“You’re getting too deep for me,” I told them, “but as long as you don’t insult the gods of Rome, I won’t protest.”
“We would never insult anyone’s gods,” said Demades. “After all, it is likely that all peoples honor the same deity, just in differing forms.”
To tell the truth, this sort of talk always made me uncomfortable. It isn’t so much that I failed to recognize the childishness of certain of our myths. It was just that, knowing how difficult it can be to understand our fellow men, it seemed presumptuous to try to understand the nature of the gods, singular or plural, and we all know how angry the gods can get at presumption on the part of mortals.
“So,” I asked, “when is this new calendar supposed to go into effect?”
“On the first day of January. Of course, Caesar in his capacity as pontifex maximus will proclaim exactly which day that will be.”
“Any time soon?”
“In seven days.”
I almost choked on a mouthful of bread. “Seven days!” I cried when I could speak. “But January is three months away!”
“Not any more. Surely you had noticed that we are well into winter, despite the name of the month, which customarily begins the season of autumn.”
“Well, the calendar has gotten shamefully out of joint. Still, what is to happen to those three months?”
“They will just disappear,” Sosigenes said. “Caesar has abolished them. Instead, the next year will have 445 days, with three extra months inserted as Caesar shall decree. This will be a unique year and all subsequent years shall be of 365 days as described.”
“Unique is the word for it, all right. This is high-handed, even for Caesar,” I mused. “Just to wave his hand and say three months are not to be. Adding an extra month is one thing: it’s customary; but to eliminate one, not to mention three, seems unnatural. Then to compound it with an extended year containing not one but three extra months is, well, it’s radical!”
That afternoon the astronomers drew up a small calendar for me and I took it to the sign painters who painted the news and government proclamations on whitewashed boards and posted them in the Forum. I directed them to make a very large sign, twenty feet long and eight feet high, with the whole calendar written on it, showing every day of every month, with the calends, ides, and nones of each month written in red paint. This was to be raised in the Forum on the Rostra so that the whole populace could see the new calendar and understand it.
The next morning, dressed in my best toga, accompanied by my freedman Hermes and a few clients, I went to the Forum and ascended the Rostra. A crowd had already gathered, gawking at the huge calendar and wondering what it might portend. I was inordinately pleased with the thing, and pleased with myself for conceiving of such a device. The painters had outdone themselves, not merely writing the name and days of each month, but adding small figures performing the labors associated with that time of year, to make the new order more easily comprehensible. Thus little painted farmers plowed in winter and sowed in spring and harvested in the fall. Others picked and trampled grapes, soldiers built a winter camp, grain ships set sail, and slaves feasted at Saturnalia.
I raised my hands for quiet and when I got it I addressed the citizenry.
“Romans! Your pontifex maximus, Caius Julius Caesar, is pleased to announce a gift to you! It is a new calendar to replace the one which has grown so out of date. It is to commence in six days’ time. As you see, it has twelve months.” I gestured grandly toward the great board. “Each month will have either thirty—”
“What about Saturnalia?” someone shouted.
Barely launched into my oration, I was caught aback. “What? Who said that?”
The man who spoke was an ordinary citizen. “What about Saturnalia? If the calends of January is to be in six days, what’s happened to the month of December? How are we to celebrate Saturnalia this year with no December?”
“Good question,” Hermes muttered from behind me. “You should have thought of it.”
“Metellus!” shouted a man who was storming up the steps of the Rostra. I knew him vaguely, a senator named Roscius. “This is an outrage! For two years I have been planning the funeral games for my father! They are to be celebrated on the ides of December! I’ve bought lions! I have engaged fifteen pairs of gladiators! I’ve made arrangements for a public banquet! How am I to do all this if December is abolished?”
“Set another date,” I suggested.
“The ides of December is specified in my father’s will!” His face was scarlet with fury. “Besides, December is the traditional month for funeral games.”
“Next year will have a December,” I assured him. “Look,” I said, pointing at the board, “it’s right there in the lower right corner.”
“And I am to feed those lions all next year? Do you have any idea how much it costs to feed lions?”
I knew exactly how much, having put on munera myself, but I wasn’t feeling sympathetic. The crowd began to grumble, feeling they were being cheated of a good show and a banquet. Not to mention Saturnalia.
“Citizens,” I shouted. “Your pontifex maximus, Caius Julius Caesar, will have answers to all your questions.”
“We’d better hope so,” Hermes muttered.
“Be still!” I muttered back. Then, in my orator’s voice, “In the meantime, allow me to explain the many advantages of the new calendar. Some of the months will have thirty-one days, others thirty, and a single month will have twenty-eight.”
“Hold up there,” said another citizen. “I pay my rent by the month. Does this mean I’ll pay as much for twenty-eight days as for thirty-one? That doesn’t seem fair.” There was much nodding and agreeing with this.
“Oh, shut up,” I said intemperately. “You’ve never known exactly how many days any month might have until the pontifexes announced it. You thought that was fair enough.”
“Fair!” bawled an enraged voice. “Nothing about this is fair! Senator, I own five insulae in this city, and more of them elsewhere in Italy. What is to become of three months’ rent I am owed for this year if those three months are just abolished?” He was a fat, bald man in a dingy toga. Luckily, everybody hates landlords and he was quickly shouted down, but I foresaw great trouble from that quarter. Much of the great and powerful class of equites depended upon rents and they would all be furious.
“You’ll have an extra three months next year!” I shouted.
“Who dreamed up this abomination?” demanded Senator Roscius. “And don’t tell me it was Caesar! I know him well, and he could never have conceived of anything as—as un-Roman as this. This thing is the work of foreigners!”
“Actually,” I said amid rising grumbles, “this fine and elegant calendar was created by the astronomers of the Museum of Alexandria, by—”
“You mean,” someone shouted, “this thing is being foisted upon us by Orientals?”
“Not all of them are eastern,” I maintained stoutly. “Oh, there’s a turban or two and a fellow calls himself Polasser of Kish, but mostly they’re Greeks. Alexandria is a Greek city, despite being located in Egypt.” I thought I was being reasonable, but I had forgotten how much the lower classes despise the Greeks. The upper classes, too, for that matter. “The distinguished Sosigenes himself—”
“I don’t care if he’s Alexander the buggering Great!” bawled the landlord. “Romans can’t let their calendar be dictated to them by foreigners!” The crowd growled agreement, temporarily forgetting that they hated landlords.
“This is the command of your dictator!” I yelled, getting desperate.
“This isn’t our Caesar’s doing!” shouted a man with the look of a centurion. “It’s that foreign bitch Cleopatra! She’s bewitched him! Next thing, she’ll be annexing Rome as part of Egypt!” This raised a truly frightening outcry from the mob. Irrationality had taken hold, and that usually meant it was time to run.
“I should have seen it,” I said to Hermes. “They’ll never blame
anything on Caesar. They love Caesar. It has to be foreigners. It has to be Cleopatra.”
“You’d better hope so,” Hermes said.
“What’s that?” But the truth was already dawning.
“You’re the one standing in front of them. You’re the one who just announced the new calendar. Maybe they’ll go storm Cleopatra’s house instead of coming up here to tear us apart.” Cleopatra had come to visit Rome and renew her liaison with Caesar, much to the annoyance of the Roman populace and that of Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia.
“Good idea,” I said. “Go to the other side of the mob and raise a cry to go kill Cleopatra.”
“They might do it,” he said.
“Then they have a long walk ahead of them. She’s taking the waters at Cumae. Caesar told me so himself.” This was much to Caesar’s relief. He had paid ardent court to her in Alexandria, but she was an embarrassment in Rome, where nobody would regard her as anything but his Egyptian concubine.
“They’ll set fire to her house and it could spread to the whole city.”
“I suppose so,” I said. Romans feared fire above all else, but they were all too ready to set them when they formed a mob, regardless of the inevitable consequences. They’d burned a good part of the Forum in the riots that followed the death of Clodius. “But she’s living across the river on the Janiculum. By the time they get there they’ll have forgotten what they’re rioting about.”
So Hermes left the Rostra and made his way around the crowd and found a few idlers to bribe and soon he had the rioters off down the Vicus Tuscus toward the Forum Boarium and the Aemilian Bridge across the river.
* * *
“So what happened then?” Julia asked me over dinner that evening.
“Well, nobody was really clear exactly where Cleopatra has been staying. Some went to the Janiculum, but others hared off into the Trans-Tiber, and you know how the people over there feel about City mobs intruding on their district. Well, pretty soon there were fights all over the place and the gladiators from the Statilian school came out to join the fun. By then I don’t think anyone remembered that it was all about the new calendar. At least there were no fires or killings last I heard.” I dipped a duck leg into some excellent garum.
“In a way it’s unfortunate that Cleopatra wasn’t home,” Julia mused. “That woman is a menace.”
“I thought you liked Cleopatra.”
I do. She’s wonderful company and better educated than any woman in Rome, by far, except for Callista, and she’s a Greek. I can think of no one I’d rather be with when visiting Alexandria, but here in Rome she’s a disruptive influence. She has ambitions for that boy of hers that bodes very ill for the future.”
The boy in question was Caesarion, who she claimed to have been fathered by Caesar, and whom Caesar himself acknowledged, but I had my doubts. Caesar was famously infertile, having sired only one daughter who had lived, out of four marriages and innumerable liaisons. Yet Cleopatra had presented him with a son, the thing he most wanted, barely nine months after meeting him, at a time when it was tremendously in her interest to do just that. She regarded Caesar as a king and a god and she believed a son would unite Rome and Egypt under her descendants. It was entirely too convenient for my skeptical taste.
“I fear you’re right. The people love Caesar almost unreservedly, the ‘almost’ part being his connection with Cleopatra. He should pack her and the boy back to Egypt, but he indulges her and I wonder why.”
“It’s so unfair to poor Calpurnia!” Julia said heatedly. This was perhaps the only subject upon which she was critical of her uncle.
“Since Cornelia, his marriages have been for the sake of political alliances,” I noted. Cornelia was Caesar’s first wife, the one he refused to divorce when Sulla had ordered him to. “I doubt that Calpurnia’s feelings carry much weight with him.” Calpurnia was the daughter of Calpurnius Piso, a man of great political importance at the time.
“It is not like him to be casually cruel to a wife, though,” Julia insisted. “I think he must have some important reason for tolerating Cleopatra in Rome.”
“Misdirection, perhaps,” I said. “Caesar is the master of that. Look at the way he sent me out to take the blame for his silly calendar, which I now perceive will be the cause of endless trouble until people get used to it.”
“Oh, you exaggerate. You always do when you’re inconvenienced in some little way.”
“A riot is not an inconvenience.”
“It was just a little riot. And how does Cleopatra constitute misdirection?”
“To the crowd Cleopatra is just a foreign queen wielding a bad influence on their beloved Caesar. Do you know what the Senate thinks about her?”
“The Senate these days is nothing but toadies and treacherous false friends who plot behind Caesar’s back.”
“True enough, but it is also full of old-fashioned men who smell a would-be king anytime one of their number rises above the rest, as Caesar has. Crassus showed the world that great wealth buys armies, and what is the greatest source of wealth in the world?”
“Egypt, of course,” she said uncomfortably.
“Precisely. We could have taken Egypt any time in the last hundred years, but no Roman would tolerate the possibility of another Roman getting his hands on all that wealth, so we kept hands off and supported the Ptolemys as our puppets. Cleopatra is for all practical purposes the last of that line, and she has declared herself body and soul for Caesar. How do you think that makes all those old-fashioned senators feel?”
“The last lot who opposed him are dead and they should be thinking of that.”
“They are, believe me, but the holdouts aren’t all dead. Sextus Pompey is still at large, for instance. Many are talking Caesar up as a Roman pharaoh. Quietly, of course.”
“He would never try to make himself king, with or without Cleopatra’s fortune!” Julia said hotly.
“As it occurs, I agree. That is what I meant by misdirection. He has the Senate focused on Cleopatra when they should be paying more attention to his other activities.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“This calendar is only one of his reforms. He has a great many more to institute, and some of them are huge and radical. He is going to completely rebuild the city: new forums, expanded walls, vast public works, even a permanent stone amphitheater.”
“So? Such changes are long overdue. Rome is the hub of a great empire and it is little more than an Italian city-state. That needs to change.”
“That’s the least of it. He wants to reform the Senate as well.”
“I can’t say that’s a bad idea either.”
“He plans to bring in provincials. Not just long-time provincials like those in northern Italy and southern Gaul, but Spaniards and Gauls from his newly conquered provinces. All of them his own clients, of course, because he is the one who got the citizenship for them.”
That sobered her. “So soon? I knew he had plans for them, but I had thought in a generation, perhaps two, after they have had a chance to become fully Romanized, and then just the sons of chieftains who have been his allies. Does he really plan to extend the franchise to this generation?”
“Within the next year,” I told her, “and the Germans won’t be far behind. Who knows what plans he has for the Parthians.” At that time Caesar was about to embark upon a war with Parthia, to recover the eagles lost by Crassus at Carrhae and retrieve Roman honor in that part of the world.
“It is radical,” Julia agreed, “and it won’t go down well with the remaining conservatives, the Brutii and their allies.”
“It won’t go down well with anyone in Rome,” I said, “but Caesar thinks his position as dictator makes him unassailable. I know otherwise.”
“I must speak with him.”
“He doesn’t listen to anyone any more, not even his favorite niece. Give it a try, by all means, but don’t expect results. Caesar listens only to Caesar these days.”
&n
bsp; 2
The next few days I spent arguing or fleeing as whole delegations of aggrieved citizens came to protest about the new calendar. At first it was businessmen, whose rents or other income were customarily calculated by the month, concerned about the phantom months so blithely dismissed by Caesar. Furthermore, word got about with incredible swiftness and soon the priests of a hundred temples descended upon Rome, furious that festivals had to be delayed or eliminated altogether, and what was I going to do about it? Then there were the officials of towns who depended upon the crowds of celebrants who came to town for those same festivals every year and left a great deal of money in their passing.
Like Roscius, there were many prominent men who had planned munera for December to honor their deceased ancestors, that being the traditional month for such obsequies, and the commons were furious at being cheated out of these shows, which had become as popular as any of the official games.
Then there were the heirs. The law was quite strict concerning the waiting time between the death of a propertied man and the day his heirs could claim their inheritance. A good many were supposed to lay their hands upon the old man’s money and property during those three missing months, and their patrimonies and all bequests were now in a state of uncertainty. Naturally, they all blamed me.
From a position of great esteem, I had suddenly become the most unpopular man not just in Rome, but in the whole of Italy. Naturally, I took my distress to Caesar who, just as naturally, was highly unimpressed.
“They will grow used to it,” he told me. “Just wait them out.”
“They won’t grow used to it anytime soon,” I said. “And then it will be too late for me. I am being threatened with massive lawsuits by men who believe that I have cost them a fortune.”
SPQR XIII: The Year of Confusion Page 2