Fortune's Favorites

by Colleen McCullough

  Up the Hill of the Bankers they toiled, through the vast portals of the Fontinalis Gate, and so to the door of Gaius Marius's house. As its peristyle garden lay at the back of the mansion, they entered straight into the foyer, and there peeled off outer garments (save for Caesar, doomed to wear his regalia). Lucius Decumius and his sons were taken away by the steward, Strophantes, to sample some excellent food and wine, while Caesar and the women entered the atrium.

  Had the weather been less unnaturally cold, they might have remained there, since it was well past dinnertime, but the open rectangle of the compluvium in the roof was acting like a vortex, and the pool below it was a twinkling crust of rapidly melting snowflakes.

  Young Marius appeared then to welcome them and usher them through into the dining room, which would be warmer, he said. He looked, thought Caesar warily, almost afire with happiness, and the emotion suited him. As tall as Caesar (who was his first cousin), he was more heavily built, fair of hair and grey of eye, handsome, impressive. Physically far more attractive than his father, he yet lacked that vital something which had made of Gaius Marius one of the Roman immortals. Many generations would go by, Caesar reflected, before every schoolchild ceased to learn about the exploits of Gaius Marius. Such would not be the lot of his son, Young Marius.

  This was a house Caesar loathed visiting; too much had happened to him here. While other boys of his age had been heedlessly frittering away their time playing on the Campus Martius, he had been required to report here every day to act as nurse/companion to the aged and vindictive Gaius Marius. And though he had swept strenuously with his sacred broom after Marius died here, that malign presence still lingered. Or so Caesar thought. Once he had admired and loved Gaius Marius. But then Gaius Marius had appointed him the special priest of Jupiter, and in that one stroke had rendered it impossible for Caesar ever to rival him. No iron, no weapons, no sight of death-no military career for the flamen Dialis! An automatic membership in the Senate without the right to stand for election as a magistrate-no political career for the flamen Dialis! It was Caesar's fate to be honored without earning that honor, revered without earning that reverence. The flamen Dialis was a creature belonging to the State, housed and paid and fed by the State, a prisoner of the mos maiorum, the established practices of custom and tradition.

  But of course Caesar's revulsion could never endure past the moment in which he set eyes upon his Aunt Julia. His father's sister, the widow of Gaius Marius. And, differently from his mother, the person in the world he loved the most. Indeed, he loved her more than he did his mother, if love could be classified as a simple rush of sheer emotion. His mother was permanently grafted to his intellect because she was adversary, adherent, critic, companion, equal. Whereas Aunt Julia enfolded him in her arms and kissed him on the lips, beamed at him with her soft grey eyes innocent of the faintest condemnation. Life for him without either one was unthinkable.

  Julia and Aurelia elected to sit side by side on the same couch, ill at ease because they were women, and women did not recline on couches. Forbidden by custom to lie comfortably, they perched on the edge with their feet dangling clear of the floor and their backs unsupported.

  "Can't you give the women chairs?" asked Caesar of Young Marius as he shoved bolsters behind his mother and his aunt.

  "Thank you, nephew, we'll manage now you've propped us up," said Julia, always the peacemaker. "I don't think the house has enough chairs for all of us! This is a conference of women."

  An inalienable truth, acknowledged Caesar ruefully. The male element of this family was reduced to two men: Young Marius and Caesar. Both only sons of dead fathers.

  Of women, there were more. Had Rome been present to see Julia and Aurelia side by side, Rome would have enjoyed the spectacle of two of her most beautiful women encompassed in one glance. Though both were tall and slim, Julia owned the innate grace of the Caesars, whereas Aurelia moved with brisk, no-nonsense economy. One, Julia, had softly waving blonde hair and widely opened grey eyes, and might have posed for the statue of Cloelia in the upper Forum Romanum. The other, Aurelia, had ice-brown hair and a quality of beauty which had, in her youth, caused her to be likened to Helen of Troy. Dark brows and lashes, a pair of deeply set eyes many of the men who had tried to marry her had insisted were purple, and the profile of a Greek goddess.

  Julia was now forty-five years old to Aurelia's forty. Both had been widowed in distressing though very different circumstances.

  Gaius Marius had died of his third and most massive stroke, but only after launching and pursuing an orgy of murder no one in Rome would ever forget. All his enemies had died-and some of his friends-and the rostra had bristled with the heads as thickly as pins in a cushion. With this sorrow, Julia lived.

  Aurelia's husband, loyal to Cinna after the death of Marius-as was only fitting in one whose son was married to Cinna's younger daughter-had gone to Etruria to recruit troops. One summer morning in Pisae he had bent over to lace up his boot, and died. A ruptured blood vessel in his brain was the conclusion reached at postmortem; he was burned on a pyre without a single member of his family present, and his ashes were then sent home to his wife. Who did not even know her husband was dead when Cinna's messenger came to present her with the funerary urn. How she felt, what she thought, no one knew. Even her son, made head of his family a month short of his fifteenth birthday. No tear had she shed that anyone had seen, and the look on her face had not changed. For she was Aurelia, fastened up inside herself, apparently more attached to her work as landlady of a busy insula than to any human being save for her son.

  Young Marius had no sisters, but Caesar had two older than himself. Both of them looked like their Aunt Julia; there were strong echoes of Aurelia in Caesar's face, but not in either of his sisters'.

  Julia Major, called Lia, was now twenty-one years old, and carried the faintest suggestion of something careworn in her expression. Not without reason. Her first husband, a penniless patrician by name of Lucius Pinarius, had been the love of her heart, so she had been allowed-albeit reluctantly-to marry him. A son had arrived less than a year later, and shortly after that happy event (which did not turn out to have the hoped-for sobering effect on Lucius Pinarius's character or behavior), Lucius Pinarius died in mysterious circumstances. Murder by a confederate was thought likely, but no proof could be found. So Lia, aged nineteen, found herself a widow in such an impoverished state that she had been obliged to return to live under her mother's roof. But between her marriage and her widowhood the identity of the paterfamilias had changed, and she now discovered that her young brother was not nearly as softhearted or malleable as her father had been.

  She must marry again, said Caesar-but a man of his choosing, for, "It is clear to me," he said to her dispassionately, "that, left to your own devices, you will pick another idiot."

  Quite how or where Caesar had found Quintus Pedius, no one knew (though some suspected a collaboration with Lucius Decumius, who might be a seedy little man of the Fourth Class, but who had remarkable contacts), but home he came with Quintus Pedius, and betrothed his widowed oldest sister to this stolid, upright Campanian knight of good but not noble family. He was not handsome. He was not dashing. At forty, he was not even very young. But he was colossally rich and almost pathetically grateful for the chance to marry a lovely and youthful woman of the most exalted patrician nobility. Lia had swallowed, looked at her fifteen-year-old brother, and graciously accepted; even at that age, Caesar could put something into his face and eyes that killed argument before it was born.

  Luckily the marriage had turned out well. Lucius Pinarius might have been handsome and dashing and young, but as a husband he had been disappointing. Now Lia discovered that there were many compensations in being the darling of a rich man twice her age, and as time went on she grew very fond of her uninspiring second husband. She bore him a son, and was so settled into her delightfully luxurious life on her husband's estates outside Teanum Sidicinum that when Scipio Asiagenus and the
n Sulla had established camps in the neighborhood, she flatly refused to go home to her mother, who would, she knew, regulate her exercise, her diet, her sons and her life to suit her own austere ideas. Of course Aurelia had arrived in person (after, it seemed, an unexpected meeting with Sulla-a meeting about which she had said little beyond mentioning it), and Lia had been bundled to Rome. Without her sons, alas; Quintus Pedius had preferred to keep them with him in Teanum.

  Julia Minor, called Ju-Ju, had been married in the early part of this year, not long after her eighteenth birthday. No chance that she would be allowed to pick someone unsuitable! Caesar did the picking, though she had railed against his highhanded usurpation of a task she felt herself fully able to perform. Of course he won. Home he came with another colossally rich suitor, this time of an old senatorial family, and himself a backbencher senator content to stay on the back benches. He hailed from Aricia, just down the Via Appia from the Caesar lands at Bovillae, and that fact made him Latin, which was one cut above mere Campanian. After setting eyes on Marcus Atius Balbus, Ju-Ju had married him without a murmur; compared to Quintus Pedius he was quite reasonable, being a mere thirty-seven, and actually handsome for such an advanced age.

  Because Marcus Atius Balbus was a senator, he owned a domus in Rome as well as enormous estates at Aricia, so Ju-Ju could congratulate herself on yet one more advantage over her elder sister; she at least lived more or less permanently in Rome! On that late afternoon when all the family was summoned to the house of Gaius Marius, she was beginning to be heavy with child. Not that her pregnancy had prevented her mother from making her walk!

  "It isn't good for pregnant women to coddle themselves," said Aurelia. "That's why so many of them die in childbirth."

  "I thought you said they died because they ate nothing but fava beans," Ju-Ju had countered, wistfully eyeing the litter in which she had made the journey from her husband's house on the Carinae to her mother's apartment building in the Subura.

  "Those too. Pythagorean physicians are a menace."

  One more woman was present, though by blood she was not related to any of the others-or at least, not closely related. Her name was Mucia Tertia, and she was Young Marius's wife. The only daughter of Scaevola Pontifex Maximus, she had been called Mucia Tertia to distinguish her from her two famous cousins, the daughters of Scaevola the Augur.

  Though she wasn't precisely beautiful, Mucia Tertia had disturbed many a man's sleep. A muddy green in color, her eyes were abnormally far apart and thickly fringed by black lashes which were longer at the outer corners of her eyes, thereby accentuating the distance between them; though she never said so, she deliberately trimmed her lashes shorter at the inner corners of her eyes with a tiny pair of ivory scissors from Old Egypt. Mucia Tertia was well aware of the nature of her unusual attractions. Her long, straight nose somehow managed not to be a disadvantage, even if the purists did think there ought to be some sort of bump or break in it. Again, her mouth was far from the Roman ideal of beauty, being very wide; when she smiled, she showed what seemed like a hundred perfect teeth. But her lips were full and sensuous, and she had a thick, creamy skin which went well with her dark red hair.

  Caesar for one found her alluring, and at half-past seventeen was already highly experienced in sexual matters. Every female in the Subura had indicated willingness to help such a lovely young man find his amatory feet, and few were deterred when they discovered Caesar insisted they be bathed and clean; the word had gone out very quickly that young Caesar was equipped with a couple of mighty weapons, and knew how best to use them.

  Most of the reason Mucia Tertia interested Caesar lay in a certain quality of enigma she owned; try as he might, she was one person he couldn't see to the bottom of. She smiled readily to display those hundred perfect teeth, yet the smile never originated in her extraordinary eyes, and she gave off no clues of gesture or expression as to what she really thought.

  She had been married for four years of apparent indifference, as much on Young Marius's side as on hers. Their conversation together was pleasantly chatty but quite formal; they never exchanged those glances of secret understanding most married couples did; no move did either make to touch the other, even when no one was looking; and they had no children. If the union was genuinely devoid of feeling, Young Marius for one certainly did not suffer; his philanderings were common knowledge. But what about Mucia Tertia, of whom no whisper had ever circulated concerning indiscretion, let alone infidelity? Was Mucia Tertia happy? Did she love Young Marius? Or did she hate him? Impossible to tell, and yet-and yet-Caesar's instincts said she was desperately unhappy.

  The group had settled down, and every eye was now fixed on Young Marius, who perversely had elected to sit upon a chair. Not to be outdone, Caesar too drew up a chair, but far removed from where Young Marius sat in the hollow of the U formed by the three dining couches; he sat behind his mother's shoulder, on the outside of the U, and so could not see the faces of his most beloved women. To him, it seemed more important by far to look at Young Marius, Mucia Tertia, and the steward Strophantes, who had been asked to attend and who stood near the doorway, having quietly refused Young Marius's invitation to seat himself.

  Wetting his lips-an unusual sign of nervousness-Young Marius began to speak. "Earlier this afternoon, I had a visit from Gnaeus Papirius Carbo and Marcus Junius Brutus."

  "That's an odd combination," said Caesar, who didn't want his cousin to flow on without interruption; he wanted Young Marius a little flustered.

  The look Young Marius flashed him was angry, but not angry enough to fluster his thinking. A start only.

  Then Caesar found his ploy foiled. Said Young Marius, “They came to ask me if I would stand for the consulship in conjunction with Gnaeus Carbo. I said I would."

  The stir was general. Caesar saw amazement on the faces of his sisters, a sudden spasm in his aunt's spine, a peculiar but unfathomable look in Mucia Tertia's remarkable eyes.

  "My son, you're not even in the Senate," said Julia.

  "I will be tomorrow, when Perperna puts me on the rolls."

  "You haven't been quaestor, let alone praetor."

  "The Senate is willing to waive the usual requirements."

  "You don't have the experience or the knowledge!" Julia persisted, her voice despairing.

  "My father was consul seven times. I grew up surrounded by consulars. Besides, you can't call Carbo inexperienced."

  Asked Aurelia, "Why are we here?"

  Young Marius shifted his earnest and appealing gaze from his mother to his aunt. “To talk the matter over between us, of course!" he said, a little blankly.

  "Rubbish!" said Aurelia bluntly. "Not only have you made up your mind already, but you've also told Carbo you'll run as his colleague. It seems to me that you've dragged us out of our warm house just to listen to news the city gossip 'would have brought to our ears almost as quickly."

  "That's not so, Aunt Aurelia!"

  "Of course it's so!" snapped Aurelia.

  Skin bright red, Young Marius turned back to his mother, a hand extended to her in appeal. "Mama, it's not so! I know I told Carbo I'd stand, but-but I always intended to listen to what my family had to say, truly! I can change my mind!"

  "Hah! You won't change your mind," said Aurelia.

  Julia's fingers fastened upon Aurelia's wrist. "Be quiet, Aurelia! I want no anger in this room."

  "You're right, Aunt Julia-anger is the last emotion we want," said Caesar, inserting himself between his mother and his aunt. From this new vantage spot he stared at his first cousin intently. "Why did you say yes to Carbo?" he asked.

  A question which didn't fool Young Marius for a moment. "Oh, give me credit for more intelligence than that, Caesar!" he said scornfully. "I said yes for the same reason you would have, if you didn't wear a laena and an apex."

  "I can see why you'd think I would have said yes, but in actual fact I never would have. In suo anno is the best way."

  "It's illegal," said Mucia
Tertia unexpectedly.

  "No," said Caesar before Young Marius could answer. "It's against the established custom and even against the lex Villia annalis, but it's not exactly illegal. It could only become prosecutably illegal if your husband usurped the position against the will of Senate and People. Senate and People can legislate to nullify the lex Villia. And that is what will happen. Senate and People will procure the necessary legislation, which means the only one who will declare it illegal is Sulla."

  A silence fell. "That is the worst of it," said Julia, voice faltering. "You'll be in the field against Sulla."

  "I would have been in the field against Sulla anyway, Mama," said Young Marius.

  “But not as the inaugurated representative of Senate and People. To be consul is to accept ultimate responsibility. You will be leading Rome's armies." A tear trickled down Julia's cheek. "You'll be the focus of Sulla's thoughts, and he is the most formidable man! I don't know him as well as your Aunt Aurelia does, Gaius, but I know him quite well enough. I've even liked him, in the days when he used to take care of your father-he did, you know. He used to smooth over the little awkwardnesses which always seemed to happen around your father. A more patient and perceptive man than your father. A man of some honor too. But your father and Lucius Cornelius share one very important factor in common-when all else fails, from constitution to popular support, they are-or should that be were?-both capable of going to whatever lengths are necessary to achieve their aims. That's why both of them have marched on Rome in the past. And that is why Lucius Cornelius will march on Rome again if Rome takes this course, elects you consul. The very fact of your election will tell him that Rome intends to fight him to the end, that there can be no peaceful resolution." She sighed, wiped the tear away. "Sulla is why I wish you'd change your mind, dear Gaius. If you had his years and background, you might possibly win. But you do not. You cannot win. And I will lose my one and only child."