But that is not the best of it, Marcus. The best is that Appius Claudius has married off his youngest sister, Clodilla, to none other than Lucullus! All of fifteen years old—he and Lucullus say. I’d make her fourteen, but I might be wrong. What a match! Thanks to Sulla, Lucullus is fabulously rich, and has besides control of the fortunes of The Heavenly Twins. Oh, I am not implying that our upright, downright Lucullus would embezzle from Faustus and Fausta—but what is to stop him popping the interest in his purse?
Thus due to the amazing energy and enterprise of this twenty-year-old youth, the fortunes of the family Appius Claudius Pulcher have taken an astonishing turn for the better. All of Rome is laughing, but not without sincere admiration. He is worth watching, our Appius Claudius! Publius Clodius, aged fourteen—then Clodilla is fifteen—is already a menace, and his big brother will do nothing to discipline him. He’s very good-looking and precocious, he’s dangerous with girls and up to all kinds of mischief. I believe, however, that he is intellectually brilliant, so he may settle down in time and become a model of the patrician Roman nobleman.
And what else have I got to tell you? Oh, yes. That famous pun of Gnaeus Sicinius’s about Marcus Crassus—you will not have forgotten the hay on both Crassus’s horns!—is even cleverer than we thought at the time. It has just come out that Sicinius has been heavily in debt to Crassus for years. So the pun contained yet another nuance. Faenum is “hay’’ and faenerator is “moneylender.” The hay wrapped round Crassus’s horns is loan money! Rome learned of the additional nuance because Sicinius is a ruined man and cannot pay Crassus back. I wasn’t aware that Crassus lent money, but his nose is clean, alas. He lends only to senators and does not levy interest. His way of building up a senatorial clientele. I think it will pay to watch friend Crassus. Do not borrow money from him, Marcus! Interest—free is a great temptation, but Crassus calls in his debts whenever he feels like it—no notice whatsoever—and he expects to be paid at once. If he isn’t paid, you’re ruined. And there is not a thing the censors (if we had censors) could do about it, because he charges no interest. Quod erat demonstrandum: he cannot be called a usurer. He’s just a thoroughly nice fellow busy helping his senatorial friends out.
And I believe that is all. Terentia is well, as is little Tullia. What a nice child your daughter is! Your brother is much as always. How I wish he could learn to get on better with my sister! But I think both you and I have given up on that. Pomponia is a termagant, Quintus is a real country squire. By that I mean he is stubborn, frugal, and proud. And wants to be master of his house.
Keep well. I will write again before I leave Rome to go back to Epirus, where my cattle ranch is thriving. Too wet for sheep, of course—their feet rot. But everyone is so keen to grow wool that they forget how much cowhide the world consumes. Cattle as an investment are underestimated.
2
At the end of Sextilis, Caesar received an urgent summons from Bithynia. King Nicomedes was dying, and asking for him. This was exactly what Caesar needed; Rome was growing daily more suffocating, the courts duller. And though the news from Bithynia was not happy, it was to be expected. Within one day of reading Oradaltis’s note, he was packed and ready to go.
Burgundus would be with him as always, Demetrius who plucked his body hair could not be left behind nor could the Spartan Brasidas, who made his Civic Crowns out of oak leaves. In fact, this time Caesar traveled with more state than of yore; his importance was increasing, and he now found himself in need of a secretary, several scribes, several personal servants, and a small escort of his own freedmen. Therefore it was with twenty persons in his entourage that he left for the east. An expensive exercise. He was now twenty-five years old, and he had been in the Senate for five of those years.
“But don’t think,” said Burgundus to the new members of the party, “that you’re going to travel in comfort. When Gaius Julius moves, he moves!”
*
Nicomedes was still alive when Caesar reached Bithynia, though he could not recover from this illness.
“It’s really nothing more nor less than plain old age,” said Queen Oradaltis, weeping. “Oh, I shall miss him! I have been his wife since I was fifteen. How will I manage without him?”
“You will because you have to,” said Caesar, drying her eyes. “I see that dog Sulla is still brisk enough, so you’ll have his company. From what you tell me, Nicomedes will be glad to go. I for one dread the idea of lingering beyond my usefulness.”
“He took to his bed for good ten days ago,” said Oradaltis, pattering down a marble corridor, “and the physicians say he may go at any time—today, tomorrow, next month—no one knows.”
When he set eyes on the wasted figure in the big carven bed, Caesar could not believe he would last beyond that day. Little was left save skin and bone, and nothing at all of the King’s physical individuality; he was dry and wrinkled as a winter apple. But when Caesar spoke his name he opened his eyes at once, held out his hands and smiled gummily, the tears falling.
“You came!” he cried, voice surprisingly strong.
“How could I not?” asked Caesar, sitting down on the edge of the bed to take both skeletal claws in a firm grip. “When you ask me to come, I come.”
With Caesar there to carry him from bed to couch and couch to chair somewhere in the sun and out of the wind, Nicomedes brightened, though the use of his legs was gone permanently and he would drop into a light doze halfway through a sentence, then wake up long moments later with no memory of what he had been saying. His ability to eat solid foods had gone; he existed upon beakers of goat’s milk mixed with fortified wine and honey, and dribbled more of them down his outside than he managed to drink. It is interesting, thought the fastidious and immaculate Caesar, that when this is happening to someone so beloved, the usual reactions are not present. I am not repelled. I am not tempted to command a servant to clean him up. Rather, it is a pleasure to care for him. I would empty his chamber pot gladly.
“Have you heard from your daughter?” Caesar asked him on one of his better days.
“Not directly. However, it seems she is still alive and well at Cabeira.”
“Can’t you negotiate with Mithridates to bring her home?”
“At the price of the kingdom, Caesar, you know that.”
“But unless she comes home there is no heir anyway.”
“Bithynia has an heir right here,” said Nicomedes.
“In Nicomedia? Who?”
“I thought of leaving Bithynia to you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. To be King.”
“No, my dear old friend, that isn’t possible.”
“You would make a great king, Caesar. Wouldn’t you like to rule your own land?”
“My own land is Rome, Nicomedes, and like all Romans, I was brought up to believe in the Republic.”
The King’s bottom lip trembled. “Can’t I tempt you?”
“No.”
“Bithynia needs someone young and very strong, Caesar. I can think of no one but you!”
“There is Rome herself.”
“And Romans like Gaius Verres.”
“That’s true. But there are also Romans like me. Rome is the only answer, Nicomedes. Unless you want to see Pontus rule.”
“Anything is preferable to that!”
“Then leave Bithynia to Rome.”
“Can you draw up my testament in a properly Roman fashion?”
“Yes.”
“Then do so, Caesar. I will leave my kingdom to Rome.”
*
Halfway through December, King Nicomedes III of Bithynia died. One hand was given to Caesar and the other to his wife, though he did not wake from his long dream to say goodbye.
The will had been couriered to Rome soon enough that Caesar had received a reply from the Senate before the eighty—five-year-old King died, to the effect that the governor of Asia Province, Marcus Junius Juncus, was being notified, and would journey to Bithynia to begin incor
porating Bithynia into Asia Province after the King was dead; as Caesar intended to stay until this happened, Caesar was to inform Juncus when it had.
That was a disappointment; Bithynia’s first governor would not be a nice or understanding man.
“I want every treasure and work of art in the whole kingdom catalogued,” said Caesar to the widowed queen, “also the contents of the treasury, the size of the fleets, the size of the army, and every suit of armor, sword, spear, piece of artillery and siege engine you have.”
“It will be done, but why?” asked Oradaltis, frowning.
“Because if the governor of Asia Province thinks to enrich his own purse by appropriating as much as one spear or one drachma, I want to know,” said Caesar grimly. “I will then make it my business to prosecute him in Rome, and I’ll secure a conviction too! Because while you’re cataloguing everything, you will make sure you have at least six of the most important Romans in your land as witnesses that the catalogue is correct. That will render the document hard evidence even a senatorial jury cannot ignore.”
“Oh, dear! Will I be safe?” asked the Queen.
“In person, quite safe. However, if you can bear to uproot yourself and move into a private house—preferably not here in Nicomedia or in Chalcedon or Prusa—taking everything you want with you, then you ought to survive in peace and comfort for the rest of your life.”
“You dislike this Marcus Junius Juncus very much.”
“I dislike him very much.”
“Is he a Gaius Verres?”
“I doubt that, Oradaltis. Just ordinarily venal. Thinking himself the first official representative of Rome on the scene, I imagine he’ll steal whatever he decides Rome will let him get away with,” said Caesar calmly. “Rome will demand a catalogue of everything from him, but it’s my guess that the list you make and the list he makes won’t tally. Then we’ll have him!”
“Won’t he suspect the existence of a catalogue?”
Caesar laughed. “Not he! Eastern realms are not prone to be so precise—precision is Roman. Of course knowing I’m here he’ll think I’ve skimmed the place first, so it won’t even cross his mind that I might have conspired with you to trap him.”
By the end of December it was all done. The Queen shifted her residence to the little fishing village of Rheba, around the corner of the Bosporus on the Euxine shore. Here Nicomedes had maintained a private villa which his queen thought an ideal place for a retired ruler to occupy.
“When Juncus demands to annex your villa, you will show him a copy of the deed of ownership and inform him that the original is in the hands of your bankers. Where will you bank?”
“I had thought Byzantium. It will be closest to me.”
“Excellent! Byzantium is not a part of Bithynia, so Juncus won’t be able to get a look at your accounts—or his hands on your funds. You will also inform Juncus that the contents of your villa are yours, a part of your dowry. That will prevent his taking anything away from you. So don’t list anything you do take with you in the catalogue! If anyone is entitled to skim the place, it’s you.”
“Well, I must think of Nysa too,” said the old woman wistfully. “Who knows? Perhaps one day before I am dead, my daughter will be returned to me.”
Word came that Juncus had sailed into the Hellespont and would arrive in Nicomedia some days hence; he intended to pause en route to inspect Prusa, said his messenger. Caesar established the Queen in her villa, made sure that the treasury yielded her enough to provide her with an adequate income, lodged Oradaltis’s funds and the catalogue with her chosen bankers in Byzantium, and then took ship from Byzantium with his retinue of twenty. He would hug the Thracian coast of the Propontis all the way to the Hellespont, and thus avoid encountering Marcus Junius Juncus, the governor of Asia Province—and the governor now of Bithynia.
Caesar was not going back to Rome. Instead he planned to sail to Rhodes, and there study with Apollonius Molon for a year or two. Cicero had convinced him that this would put an additional polish on his oratory, though he was well aware how good his oratory already was. He didn’t miss Rome as Cicero always did, nor did he miss his family. Very pleasant and reassuring though possession of that family was, his wife and child and mother were there to wait for him, and would be there when eventually he returned. It never occurred to him that one or more of them might be snatched from him by death while he was away.
This trip, he was discovering, was an expensive one, and he had refused to allow Nicomedes or Oradaltis to give him money. He had asked for a keepsake only, and been given a genuine emerald from Scythia rather than the much paler, cloudier stones from the Sinus Arabicus; a flattish cabochon the size of a hen’s egg, it had the King and Queen of Bithynia engraved in profile upon it. Not for sale at any price, nor for any need. However, Caesar never worried about money. For the time being he had sufficient, and the future, he was convinced, would look after itself; an attitude which drove his careful mother to distraction. But retinues of twenty and hired ships did multiply by a factor of ten those early journeys he had made!
In Smyrna he spent time with Publius Rutilius Rufus again, and was highly entertained by the old man’s stories of Cicero, who had visited him on his way back to Rome from Rhodes.
“An amazing kind of mushroom!” was Rutilius Rufus’s verdict to Caesar. “He’ll never be happy in Rome, you know, though he worships the place. I would call him the salt of the earth—a decent, warmhearted and old—fashioned fellow.”
“I know what you mean,” nodded Caesar. “The trouble is, Uncle Publius, that he has a superbly able mind and much ambition.”
“Like Gaius Marius.”
“No,” said Caesar firmly. “Not like Gaius Marius.”
*
In Miletus he learned how Verres had stolen the finest wools and tapestries and rugs the city owned, and advised the ethnarch to lodge a complaint with the Senate in Rome.
“Though,” he said, preparing to embark for the voyage to Halicarnassus, “you were lucky he didn’t pilfer your art and despoil your temples as well. That was what he did elsewhere.”
The ship he had hired in Byzantium was a neat enough cargo vessel of some forty oars, high in the poop where the two great rudder oars resided, and having a cabin for his use on the deck amidships. Thirty assorted mules and horses—including the Nesaean and his own beloved Toes—were accommodated in stalls between his cabin and the poop. As they never sailed more than fifty miles without putting in at another port, readying to sail again was something of a fussy ordeal as horses and mules were brought back on board and settled down.
Miletus was no different from Smyrna, Pitane, half a dozen earlier ports of call; everyone in the harborside area knew that this particular ship was on hire to a Roman senator, and everyone was hugely interested. Look, there he was! The lovely young man in the pristine toga who walked as if he owned the world! Well, and didn’t he own the world? He was a Roman senator. Of course the lesser lights in his retinue contributed to the talk, so that all the habitual loiterers around the Miletus harborfront knew that he was a high aristocrat, a brilliant man, and single—handedly responsible for persuading King Nicomedes of Bithynia to leave his realm to Rome when he died. Little wonder then that Caesar himself was always glad when the gangplanks were away, the anchors up, and the ship cast off to put out to sea again.
But it was a beautiful day and the water was calm, a good breeze blew to fill the great linen sail and spare the oarsmen, and Halicarnassus, the captain assured Caesar as they stood together on the poop, would be reached on the following day.
Some seven or eight miles down the coast, the tip of a promontory jutted into the sea; Caesar’s ship sailed placidly between it and a looming island.
“Pharmacussa,” said the captain, pointing to the island.
They passed it close inshore with Iasus on the mainland much further away, on a course which would skirt the next peninsula on that dissected coast. A very small place, Pharmacussa was shaped li
ke a lopsided pair of woman’s breasts, the southernmost mound being the bigger of the two.
“Does anyone live there?” asked Caesar idly.
“Not even a shepherd and his sheep.”
The island had almost slid by when a low, sleek war galley emerged from behind the bigger breast, moving very fast, and on a course to intercept Caesar’s ship.
“Pirates!” squawked the captain, face white.
Caesar, who had turned his head to look down their wake, nodded. “Yes, and another galley coming up our rear. How many men aboard the one in front?’’ he asked.
“Fighting men? At least a hundred, armed to the teeth.”
“And on the one behind?”
The captain craned his neck. “It’s a bigger ship. Perhaps one hundred and fifty.”
“Then you do not recommend that we resist.”
“Ye gods, Senator, no!” the man gasped. “They would kill us as soon as look at us! We must hope they’re looking for a ransom, because they know from our lie in the water that we’re not carrying cargo.”
“Do you mean they’re aware there’s someone aboard us who will fetch a good ransom?”
“They know everything, Senator! They have spies in every port around the Aegean. It’s my guess the spies rowed out from Miletus yesterday with a description of my vessel and the news that she carries a Roman senator.”
“Are the pirates based on Pharmacussa, then?”
“No, Senator. It would be too easy for Miletus and Priene to scour them out. They’ve just been hiding there for a few days—on the lookout for a likely victim. It’s never necessary to wait more than a few days. Something juicy always comes along. We’re unlucky. This being winter and usually stormy, I’d hoped to escape pirates. But the weather has been too good, alas!”
“What will they do with us?”
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