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

by Colleen McCullough

  “That wouldn’t be hard, Mater.”

  “No.”

  “Aunt Julia will find it lonely without her.”

  “Yes. But she’ll just find more to do.”

  “A pity she has no grandchildren.”

  “For which, blame Young Marius!” said Aurelia tartly.

  They had almost reached the Vicus Patricius before Caesar spoke again. “Mater, I have to go back to Bithynia,” he said.

  “Bithynia? My son, that isn’t wise!”

  “I know. But I gave the King my word.”

  “Isn’t it one of Sulla’s new rules for the Senate that any senator must seek permission to leave Italy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s good,” said Aurelia, sounding pleased. “You must be absolutely candid about where you’re going to the whole House. And take Eutychus with you as well as Burgundus.”

  “Eutychus?” Caesar stopped to stare at her. “But he’s your steward! You won’t manage easily without him. And why?”

  “I’ll manage without him. He’s from Bithynia, my son. You must tell the Senate that your freedman who is still your steward is obliged to travel to Bithynia to see to his business affairs, and that you must accompany him, as is the duty of any proper patron.”

  Caesar burst out laughing. “Sulla is absolutely right! You ought to have been a man. And so Roman! Subtle. Hit them in the face with my destination instead of pretending I’m going to Greece and then being discovered in Bithynia. One always is discovered in a lie, I find.” A different thought occurred to him. “Speaking of subtlety, that fellow Pompeius is not, is he? I wanted to hit him when he said what he did to poor Aunt Julia. And ye gods, can he brag!”

  “Incessantly, I suspect,” said Aurelia.

  “I’m glad I met him,” said her son soberly. “He showed me an excellent reason why the slur upon my reputation might prove a good thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing has served to put him in his place. He has one—but it is not as high or as inviolate as he thinks. Circumstances have conspired to inflate his opinion of himself to insufferable heights. What he’s wanted so far has always been given to him. Even a bride far above his merits. So he’s grown into the habit of assuming it will be forever thus. But it won’t, of course. One day things will go hideously wrong for him. He will find the lesson intolerable. At least I have already had the lesson.”

  “You really think Mucia is above his merits?”

  “Don’t you?” asked Caesar, surprised.

  “No, I don’t. Her birth is immaterial. She was the wife of Young Marius, and she was that because her father knowingly gave her to the son of a complete New Man. Sulla doesn’t forget that kind of thing. Nor forgive it. He’s dazzled that gullible young man with her birth. But he’s neglected toexpound upon all his reasons for giving her away to someone beneath her.”

  “Cunning!”

  “Sulla is a fox, like all red men since Ulysses.”

  “Then it’s as well I intend to leave Rome.”

  “Until after Sulla steps down?’’

  “Until after Sulla steps down. He says that will be after he superintends the election of the year after next’s consuls—perhaps eleven months from now, if he holds his so—called elections in Quinctilis. Next year’s consuls are to be Servilius Vatia and Appius Claudius. But who he intends for the year after, I don’t know. Catulus, probably.”

  “Will Sulla be safe if he steps down?”

  “Perfectly,” said Caesar.

  PART IV

  from OCTOBER 80 B.C.

  until MAY 79 B.C.

  1

  “You’ll have to go to Spain,” said Sulla to Metellus Pius. “Quintus Sertorius is rapidly taking the whole place over.”

  Metellus Pius gazed at his superior somewhat reprovingly. “Surely not!” he said in reasonable tones. “He has fruh—fruh—friends among the Lusitani and he’s quite strong west of the Baetis, buh—buh—but you have good governors in both the Spanish provinces.”

  “Do I really?” asked Sulla, mouth turned down. “Not anymore! I’ve just had word that Sertorius has trounced Lucius Fufidius after that fool was stupid enough to offer him battle. Four legions! Yet Fufidius couldn’t beat Sertorius in command of seven thousand men, only a third of whom were Roman!”

  “He bruh—bruh—brought the Romans with him from Mauretania last spring, of course,” said Metellus Pius. “The rest are Lusitani?”

  “Savages, dearest Piglet! Not worth one hobnail on the sole of a Roman caliga! But quite capable of beating Fufidius.”

  “Oh… Edepol!”

  For some reason beyond the Piglet, this delightfully mild expletive sent Sulla into paroxysms of laughter; some time elapsed before the Dictator could compose himself sufficiently to speak further upon the vexing subject of Quintus Sertorius.

  “Look, Piglet, I know Quintus Sertorius of old. So do you! If Carbo could have kept him in Italy, I might not have won at the Colline Gate because I may well have found myself beaten long before then. Sertorius is at least Gaius Marius’s equal, and Spain is his old stamping ground. When Luscus drove him out of Spain last year, I’d hoped to see the wretched fellow degenerate into a Mauretanian mercenary and trouble us never again. But I ought to have known better. First he took Tingis off King Ascalis, then he killed Paccianus and stole his Roman troops. Now he’s back in Further Spain, busy turning the Lusitani into crack Roman troops. It will have to be you who goes to govern Further Spain—and at the start of the New Year, not in spring.” He picked up a single sheet of paper and waved it at Metellus Pius gleefully. “You can have eight legions! That’s eight less I have to find land for. And if you leave late in December, you can sail direct to Gades.”

  “A great command,” said the Pontifex Maximus with genuine satisfaction, not at all averse to being out of Rome on a long campaign—even if that meant he had to fight Sertorius. No religious ceremonies to perform, no sleepless nights worrying as to whether his tongue would trip him up. In fact, the moment he got out of Rome, he knew his speech impediment would disappear—it always did. He bethought himself of something else. “Whom will you send to govern Nearer Spain?”

  “Marcus Domitius Calvinus, I think.”

  “Not Curio? He’s a guh—guh—guh—good general.”

  “I have Africa in mind for Curio. Calvinus is a better man to support you through a major campaign, Piglet dear. Curio might prove too independent in his thinking,” said Sulla.

  “I do see what you mean.”

  “Calvinus can have a further six legions. That’s fourteen altogether. Surely enough to tame Sertorius!”

  “In no time!” said the Piglet warmly. “Fuh—fuh—fear not, Lucius Cornelius! Spain is suh—suh—safe!”

  Again Sulla began to laugh. “Why do I care? I don’t know why I care, Piglet, and that’s the truth! I’ll be dead before you come back.”

  Shocked, Metellus Pius put out his hands in protest. “No! Nonsense! You’re still a relatively young man!”

  “It was foretold that I would die at the height of my fame and power,” said Sulla, displaying no fear or regret. “I shall step down next Quinctilis, Pius, and retire to Misenum for one last, glorious fling. It won’t be a long fling, but I am going to enjoy every single moment!”

  “Prophets are un—Roman,” said Metellus Pius austerely. “We both know they’re more often wrong than right.”

  “Not this prophet,” said Sulla firmly. “He was a Chaldaean, and seer to the King of the Parthians.”

  Deeming it wiser, Metellus Pius gave the argument up; he settled instead to a discussion of the coming Spanish campaign.

  *

  In truth, Sulla’s work was winding down to inertia. The spate of legislation was over and the new constitution looked as if it would hold together even after he was gone; even the apportioning of land to his veterans was beginning to arrive at a stage where Sulla himself could withdraw from the business, and Volaterrae had fi
nally fallen. Only Nola—oldest and best foe among the cities of Italy—still held out against Rome.

  He had done what he could, and overlooked very little. The Senate was docile, the Assemblies virtually impotent, the tribunes of the plebs mere figureheads, his courts a popular as well as a practical success, and the future governors of provinces hamstrung. The Treasury was full, and its bureaucrats mercilessly obliged to fall into proper practices of accounting. If the Ordo Equester didn’t think the loss of sixteen hundred knights who had fallen victim to Sulla’s proscriptions was enough of a lesson, Sulla drove it home by stripping the knights of the Public Horse of all their social privileges, then directed that all men exiled by courts staffed by knight juries should come home.

  He had crotchets, of course. Women suffered yet again when he forbade any female guilty of adultery to remarry. Gambling (which he abhorred) was forbidden on all events except boxing matches and human footraces, neither of which drew a crowd, as he well knew. But his chief crotchet was the public servant, whom he despised as disorganized, slipshod, lazy, and venal. So he regulated every aspect of the working lives of Rome’s secretaries, clerks, scribes, accountants, heralds, lictors, messengers, the priestly attendants called calatores, the men who reminded other men of yet other men’s names—nomenclatores—and general public servants who had no real job description beyond the fact that they were apparitores. In future, none of these men would know whose service they would enter when the new magistrates came into office; no magistrate could ask for public servants by name. Lots would be drawn three years in advance, and no group would consistently serve the same sort of magistrate.

  He found new ways to annoy the Senate, having already banned every noisy demonstration of approbation or disapproval and changed the order in which senators spoke; now he put a law on the tablets which severely affected the incomes of certain needy senators by limiting the amount of money provincial delegations could spend when they came to Rome to sing the praises of an ex-governor, which meant these delegations could not (as they had in the past) give money to certain needy senators.

  It was a full program of laws which covered every aspect of Roman public life as well as much Roman life hitherto private. Everyone knew the parameters of his lot—how much he could spend, how much he could take, how much he paid the Treasury, who he could marry, whereabouts he would be tried, and what he would be tried for. A massive undertaking executed, it seemed, virtually single—handed. The knights were down, but military heroes were up, up, up. The Plebeian Assembly and its tribunes were down, but the Senate was up, up, up. Those closely related to the proscribed were down, but men like Pompey the Great were up, up, up. The advocates who had excelled in the Assemblies (like Quintus Hortensius) were down, but the advocates who excelled in the more intimate atmosphere of the courts (like Cicero) were up, up, up.

  “Little wonder that Rome is reeling, though I don’t hear a single voice crying Sulla nay,” said the new consul, Appius Claudius Pulcher, to his colleague in the consulship, Publius Servilius Vatia.

  “One reason for that,” said Vatia, “lies in the good sense behind so much of what he has legislated. He is a wonder!”

  Appius Claudius nodded without enthusiasm, but Vatia didn’t misinterpret this apathy; his colleague was not well, had not been well since his return from the inevitable siege of Nola which he seemed to have supervised on and off for a full ten years. He was, besides, a widower burdened with six children who were already notorious for their lack of discipline and a distressing tendency to conduct their tempestuous and deadly battles in public.

  Taking pity on him, Vatia patted his back cheerfully. “Oh, come, Appius Claudius, look at your future more brightly, do! It’s been long and hard for you, but you’ve finally arrived.”

  “I won’t have arrived until I restore my family’s fortune,” said Appius Claudius morosely. “That vile wretch Philippus took everything I had and gave it to Cinna and Carbo—and Sulla has not given it back.”

  “You should have reminded him,” said Vatia reasonably. “He has had a great deal to do, you know. Why didn’t you buy up big during the proscriptions?”

  “I was at Nola, if you remember,” said the unhappy one.

  “Next year you’ll be sent to govern a province, and that will set all to rights.”

  “If my health holds up.”

  “Oh, Appius Claudius! Stop glooming! You’ll survive!”

  “I can’t be sure of that” was the pessimistic reply. “With my luck, I’ll be sent to Further Spain to replace Pius.”

  “You won’t, I promise you,” soothed Vatia. “If you won’t ask Lucius Cornelius on your own behalf, I will! And I’ll ask him to give you Macedonia. That’s always good for a few bags of gold and a great many important local contracts. Not to mention selling citizenships to rich Greeks.”

  “I didn’t think there were any,” said Appius Claudius.

  “There are always rich men, even in the poorest countries. It is the nature of some men to make money. Even the Greeks, with all their political idealism, failed to legislate the wealthy man out of existence. He’d pop up in Plato’s Republic, I promise you!”

  “Like Crassus, you mean.”

  “An excellent example! Any other man would have plummeted into obscurity after Sulla cut him dead, but not our Crassus!”

  They were in the Curia Hostilia, where the New Year’s Day inaugural meeting of the Senate was being held because there was no temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and the size of the Senate had grown sufficiently to render places like Jupiter Stator and Castor’s too small for a comfortable meeting that was to be followed by a feast.

  “Hush!” said Appius Claudius. “Sulla is going to speak.”

  “Well, Conscript Fathers,” the Dictator commenced, voice jovial, “basically it is all done. It was my avowed intention to set Rome back on her feet and make new laws for her that fulfilled the needs of the mos maiorum. I have done so. But I will continue as Dictator until Quinctilis, when I will hold the elections for the magistrates of next year. This you already know. However, I believe some of you refuse to credit that a man endowed with such power would ever be foolish enough to step down. So I repeat that I will step down from the Dictatorship after the elections in Quinctilis. This means that next year’s magistrates will be the last personally chosen by me. In future years all the elections will be free, open to as many candidates as want to stand. There are those who have consistently disapproved of the Dictator’s choosing his magistrates, and putting up only as many names for voting as there are jobs to fill. But—as I have always maintained!—the Dictator must work with men who are prepared to back him wholeheartedly. The electorate cannot be relied upon to return the best men, nor even the men who are overdue for office and entitled to that office by virtue of their rank and experience. So as the Dictator I have been able to ensure I have both the men I wish to work with and to whom office was morally and ethically owed. Like my dear absent Pontifex Maximus, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius. He continues to be worthy of my favor, for he is already on the way to Further Spain, there to contend with the outlawed felon, Quintus Sertorius.”

  “He’s rambling a bit,” said Catulus clinically.

  “Because he has nothing to say,” said Hortensius.

  “Except that he will stand down in Quinctilis.”

  “And I am actually beginning to believe that.”

  *

  But that New Year’s Day, so auspiciously begun, was to end with some long—delayed bad news from Alexandria.

  Ptolemy Alexander the Younger’s time had finally come at the beginning of the year just gone, the second year of Sulla’s reign. Word had arrived then from Alexandria that King Ptolemy Soter Chickpea was dead and his daughter Queen Berenice now ruling alone. Though the throne came through her, under Egyptian law she could not occupy it without a king. Might, the embassage from Alexandria humbly asked, Lucius Cornelius Sulla grant Egypt a new king in the person of Ptolemy Alexander the Yo
unger?

  “What happens if I deny you?’’ asked Sulla.

  “Then King Mithridates and King Tigranes will win Egypt,” said the leader of the delegation. “The throne must be occupied by a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty. If Ptolemy Alexander is not made King and Pharaoh, then we will have to send to Mithridates and Tigranes for the elder of the two bastards, Ptolemy Philadelphus who was called Auletes because of his piping voice.”

  “I can see that a bastard might be able to assume the title of King, but can he legally become Pharaoh?” asked Sulla, thus revealing that he had studied the Egyptian monarchy.

  “Were he the son of a common woman, definitely not’’ was the answer. “However, Auletes and his younger brother are the sons of Ptolemy Soter and Princess Arsinoe, the royal concubine who was the eldest legitimate daughter of the King of Nabataea. It has long been the custom for all the small dynasts of Arabia and Palestina to send their oldest daughters to the Pharaoh of Egypt as his concubines, for that is a more august and respectable fate than marriage to other small dynasts—and brings greater security to their fathers, who all need Egyptian co-operation to carry on their trading activities up the Sinus Arabicus and across the various deserts.”

  “So you’re saying that Alexandria and Egypt would accept one of the Ptolemaic bastards because his mother was royal?’’

  “In the event that we cannot have Ptolemy Alexander, that is inevitable, Lucius Cornelius.”

  “Mithridatid and Tigranic puppets,” said Sulla thoughtfully.

  “As their wives are the daughters of Mithridates, that too is inevitable. Tigranes is now too close to the Egyptian border for us to insist the Ptolemy bastards divorce these girls. He would invade in the name of Mithridates. And Egypt would fall. We are not militarily strong enough to deal with a war of that magnitude. Besides which, the girls have sufficient Ptolemaic blood to pass on the throne. In the event,” said the delegation’s leader suavely, “that the child of Ptolemy Soter and his concubine the daughter of the King of Idumaea fails to grow up and provide Auletes with a wife of half—Ptolemaic blood.”