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

by Colleen McCullough

  “Ye gods!”

  “You must come with me.”

  “They wouldn’t let me!”

  “They’ll never know. I’ll inform Lucullus that you’re too ill to travel with Sulla’s cortege, that I’ll send you to Rome before the funeral. Lucullus is too busy at the moment to remember his own frail position, and he doesn’t know about your child. So if you are to escape him it must be now, Valeria.”

  “You’re right. He would indeed denounce me.”

  “He might even have you killed.”

  “Oh, Metrobius!”

  “Come with me, Valeria. As soon as he’s gone you and I will walk out of this house. No one will see us go. Nor will anyone ever find out what happened to you.” Metrobius smiled wryly. “After all, I was just Sulla’s boy. You, a Valeria Messala, were his wife. Far above me!”

  But she didn’t think she was above him at all. Months ago she had fallen in love with him, even though she understood it was not in him to return that love. So she said, “I will come.”

  The hand he still held was patted gladly, then placed in her lap. “Good! Stay here for the present. Lucullus must not set eyes on you. Get a few things together, but nothing more than will fit on the back of a pack mule. Make sure you take only dark plain gowns, and that your cloaks have hoods. You must look like my wife, not the wife of Lucius Cornelius Sulla.”

  Off he went, leaving Valeria Messala to look at a future vastly different from the one she had contemplated would be hers after Sulla’s obsequies were over. Never having understood the threat she posed to Lucullus, she knew she had cause to be very grateful to the actor. To go with Metrobius might mean the pain of seeing him love men when she longed for him to love her; but he would regard the child as his own, and she could offer him a family life he might in time come to appreciate more than the tenuous affairs he had enjoyed with men other than Sulla. Yes, better that by far than the agony of never seeing him again! Or the finality of death. Without, she had thought until now, good reason, she had feared the cold and haughty Lucullus. Rightly so.

  Rising, she began to sort through her many chests of rich garments, choosing the plainest and darkest things. Of money she had none, but her jewels were glorious. Apparently Metrobius had plenty of money, so the jewels could be her dowry. A hedge against hard times in the future. Cyrenaica! The golden backwater of the world. It sounded wonderful.

  *

  Sulla’s funeral reduced his triumph to utter insignificance. Two hundred and ten litters loaded down to creaking point with myrrh, frankincense, cinnamon, balsam, nard and other aromatics—the gift of Rome’s women—were carried by black—garbed bearers. And because Sulla’s corpse was so shrunken and mummified by loss of blood that it could not be displayed, a group of sculptors had set to work and fashioned out of cinnamon and frankincense an effigy of Sulla sitting on his bier, preceded by a lictor made from the same spices. There were floats depicting every aspect of his life except the first thirty-three disreputable years and the last few disreputable months. There he was before the walls of Nola receiving his Grass Crown from the hands of a centurion; there he was standing sternly over a cowering King Mithridates making sure the Treaty of Dardanus was signed; there he was winning battles, legislating laws, capturing Jugurtha, executing the Carboan prisoners after the Colline Gate. A special vehicle displayed the more than two thousand chaplets and wreaths made from pure gold which had been given to him by towns and tribes and kings and countries everywhere. His ancestors rode, clad in black, in black—and—gilt chariots drawn by splendid black horses, and his chubby little five-year-old twins Faustus and Fausta walked amid the chief mourners.

  The day was suffocating and overcast, the air exuded unshed rain. But the biggest funeral procession Rome had ever seen got under way from the house overlooking the Circus Maximus, wended its way down through the Velabrum to the Forum Romanum, where Lucullus—a powerful and famous speaker—gave the eulogy from the top of the rostra, standing alongside the cunning bier on which the frankincense and cinnamon Sulla sat upright behind his spicy lictor and the horrible wizened old corpse lay below in a special compartment. For the second time in three years Rome wept to see his twins deprived of a parent, and broke into applause when Lucullus told Rome that he was the children’s guardian, and would never see them want. Sentiment clouded every watering eye; had it not, Rome would have perceived that Faustus and Fausta were now old enough to reveal that in physique and faces and coloring they were going to take after their maternal great—uncle, the awesome but unhandsome Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus. Whom their father had called Piggle—wiggle. And murdered in a fit of rage after Aurelia had repudiated him.

  As if under the spell of some enchantment, the rain held off as the procession got under way again, this time up the Clivus Argentarius, through the Fontinalis Gate beyond which lay the mansion which had once belonged to Gaius Marius, and down to the Campus Martius. There Sulla’s tomb already waited in sumptuous isolation on the Via Lata adjacent to the ground on which met the Centuriate Assembly. At the ninth hour of daylight the bier was deposited on top of the huge, well-ventilated pyre, its kindling and logs interspersed with the contents of those two hundred and ten litters of spices. Never would Sulla smell sweeter than when, according to his wishes, his mortal remains burned.

  Just as the torches licked at the kindling all around the base of the pyre, a huge wind arose; the miniature mountain went up with a roar, and blazed so fiercely the mourners gathered around it had to move away, shielding their faces. Then as the fire died down it began to rain at last, a solid downpour which quenched and cooled the coals so quickly that Sulla’s ashes were collected a few short moments after the holocaust. Into an exquisite alabaster jar ornamented with gold and gems all that was left of Sulla went; Lucullus dispensed with the canopy Sulla had asked for to shelter his remains from contamination by a stray granule of Gaius Marius, for the rain continued unabated, and no stray granules of any dust floated on the air.

  The jar was deposited carefully inside the tomb, built and masoned and sculpted within four days out of multicolored marbles, round in shape and supported by fluted columns crowned with the new kind of capital Sulla had brought back from Corinth and had made so popular—delicate sprays of acanthus leaves. His name and titles and deeds were carved upon a panel facing the road, and beneath them was his simple epitaph. He had composed it himself, and it said:

  NO BETTER FRIEND • NO WORSE ENEMY

  “Well, I’m very glad that’s over,” said Lucullus to his brother as they trudged home through the tempest, soaked to their skins and shivering with cold.

  He was a worried man: Valeria Messala had not arrived in Rome. Her brother, Rufus, her cousins Niger and Metellus Nepos, and her great—aunt the retired Vestal were all beginning to ask agitated questions; Lucullus had been obliged to inform them that he had sent to Misenum for her, only to be told by an exhausted messenger on a winded horse that she had disappeared.

  Almost a month went by before Lucullus called off the now frantic search, which had included a careful combing of the shore for some miles north and south of the villa, and of every wood and grove between Neapolis and Sinuessa. Sulla’s last wife had vanished. And so had her jewels.

  “Robbed and murdered,” said Varro Lucullus.

  His brother (who kept some things even from this beloved person) made no answer. His luck, he told himself, bade fair to be as good as Sulla’s, for he had not got as far as the day of the funeral before he realized how dangerous Valeria Messala might be. She knew too much about him, whereas he knew virtually nothing about her. He would have had to kill her. How providential therefore that someone had done it for him! Fortune favored him.

  The disappearance of Metrobius concerned him not at all—if indeed he had bothered to think about it, which he did not. Rome had more than enough tragedy queens to stop up the gap; her theater world was stuffed with them. Of more moment to Lucullus by far was the fact that he no longer had access to u
nlimited supplies of motherless little girls. Oh, how he would miss Misenum!

  PART V

  from SEXTILIS (AUGUST) 80 B.C.

  until SEXTILIS (AUGUST) 77 B.C.

  1

  This time, Caesar sailed to the east. His mother’s steward, Eutychus (really his steward, but Caesar never made the mistake of thinking that), soft and semi—sedentary for years, discovered that traveling with Gaius Julius Caesar was no leisurely progress. On land—particularly when the road was as respectable as the Via Appia—he would cover forty miles in a day, and anyone who did not keep up was left behind. Only dread of disappointing Aurelia enabled Eutychus to hang on, especially during the first few days, when the steward’s fat smooth legs and pampered bottom dissolved into one enormous pain.

  “You’re saddlesore!” laughed Caesar unsympathetically when he found Eutychus weeping miserably after they stopped at an inn near Beneventum.

  “It’s my legs hurt the worst,” sniffled Eutychus.

  “Of course they do! On a horse they’re unsupported weight, they just dangle off the end of your behind and flop about—particularly true of yours, Eutychus! But cheer up! By the time we get to Brundisium they’ll feel much better. So will you. Too much easy Roman living.”

  The thought of reaching Brundisium did nothing to elevate the steward’s mood; he burst into a fresh spate of tears at the prospect of a heaving Ionian Sea.

  “Caesar’s a beggar,” said Burgundus, grinning, after Caesar had departed to make sure their accommodation was clean.

  “He’s a monster!” wailed Eutychus. “Forty miles a day!’’

  “You’re lucky. This is just the beginning. He’s going easy on us. Mostly because of you.”

  “I want to go home!”

  Burgundus reached out to give the steward’s shoulder a clumsy pat. “You can’t go home, Eutychus, you know that.” He shivered, grimaced, his wide and slightly vacant-looking eyes filled with horror. “Come on, dry your face and try to walk a bit. It’s better to suffer with him than go back to face his mother—brrr! Besides, he’s not as unfeeling as you think he is. Right at this moment he’s arranging for a nice hot bath for your nice sore arse.”

  Eutychus survived, though he wasn’t sure he would survive the sea crossing. Caesar and his small entourage took nine days to cover the three hundred and seventy miles between Rome and Brundisium, where the relentless young man shepherded his hapless flock onto a ship before any of them could find the breath to petition him for a few days’ rest first. They sailed to the lovely island of Corcyra, took another ship there for Buthrotum in Epirus, and then rode overland through Acarnania and Delphi to Athens. This was a Greek goat path, not a Roman road; up and down the tall mountains, through wet and slippery forests.

  “Obviously even we Romans don’t move armies along this route,’’ Caesar observed when they emerged into the awesome vale of Delphi, more a gardened lap on a seated massif. The idea had to be finished before he could gaze about and admire; he said, “That’s worth remembering. An army could move along it if the men were stouthearted. And no one would know because no one would believe it. Hmmm.”

  Caesar liked Athens, and Athens liked him. In contrast to his noble contemporaries, he had nowhere solicited hospitality from the owners of large houses or estates, contenting himself with hostelries where available, and a camp beside the road where they were not. So in Athens he had found a reasonable-looking inn below the Acropolis on its eastern side, and taken up residence. Only to find himself summoned immediately to the mansion of Titus Pomponius Atticus. He didn’t know the man, of course, though (like everyone else in Rome) he knew the history of the famous financial disaster Atticus and Crassus had suffered the year after Gaius Marius died.

  “I insist you stay with me,” said the urbane man—of—the—world, who (despite that earlier miscalculation) was a very shrewd judge of his peers. One look at Caesar told him what reports had hinted; here was someone who was going to matter.

  “You are too generous, Titus Pomponius,” Caesar said with a wide smile. “However, I prefer to remain independent.”

  “Independence in Athens will only give you food poisoning and dirty beds,” Atticus answered.

  The cleanliness fanatic changed his mind. “Thank you, I will come. I don’t have a large following—two freedmen and four servants, if you have room for them.”

  “More than enough room.”

  And so it was arranged. As were dinner parties and tourist expeditions; Caesar found an Athens suddenly opened to him that demanded a longer stay than expected. Epicurean and lover of luxury though Atticus was reputed to be, he was not soft, so there were plenty of opportunities to engage in some rough scrambling up cliffs and mountain shoulders of historical note, and good hard gallops across the flats at Marathon. They rode down to Corinth, up to Thebes, looked at the marshy foreshores of Lake Orchomenus where Sulla had won the two decisive battles against the armies of Mithridates, explored the tracks which had enabled Cato the Censor to circumvent the enemy at Thermopylae—and the enemy to circumvent the last stand of Leonidas.

  “Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their command,’’ Caesar read off the stone commemorating that valiant last stand. He turned to Atticus. “The whole world can quote this inscription, but it has a resonance here on the spot that it doesn’t when read off a piece of paper.”

  “Would you be content to be so remembered, Caesar?”

  The long, fair face closed up. “Never! It was a stupid and futile gesture, a waste of brave men. I will be remembered, Atticus, but not for stupidity or futile gestures. Leonidas was a Spartan king. I am a patrician Roman of the Republic. The only real meaning his life had was the manner in which he threw it away. The meaning of my life will lie in what I do as a living man. How I die doesn’t matter, provided I die like a Roman.”

  “I believe you.”

  Because he was a natural scholar and very well educated, Caesar found himself with much in common with Atticus, whose tastes were intellectual and eclectic. They found themselves with a similar taste in literature and works of art, and spent hours poring over a Menander play or a Phidias statue.

  “There are not, however, very many good paintings left in Greece,” Atticus said, shaking his head sadly. “What Mummius didn’t carry off to Rome after he sacked Corinth—not to mention Aemilius Paullus after Pydna!—have successfully vanished in the decades since. If you want to see the world’s best paintings, Caesar, you must go to the house of Marcus Livius Drusus in Rome,”

  “I believe Crassus owns it now.”

  Atticus’s face twisted; he disliked Crassus, colleagues in speculation though they had been. “And has probably dumped the paintings in a dusty heap somewhere in the basement, where they will lie until someone drops a hint to him that they’re worth more than tutored slaves on the market or insulae bought up cheap.”

  Caesar grinned. “Well, Atticus my friend, we can’t all be men of culture and refinement! There’s room for a Crassus.”

  “Not in my house!”

  “You’re not married,” said Caesar toward the end of his time in Athens. He had his ideas as to why Atticus had avoided the entanglements of matrimony, but the statement as he put it was not insulting because the answer did not need to be revealing.

  Atticus’s long, ascetic and rather austere face produced a faint moue of disgust. “No, Caesar. Nor do I intend to marry.”

  “Whereas I have been married since I was thirteen. And to a girl who is still not old enough to take to my bed. That is a strange fate.”

  “Stranger than most. Cinna’s younger daughter. Whom you would not divorce, even for Jupiter Optimus Maximus.”

  “Even for Sulla, you mean,” said Caesar, laughing. “It was very fortunate. I escaped Gaius Marius’s net—with Sulla’s active connivance!—and ceased to be the flamen Dialis.”

  “Speaking of marriages, are you acquainted with Marcus Tullius Cicero?” asked Atticus.

  “No.
I’ve heard of him, of course.”

  “You ought to get on well together, but I suspect you may not,” said Atticus thoughtfully. “Cicero is touchy about his intellectual abilities, and dislikes rivals. You may well be his intellectual superior.”

  “What has this to do with marriage?”

  “I’ve just found him a wife.”

  “How splendid,” said Caesar, uninterested.

  “Terentia. Varro Lucullus’s adoptive sister.”

  “A dreadful woman, I hear.”

  “Indeed. But socially better than he could have hoped for.”

  Caesar made up his mind; time to go, when one’s host was reduced to aimless conversation. Whose fault that was, the guest knew. His reading of this Roman plutocrat in self-imposed exile was that Atticus’s sexual preferences were for young boys, which imposed upon Caesar a degree of reserve normally foreign to his outgoing nature. A pity. There might otherwise have grown out of this first meeting a deep and lasting friendship.

  From Athens, Caesar took the Roman-built military road north from Attica through Boeotia and Thessaly and the pass at Tempe, with a casual salute to Zeus as they rode at Caesar’s remorseless pace past the distant peak of Mount Olympus. From Dium just beyond the party took ship again and sailed from island to island until it reached the Hellespont. From there to Nicomedia was a voyage of three days.

  His reception in the palace at Nicomedia was ecstatic. The old King and Queen had quite given up hope of ever seeing him again, especially after word had come from Mitylene that Caesar had gone back to Rome in company with Thermus and Lucullus. But it was left to Sulla the dog to express the full extent of the joy Caesar’s advent provoked. The animal tore about the palace yelping and squealing, would leap up at Caesar, race over to the King and Queen to tell them who was here, then back to Caesar; its antics quite paled the royal hugs and kisses into insignificance.