Fortune's Favorites

by Colleen McCullough

  "Oh!" he cried again, more loudly still. "My dream! My dream has come true!"

  And he bounded onto the rostra so suddenly that Pompey and Crassus automatically stepped apart. Young Gaius Cotta planted himself between them, one arm around each, and gazed at the throng in the well of the Comitia with tears streaming down his face.

  "Quirites!" he shouted, "last night I had a dream! Jupiter Optimus Maximus spoke to me out of cloud and fire, soaked me and burned me! Far below where I stood I could see the two figures of our consuls, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus. But they were not as I saw them today, standing together. Instead they stood one to the east and one to the west, stubbornly looking in opposite directions. And the voice of the Great God said to me out of the cloud and the fire, 'They must not leave their consular office disliking each other! They must leave as friends!' "

  An utter silence had fallen; a thousand faces looked up at the three men. Gaius Cotta let his arms fall from about the consuls and stepped forward, then turned to face them.

  "Gnaeus Pompeius, Marcus Licinius, will you not be friends?" the young man asked in a ringing voice.

  For a long moment no one moved. Pompey's expression was stern, so was Crassus's.

  "Come, shake hands! Be friends!" shouted Gaius Cotta.

  Neither consul moved. Then Crassus rotated toward Pompey and held out one massive hand.

  "I am delighted to yield first place to a man who was called Magnus before he so much as had a beard, and celebrated not one but two triumphs before he was a senator!" Crassus yelled.

  Pompey emitted a sound somewhere between a squeal and a yelp, grabbed at Crassus's paw and wrung both it and his forearm, face transfigured. They stepped toward each other and fell on each other's necks. And the crowd went wild. Soon the news of the reconciliation was speeding into the Velabrum, into the Subura, into the manufactories beyond the swamp of the Palus Ceroliae; people came running from everywhere to see if it was true that the consuls were friends again. For the rest of that day the two of them walked around Rome together, shaking hands, allowing themselves to be touched, accepting congratulations.

  "There are triumphs, and then again, there are triumphs," said Caesar to his uncle Lucius and his cousin Gaius. 'Today was the better kind of triumph. I thank you for your help."

  "Was it hard to convince them that they had to do it?" asked the young Gaius Cotta.

  "Not really. If that pair understand nothing else, they always understand the importance of popularity. Neither of them is an adept at the art of compromise, but I split the credit equally between them, and that satisfied them. Crassus had to swallow his pride and say all those nauseating things about dear Pompeius. But on the other hand he reaped the accolades for being the one to hold out his hand first and make the concessions. So, as in the duel about pleasing the people, it was Crassus won. Luckily Pompeius doesn't see that. He thinks he won because he stood aloof and forced his colleague to admit his superiority."

  "Then you had better hope," said Lucius Cotta, "that Magnus doesn't find out who really won until after the year is over."

  "I'm afraid it disrupted your meeting, Uncle. You'll never keep a crowd still enough to vote now."

  "Tomorrow will do just as well."

  The two Cottae and Caesar left the Forum Romanum via the Vestal Stairs onto the Palatine, but halfway up Caesar stopped and turned to look back. There they were, Pompey and Crassus, surrounded by hordes of happy Romans. And happy themselves, the breach forgotten.

  "This year has been a watershed," said Caesar, beginning to ascend the rest of the steps. "All of us have crossed some kind of barrier. I have the oddest feeling that none of us will enjoy the same life again."

  "Yes, I know what you mean," said Lucius Cotta. "My stab at the history books happened this year, with my jury law. If I ever decide to run for consul, I suspect it will be an anticlimax."

  "I wasn't thinking along the lines of anticlimax," said Caesar, laughing.

  "What will Pompeius and Crassus do when the year is ended?" asked young Gaius Cotta. "They say neither of them wants to go out to govern a province."

  "That's true enough," said Lucius Cotta. "Both of them are returning to private life. Why not? They've each had great campaigns recently-they're both so rich they don't need to stuff provincial profits in their purses-and they crowned their dual consulship with laws to exonerate them from any suspicion of treason and laws to grant their veterans all the land they want. I wouldn't go to govern a province if I were in their boots!"

  "You'd find their boots more uncomfortable than they're worth," said Caesar. "Where can they go from here? Pompeius says he's returning to his beloved Picenum and will never darken the doors of the Senate again. And Crassus is absolutely driven to earn back the thousand talents he spent this year." He heaved a huge and happy sigh. "And I am going to Further Spain as its quaestor, under a governor I happen to like."

  "Pompeius's ex-brother-in-law, Gaius Antistius Vetus," said young Cotta with a grin.

  Caesar didn't mention his most devout wish: that he leave for Spain before Aunt Julia died.

  But that was not to be. He was summoned to her bedside on a blustery night midway through February; his mother had been staying in Julia's house for some days.

  She was conscious, and could still see; when he entered the room her eyes lit up a little. "I waited for you," she said.

  His chest ached with the effort of keeping his emotions under control, but he managed to smile as he kissed her, then sat upon the edge of her bed, as he always did. "I wouldn't have let you go," he said lightly.

  "I wanted to see you," she said; her voice was quite strong and distinct.

  "You see me, Aunt Julia. What can I do for you?"

  "What would you do for me, Gaius Julius?"

  "Anything in the world," he said, and meant it.

  "Oh, that relieves me! It means you will forgive me."

  "Forgive you?" he asked, astonished. "There's nothing to forgive, absolutely nothing!"

  “Forgive me for not preventing Gaius Marius from making you the flamen Dialis," she said.

  "Aunt Julia, no one could stop Gaius Marius from doing what he wanted to do!" Caesar cried. "Rome's outskirts are ornamented with the tombs of the men who tried! It never for one moment occurred to me to blame you! And you mustn't blame yourself."

  "I won't if you don't."

  "I don't. You have my word on it."

  Her eyes closed, tears oozed from beneath their lids. “My poor son," she whispered. "It is a terrible thing to be the son of a great man.... I hope you have no sons, for you will be a very great man."

  His gaze met his mother's, and he suddenly saw a tinge of jealousy in her face.

  The response was savage and immediate; he gathered Julia into his arms and put his cheek to hers. "Aunt Julia," he said into her ear, "what will I do without your arms around me and all your kisses?" And there! his eyes were saying to his mother, she was the source of my juvenile hugs and kisses, not you! Never you! How can I live without Aunt Julia?

  But Aunt Julia didn't answer, nor did she lift her lids to look at him. She neither spoke nor looked again, but died still clasped in his arms several hours later.

  Lucius Decumius and his sons were there, so was Burgundus; he sent his mother home with them, and himself walked through the bustling crowds of day without seeing a single person. Aunt Julia was dead, and no one save he and his family knew of it. The wife of Gaius Marius was dead, and no one save he and his family knew of it. Just when the tears should have come this thought came, and the tears were driven inward forever. Rome should know of her death! And Rome would know of her death!

  "A quiet funeral," said Aurelia when he entered her apartment at the going down of the sun.

  "Oh no!" said Caesar, who looked enormously tall, filled with light and power. “Aunt Julia is going to have the biggest woman's funeral since the death of Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi! And all the ancestral masks will come out, inc
luding the masks of Gaius Marius and his son."

  She gasped. "Caesar, you can't! Hortensius and Metellus Little Goat are consuls, Rome has gone conservative with a vengeance! Some Hortensian tribune of the plebs will have you thrown from the Tarpeian Rock if you display the imagines of two men their Rome brands as traitors!"

  "Let them try," said Caesar scornfully. "I will send Aunt Julia to the darkness with all the honor and public acclaim she ought to have."

  And that resolution of course made the grief easier to bear; Caesar had something concrete to do, an outlet he found worthier of that lovely lady than bouts of tears and a constant feeling of irreplaceable loss. Keep busy, keep working. Work for her.

  He knew how he was going to get away with it, of course. Which was to make it impossible for any of the magistrates to foil him or prosecute him, no matter how they tried. But preferably to make it impossible for them to try at all. The funeral was arranged with Rome's most prestigious undertakers, and the price agreed upon was fifty talents of silver; for this huge amount of money everyone agreed to participate despite the fact that Caesar intended to display the masks of Gaius Marius and Young Marius for all of Rome to see. Actors were hired, chariots for them to ride in: the ancestors would include King Ancus Marcius, Quintus Marcius Rex, Iulus , that early Julian consul, Sextus Caesar and Lucius Caesar, and Gaius Marius and his son.

  But that was not the most important arrangement; he would trust no one except Lucius Decumius and his Brethren of the crossroads college to do that. Which was to spread the word as far and wide as possible through Rome that the great Julia, widow of Gaius Marius, had died and would be buried at the third hour in two days' time. Everyone who wanted to come must come. For Gaius Marius there had been no public funeral, and for his son only the sight of a head rotting away on the rostra. Therefore Julia's obsequies would be splendid, and Rome could do her long overdue mourning for the Marii by attending Julia's rites.

  He caught all the magistrates napping, for no one informed them what was going to happen, and none of the magistrates had planned to be present at Julia's funeral. But Marcus Crassus came, and so did Varro Lucullus, and Mamercus with Cornelia Sulla, and none other than Philippus. So too did Metellus Pius the Piglet come. Plus the two Cottae, of course. All of them had been warned; Caesar wanted no one unwillingly compromised.

  And Rome turned out en masse, thousands upon thousands of ordinary people who cared nothing for interdictions and decrees of outlawry or sacrilege. Here was a chance at last to mourn for Gaius Marius, to see that beloved fierce face with its gigantic eyebrows and its stern frown worn by a man who was as tall and as broad as Gaius Marius had been. And Young Marius too, so comely, so impressive! But more impressive still was Gaius Marius's living nephew, robed in a mourning toga as black as the coats of the horses which drew the chariots, his golden hair and pale face a striking contrast to the pall of darkness around him. So good-looking! So godlike! This was Caesar's first appearance before a huge crowd since the days when he had supported crippled old Marius, and he needed to ensure that the people of Rome would not forget him. He was the only heir Gaius Marius had left, and he intended that every man and woman who came to Julia's funeral would know who he was: Gaius Marius's heir.

  He gave her eulogy from the rostra; it was the first time he had spoken from that lofty perch, the first time he had looked down upon a sea of faces whose eyes were all directed at him. Julia herself had been exquisitely prepared for her last and most public appearance, so artfully made up and padded that she looked like a young woman; her beauty alone made the crowd weep. Three other very beautiful women were near her on the rostral platform, one in her fifties whom Lucius Decumius's agents were busy whispering here and there was Caesar's mother, one of about forty whose red-gold hair proclaimed her Sulla's daughter, and a very pregnant little dark girl sitting in a black sedan chair who turned out to be Caesar's wife. On her lap there sat the most ravishing silver-fair child perhaps seven years old; it was not difficult to tell that this was Caesar's daughter.

  "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 g
lance 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."