Neither praetor was a man of decision, so both stood stunned and disorientated amid the turmoil on the docks. There a group of pirates discovered them, took them and their lictors prisoner, loaded them on board a galley, and sailed merrily off in the wake of the disappearing grain fleet. The capture of two praetors—one no less than the uncle of the great patrician nobleman Catilina—together with their lictors and fasces would mean at least two hundred talents in ransom!
The effect of the raid inside Rome was as predictable as it was inevitable: grain prices soared immediately; crowds of furious merchants, millers, bakers and consumers descended upon the lower Forum to demonstrate against governmental incompetence; and the Senate went into a huddle with the Curia doors shut so that no one outside would hear how dismal the debate within was bound to be. And dismal it was. No one even wanted to open it.
When Quintus Marcius Rex had called several times to no avail for speakers, there finally rose—it seemed with enormous reluctance—the tribune of the plebs-elect Aulus Gabinius, who looked, thought Caesar, even more the Gaul in that dim, filtered light. That was the trouble with all the men from Picenum—the Gaul in them showed more than the Roman. Including Pompey. It wasn’t so much the red or gold hair many of them sported, nor the blue or green eyes; plenty of impeccably Roman Romans were very fair. Including Caesar. The fault lay in Picentine bone structure. Full round faces, dented chins, short noses (Pompey’s was even snubbed), thinnish lips. Gaul, not Roman. It put them at a disadvantage, proclaimed to the whole of their world that they might protest all they liked that they were descended from Sabine migrants, but the truth was that they were descended from Gauls who had settled in Picenum over three hundred years ago.
The reaction among the majority of the senators who sat on their folding stools was palpable when Gabinius the Gaul rose to his feet: distaste, disapproval, dismay. Under normal circumstances his turn to speak would have been very far down the hierarchy. At this time of year he was outranked by fourteen incumbent magistrates, fourteen magistrates-elect, and some twenty consulars—if, of course, everyone was present. Everyone was not. Everyone never was. Nonetheless, to have a tribunician magistrate open the debate was almost unprecedented.
“It hasn’t been a good year, has it?” Aulus Gabinius asked the House after completing the formalities of addressing those above and below him in the pecking order. “During the past six years we have attempted to wage war against the pirates of Crete alone, though the pirates who have just sacked Ostia and captured the grain fleet—not to mention kidnapped two praetors and their insignia of office—don’t hail from anywhere half as far away as Crete, do they? No, they patrol the middle of Our Sea from bases in Sicily, Liguria, Sardinia and Corsica. Led no doubt by Megadates and Pharnaces, who for some years have enjoyed a really delightful little pact with various governors of Sicily like the exiled Gaius Verres, whereby they can go wherever they please in Sicilian waters and harbors. I imagine they rounded up their allies and shadowed this grain fleet all the way from Lilybaeum. Perhaps their original intention was to raid it at sea. Then some enterprising person in their pay at Ostia sent them word that there were no barges at Ostia, nor likely to be for eight or nine days. Well, why settle for capturing a part only of the grain fleet by attempting to raid it at sea? Better to do the job while it lay intact and fully laden in Ostia harbor! I mean, the whole world knows Rome keeps no legions in her home territory of Latium! What was to stop them at Ostia? What did stop them at Ostia? The answer is very short and simple—nothing!”
This last word was bellowed; everyone jumped, but no one replied. Gabinius gazed about and wished Pompey was present to hear him. A pity, a great pity. Still, Pompey would love the letter Gabinius intended to send him this night!
“Something has got to be done,” Gabinius went on, “and by that I do not mean the usual debacle so exquisitely personified by the campaign our chief Little Goat is still waging in Crete. First he barely manages to defeat some Cretan rabble in a land battle, then he lays siege to Cydonia, which eventually capitulates—but he lets the great pirate admiral Panares go free! So a couple more towns fall, then he lays siege to Cnossus, within whose walls the great pirate admiral Lasthenes is skulking. When the fall of Cnossus looks inevitable, Lasthenes destroys what treasures he can’t carry away with him, and escapes. An efficient siege operation, eh? But which disaster causes our chief Little Goat more sorrow? The flight of Lasthenes or the loss of the treasure trove? Why, the loss of the treasure trove, of course! Lasthenes is only a pirate, and pirates don’t ransom each other. Pirates expect to be crucified like the slaves they once were!”
Gabinius the Gaul from Picenum paused, grinning savagely in the way a Gaul could. He drew a deep breath, then said, “Something has got to be done!” And sat down.
No one spoke. No one moved.
Quintus Marcius Rex sighed. “Has no one anything to say?” His eyes roamed from one tier to another on both sides of the House, and rested nowhere until they encountered a derisive look on Caesar’s face. Now why did Caesar stare like that?
“Gaius Julius Caesar, you were once captured by pirates, and you managed to get the better of them. Have you nothing to say?” asked Marcius Rex.
Caesar rose from his seat on the second tier. “Just one thing, Quintus Marcius. Something has got to be done.” And sat down.
The sole consul of the year lifted both hands in the air as a gesture of defeat, and dismissed the meeting.
“When do you intend to strike?” asked Caesar of Gabinius as they left the Curia Hostilia together.
“Not quite yet,” said Gabinius cheerfully. “1 have a few other things to do first, so does Gaius Cornelius. I know it’s customary to start one’s year as a tribune of the plebs with the biggest things first, but I consider those bad tactics. Let our esteemed consuls-elect Gaius Piso and Manius Acilius Glabrio warm their arses on their curule chairs first. I want to let them think Cornelius and I have exhausted our repertoire before I so much as attempt to reopen today’s subject.”
“January or February, then.”
“Certainly not before January,” said Gabinius.
“So Magnus is fully prepared to take on the pirates.”
“Down to the last bolt, nail and skin of water. I can tell you, Caesar, that Rome will never have seen anything like it.”
“Then roll on, January.” Caesar paused, turned his head to look at Gabinius quizzically. “Magnus will never succeed in getting Gaius Piso on his side, he’s too glued to Catulus and the boni, but Glabrio is more promising. He’s never forgotten what Sulla did to him.”
“When Sulla forced him to divorce Aemilia Scaura?’’
“Precisely. He’s the junior consul next year, but it’s handy to have at least one consul in thrall.”
Gabinius chuckled. “Pompeius has something in mind for our dear Glabrio.”
“Good. If you can divide the consuls of the year, Gabinius, you can go a lot further, a lot faster.”
*
Caesar and Servilia resumed their liaison after she returned from Cumae at the end of October, no less absorbed in it and in each other. Though Aurelia tried to fish from time to time, Caesar confined his information about the progress of the affair to a minimum, and gave his mother no real indication how serious a business it was, nor how intense. He still disliked Servilia, but that couldn’t affect their relationship because liking wasn’t necessary. Or perhaps, he thought, liking would have taken something vital away from it.
“Do you like me?’’ he asked Servilia the day before the new tribunes of the plebs assumed office.
She fed him one breast at a time, and delayed her answer until both nipples had popped up and she could feel the heat start to move downward through her belly.
“I like no one,” she said then, climbing on top of him. “I love or I hate.”
“Is that comfortable?”
Because she lacked a sense of humor, she did not mistake his question for a reference to their pr
esent juxtaposition, but went straight to its real meaning. “Far more comfortable than liking, I’d say. I’ve noticed that when people like each other, they become incapable of acting as they ought. They delay telling each other home truths, for example, it seems out of fear that home truths will wound. Love and hate permit home truths.”
“Would you care to hear a home truth?” he asked, smiling as he kept absolutely still; that drove her to distraction when her blood was afire and she needed him to move inside her.
“Why don’t you just shut up and get on with it, Caesar?”
“Because I want to tell you a home truth.”
“All right, then, tell it!” she snapped, kneading her own breasts when he would not. “Oh, how you love to torment!”
“You like being on top a great deal more than being underneath, or sideways, or any other way,” he said.
“That’s true, I do. Now are you happy? Can we get on with it?”
“Not yet. Why do you like being on top best?”
“Because I’m on top, of course,” she said blankly.
“Aha!” he said, and rolled her over. “Now I’m on top.”
“I wish you weren’t.”
“I am happy to gratify you, Servilia, but not when it means I also gratify your sense of power.”
“What other outlet do I have to gratify my sense of power?” she asked, wriggling. “You’re too big and too heavy this way!”
“You’re quite right about comfort,” he said, pinning her down. “Not liking someone means one is not tempted to relent.”
“Cruel,” she said, eyes glazing.
“Love and hate are cruel. Only liking is kind.”
But Servilia, who did not like anyone, had her own method of revenge; she raked her carefully tended nails from his left buttock to his left shoulder, and drew five parallel lines with his blood.
Though she wished she hadn’t, for he took both her wrists and ground their bones, then made her lie beneath him for what seemed an eternity ramming himself home deeper and deeper, harder and harder; when she cried and screamed at the end, she scarcely knew whether agony or ecstasy provoked her, and for some time was sure her love had turned to hate.
The worst of that encounter did not occur until after Caesar went home. Those five crimson tracks were very sore, and his tunic when he peeled it away showed that he was still bleeding. The cuts and scratches he had sustained in the field from time to time told him that he would have to ask for someone to wash and dress the damage or run the risk of festering. If Burgundus had been in Rome it would have been easy, but these days Burgundus lived in the Caesar villa at Bovillae with Cardixa and their eight sons, caring for the horses and sheep Caesar bred. Lucius Decumius wouldn’t do; he was not clean enough. And Eutychus would blab the story to his boyfriend, his boyfriend’ s boyfriends and half the members of the crossroads college. His mother, then. It would have to be his mother.
Who looked and said, “Ye immortal Gods!”
“I wish I was one, then it wouldn’t hurt.”
Off she went to bring two bowls, one half-full of water and the other half-full of fortified but sour wine, together with wads of clean Egyptian linen.
“Better linen than wool, wool leaves fluff behind in the depths of the wounds,” she said, beginning with the strong wine. Her touch wasn’t tender, but it was thorough enough to make his eyes water; he lay on his belly, as much of him covered as her sense of decency dictated, and endured her ministrations without a sound. Anything capable of festering after Aurelia got through with it, he consoled himself, would kill a man from gangrene.
“Servilia?” she asked some time later, finally satisfied that she had got enough wine into the tracks to cow any festering thing lurking there, and beginning afresh with water.
“Servilia.”
“What sort of relationship is this?” she demanded.
“Not,” he said, and shook with laughter, “a comfortable one.”
“So much I see. She might end in murdering you.”
“I trust I preserve sufficient vigilance to prevent that.”
“Bored you’re not.”
“Definitely not bored, Mater.”
“I do not think,” she finally pronounced as she patted the water dry, “that this relationship is a healthy one. It might be wise to end it, Caesar. Her son is betrothed to your daughter, which means the two of you will have to preserve the proprieties for many years to come. Please, Caesar, end it.”
“I’ll end it when I’m ready, not before.”
“No, don’t get up yet!” Aurelia said sharply. “Let it dry properly first, then put on a clean tunic.” She left him and began to hunt through his chest of clothes until she found one which satisfied her sniffing nose. “It’s plain to see Cardixa isn’t here, the laundry girl isn’t doing her job as she ought. I shall have something to say about that tomorrow morning.” Back to the bed she came, and tossed the tunic down beside him. “No good will come of this relationship, it isn’t healthy,” she said.
To which he answered nothing. By the time he had swung his legs off the bed and plunged his arms into the tunic, his mother was gone. And that, he told himself, was a mercy.
*
On the tenth day of December the new tribunes of the plebs entered office, but it was not Aulus Gabinius who dominated the rostra. That privilege belonged to Lucius Roscius Otho of the boni, who told a cheering crowd of senior knights that it was high time they had their old rows at the theater restored for their exclusive use. Until Sulla’s dictatorship they had enjoyed sole possession of the fourteen rows just behind the two front rows of seats still reserved for senators. But Sulla, who loathed knights of all kinds, had taken this perquisite away from them together with sixteen hundred knight lives, estates and cash fortunes. Otho’s measure was so popular it was carried at once, no surprise to Caesar, watching from the Senate steps. The boni were brilliant at currying favor with the knights; it was one of the pillars of their continuing success.
The next meeting of the Plebeian Assembly interested Caesar far more than Otho’s equestrian honeycomb: Aulus Gabinius and Gaius Cornelius, Pompey’s men, took over. The first order of business was to reduce the consuls of the coming year from two to one, and the way Gabinius did it was deliciously clever. He asked the Plebs to give the junior consul, Glabrio, governance of a new province in the East to be called Bithynia-Pontus, then followed this up by asking the Plebs to send Glabrio out to govern it the day after he was sworn into office. That would leave Gaius Piso on his own to deal with Rome and Italia. Hatred of Lucullus predisposed the knights who dominated the Plebs to favor the bill because it stripped Lucullus of power—and of his four remaining legions. Still commissioned to fight the two kings Mithridates and Tigranes, he now had nothing save an empty title.
Caesar’s own feelings about it were ambivalent. Personally he detested Lucullus, who was such a stickler for the correct way to do things that he deliberately elected incompetence in others if the alternative was to ignore proper protocols. Yet the fact remained that he had refused to allow the knights of Rome complete freedom to fleece the local peoples of his provinces. Which of course was why the knights hated him so passionately. And why they were in favor of any law which disadvantaged Lucullus. A pity, thought Caesar, sighing inwardly. That part of himself longing for better conditions for the local peoples of Rome’s provinces wanted Lucullus to survive, whereas the monumental injury Lucullus had offered his dignitas by implying that he had prostituted himself to King Nicomedes demanded that Lucullus fall.
Gaius Cornelius was not quite as tied to Pompey as Gabinius was; he was one of those occasional tribunes of the plebs who genuinely believed in righting some of Rome’s most glaring wrongs, and that Caesar liked. Therefore Caesar found himself silently willing Cornelius not to give up after his first little reform was defeated. What he had asked the Plebs to do was to forbid foreign communities to borrow money from Roman usurers. His reasons were sensible and patriotic. Thoug
h the moneylenders were not Roman officials, they employed Roman officials to collect when debts became delinquent. With the result that many foreigners thought the State itself was in the moneylending business. Rome’s prestige suffered. But of course desperate or gullible foreign communities were a valuable source of knight income; little wonder Cornelius failed, thought Caesar sadly.
His second measure almost failed, and showed Caesar that this Picentine fellow was capable of compromise, not usual in the breed. Cornelius’s intention was to stop the Senate’s owning the power to issue decrees exempting an individual from some law. Naturally only the very rich or the very aristocratic were able to procure an exemption, usually granted when the senatorial mouthpiece had a meeting specially convened, then made sure it was filled with his creatures. Always jealous of its prerogatives, the Senate opposed Cornelius so violently that he saw he would lose. So he amended his bill to leave the power to exempt with the Senate—but only on condition that a quorum of two hundred senators was present to issue a decree. It passed.
By now Caesar’s interest in Gaius Cornelius was growing at a great rate. The praetors earned his attention next. Since Sulla’s dictatorship their duties had been confined to the law, both civil and criminal. And the law said that when a praetor entered office he had to publish his edicta, the rules and regulations whereby he personally would administer justice. The trouble was that the law didn’t say a praetor had to abide by his edicta, and the moment a friend needed a favor or there was some money to be made, the edicta were ignored. Cornelius simply asked the Plebs to stop up the gap, compel praetors to adhere to their edicta as published. This time the Plebs saw the sense of the measure as clearly as Caesar did, and voted it into law.
Unfortunately all Caesar could do was watch. No patrician might participate in the affairs of the Plebs. So he couldn’t stand in the Well of the Comitia, or vote in the Plebeian Assembly, or speak in it, or form a part of a trial process in it. Or run for election as a tribune of the plebs. Thus Caesar stood with his fellow patricians on the Curia Hostilia steps, as close to the Plebs in session as he was permitted to go.
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