As the debating order had already been worked out, no praetor offered his services, nor did any aedile, curule or plebeian; Gaius Piso passed to the ranks of the consulars in the front rows on either side of the House. That meant the most powerful piece of oratorical artillery would fire first: Quintus Hortensius.
“Honored consul, censors, magistrates, consulars and senators,” he began, “it is time once and for all to put paid to these so-called special military commissions! We all know why the Dictator Sulla incorporated that clause in his amended constitution—to purchase the services of one man who did not belong to this august and venerable body—a knight from Picenum who had the presumption to recruit and general troops in Sulla’s employ while still in his early twenties, and who, having tasted the sweetness of blatant unconstitutionality, continued to espouse it—though espouse the Senate he would not! When Lepidus revolted he held Italian Gaul, and actually had the temerity to order the execution of a member of one of Rome’s oldest and finest families—Marcus Junius Brutus. Whose treason, if treason it really was, this body defined by including Brutus in its decree outlawing Lepidus. A decree which did not give Pompeius the right to have Brutus’s head lopped off by a minion in the marketplace at Regium Lepidum! Nor to cremate the head and body, then casually send the ashes to Rome with a short, semiliterate note of explanation!
“After which, Pompeius kept his precious Picentine legions in Mutina until he forced the Senate to commission him—no senator, no magistrate!—with a proconsular imperium to go to Spain, govern the nearer province in the Senate’s name and make war on the renegade Quintus Sertorius. When all the time, Conscript Fathers, in the further province we had an eminent man of proper family and background, the good Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Pontifex Maximus, already in the field against Sertorius—a man who, I add, did more to defeat Sertorius than this extraordinary and unsenatorial Pompeius ever did! Though it was Pompeius who took the glory, Pompeius who collected the laurels!”
Quite a good-looking man of imposing presence, Hortensius turned slowly in a circle and seemed to look into every pair of eyes, a trick he had used to good effect in law courts for twenty and more years. “Then what does this Picentine nobody Pompeius do when he returns to our beloved country? Against every provision of the constitution, he brings his army across the Rubico and into Italia, where he sits it down and proceeds to blackmail us into allowing him to stand for consul! We had no choice. Pompeius became consul. And even today, Conscript Fathers, I refuse with every fiber of my being to accord him that abominable name of Magnus he awarded himself! For he is not great! He is a boil, a carbuncle, a putrid festering sore in Rome’s maltreated hide!
“How dare Pompeius assume he can blackmail this body yet again? How dare he put his fellating minion Gabinius up to this? Unlimited imperium and unlimited forces and unlimited money, if you please! When all the time the Senate has an able commander in Crete doing an excellent job! An excellent job, I repeat! An excellent job! Excellent, excellent!” Hortensius’s Asianic style of oratory was now in full flight, and the House had settled down (particularly as it was in agreement with every word he said) to listen to one of its all-time great speakers. “I tell you, fellow members of this House, that I will never, never, never consent to this command, no matter whose name might be put up to fill it! Only in our time has Rome ever needed to resort to unlimited imperium, unlimited commands! They are unconstitutional and unconscionable and unacceptable! We will clear Our Sea of pirates, but we will do it the Roman way, not the Picentine way!”
At which point Bibulus began to cheer and drum his feet, and the whole House joined him. Hortensius sat down, flushed with a sweet victory.
Aulus Gabinius had listened impassively, and at the end shrugged his shoulders, lifted his hands. “The Roman way,” he said loudly when the cheering died down, “has degenerated to such a point of ineffectuality that it might better be called the Pisidian way! If Picenum is what the job needs, then Picenum it has to be. For what is Picenum, if it is not Rome? You draw geographical boundaries, Quintus Hortensius, which do not exist!”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” screamed Piso, leaping to his feet and down off the curule dais to face the tribunician bench beneath it. “You dare to prate of Rome, you Gaul from a nest of Gauls? You dare to lump Gaul with Rome? Beware then, Gabinius the Gaul, that you do not suffer the same fate as Romulus, and never return from your hunting expedition!”
“A threat!” shouted Gabinius, leaping to his feet. “You hear him, Conscript Fathers? He threatens to kill me, for that is what happened to Romulus! Killed by men who weren’t his bootlace, lurking in the Goat Swamps of the Campus Martius!”
Pandemonium broke out, but Piso and Catulus quelled it between them, unwilling to see the House dissolve before they had had their say. Gabinius had returned to his perch on the end of the bench where the tribunes of the plebs sat, and watched bright-eyed as the consul and the consular went their rounds, soothing, clucking, persuading men to put their behinds back on their stools.
And then, when quiet had more or less returned and Piso was about to ask Catulus his opinion, Gaius Julius Caesar rose to his feet. As he wore his corona civica and therefore ranked with any consular in the speaking order, Piso, who disliked him, threw him a dirty look which invited him to sit down again. Caesar remained standing, Piso glaring.
“Let him speak, Piso!” cried Gabinius. “He’s entitled!”
Though he didn’t exercise his oratorical privilege in the House very often, Caesar was acknowledged as Cicero’s only real rival; Hortensius’s Asianic style had fallen out of favor since the advent of Cicero’s plainer but more powerful Athenian style, and Caesar too preferred to be Attic. If there was one thing every member of the Senate had in common, it was a connoisseur’s appreciation for oratory. Expecting Catulus, they all opted for Caesar.
“As neither Lucius Bellienus nor Marcus Sextilius has yet been returned to our bosom, I believe I am the only member of this House present here today who has actually been captured by pirates,” he said in that high, absolutely clear voice he assumed for public speech. “It makes me, you might say, an expert on the subject, if expertise can be conveyed by firsthand experience. I did not find it an edifying experience, and my aversion began in the moment I saw those two trim war galleys bearing down on my poor, plodding merchant vessel. For, Conscript Fathers, I was informed by my captain that to attempt armed resistance was as certain to produce death as it was bound to be futile. And I, Gaius Julius Caesar, had to yield my person to a vulgar fellow named Polygonus, who had been preying upon merchantmen in Lydian, Carian and Lycian waters for over twenty years.
“I learned a lot during the forty days I remained the prisoner of Polygonus,” Caesar went on in more conversational tones. “I learned that there is an agreed sliding scale of ransom for all prisoners too valuable to be sent to the slave markets or chained up to wait on these pirates back home in their lairs. For a mere Roman citizen, slavery it is. A mere Roman citizen isn’t worth two thousand sesterces, which is the bottom price he could fetch in the slave markets. For a Roman centurion or a Roman about halfway up the hierarchy of the publicani, the ransom is half a talent. For a top Roman knight or publicanus, the price is one talent. For a Roman nobleman of high family who is not a member of the Senate, the price is two talents. For a Roman senator of pedarius status, the ransom is ten talents. For a Roman senator of junior magisterial status—quaestor or aedile or tribune of the plebs—the ransom is twenty talents. For a Roman senator who has held a praetorship or consulship, the ransom is fifty talents. When captured complete with lictors and fasces, as in the case of our two latest praetor victims, the price goes up to one hundred talents each, as we have learned only days ago. Censors and consuls of note fetch a hundred talents. Though I am not sure what value pirates put on consuls like our dear Gaius Piso here—perhaps one talent? I wouldn’t pay more for him myself, I do assure you. But then, I am not a pirate, though I sometimes wonder about
Gaius Piso in that respect!
“One is expected during one’s imprisonment,” Caesar continued in that same casual manner, “to blanch in fear and fall down with great regularity to beg for one’s life. Not something these Julian knees of mine are accustomed to doing—nor did. I spent my time spying out the land, assessing possible resistance to attack, discovering what was guarded and whereabouts. And I also spent my time assuring everyone that when my ransom was found—it was fifty talents—I would return, capture the place, send the women and children to the slave markets, and crucify the men. They thought that a wonderful joke. I would never, never find them, they told me. But I did find them, Conscript Fathers, and I did capture the place, and I did send the women and children to the slave markets, and I did crucify all the men. I could have brought back the beaks of four pirate ships to adorn the rostra, but since I used the Rhodians for my expedition, the beaks stand now on a column in Rhodus next door to the new temple of Aphrodite that I caused to be built by my share of the spoils.
“Now Polygonus was only one of hundreds of pirates at that end of Our Sea, and not even a major pirate, if they are to be graded. Mind you, Polygonus had been having such a lucrative time of it working on his own with a mere four galleys that he saw no point in joining forces with other pirates to form a little navy under a competent admiral like Lasthenes or Panares—or Pharnaces or Megadates, to move a little closer to home. Polygonus was happy to pay five hundred denarii to a spy in Miletus or Priene in return for information as to which ships were worth boarding. And how assiduous his spies were! No fat pickings escaped their attention. Among his hoard were many items of jewelry made in Egypt, which indicates that he raided vessels between Pelusium and Paphos too. So his network of spies must have been enormous. Paid only for information which found him good prey, of course, not routinely paid. Keep men short and their noses keen, and in the end it’s cheaper as well as more effective.
“Noxious and of great nuisance value though they are, however, pirates like Polygonus are a minor affair compared to the pirate fleets under their pirate admirals. They don’t need to wait for lone ships to come along, or ships in unarmed convoys. They can attack grain fleets escorted by heavily armed galleys. And then they proceed to sell back to Roman middlemen what was Rome’s in the first place, already bought and paid for. Little wonder Roman bellies are empty, half of that vacuum from lack of grain, half because what grain there is sells at three and four times what it should, even from the aedile’s dole list.”
Caesar paused, but no one interrupted, even Piso, face red at the insult tossed his way as if no moment. “I do not need to labor one point,” he said evenly, “because I can see no merit in laboring it. Namely, that there have been provincial governors appointed by this body who have actively connived with pirates to allow them port facilities, food, even vintage wines on stretches of coast that otherwise would have been closed to pirate tenancy. It all came out during the trial of Gaius Verres, and those of you sitting here today who either engaged in this practice or let others engage in it know well who you are. And if the fate of my poor uncle Marcus Aurelius Cotta is anything to go by, be warned that the passage of time is no guarantee that crimes, real or imagined, will not one day be put to your accounts.
“Nor am I about to labor another point so obvious that it is very old, very tired, very threadbare. Namely, that so far Rome—and by Rome I mean both the Senate and the People!—has not even touched the problem of piracy, let alone begun to scotch it. There is absolutely no way one man in one piddling little spot, be that spot Crete or the Baleares or Lycia, can hope to terminate the activities of pirates. Strike at one place, and all that happens is that the pirates pick up their gear and sail off somewhere else. Has Metellus in Crete actually succeeded in cutting off a pirate head? Lasthenes and Panares are but two of the heads this monster Hydra owns, and theirs are still on their shoulders, still sailing the seas around Crete.
“What it needs,” cried Caesar, his voice swelling, “is not just the will to succeed, not just the wish to succeed, not just the ambition to succeed! What it needs is an all-out effort in every place at one and the same moment, an operation masterminded by one hand, one mind, one will. And hand and mind and will must belong to a man whose prowess at organization is so well known, so well tested, that we, the Senate as well as the People of Rome, can give the task to him with confidence that for once our money and our manpower and our materiel will not be wasted!”
He drew in a breath. “Aulus Gabinius suggested a man. A man who is a consular and whose career says that he can do the job as it must be done. But I will go one better than Aulus Gabinius, and name that man! I propose that this body give command against the pirates with unlimited imperium in all respects to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus!”
“Three cheers for Caesar!” Gabinius shouted, leaping onto the tribunician bench with both arms above his head. “I say it too! Give the command in the war against piracy to our greatest general, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus!”
All outraged attention swung from Caesar to Gabinius, with Piso in the lead; off the curule dais he jumped, grabbed wildly at Gabinius, hauled him down. But Piso’s body temporarily gave Gabinius the cover he needed, so he ducked under one flailing fist, tucked his toga around his thighs for the second time in two days, and bolted for the doors with half the Senate in pursuit.
Caesar picked his way between upended stools to where Cicero sat pensively with his chin propped up on one palm; he turned the stool next to Cicero the right way up, and sat down too.
“Masterly,” said Cicero.
“Nice of Gabinius to divert their wrath from my head to his,” said Caesar, sighing and stretching his legs out.
“It’s harder to lynch you. There’s a barrier built into their minds because you’re a patrician Julian. As for Gabinius, he’s—how did Hortensius put it?—a fellating minion. Add as understood, Picentine and Pompeian. Therefore he may be lynched with impunity. Besides, he was closer to Piso than you, and he didn’t win that,” Cicero ended, pointing to the chaplet of oak leaves Caesar wore. “I think there will be many times when half of Rome may want to lynch you, Caesar, but it would be an interesting group succeeded. Definitely not led by the likes of Piso.”
Sounds of shouting and violence outside rose in volume; the next thing Piso flew back into the chamber with various members of the professional Plebs behind him. Catulus in his wake dodged around the back of one of the open doors, and Hortensius around the other. Piso fell under a tackle and was dragged outside again, head bleeding.
“I say, it looks as if they’re in earnest,” Cicero observed with clinical interest. “Piso might be lynched.”
“I hope he is,” said Caesar, not moving.
Cicero giggled. “Well, if you won’t stir to help, I fail to see why I should.”
“Oh, Gabinius will talk them out of it, that will make him look wonderful. Besides, it’s quieter up here.”
“Which is why I transferred my carcass up here.”
“I take it,” said Caesar, “that you’re in favor of Magnus’s getting this gigantic command?”
“Definitely. He’s a good man, even if he isn’t one of the boni. There’s no one else has a hope. Of doing it, I mean.”
“There is, you know. But they wouldn’t give the job to me anyway, and I really do think Magnus can do it.”
“Conceit!” cried Cicero, astonished.
“There is a difference between truth and conceit.”
“But do you know it?”
“Of course.”
They fell silent for a while, then as the noise began to die away both men rose, descended to the floor of the chamber, and sallied out into the portico.
There it became clear that victory had gone to the Pompeians; Piso sat bleeding on a step being tended by Catulus, but of Quintus Hortensius there was no sign.
“You!” cried Catulus bitterly as Caesar ranged alongside him. “What a traitor to your class you are, Caesar! Just as I told you a
ll those years ago when you came begging to serve in my army against Lepidus! You haven’t changed. You’ll never change, never! Always on the side of these ill-born demagogues who are determined to destroy the supremacy of the Senate!”
“At your age, Catulus, I would have thought you’d come to see that it’s you ultraconservative sticks with your mouths puckered up like a cat’s anus will do that,” said Caesar dispassionately. “I believe in Rome, and in the Senate. But you do it no good by opposing changes that your own incompetence have made necessary.”
“I will defend Rome and the Senate against the likes of Pompeius until the day I die!”
“Which, looking at you, may not be so far off.”
Cicero, who had gone to hear what Gabinius on the rostra was saying, returned to the bottom of the steps. “Another meeting of the Plebs the day after tomorrow!” he called, waving farewell.
“There’s another one who will destroy us,” said Catulus, lip curling contemptuously. “An upstart New Man with the gift of the gab and a head too big to fit through these doors!”
*
When the Plebeian Assembly met, Pompey was standing on the rostra next to Gabinius, who now proposed his lex Gabinia de piratis persequendis with a name attached to the man: Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Everybody’s choice, so much was clear from all the cheering. Though he was a mediocre speaker, Pompey had something in its way more valuable, which was a fresh and open, honest and engaging look about him, from the wide blue eyes to the wide frank smile. And that quality, reflected Caesar, watching and listening from the Senate steps, I do not have. Though I do not think I covet it. His style, not mine. Mine works equally well with the people.
Today’s opposition to the lex Gabinia de piratis persequendis was going to be more formal, though possibly no less violent; the three conservative tribunes of the plebs were very much in evidence on the rostra, Trebellius standing a little in front of Roscius Otho and Globulus to proclaim that he was their leader.
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