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

by Colleen McCullough

  Understanding much of this, she was immensely pleased, as she wrote to her elder sister, Cleopatra Tryphaena, in Alexandria:

  I suppose I will never see him again. He is not the kind of man who goes anywhere or does anything without an excellent reason, and by reason, I mean a man’s reason. I think he might have loved me a little. But that would never draw him back to Cyprus. No woman will ever come between him and his purpose.

  I had not met a Roman before, though I understand that in Alexandria they are to be met fairly frequently, so you probably know quite a few. Is his difference because he is a Roman? Or because he is himself alone? Perhaps you can tell me. Though I think I know what you will answer.

  I liked best the unassailable quality he owned; and his calmness, which was not matter—of—fact. Admittedly with my help, he got his fleet. I know, I know, he used me! But there are times, dear Tryphaena, when one does not mind being used. He loved me a little. He prized my birth. And there is not a woman alive who could resist the way he laughs at her.

  It was a very pleasant interlude. I miss him, the wretch! Do not worry about me. To be on the safe side, I took the medicine after he left. Was I married in truth rather than in name only, I might have been tempted not to—Caesar blood is better blood than Ptolemy. As it is, there will never be children for me, alas.

  I am sorry for your difficulties, and sorry too that we were not reared to understand the situation in Egypt. Not, mind you, that our father, Mithridates, and our uncle, Tigranes, would have cared about these difficulties. We are simply their way to obtain an interest in Egypt, since we do have the necessary Ptolemaic blood to establish our claims. But what we could not know was this business about the priests of Egypt and their hold upon the common people, those of true Egyptian blood rather than Macedonian. It is almost as if there were two countries called Egypt, the land of Macedonian Alexandria and the Delta, and the land of the Egyptian Nile.

  I do think, dearest Tryphaena, that you ought to proceed to make your own negotiations with the Egyptian priests. Your husband Auletes is not a man for men, so you do have hope of children. You must bear children! But that you cannot do under Egyptian law until after you are crowned and anointed, and you cannot be crowned and anointed until the Egyptian priests agree to officiate. I know the Alexandrians pretended to the embassage from Rome that you were crowned and anointed—they had the security of knowing that Marcus Perperna and his other ambassadors are ignorant of Egyptian laws and ways. But the people of Egypt know you have not been confirmed in the monarchy. Auletes is a silly man, somewhat deficient in true intellect and quite without political acumen. Whereas you and I are our father’s daughters, and better blessed.

  Go to the priests and begin to negotiate. In your own name. It is clear to me that you will achieve nothing—even children—until the priests are brought around. Auletes chooses to believe that he is more important than they, and that the Alexandrians are powerful enough to end in defeating the priests. He is wrong. Or perhaps it might be best to say, Auletes believes it is more important to be the Macedonian King than the Egyptian Pharaoh—that if he is King, he must also end in becoming Pharaoh. From your letters to me, I am aware that you have not fallen into this trap. But it is not enough. You must also negotiate. The priests understand that our husbands are the last of the line, and that to establish rival dynasts of Egyptian blood after almost a thousand years of foreign invasions and foreign rulers would be more perilous than sanctioning the last of the Ptolemies. So I imagine that what they really want is to be deferred to rather than ignored or held lightly. Defer to them, dearest Tryphaena. And make your husband defer to them! After all, they have custody of the Pharaoh’s treasure labyrinths, of Nilotic income, and of the Egyptian people. The fact that Chickpea succeeded in sacking Thebes seven years ago is beside the point. He was crowned and anointed, he was Pharaoh. And Thebes is not the whole of the Nile!

  In the meantime continue to take the medicine and do not antagonize either your husband or the Alexandrians. As long as they remain your allies, you have a basis for your negotiations with the priests in Memphis.

  By the end of Sextilis, Gaius Julius Caesar had returned to Vatia in Tarsus and could present him with agreements to provide ships and crews at his demand from all the important naval cities and territories in Vatia’s bailiwick. Clearly Vatia was pleased, especially at the agreement with Cyprus. But he had no further military duties for his young subordinate, and was besides the harbinger of the news that Sulla was dead in Rome.

  “Then, Publius Servilius,” said Caesar, “with your leave I would like to return home.”

  Vatia frowned. “Why?”

  “For several reasons,” said Caesar easily. “First—and most importantly—I am of little use to you—unless, that is, you intend to mount an expedition to eject King Tigranes from eastern Pedia and Euphratic Cappadocia?”

  “Such are not my orders, Gaius Julius,” said Vatia stiffly. “I am to concentrate upon governing my province and eliminating the pirate menace. Cappadocia and eastern Pedia must wait.”

  “I understand. In which case, you have no military duties for me in the near future. My other reasons for wishing to return home are personal. I have a marriage to consummate and a career in the law courts to embark upon. My time as flamen Dialis has meant that I am already long in the tooth to begin as an advocate. I mean to become consul in my year. It is my birthright. My father was praetor, my uncle consul, my cousin Lucius consul. The Julii are once more in the forefront.”

  “Very well, Gaius Julius, you may go home,” said Vatia, who was sensitive to these arguments. “I will be happy to commend you to the Senate, and to classify your gathering of my fleet as campaign duty.”

  2

  The death of Sulla had marked the end of amicable relations between the consuls Lepidus and Catulus. Not a pair who by nature were intended to get on together, the actual passing of the Dictator saw the first instance of their falling out; Catulus proposed that Sulla be given a State funeral, whereas Lepidus refused to countenance the expenditure of public funds to bury one whose estate could well afford to bear this cost. It was Catulus who won the ensuing battle in the Senate; Sulla was interred at the expense of the Treasury he had, after all, been the one to succeed in filling.

  But Lepidus was not without support, and Rome was starting to see those return whom Sulla had forced to flee. Marcus Perperna Veiento and Cinna’s son, Lucius, were both in Rome shortly after the funeral was over. Somehow Perperna Veiento had succeeded in evading actual proscription despite his tenure of Sicily at the advent of Pompey—probably because he had not stayed to contest possession of Sicily with Pompey, and had not enough money to make him an alluring proscription prospect. Young Cinna, of course, was penniless. But now that the Dictator was dead both men formed the nucleus of factions secretly opposed to the Dictator’s policies and laws, and naturally preferred to side with Lepidus rather than with Catulus.

  Not only the senior consul but also armed with a reputation of having stood up to Sulla in the Senate, Lepidus considered himself in an excellent position to lessen the stringency of some of Sulla’s legislation now that the Dictator was dead, for his senatorial supporters actually outnumbered those who were for Catulus.

  “I want,” said Lepidus to his great friend Marcus Junius Brutus, “to go down in the history books as the man who regulated Sulla’s laws into a form more acceptable to everyone—even to his enemies.”

  Fortune had favored both of them. Sulla’s last handpicked list of magistrates had included as a praetor the name of Brutus, and when the consuls and praetors had assumed office on the previous New Year’s Day, the lots to determine which provinces would go to which executives had been good to both Lepidus and Brutus; Lepidus had drawn Gaul-across-the-Alps and Brutus Italian Gaul, their terms as governors to commence at the end of their terms in office—that is, on the next New Year’s Day. Gaul-across-the-Alps had not recently been a consul’s province, but two things had changed
that: the war in Spain against Quintus Sertorius (not going well) and the state of the Gallic tribes, now stirring into revolt and thus threatening the land route to Spain.

  “We’ll be able to work our provinces as a team,” Lepidus had said eagerly to Brutus once the lots were drawn. “I’ll wage war against rebellious tribes while you organize Italian Gaul to send me supplies and whatever other support I might need.”

  Thus both Lepidus and Brutus looked forward to a busy and rewarding time as governors next year. Once Sulla was buried, Lepidus had gone ahead with his program to soften the harshest of Sulla’s laws, while Brutus, president of the Violence court, coped with the amendments to Sulla’s laws for that court instituted in the previous year by Sulla’s praetor Gnaeus Octavius. Apparently with Sulla’s consent, Gnaeus Octavius had legislated to compel some of the proscription profiteers to give back property obtained by violence, force, or intimidation—which of course also meant removing the names of the original owners from the lists of the proscribed. Approving of Gnaeus Octavius’s measure, Brutus had continued his work with enthusiasm.

  In June, Sulla’s ashes now enclosed in the tomb on the Campus Martius, Lepidus announced to the House that he would seek the House’s consent to a lex Aemilia Lepida giving back some of the land Sulla had sequestrated from towns in Etruria and Umbria in order to bestow it upon his veterans.

  “As you are all aware, Conscript Fathers,” Lepidus said to an attentive Senate, “there is considerable unrest to the north of Rome. It is my opinion—and the opinions of many others!—that most of this unrest stems out of our late lamented Dictator’s fixation upon punishing the communities of Etruria and Umbria by stripping from them almost every last iugerum of town land. That the House was not always in favor of the Dictator’s measures, the House clearly showed when it opposed the Dictator’s wish to proscribe every citizen in the towns of Arretium and Volaterrae. And it is to our credit that we did manage to dissuade the Dictator from doing this, even though the incident occurred when he was at the height of his power. Well, do not think that my new law has anything good to offer Arretium and Volaterrae! They actively supported Carbo, which means they will get nothing from me. No, the communities I am concerned about were at most involuntary hosts to Carbo’s legions. I speak about places like Spoletium and Clusium, at the moment seething with resentment against Rome because they have lost their town lands, yet were never traitorous! Just the hapless victims of civil war, in the path of someone’s army.”

  Lepidus paused to look along the tiers on both sides of the Curia Hostilia, and was satisfied at what his eyes saw. A little more feeling in his voice, he continued.

  “Any place which actively supported Carbo is not at issue here, and the lands of these traitors are more than enough to settle Sulla’s soldiers upon. I must emphasize that. With very few exceptions, Italy is now Roman to the core, its citizens enfranchised and distributed across the full gamut of the thirty-five tribes. Yet many of the districts of Etruria and Umbria in particular are still being treated like rebellious old—style Allies, for during those times it was always Roman practice to confiscate a district’s public lands. But how can Rome usurp the lands of proper, legal Romans? It is a contradiction! And we, Conscript Fathers of Rome’s senior governing body, cannot continue to condone such practices. If we do, there will be yet another rebellion in Etruria and Umbria—and Rome cannot afford to wage another war at home when she is so pressed abroad! At the moment we have to find the money to support fourteen legions in the field against Quintus Sertorius. And obviously this is where our precious money must go. My law to give back their lands to places like Clusium and Tuder will calm the people of Etruria and Umbria before it is too late.”

  The Senate listened, though Catulus spoke out strongly against the measure and was followed by the most pro—Sullan and conservative elements, as Lepidus had expected.

  “This is the thin end of the wedge!” cried Catulus angrily. “Marcus Aemilius Lepidus intends to pull down our newly formed constitution a piece at a time by starting with measures he knows will appeal to this House! But I say it cannot be allowed to happen! Every measure he succeeds in having sent to the People with a senatus consultant attached will embolden him to go further!”

  But when neither Cethegus nor Philippus came out in support of Catulus, Lepidus felt he was going to win. Odd perhaps that they had not supported Catulus; yet why question such a gift? He therefore went ahead with another measure in the House before he had succeeded in obtaining a senatus consultum of approval for his bill to give back the sequestrated lands.

  “It is the duty of this House to remove our late lamented Dictator’s embargo upon the sale of public grain at a price below that levied by the private grain merchants,” he said firmly, and with the doors of the Curia Hostilia opened wide so that those who listened outside could hear. “Conscript Fathers, I am a sane, decent man! I am not a demagogue. As senior consul I have no need to woo our poorest citizens. My political career is at its zenith—I am not a man on the rise. I can afford to pay whatever the private grain merchants ask for their wheat. Nor do I mean to imply that our late lamented Dictator was wrong when he fixed the price of public grain to the price asked by the private grain merchants. I think our late lamented Dictator did not realize the consequences, is all. For what in actual fact has happened? The private grain merchants have raised their prices because there is now no governmental policy to oblige them to keep their prices down! After all, Conscript Fathers, what businessman can resist the prospect of greater profits? Do kindness and humanity dictate his actions? Of course not! He’s in business to make a profit for himself and his shareholders, and mostly he is too myopic to see that when he raises the price of his product beyond the capacity of his largest market to pay for it, he begins to erode his whole profit basis.

  “I therefore ask you, members of this House, to give my lex Aemilia Lepida frumentaria your official stamp of approval, enabling me to put it before the People for ratification. I will go back to our old, tried—and—true method, which is to have the State offer public grain to the populace for the fixed price of ten sesterces the modius. In years of plenty that price still enables the State to make a good profit, and as years of plenty outnumber years of scarcity, in the long run the State cannot suffer financially.”

  Again the junior consul Catulus spoke in opposition. But this time support for him was minimal; both Cethegus and Philippus were in unequivocal favor of Lepidus’s measure. It therefore got its senatus consultum at the same session as Lepidus brought it up. Lepidus was free to promulgate his law in the Popular Assembly, and did. His reputation rose to new heights, and when he appeared in public he was cheered.

  But his lex agraria concerning the sequestrated lands was a different matter; it lingered in the House, and though he put it to the vote at every meeting, he continued to fail to secure enough votes to obtain a senatus consultum—which meant that under Sulla’s constitution he could not take it to an Assembly.

  “But I am not giving up,” he said to Brutus over dinner at Brutus’s house.

  He ate at Brutus’s house regularly, for in truth he found his own house unbearably empty these days. At the time the proscriptions had begun, he, like most of Rome’s upper classes, had very much feared he would be proscribed; he had remained in Rome during the years of Marius, Cinna and Carbo—and he was married to the daughter of Saturninus, who had once attempted to make himself King of Rome. It had been Appuleia herself who had suggested that he divorce her at once. They had three sons, and it was of paramount importance that the family fortunes remain intact for the younger two of these boys; the oldest had been adopted into the ranks of Cornelius Scipio and was bound to prosper, that family being closely related to Sulla and uniformly in Sulla’s camp. Scipio Aemilianus (namesake of his famous ancestor) was fully grown at the time Appuleia suggested the divorce, and the second son, Lucius, was eighteen. The youngest, Marcus, was only nine. Though he loved Appuleia dearly, Lepidus had di
vorced her for the sake of their sons, thinking that at some time in the future when it was safe, he would remarry her. But Appuleia was not the daughter of Saturninus for nothing; convinced that her presence in the lives of her ex-husband and her sons would always place them in jeopardy, she committed suicide. Her death was a colossal blow to Lepidus, who never really recovered emotionally. And so whenever he could he spent his private hours in the house of another man: especially the house of his best friend, Brutus.

  “Exactly right! You must never give up,” said Brutus. “A steady perseverance will wear the Senate down, I’m sure of it.”

  “You had better hope that senatorial resistance crumbles quickly,” said the third diner, seated on a chair opposite the lectus medius.

  Both men looked at Brutus’s wife, Servilia, with a concern tempered by considerable respect; what Servilia had to say was always worth hearing.

  “What precisely do you mean?’’ asked Lepidus.

  “I mean that Catulus is girding himself for war.”

  “How did you find that out?” asked Brutus.

  “By keeping my ears pricked,” she said with expressionless face. Then she smiled in her secretive, buttoned—up way. “I popped around to visit Hortensia this morning, and she’s not the sister of our greatest advocate for no reason—like him, she’s an inveterate talker. Catulus adores her, so he talks to her too much—and she talks to anyone with the skill to pump her.”

  “And you, of course, have that skill,” said Lepidus.

  “Certainly. But more importantly I have the interest to pump her. Most of her female visitors are more fascinated by gossip and women’s matters, whereas Hortensia would far rather talk politics. So I make it my business to see her often.”