“It will be done,” said Niger, beaming.
“I also suggest that I issue a decree throughout Italia and Italian Gaul that no male Roman citizen between the ages of forty and seventeen be exempted from military service.”
A chorus of ayes greeted this.
Pompey dismissed the meeting, well satisfied, and returned to his villa, where he was joined shortly afterward by Plancus Bursa, who had received the nod from Pompey indicating a summons.
“A few things,” said Pompey, stretching luxuriously,
“Whatever you want, Magnus.”
“What I don’t want, Bursa, are elections. You know Sextus Cloelius, of course.”
“Well enough. He did a good job on the crowd when Clodius burned. Not a gentleman, but very useful.”
“Good. Without Clodius I understand the crossroads college dissidents are leaderless, but Cloelius ran them for Clodius, and now he can run them for me.”
“And?”
“I want no elections,” Pompey said again. “I ask nothing else of Cloelius than that. Milo is still a strong contender for the consulship, and if he should get in, he might manage to be a bigger force in Rome than I’d care to see him become. We just can’t have Claudians murdered, Bursa.”
Plancus Bursa cleared his throat noisily. “Might I suggest, Magnus, that you acquire a well-armed and very strong bodyguard? And perhaps give it out that Milo has threatened you? That you fear you might become his next victim?”
“Oh, good thinking, Bursa!” cried Pompey, delighted.
“Sooner or later,” Bursa said, “Milo will have to be tried.”
“Definitely. But not yet. Let’s wait and see what happens when the interreges can’t manage to hold elections.”
*
By the end of January the second Interrex was out of office and the third Interrex took over. The level of violence in Rome rose to a point whereat no shop or business within a quarter of a mile of the Forum Romanum dared open its doors, which in turn led to job dismissals, which in turn led to fresh violence, which in turn spread further throughout the city. And Pompey, empowered to care for the State in tandem with the tribunes of the plebs, spread his hands wide, opened his once-arresting blue eyes wide, said flatly that as there was no genuine revolution going on, the control of all this rested with the Interrex.
“He wants to be Dictator,” said Metellus Scipio to Cato and Bibulus. “He doesn’t say it, but he means to be it.”
“He can’t be let,” said Cato tersely.
“Nor will he be let,” said Bibulus calmly. “We’ll work out a way to make Pompeius happy, tie him to us, and proceed to where the real enemy is. Caesar.”
Who had just intruded into Pompey’s nicely turning world in a manner Pompey did not appreciate. On the last day of January he received a letter from Caesar, now in Ravenna.
I have just heard of the death of Publius Clodius. A shocking affair, Magnus. What is Rome coming to? Very wise of you to get a good bodyguard together. When assassination is so blatant, anyone is a likely victim, and you the most likely victim of all.
I have several favors to ask of you, my dear Magnus, the first of which I know you won’t mind granting, as my informants tell me you have already personally requested Cicero to bring his influence to bear on Caelius, make him stop stirring up trouble for you and support for Milo. If you would ask Cicero to take the journey to Ravenna—a delightful climate, so no real hardship—I would be grateful. Perhaps if my pleas are joined to yours, he will muzzle Caelius.
The second favor is more complex. We have been dear friends now for eight years, six of them spent in the mutual delight of sharing our beloved Julia. Seventeen months have gone by since our girl perished, time enough to learn to live without her, even if neither of our lives will ever be the same again. Perhaps now is the time to think about renewing our relationship through marriage ties, a Roman way to show the world that we are in communion. I have already spoken to Lucius Piso, who is happy if I settle a very comfortable fortune on Calpurnia and divorce her. The poor creature is completely isolated in the female world of the Domus Publica, my mother is no longer there to keep her company, and she meets no one. She should be given the chance to find a husband with time to spend with her before she reaches an age when good husbands are not easy to find. Fabia and Dolabella are a good example.
I understand that your daughter, Pompeia, is not at all happy with Faustus Sulla, especially since his twin, Fausta, married Milo With Publius Clodius dead, Pompeia will be forced into social contacts very much against her taste and her father’s wishes. What I would propose is that Pompeia divorce Faustus Sulla and marry me. I am, as you have good reason to know, a decent and reasonable husband provided my wife keeps herself above suspicion. Dear Pompeia is all that I could ask for in a wife.
Now I come to you, a widower for seventeen months. How much I wish that I had a second daughter to offer you! Unfortunately I do not. I have one niece, Atia, but when I wrote to ask Philippus how he would feel about divorcing her, he answered that he preferred to keep her, as she is a pearl beyond price, above suspicion. Were there a second Atia, I would cast my net further, but, alas, Atia is my only niece. Atia has a daughter by the late Gaius Octavius, as you know, but again Caesar’s luck is out. Octavia is barely thirteen years old, if that. However, Gaius Octavius had a child by his first wife, Ancharia, and this Octavia is now of marriageable age. A very good and solid senatorial background, and the Octavii, who hail from Velitrae in the Latin homelands, have had consuls and praetors in some of their branches. All of which you know. Both Philippus and Atia would be pleased to give this Octavia to you as a wife.
Please think deeply, Magnus. I miss my son-in-law greatly! To be your son-in-law would turn the tables nicely.
The third favor is simple. My governorship of the Gauls and Illyricum will finish some four months before the elections at which I intend to stand for my second term as a consul. As we have both been the targets of the boni and have no love for them from Cato to Bibulus, I do not wish to afford them the chance to prosecute me in some court rigged so hard and fast against me that I will go down. If I have to cross the pomerium into the city of Rome in order to declare my candidacy, I will automatically give up my imperium. Without my imperium, I can be forced to trial in a court of law. Thanks to Cicero, candidates for the consulship cannot stand for it in absentia. But this I need to do. Once I’m consul, I’ll soon deal with any false charges the boni would bring against me.
But those four months must see me retain my imperium. Magnus, I hear that you will very soon be Dictator. No one could handle that office better. In fact, you will bring it back into luminous distinction after Sulla dirtied it so disgracefully. Rome need not fear proscriptions and murder under the good Pompeius Magnus! If you could see your way clear to procuring me a law enabling me to stand for the consulship in absentia, I would be enormously grateful.
I have just had a copy of Gaius Cassius Longinus’s report to the Senate on affairs in Syria. A most remarkable document, and better writing than I thought any Cassius was capable of, apart from Cassius Ravilla. The epilogue of poor Marcus Crassus’s progress to Artaxata and the court of the two kings was heartrending.
Keep well, my dear Magnus, and write to me at once. Rest assured that I remain your most loving friend, Caesar.
Pompey laid the letter down with trembling hands and then used them to cover his face. How dare he! Just who did Caesar think he was, to offer a man who had had three of the highest-born brides in Rome a girl who was a bigger nobody than Antistia? Oh, well, Magnus, I don’t have a second daughter, and Philippus—ye Gods, Philippus!—won’t divorce my niece for you, but my dog once piddled in your yard, so why don’t you marry this nobody Octavia? After all, she shits in the same latrine as a Julian woman!
He began to grind his teeth; the fists clenched, unclenched, A moment later his horrified household heard the unmistakable sound of something they hadn’t heard during Julia’s time. A Pompeia
n temper tantrum. There would be bent metal from precious to base, smashed vessels, tufts of hair, specks of blood and shredded fabric to clear up. Oh, dear! What had the letter from Caesar said?
But after the spasm was over, Pompey felt much better. He sat down at his ink-splattered desk, found a pen and some untorn paper, and scribbled the draft of an answer for Caesar.
Sorry, old chap, I love you too, but afraid none of the marriage business is remotely possible. I have another bride in mind for myself, and Pompeia is perfectly happy with Faustus Sulla. Appreciate your dilemma over Calpurnia, but can’t help, really, really can’t help. Glad to send Cicero to Ravenna. He has to listen to you, since you’re the one he owes all the money to. Won’t listen to me, but then I’m a mere Pompeius from that nest of Gauls, Picenum. Happy to oblige with that little law about in absentia. Do it the moment I can, rest assured. Be quite a coup if I can persuade all ten tribunes of the plebs to endorse it, eh?
A runnel of blood trickled down his face from his lacerated scalp, reminding him that he had made rather a mess of his study. He clapped his hands for his steward.
“Clean up, will you?” he asked in the tone of an order, and not according Doriscus his name because he never did. “Send my secretary in. I need a good copy made of a letter.”
3
When Brutus returned to Rome from Cilicia at the very beginning of February, he had of course first to face his wife, Claudia, and his mother, Servilia. The truth was that he infinitely preferred the company of Claudia’s father to Claudia, but he and Scaptius had done so well in the moneylending business in Cilicia that he had had firmly to decline Appius Claudius’s offer to keep him on as quaestor. Because that vile wretch Aulus Gabinius had passed a law which made it very difficult for Romans to lend money to non-citizen provincials, his return to Rome had become mandatory. As he was a senator now, and so superbly connected to at least half the House, he could procure senatorial decrees to exempt the firm of Matinius et Scaptius from the lex Gabinia. Matinius et Scaptius was a fine old company of usurers and financiers, but nowhere on its books did it record the fact that its real name ought to have been Brutus et Brutus. Senators were not permitted to engage in any business ventures unrelated to the ownership of land, a fribble which at least half the Senate had ways of getting around; most of Rome thought the worst senatorial offender in this respect was the late Marcus Licinius Crassus, but had Crassus been alive, he could have disillusioned most of Rome on that score. By far the worst offender was young Marcus Junius Brutus, who was also, thanks to a testamentary adoption, Quintus Servilius Caepio, heir to the Gold of Tolosa. Not that there was any gold; there had not been any gold for fifty and more years. It had all gone to purchase a commercial empire which was the inheritance of Servilia’s only full brother. Who had died without a male heir fifteen years ago, and made Brutus his heir.
Brutus loved not so much money itself—that had been poor Crassus’s abetting sin—as what money brought with it. Power. Perhaps understandable in one whose illustrious name could not fix its owner in the center of a blaze of brilliance. For Brutus was not tall, not handsome, not inspiring, not intelligent in the ways Rome admired. As to how he looked, that could not be very much improved, for the dreadful acne which had so diminished him as a youth had not gone away with maturity; the poor empustuled face could not endure a razor in a time and place when and where all men were invariably smoothly shaven. He did the best he could by clipping his dense black beard as closely as possible, but his large, heavy-lidded and very sad brown eyes looked out on his world from the midst of a facial shambles. Knowing it, hating it, he had retreated from any circumstances likely to make him the focus of ridicule, sarcasm, pity. Thus he had—or rather, his mother had—procured exemption from compulsory military service, and appeared but briefly in the Forum to learn the legalities and protocols of public life. This last was not something he was prepared to give up; a Junius Brutus could not do that. For he traced his lineage back to Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Republic, and through his mother to Gaius Servilius Ahala, who had killed Maelius when he tried to restore the monarchy.
The first thirty years of his life had been spent waiting in the wings to enter upon the only stage he craved: the Senate, and the consulship. Snug within the Senate, he knew that how he looked would not militate against him. The Conscript Fathers of the Senate, his peers, respected familial clout and money far too much. Power would bring him what his face and body could not, nor his pretensions to an intellectualism no deeper than the skin on sheep’s milk. But Brutus wasn’t stupid, though that was what the name Brutus meant—stupid. The founder of the Republic had survived the tyrannies of Rome’s last King by seeming to be stupid. A very big difference. No one appreciated that fact more than did Brutus.
He felt nothing for his wife, not even repugnance; Claudia was a nice little thing, very quiet and undemanding. Somehow she had managed to carve herself a tiny niche in the house her mother-in-law ran in much the same way as Lucullus had run his army—coldly, unswervingly, inhumanly. Luckily it was large enough to afford Brutus’s wife her own sitting room, and there she had set herself up with her loom and her distaff, her paints and her treasured collection of dolls. Since she spun beautifully and wove at least as well as professional weavers, she was able to draw favorable comment from her mother-in-law, and even allowed to make Servilia lengths of fine and filmy fabrics for her gowns. Claudia painted flowers on bowls, birds and butterflies on plates, then sent them to the Velabrum to be glazed. They made such nice presents, a serious concern for a Claudia Pulchra, who had so many aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces that a small purse did not extend far enough.
Unfortunately she was quite as shy as Brutus, so that when he returned from Cilicia—almost a stranger, in fact, as he had married her scant weeks before leaving—she found herself in no position to deflect his attention from his mother. So far he had not visited her sleeping cubicle, which had created a pillow damp from tears each morning, and during dinner (when Brutus attended) Servilia gave her no chance to say a word—had Claudia thought of a word to say.
Therefore it was Servilia who occupied Brutus’s time and Brutus’s mind whenever he entered the house which was actually his, though he never thought of it as his.
She was now fifty-two years old, Servilia. Little had changed about her in many years. Her figure was voluptuous but well proportioned, hardly an inch thicker in the waist than it had been before she produced her four children, and her long, thick black hair was still long, thick and black. Two lines had etched themselves one on either side of her nose and ran down past the corners of her small, secretive mouth, but her forehead was uncreased and the skin beneath her chin enviably taut. Caesar, in fact, would have found her no different. Nor did she intend that he would when he returned to Rome.
He still dictated the terms of her life, though she did not admit that even to herself. Sometimes she ached for him with a dry, awful longing she could not assuage; and sometimes she loathed him, usually when she wrote him an infrequent letter, or heard his name spoken at a dinner party. Ever more and more, these days. Caesar was famous. Caesar was a hero. Caesar was a man, free to do as he pleased, not trammeled by the conventions of a society which Servilia found quite as repressive as Clodia and Clodilla did, but which she would not transgress as they did every day of their lives. So whereas Clodia sat demurely on the bank of the Tiber opposite the Trigarium wherein the young men swam, and sent her rowboat across with a proposition for some lovely naked fellow, Servilia sat among the arid mustiness of her account books and her specially procured verbatim records of meetings of the Senate and plotted, and schemed, and chafed, and yearned for action.
But why had she associated action with the return of her only son? Oh, he was impossible! No handsomer. No taller. No less enamored of her hateful half brother, Cato. If anything, Brutus was worse. At thirty, he was developing a slight fussiness of manner which reminded Servilia too painfully of that underbred upst
art from Arpinum, Marcus Tullius Cicero. He didn’t waddle, but he didn’t stroll either, and a stroll with shoulders back was mandatory for a man to look his best in a toga. Brutus took quick little steps. He was pedantic. A trifle absent. And if her inner eye filled suddenly with a vision of Gaius Julius Caesar, so tall and golden and brazenly beautiful, oozing power, she would snarl at Brutus over dinner, and drive him away to seek solace with that frightful descendant of a slave, Cato.
Not a happy household. In which, after three or four days had gone by, Brutus spent less and less time.
It hurt to have to pay good money for a bodyguard, but one glance at the environs of the Forum, followed by a conversation with Bibulus, had decided him to pay that money. Even Uncle Cato, so fearless that he had had the same arm broken several times in the Forum over the years, now employed a bodyguard.
“Times are fine for ex-gladiators,” Cato brayed. “They can pick and choose. A good man charges five hundred sesterces per nundinae, and then insists on plenty of time off. I exist at the beck and call of a dozen cerebrally deficient soldiers of the sawdust who eat me out of house and home and tell me when I can go to the Forum!”
“I don’t understand,” said Brutus, wrinkling his brow. “If we’re under martial law and Pompeius is in charge, why hasn’t the violence settled down? What’s being done?”
“Nothing whatsoever, nephew.”
“Why?”
“Because Pompeius wants to be made Dictator.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. He’s been after absolute power since he executed my father out of hand in Italian Gaul. And poor Carbo, whom he wouldn’t even accord privacy to relieve his bowels before he beheaded him. Pompeius is a barbarian.”
Cato’s ruined appearance devastated Brutus, a mere eleven years younger than Cato. Thus Cato had never seemed avuncular; more an older brother, wise and brave and so unbelievably strong in himself. Of course Brutus had not known Cato very well during his childhood and young manhood. Servilia would not permit uncle and nephew to fraternize. All that had changed from the day when Caesar had come round in the full regalia of the Pontifex Maximus and calmly announced that he was breaking the engagement between Julia and Brutus in order to marry Julia to the man who had murdered Brutus’s father. Because Caesar had needed Pompey.
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