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

by Colleen McCullough

  “Not a thing, Magnus, I assure you,” said Caesar, seating himself once more. “I need the services of an augur, is all, and I thought you might like to oblige me.”

  “Anytime, Caesar. But for what?”

  “Well, as I’m sure you know, Publius Clodius has been desirous of abrogating his patrician status for some time. This is his adoptive father, Publius Fonteius. I’d like to get the business done this afternoon, if you’d act as augur.”

  No, Pompey was not a fool. Caesar hadn’t got it out before he understood the object of the exercise. He too had been in the Forum to listen to Cicero, and he had hurt more from it than Caesar had, for whatever insults were heaped on Caesar’s head reflected on him. For years he’d put up with Cicero’s vacillations; nor was he pleased with the way Cicero had shied on every occasion he had asked for help since his return from the East. Savior of his country indeed! Let the conceited nincompoop suffer a little for a change! Oh, how he’d cringe when he knew Clodius was on his tail!

  “I’m happy to oblige,” said Pompey.

  “Then let’s all meet in the Well of the Comitia in one hour’s time,” said Caesar. “I’ll have the thirty lictors of the curiae present, and we’ll get on with it. Minus the beards.”

  Clodius lingered at the door. “Does it happen immediately, Caesar, or do I have to wait for seventeen days?”

  “Since the tribunician elections are not due for some months yet, Clodius, what does it matter?” asked Caesar, laughing. “But to make absolutely sure, we’ll have another little ceremony after three nundinae have elapsed.” He paused. “I presume you’re sui iuris, not under the hand of Appius Claudius still?’’

  “No, he ceased to be my paterfamilias when I married.”

  “Then there is no impediment.”

  Nor was there. Few of the men who mattered in Rome were there to witness the proceedings of adrogatio, with their prayers, chants, sacrifices and archaic rituals. Publius Clodius, formerly a member of the patrician gens Claudia, became a member of the plebeian gens Fonteia for a very few moments before assuming his own name again and continuing to be a member of the gens Claudia—but this time of a new plebeian branch, distinct from the Claudii Marcelli. He was, in effect, founding a new Famous Family. Unable to enter the religious circle, Fulvia watched from the closest spot she could, then joined Clodius afterward to whoop about the lower Forum telling everyone that Clodius was going to be a tribune of the plebs next year—and that Cicero’s days as a Roman citizen were numbered.

  *

  Cicero learned of it in the little crossroads settlement of Tres Tabernae, on his way to Antium; there he met young Curio.

  “My dear fellow,” said Cicero warmly, drawing Curio into his private parlor at the best of the three inns, “the only thing which saddens me to meet you is that it means you haven’t yet resumed your brilliant attacks on Caesar. What happened? Last year so vocal, this year so silent.”

  “1 got bored,” said Curio tersely; one of the penalties of flirting with the boni was that one had to put up with people like Cicero, who also flirted with the boni. He was certainly not about to tell Cicero now that he had stopped attacking Caesar because Clodius had helped him out of a financial embarrassment, and fixed as his price silence on the subject of Caesar. So, having a little venom of his own, he sat down companionably with Cicero and let the conversation flow wherever Cicero wished for some time. Then he asked, “How do you feel about Clodius’s new plebeian status?”

  The effect was all he could have hoped for. Cicero went white, grabbed the edge of the table and hung on for dear life.

  “What did you say?” the savior of his country whispered.

  “Clodius is a plebeian.”

  “When?”

  “Not too many days ago—you will travel by litter, Cicero; you move at the pace of a snail. I didn’t see it myself, but I heard all about it from Clodius, very elated. He’s standing for the tribunate of the plebs, he tells me, though I’m not quite sure why aside from settling his score with you. One moment he was praising Caesar like a god because Caesar had procured him his lex Curiata, the next moment he was saying that as soon as he entered office he’d invalidate all Caesar’s laws. But that’s Clodius!”

  The color now flooded into Cicero’s face, reddening it to the point whereat Curio wondered if he was about to have a stroke. “Caesar made him a plebeian?’’

  “On the same day you let your tongue run away with you at the trial of Hybrida. At noon all was peace and quiet, three hours later there was Clodius screaming his new plebeian status from the rooftops. And that he’d be prosecuting you.”

  “Free speech is dead!” groaned Cicero.

  “You’re only just finding that out?” Curio asked, grinning.

  “But if Caesar made him a plebeian, why is he threatening to invalidate all Caesar’s laws?”

  “Oh, not because he’s vexed with Caesar,” Curio said. “It’s Pompeius he loathes. Caesar’s laws are designed to benefit Magnus, that simple. Clodius deems Magnus a tumor in Rome’s bowels.”

  “Sometimes I agree with him,” Cicero muttered.

  Which didn’t prevent his greeting Pompey with joy when he reached Antium to find the Great Man staying there on his way back to Rome after a quick trip to Campania as a land committeeman.

  “Have you heard that Clodius is now a plebeian?” he asked as soon as he considered it polite to terminate the courtesies.

  “I didn’t hear it, Cicero, I was a part of it,” said Pompey, bright blue eyes twinkling. “I took the auspices, and very fine they were too. The clearest liver! Classical.”

  “Oh, what’s going to happen to me now?” moaned Cicero, his hands writhing.

  “Nothing, Cicero, nothing!” said Pompey heartily. “Clodius is all talk, believe me. Neither Caesar nor I will let him harm a hair of your venerable head.”

  “Venerable?” squawked Cicero. “You and I, Pompeius, are the same age!”

  “Who said I wasn’t venerable too?”

  “Oh, I’m doomed!”

  “Nonsense!” said Pompey, reaching over to pat Cicero’s back between his huddled shoulders. “Give you my word he won’t harm you, truly!”

  A promise Cicero wanted desperately to cling to; but could anyone keep Clodius in check once he had a target in sight?

  “How do you know he won’t harm me?” he asked.

  “Because I told him not to at the adoption ceremony. Time someone told him! He reminds me of a really bumptious and cocky junior military tribune who mistakes a little talent for a lot. Well, I’m used to dealing with those! He just needed smartening up by the man with the real talent—the general.”

  That was it. Curio’s puzzle answered. Didn’t Pompey begin to understand? A man of respectable birth from rural parts didn’t presume to tell a patrician Roman how to behave. If Clodius had not already decided he loathed Pompey, to be treated like a junior military tribune by the likes of Pompeius Magnus at the very moment of his victory would surely have done it.

  *

  Rome during March buzzed, some of it arising from politics and some from the sensational death of Metellus Celer. Still dallying in Rome and leaving his province of Further Gaul to the ministrations of his legate Gaius Pomptinus, Celer seemed not to know what to do for the best. It had been bad enough when Clodia blazed a trail across Rome’s social sky in the throes of her wild affair with Catullus, but that was finished. The poet from Verona was crazed with grief; his howls and sobs could be heard from the Carinae to the Palatine—and his wonderful poems read from the same to the same. Erotic, passionate, heartfelt, luminous—if Catullus had searched forever for a suitable object of a great love, he could not have found a better than his adored Lesbia, Clodia. Her perfidy, cunning, heartlessness and rapacity coaxed words out of him he hadn’t known himself capable of producing.

  She terminated Catullus when she discovered Caelius, about to commence his prosecution of Gaius Antonius Hybrida. What had attracted her to Catullus was p
resent to some extent in Caelius, but in a more Roman mold; the poet was too intense, too volatile, too prone to gloomy depression. Whereas Caelius was sophisticated, witty, innately joyous. He came from good stock and had a rich father who was anxious that his brilliant son should snatch nobility for the Caelius family by attaining the consulship. Caelius was a New Man, yes, but not of the more obnoxious kind. The striking and stormy good looks of Catullus had ravished her, but the powerful thews and equally handsome face belonging to Caelius pleased Clodia more; it could become quite an ordeal to be a poet’s mistress.

  In short, Catullus began to bore Clodia at precisely the moment she spied Caelius. So it was off with the old and on with the new. And how did a husband fit into this frenzied activity? The answer was, not very well. Clodia’s passion for Celer had lasted until she neared thirty, but that was the end of it. Time and increasing self-assurance had weaned her away from her first cousin and childhood companion, prompted her to seek whatever it was she looked for with Catullus, her second essay in illicit love—at least of a glaringly public kind. The incest scandal she, Clodius and Clodilla had provoked had whetted an appetite eventually grown too great not to be indulged. Clodia also found that she adored being despised by all the people she herself despised. Poor Celer was reduced to the role of helpless onlooker.

  She was twelve years older than the twenty-three-year-old Marcus Caelius Rufus when she spied him, not that he had just arrived in Rome; Caelius had flitted in and out since he had come to study under Cicero three years before the consulship. He had flirted with Catilina, been sent in disgrace to assist the governor of Africa Province until the fuss died down because Caelius Senior happened to own a great deal of the wheatlands of the Bagradas River in that province. Recently Caelius had come home to start his Forum career in earnest, and with as much splash as possible. Thus he elected to prosecute the man even Gaius Caesar hadn’t been able to convict, Gaius Antonius Hybrida.

  For Celer the misery just kept on waxing at the same rate as Clodia’s interest in him waned. And then, on top of being shown that he had no choice other than to swear the oath to uphold Caesar’s land bill, he learned that Clodia had a new lover, Marcus Caelius Rufus. The inhabitants of the houses around Celer’s residence had no trouble hearing the frightful quarrels which erupted out of Celer’s peristyle at all hours of day and night. Husband and wife specialized in shouting threats of murder at each other, and there were sounds of blows struck, missiles landing, breaking pottery or glass, frightened servants’ voices, shrieks which froze the blood. It couldn’t last, all the neighbors knew it, and speculated how it would eventually end.

  But who could have predicted such an end? Unconscious, brain herniating out of the splintered depths of a shocking head wound, Celer was hauled naked from his bath by servants while Clodia stood screaming, robe soaked because she had climbed into the bath in an attempt to get him out herself, covered in blood because she had held his head out of the water. When the horrified Metellus Nepos was joined by Appius Claudius and Publius Clodius, she was able to tell them what had happened. Celer had been very drunk, she explained, but insisted on a bath after he vomited—who could ever reason with a drunken man or persuade him not to do what he was determined to do? Repeatedly telling him that he was too drunk to bathe, Clodia accompanied him to the bathroom, and continued to plead with him as he undressed. Then, poised on the top step and about to descend into the tepid water, her husband fell and struck his head on the rear parapet of the tub—sharp, projecting, lethal.

  Sure enough, when the three men went to the bathroom to inspect the scene of the accident, there on the rear parapet were blood, bone, brain. The physicians and surgeons tenderly inserted a comatose Metellus Celer into his bed, and a weeping Clodia refused to leave his side for any reason.

  Two days later he died, never having regained consciousness. Clodia was a widow, and Rome plunged into mourning for Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer. His brother, Nepos, was his principal heir, but Clodia had been left extremely comfortably off, and no agnate relative of Celer’s was about to invoke the lex Voconia.

  Busy preparing his case for the defense of Hybrida, Cicero had listened fascinated when Publius Nigidius Figulus told him and Atticus (in Rome for the winter) the details Appius Claudius had told him in confidence.

  When the story was done the thought popped into Cicero’s mind; he giggled. “Clytemnestra!” he said.

  To which the other two said not one word, though they seemed distinctly uneasy. Nothing could be proved, there had been no witnesses aside from Clodia. But certainly Metellus Celer had borne the same kind of wound as King Agamemnon had after his wife, Queen Clytemnestra, had plied an axe to murder him in his bath so that she could continue her liaison with Aegisthus.

  So who spread the new nickname of Clytemnestra? That was never established either. But from that time on Clodia was also known as Clytemnestra, and many people implicitly believed that she had murdered her husband in his bath.

  The sensation did not die down after Celer’s funeral, for he left a vacancy in the College of Augurs, and every aspiring man in Rome wanted to contest the election. In the old days when men had been co-opted into the priestly colleges, the new augur would have been Metellus Nepos, the dead man’s brother. Nowadays, who knew? The boni had very vocal supporters, but they were not in the majority. Perhaps aware of this, Nepos was heard saying that he would probably not nominate himself, as he was so brokenhearted he intended to travel abroad for several years.

  The squabbles over the augurship may not have attained the height of those frightful altercations heard from the house of Celer before he died, but they enlivened the Forum mightily. When the tribune of the plebs Publius Vatinius announced that he would stand, Bibulus and the Chief Augur, Messala Rufus, blocked his candidacy very simply. Vatinius had a disfiguring tumor on his forehead; he wasn’t perfect.

  “At least,” Vatinius was heard to say loudly, though it seemed with great good humor, “my wen is where everyone can see it! Now Bibulus’s wen is on his arse, though Messala Rufus goes one better—he has two wens where his balls used to be. I am going to move in the Plebs that all future candidates for an augurship should be required to strip naked and parade up and down the Forum.”

  *

  In April the junior consul Bibulus could enjoy true possession of the fasces for the first time, given February’s foreign affairs. He entered his month well aware that all was not going well with the execution of the lex Iulia agraria: the commissioners were unusually zealous and the five committeemen enormously helpful, but every organized settlement in Italy still retaining public lands was being obstructive, and sale of private lands was tardy because even knightly acquisition of land for resale to the State took time. Oh, the act was so beautifully thought out that things would sort themselves out eventually! The trouble was that Pompey needed to settle more of his veterans at once than could be done.

  “They have to see action,” said Bibulus to Cato, Gaius Piso, Ahenobarbus and Metellus Scipio, “but action isn’t on the horizon as yet. What they need is a very large tract of public land already surveyed and apportioned out in ten-iugera lots by some previous land legislator who didn’t live long enough to implement his law.”

  Cato’s huge nose contracted, his eyes blazed. “They would never dare!” he said.

  “Dare what?” asked Metellus Scipio.

  “They will dare,” Bibulus insisted.

  “Dare what?”

  “Bring in a second land bill to use the Ager Campanus and the Capuan public lands. Two hundred and fifty square miles of land parceled up by almost everyone since Tiberius Gracchus, ready for seizure and settlement.”

  “It will pass,” said Gaius Piso, lips peeled away from teeth.

  “I agree,” said Bibulus, “it will pass.”

  “But we have to stop it,” from Ahenobarbus.

  “Yes, we have to stop it.”

  “How?” asked Metellus Scipio.

  “I had h
oped,” said the junior consul, “that my ploy to make all comitial days feriae would answer, though I should have known that Caesar would use his authority as Pontifex Maximus. However, there is one religious ploy neither he nor the Colleges can counter. I may have exceeded my authority as a lone augur in the feriae business, but I will not exceed my authority as both augur and consul if I approach the problem in both roles.”

  They were all leaning forward eagerly. Perhaps Cato was the most publicly prominent one among them, but there could be no doubt that Bibulus’s heroism in choosing to suggest a menial and very belittling proconsulship had given him the edge over Cato in all private meetings of the leaders of the boni. Nor did Cato resent this; Cato had no aspirations to lead.

  “I intend to retire to my house to watch the skies until the end of my year as consul.”

  No one spoke.

  “Did you hear me?’’ asked Bibulus, smiling.

  “We heard, Marcus Bibulus,” said Cato, “but will it work? How can it work?”

  “It’s been done before, and it’s firmly established as a part of the mos maiorum. Besides which, I organized a secret little search of the Sacred Books, and found a prophecy which could easily be interpreted as meaning that this year the sky is going to produce an omen of extreme significance. Just what the sign is the prophecy didn’t say, and that’s what makes the whole ploy possible. Now when the consul retires to his house to watch the skies, all public business must be suspended until he emerges to take up his fasces again. Which I have no intention of doing!”

  “It won’t be popular,” said Gaius Piso, looking worried.

  “At first perhaps not, but we’re all going to have to work hard to make it look more popular than it actually will be. I intend to use Catullus—he’s so good at lampooning, and now that Clodia’s finished with him he can’t do enough to make her or her little brother unhappy. I just wish I could get Curio again, but he won’t oblige. However, we’re not going to concentrate on Caesar, he’s immune. We’re going to set Pompeius Magnus up as our chief target, and for the rest of the year we make absolutely sure that not a day goes by without as many of our adherents in the Forum as we can marshal. Numbers don’t actually mean much. Noise and numbers in the Forum are what count. The bulk of city and country want Caesar’s laws, but they’re hardly ever in the Forum unless there’s a vote or a vital contio.”