“My family,” cried Caesar from the rostra in his high—pitched orator’s voice, “is one of women! There are no men of my father’s generation left alive, and of the men in my own generation, I am the only one here in Rome today to mourn the passing of my family’s most senior woman. Julia, whose name was never shortened or added to, for she was the eldest of her Julian peers, and graced the name of her gens so incomparably that Rome knows no other woman like her. She had beauty, a gentle disposition, all the loyalty a man could ask for in a wife or mother or aunt, the warmth of a loving nature, the kindness of a generous spirit. The only other woman to whom I might compare her also lost her husband and her children long before she died—I mean, of course, another great patrician woman, Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi. Their careers were not unalike in that Cornelia and Julia both suffered the loss of a son whose head was removed from his body, and neither of whom was allowed burial. And who can tell which woman’s sorrows were the greater, when one suffered the deaths of all her sons but knew not the disgrace of a dishonored husband, and the other suffered the death of her only child but knew the disgrace of a dishonored husband and poverty in her old age? Cornelia lived into her eighties, Julia expired in her fifty-ninth year. Was that lack of courage on Julia’s part, or an easier life on Cornelia’s? We will never know, people of Rome. Nor should we ever ask. They were two great and illustrious women.
“But I am here to honor Julia, not Cornelia. Julia of the Julii Caesares, whose lineage was greater than any other Roman woman’s. For in her were joined the Kings of Rome and the founding Gods of Rome. Her mother was Marcia, the youngest daughter of Quintus Marcius Rex, the august descendant of the fourth King of Rome, Ancus Marcius, and who is remembered every day in this great city with gratitude and praise, for he it was who brought Rome fresh sweet water to gush out of fountains in every public square and crossroads. Her father was Gaius Julius Caesar, the younger son of Sextus Julius Caesar. Patricians of the tribe Fabia, once the Kings of Alba Longa, and descended from Iulus , who was the son of Aeneas, who was the son of the goddess Venus. In her veins there ran the blood of a mighty and powerful goddess, and the blood of Mars and Romulus too—for who was Rhea Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus? She was Julia! Thus in my blood—aunt Julia the supreme mortal power of kings conjoined with the immortal power of the gods who hold even the greatest kings in thrall.
“When she was eighteen years old, she married a man of whom every last one of you knows, and many of you knew as a living man. She married Gaius Marius, consul of Rome an unprecedented seven times, called the Third Founder of Rome, the conqueror of King Jugurtha of Numidia, the conqueror of the Germans, and winner of the earliest battles in the Italian War. And until this indisputably mighty man died at the height of his power, she remained his loyal and faithful wife. By him she had her only child, Gaius Marius Junior, who was senior consul of Rome at the age of twenty-six.
“It is not her fault that neither husband nor son kept his reputation untarnished after death. It is not her fault that an interdiction was placed upon her and that she was forced to move from her home of twenty-eight years to a far meaner house exposed to the bitter north winds which whistle across the outer Quirinal. It is not her fault that Fortune left her little to live for save to help the people of her new district in their troubles. It is not her fault that she died untimely. It is not her fault that the life masks of her husband and son were forbidden ever to be displayed again.
“When I was a child I knew her well, for I was Gaius Marius’s boy during that terrible year when his second stroke left him a helpless cripple. Every day I went to her house to do my duty to her husband and to receive her sweet thanks. From her I had a love I have known from no other woman, for my mother had to be my father too, and could not permit herself the luxury of hugs and kisses, for they are not the province of a father. But I had Aunt Julia for those, and though I live to be a thousand years old, I will never forget a single hug, a single kiss, a single loving glance from her beautiful grey eyes. And I say to you, people of Rome, mourn for her! Mourn for her as I do! Mourn for her fate and for the sadness of an undeservedly sad life. And mourn too for the fates of her husband and her son, whose imagines I show you on this unhappy day. They say I am not allowed to show you the Marian masks, that I can be stripped of my rank and my citizenship for committing this outrageous crime of displaying here in the Forum—which knew both men so well!—two inanimate things made of wax and paint and someone else’s hair! And I say to you that if it be so ordered, if I be stripped of my rank and my citizenship for displaying the Marian masks, then so be it! For I will honor this aunt of my blood as she ought to be honored, and that honor is all wrapped up in her devotion to the Marii, who were husband and son. I show these imagines for Julia’s sake, and I will permit no magistrate in this city to remove them from her funeral procession! Step forward, Gaius Marius, step forward, Gaius Marius Junior! Honor your wife and mother, Julia of the Julii Caesares, daughter of kings and gods!”
The crowd had wept desolately, but when the actors wearing the masks of Gaius Marius and Young Marius stepped forward to make their obesiances to the stiff still figure on the bier, a murmuring began that swelled into a chorus of exclamations and then exploded into a full—throated roar. And Hortensius and Metellus Little Goat, watching appalled from the top of the Senate House steps, turned away in defeat. Gaius Julius Caesar’s crime would have to be suffered in legal and disciplinary silence, for Rome wholeheartedly approved.
“It was brilliant,” said Hortensius to Catulus a little later. “Not only did he defy Sulla’s and the Senate’s laws, but he used the opportunity to remind every last face in that crowd that he is descended from kings and gods!”
“Well, Caesar, you got away with it,” said Aurelia at the end of that very long day.
“I knew I would,” he said, dropping his black toga on the floor with a sigh of sheer weariness. “The conservative rump of the Senate may be in power this year, but not one member of it can be sure that next year’s electors will feel the same way. Romans like a change of government. And Romans like a man with the courage of his convictions. Especially if he elevates old Gaius Marius to the pedestal from which the people of this city have never torn him down, no matter how many of his statues toppled.”
Moving like an ancient dropsical woman, Cinnilla dragged herself into the room and went to sit at Caesar’s side on the couch. “It was wonderful,” she said, pushing her hand into his. “I am glad I felt well enough to attend the eulogy, even if I couldn’t get any further. And how well you spoke!”
Turning side on, he cupped her face in his fingers and pushed a stray strand of hair away from her brow. “My poor little one,” he said tenderly, “not much longer to go now.” He swept her feet from the floor and placed them in his lap. “You ought not to sit with your legs dangling, you know that.”
“Oh, Caesar, it has been so long! I carried Julia with no trouble whatsoever, yet here I am this second time in such a mess! I don’t understand it,” she said, eyes filling with tears.
“I do,” said Aurelia. “This one is a boy. I carried both my girls without trouble, but you, Caesar, were a burden.”
“I think,” said Caesar, putting Cinnilla’s feet on the couch beside him and rising, “that I’ll go to my own apartment to sleep tonight.”
“Oh, please, Caesar, don’t!” begged his wife, face puckering. “Stay here tonight. I promise we won’t talk of babies and women’s troubles. Aurelia, you must stop or he’ll leave us.”
“Pah!” said Aurelia, getting up from her chair. “Where is Eutychus? What all of us need is a little food.”
“He’s settling Strophantes in,” said Cinnilla sadly, her face clearing when Caesar, resigned, sank back onto the couch. “Poor old man! They’re all gone.”
“So will he be soon,” said Caesar.
“Oh, don’t say that!”
“It’s in his face, wife. And it will be a mercy.”
&nb
sp; “I hope,” said Cinnilla, “that I don’t live to be the last one left. That is the worst fate of all, I think.”
“A worse fate,” said Caesar, who didn’t want to be reminded of painful things, “is to speak of nothing except gloom.”
“It’s just Rome,” she said, smiling to reveal that little pink crease of inner lip. “You’ll be better when you get to Spain. You’re never really as happy in Rome as you are when you’re traveling.”
“Next nundinus, wife, by sea at the start of winter. You are quite right. Rome isn’t where I want to be. So how about having this baby anytime between now and the next nundinus! I’d like to see my son before I leave.”
*
He saw his son before he left at the next nundinus, but the child when finally the midwife and Lucius Tuccius managed to remove it from the birth canal had obviously been dead for several days. And Cinnilla, swollen and convulsing, one side paralyzed from a massive stroke, died at almost the same moment as she put forth her stillborn boy.
No one could believe it. If Julia had been a shock and a grief, the loss of Cinnilla was unbearable. Caesar wept as he never had in his life before, and cared not who saw him. Hour after hour, from the moment of that first horrible convulsion until it was time to bury her too. One was possible. Two was a nightmare from which he never expected to awaken. Of the dead child he had neither room nor inclination to think; Cinnilla was dead, and she had been a part of his family life from his fourteenth year, a part of the pain of his flaminate, the chubby dark mite whom he had loved as a sister for as long as he had loved her as a wife. Seventeen years! They had been children together, the only children in that house.
Her death smote Aurelia as Julia’s could not, and that iron woman wept as desolately as her son did. A light had gone out that would dim the rest of her life. Part grandchild, part daughter-in-law, a sweet little presence left only in echoes, an empty loom, half of an empty bed. Burgundus wept, Cardixa wept, their sons wept, and Lucius Decumius, Strophantes, Eutychus, all the servants who scarcely remembered Aurelia’s apartment without Cinnilla there. The tenants of the insula wept, and a great many people in the Subura.
This funeral was different from Julia’s. That had been a glory of sorts, a chance for the orator to show off a great woman and his own family. There were similarities; Caesar extracted the Cornelius Cinna imagines from the storage room in which he had hidden them alongside the masks of the two Marii, and they were worn by actors to scandalize Hortensius and Metellus Little Goat anew; and though it was not accepted practice to eulogize a young woman from the rostra, Caesar went through that public ordeal too. But not in a kind of glory. This time he spoke softly, and confined his remarks to the pleasure he had known in her company and the years during which she had consoled him for the loss of his boy’s freedom. He talked about her smile and those dismal hairy garments she had dutifully woven for her destiny as flaminica Dialis. He talked about his daughter, whom he held in his arms while he spoke. He wept.
And he ended by saying, “I know nothing of grief beyond what I feel inside myself. That is grief’s tragedy—that each of us must always deem his or her own grief greater than anyone else’s. But I am prepared to confess to you that perhaps I am a cold, hard man whose greatest love is for his own dignitas. So be it. Once I refused to divorce Cinna’s daughter. At the time I thought I refused to obey Sulla’s command to divorce her for my own private benefit and the possibilities it opened up. Well, I have explained to you what grief’s tragedy is. But that tragedy is as nothing to the tragedy of never knowing how much someone has meant to you until after that someone is dead.”
No one cheered the imago of Lucius Cornelius Cinna, nor those of his ancestors. But Rome wept so deeply that for the second time in two nundinae, Caesar’s enemies found themselves rendered impotent.
*
His mother was suddenly years older, absolutely heartbroken. A difficult business for the son, whose attempts to comfort her with hugs and kisses were still repulsed.
Am I so cold and hard because she is so cold and hard? But she isn’t cold and hard with anyone except me! Oh, why does she do this to me? Look how she grieves for Cinnilla. And how she grieved for awful old Sulla.
If I were a woman, my child would be such a consolation. But I am a Roman nobleman, and a Roman nobleman’s children are at best on the periphery of his life. How many times did I see my father? And what did I ever have to talk to him about?
“Mater,” he said, “I give you little Julia to be your own. She’s almost exactly the same age now as Cinnilla was when she came to live here. In time she’ll fill the largest part of your vacant space. I won’t try to suborn her away from you.”
“I’ve had the child since she was born,” said Aurelia, “and I know all that.”
Old Strophantes shuffled in, looked rheumily at mother and son, shuffled out again.
“I must write to Uncle Publius in Smyrna,” Aurelia said. “He’s another one who has outlived everybody, poor old man.”
“Yes, Mater, you do that.”
“I don’t understand you, Caesar, when you behave like the child who cries because he’s eaten all his honey cake yet thinks it ought never to diminish.”
“And what has provoked that remark?”
“You said it during Julia’s funeral oration. That I had to be both mother and father to you, which meant I couldn’t give you the hugs and kisses Julia did. When I heard you say that, I was relieved. You understood it at last. But now I find you just as bitter as ever. Accept your lot, my son. You mean more to me than life, than little Julia, than Cinnilla, than anyone. You mean more to me than your father did. And more by far than Sulla ever could have, even had I weakened. If there cannot be peace between us, can’t we at least declare a truce?”
He smiled wryly. “Why not?” he asked.
“You’ll come good once you get out of Rome, Caesar.”
“That’s what Cinnilla said.”
“She was right. Nothing will ever blow away your grief at this death, but a brisk sea voyage will blow away the rubbish cluttering up your mind. It will function again. It can’t not.”
It can’t not, echoed Caesar, riding the short miles between Rome and Ostia, where his ship waited. That is a truth. My spirit might be bruised to pulp, but my mind is unharmed. New things to do, new people to meet, a new country to explore—and no sign of Lucullus! I will survive.
FINIS
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Author’s Afterword
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Colleen McCullough
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AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD
Fortune’s Favorites, though by no means the last book in this series, does mark the end of that period of Roman history wherein the ancient sources are a little thin, due to the absence of Livy and Cassius Dio, not to mention Cicero at his most prolific. In effect, this has meant that in the first three books I have been able to encompass almost all the historical events from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. So Fortune’s Favorites also marks a turning point in how I treat my subject, which is the fall of the Roman Republic. The books still to come will have to concentrate upon fewer aspects than the full sweep of the history of the time, which I think will be an advantage to both reader and writer.
However, even Fortune’s Favorites is enriched by increasing ancient source material, as marked by the appearance as characters of. two animals—the dog belonging to the wife of King Nicomedes of Bithynia, and the famous pet fawn of Quintus Sertorius. Both are attested; the dog by Strabo, the fawn by Plutarch.
Fortune’s Favorites also arrives at the beginning of a period of Roman hist
ory flirted with by Hollywood, to the detriment of history, if not Hollywood. The reader will find a rather different version of Spartacus than the celluloid one. I have neither the room nor the inclination to argue here why I have chosen to portray Spartacus in the way I have; scholars will be able to see the why—and the who—of my argument in the text.
The glossary has been completely rewritten specifically to suit this book; please note that some of the general articles, like steel and wine, have been lifted out. As the books go on, I would have to keep increasing the size of the glossary did I not cull the entries, and time and space dictate the impossibility of a glossary which would eventually be longer than the book.
For those interested readers, the glossaries of the earlier books if combined with this one will yield information on most things. The entries on the governmental structure of Republican Rome will always be incorporated, though in a changing form as various laws and men worked upon it. Only those places and/or peoples about which the reader might want to refresh his or her knowledge are included. The most interesting new entries concern ships, which are now becoming more important. Hence find bireme, hemiolia, merchantman, myoparo, quinquereme, sixteener and trireme in the glossary of Fortune’s Favorites.
Of the drawings, both the “youthened” young Pompey and the Pompey in his thirties are taken from authenticated busts. The young man Caesar is a “youthened’’ drawing taken from a bust of the middle—aged man—a somewhat easier exercise than with Pompey, as Caesar kept his figure. The drawing of Sulla is taken from a bust. Dissension rages as to which of two extant busts is actually Sulla: one is of a handsome man in his late thirties, the other is of an old man. I think both are Sulla. Ears, nose, chin, face shape and face folds are identical. But the handsome mature man is now wearing a wig of tight curls (that it is a wig is confirmed by two tongues of absolutely straight hair projecting down in front of the ears), has lost his teeth (a phenomenon which lengthens the chin, of course), and at some time in the recent past has lost a great deal of weight. As Sulla was at most sixty-two when he died, illness must have taken a terrible toll—a fact quite consistent with what Plutarch has to say. Lucius Licinius Lucullus is also an authenticated bust.
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