Antony stared at him resentfully. Not much to look at aside from a certain air of ruthless competence—slight, of average height, so white-blond that he had earned the cognomen of Albinus. Yet Caesar loved him, esteemed him so much he had been given jobs more properly in the purlieus of senior legates. Why wouldn’t Caesar love his cousin Marcus Antonius? Why?
*
The pivot around whom all these people turned, Publius Clodius, was a slight man of average height too, but as dark as Decimus Brutus was fair. His face was impish, with a slightly anxious expression when it wasn’t smiling, and his life had been extraordinarily eventful in a way which perhaps could not have happened to anyone other than a member of that highly unorthodox patrician clan the Claudii Pulchri. Among many other things, he had provoked the Arabs of Syria into circumcising him, Cicero into mercilessly ridiculing him in public, Caesar into permitting him to be adopted into the Plebs, Pompey into paying Milo to start up rival street gangs, and all of noble Rome into believing that he had enjoyed incestuous relations with his sisters, Clodia and Clodilla.
His greatest failing was an insatiable thirst for revenge. Once a person insulted or injured his dignitas, he put that person’s name on his revenge list and waited for the perfect opportunity to pay the score in full. Among these persons were Cicero, whom he had succeeded in legally banishing for a time; Ptolemy the Cyprian, whom he had pushed into suicide by annexing Cyprus; Lucullus, his dead brother-in-law, whose career as one of Rome’s greatest generals Clodius had sent crashing by instigating a mutiny; and Caesar’s mother, Aurelia, whose celebration of the winter feast of Bona Dea, the Good Goddess of Women, he had mocked and ruined. Though this last revenge still haunted him whenever his enormous self-confidence suffered a check, for he had committed a terrible sacrilege against Bona Dea. Tried in a court of law for it, Clodius was acquitted because his wife and other women bought the jury—Fulvia because she loved him, the other women because they wanted him preserved for Bona Dea’s own revenge. It would come, it would come… and that was what haunted Clodius.
His latest act of revenge was founded in a very old grudge. Over twenty years ago, aged eighteen, he had charged the beautiful young Vestal Virgin Fabia with unchastity, a crime punishable by death. He lost the case. Fabia’s name went immediately onto his list of victims; the years passed, Clodius waited patiently while others involved, like Catilina, bit the dust. Then, aged thirty-seven and still a beautiful woman, Fabia (who, to add to her score, was the half sister of Cicero’s wife, Terentia) retired. Having served her thirty years, she removed from the Domus Publica to a snug little house on the upper Quirinal, where she intended to live out the rest of her life as an honored ex-Chief Vestal. Her father had been a patrician Fabius Maximus (it was a mother she shared with Terentia), and he had dowered her richly when she had entered the Order at seven years of age. As Terentia, extremely shrewd in all money matters, had always administered Fabia’s dowry with the same efficiency and acumen she brought to the management of her own large fortune (she never let Cicero get his hands on one sestertius of it), Fabia left the Order a very wealthy woman.
It was this last fact which started the seed germinating in Clodius’s fertile mind. The longer he waited, the sweeter revenge became. And after a whole twenty years he suddenly saw how to crush Fabia completely. Though it was perfectly acceptable for an ex-Vestal to marry, few ever did; it was thought to be unlucky. On the other hand, few ex-Vestals were as attractive as Fabia. Or as wealthy. Clodius cast round in his mind for someone who was as penurious as he was handsome and wellborn, and came up with Publius Cornelius Dolabella. A part-time member of the Clodius Club. And of much the same kind as that other brute, Mark Antony: big, burly, bullish, bad.
When Clodius suggested that he woo Fabia, Dolabella leaped at the idea. Patrician of impeccable ancestry though he was, every father whose daughter he eyed whisked her out of sight and said a firm no to any proposal of marriage. Like another patrician Cornelius, Sulla, Dolabella had no choice other than to live on his wits. Ex-Vestals were sui iuris-— they answered to no man; they were entirely in charge of their own lives. How fortuitous! A bride of blood as good as his own, still young enough to bear children, very rich—and no paterfamilias to thwart him.
But where Dolabella differed from that other brute, Antony, lay in his personality. Mark Antony was by no means unintelligent, but he utterly lacked charm; his attractions were of the flesh. Dolabella, to the contrary, possessed an easy, happy, light manner and a great talent for conversation. Antony’s amours were of the “I love you, lie down!” variety, whereas Dolabella’s were more “Let me drink in the sight of your dear, sweet face!”
The outcome was a marriage. Not only had the ingratiating Dolabella swept Fabia off her feet, he had also swept the female members of Cicero’s household off their feet. That Cicero’s daughter, Tullia (unhappily married to Furius Crassipes), should deem him divine was perhaps not surprising, but that the sour, ugly Terentia should also deem him divine rocked Rome of the gossips to its foundations. Thus Dolabella wooed Fabia with her sister’s fervent blessing; poor Tullia cried.
Clodius was still enjoying his revenge, for the marriage was a disaster from its first day. A late-thirties virgin cloistered among women for thirty years required a kind of sexual initiation Dolabella was not qualified—or interested enough—to pursue. Though the rupture of Fabia’s hymen could not be classified as a rape, neither was it an ecstasy. Exasperated and bored, Fabia’s money safely his, Dolabella went back to women who knew how to do it and were willing at least to pretend ecstasy. Fabia sat at home and wept desolately, while Terentia kept yapping that she was a fool who didn’t know how to handle a man. Tullia, on the other hand, cheered up enormously and began thinking of divorce from Furius Crassipes.
However, Clodius’s genuine glee at this latest successful revenge was already beginning to pall; politics were always his first priority.
He was determined to be the First Man in Rome, but would not go about achieving this end in the usual fashion—the highest political office allied to a degree of military prowess bordering on legendary. Mainly because Clodius’s talents were not martial. His method was demagoguery; he intended to rule through the Plebeian Assembly, dominated by Rome’s knight-businessmen. Others had taken that path, but never the way Clodius intended to.
Where Clodius differed was in his grand strategy. He did not woo these powerful, plutocratic knight-businessmen. He intimidated them. And in order to intimidate them he employed a section of Roman society which all other men ignored as totally valueless—the proletarii, the Head Count who were the Roman citizen lowly. No money, no votes worth the tablets they were written on, no influence with the mighty, no other reason for existence beyond giving Rome children and enlisting as rankers in Rome’s legions. Even this latter entitlement was relatively recent, for until Gaius Marius had thrown the legions open to men who had no property, Rome’s armies had consisted solely of propertied men. The Head Count were not political people. Far from it. Provided their bellies were full and they were offered regular free entertainment at the games, they had no interest whatsoever in the political machinations of their betters.
Nor was it Clodius’s intention to turn them into political people. He needed their numbers, that was all; it was no part of his purpose to fill them with ideas of their own worth, or draw their attention to the power their sheer numbers potentially wielded. Very simply, they were Clodius’s clients. They owed him cliental loyalty as the patron who had obtained huge benefits for them: a free issue of grain once a month; complete liberty to congregate in their sodalities, colleges or clubs; and a bit of extra money once a year or so. With the assistance of Decimus Brutus and some lesser lights, Clodius had organized the thousands upon thousands of lowly men who frequented the crossroads colleges which littered Rome. On any one day when he scheduled gangs to appear in the Forum and the streets adjacent to it, he needed at most a mere one thousand men. Due to Decimus Brutus, he had a system of rosters and a
set of books enabling him to distribute the load and share out the five-hundred-sestertius fee paid for a sortie among the whole of the crossroads colleges lowly; months would go by before the same man was called again to run riot in the Forum and intimidate the influential Plebs. In that way the faces of his gang members remained anonymous.
After Pompey the Great had paid Milo to set up rival gangs composed of ex-gladiators and bully-boys, the violence became complicated. Not only did it have to achieve Clodius’s objective, intimidation of the Plebs, it now also had to contend with Milo and his professional thugs. Then after Caesar concluded his pact with Pompey and Marcus Crassus at Luca, Clodius was brought to heel. This had been accomplished by awarding him an all-expenses-paid embassage to Anatolia, which afforded him the chance to make a lot of money during the year he was away. Even after he returned, he was quiet. Until Calvinus and Messala Rufus were elected the consuls at the end of last Quinctilis. At this time the war between Clodius and Milo had broken out afresh.
*
Curio was watching Fulvia, but he had been doing that for so many years that no one noticed. Admittedly she was eminently watchable, with her ice-brown hair, her black brows and lashes, her huge dark blue eyes. Several children had only added to her charms, as did a good instinct for what clothing became her. The granddaughter of the great demagogue aristocrat Gaius Gracchus, she was so sure of her place in the highest stratum of society that she felt free to attend meetings in the Forum and barrack in the most unladylike way for Clodius, whom she adored.
“I hear,” said Curio, wrenching his eyes away from his best friend’s wife, “that the moment you’re elected praetor you intend to distribute Rome’s freedmen across the thirty-five tribes. Is that really true, Clodius?”
“Yes, it’s really true,” said Clodius complacently.
Curio frowned, an expression which didn’t suit him. Of an old and noble plebeian family, Scribonius, at thirty-two Curio still had the face of a naughty little boy. His eyes were brown and gleamed wickedly, his skin was smothered in freckles, and his bright red hair stood up on end no matter what his barber did to smooth it down. The urchin look was strengthened when he smiled, for he was missing a front tooth. An exterior very much at odds with Curio’s interior, which was tough, mature, sometimes scandalously courageous, and ruled by a first-class mind. When he and Antony, always boon companions, had been ten years younger, they had tormented Curio’s ultra-conservative consular father unmercifully by pretending to be lovers, and between them had fathered more bastards than, said rumor, anyone else in history.
But now Curio frowned, so the gap in his teeth didn’t show and the mischief in his eyes was quite missing. “Clodius, to distribute the freedmen across all thirty-five tribes would skew the whole of the tribal electoral system,” he said slowly. “The man who owned their votes—that’s you, if you do it—would be unstoppable. All he’d have to do to secure the election of the men he wanted would be to postpone the elections until there were no country voters in town. At the moment the freedmen can vote in only two urban tribes. But there are half a million of them living inside Rome! If they’re put in equal numbers into all thirty-five tribes, they’ll have the numbers to outvote the few permanent residents of Rome who belong to the thirty-one rural tribes—the senators and knights of the First Class. The true Roman Head Count are confined to the four urban tribes—they don’t vote across all thirty-five tribes! Why, you’d be handing over control of Rome’s tribal elections to a pack of non-Romans! Greeks, Gauls, Syrians, ex-pirates, the detritus of the world, all of them slaves in their own lifetimes! I don’t grudge them their freedom, nor do I grudge them our citizenship. But I do bitterly grudge them control of a congress of true Roman men!” He shook his head, looked fierce. “Clodius, Clodius! They’ll never let you get away with it! Nor, for that matter, will I let you get away with it!”
“Neither they nor you will be able to prevent me,” Clodius said with insufferable smugness.
A dour and silent man who had recently entered office as a tribune of the plebs, Plancus Bursa spoke up in his passionless way. “To do that is to play with fire, Clodius,” he said.
“The whole First Class will unite against you,” Pompeius Rufus, another new tribune of the plebs, said in a voice of doom.
“But you intend to do it anyway,” said Decimus Brutus.
“I intend to do it anyway. I’d be a fool if I didn’t.”
“And a fool my little brother is not,” mumbled Clodia, sucking her fingers lasciviously as she ogled Antony.
Antony scratched his groin, shifted its formidable contents with the same hand, then blew Clodia a kiss; they were old bedmates. “If you do succeed, Clodius, you’ll own every freedman in Rome,” he said thoughtfully. “They’ll vote for whomever you say. Except that owning the tribal elections won’t procure you consuls in the centuriate elections.”
“Consuls? Who needs consuls?” asked Clodius loftily. “All I need are ten tribunes of the plebs year after year after year. With ten tribunes of the plebs doing whatever I command them to, consuls aren’t worth a fava bean to a Pythagorean. And praetors will simply be judges in their own courts; they won’t have any legislative powers. The Senate and the First Class think they own Rome. The truth is that anyone can own Rome if he just finds the right way to go about it. Sulla owned Rome. And so will I, Antonius. Through freedmen distributed across the thirty-five tribes and the ten tame tribunes of the plebs they’ll return—because I’ll never let the elections be held while the country bumpkins are in Rome for the games. Why do you think Sulla fixed Quinctilis during the games as the time to hold elections? He wanted the rural tribes—which means the First Class—to control the Plebeian Assembly and the tribunes of the plebs. That way, everybody with clout can own one or two tribunes of the plebs. My way, I’ll own all ten.”
Curio was staring at Clodius as if he’d never seen him before. “I’ve always known that you’re not quite right in the head, Clodius, but this is absolute insanity! Don’t try!”
The women, who respected Curio’s opinions greatly, began to shrink together on the couch they shared, Fulvia’s beautiful brown skin paler by the moment. Then she gulped, tried to giggle, thrust out her chin pugnaciously.
“Clodius always knows what he’s doing!” she cried. “He’s got it all worked out.”
Curio shrugged. “Be it on your own head, then, Clodius. I still think you’re mad. And I’m warning you, I’ll oppose you.”
Back came the overindulged, atrociously spoiled youth Clodius had been; he gave Curio a look of burning scorn, sneered, slid off the couch he shared with Decimus Brutus, and flounced out of the room, Fulvia flying after him.
“They’ve left their shoes behind,” said Pompeius Rufus, whose intellect was on a par with his sister’s.
“I’d better find him,” said Plancus Bursa, departing too.
“Take your shoes, Bursa!” cried Pompeius Rufus.
Which struck Curio, Antony and Decimus Brutus as exquisitely funny; they lay flat out and howled with laughter.
“You shouldn’t irritate Publius,” said Clodilla to Curio. “He’ll sulk for days.”
“I wish he’d think!” growled Decimus Brutus.
Clodia, not as young as she once had been but still a most alluring woman, gazed at the three men with dark eyes wide. “I know you’re all fond of him,” she said, “which means that you really do fear for him. But should you? He’s bounced from one mad scheme to another all his life, and somehow they work to his advantage.”
“Not this time,” said Curio, sighing.
“He’s insane,” said Decimus Brutus.
But Antony had had enough. “I don’t care if they brand the mad sign on Clodius’s forehead,” he growled. “I need to be elected quaestor! I’m scratching for every sestertius I can find, but all I do is get poorer.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve run through Fadia’s money already, Marcus,” said Clodilla.
“Fadia’s been dead for
four years!” cried Antony indignantly.
“Rubbish, Marcus,” said Clodia, licking her fingers. “Rome is full of ugly daughters with plutocrat fathers scrambling up the social ladder. Find yourself another Fadia.”
“At the moment it’s probably going to be my first cousin, Antonia Hybrida.”
They all sat up to stare, including Pompeius Rufus.
“Lots of money,” said Curio, head to one side.
“That’s why I’ll probably marry her. Uncle Hybrida can’t abide me, but he’d rather Antonia married me than a mushroom.” He looked thoughtful. “They say she tortures her slaves, but I’ll soon beat that out of her.”
“Like father, like daughter,” said Decimus Brutus, grinning.
“Cornelia Metella is a widow,” Clodilla suggested. “Old, old family. Many thousands of talents.”
“But what if she’s like dear old tata Metellus Scipio?” asked Antony, red-brown eyes twinkling. “It’s no trouble dealing with someone who tortures her slaves, but pornographic pageants?”
More laughter, though it was hollow. How could they protect Publius Clodius from himself if he persisted in this scheme?
*
Though his beloved Julia had been dead now for sixteen months and his grief had worn itself out to the point whereat he could speak her name without dissolving immediately into tears, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus had not thought of remarriage. There was actually nothing to prevent his relocating himself in his provinces, Nearer and Further Spain, which he would be governing for another three years. Yet he had not moved from his villa on the Campus Martius, still left his provinces to the care of his legates Afranius and Petreius. He was also, of course, curator of Rome’s grain supply, a job which he could use as an excuse for remaining in the vicinity of Rome; but in spite of Clodius’s free grain dole and a recent drought, he had brought the grain supply so tidily into running itself that little was required of him. Like all publicly conducted enterprises, what it had needed was someone with a genius for organization and the clout to ride roughshod over those ghastly ditherers the civil servants.
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