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

by Colleen McCullough

  Young Caesar grew tired of waiting for an answer, and launched into his own answer. “I am never to go to war and rival him there. I am never to stand for the consulship and rival him there. I am never to have the opportunity to be called the Fourth Founder of Rome. Instead, I am to spend the rest of my days muttering prayers in a language none of us understands anymore—sweeping out the temple—making myself available to every Lucius Tiddlypuss in need of having his house purified—wearing ridiculous clothes!” Square of palm and long of finger, beautiful in a masculine way, the hands were lifted to grope at the air, clench upon it impotently. “That old man has stripped me of my birthright, all to safeguard his own wretched status in the history books!”

  Neither of them had much insight into how Young Caesar’s mind worked, nor had either of them been privileged to listen to his dreams for his own future; as they stood listening to this passionate speech, both of them searched for a way to make Young Caesar understand that what had happened, what had been decided, was now inevitable. He must be made to see that the best thing he could do in the circumstances was to accept his fate with a good grace.

  His father chose to be stern, disapproving. “Don’t be so ridiculous!” he said.

  His mother followed suit because this was how she always handled the boy—duty, obedience, humility, self-effacement—all the Roman virtues he did not possess. So she too said, “Don’t be ridiculous!” But she added, “Do you seriously think you could ever rival Gaius Marius? No man can!”

  “Rival Gaius Marius?” asked their son, rearing back. “I will outstrip him in brilliance as the sun does the moon!”

  “If that is how you see this great privilege, Gaius Junior,” she said, “then Gaius Marius was right to give you this task. It is an anchor you badly need. Your position in Rome is assured.”

  “I don’t want an assured position!” cried the boy. “I want to fight for my position! I want my position to be the consequence of my own efforts! What satisfaction is there in a position older than Rome herself, a position visited upon me by someone who dowers me with it to save his own reputation?”

  Caesar looked forbidding.’’ You are ungrateful,” he said.

  “Oh, Father! How can you be so obtuse? It isn’t I at fault, it’s Gaius Marius! I am what I have always been! Not ungrateful! In giving me this burden I shall have to find a way to rid myself of, Gaius Marius has done not one thing to earn gratitude from me! His motives are as impure as they are selfish.”

  “Will you stop overrating your own importance?” cried Aurelia in despairing tones. “My son, I have been telling you since you were so small I had to carry you that your ideas are too grand, your ambitions too overweening!”

  “What does that matter?” asked the boy, his tones more despairing still. “Mother, I am the only one who can make that judgment! And it is one I can make only at the end of my life—not before it has begun! Now it cannot begin at all!”

  Caesar thought it time to try a different tack. “Gaius Junior, we have no choice in the matter,” he said. “You’ve been in the Forum, you know what’s happened. If Lucius Cinna, who is the senior consul, thinks it prudent to agree to whatever Gaius Marius says, I cannot stand against him! I have not only to think about you, but to think about your mother and the girls. Gaius Marius is not his old self. His mind is diseased. But he has the power.”

  “Yes, I see that,” said Young Caesar, calming a little. “In that one respect I have no desire to surpass him—or even to emulate him. I will never cause blood to flow in the streets of Rome.”

  As insensitive as she was practical, Aurelia deemed the crisis over. She nodded. “There, that’s better, my son. Like it or not, you are going to be flamen Dialis.”

  Lips hard, eyes bleak, Young Caesar looked from his mother’s haggardly beautiful face to his father’s tiredly handsome one and saw no true sympathy; worse by far, he thought he saw no true understanding. What he didn’t realize was that he himself lacked understanding of his parents’ predicament.

  “May I please go?” he asked.

  “Provided you avoid any Bardyaei and don’t go further than Lucius Decumius’s,” Aurelia said.

  “I’m only going to find Gaius Matius.”

  He walked off to the door which led into the garden at the bottom of the insula’s light-well, taller than his mother now and slim rather than thin, with shoulders seeming too broad for his width.

  “Poor boy,” said Caesar, who did understand some of it.

  “He’s permanently anchored now,” said Aurelia tightly. “I fear for him, Gaius Julius. He has no brakes.”

  *

  Gaius Matius was the son of the knight Gaius Matius, and was almost exactly the same age as Young Caesar; they had been born on opposite sides of the courtyard separating the apartments of their parents, and had grown up together. Their futures had always been different, just as their childish hopes were, but they knew each other as well as brothers did, and liked each other very much more than brothers usually did.

  A smaller child than Young Caesar, Gaius Matius was fairish in coloring, with hazel eyes; he had a pleasantly good-looking face and a gentle mouth, and was his father’s son in every way—he was already attracted to commerce and commercial law, and most happy that his manhood would be spent in them; he also loved to garden, and had eight green fingers and two green thumbs.

  Digging happily in “his” corner of the courtyard, he saw his friend come through the door and knew immediately that something serious was wrong. So he put his trowel down and got to his feet, flicking soil from his tunic because his mother didn’t like his bringing dirt inside, then ruining the effect by wiping his grubby paws on its front.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked placidly.

  “Congratulate me, Pustula!” said Young Caesar in ringing tones. “I am the new flamen Dialisl”

  “Oh, dear,’’ said Matius, whom Young Caesar had called Pimple since early childhood because he was always much smaller. He squatted down again, resumed his digging. “That is a shame, Pavo,” he said, putting just enough sympathy into his voice. He had called Young Caesar a peacock for as long as he had been called a pimple; their mothers had taken them and their sisters on a picnic treat out to the Pincian hill, where peacocks strutted and fanned out their tails to complement the froth of almond blossoms and the carpet of narcissus. Just so did the toddler Caesar strut, just so did he plume himself. And Pavo the peacock it had been ever since.

  Young Caesar squatted beside Gaius Matius and concentrated upon keeping his tears at bay, for he was losing his anger and discovering grief instead. “I was going to win the Grass Crown even younger than Quintus Sertorius,” he said now. “I was going to be the greatest general in the history of the world—greater even than Alexander! I was going to be consul more times than Gaius Marius. My dignitas was going to be enormous!”

  “You’ll have great dignitas as flamen Dialis.”

  “Not for myself, I won’t. People respect the position, not the holder of it.”

  Matius sighed, put his trowel down again. “Let’s go and see Lucius Decumius,” he said.

  That being exactly the right suggestion, Young Caesar rose with alacrity. “Yes, let’s,” he said.

  They emerged into the Subura Minor through the Matius apartment and walked up the side of the building to the big crossroads junction between the Subura Minor and the Vicus Patricius. Here in the apex of Aurelia’s triangular insula was located the premises of the local crossroads college, and here inside the crossroads college had Lucius Decumius reigned for over twenty years.

  He was there, of course. Since New Year’s Day he hadn’t gone anywhere unless to guard Aurelia or her children.

  “Well, if it isn’t the peacock and the pimple!” he said cheerfully from his table at the back. “A little wine in your water, eh?”

  But neither Young Caesar nor Matius had a taste for wine, so they shook their heads and slid onto the bench opposite Lucius Decumius as h
e filled two cups with water.

  “You look glum. I wondered what was going on with Gaius Marius. What’s the matter?” Lucius Decumius asked

  Young Caesar, shrewd eyes filled with love.

  “Gaius Marius has appointed me flamen Dialis.”

  And at last the boy got the reaction he had wanted so badly; Lucius Decumius looked stunned, then angry.

  “The vindictive old shit!”

  “Yes, isn’t he?”

  “When you looked after him all those months, Pavo, he got to know you too well. Give him this—he’s no fool, even if his head is cracked from the inside out.”

  “What am I going to do, Lucius Decumius?”

  For a long moment the caretaker of the crossroads college did not reply, chewing his lip thoughtfully. Then his bright gaze rested upon Young Caesar’s face, and he smiled. “You don’t know that now, Pavo, but you will!” he said chirpily. “What’s all this down in the dumps for? Nobody can plot and scheme better than you when you needs to. You’re farsighted about your future—but you isn’t afraid of your future! Why so frightened now? Shock, boy, that’s all. I knows you better than Gaius Marius do. And I thinks you’ll find a way around it. After all, Young Caesar, this is Rome, not Alexandria. There’s always a legal loophole in Rome.”

  Gaius Matius Pustula sat listening, but said nothing. His father was in the business of drawing up contracts and deeds, so no one knew better than he how accurate that statement was. And yet... That was all very well for contracts and laws. Whereas the priesthood of Jupiter was beyond all legal loopholes because it was older even than the Twelve Tables, as Pavo Caesar was certainly intelligent and well-read enough to know.

  So too did Lucius Decumius definitely know. But, more sensitive than Young Caesar’s parents, Lucius Decumius understood that it was vital to give Young Caesar hope. Otherwise he was just as likely to fall on the sword he was now forbidden to touch. As Gaius Marius surely knew, Young Caesar was not the type suited to holding a flaminate. The boy was inordinately superstitious, but religion bored him. To be so confined, to be so hedged around with rules and regulations, would kill him. Even if he had to kill himself to escape.

  “I am to be married tomorrow morning before I am inaugurated,” said Young Caesar, pulling a face.

  “What, to Cossutia?”

  “No, not her. She’s not good enough to be flaminica Dialis, Lucius Decumius. I was only marrying her for her money. As flamen Dialis I have to marry a patrician. So they’re going to give me Lucius Cinna’s daughter. She’s seven.”

  “Well, that don’t matter either then, do it? Better seven than eighteen, little peacock.”

  “I suppose so.” The boy folded his lips together, nodded. “You are right, Lucius Decumius. I will find a way!”

  But the events of the next day made that vow seem hollow, as Young Caesar came to understand how brilliantly Gaius Marius had trapped him. Everyone had dreaded the walk from the Subura to the Palatine, but during the previous eighteen hours a massive cleanup had taken place, as Lucius Decumius was able to inform the anxious Caesar when he debated how far around the city’s center they ought to walk, not so much for the sake of Young Caesar—who had been exposed to the worst of it already—but for the sake of his mother and his two sisters.

  “Your boy’s is not the only wedding this morning, the Bardyaei tell me,” said Lucius Decumius. “Gaius Marius brought Young Marius back to Rome last night for his wedding. He don’t mind who sees the mess. Except for Young Marius. We can walk across the Forum. The heads is all gone. Blood’s washed away. Bodies dumped. As if the poor young fellow don’t know what his father’s gone and done!”

  Caesar eyed the little man with awe. “Do you actually stand on speaking terms with those terrible men?” he asked.

  “Course I does!” said Lucius Decumius scornfully. “Six of them was—well, is, I suppose—members of my own brotherhood.”

  “I see,” said Caesar dryly. “Well, let us go, then.”

  The wedding ceremony at the house of Lucius Cornelius Cinna was confarreatio, and therefore a union for life. The tiny bride—tiny even for her age—was neither bright nor precocious. Incongruously tricked out in flame and saffron, hung about with wool and talismans, she went through the ceremonies with the animation and enthusiasm of a doll. When the veil was lifted from her face, Young Caesar found it dimpled, flowerlike, and endowed with an enormous pair of soft dark eyes. So, feeling sorry for her, he smiled at her with that conscious charm of his, and was rewarded with a display of the dimples and a gleam of adoration.

  Married at an age when most noble Roman parents had done no more than toy with possible candidates for betrothal, the child newlyweds were then escorted by both families up onto the Capitol and into the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, whose statue smiled down on them fatuously.

  There were other newlyweds present. Cinnilla’s older sister, who was properly Cornelia Cinna, had been hastily married the day before to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. The haste was not due to the usual reason. Rather, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus thought it prudent to safeguard his head by marrying Gaius Marius’s colleague’s daughter, to whom he was promised anyway. Young Marius, arriving after dark the day before, at dawn had married Scaevola Pontifex Maximus’s daughter, called Mucia Tertia to distinguish her from her two elderly cousins. Neither couple looked in the least happy, but particularly was this true of Young Marius and Mucia Tertia, who had never met and would not have an opportunity to consummate their union, as Young Marius had been ordered back to duty the moment the last of the day’s formalities was over.

  Of course Young Marius knew of his father’s atrocities, and had expected to know their extent when he reached Rome. Marius saw him at his camp in the Forum, a very brief interview.

  “Report to the house of Quintus Mucius Scaevola at dawn for your wedding,” he was told. “Sorry I won’t be there, too busy. You and your wife will attend the inauguration of the new flamen Dialis—that’s a very big occasion, they tell me—and then go to the feast at the house of the new flamen Dialis afterward. The moment that’s finished, you go back to duty in Etruria.”

  “What, don’t I get an opportunity to consummate my marriage?” asked Young Marius, trying to be light.

  “Sorry, my son, that will have to wait until things are tidier,” said Marius. “Straight back to work!”

  Something in the old man’s face made him hesitate to ask the question he had to ask; Young Marius drew in a breath and asked it. “Father, may I go now to see my mother? May I sleep there?”

  Grief, pain, anguish; all three flared in Gaius Marius’s eyes. His lips quivered. Then he said, “Yes,” and turned away.

  The moment in which he met his mother was the most awful of all Young Marius’s life. Her eyes! How old she looked! How beaten. How sad. She was completely closed in upon herself, and reluctant to discuss what had happened.

  “I want to know, Mama! What did he do?”

  “What no man does in his right mind, little Gaius.”

  “I have known he was mad since Africa, but I didn’t know how bad it was. Oh, Mama, how can we repair the damage?”

  “We cannot.” She lifted one hand to her head, frowned. “My son, let us not speak of it!” She wet her lips. “How does he look?”

  “You mean it’s true?”

  “What is true?”

  “That you haven’t seen him at all?”

  “I haven’t seen him at all, little Gaius. I never will again.”

  And the way she said it, Young Marius didn’t know whether she meant it from her own side, or divined it from a presentiment of the future, or thought that was how his father wanted it.

  “He looks unwell, Mama. Not himself. He says he won’t be at my wedding. Will you come?”

  “Yes, little Gaius, I’ll come.”

  After the wedding—what an interesting-looking girl Mucia Tertia was!—Julia accompanied the party to Young Caesar’s ceremonies in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Max
imus because Gaius Marius was not present. They had found the city scrubbed and polished, so Young Marius still did not know the extent of his father’s atrocities. And being the Great Man’s son, could not ask a soul.

  The rituals in the temple were enormously long and unbelievably boring. Stripped to his ungirt tunic, Young Caesar was invested with the garments of his new office—the hideously uncomfortable and stuffy circular cape made of two layers of heavy wool widely striped in red and purple, the close-fitting spiked ivory helmet with its impaled disc of wool, the special shoes without knot or buckle. How could he possibly endure to wear all this every single day of his life? Used to feeling his waist cinched with a neat leather belt Lucius Decumius had given him together with a beautiful little dagger in a sheath attached to the belt, Young Caesar’s midriff felt peculiar without it, and the ivory helmet—made for a man with a much smaller head—did not come down to encircle his ears as it should, but sat perched ridiculously atop his ivory-colored hair. That was all right, Scaevola Pontifex Maximus assured him; Gaius Marius was donating him a new apex, and the maker would come round to his mother’s apartment to measure his head for it on the morrow.

  When the boy set eyes on his Aunt Julia, his heart smote him. Now, while the various priests droned on and on and on, he watched her fixedly, willing her to look at him. She could feel that will, of course, but she would not look. Suddenly she was so much older than her forty years; all her beauty retreated before a wall of worry she couldn’t see over or around. But at the end of the ceremonies, when everybody clustered round to greet the new flamen Dialis and his doll like flaminica, Young Caesar saw Julia’s eyes at last, and wished he had not. She kissed him on the lips as she always did, and leaned her head onto his shoulder to weep a little.

  “I am so sorry, Young Caesar,” she whispered. “An unkinder thing he could not have done. He is so busy hurting everyone, even those he ought not to hurt. But he isn’t himself, please see that!”