts! He’s Cato the Censor’s grandson.”

  “But wouldn’t his grandmother have been Licinia, and his mother Aemilia Paulla? Surely that makes him acceptable!” objected Livia Drusa, eyes shining.

  Servilia Caepionis snorted again. “Wrong branch, my dear. He’s no son of Aemilia Paulla’s—if he were, he’d have to be years older than he is. No, no! He’s not a Cato Licinianus! He’s a Cato Salonianus. And the great-grandson of a slave.”

  Livia Drusa’s imaginary world shifted, grew a network of tiny cracks. “I don’t understand,” she said, bewildered.

  “What, you don’t know the story? He’s the son of the son of Cato the Censor’s second marriage.”

  “To the daughter of a slave?” gasped Livia Drusa.

  “The daughter of his slave, to be exact. Salonia, her name was. I think it’s an absolute disgrace that they’re allowed the same license to mingle with us as the descendants of Cato the Censor’s first wife, Licinia! They’ve even wormed their way into the Senate. Of course,” Servilia Caepionis said, “the Porcii Catones Liciniani don’t speak to them. Nor do we.”

  “Why does Gnaeus Domitius suffer him, then?”

  Servilia Caepionis laughed, sounding very much like her insufferable father. “Well, the Domitii Ahenobarbi aren’t such an illustrious lot, are they? More money than ancestors, in spite of all the tales they tell about Castor and Pollux touching their beards with red! I don’t know exactly why he’s accepted among them. But I can guess. My father worked it out.”

  “Worked out what?” asked Li via Drusa, heart in her feet.

  “Well, it’s a red-haired family, Cato the Censor’s second lot. Cato the Censor was red-haired himself, for that matter. But Licinia and Aemilia Paulla were both dark, so their sons and daughters have brown hair and brown eyes. Whereas Cato the Censor’s slave Salonius was a Celtiberian from Salo in Nearer Spain, and he was fair. His daughter Salonia was very fair. And that’s why the Catones Saloniani have kept the red hair and the grey eyes.” Servilia Caepionis shrugged. “The Domitii Ahenobarbi have to perpetuate the myth they started about the red beards they inherited from the ancestor touched by Castor and Pollux. So they always marry red-haired women. Well, red-haired women are scarce. And if there’s no better-born red-haired woman about, I imagine a Domitius Ahenobarbus would marry a Cato Salonianus. They’re so stuck up they think their own blood capable of absorbing any old rubbish.”

  “So Gnaeus Domitius’s friend must have a sister?”

  “He has a sister.” Servilia Caepionis shook herself. “I must go inside. Oh, what a day! Come, dinner will be there.”

  “You go ahead,” said Livia Drusa. “I’ll have to feed my daughter before I feed myself.’’

  Mention of the baby was enough to send poor child-hungry Servilia Caepionis hurrying off; Livia Drusa returned to the balustrade and looked over it. Yes, they were still there, Gnaeus Domitius and his visitor. His visitor with a slave for a great-grandfather. Perhaps the burgeoning gloom was responsible for the dimming of the hair on the man below, for the diminishing of his height, the width of his shoulders. His neck now looked slightly ridiculous, too long and skinny to be really Roman. Four tears dropped to star the yellow-painted railing, but no more.

  I have been a fool as usual, thought Livia Drusa. I have dreamed and mooned for four whole years over a man who turns out to be the recent descendant of a slave—a fact-slave, not a myth-slave. I confabulated him into a king, noble and brave as Odysseus. I made myself into patient Penelope, waiting for him. And now I find out he’s not noble. Not even decently born! After all, who was Cato the Censor but a peasant from Tusculum befriended by a patrician Valerius Flaccus? A genuine harbinger of Gaius Marius. That man on the terrace below is the recent descendant of a Spanish slave and a Tusculan peasant. What a fool I am! What a stupid, stupid idiot!

  When she reached the nursery she found little Servilia thriving and hungry, so she sat for fifteen minutes and fed the small one, whose regular routine had been thrown out of kilter this momentous day.

  “You’d better find her a wet nurse,” she said to the Macedonian nanny as she prepared to leave. “I’d like a few months of rest before I bear again. And when this new baby comes, you can get in wet nurses from the start. Feeding a child oneself obviously doesn’t prevent conception, or I wouldn’t be pregnant right now.”

  She slipped into the dining room just as the main courses were being served, and sat down as inconspicuously as she could on a straight chair opposite Caepio Junior. Everyone seemed to be making a good meal; Livia Drusa discovered she too was hungry.

  “Are you all right, Livia Drusa?” asked Caepio Junior, a trifle anxiously. “You look sort of sick.”

  Startled, she stared at him, and for the first time in all the many years she had known him, the sight of him did not arouse all those inchoate feelings of revulsion. No, he did not have red hair; no, he did not have grey eyes; no, he was not tall and graceful and broad-shouldered; no, he would never turn into King Odysseus. But he was her husband; he had loved her faithfully; he was the father of her children; and he was a patrician Roman nobleman on both sides.

  So she smiled at him, a smile which reached her eyes. “I think it’s only the day, Quintus Servilius,” she said gently. “In myself, I feel better than I have in years.”

  *

  Encouraged by the result of the trial of Caepio, Saturninus began to act with an arbitrary arrogance that rocked the Senate to its foundations. Hard on the heels of Caepio’s trial, Saturninus himself prosecuted Gnaeus Mallius Maximus for “loss of his army” in the Plebeian Assembly, with a similar result: Mallius Maximus, already deprived of his sons by the battle of Arausio, was now deprived of his Roman citizenship and all his property, and sent into exile a more broken man by far than the gold-greedy Caepio.

  Then late in February came the new treason law, the lex Appuleia de maiestate, which took treason trials off the cu
mbersome Centuries and put them into a special court staffed entirely by knights. The Senate was to have no part in this court at all. In spite of which, the senators said little derogatory about the bill during their obligatory debate, nor attempted to oppose its passage into law.

  Monumental though these changes were, and of an unimaginable importance to the future government of Rome, they could not capture the interest of Senate or People the way the pontifical election held at the same time did. The death of Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus had left not one, but two vacancies in the College of Pontifices; and yet, since these two vacancies were held by one and the same man, there were those who argued only one election was necessary. But, as Scaurus Princeps Senatus pointed out, voice wobbling dangerously, mouth quivering, that would only be possible if the man who was elected ordinary pontifex was also a candidate for the big job. Finally it was agreed that the Pontifex Maximus would be elected first.

  “Then we shall see what we shall see,” said Scaurus, taking deep breaths, and only once hooting with laughter.

  Both Scaurus Princeps Senatus and Metellus Numidicus had put their names up as candidates for Pontifex Maximus, as had Catulus Caesar. And Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus.

  “If I am elected, or Quintus Lutatius is elected, then we must hold a second poll for the ordinary pontifex, as we are both already in the college,” said Scaurus, voice control heroic.

  Among this field were a Servilius Vatia, an Aelius Tubero, and Metellus Numidicus. And Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus.

  The new law stipulated that seventeen of the thirty-five tribes be chosen by casting the lots, and that they alone vote. So the lots were cast, and the seventeen tribes which would vote determined. All this was done in a spirit of high good humor and great tolerance; no violence in the Forum Romanum that day! For many more than Scaurus Princeps Senatus were enjoying a wonderful chuckle. Nothing appealed to the Roman sense of humor more than a squabble involving the most august names on the censors’ rolls, especially when the aggrieved party had managed so neatly to turn the tables on those who had caused the grievance.