“Not if I get him alone for long enough, he isn’t,” said Servilia ominously.
“You won’t ever get him alone, Miss Knobby-nose!” said Young Caepio, pushing himself in front of Young Cato.
“I do not have a knobby nose!” said Servilia angrily.
“You do so too!” said Young Caepio. “It’s a horrible little nose with a horrible little knob on the end, ugh, erk, brrh!”
“Be quiet!” cried Drusus. “Do you ever do anything save fight?”
“Yes!” said Young Cato loudly. “We argue!”
“How can we not, with him here?” asked Drusus Nero.
“You shut up, Nero Black-face!” said Young Caepio, leaping to Young Cato’s defense.
“I am not a black-face!”
“Are, are, are!” shouted Young Cato, fists clenched.
“You’re no Servilius Caepio!” said Servilia to Young Caepio. “You’re the descendant of a red-haired Gallic slave, you were foisted on us Servilii Caepiones!”
“Knobby nose, knobby nose, ugly horrible knobby nose!”
“Tacete!” yelled Drusus.
“Son of a slave!” hissed Servilia.
“Daughter of a dullard!” cried Porcia.
“Freckledy-face porky!” said Lilla.
“Sit down over here, my son,” said Cornelia Scipionis, quite unruffled by this nursery brawl. “When they’ve finished, they’ll pay attention to us.”
“Do they always bring up ancestry?” asked Drusus above the cries and shouts.
“With Servilia here, of course,” said their avia.
The girl Servilia, figure formed at thirteen and blessed with a lovely, secretive face, ought to have been segregated from the younger children two or three years earlier, but had not been, as part of her punishment. After witnessing some of the contents of this quarrel, Drusus found himself wondering if he had been wrong to keep her in the nursery.
Servililla-Lilla, now just turned twelve, was also maturing fast. Prettier than Servilia yet not as attractive, her dark and roguish, open face told everyone what sort of person she was. The third member of the senior group, and very much aligned with them against the junior group, was Drusus’s adopted son, Marcus Livius Drusus Nero Claudianus; nine years old, handsome in the mould of the Claudii—who were dark and dour—he was not a clever boy, alas, but he was pleasant and docile.
Then came Cato’s brood, for Drusus could never think of Young Caepio as Caepio’s child, no matter how Livia Drusa had insisted. He was so like Cato Salonianus—the same slenderly muscular build, the promise of tall stature, the shape of his head and ears, the long neck, long limbs— and the bright red hair. Though his eyes were light brown, they were not Caepio’s eyes, for they were widely spaced, well opened, and deeply set within their bony orbits. Of all six children, Young Caepio was Drusus’s favorite. There was a strength about him, a need to shoulder responsibility, and this appealed to Drusus; now aged three quarters past five, the child would converse with Drusus like an old, tremendously wise man. His voice was very deep, the expression in his reddish eyes always serious and thoughtful. Of smiles he produced few, save when his little brother, Young Cato, did something he found amusing or touching; his affection for Young Cato was so strong it amounted to outright paternalism, and he would not be separated from him.
Porcia called Porcella was almost due to turn four. A homely child, she was just beginning to develop freckles everywhere, big splotchy brown freckles which made her the object of contemptuous teasing from her older half sisters, who disliked her intensely, and made her poor little life a secret misery of sly pinches, kicks, bites, scratches, slaps. The Catonian beak of a nose ill became her, but she did have a beautiful pair of dark grey eyes, and by nature she was a nice person.
Young Cato was three quarters past two, a veritable monster both in looks and essence. His nose seemed to grow faster than the rest of him, beaked with a Roman bump rather than a Semitic hook, and was out of keeping with the rest of his face, which was strikingly good-looking-exquisite mouth, lovely luminous and large light grey eyes, high cheekbones, good chin. Though broad shoulders hinted that he might develop a nice body later on, he was painfully thin because he evinced absolutely no interest in food. By nature he was obnoxiously intrusive, with the kind of mentality Drusus, for one, abominated most; a lucid and reasonable answer to one of his loud and hectoring questions only provoked more questions, indicating that Young Cato was either dense, or too stubborn to see another point of view. His most endearing characteristic—and he needed an endearing characteristic!—was his utter devotion to Young Caepio, from whom he refused to be parted, day or night; when he became absolutely intolerable, a threat to take his brother away from him produced immediate docility.
Not long after Young Cato’s second birthday, Silo had paid his last visit to Drusus; Drusus was now a tribune of the plebs, and Silo had felt it unwise to show Rome that their friendship was as strong as ever. A father himself, Silo had always liked to see the children whenever he was a guest in Drusus’s house. So he had paid attention to the little spy, Servilia, and flattered her, yet could be detached enough to laugh at her contempt for him, a mere Italian. The four middle children he loved, played with them, joked with them. But Young Cato he loathed, though he was hard put to give Drusus a logical reason for detesting a two-year-old.
“I feel like a mindless animal when I’m with him,” said Silo to Drusus. “My senses and instincts tell me he is an enemy.”
It was the child’s Spartan endurance got under his skin, admirable trait though Spartan endurance was. When he saw the tiny little fellow stand tearless and firm-jawed after a nasty injury, physical or mental, Silo found his hackles rising along with his temper. Why is this so? he would ask himself, and could never arrive at an answer that satisfied him. Perhaps it was because Young Cato never bothered to hide his contempt for mere Italians. That of course was the malign influence of Servilia. Yet when he encountered the same sort of treatment from her, he could brush it off. Young Cato, he concluded, was just not the sort of person anyone would ever be able to brush off.
One day, goaded beyond endurance by Young Cato’s harsh and badgering questions to Drusus—and his lack of appreciation for Drusus’s patience and kindness—Silo picked the child up and held him out the window above a rock garden full of sharp stones.
“Be reasonable, Young Cato, or I’ll drop you!” Silo said.
Young Cato hung there doggedly silent, as defiant and in control of his fate as ever; no amount of shaking, pretended dropping, or other threats served to loosen the child’s tongue or determination. In the end Silo put him down, the loser of the battle, shaking his head at Drusus.
“Just as well Young Cato is a baby,” he said. “If he were a grown man, Italy would never persuade the Romans!”
On another occasion, Silo asked Young Cato whom he loved.
“My brother,” said Young Cato.
“And who next after him?” Silo asked.
“My brother.”
“But who next-best after your brother?”
“My brother.”
Silo turned to Drusus. “Does he love no one else? Not you? Not his avia, your mother?”
Drusus shrugged. “Apparently, Quintus Poppaedius, he loves no one but his brother.”
Silo’s reaction to Young Cato was very much the reaction of most people; certainly Young Cato did not provoke fondness.
The children had permanently polarized into two groups, the seniors allied against Cato Salonianus’s brood, and the nursery resounded perpetually to the cries and screeches of battle. It might logically have been presumed that the Servilian-Livians outweighed, outranked and outdid the much smaller Catonians, but from the time Young Cato turned two years old and could add his minuscule bulk to the fray, the Catonians gained the ascendancy. No one could cope with Young Cato, who couldn’t be pummeled into submission, shouted into submission, argued into submission. A slow learner when it came to facts Young Cato might be
, but he was the absolute quintessence of a natural enemy— indefatigable, constant, carping, loud, remorseless, monstrous.
“Mama,” said Drusus to his mother, summing the nursery up, “we have gathered together every disadvantage Rome possesses.”
4
Other men than Drusus and the Italian leaders had also worked through that summer; Caepio In had lobbied the knights assiduously, Varius and Caepio combined had managed to harden Comitial resistance to Drusus, and Philippus, his tastes always outrunning his purse, allowed himself to be bought by a group of knights and senators whose latifundia holdings represented the major part of their assets.
Of course no one knew what was coming, but the House knew that Drusus had lodged a request to speak at the meeting on the Kalends of September, and was consumed with curiosity. Many among the senators, carried away by the force of Drusus’s oratory earlier in the year, were now wishing Drusus had talked less well; the initial flush of senatorial supportive enlightenment had dissipated, so that the men who gathered in the Curia Hostilia on the first day of September were resolved to close their ears to Drusus’s magic.
Sextus Julius Caesar was in the chair, September being one of the months during which he held the fasces, which meant the preliminary rites were scrupulously observed. The House sat and rustled restlessly while the omens were consulted, the prayers said, the sacrificial mess cleared away. And when the House finally settled down to business, everything taking precedence over a speech from a tribune of the plebs was dealt with extremely quickly.
Time. It was time. Drusus rose from the tribunician bench below the dais on which sat the consuls, the praetors and the curule aediles, and walked to his usual spot up by the great bronze doors, which—as on previous occasions—he had asked be shut.
“Revered fathers of our country, members of the Senate of Rome,” he began softly, “several months ago I spoke in this House of a great evil in our midst—the evil of the ager publicus. Today I intend to speak about a much greater evil than the ager publicus. One which, unless crushed, will see the end of us. The end of Rome.
“I mean, of course, the people who dwell side by side with us in this peninsula. I mean the people we call Italians.”
A wave of sound passed through the white ranks on either side of the House, more like a rising wind in trees than human voices, or like a swarm of wasps in the distance. Drusus heard it, understood its import, continued regardless.
“We treat them, these thousands upon thousands of people, like third-class citizens. Literally! The first-class citizen is the Roman. The second-class citizen holds the Latin Rights. And the third-class citizen is the Italian. He who is considered unworthy of any right to participate in our Roman congress. He who is taxed, flogged, fined, evicted, plundered, exploited. He whose sons are not safe from us, he whose women are not safe from us, he whose property is not safe from us. He who is called upon to fight in our wars and fund the troops he donates us, yet is expected to consent to his troops being commanded by us. He who, if we had lived up to our promises, would not have to endure the Roman and Latin colonies in his midst—for we promised full autonomy to the Italian nations in return for troops and taxes, then tricked them by seeding our colonies within their borders—thus taking the best of their world off them, as well as withholding our world from them.”
The noise was increasing, though as yet it did not obscure what Drusus was saying; a storm coming closer, a swarm coming closer. Drusus found his mouth dry, had to pause to lick and swallow in the most natural manner he could summon. There must be no obvious nervousness. He pressed on.
“We of Rome have no king. Yet within Italy, every last one of us acts like a king. Because we like the sensation it gives us, we like to see our inferiors crawl about under our regal noses. We like to play at kings! Were the people of Italy genuinely our inferiors, there might be some excuse for it. But the truth is that the Italians are not inferior to us in any natural way. They are blood of our blood. If they were not, how could anyone in this House cast aspersions upon another member of this House for his ‘Italian blood’? I have heard the great and glorious Gaius Marius called an Italian. Yet he conquered the Germans! I have heard the noble Lucius Calpurnius Piso called an Insubrian. Yet his father died gallantly at Burdigala! I have heard the great Marcus Antonius Orator condemned because he took the daughter of an Italian as his second wife. Yet he overcame the pirates, and was a censor!”
“He was indeed a censor,” said Philippus, “and while he was a censor, he permitted thousands and thousands of Italians to enroll themselves as Roman citizens!”
“Do you mean to imply, Lucius Marcius, that I connived at it?” asked Antonius Orator in a dangerous voice.
“I most certainly do, Marcus Antonius!”
Antonius Orator rose to his feet, big and burly. “Step outside, Philippus, and repeat that!” he cried.
“Order! Marcus Livius has the floor!” said Sextus Caesar, beginning to wheeze audibly. “Lucius Marcius and Marcus Antonius, you are both out of order! Sit down and be silent!”
Drusus resumed. “I repeat. The Italians are blood of our blood. They have been no mean part of our successes, both within Italy and abroad. They are no mean soldiers. They are no mean farmers. They are no mean businessmen. They have riches. They have a nobility as old as ours, leading men as educated as ours are, women as cultured and refined as ours are. They live in the same kind of houses as we do. They eat the same kind of food as we do. They have as many connoisseurs of wine as we do. They look like us.”
“Rubbish!” cried Catulus Caesar scornfully, and pointed at Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo from Picenum. “See him? Snub nose and hair the color of sand ! Romans may be red, Romans may be yellow, Romans may be white, but Romans are not sandy! He’s a Gaul, not a Roman! And if I had my way, he and all the rest of the un-Roman mushrooms glowing in the dark of our beloved Curia Hostilia would be pulled up and thrown out! Gaius Marius, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, Quintus Varius, Marcus Antonius for marrying beneath him, every Pompeius who ever marched down from Picenum with a straw between his teeth, every Didius from Campania, every Pedius from Campania, every Saufeius and Labienus and Appuleius — get rid of the lot, I say!”
The House was in an uproar. Either by name or by inference, Catulus Caesar had managed to insult a good third of its members; but what he said sat very well with the other two thirds, if only because Catulus Caesar had reminded them of their superiority. Caepio alone did not beam quite as widely as he ought — Catulus Caesar had singled out Quintus Varius.
“I will be heard!” Drusus shouted. “If we sit here until darkness falls, I will be heard!”
“Not by me, you won’t!” yelled Philippus.
“Nor by me!” shrieked Caepio.
“Marcus Livius has the floor! Those who refuse to allow him to speak will be ejected!” cried Sextus Caesar. “Clerk, go outside and bring in my lictors!”
Off scurried the head clerk, in marched Sextus Caesar’s twelve lictors in their white togas, fasces shouldered.
“Stand here on the back of the curule dais,” said Sextus Caesar loudly. “We have an unruly meeting, and I may ask you to eject certain men.” He nodded to Drusus. “Continue.”
“I intend to bring a bill before the concilium plebis giving the full Roman citizenship to every man from the Arnus to Rhegium, from the Rubico to Vereium, from the Tuscan Sea to the Adriatic Sea!” said Drusus, shouting now to make himself heard. “It is time we rid ourselves of this frightful evil—that one man in Italy is deemed better than another man—that we of Rome can keep ourselves exclusive! Conscript Fathers, Rome is Italy! And Italy is Rome! Let us once and for all admit that fact, and put every man in Italy upon the same footing!”
The House boiled into madness, men shouting “No, no, no!,” feet stamping, roars of outrage, boos and hisses, stools flying to crash on the floor around Drusus, fists shaking at Drusus from every tier on either side.
But Drusus stood unmoving and uncowed. “I will d
o it!” he screamed. “I—will—do—it!”
“Over my dead body!” howled Caepio from the dais.
Now Drusus moved, swung to face Caepio. “If necessary, it will be over your dead body, you overbred cretin! When have you ever had speech or congress with Italians, to know what sort of men they are?” Drusus yelled, trembling with anger.
“In your house, Drusus, in your house! Talking sedition! A nest of them, all dirty Italians! Silo and Mutilus, Egnatius and Vidacilius, Lamponius and Duronius!”
“Never in my house, and never sedition!”
Caepio was on his feet, face purple. “You’re a traitor, Drusus! A blight on your family, an ulcer on the fair face of Rome! I’ll bring you to trial for this!”
“No, you festering scab, it’s I who will bring you to trial! What happened to all that gold from Tolosa, Caepio? Tell this House that! Tell this House how enormous and prosperous your business enterprises are, and how unsenatorial!” Drusus shouted.
“Are you going to let him get away with this?” roared Caepio, turning from one side of the chamber to the other, hands outstretched imploringly. “He’s the traitor! He’s the viper!”
Through all of this exchange Sextus Caesar and Scaurus Princeps Senatus had been calling for order; Sextus Caesar now gave up. Snapping his fingers at his lictors, he adjusted his toga and stalked out of the meeting behind his escort, looking neither to left nor to right. Some of the praetors followed him, but Quintus Pompeius Rufus leaped from the dais in the direction of Catulus Caesar at precisely the same moment as Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo came at Catulus from the far side of the House. Both meant murder, fists doubled, faces ugly. However, before either Pompeius could reach the sneering, haughty Catulus Caesar, Gaius Marius stepped into the fray. Shaking his fierce old head, he grabbed at Pompey Strabo’s wrists and bore them down, while Crassus Orator restrained the furious Pompeius Rufus. The Pompeii were hauled unceremoniously from the chamber, Marius gathering in Drusus as he went, Antonius Orator helping. Catulus Caesar remained standing beside his stool, smiling.
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