'What does Cicero want from me?' I growled.
'Only a small favour.'
I pursed my lips. 'You try my patience, Marcus Caelius.'
He laughed good-naturedly, as if to say: Very well, I've bested you and will toy with you no longer. 'Cicero wishes that you should play host to a certain senator. He asks you to open your house to this senator whenever he wishes and provide a haven for him, a safe retreat from the city. You should understand the need for that'
'Who is this senator? A friend of Cicero's, or someone to whom he owes a favour?'
'Not exactly.'
"Then who?'
'Catilina.'
‘What!’
'Lucius Sergius Catilina.'
'Cicero wishes me to provide a safe haven for his worst enemy? What sort of plot is this?'
"The plot is Catilina's. The point is to stop it'
I vigorously shook my head. ‘I want no part of this!'
'Your honour, Gordianus—'
'To Hades with you!' I rose from my chair so abruptly that I knocked it to the floor. I stepped out of the door and crossed the herb garden, waving the wasp out of my way, and strode through the gate without looking back.
I turned towards the front of the house, then remembered that
Caelius's bodyguards were loitering there. The sight of them would only make me more furious. I spun around and circled towards the rear of the house. An instant later I glimpsed a figure crouching beneath the library window. Aratus, I thought, spying on me again!
I opened my mouth, but the curse died stillborn in my throat. The figure turned towards me — and it was Meto, not Aratus, who looked me square in the face. He put a finger to his lips and backed cautiously away from the window, then scurried to my side, looking not the least bit guilty for eavesdropping on his own father.
III
‘A son should not spy on his father,' I said, trying to be stern. "There are some Roman fathers who would beat their sons for such a crime, or even have them strangled.'
Up on the ridge, Meto and I sat side by side on the stumps and looked down on the farm. In front of the house, Caelius's bodyguards sat beneath the shade of a yew tree. Caelius himselfhad stepped into the herb garden and was peering towards the stream with one hand shading his brow from the westering sun. He had no idea where I was.
'I wasn't exactly spying,' Meto said, chagrined.
'No? Spying is the only word for it'
'Well, I learned it from you. I suppose it's in the blood.'
This last was absurd, since Meto was the son of slaves and had not a drop of my blood in his veins, but I was touched by his fantasy. I couldn't resist reaching out to muss his hair, and none too gently. 'I suppose you blame your wilfulness on me, as well?'
'I give you credit for all my outstanding qualities, Papa.' He smiled crookedly. The clever, charming little boy I had adopted had grown into a handsome and soft-spoken youth. His face became pensive. 'Papa, who is Catilina? And why do you bear such a grudge against Cicero? I thought he was your friend.'
I sighed. These matters are very complex. Or not complex at all if a man does the sensible thing and turns his back on them for good.'
'But is that possible? Marcus Caelius says you owe a personal favour to Cicero.'
'True enough.'
'Without Cicero, we wouldn't have the farm.'
'Might not have the farm,' I corrected him — but the guilelessness in his soft brown eyes compelled me to acknowledge the truth. 'Very well, without Cicero there would be no farm. Without him to represent me, the Claudii and their lawyers would have eaten me alive in court. I owe him a great favour, like it or not. But what use is this farm if I must pay for it by allowing men like Caelius to bring Rome to my very doorstep?'
'Is Rome truly so awful? I like the farm, Papa, but sometimes I miss the city.' His eyes lit up. ‘Do you know what I miss most? The festivals, when they have plays and chariot races! Especially the races.'
Of course you miss them, I thought. You're young, and youth craves distraction. I shook my head, feeling old and sour.
'The festivals are only another form of corruption, Meto. Who pays for festivals? The various magistrates elected each year. And why? They will tell you they do it to honour the gods and the traditions of our ancestors, but in truth they do it to impress the crowd, for their own personal aggrandizement. The crowd gives its support to the man who can put on the most splendid games and spectacles. Absurd! The spectacles are only a means to an end. They impress the voters, who in turn give a man power. It's the power which ultimately counts — power over the fates and property of men, over the life and death of nations. Time and again I see the people, impressed by games and shows, give their votes to a man who then proceeds to legislate against their interest. Sheer stupidity! Point out this betrayal to the citizen in the street and he will answer But, oh, what a splendid spectacle the man put on for us! Never mind that he emasculated the people's representation in the Forum or passed some invidious property law — he brought white tigers from Libya to the Circus Maximus and hosted a great feast to inaugurate the Temple of Hercules! Who's more to blame for such wickedness — the cynical politician without a shred of principle, or the Roman citizens who allow themselves to be so easily duped?'
— I shook my head. 'You see how it affects me to speak of it, Meto? My heart begins to race and my face turns hot. Once I accepted the madness of the city without question; such was life and there was nothing particularly wrong with it — there is a fascination, after all, in the dealings of men, no. matter how vile and corrupt. More importantly, there was nothing I could do about it, and so I merely accepted it. My livelihood took me deep within the councils of powerful men, and showed me more of the truth than most men ever see. I was growing wise in the ways of the world, I thought proudly, but what good is such wisdom if it only leads to a knowledge of how helpless one is to change this world? Now, as I grow older, Meto, I grow less and less able to tolerate the stupidity of the people and the wickedness of their rulers. I have seen too much suffering created by ambitious men who care only for themselves. Unable to affect the course of events, I turn my back on them! Now Cicero would force me into the arena again, like a gladiator pressed to fight against his will’
Meto considered this in silence for a moment. 'Is Cicero a bad man, Papa?'
'Better than most. Worse than some.'
'And Catilina?'
I remembered my recent conversation with Claudia, whom I had cut off when she began to talk of Catilina's bid for the consulship. 'Our neighbour on the far side of the ridge calls him a wild-eyed madman.'
'Is he?'
'Cicero would say so.'
'But what do you think, Papa?' He frowned. 'Or should I not press you to talk about it?'
I sighed. 'No, Meto, press on. Since I manumitted you and made you my son, you are a Roman citizen, no more or less than any other Roman, and soon you will put on the manly toga. Who else should educate a boy in the ways of Roman politics except his father, even if I must bite my tongue to do it?'
I paused for breath and looked down on the farm. Caelius's men were still idle, while Caelius himself had withdrawn from the heat of the herb garden back into the cool of the library; he was probably looking through the tew modest volumes I had acquired over the years, many of them from Cicero as gifts to sweeten his payment for my services. The slaves were busy at their labours; the beasts were drowsing in their pens. I could stay on the ridge all afternoon, but eventually the sun would set and Bethesda would send Diana to fetch us for dinner. I would be compelled to offer hospitality to Marcus Caelius. He would press me again to honour my debt to Cicero, and how could I refuse?
'I've often thought, Meto, that the death of my friend Lucius Claudius was somehow providential. Oh, I'm not so vain as to think that the gods would strike down a good man merely to make my life more bearable, but in many odd ways the Fates sift out the details of our lives to unseen ends and, if we're fortunate, to happy coi
ncidence. Just when I felt that I could no longer stand living in the city another year, the dream of a retreat from the city became real. The election campaign last summer was the last straw. Consular campaigns as a rule are crude, vicious affairs, but an uglier campaign I've never witnessed.
'Candidates all run against each other,' I explained, 'and the two who garner the most votes become joint consuls for the year. If the two consuls are of the same political persuasion, they can reinforce one another and have a very effective year in office. If they're of different stripes, the Senate quickly learns which is the more dominant of the two and which the more easily led. In some years rivals are elected, and the stalemate as they try to outdo one another can be spectacular— literally. The year you came to live with me, Crassus and Pompey shared the consulship, and it was one feast after another, festival upon festival, from their inauguration in Januarius up to their valedictory addresses in December. The citizens grew fat and saw some fine chariot races that year!'
'Can any senator run for the consulship?' asked Meto.
'No. There is a prescribed sequence of offices that must be held first. The praetorships, the quaestorships, and so on, all last a year and have their specific functions. A politician goes up the ladder rung by rung, year by year. An electoral defeat means he sits out a whole year, and men in a hurry quickly grow bitter.'
'But what keeps a man from holding the same office over and over?'
'No man may hold the same office two years in a row — otherwise the same tiny handful of the most powerful men, like Pompey and Crassus, would be consul over and over. Besides, the consulship itself is yet another stepping-stone. The whole point of attaining the consulship is that it entities a man to a year as governor of a foreign province. A Roman governor can become fabulously rich by bleeding the locals white with taxes. The whole ugly enterprise is fuelled by endless corruption and greed.'
'And who votes?'
'Every citizen but me, I suppose, since I gave it up years ago. Nothing will ever be changed in Rome by voting, because not all votes are equal'
'What do you mean?'
I shook my head. Having been born a slave, Meto had no grounding from infancy in the inherited privileges of citizenship; having been raised in my household, his subsequent education in such technicalities had been sorely neglected, due to my own growing apathy. "The votes of a poor man count less than those of a rich one,' I said. 'But how?'
'On election day the citizens gather on the Campus Martius, between the old city walls and the River Tiber. Eligible voters are divided into what are called centuries. But the centuries have nothing to do with the number of voters in them. One century might have a hundred men in it and another might have a thousand. The rich are allotted more centuries than the poor, even though there are fewer rich men than poor ones. Thus, when a rich man votes, his vote counts much more than a poor man's vote.
'Even so, me poor man's vote is often needed, since the candidates all come from the rich or high-born classes and split those centuries among themselves. So common citizens are not neglected; they are wooed, seduced, suborned, and intimidated in all sorts of legal and illegal ways, from promises of favouritism, to outright bribery, to gangs set loose in the streets to beat up a rival's supporters. During the campaign the candidates tell pretty lies about themselves and hurl hideous accusations at their rivals, while their supporters cover the city with slanderous graffiti.'
' "Lucius Roscius Otho kisses the buttocks of the brothel keepers!" ' quoted Meto, laughing.
'Yes, one of the more memorable slogans from last year,' I agreed glumly. 'Yet Otho was elected praetor nonetheless!'
'But what was so unusual about last year's campaign?' asked Meto earnestly. 'I remember hearing you rage about it to visitors in your library, but I never really understood.'
'Only that it was so dirty and disgusting. And the fact that it was Cicero, of all people, who plunged the tone of the campaign to such depths. And the things that Cicero has done since the election…'
I shook my head and started again. 'There were three leading candidates: Cicero, Catilina, and Antonius. Antonius is a nonentity, a wastrel and a scoundrel, with no political programme at all, only a desperate need to get his hands, on a provincial governorship so that he can bleed enough taxes from the unfortunate locals to pay off his debts. There are those who say the same things about Catilina, but no one denies that Catilina has charm to spare and a keen political sense. He comes from ancient patrician stock, but he has no fortune; just the sort of aristocrat who backs radical schemes for redistributing wealth, cancelling debts, democratizing public offices and the priesthoods — and the conservative ruling classes do not like to hear that sort of talk. Even so, within the old ruling class there are plenty of patricians who have fallen on bad times and are desperate for a way out, and there are plenty of rich men who think they might use a demagogue for their own purposes, and so Catilina was not without substantial backing, despite his radical posturing. Crassus himself, the richest man in Rome, was his chief financial backer. Who knows what Crassus was up to?
'Then there was Cicero. None of his ancestors had ever held elective office before — he was the first of his family to hold public office, what they call a New Man. And no New Man had managed to get himself elected consul in living memory. The aristocracy turned up their noses at him, despising his political canniness, his eloquence, his success with the crowd. Cicero is a glorious upstart, a comet that came from nowhere, and immodest as a peacock. In his own way he must have appeared as much a threat to the order of things as Catilina. And he might have been, had his principles not proved to be so flexible.
'Catilina and Antonius formed an alliance. From early on they were both favoured to win. Catilina never ceased to needle the aristocracy with reminders of Cicero's common origins (though Cicero was hardly born poor!), but to his own supporters he began talking up the kind of radical schemes that give property owners grey hair and sleepless nights. The rich were in a quandary — Cicero they could not stomach, but Catilina they truly feared.
'As for Cicero, his campaign was managed by his brother Quintus. After the election, one day when I had business at his house, Cicero pressed me to look at a series of letters that he had exchanged with Quintus, discussing the progress of the campaign; he was so proud of them that he was actually talking aboutmaking them into a pamphlet, a sort of guide to successful electioneering. At the very outset Cicero and his brother decided to stop at nothing to destroy Catilina's character. Slander is the accepted style in any election campaign, but Cicero set new standards. Some of the accusations were whispered from ear to ear; others were made by Cicero outright in his speeches. In the thick of it I dreaded setting foot in the Forum, knowing I would have to hear Cicero haranguing the crowd. Even when I could avoid the Forum, the graffiti and the gossip were everywhere. If only half of what they said about Catilina is true, the man should have been strangled in his mother's womb.'
'What was he accused of?'
'A whole catalogue of crimes. There were the usual accusations of corruption, of course, such as buying votes and bribing election officials; those accusations were probably true, considering the financial backing that Catilina was receiving from Crassus — what good is so much money in an election except for bribes? When Roman voters know a candidate has money, they run to him with their palms up.
'Cicero also dredged up old charges of corruption from the days when Catilina was an administrator in Africa. A few years ago Catilina was tried on those particular charges — and Cicero himself considered defending him. Catilina was found innocent, for what it's worth. Lodging such criminal charges is just another tool that Roman politicians use to embarrass a rival and disqualify him from running for office. Both the charge and the verdict are purely political; any link to truth or justice is purely coincidental.
"Then there were the more serious accusations and innuendoes — rumours of sexual scandal, incest, murder… but perhaps all this talk of
politics is beginning to bore you.'
'Not at all!' Meto's wide eyes showed I had his full attention.
I cleared my throat. 'Very well. They say that back in the terrible days of Sulla the dictator, Catilina served as one of his henchmen, killing Sulla's enemies and bringing in their heads for the bounty. They say he got away with murdering his own brother-in-law that way; Catilina's sister wanted the man killed and Catilina did it in cold blood, then made it legal by listing the man as one of Sulla's enemies.'
'Is it true?'
I shrugged. 'Men did terrible things in Sulla's time. Crassus made himself rich by buying up murdered men's estates. When murder is made legal, you see the true capacity of men for wickedness. Perhaps the story about Catilina is true, perhaps not. He was brought to trial for one instance of murder, twenty years after the fact, and found innocent. Who knows? But these were only the first of his alleged murders.
'A few years ago, when he came back from Africa, Catilina took a new wife. They say the woman refused to wed Catilina if there was already an heir in his house, so he murdered his son. As for the young bride, she happens to be the daughter of one of Catilina's former mistresses — there are even those who say she's Catilina's daughter!'
'Incest!' whispered Meto.
'Cicero himself never said that word aloud, he only made the innuendo. And that is only the beginning of the list of Catilina's alleged sexual crimes. They claim he corrupted one of the Vestal Virgins in a great scandal ten years ago; about that I happen to know a little, because I was summoned to investigate the matter in secret. It's the only time I've ever had personal dealings with Catilina, and I found him a puzzlement — utterly charming and utterly suspicious. Cicero likes to remind his listeners of the scandal, but only to a point, since his wife's sister was the Vestal accused of fornicating with Catilina! Oh, in some ways Rome is quite a small town.'
'And did they? Catilina and the Vestal?' Meto was positively glowing with interest.
Catilina's riddle rsr-3 Page 4