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

by Colleen McCullough

  Being Julia, she found a smile and actually made it reach her eyes. “Oh, it isn’t all bad news! I was given a letter from Sulla which authorizes payment out of the estate of one hundred silver talents. That is what he assesses my dowry at, had Gaius Marius ever got round to giving me one. For, as all the gods know, I came to him penniless! But I am to have the hundred talents because, Sulla informs me, I am the sister of Julilla. For her sake, as she was his wife, he will not see me want. The letter was actually quite gracefully phrased.”

  “It sounds a lot of money—but after what you’ve had, it’s nothing,” said Aurelia, tight—lipped.

  “It will buy me a nice house on the Vicus Longus or the Alta Semita, and yield me an adequate income besides. The slaves of course are to go with the estate, but Sulla has allowed me to keep Strophantes—I am so glad about that! The poor old man is quite crazed with grief.” She stopped, her grey eyes full of tears—not for herself, but for Strophantes. “Anyway,” she continued, “I will manage very comfortably. Which is more than the wives or mothers of other men on the list can say. They will get absolutely nothing.”

  “And what about you, Mucia Tertia?” asked Caesar. “Are you classified as Marian or Mucian?’’ She displayed no sign of grief for her husband, he noted, or even self-pity at her widow’s status. One knew Aunt Julia grieved, though she never showed it. But Mucia Tertia?

  “I am classified as Marian,” she said, “so I lose my dowry. My father’s estate is heavily encumbered. There was nothing for me in his will. Had there been something, my stepmother would try to keep it from me anyway. My own mother is all right—Metellus Nepos is safe, he is for Sulla. But their two boys must be thought of ahead of me. Julia and I have talked it over on the way here. I am to go with her. Sulla has forbidden me to remarry, as I was the wife of a Marius. Not that I wish to take another husband. I do not.”

  “It’s a nightmare!” cried Aurelia. She looked down at her hands, inky—fingered and a little swollen in their joints. “It may be that we too will be put on the list. My husband was Gaius Marius’s man to the end. And Cinna’s at the time he died.”

  “But this insula is in your name, Mater. As all the Cottae stand for Sulla, it should remain yours,” Caesar said. “I may lose my land. But at least as flamen Dialis I will have my salary from the State and a State house in the Forum. I suppose Cinnilla will lose her dowry, such as it is.”

  “I gather Cinna’s relatives will lose everything,” Julia said, and sighed. “Sulla means to see an end to opposition.”

  “What of Annia? And the older daughter, Cornelia Cinna?” asked Aurelia. “I have always disliked Annia. She was a poor mother to my little Cinnilla, and she remarried with indecent haste after Cinna died. So I daresay she’ll survive.”

  “You’re right, she will. She’s been married to Pupius Piso Frugi long enough to be classified as Pupian,” said Julia. “I found out a lot from Dolabella, he was only too anxious to tell me who was going to suffer! Poor Cornelia Cinna is classified with Gnaeus Ahenobarbus. Of course she lost her house to Sulla when he first arrived, and Annia wouldn’t take her in then. I believe she’s living with an old Vestal aunt out on the Via Recta.”

  “Oh, I am so glad both my girls are married to relative nobodies!’’ Aurelia exclaimed.

  “I have a piece of news,” said Caesar, to draw the women’s attention away from their own troubles.

  “What?” asked Mucia Tertia.

  “Lepidus must have had a premonition of this. Yesterday he divorced his wife. Saturninus’s daughter, Appuleia.”

  “Oh, that’s terrible!” cried Julia. “I can bear the fact that the ones who fought against Sulla must be punished, but why must their children and their children’s children suffer too? All the fuss about Saturninus was so long ago! Sulla won’t care about Saturninus, so why should Lepidus do that to her? She’s borne him three splendid sons!”

  “She won’t bear him any more,” Caesar said. “She took a nice hot bath and opened her veins. So now Lepidus is running around sobbing rivers of grief. Pah!”

  “Oh, but he was always that sort of man,” said Aurelia with scorn. “I do not deny that there must be a place in the world for flimsy men, but the trouble with Marcus Aemilius Lepidus is that he genuinely believes he has substance.”

  “Poor Lepidus!” sighed Julia.

  “Poor Appuleia,” said Mucia Tertia rather dryly.

  *

  But now, after what Cotta had told them, it seemed that the Caesars were not to be proscribed. The six hundred iugera at Bovillae were safe, Caesar would have a senatorial census. Not, he reflected wryly as he watched the snow pouring down the light well like a powdery waterfall, that he needed to worry about a senatorial census! The flamen Dialis was automatically a member of the Senate.

  As he watched this sudden appearance of real winter, his mother watched him.

  Such a nice person, she thought—and that is my doing, no one else’s. For though he has many excellent qualities, he is far from perfect. Not as sympathetic or forgiving or tender as his father, for all that he has a look of his father about him. A look of me too. He is so brilliant in so many different ways. Send him anywhere in this building and he can fix whatever is wrong—pipes, tiles, plaster, shutters, drains, paint, wood. And the improvements he has made to our elderly inventor’s brakes and cranes! He can actually write in Hebrew and Median! And speak a dozen languages, thanks to our amazing variety of tenants. Before he became a man he was a legend on the Campus Martius, so Lucius Decumius swears to me. He swims, he rides, he runs, all like the wind. The poems and plays he writes—as good as Plautus and Ennius, though I am his mother and should not say so. And his grasp of rhetoric, so Marcus Antonius Gnipho tells me, is without peer. How did Gnipho put it? My son can move stones to tears and mountains to rage. He understands legislation. And he can read anything at a single glance, no matter how bad the writing. In all of Rome there is no one else who can do that, even the prodigy Marcus Tullius Cicero. As for the women—how they pursue him! Up and down the Subura. He thinks I do not know, of course. He thinks I believe him chaste, waiting for his dear little wife. Well, that is better so. Men are strange creatures when it comes to the part of them makes them men. But my son is not perfect. Just superlatively gifted. He has a shocking temper, though he guards it well. He is self-centered in some ways and not always sensitive to the feelings and wants of others. As for this obsession he has about cleanliness—it pleases me to see him so fastidious, yet the extent of it he never got from me or anyone else. He won’t look at a woman unless she’s come straight from a bath, and I believe he actually inspects her from the top of her head to the spaces between her toes. In the Subura! However, he is greatly desired, so the standard of cleanliness among the local women has risen hugely since he turned fourteen. Precocious little beast! I always used to hope my husband availed himself of the local women during those many years he was away, but he always told me he didn’t, he waited for me. If I disliked anything in him, it was that. Such a burden of guilt he shifted to me by keeping himself for me, whom he rarely saw. My son will never do that to his wife. I hope she appreciates her luck. Sulla. He has been summoned to see Sulla. I wish I knew why. I wish—

  She came out of herself with a start to find Caesar leaning across his desk snapping his fingers at her, and laughing.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “All over the place,” she answered as she got up, feeling the chill. “I’ll have Burgundus give you a brazier, Caesar. It is too cold in this room.”

  “Fusspot!” he said lovingly to her back.

  “I don’t want you confronting Sulla with a sniffle and a thousand sneezes,” she said.

  But the morrow brought no sniffles, no sneezes. The young man presented himself at the house of Gnaeus Ahenobarbus a good summer hour before the winter dinnertime, prepared to kick his heels in the atrium rather than run the risk of arriving too late. Sure enough, the steward—an exquisitely oily Greek who subjec
ted him to subtle come—hither glances—informed him that he was too early, would he mind waiting? Conscious of crawling skin, Caesar nodded curtly and turned his back on the man who would soon be famous, whom all Rome would know as Chrysogonus.

  But Chrysogonus wouldn’t go; clearly he found the visitor attractive enough to pursue, and Caesar had the good sense not to do what he longed to do—knock the fellow’s teeth down his throat. Then inspiration struck. Caesar walked briskly out onto the loggia, and the steward disliked the cold too much to follow him. This house had two loggias, and the one where Caesar stood making crescent patterns in the snow with the toe of his clog looked not down onto the Forum Romanum, but back up the Palatine cliff in the direction of the Clivus Victoriae. Right above him was the loggia of another house literally overhung the house of Ahenobarbus.

  Whose house? Caesar wrinkled his brow, remembered. Marcus Livius Drusus, assassinated in its atrium ten years ago. So this was where all those orphaned children lived under the arid supervision of… Who? That’s right, the daughter of that Servilius Caepio who had drowned coming back from his province! Gnaea? Yes, Gnaea. And her dreaded mother, the ghastly Porcia Liciniana! Lots of little Servilii Caepiones and Porcii Catones. The wrong Porcii Catones, of the branch Salonius. Descendants of a slave—there was one now! He was leaning over the marble balustrade, a painfully thin boy with a neck long enough to give him a resemblance to a stork, and a nose large enough to show even at this distance. A lot of lank, reddish hair. No mistaking Cato the Censor’s brood!

  All of these thoughts indicated one thing about Caesar his mother had not catalogued during her reverie: he adored gossip and forgot none of it.

  “Honored priest, my master is ready to see you.” Caesar turned away with a grin and a cheerful wave up to the boy on Drusus’s balcony, hugely amused when the wave was not returned. Young Cato was probably too amazed to wave back; there would be few in Sulla’s temporary dwelling with the time to make overtures of friendship to a poor little storky boy who was the descendant of a Tusculan squire and a Celtiberian slave.

  *

  Though he was prepared for the sight of Sulla the Dictator, Caesar still found himself shocked. No wonder he hadn’t sought Mater out! Nor would I if I were he, thought Caesar, and walked forward as quietly as his wooden-soled clogs permitted.

  Sulla’s initial reaction was that he looked upon a total stranger; but this was due to the ugly red-and-purple cape and the peculiar effect the creamy ivory helmet created, of someone with a shaven skull.

  “Take all that stuff off,” said Sulla, and returned his gaze to the mass of papers on his desk.

  When he looked up again the priestling was gone. In his place there stood his son. The hairs bristled on Sulla’s arms, and on the back of his neck; he emitted a sound like air oozing out of a bladder and stumbled to his feet. The golden hair, the wide blue eyes, the long Caesar face, all that height… And then Sulla’s tear-clouded vision assimilated the differences; Aurelia’s high sharp cheekbones with the hollows beneath and Aurelia’s exquisite mouth with the creases in the corners. Older than Young Sulla had been when he died, more man than boy. Oh, Lucius Cornelius, my son, why did you have to die?

  He dashed the tears away. “I thought you were my son for a moment,” he said harshly, and shivered.

  “He was my first cousin.”

  “I remember you said you liked him.”

  “I did.”

  “Better than Young Marius, you said.”

  “I did.”

  “And you wrote a poem about him after he died, but you said it wasn’t good enough to show me.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  Sulla sank back into his chair, his hands trembling. “Sit, boy. There, where the light is best and I can see you. My eyes are not what they used to be.” Drink him in! He is sent from the Great God, whose priest he is. “Your uncle Gaius Cotta told you what?”

  “Only that I had to see you, Lucius Cornelius.”

  “Call me Sulla, it’s what everybody calls me.”

  “And I am called Caesar, even by my mother.”

  “You are the flamen Dialis.”

  Something flashed through the disquietingly familiar eyes—why were they so familiar, when his son’s had been much bluer and sprightlier? A look of anger. Pain? No, not pain. Anger.

  “Yes, I am the flamen Dialis,” Caesar answered.

  “The men who appointed you were enemies of Rome.”

  “At the time they appointed me they were not.”

  “That’s fair enough.” Sulla picked up his reed pen, which was encased in gold, then put it down again. “You have a wife.”

  “I do.”

  “She’s Cinna’s daughter.”

  “She is.”

  “Have you consummated your marriage?’’

  “No.”

  Up from behind his desk Sulla got to walk over to the window, which gaped wide open despite the freezing cold. Caesar smiled inwardly, wondering that his mother would have said—here was another who didn’t care about the elements.

  “I have undertaken the restitution of the Republic,” said Sulla, looking out the window straight at the statue of Scipio Africanus atop his tall column; at this altitude, he and tubby old Scipio Africanus were on the same level. “For reasons I imagine you will understand, I have chosen to begin with religion. We have lost the old values, and must return to them. I have abolished the election of priests and augurs, including the Pontifex Maximus. Politics and religion in Rome are inextricably intertwined, but I will not see religion made the servant of politics when it ought to be the other way round.”

  “I do understand,” said Caesar from his chair. “However, I believe the Pontifex Maximus must be elected.”

  “What you believe, boy, does not interest me!”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “Certainly not to make smart remarks at my expense!”

  “I apologize.”

  Sulla swung round, glared at the flamen Dialis fiercely. “You’re not a scrap afraid of me, boy, are you?”

  Came the smile—the same smile!—the smile which caught at heart and mind together. “I used to hide in the false ceiling above our dining room and watch you talking to my mother. Times have changed, and so have all our circumstances. But it’s hard to be afraid of someone you suddenly loved in the moment you found out he was not your mother’s paramour.”

  That provoked a roar of laughter, laughter to drive away a fresh spring of tears. “True enough! I wasn’t. I did try once, but she was far too wise to have me. Thinks like a man, your mother. I bring no luck to women, I never have.” The pale unsettling eyes looked Caesar up and down. “You won’t bring any luck to women either, though there’ll be plenty of women.”

  “Why did you summon me, if not to seek my advice?”

  “It’s to do with regulating religious malpractices. They say you were born on the same day of the year that Jupiter’s fire finally went out.”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did you interpret that?”

  “As a good omen.”

  “Unfortunately the College of Pontifices and the College of Augurs do not agree with you, young Caesar. They have made you and your flaminate their most important business for some time now. And have concluded that a certain irregularity in your flaminate was responsible for the destruction of the Great God’s temple.”

  The joy flooded into Caesar’s face. “Oh, how glad I am to hear you say that!”

  “Eh? Say what?”

  “That I am not the flamen Dialis.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You did! You did!”

  “You’ve misinterpreted me, boy. You are definitely the flamen Dialis. Fifteen priests and fifteen augurs have arrived at that conclusion beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

  The joy had died out of Caesar’s face completely. “I’d rather be a soldier,” he said gruffly. “I’m more suited for it.”

  “What you’d rather be doe
sn’t matter. It’s what you are that does. And what your wife is.”

  Caesar frowned, looked at Sulla searchingly. “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned my wife.”

  “You must divorce her,” said Sulla baldly.

  “Divorce her? But I can’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re married confarreatio.”

  “There is such a thing as diffarreatio.”

  “Why must I divorce her?’’

  “Because she’s Cinna’s brat. It turns out that my laws pertaining to proscribed men and their families contain a minor flaw in regard to the citizen status of children under age. The priests and augurs have decided that the lex Minicia applies. Which means your wife—who is flaminica Dialis—is not Roman or patrician. Therefore she cannot be flaminica Dialis. As this flaminate is a dual one, the legality of her position is quite as important as yours. You must divorce her.”

  “I won’t do that,” said Caesar, beginning to see a way out of this hated priesthood.

  “You’ll do anything I say you must, boy!”

  “I will do nothing I think I must not.”

  The puckered lips peeled back slowly. “I am the Dictator,” said Sulla levelly. “You will divorce your wife.”

  “I refuse,” said Caesar.

  “I can force you to it if I have to.”

  “How?’’ asked Caesar scornfully. ‘ The rites of diffarreatio require my complete consent and co-operation.”

  Time to reduce this young pest to a quivering jellyfish: Sulla let Caesar see the naked clawed creature which lived inside him, a thing fit only to screech at the moon. But even as the creature leaped forth, Sulla realized why Caesar’s eyes were so familiar. They were like his own! Staring back at him with the cold and emotionless fixity of a snake. And the naked clawed creature slunk away, impotent. For the first time in his life Sulla was left without the means to bend another man to his will. The rage which ought by now to possess him could not come; forced to contemplate the image of himself in someone else’s face, Lucius Cornelius Sulla was powerless.

  He had to fight with mere words. “I have vowed to restore the proper religious ethics of the mos maiorum,” he said. “Rome will honor and care for her gods in the way she did at the dawn of the Republic. Jupiter Optimus Maximus is displeased. With you—or rather, with your wife. You are his special priest, but your wife is an inseparable part of your priesthood. You must separate yourself from this present unacceptable wife, take another one. You must divorce Cinna’s non—Roman brat.”