A Pillar of Iron: A Novel of Ancient Rome

by Taylor Caldwell

  “I never hear you return,” said Tullius, imploringly. “When I awake in the morning you have already gone. When you are at home, you have clients or guests—when you are at home, I hear your voice only at a distance.”

  “I am a busy man,” said Marcus. “I have a family whom I must support. I have public duties.”

  “Yes,” said Tullius.

  “You have not told me of the ‘necessary’ thing.” Tullius lifted his eyes and looked with grave intentness at his son. “I have forgotten,” he said, and stood aside to let Marcus pass. Marcus hesitated. He felt a faint pain in his breast, a sort of vague sorrow. But it was all overlaid with impatience. He said, as if defending himself, “I also write books and treatises and essays. This is a different world than the world you knew, Father.”

  His father, for some intangible reason, was a reproach to him. He did not like reproaches; he received too many from Terentia, who wearied him to death now, and who had lost what little comeliness she had once possessed.

  “It is always the same world,” muttered Tullius. “You will discover that to your own anguish before you die.”

  Marcus’ amiable lips tightened. He inclined his head and went to his quarters and prepared for the evening. The sun at the window darkened as a cloud passed; then the chamber was warm and bright again.

  It was very late when he returned. Clodia had been alone, as it had been arranged. Marcus yawned over and over and thought of his own bed with pleasure. Then, as he alighted from his litter, he saw that the bronze doors of his house were open and flooded with light, and that lamplight gleamed at all the windows, though the dawn was already gray in the east.

  His heart jumped. He thought of his daughter, Tullia. He hastened into the house to be met in the hall by a weeping Terentia, who immediately fell on him like a tearful fury.

  “While you lay in the arms of your harlot,” she screamed, “your mother died!”

  Helvia’s ashes were laid with her father’s. The funeral meats had been eaten, the cypress planted at the door, the guests departed. The sun was still warm and golden, the air still sweet, and the birds in the atrium still sang in ecstasy. The garden was still fragrant, and the city below the Palatine hummed and clattered and bellowed, and the hills beyond, chaotic with buildings, caught the red rays of the western sky. Grief comes to every house, but its shadow is driven away as fast as possible. The dead were as if they had never lived, even those of power and of mighty houses.

  There had been a multitude of mourners, including all the Caesares, and even Crassus had sent Pompey as his delegate, and the Helvii had wept for their sister, their aunt, their cousin. Quintus and Terentia had wept, but Tullius and Marcus were dry of eye for they mourned her the most. Little Tullia cried for her grandmother, and Marcus could not comfort her.

  On the fourth day he sat in his favorite spot in his garden, beneath the myrtle trees, and his hands were flaccid on his knees. He sat for a long time. Then he saw that his father was seated not far from him, and gazing at him, and Tullius appeared like a shade, himself.

  “I have lost more than a wife, a dear companion,” said Tullius, in a voice that rustled like dead leaves. “I have lost a mother.”

  And that is true, thought Marcus with bitterness. You have made Terentia your aunt and your serving maid and have assigned Tullia to be a sister to you. Always, you have depended on others, leaning upon them, your hands outheld like a beggar’s hands, crying for the alms of love and protection. To my grandfather you were always a child. But you shall not succeed in creating a father in me for yourself.

  He did not know why he felt something evilly akin to hatred for his father, except that his own loss was so great and he must turn on something to alleviate his suffering. The house on the Carinae was now occupied by Quintus and his wife, Pomponia, and their young son. Marcus said, “Doubtless, my father, you will feel more comforted if you live with Quintus and his family, for Quintus is much like my mother and he was her favorite, and his boy resembles her.”

  Tullius raised his beaten eyes and studied Marcus in silence. Then he said, “So be it.” He groped weakly to his feet and moved away into the shadows like an old man.

  “Have you no filial feeling?” Terentia cried. “You have driven your father from your house, and he who does that is cursed!”

  “I did not drive him away. He will be happier with Quintus. Had he wished to stay he had but to say the word. I have sent his special slave with him, who will comfort him and sleep at his feet. My door is not closed to him. He will always be an honored guest in my house.”

  “I do not understand you, Marcus. You are not the man I knew.”

  “No one ever is.”

  Terentia was clothed in black. She was fat and sallow in it, and her brown hair had lost its lustre and an extra chin sagged below the first one. Her hands, in her lap, showed their big competence and large knuckles. She has the ugliest hands I have ever seen in a woman, thought Marcus. He felt weary to death.

  “Do you wish me to divorce you?” asked Terentia, wiping away her tears.

  “If you wish.”

  “Do you care for nothing?” she exclaimed.

  “I try to refrain from caring,” he answered. “That is the only way I can endure.”

  “Endure what?” Terentia was outraged. “Are you poor, deprived, homeless, wifeless, childless, without a copper in your purse? Do you sleep under aqueducts among runaway slaves? No! You are rich and famous and have a magnificent house, and are the friend of the powerful, and you own other houses and lands and villas and farms. Your health is good; you want for nothing. There is silver and gold on your table, and lemonwood furniture in your rooms, and ebony and Alexandrian glass and bronze, and your walls are covered with costly murals and your floors with rich rugs. Bankers hasten to honor your drafts. Your offices are filled with notable clients. You are to be Praetor. Yet, you speak of ‘enduring!’ Beware, Marcus, that the gods do not take back their gifts from one so ungrateful!”

  But Marcus did not answer. He rose and left her.

  The next morning she confronted him resolutely. “No,” she said, “I shall not divorce you. Divorce is a wicked thing. You no longer love me; you love that harlot, Clodia, who perfumes her body and is young and showers gold dust in her hair and reveals the contours of her breast shamelessly. I love you, Marcus. And I shall not deprive Tullia of her father, whom she adores. Despise me and reject me, as you have done for many years. You will find me here to welcome you, when it pleases you to notice my presence.”

  He was moved to pity and shame. “I did not think you would divorce me, though we have mentioned this before. Believe me, Terentia, I shall always regard you as my wife, the mother of my daughter, the heart of my household. If I have betrayed you, I offer no excuse, nor do I reproach you who deserve no reproach. If I do not talk with you, it is because I cannot.”

  To his surprise she began to smile through her tears. “So my father often told my mother—‘I cannot talk with you.’ All men are the same. They are like children who believe their thoughts are too mighty to be communicated. In reality, they are very simple, and easily understood by women. Now why and how have I affronted you again?”

  He made his brow smooth and put his hand briefly on her shoulder. “You have not affronted me. I have a headache this morning. There are so many things—”

  “And few of them important,” she said in an arch and soothing voice, and smiled again as if he were ten years old and she his indulgent mother. To keep down his anger he turned aside his head, and listened for the slaves who were bringing his litter.

  “Ah, it is well that we women comprehend so utterly,” said Terentia, “and understand that what engrosses men the most is of the least importance.”

  Marcus almost ran from the atrium to his litter. He said to himself, when he was sitting on the cushions, I am becoming irascible and hateful.

  He thought of his dead mother and wished again that he could weep.

  He kne
w he must flee. He would go to the island for a while and try to remember why he was living.

  He would try to remember the meaning of the words of Isaias, of which Noë had told him: “Why do you spend money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy you?”

  There were no answers or meanings in the howling streets of the Urbs, the company of impotent intellectuals, the crowded porticoes of those who questioned, not of the sky, but of mythical enigmas, the tigerfaced men of power, the horrible complex of the city of man with its wastes of streets and godless temples and politicians and evil busyness that had no goal, the white-lipped philosophers who created bodiless paradoxes and knew nothing of the mysteries of a simple tree, the empty-eyed men who talked of reason and had never known reality, the shrieking, wanton-eyed children who had never felt the living earth under their feet, the markets, the shops, the trading and the counting houses, the fora and the buildings of man’s expedient laws, the schools and the sanitaria, the polluted rivers and the stenches of the alleys, the discordant music of those who had never heard the music of a forest, and all the petty and wicked men who prated of the future of man as if man were a beginning and an end in himself!

  Only when man left men did he find the Civitas Dei—the City of God—uncrowded, sweet, full of light and emotion and ecstasy and shining law, singing with angelic passions and crying with the utterances of unchangeable truths, brilliant with spaces and inhabited only by beauty and freedom and many silences. The blessed silences where man was not!

  The island had another ghost now, and it was that of Helvia. It was strange that Helvia seemed more alive here, and the old grandfather, and Livia, than they had ever seemed in life. Marcus lay on the warm grass and conversed with them and slowly a little peace came to him, and the answer to that which he sought seemed almost within reach of his eye and his ear. But he no longer felt tranquil and for that he thanked the gods.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  “I agree with you that the Republic is lost,” said the young politician Publius Clodius, surnamed Pulcher. “And I agree with you that the future of Rome belongs to the Caesares. It is regrettable. My fathers believed in the Republic.”

  “When a nation becomes so demoralized and corrupt and angerless as Rome, then that nation is lost forever,” said Marcus. “Then come the Caesares.”

  “The man on horseback. Yes,” said Clodius. He was a lively and witty young man, slender and not very tall, with a dark and somewhat reckless face and very brilliant black eyes. “The man does not leap on horseback by himself; the people offer their hands to his ascent. So Caesar will leap one of these days. I can think of worse men.”

  Marcus eyed him curiously. “If it came to a contest between Caesar and me, whom would you support?”

  “I love you, Marcus, but the cause of Cicero is lost. I prefer to continue living.” He paused and eyed Marcus with his own curiosity. “Why do you continue to oppose the Fates?”

  “To paraphrase you, because I prefer to continue living—with myself.”

  “Then you have hope?”

  But Marcus shook his head. “I have no hope. But I may have the illusion of all soldiers in a lost cause—that there will be reinforcements.” Marcus was beginning to wonder and just faintly to hope. He was now Praetor of Rome. Clodius said, “You remind me of Hector, the noble Trojan hero, who, though knowing his country was wrong, and had done great evil, yet fought for her with patriotic fervor, and hoped to save her—though he knew it was impossible—from her inevitable fate. Are you ambitious, Cicero?”

  “Only for my country, and her honor,” said Marcus.

  “Old-fashioned words,” said Clodius. “These are modern times.”

  “They always are, Clodius. Why do men deceive themselves that the past is not the present, the future the past? Every age has shouted, ‘We are a new era!’ Yet it is always the same, for man does not change. Has it not been said that the nation that does not learn from history is doomed to repeat its mistakes? Ages yet unborn shall say, ‘None other was ever like us.’ But they shall be as Rome.”

  Clodius smiled indulgently. “Then there is no hope for man?”

  Marcus hesitated. “Not unless God gives us a new way and a new path for the future, and reveals Himself.”

  Clodius, that young man, thought to himself: Cicero is aging, and he speaks as all the aging men speak. He thought of his beauteous sister, Clodia, and amusedly wondered if Cicero ever forgot his griefs in her smooth white arms. It is possible, for has he not now published a book of poetry over which there has been much controversy and much fame for him? A man is not moved to poetry of such brilliance when he is in despair. He is a paradox.

  It was then that Clodius, who had his own secret ambitions, began to feel uneasy concerning Marcus. Paradoxes, though exciting to consider, were not reliable in their conduct, and not predictable, especially when they were both prudent and poets. Clodius went to Julius Caesar and said, “Our friend, Cicero, is a paradox.”

  Julius laughed. “Honest men are always so to men like us. They belong to no category we can name. So we say to ourselves: He must be assassinated, or destroyed in some other manner, or rendered impotent.” Julius reflected for a moment, still smiling. “Do you not know that both the patricians and the people trust him? Is that not a paradox in itself? I am sorry for these few honest men, who believe that honesty will commend itself to the admiration of a nation.”

  “He seems inconsistent to me,” said Clodius.

  “Are we not all?” said Julius. “Man, by his very nature, is inconsistent, a friend today, an enemy tomorrow, a lover of justice in the morning, and suborned in the evening. Why do we insist on consistency, we who are the inconsistent?”

  “Cicero would say, because at the core of life all is consistent, and we echo it though we betray it.”

  “You are becoming a philosopher,” said Julius, and yawned. “An hour with Cicero is enough to make one doubt his ambitions and the purpose of his life. This is disconcerting. Let us avoid our dear Cicero, and consider what we desire.”

  “Did I not work endlessly to make you an aedile?” asked Marcus angrily of his brother, Quintus. “You know my bias against military men. You grow in ill temper every day. Is it that Pomponia exasperates you? What woman does not exasperate her husband! You have a son. You are rich, due to my efforts, and, I must admit, to the advice my Terentia gave you concerning investments. What is it that you wish?”

  “I am a simple man. Therefore, I am akin to the simple animals,” said Quintus with a scowl. “I do not think you are safe, my brother. I lift my nose and sniff the air. I am full of unease. You think me ambitious, but I am ambitious only to protect you, you who are dearer to me than wife or son.”

  “Do I not know this?” said Marcus, greatly moved. “But still, you have not explained your bad temper. Once you were the most indulgent of young men, the most smiling and calm. Now you pace floors. You remind me of our grandfather, and no longer of our dear mother.”

  Quintus ruffled the thick black curls on his head then flung his arms wide in despair. “I do not know!” he exclaimed. “But affairs in Rome become more chaotic every day. They are more complex, more inscrutable, and I am a simple man! Why do not matters remain simple, black and white, good and evil?”

  “They do not remain that way because they never were,” said Marcus.

  “Once you believed that good order and good principle and virtue among men would conquer everything,” said Quintus, baffled.

  Marcus answered sadly, “True. However, these are subjective terms, the terms of the soul. The objective world does not conform to the soul of man, and whose is the fault? In the meantime, control your temper, or someone will murder you.”

  Marcus put his hands over his face. “I grow more confused each day. But still, I must work out my own destiny, for I have no other.”

  Quintus frowned. “What destiny has our father? He grows more wan day by day, more removed. He is a shade
in my house, and Pomponia complains. He hardly knows he is a grandfather, and rarely speaks to my young son. What troubles him? He is not a complex man like you, Marcus.”

  “And how do you know that?” said Marcus, gloomily, and with that inner spasm of pain he always felt when his father was mentioned.

  “He believes you compromise,” said Quintus.

  “He never compromised because he never took a stand,” said Marcus, with anger of his own. “Do you think it easy for me to endure Caesar and Crassus and Pompey, and all their friends? No. But they exist in my world and I must endure them.”

  “Including Catilina?”

  Marcus rose abruptly to his feet and his fine eyes flashed on his brother. “No.”

  Quintus felt appeased, though he did not know why. Then he scowled once more. “I am worried about my young son. He is devious, and not to be trusted. He smiles disarmingly. I am afraid he is subtle, and exigent.”

  Marcus knew this was true. The young Quintus slipped agilely through one’s grasp. So Marcus pitied his ingenuous brother, and thought of his own daughter, Tullia, with passionate relief. Marcus said, “I will soon seek to be Consul of Rome.” He hoped to divert his brother’s thoughts.

  Quintus eyed him with sudden grimness. “Do you not know the rumor? It is said that Catilina will be Consul of Rome. Who can oppose him, he who has the mob in the palm of his hand?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Romans, being realists and pragmatic materialists, were suspicious of men of intellect. They loved Marcus for his justice; they could not forgive him his books of essays and poetry, though few of them read the works. Those who did read them, the intellectuals themselves, spoke in violent controversy for them and against them. Some affected to believe that Marcus, a member of the “new,” or middle-class, men, was not capable of truly abstract thought. He dealt in “duty” and “patriotism” and “honor,” and “law,” as if these were immutables! Was anything more ridiculous to a cultivated man? But some of the intellectuals disagreed and thought gloomily of themselves, who had betrayed that which had been dear to their fathers. This made them angry with Marcus, who aroused their conscience.