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

by Colleen McCullough

  Naturally most people wanted to believe it, chiefly because it was so deliciously awful, but also because the Claudii/Clodii Pulchri were an outlandish lot, brilliant and unpredictable and erratic. Had been for generations! Patricians, say no more.

  Poor Appius Claudius took it very hard, but had more sense than to be pugnacious about it; his best defense was to stalk around the Forum looking as if the last thing in the world he wanted to talk about was incest, and people took the hint. Rex had remained in the East as one of Pompey’s senior legates, but Claudia, his wife, adopted the same attitude as big brother Appius. The middle one of the three brothers, Gaius Claudius, was rather intellectually dull for a Claudian, therefore not considered a worthy target by the Forum wits. Luckily Clodia’s husband, Celer, was another absentee on duty in the East, as was his brother, Nepos; they would have been more awkward, asked some difficult questions. As it was, the three culprits went about looking both innocent and indignant, and rolled on the floor laughing when no outsiders were present. What a gorgeous scandal!

  Cicero, however, had the last word. “Incest,” he said gravely to a large crowd of Forum frequenters, “is a game the whole family can play.”

  *

  Clodius was to rue his rashness when finally the trial of Catilina came on, for many of the jury looked at him askance, and allowed their doubts to color their verdict. It was a hard and bitter battle which Clodius for one fought valiantly; he had taken Cicero’s advice about the nakedness of his prejudices and his malice seriously, and conducted his prosecution with skill. That he lost and Catilina was acquitted couldn’t even be attributed to bribery, and he had learned enough not to imply bribery when the verdict of ABSOLVO came in. It was, he concluded, just the luck of the lots and the quality of the defense, which had been formidable.

  “You did well, Clodius,” said Caesar to him afterward. “It wasn’t your fault you lost. Even the tribuni aerarii on that jury were so conservative they made Catulus look like a radical.” He shrugged. “You couldn’t win with Torquatus leading the defense, not after the rumor that Catilina planned to assassinate him last New Year’s Day. To defend Catilina was Torquatus’s way of saying he didn’t choose to believe the rumor, and the jury was impressed. Even so, you did well. You presented a neat case.”

  Publius Clodius rather liked Caesar, recognizing in him another restless spirit, and envying him a kind of self-control Clodius was unhappily aware he didn’t own. When the verdict came in, he had been tempted to scream and howl and weep. Then his eyes fell on Caesar and Cicero standing together to watch, and something in their faces gave him pause. He would have his revenge, but not today.

  To behave like a bad loser could benefit no one save Catilina.

  “At least it’s too late for him to run for the consulship,” said Clodius to Caesar, sighing, “and that’s some sort of victory.”

  “Yes, he’ll have to wait another year.” They walked up the Sacra Via toward the inn on the corner of the Clivus Orbius, with the imposing facade of Fabius Allobrogicus’s arch across the Sacred Way filling their eyes. Caesar was on his way home, and Clodius heading for the inn itself, where his clients from Africa were lodging.

  “I met a friend of yours in Tigranocerta,” said Clodius.

  “Ye gods, who could that have been?”

  “A centurion by name of Marcus Silius.”

  “Silius? Silius from Mitylene? A Fimbrianus?”

  “The very one. He admires you very much.”

  “It’s mutual. A good man. At least now he can come home.’’

  “It appears not, Caesar. I had a letter from him recently, written from Galatia. The Fimbriani have decided to enlist with Pompeius.”

  “I wondered. These old campaigners weep a lot about home, but when an interesting campaign crops up, somehow home loses its allure.” Caesar extended his hand with a smile. “Ave, Publius Clodius. I intend to follow your career with interest.”

  Clodius stood outside the inn for some time, staring into nothing. When he finally entered, he looked as if he was prefect of his school—upright, honor-bound, incorruptible.

  III

  from JANUARY of 65 B.C.

  until QUINCTILIS of 63 B.C.

  1

  Marcus Licinius Crassus was now so rich that he had begun to be called by a second cognomen, Dives, which just meant fabulously wealthy. And when together with Quintus Lutatius Catulus he was elected censor, nothing was missing from his career save a great and glorious military campaign. Oh, he had defeated Spartacus and earned an ovation for it, but six months in the field against a gladiator in whose army were many slaves rather took the gloss off his victory. What he hankered after was something more in the line of Pompey the Great—savior of his country, that kind of campaign. And that kind of reputation. It hurt to be eclipsed by an upstart!

  Nor was Catulus an amicable colleague in the censorship, for reasons which escaped the bewildered Crassus. No Licinius Crassus had ever been apostrophized as a demagogue or any other sort of political radical, so what was Catulus prating about?

  “It’s your money,” said Caesar, to whom he addressed this peevish question. “Catulus is boni, he doesn’t condone commercial activities for senators. He’d dearly love to see himself in tandem with another censor and both of them busy investigating you. But since you’re his colleague, he can’t very well do that, can he?”

  “He’d be wasting his time if he tried!” said Crassus indignantly. “I do nothing half the Senate doesn’t do! I make my money from owning property, which is well within the province of every or any senator! I admit I have a few shares in companies, but I am not on a board of directors, I have no vote in how a company will conduct its business. I’m simply a source of capital. That’s unimpeachable!”

  “I realize all that,” said Caesar patiently, “and so does our beloved Catulus. Let me repeat: it’s your money. There’s old Catulus toiling away to pay for the rebuilding of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, never managing to increase the family fortune because every spare sestertius has to go into Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Whereas you just keep on making money. He’s jealous.”

  “Then let him save his jealousy for men who deserve it!” growled Crassus, unmollified.

  Since stepping down from the consulship he had shared with Pompey the Great, Crassus had gone into a new kind of business, one pioneered forty years earlier by a Servilius Caepio: namely, the manufacture of arms and armaments for Rome’s legions in a series of townships north of the Padus River in Italian Gaul. It was his good friend Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the armaments gatherer for Rome during the Italian War, who had drawn Crassus’s attention to it. Lucius Piso had recognized the potential in this new industry, and espoused it so wholeheartedly that he succeeded in making a great deal of money out of it. His ties of course were to Italian Gaul anyway, for his mother had been a Calventia from Italian Gaul. And when Lucius Piso died, his son, another Lucius Piso, continued both in this activity and in the warm friendship with Crassus. Who had finally been brought to see the advantages in owning whole towns devoted to the manufacture of chain mail, swords, javelins, helmets, daggers; senatorially proper too.

  As censor Crassus was now in a position to help his friend Lucius Piso as well as young Quintus Servilius Caepio Brutus, the heir to the Servilius Caepio manufactories in Feltria, Cardianum, Bellunum. Italian Gaul on the far side of the Padus had been Roman for so long by now that its citizens, many of them Gauls but many more of mixed stock due to intermarriage, had come to harbor much resentment because they were still being denied the citizenship. Only three years earlier there had been stirrings, quietened after the visit of Caesar returning from Spain. And Crassus saw his duty very clearly once he became censor and had charge of the rolls of Roman citizens: he would help his friends Lucius Piso and Caepio Brutus and establish a huge clientele for himself by giving the full Roman citizenship to everyone on the far side of the Padus in Italian Gaul. Everyone south of the Padus had the full citizenship—it didn’t se
em right to deny people of exactly the same blood just because they were located on the wrong side of a river!

  But when he announced his intention to enfranchise all of Italian Gaul, his fellow censor Catulus seemed to go mad. No, no, no! Never, never, never! Roman citizenship was for Romans, and Gauls were not Romans! There were already too many Gauls calling themselves Romans, like Pompey the Great and his Picentine minions.

  “The old, old argument,” said Caesar, disgusted. “The Roman citizenship must be for Romans only. Why can’t these idiot boni see that all the peoples of Italia everywhere are Romans? That Rome herself is really Italia?”

  “I agree with you,” said Crassus, “but Catulus doesn’t.”

  Crassus’s other scheme was not favored either.

  He wanted to annex Egypt, even if that meant going to war—with himself at the head of the army, of course. On the subject of Egypt, Crassus had become such an authority that he was encyclopaedic. And every single fact he learned only served to confirm what he had suspected, that Egypt was the wealthiest nation in the world.

  “Imagine it!” he said to Caesar, face for once anything but bovine and impassive. “Pharaoh owns everything! There’s no such thing as freehold land in Egypt—it’s all leased from Pharaoh, who collects the rents. All the products of Egypt belong to him outright, from grain to gold to jewels to spices and ivory! Only linen is excluded. It belongs to the native Egyptian priests, but even then Pharaoh takes a third of it for himself. His private income is at least six thousand talents a year, and his income from the country another six thousand talents. Plus extra from Cyprus.”

  “I heard,” said Caesar, for no other reason than that he wanted to bait the Crassus bull, “that the Ptolemies have been so inept they’ve run through every drachma Egypt possesses.”

  The Crassus bull did snort, but derisively rather than angrily. “Rubbish! Absolute rubbish! Not the most inept Ptolemy could spend a tenth of what he gets. His income from the country keeps the country—pays for his army of bureaucrats, his soldiers, his sailors, police, priests, even his palaces. They haven’t been to war in years except on each other, and then the money simply goes to the victor, not out of Egypt. His private income he puts away, and all the treasures—the gold, the silver, the rubies and ivory and sapphires, the turquoise and carnelian and lapis lazuli—he never even bothers to convert into cash, they all get put away too. Except for what he gives to the artisans and craftsmen to make into furniture or jewelry.”

  “What about the theft of the golden sarcophagus of Alexander the Great?’’ asked Caesar provocatively. “The first Ptolemy called Alexander was so impoverished he took it, melted it down into gold coins and replaced it with the present rock-crystal sarcophagus.”

  “And there you have it!” said Crassus scornfully. “Truly, all these ridiculous stories! That Ptolemy was in Alexandria for about five days all told before he fled. And do you mean to tell me that in the space of five days he removed an object of solid gold weighing at least four thousand talents, cut it into pieces small enough to fit into a goldsmith’s beaker-sized furnace, melted all those little pieces down in however many furnaces, and then stamped out what would have amounted to many millions of coins? He couldn’t have done it inside a year! Not only that, but where’s your common sense, Caesar? A transparent rock-crystal sarcophagus big enough to contain a human body—yes, yes, I am aware Alexander the Great was a tiny fellow!—would cost a dozen times what a solid-gold sarcophagus would cost. And take years to fashion once a big enough piece was found. Logic says someone found that big enough piece, and by coincidence the replacement happened while Ptolemy Alexander was there. The priests of the Sema wanted the people to actually see Alexander the Great.”

  “Ugh!” said Caesar.

  “No, no they preserved him perfectly. I believe he’s quite as beautiful today as he was in life,” said Crassus, thoroughly carried away.

  “Leaving aside the questionable topic of how well preserved Alexander the Great is, Marcus, there’s never smoke without some fire. One is forever hearing tales of this or that Ptolemy down the centuries having to flee shirtless, without two sesterces to rub together. There cannot be nearly as much money and treasure as you say there is.”

  “Aha!” cried Crassus triumphantly. “The tales are based on a false premise, Caesar. What people fail to understand is that the Ptolemaic treasures and the country’s wealth are not kept in Alexandria. Alexandria is an artificial graft on the real Egyptian tree. The priests in Memphis are the custodians of the Egyptian treasury, which is located there. And when a Ptolemy—or a Cleopatra—needs to fly the coop, they don’t head down the delta to Memphis, they sail out of the Cibotus Harbor at Alexandria and they head for Cyprus or Syria or Cos. Therefore they can’t lay their hands on more funds than there are in Alexandria.”

  Caesar looked terrifically solemn, sighed, leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “My dear Crassus, you have convinced me,” he said.

  It was only then that Crassus calmed down enough to see the ironic gleam in Caesar’s eyes, and burst out laughing. “Wretch! You’ve been teasing me!”

  “I agree with you about Egypt in every respect,” said Caesar. “The only trouble is that you’ll never manage to talk Catulus into this venture.”

  Nor did he talk Catulus into it, while Catulus talked the Senate out of it. The result was that after less than three months in office and long before they could revise the roll of the Ordo Equester, let alone take a census of the people, the censorship of Catulus and Crassus ceased to be. Crassus resigned publicly and with much to say about Catulus, none of it complimentary. So short a term had it been, in fact, that the Senate decided to have new censors elected in the following year.

  *

  Caesar acquitted himself as a good friend ought by speaking in the House in favor of both Crassus’s proposals, enfranchisement of the Trans-Padane Gauls and the annexation of Egypt, but his chief interest that year lay elsewhere: he had been elected one of the two curule aediles, which meant that he was now permitted to sit in the ivory curule chair, and was preceded by two lictors bearing the fasces. It had happened “in his year,” an indication that he was exactly as far up the cursus honorum of public magistracies as he was supposed to be. Unfortunately his colleague (who polled far fewer votes) was Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus.

  They had very different ideas as to what the curule aedileship consisted of, and that went for every aspect of the job. Together with the two plebeian aediles, they were responsible for the general upkeep of the city of Rome: the care of streets, squares, gardens, marketplaces, traffic, public buildings, law and order, the water supply including fountains and basins, land registers, building ordinances, drainage and sewers, statues displayed in public places, and temples. Duties were either carried out by all four together, or else amicably assigned to one or more among them.

  Weights and measures fell to the lot of the curule aediles, who had their headquarters in the temple of Castor and Pollux, a very central location on the Vestal fringe of the lower Forum; the set of standard weights and measures was kept under the podium of this temple, always referred to simply as “Castor’s,” Pollux being quite overlooked. The plebeian aediles were located much farther away, in the beautiful temple of Ceres at the foot of the Aventine, and perhaps because of this seemed to pay less attention to the duties involved in caring for Rome’s public and political center.

  One duty all four shared was most onerous of all: the grain supply in all its aspects, from the moment in which it was taken off the barges until it disappeared into an entitled citizen’s sack to be carried home. They also were responsible for buying in grain, paying for it, tallying it on arrival, and collecting the money for it. They kept the list of citizens entitled to low-priced State grain, which meant they had a copy of the roll of Roman citizens. They issued the chits from their booth in the Porticus Metelli on the Campus Martius, but the grain itself was stored in huge silos lining the cliffs of the
Aventine along the Vicus Portae Trigeminae at the Port of Rome.

  The two plebeian aediles of that year were no competition for the curule aediles, with Cicero’s younger brother, Quintus, the senior of the pair.

  “Which means undistinguished games from them,” said Caesar to Bibulus, and sighing as he said it. “It appears they’re not going to do much about the city either.”

  Bibulus eyed his colleague with sour dislike. “You may disabuse yourself of any grand pretensions in the curule aediles as well, Caesar. I will contribute to good games, but not great games. My purse won’t run to that any more than yours will. Nor do I intend to undertake any surveys of the sewers, or have the adjutages inspected along every branch of the water supply, or put a new coat of paint on Castor’s, or go rushing around the markets checking every pair of scales.”

  “What do you intend to do?” asked Caesar, lifting his lip.

  “I intend to do what is necessary, and nothing more.”

  “Don’t you think checking scales is necessary?”

  “I do not.”

  “Well,” said Caesar, grinning nastily, “I think it’s very appropriate that we’re located in Castor’s. If you want to be Pollux, go right ahead. But don’t forget Pollux’s fate—never to be remembered and never to be mentioned.”

  Which was not a good start. However, always too busy and too well organized to bother with those who declared themselves unwilling to co-operate, Caesar went about his duties as if he were the only aedile in Rome. He had the advantage of owning an excellent network of reporters of transgressions, for he enlisted Lucius Decumius and his crossroads brethren as informers, and cracked down very hard on merchants who weighed light or measured short, on builders who infringed boundaries or used poor materials, on landlords who had cheated the water companies by inserting bigger-bore adjutage pipes from the mains into their properties than the law prescribed. He fined ruthlessly, and fined heavily. No one escaped, even his friend Marcus Crassus.