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

by Colleen McCullough

  “Why a Picentine?”

  “For one thing, he’ll be inclined to favor Pompeius. They’re a clannish lot, the Picentines. For another, he’ll be a fire—eater. They’re born breathing fire in Picenum!”

  “Take care you don’t end up with burned hands,” said Crassus, already thinking about which of his freedmen would drive the hardest bargain with the agents who rented villas on the Pincian Hill. What a pity he’d never thought of investing in real estate there! An ideal location. All those foreign kings and queens looking for Roman palaces—no, he wouldn’t rent! He’d buy! Rent was a disgraceful waste; a man never saw a sestertius’s return.

  2

  In November the Senate gave in. Marcus Licinius Crassus was informed that he would be allowed to stand in absentia for the consulship. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus was informed that the Senate had sent a decree to the Assembly of the People asking that body to waive the usual requirements—membership in the Senate, the quaestorship and praetorship—and legislate to allow him to stand for the consulship. As the Assembly of the People had passed the necessary law, the Senate was pleased to inform Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus that he would be allowed to stand in absentia for the consulship, et cetera, et cetera.

  When a candidate stood for office in absentia, canvassing was difficult. He couldn’t cross the pomerium into the city to meet the voters, chat to everyone in the Forum, pose modestly nearby when some tribune of the plebs called a contio of the Plebeian Assembly to discuss the merits of this favored candidate—and lambaste his rivals. Because in absentia required special permission from the House, it was rarely encountered, but never before had two candidates for the consulship both stood in absentia. However, as things turned out the usual disadvantages mattered not a bit. Debate in the Senate—even under the threat of those two undischarged armies—had been as feverishly hot as it had been protracted;when the House gave in at last, every other candidate for the consulship had withdrawn from the contest as a protest against the blatant illegality of Pompey’s candidature. If there were no other candidates, Pompey and Crassus would look what they were: dictators in disguise.

  Many and varied were the threats called down upon Pompey’s head and Crassus’s head, mostly in the form of prosecution for treason the moment imperium was lost; so when the tribune of the plebs Marcus Lollius Palicanus (a man from Picenum) called a special meeting of the Plebeian Assembly in the Circus Flaminius on the Campus Martius, every senator who had turned his back on Pompey and Crassus sat up with a shock of realization. They were going to wriggle out of treason charges by bringing back the full powers of the tribunate of the plebs and having ten grateful tribunes of the plebs legislate them immunity from the consequences of their actions!

  Many in Rome wanted to see the restoration, most people because the tribunate of the plebs was a hallowed institution in proper harmony with the mos maiorum, and not a few people because they missed the vigor and buzz of the old days in the lower Forum Romanum when some militant demagogue fired up the Plebs until fists swung and hired ex-gladiators waded into the fray. So Lollius Palicanus’s meeting, widely advertised as being to discuss the restoration of the tribunate of the plebs, was bound to attract crowds. But when the news got round that the consular candidates Pompey and Crassus were going to speak in support of Palicanus, enthusiasm reached heights unknown since Sulla had turned the Plebeian Assembly into a rather attenuated men’s club.

  Used for the less well patronized games, the Circus Flaminius held a mere fifty thousand people; but on the day of Palicanus’s meeting every bleacher was full. Resigned to the fact that no one save those lucky enough to be within a couple of hundred feet would hear a word, most of those who had streamed out along the bank of the Tiber had only come so that they could tell their grandchildren that they had been there on the day two consular candidates who were also military heroes had promised to restore the tribunate of the plebs. Because they would do it! They would!

  Palicanus opened the meeting with a rousing speech aimed at procuring the most possible votes for Pompey and Crassus at the curule elections; those close enough to hear were those high enough in the classes to have a worthwhile vote. All Palicanus’s nine colleagues were present, and all spoke in support of Pompey and Crassus. Then Crassus appeared to great applause and spoke to great applause. A nice series of preliminary entertainments before the main performance. And here he came, Pompey the Great! Clad in glittering golden armor as bright as the sun, looking absolutely gorgeous. He did not have to be an orator; for all the crowd cared, he might have recited gibberish. The crowd had come to see Pompey the Great, and went home deliriously satisfied. No surprise then that when the curule elections took place on the day before the Nones of December, Pompey was voted in as senior consul and Crassus as his junior. Rome was going to have a consul who had never been a member of the Senate—and Rome had preferred him to his more elderly and orthodox colleague.

  *

  “So Rome has her first consul who was never a senator,” said Caesar to Crassus after the election gathering had dispersed. He was sitting with Crassus on the loggia of the Pincian villa where once King Jugurtha of Numidia had sat plotting; Crassus had bought the property after he saw the long list of illustrious foreign names who had rented it over the years. Both of them were looking at the public slaves clearing up the enclosures, bridges and voting platforms from the Saepta.

  “For no other reason than that he wanted to be consul,” said Crassus, aping the peevish note Pompey put into his voice whenever he was thwarted. “He’s a big baby!”

  “In some ways, yes.” Caesar turned his head to glance at Crassus’s face, which bore its usual placid expression. “It’s you who’ll have to do the governing. He doesn’t know how.”

  “Oh, don’t I know! Though he must have absorbed something by now from Varro’s handy little instant manual on senatorial and consular conduct,” said Crassus, and grunted. “I ask you! The senior consul having to peruse a manual of behavior! I have these wonderful visions of what Cato the Censor would say.”

  “He’s asked me to draft the law returning all its powers to the tribunate of the plebs, did he tell you?’’

  “When does he ever tell me anything?”

  “I declined.”

  “Why?”

  “First of all, because he assumed he’d be senior consul.”

  “He knew he’d be senior consul!”

  “And secondly, you’re perfectly capable of drafting any law the pair of you might want to promulgate—you were urban praetor!”

  Crassus shook his huge head, put his hand on Caesar’s arm. “Do it, Caesar. It will keep him happy! Like all spoiled big babies, he has a gift for using the right people to achieve his ends. If you decline because you don’t care to be used, that’s all right by me. But if you’d like the challenge and you think it would add to your legislative experience, then do it. No one is going to know—he’ll make sure of that.”

  “How right you are!” laughed Caesar, then sobered. “I would like to do it, as a matter of fact. We haven’t had decent tribunes of the plebs since I was a boy—Sulpicius was the last. And I can foresee a time when all of us might need tribunician laws. It has been very interesting for a patrician to associate with the tribunes of the plebs the way I have been lately. Palicanus has a replacement ready for me, by the way.”

  “Who?”

  “A Plautius. Not one of the old family Silvanus. This one is from Picenum and seems to go back to a freedman. A good fellow. He’s prepared to do whatever I need done through the newly revitalized Plebeian Assembly.”

  “The tribunician elections haven’t been held yet. Plautius may not get in,” said Crassus.

  “He’ll get in,” said Caesar confidently. “He can’t lose—he’s Pompeius’s man.”

  “And isn’t that an indictment of our times?”

  “Pompeius is lucky having you for a colleague, Marcus Crassus. I keep seeing Metellus Little Goat there instead. A disaster! But I am sorry that yo
u haven’t the distinction of being senior consul.”

  Crassus smiled, it seemed without rancor. “Don’t worry, Caesar. I am reconciled.” He sighed. “However, it would be nice to see Rome mourn my passing more than she does Pompeius’s passing when we leave office.”

  “Well,” said Caesar, rising, “it’s time I went home. I have devoted little time to the women of my family since I came back to Rome, and they’ll be dying to hear all the election news.”

  *

  But one glance at his reception room caused Caesar to rue his decision to go home; it appeared to be full of women! A count of heads reduced full to six—his mother, his wife, his sister Ju—Ju, his Aunt Julia, Pompey’s wife, and another woman closer inspection placed as his cousin Julia called Julia Antonia because she was married to Marcus Antonius, the pirate eradicator. Everyone’s attention was focused on her, not surprising: she was perched on the edge of a chair with her legs stretched out rigidly before her, and she was bawling.

  Before Caesar could move any further, someone gave him a tremendous buffet in the small of the back, and he whipped around to see a big, unmistakably Antonian child standing there grinning. Not for long! Caesar’s hand went out to grasp the boy painfully by his nose, dragged him forward. Howls quite as loud as those his mother was producing erupted from his gaping mouth, but he wasn’t about to curl into a helpless ball; he lashed out with one big foot at Caesar’s shins, doubled his hands into fists and swung with both of them. At the same time two other, smaller boys dived on Caesar too, pummeling his sides and chest, though the immense folds of toga prevented this triple assault from inflicting any real damage.

  Then too quickly for anyone to see how it was done, all three boys were rendered hors de combat. The two smaller ones Caesar dealt with by banging their heads together with an audible crack and throwing them heavily against the wall; the biggest boy got a wallop on the side of the face that made his eyes water, and was marched to join his brothers in a jerking progress punctuated by resounding kicks on his backside.

  The bawling mother had ceased her plaints when all this had begun, and now leaped from her chair to descend upon the tormentor of her darling precious sons.

  “Sit down, woman!’‘ roared Caesar in a huge voice.

  She tottered back to her chair and collapsed, bawling.

  He turned back to where the three boys half—lay, half—sat against the wall, blubbering as lustily as their mother.

  “If any one of you moves, he’ll wish he’d never been born. This is my house, not the Pincian menagerie, and while you’re guests in it you’ll behave like civilized Romans, not Tingitanian apes. Is that quite clear?”

  Holding the crumpled disorder of dirty toga around him, he walked through the midst of the women to the door of his study. “I am going to rectify the damage,” he said in the deceptively quiet tones his mother and wife recognized as temper reined in by an iron hold, “and when I return, I expect to see a beautiful peace descended. Shut that wretched woman up if you have to gag her, and give her sons to Burgundus. Tell Burgundus he has my full permission to strangle them if necessary.”

  Caesar was not gone long, but when he returned it was to find the boys vanished and the six women sitting bolt upright in utter silence. Six pairs of enormous eyes followed him as he went to sit between his mother and his wife.

  “Well, Mater, what’s the trouble?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Marcus Antonius is dead,” Aurelia explained, “by his own hand, in Crete. You know that he was defeated by the pirates twice on the water and once on the land, and lost all his ships and men. But you may not know that the pirate strategoi Panares and Lasthenes literally forced him to sign a treaty between Rome and the Cretan people. The treaty has just arrived in Rome, accompanied by poor Marcus Antonius’s ashes. Though the Senate hasn’t had time to meet about it, they are already saying around the city that Marcus Antonius has disgraced his name forever—people are even beginning to refer to him as Marcus Antonius Creticus! But they don’t mean Crete, they mean Man of Chalk.”

  Caesar sighed, his face betraying exasperation rather than sorrow. “He wasn’t the right man for that job,” he said, not willing to spare the feelings of the widow, a vastly silly woman. “I saw it when I was his tribune in Gytheum. However, I confess I didn’t see precisely what the end would be. But there were plenty of signs.” He looked at Julia Antonia. “I’m sorry for you, lady, but I fail to see what I can do for you.”

  “Julia Antonia came to see if you would organize Marcus Antonius’s funeral rites,” said Aurelia.

  “But she has a brother. Why can’t Lucius Caesar do it?” asked Caesar blankly.

  “Lucius Caesar is in the east with the army of Marcus Cotta, and your cousin Sextus Caesar refuses to have anything to do with it,” said Aunt Julia. “In the absence of Gaius Antonius Hybrida, we are the closest family Julia Antonia has in Rome.”

  “In that case I will organize the obsequies. It would be wise, however, to make it a very quiet funeral.”

  Julia Antonia rose to go, shedding handkerchiefs, brooches, pins, combs in what seemed an endless cascade; she seemed now to hold no umbrage against Caesar for his summary treatment of her sons—or for his dispassionate appraisal of her late husband’s ability. Evidently she liked being roared at and told to behave, reflected Caesar as he escorted her toward the door. No doubt the late Marcus Antonius had obliged her! A pity he hadn’t also disciplined his children, as the mother was incapable of it. Her boys were fetched from Burgundus’s quarters, where they had undergone a salutary experience; the sons of Cardixa and Burgundus had dwarfed them completely. Like their mother they seemed not to have taken permanent offense. All three eyed Caesar warily.

  “There’s no need to be afraid of me unless you’ve stepped over the mark of common decent behavior,” said Caesar cheerfully, his eyes twinkling. “If I catch you doing that—watch out!”

  “You’re very tall, but you don’t look all that strong to me,” said the oldest boy, who was the handsomest of the three, though his eyes were too close together for Caesar’s taste. However, they stared at him straightly enough, and their expression did not lack courage or intelligence.

  “One day you’ll encounter a tiny little fellow who slaps you flat on your back before you can move a finger,” said Caesar. “Now go home and look after your mother. And do your homework instead of prowling through the Subura getting up to mischief and stealing from people who’ve done you no harm. Homework will benefit you more in the long run.”

  Mark Antony blinked. “How do you know about that?”

  “I know everything,” said Caesar, shutting the door on them. He returned to the rest of the women and sat down again. “The invasion of the Germans,” he said, smiling. “What a frightful tribe of little boys! Does no one supervise them?”

  “No one,” said Aurelia. She heaved a sigh of pure pleasure. “Oh, I did enjoy watching you dispose of them! My hand had been itching to administer a good spanking ever since they arrived.”

  Caesar’s eyes were resting on Mucia Tertia, who looked, he thought, marvelously attractive; marriage to Pompey obviously agreed with her. Mentally he added her name to his list of future conquests—Pompey had more than asked for it! But not yet. Let the abominable Kid Butcher first climb even higher. Caesar had no doubt he could succeed with Mucia Tertia; he had caught her staring at him several times. No, not yet. She needed more time to ripen on Pompey’s vine before he snipped her off. At the moment he had enough on his plate dealing with Metella Little Goat, who was the wife of Gaius Verres. Now ploughing her furrow was one exercise in horticulture he found enormously gratifying!

  His sweet little wife was watching him, so he removed his eyes from Mucia Tertia and focused them on her instead. When he dropped one lid in a wink Cinnilla had to suppress a giggle, and demonstrated that she had inherited one characteristic from her father; she blushed scarlet. A dear lady. Never jealous, though of course she heard the rumors—and probably believ
ed them. After all these years she must surely know her Caesar! But she was too shaped by Aurelia ever to bring up the subject of his philanderings, and naturally he did not. They had nothing to do with her.

  With his mother he was not so circumspect—it had been her idea in the first place to seduce the wives of his peers. Nor was he above asking her advice from time to time, when some woman proved difficult. Women were a mystery he suspected would always remain a mystery, and Aurelia’s opinions were worth hearing. Now that she mixed with her peers from Palatine and Carinae she heard all the gossip and faithfully reported it to him free of embellishments. What he liked of course was to drive his women out of their minds for love of him before dropping them; it rendered them useless to their cuckolded husbands ever after.

  “I suppose all of you gathered to console Julia Antonia,” he said, wondering if his mother would have the gall to offer him sweet watered wine and little cakes.

  “She arrived at my house trailing trinkets and those awful boys,” said Aunt Julia, “and I knew I couldn’t cope with all four of them. So I brought them here.”

  “And you were visiting Aunt Julia?” asked Caesar of Mucia Tertia, his smile devastating.

  She drew a breath, caught it, coughed. “I visit Julia a lot, Gaius Julius. The Quirinal is very close to the Pincian.”

  “Yes, of course.” He gave much the same smile to Aunt Julia, who was by no means impervious to it, but naturally saw it in a different way.

  “I suspect I’ll see a great deal more of Julia Antonia in the future, alas,” said Aunt Julia, sighing. “I wish I had your technique with her sons!”

  “Her visits won’t go on for long, Aunt Julia, and I’ll make it my business to have a little word with the boys, don’t worry. Julia Antonia will be married again in no time.”