“Oh, poor Brutus!”
He cleared his throat. “Aren’t you curious as to what brings me here today?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t think beyond the fact that you’ve come.”
He shifted in his chair, then looked directly at her. “I’m deputed to break some painful news to you, Porcia.”
Her skin paled, she licked her lips. “Bibulus is dead.”
“No, Bibulus is well. But Marcus and Gnaeus were murdered in Alexandria.”
The tears coursed down her face at once, but she said not one word. Brutus fished out his handkerchief and gave it to her, knowing full well that she would have put hers into service as a blotter or a mop. He let her weep for some time, then got to his feet a little awkwardly.
“I must go, Porcia. But may I come back? Would you like me to tell young Lucius?”
“No,” she mumbled through the folds of linen. “I’ll tell him, Brutus. But please come back.”
Brutus went away saddened, though not, he realized, for the sons of Marcus Bibulus. For that poor, vital, glorious creature whose husband could say no better of her than that she was—oh, horrible word!— juiceless.
*
Cato was still lobbying among the minor boni to succeed in postponing the discussion of Caesar’s provinces until the Ides of November when the word came that Quintus Hortensius was dying, and had sent for him.
The atrium was quite crowded by well-wishers, but the steward conducted Cato into the “reclining room” at once. Hortensius lay on the beautiful bed, swaddled in blankets and shivering dreadfully, the left side of his mouth drooped and drooling, his right hand picking at the bedclothes around his neck. But, as on Cato’s earlier visit, Hortensius recognized him immediately. Young Quintus Hortensius, who was the same age as Brutus and well ensconced in the Senate, got up from his chair and offered it to Cato with true Hortensian courtesy.
“Won’t be long,” said Hortensius very thickly. “Had a stroke this morning. Can’t move my left side. Can still speak but tongue gone clumsy. What a fate for me, eh? Won’t be long. Another stroke soon.”
Cato pulled the blankets away until he could take that feebly plucking right hand comfortably in his own; it clung pathetically.
“Left you something in my will, Cato.”
“You know I don’t accept inheritances, Quintus Hortensius.”
“Not money, hee hee,” the dying man tittered. “Know you won’t take money. But will take this.” Whereupon he closed his eyes and seemed to fall into a doze.
Still holding the hand, Cato had time to look about, which he did not in dread but with a steeled determination. Yes, Marcia was there, with three other women.
Hortensia he knew well; she was his brother Caepio’s widow and had never remarried. Her daughter by Caepio, young Servilia, was just about of marriageable age, Cato realized with a shock—where did the years go? Was it that long since Caepio died? Not a nice girl, young Servilia. Did owning the name predispose them, all the Servilias? The third one was young Hortensius’s wife, Lutatia, daughter of Catulus and therefore a double first cousin to her husband. Very proud. Very beautiful in an icy way.
Marcia had fixed her eyes upon a chandelier in the far corner of the room; he was free to gaze at her without fearing to meet her eyes, he knew that. The other three women he had dismissed in his misogynistic way, but he couldn’t dismiss Marcia. He didn’t have that kind of memory which could conjure up the exact lineaments of a beloved face, and that had been one of the saddest aspects of his ongoing sorrow since his brother Caepio had died. So he stared at Marcia in amazement. Was that how she looked?
He spoke, loudly and harshly; Hortensius started, opened his eyes, and kept them open, smiling gummily at Cato.
“Ladies, Quintus Hortensius is dying,” he said. “Bring up chairs and sit where he can see you. Marcia and young Servilia, here by me. Hortensia and Lutatia, on the other side of the bed. A man who is dying must have the comfort of resting his eyes on all the members of his family.”
Young Quintus Hortensius, now ranged around by his wife and his sister, had taken his father’s paralyzed left hand in his hold; he was a rather soldierly fellow for the offspring of a most unmilitary man, but then the same could be said of Cicero’s son, much younger. Sons didn’t seem to take after their fathers. Cato’s own son was not soldierly, not valorous, not political. How odd, that both he and Hortensius should have produced daughters eminently more suited to follow in the family footsteps. Hortensia understood the law brilliantly. Had the gift of oratory. Led a scholarly existence. And Porcia was the one who could have taken his place in Senate and public arena.
His arrangement of the family around the bed meant that he didn’t have to look at Marcia, though he was intensely conscious of her body scant inches from his own.
They sat on through the hours, hardly aware that servants came in to light the lamps as darkness fell, leaving the bedside only for brief visits to the latrine. All looking at the dying man, whose eyes had fallen shut again with the going of the sun. At midnight the second stroke liberated a huge spate of blood under pressure into the vital parts of his brain and killed them so quickly, so subtly that no one realized the second stroke had taken place. Only the cooling temperature of the hand he held told Cato, who drew a deep breath and carefully untwined his numbed fingers from that clutch. He stood up.
“Quintus Hortensius is dead,” he said, reached across the bed to pluck the flaccid left hand from Hortensius’s son, and folded them across the chest. “Put in the coin, Quintus.”
“He died so peacefully!” said Hortensia, astonished.
“Why should he not?” asked Cato, and walked from the room to seek the solitude of the cold, wintry garden.
He paced the paths for long enough to grow used to the moonless, clouded night, intent upon remaining there until the deathbed was passed into the care of the undertakers; then he would slip through the garden gate into the street without going back to the house. Not thinking of Quintus Hortensius Hortalus. Thinking of Marcia.
Who materialized before him so suddenly that he gasped. And none of it mattered. Not the years, the aged husband, the loneliness. She walked into his arms and took his face between her hands, smiling up at him.
“My exile is over,” she said, and offered him her mouth.
He took it, wrung with pain, wracked with guilt, all the ardor and immensity of feeling he had passed on to his daughter liberated, uncontrollable, as fierce and wondrous as it had been in those long-forgotten days before Caepio died. His face was wet with tears, she licked them up, he pulled at her black robe and she at his, and together they fell upon the freezing ground, oblivious. Not once in the two years when she had been with him had he made love to her as he did then, holding nothing back, helpless to withstand the enormity of the emotion which invaded him. The dam had burst, he flew asunder, not all the stringent discipline of his self-inflicted and pitiless ethic could mar this stunning discovery or keep his spirit from leaping into a joy he had never known existed, there with her and within her, over and over and over again.
It was dawn when they parted, not having spoken a single word to each other; nor did they speak when he tore himself away and let himself out through the garden gate into the stirring street. While she gathered her clothing about her in some wry semblance of order and retreated unseen to her own suite of rooms in that vast house. She ached, but with triumph. Perhaps this exile had been the only way Cato could ever have come to terms with what he felt for her; smiling, she sought her bath.
Philippus came to see Cato that morning, and blinked his weary eyelids in surprise at the appearance of Rome’s most famous and dedicated Stoic: vibrant with life, actually grinning!
“Don’t offer me any of that ghastly piss you call wine,” said Philippus, seating himself in a chair.
Cato sat to one side of his shabby desk and waited.
“I’m the executor of Quintus Hortensius’s will,” the visitor said, looking distinc
tly peevish.
“Oh yes, Quintus Hortensius said something about a bequest.”
“Bequest? I’d rather call it a gift from the Gods!”
The pale red eyebrows rose; Cato’s eyes twinkled. “I’m all agog, Lucius Marcius,” he said.
“What’s the matter with you this morning, Cato?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Absolutely everything, I would have said. You’re odd.”
“Yes, but I always was.”
Philippus drew a breath. “Hortensius left you the entire contents of his wine cellar,” he said.
“How very nice of him. No wonder he said I’d accept.”
“It doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it, Cato?”
“You’re quite wrong, Lucius Marcius. It means a great deal.”
“Do you know what Quintus Hortensius has in his cellar?”
“Some very good vintages, I imagine.”
“Oh, yes, he has that! But do you know how many amphorae?”
“No. How could I?”
“Ten thousand amphorae!” Philippus yelled. “Ten thousand amphorae of the finest wines in the world, and who does he go and leave it to but you! The worst palate in Rome!”
“I see what you mean and how you’re feeling, Philippus.” Cato leaned forward, put his hand on Philippus’s knee, a gesture so strange from Cato that Philippus almost drew away. “I tell you what, Philippus. I’ll make a bargain with you,” said Cato.
“A bargain?”
“Yes, a bargain. I can’t possibly accommodate ten thousand amphorae of wine in my house, and if I put it in storage down at Tusculum, the whole district would steal it. So I’ll take the worst five hundred amphorae in poor old Hortensius’s cellar, and give you the nine thousand five hundred best.”
“You’re mad, Cato! Rent a stout warehouse, or sell it! I will buy whatever I can afford of it, so I won’t lose. But you can’t just give away almost all of it, you just can’t!”
“I didn’t say I was giving it away. I said I would make a bargain with you. That means I want to trade it.”
“What on earth do I have worth that much?”
“Your daughter,” said Cato.
Philippus’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“I’ll trade you the wine for your daughter.”
“But you divorced her!”
“And now I’m going to remarry her.”
“You are mad! What do you want her back for?”
“That’s my business,” said Cato, looking extraordinarily pleased with himself. He stretched voluptuously. “I intend to remarry her as soon as Quintus Hortensius has gone into his urn.”
The jaw snapped shut, the mouth worked; Philippus swallowed. “My dear fellow, you can’t do that! The mourning period is a full ten months! And that is even if I did agree,” he added.
The humor fled from Cato’s eyes, which became their normal stern, resolute selves. He compressed his lips. “In ten months,” he said, voice very harsh, “the world might have ended. Or Caesar might have marched on Rome. Or I might have been banished to a village on the Euxine Sea. Ten months are precious. Therefore I will marry Marcia immediately after the funeral of Quintus Hortensius.”
“You can’t! I won’t consent! Rome would go insane!”
“Rome is insane.”
“No, I won’t consent!”
Cato sighed, turned in his chair and stared dreamily out of his study window. “Nine thousand five hundred enormous, huge, gigantic amphorae of vintage wine,” he said. “How much does one amphora hold? Twenty-five flagons? Multiply nine thousand five hundred by twenty-five, and you have two hundred and thirty-seven thousand five hundred flagons of an unparalleled collection of Falernian, Chian, Fucine, Samian…” He sat up so suddenly that Philippus started. “Why, I do believe that Quintus Hortensius had some of that wine King Tigranes, King Mithridates and the King of the Parthians used to buy from Publius Servilius!”
The dark eyes were rolling wildly, the handsome face was a picture of confusion; Philippus clasped his hands together and extended them imploringly to Cato. “I can’t! It would create a worse scandal than your divorcing her and marrying her to poor old Hortensius! Cato, please! Wait a few months!”
“No wine!” said Cato. “Instead, you can watch me take it down, wagonload after wagonload, to the Mons Testaceus in the Port of Rome, and personally break every amphora with a hammer.”
The dark skin went absolutely white. “You wouldn’t!”
“Yes, I would. After all, as you said yourself, I have the worst palate in Rome. And I can afford to drink all the ghastly piss I want. As for selling it, that would be tantamount to taking money from Quintus Hortensius. I never accept monetary bequests.” Cato sat back in his chair, put his arms behind his head, and looked ironically at Philippus. “Make up your mind, man! Conduct your widowed daughter to her marriage with her ex-husband in five days’ time—and slurp your way ecstatically through two hundred and thirty-seven thousand five hundred flagons of the world’s best wine—or watch me break them into shards on the Mons Testaceus. After doing which, I will marry Marcia anyway. She’s twenty-four years old, and she passed out of your hand six years ago. She’s sui iuris; you can’t stop us. All you can do is lend our second union a little respectability. For myself, I am indifferent to that kind of respectability. You know that. But I would prefer that Marcia feel comfortable enough to venture outside our door.”
Frowning, Philippus studied the highly strung creature gazing at him quite indomitably. Perhaps he was mad. Yes, of course he was mad. Everyone had known it for years. The kind of single-minded dedication to a cause that Cato owned was unique. Look at how he kept on after Caesar. Would keep on keeping on after Caesar. Today’s encounter, however, had revealed a great many more facets to Cato’s madness than Philippus had suspected existed.
He sighed, shrugged. “Very well then. If you must, you must. Be it on your own heads, yours and Marcia’s.” His expression changed. “Hortensius never laid a finger on her, you know. At least, I suppose you must know, since you want to remarry her.”
“I didn’t know. I assumed the opposite.”
“He was too old, too sick and too addled. He simply set her on a metaphorical pedestal as Cato’s wife, and adored her.”
“Yes, that makes sense. She has never ceased to be Cato’s wife. Thank you for the information, Philippus. She would have told me herself, but I would have hesitated to believe her.”
“Do you think so poorly of my Marcia? After husbanding her?”
“I husbanded a woman who cuckolded me with Caesar too.”
Philippus got to his feet. “Quite so. But women differ as much as men.” He started to walk to the door, then turned. “Do you realize, Cato, that I never knew until today that you have a sense of humor?”
Cato looked blank. “I don’t have a sense of humor,” he said.
Thus it was that very shortly after the funeral of Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, the seal was set upon the most delicious and exasperating scandal in the history of Rome: Marcus Porcius Cato remarried Marcia, the daughter of Lucius Marcius Philippus.
2
Halfway through May the Senate voted to postpone any discussion of Caesar’s provinces until the Ides of November. Cato’s lobbying had succeeded, though, not surprisingly, persuasion of his closest adherents proved hardest; Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus wept, Marcus Favonius howled. Only letters from Bibulus to each of them had finally reconciled them to it.
“Oh, good!” said Curio gleefully in the House after the vote. “I can have a few months off. But don’t think that I won’t be interposing my veto again on the Ides of November, because I will.”
“Veto away, Gaius Curio!” brayed Cato, the fabulous aura of his scandalous remarriage endowing him with considerable glamour. “You’ll be out of office shortly after that, and Caesar will fall.”
“Someone else will take my place,” said Curio jauntily.
“But not like you” was Cato’s
rejoinder. “Caesar will never find another like you.”
Perhaps Caesar would not, but his envisioned replacement for Curio was hurrying from Gaul to Rome. The death of Hortensius had created a gap in more than the ranks of the great advocates; he had also been an augur, which meant that his spot in the College of Augurs was up for election. And Ahenobarbus was going to try again, determined that he would put his family back into the most exclusive club in Rome, the priestly colleges. Priest or augur did not matter, though priest would have been more satisfactory for one whose grandfather had been Pontifex Maximus and brought in the law which required public election for priests and augurs.
Only candidates for consul and praetor were compelled to register in person inside the sacred boundary of Rome; for all other magistracies, including the religious ones, in absentia candidacy could be obtained. Thus Caesar’s envisioned replacement for Curio as tribune of the plebs, hurrying from Gaul, sent ahead and registered as a candidate for the vacant augurship of Quintus Hortensius. The election was held before he reached Rome, and he won. Ahenobarbus’s very vocal chagrin when he was defeated yet again seemed likely to inspire the writing of several epic poems.
“Marcus Antonius!” sniffled Ahenobarbus, his shiny hairless pate rucked into wrinkles by his writhing fingers. Rage was not possible; he had passed beyond it into despair at the last augural election, when Cicero had beaten him. “Marcus Antonius! I thought Cicero was as low as the electors could get, but Marcus Antonius! That oaf, that lecher, that brainless bully-boy brat! Rome is littered with his bastards! A cretin who vomits in public! His father committed suicide rather than come home to face his trial for treason; his uncle tortured free Greek men, women and children; his sister was so ugly they had to marry her to a cripple; his mother is undoubtedly the silliest female alive even if she is a Julia; and his two younger brothers differ from Antonius only in having even less intelligence!”
Ahenobarbus’s auditor was Marcus Favonius; Cato seemed to spend every spare moment at home with Marcia these days, Metellus Scipio was off in Campania dancing attendance on Pompey, and the boni lesser lights were all thronging admiringly around the Marcelli.
Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar Page 518