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

by Colleen McCullough

  “Like his wife, he’s feckless,” said Terentia unsympathetically.

  “Be that as it may, today was odd.”

  Terentia snorted. “In more ways than just Lentulus Sura.”

  “Tomorrow I shall find out what Atticus knows, and that is likely to be interesting,” said Cicero, yawning until his eyes began to water. “I’m tired, my dear. Might I ask you to send our darling Tiro in? I’ll give him dictation.”

  “You must be tired! Not like you to prefer someone else doing the scribbling, even Tiro. I will send him in, but only for a little while. You need sleep.”

  As she got up from her chair Cicero held out his hand to her impulsively, and smiled. “Thank you, Terentia, for everything! What a difference it makes to have you on my side.”

  She took the proffered hand, squeezed it hard, and gave him a rather shy grin, boyish and immature. “Think nothing of it, husband,” she said, then whisked herself off before the mood in the room could become emotionally sloppy.

  *

  Had someone asked Cicero whether he loved his wife and his brother, he would have answered instantly in the affirmative, and there would have been truth in that answer. But neither Terentia nor Quintus Cicero lay as close to his heart as several other people, only one of them his relation by blood. That of course was his daughter, Tullia, a warm and sparkling contrast to her mother. His son was still too young to have wormed his way into Cicero’s strong affections; perhaps little Marcus never would, as he was more like brother Quintus in nature, impulsive, quick-tempered, strutting, and no prodigy.

  Who then were the others?

  The name which sprang first to Cicero’s mind would have been Tiro. Tiro was his slave, but also literally a part of his family, as did happen in a society wherein slaves were not so much inferior beings as unfortunates subject to the laws of ownership and status. Because a Roman’s domestic slaves lived in such close—indeed, almost intimate—proximity to the free persons of the household, it was in many ways an extended-family situation, and carried all the advantages and disadvantages of that state. The interweaving of personalities was complex, major and minor storms came and went, power bases existed on both free and servile sides, and it was a hard master who could remain impervious to servile pressures. In the Tullius household Terentia was the one a slave had to look out for, but even Terentia was unable to resist Tiro, who could calm little Marcus down as easily as he could persuade Tullia that her mother was right.

  He had come to the Tullius household young, a Greek who had sold himself into bondage as an alternative preferable to stagnation in a poor and obscure Boeotian town. That he would take Cicero’s fancy was inevitable, for he was as tender and kind as he was brilliant at his secretarial work, the sort of person one could not help but love. As Tiro was abidingly thoughtful and considerate, not even the nastiest and most selfish among his fellow slaves in the Tullius household could accuse him of currying favor with the master and mistress; his sweetness spilled over into his relations with his fellow slaves and made them love him too.

  However, Cicero’s affection for him outweighed all others. Not only were Tiro’s Greek and Latin superlatively good, but so were his literary instincts, and when Tiro produced a faint look of disapproval at some phrase or choice of adjective, his master paused to reconsider the offending item. Tiro took flawless shorthand, transcribed into neat and lucid writing, and never presumed to alter one word.

  At the time of the consulship, this most perfect of all servants had been in the bosom of the family for five years. He was of course already emancipated in Cicero’s will, but in the normal scheme of things his service as a slave would continue for ten more years, after which he would pass into Cicero’s clientele as a prosperous freed-man; his wage was already high, and he was always the first to receive another raise in his stips. So what it boiled down to in the Tullius household was simply, how could it exist without Tiro? How could Cicero exist without Tiro?

  Second on the list was Titus Pomponius Atticus. That was a friendship which went back many, many years. He and Cicero had met in the Forum when Cicero had been a youthful prodigy and Atticus training to take over his father’s multiple businesses, and after the death of Sulla’s eldest son (who had been Cicero’s best friend), it was Atticus who took young Sulla’s place, though Atticus was four years the older of the two. The family name of Pomponius had considerable distinction, for the Pomponii were in actual fact a branch of the Caecilii Metelli, and that meant they belonged at the very core of high Roman society. It also meant that, had Atticus wanted it, a career in the Senate and perhaps the consulship were not unattainable. But Atticus’s father had hankered after senatorial distinction, and suffered for it as the factions which controlled Rome during those terrible years had come and gone. Firmly placed in the ranks of the Eighteen—the eighteen senior Centuries of the First Class—Atticus had abjured both Senate and public office. His inclinations went hand in hand with his desires, which were to make as much money as possible and pass into history as one of Rome’s greatest plutocrats.

  In those early days he had been, like his father before him, simple Titus Pomponius. No third name. Then in the troubled few years of Cinna’s rule, Atticus and Crassus had formed a plan and a company to mine the taxes and goods of Asia Province, Sulla having wrested it back from King Mithridates. They had milked the necessary capital from a horde of investors, only to find that Sulla preferred to regulate Asia Province’s administration in a way which prevented the Roman publicani from profiting. Both Crassus and Atticus were forced to flee their creditors, though Atticus managed to take his own personal fortune with him, and therefore had the wherewithal to live extremely comfortably while in exile. He settled in Athens, and liked it so well that it ever afterward held first place in his heart.

  It was no real problem to establish himself with Sulla after that formidable man returned to Rome as its Dictator, and Atticus (now so called because of his preferences for the Athenian homeland, Attica) became free to live in Rome. Which he did for some of the time, though he never relinquished his house in Athens, and went there regularly. He also acquired huge tracts of land in Epirus, that part of Greece on the coast of the Adriatic Sea to the north of the Gulf of Corinth.

  Atticus’s predilection for young male lovers was well known, but remarkably free from taint in such a homophobic place as Rome. That was because he indulged it only when he traveled to Greece, wherein such preferences were the norm, and actually added to a man’s reputation. When in Rome, he betrayed neither by word nor look that he practised Greek love, and this rigid self-control enabled his family, friends and social peers to pretend that there was no different side to Titus Pomponius Atticus. Important too because Atticus had become enormously wealthy and a great power in financial circles. Among the publicani (who were businessmen bidding for public contracts) he was the most powerful and the most influential. Banker, shipping magnate, merchant prince, Atticus mattered immensely. If he couldn’t quite make a man consul, he could certainly go a long way toward visibly assisting that man, as he had Cicero during Cicero’s campaign.

  He was also Cicero’s publisher, having decided that money was a little boring, and literature a refreshing change. Extremely well educated, he had a natural affinity for men of letters, and admired Cicero’s way with words as few others could. It both amused and satisfied him to become a patron of writers—and also enabled him to make money out of them. The publishing house which he set up on the Argiletum as a rival establishment to the Sosii thrived. His connections provided him with an ever-widening pool of new talent, and his copyists produced highly prized manuscripts.

  Tall, thin and austere looking, he might have passed as the father of none other than Metellus Scipio, though the blood links were not close, as Metellus Scipio was a Caecilius Metellus only by virtue of adoption. The resemblance did mean, however, that all the members of the Famous Families understood his bloodline was unimpeachable and of great antiquity.

 
He genuinely loved Cicero, but was proof against Ciceronian weaknesses—in which he followed the example set by Terentia, also wealthy, also unwilling to help Cicero out when his finances needed supplementing. On the one occasion when Cicero had drummed up the courage to ask Atticus for a trifling loan, his friend had refused so adamantly that Cicero never asked again. From time to time he half-hoped Atticus would offer, but Atticus never did. Quite willing to procure statues and other works of art for Cicero during his extensive travels in Greece, Atticus also insisted on being paid for them—and for the cost of shipping them to Italy. What he didn’t charge for, Cicero supposed, was his time in finding them. In the light of all this, was Atticus incurably stingy? Cicero didn’t think so, for unlike Crassus he was a generous host and paid good wages to his slaves as well as to his free employees. It was more that money mattered to Atticus, that he saw it as a commodity meriting huge respect, and could not bear to bestow it gratuitously upon those who did not hold it in equal respect. Cicero was an arty fellow, a fritterer, a dilettante, a blower hot and cold. Therefore he did not—could not—esteem money as it deserved.

  Third on the list was Publius Nigidius Figulus, of a family quite as old and venerated as Atticus’s. Like Atticus, Nigidius Figulus (the nickname Figulus meant a worker in clay, a potter, though how the first Nigidius to bear it had earned it, the family did not know) had abjured public life. In Atticus’s case, public life would have meant giving up all commercial activities not arising out of the ownership of land, and Atticus loved commerce more than he did politics. In Nigidius Figulus’s case, public life would have eaten too voraciously into his greatest love, which was for the more esoteric aspects of religion. Acknowledged the chief expert on the art of divination as practised by the long-gone Etruscans, he knew more about the liver of a sheep than any butcher or veterinarian. He knew about the flight of birds, the patterns in lightning flashes, the sounds of thunder or earth movements, numbers, fireballs, shooting stars, eclipses, obelisks, standing stones, pylons, pyramids, spheres, tumuli, obsidian, flint, sky eggs, the shape and color of flames, sacred chickens, and all the convolutions an animal intestine could produce.

  He was of course one of the custodians of Rome’s prophetic books and a mine of information for the College of Augurs, no member of which was an authority on the subject of augury, as augurs were no more and no less than elected religious officials who were legally obliged to consult a chart before pronouncing the omens auspicious or inauspicious. It was Cicero’s most ardent wish to be elected an augur (he was not fool enough to think he stood a chance of being elected a pontifex); when he was, he had vowed, he would know more about augury than any of the fellows who, whether elected or co-opted, calmly rode into religious office because their families were entitled.

  Having first cultivated Nigidius Figulus because of his knowledge, Cicero soon succumbed to the charm of his nature, unruffled and sweet, humble and sensitive. No snob despite his social pre-eminence, he enjoyed quick wit and lively company, and thought it wonderful to spend an evening with Cicero, famous for wit and always lively company. Like Atticus, Nigidius Figulus was a bachelor, but unlike Atticus, he had chosen this state for religious reasons; he firmly believed that to introduce a woman into his household would destroy his mystical connections to the world of invisible forces and powers. Women were earth people. Nigidius Figulus was a sky person. And air and earth never mixed, never enhanced each other any more than they consumed each other. He also had a horror of blood save in a holy place, and women bled. Thus all his slaves were male, and he had put his mother to live with his sister and her husband.

  *

  Cicero had intended to see Atticus and Atticus only on the day following the curule elections, but family matters intruded. Brother Quintus had been elected a praetor. Naturally that called for a celebration, especially as Quintus had followed his older brother’s example and got himself elected in suo anno, exactly the right age (he was thirty-nine). This second son of a humble squire from Arpinum lived in the house on the Carinae which the old man had bought when he first moved his family to Rome in order to give the prodigy Marcus all the advantages his intellect demanded. So it was that Cicero and his family trudged from the Palatine to the Carinae shortly before the dinner hour, though this fraternal obligation did not negate a talk with Atticus—he would be there because Quintus was married to Atticus’s sister, Pomponia.

  There was a strong likeness between Cicero and his brother, but Cicero himself was inarguably the more attractive of the two. For one thing, he was physically much taller and better built; Quintus was tiny and sticklike. For another, Cicero had kept his hair, whereas Quintus was very bald on top. Quintus’s ears seemed to protrude more than Cicero’s, though that was actually a visual illusion due to the massive size of Cicero’s skull, which dwarfed these appendages. They were both brown-eyed and brown-haired, and had good brown skins.

  In one other respect they had much in common: both men had married wealthy termagants whose near relations had despaired of ever giving them away in wedlock. Terentia had been justly famous for being impossible to please as well as such a difficult person that no one, however needy, could summon up the steel to ask for her in marriage even if she had been willing. It had been she who chose Cicero, rather than the other way around. As for Pomponia-well, Atticus had twice thrown up his hands in exasperation over her! She was ugly, she was fierce, she was rude, she was bitter, she was truculent, she was vengeful, and she could be cruel. His feet firmly on the commercial ladder thanks to Atticus’s support, her first husband had divorced her the moment he could do without Atticus, leaving her back on Atticus’s doorstep. Though the ground for divorce was barrenness, all of Rome assumed (correctly) that the real ground was lack of desire to cohabit. It was Cicero who suggested that brother Quintus might be prevailed upon to marry her, and he and Atticus between them had done the persuading. The union had taken place thirteen years before, the groom being considerably younger than the bride. Then ten years after the wedding Pomponia gave the lie to barrenness by producing a son, also Quintus.

  They fought constantly, and were already using their poor little boy as ammunition in their never-ending struggle for psychic supremacy, pushing and pulling the hapless child from one side to the other and back again. It worried Atticus (this son of his sister’s was his heir) and it worried Cicero, but neither man succeeded in convincing the antagonists that the real sufferer was little Quintus. Had brother Quintus only owned the sense to be a doormat like Cicero, bent over backward to placate his wife and strive never to draw her attention toward himself, the marriage might have worked better than that of Cicero and Terentia, for what Pomponia wanted was simple dominance, whereas what Terentia wanted was political clout. But, alas, brother Quintus was far more like their father than Cicero was; he would be master in his own house no matter what.

  The war was going well, so much was plain when Cicero, Terentia, Tullia and two-year-old Marcus entered the house. It was the steward bore Tullia and baby Marcus off to the nursery; Pomponia was too busy screaming at Quintus, and Quintus equally engrossed in shouting her down.

  “Just as well,” roared Cicero in his loudest Forum voice, “that the temple of Tellus is right next door! Otherwise there’d be yet more neighbors complaining.”

  Did that stop them? Not at all! They continued as if the newcomers didn’t exist, until Atticus too arrived. His technique to terminate the battle was as direct as it was elementary: he simply strode forward, grabbed his sister by the shoulders and shook her until her teeth rattled.

  “Go away, Pomponia!” he snapped. “Go on, take Terentia somewhere and pour your troubles out in her ear!”

  “I shake her too,” said brother Quintus plaintively, “but it doesn’t work. She just knees me in the you-know-whats.”

  “If she kneed me,” said Atticus grimly, “I’d kill her.”

  “If I killed her, you’d see me tried for murder.”

  “True,” said Atticus, grin
ning. “Poor Quintus! I’ll have another talk with her and see what I can do.”

  Cicero did not participate in this exchange, as he had beaten a retreat before Atticus’s advent, and emerged now from the direction of the study with a scroll opened between his hands.

  “Writing again, brother?” he asked, looking up.

  “A tragedy in the style of Sophocles.”

  “You’re improving, it’s quite good.”

  “I hope I’m improving! You’ve usurped the family reputation for speeches and poetry, which leaves me to choose from history, comedy and tragedy. I haven’t the time for the research history demands, and tragedy comes easier to me than comedy, given the kind of atmosphere I live in.”

  “I would have thought that called for farce,” said Cicero demurely.

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “There are always philosophy and natural science.”

  “My philosophy is simple and natural science baffling, so it still comes down to history, comedy or tragedy.”

  Atticus had wandered off, and spoke now from the far end of the atrium. “What’s this, Quintus?” he asked, a hint of laughter in his voice.

  “Oh, bother, you found it before I could show it to you!” cried Quintus, hurrying to join him, Cicero in his wake. “Now I’m a praetor, it’s permitted.”

  “Indeed it is,” said Atticus gravely, only his eyes betraying his mirth.

  Cicero shoved between them and stood at the proper distance to absorb its glory fully, face solemn. What he gazed at was a gigantic bust of Quintus, so much larger than life that it could never be displayed in a public place, for only the gods might exceed the actual stature of a man. Whoever had done it had worked in clay, then baked it before applying the colors, which made it both good and bad. Good because the likeness was speaking and the colors beautifully tinted, bad because clay-work was cheap and the chances of breakage into shards considerable. None knew better than Cicero and Atticus that Quintus’s purse would not run to a bust in marble or bronze.