Caesar's Women

by Colleen McCullough

  But Julia saw things differently, and told him so. "How nice for her and Silanus," the nine-year-old had said, smiling tenderly. "You mustn't be angry with her, Brutus, truly. What happens if after we've been married for twenty or so years, we should have an extra child? Would you understand your oldest son's anger?"

  His skin was worse than it had been a year ago, always in a state of eruption, yellow sores and red sores, sores which itched or burned, needed to be scratched or squeezed or torn at. Self-hate had fueled his hatred of his mother's condition, and was hard to put by now at this reasonable and charitable question. He scowled, growled, but then said reluctantly, "I would understand his anger, yes, because I feel it. But I do see what you mean."

  "Then that's a beginning, it will do," said the little sage. "Servilia isn't quite a girl anymore, avia explained that to me, and said that she would need lots of help and sympathy."

  "I'll try," said Brutus, "for you, Julia." And took himself home to try.

  All of which paled into insignificance when Servilia's chance came not two weeks after she had borne Tertia. Her brother Caepio called to see her with interesting news.

  One of the urban quaestors, he had been earmarked earlier in the year to assist Pompey in his campaign against the pirates, a task he had not thought would necessitate his leaving Rome.

  "But I've been sent for, Servilia!" he cried, happiness shining in eyes and smile. "Gnaeus Pompeius wants quite a lot of money and accounts brought to him in Pergamum, and I am to make the journey. Isn't that wonderful? I can go overland through Macedonia and visit my brother Cato. I miss him dreadfully!"

  "How nice for you," said Servilia listlessly, not in the least interested in Caepio's passion for Cato, as it had been a part of all their lives for twenty-seven years.

  "Pompeius doesn't expect me before December, so if I get going immediately I can have quite a long time with Cato before I have to move on," Caepio continued, still in that mood of happy anticipation. “The weather will hold until I leave Macedonia, and I can continue on by road." He shivered. "I hate the sea!"

  "Safe from pirates these days, I hear."

  "Thank you, I prefer terra firma."

  Caepio then proceeded to acquaint himself with baby Tertia, gooing and clucking as much out of genuine affection as out of duty, and comparing his sister's child to his own, also a girl.

  "Lovely little thing," he said, preparing to depart. “Most distinguished bones. I wonder where she gets those from?"

  Oh, thought Servilia. And here was I deluding myself that I am the only one to see a likeness to Caesar! Still, Porcius Cato though his blood was, Caepio had no malice in him, so his remark had been an innocent one.

  Her mind clicked from that thought into an habitual sequel, Caepio's manifest unworthiness to inherit the fruits of the Gold of Tolosa, followed by a burning resentment that her own son, Brutus, could not inherit. Caepio, the cuckoo in her family nest. Cato's full brother, not her full brother.

  It had been months since Servilia had been able to concentrate on anything beyond Caesar's perfidy in marrying that young and delectable nincompoop, but those reflections on the fate of the Gold of Tolosa now flowed into a completely different channel unclouded by Caesar-induced emotions. For she glanced out of her open window and saw Sinon prancing blithely down the colonnade on the far side of the peristyle garden. Servilia loved this slave, though not in any fleshly sense. He had belonged to her husband, but not long after their marriage she had asked Silanus sweetly if he would transfer Sinon's ownership to her. The deed accomplished, she had summoned Sinon and informed him of the change in his status, expecting horror, hoping for something else. She had got that something else, and loved Sinon ever since. For he had greeted her news with joy.

  "It takes one to know one," he had remarked impudently.

  “If it does, Sinon, bear this in mind: I am your superior, I have the power."

  "I understand," he answered, smirking. "That's good, you know. As long as Decimus Junius remained my master, there was always the temptation to take things too far, and that might well have resulted in my downfall. With you as my mistress, I will never forget to watch my step. Very good, very good! But do remember, domina, that I am yours to command."

  And command him she had from time to time. Cato, she knew from childhood, was afraid of absolutely nothing except large and hairy spiders, which reduced him to gibbering panic. So Sinon was often allowed to prowl out of Rome in search of large and hairy spiders, and was paid extremely well to introduce them into Cato's house, from his bed to his couch to his desk drawers. Not once had he been detected at the business, either. Cato's full sister, Porcia, who was married to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, had an abiding horror of fat beetles. Sinon caught fat beetles and introduced them into that household. Then sometimes Servilia would instruct him to dump thousands of worms or fleas or flies or crickets or roaches into either residence, and send anonymous notes containing worm curses or flea curses or whatever curse was relevant. Until Caesar had entered her life, such activities had kept her amused. But since Caesar had entered her life, those diversions had not been necessary, and Sinon's time had become all his own. He toiled not, save in the procurement of insect pests, as the mantle of the lady Servilia wrapped him round.

  "Sinon!" she called.

  He stopped, turned, came skipping up the colonnade and round the corner to her sitting room. Quite a pretty fellow, he had a certain grace and insouciance which made him likable to those who did not know him well; Silanus, for instance, still thought highly of him, and so did Brutus. Slight in build, he was a brown person—brown skin, light brown eyes, light brown hair. Pointed ears, pointed chin, pointed fingers. No wonder many of the servants made the sign to ward off the Evil Eye when Sinon appeared. There was a satyr quality to him.

  "Domina?" he asked, stepping over the sill.

  "Close the door, Sinon, then close the shutters."

  "Oh, goody, work!" he said, obeying.

  "Sit down."

  He sat, gazing at her with a mixture of cheek and expectation. Spiders? Roaches? Perhaps she would graduate to snakes?

  "How would you like your freedom, Sinon, with a fat purse of gold to go with it?'' she asked.

  That he did not expect. For a moment the satyr vanished to reveal another quasi-human less appealing underneath, some creature out of a children's nightmare. Then it too disappeared, he merely looked alert and interested.

  "I would like that very much, domina."

  “Have you any idea what I would ask you to do that could earn such a reward?"

  "Murder at the very least," he answered without hesitation.

  "Quite so," said Servilia. "Are you tempted?"

  He shrugged. "Who would not be, in my position?"

  "It takes courage to do murder."

  "I am aware of that. But I have courage."

  "You're a Greek, and Greeks have no sense of honor. By that I mean they do not stay bought."

  "I would stay bought, domina, if all I had to do was murder and then could disappear with my fat purse of gold."

  Servilia was reclining on a couch, and did not alter her position in the slightest through all of this. But having got his answer, she straightened; her eyes grew absolutely cold and still. "I do not trust you because I trust nobody," she said, "yet this is not a murder to be done in Rome, or even in Italia. It will have to be done somewhere between Thessalonica and the Hellespont, an ideal spot from which to disappear. But there are ways I can keep hold of you, Sinon, do not forget that. One is to pay you some of your reward now, and send the rest to a destination in Asia Province."

  "Ah, domina, but how do I know you will keep your side of the bargain?" Sinon asked softly.

  Servilia's nostrils flared, an unconscious hauteur. "I am a patrician Servilius Caepio," she said.

  "I appreciate that."

  "It is the only guarantee you need that I will keep my side of the bargain."

  "What do I have to do?"

>   “First of all, you have to procure a poison of the best kind. By that I mean a poison which will not fail, and a poison which will not be suspected."

  "I can do that."

  "My brother Quintus Servilius Caepio leaves for the East in a day or so," said Servilia, level-voiced. "I will ask him if you may accompany him, as I have business for you to do in Asia Province. He will agree to take you, of course. There is no reason why he should not. He will be carrying scrip and accounts for Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in Pergamum, and he will have no ready money to tempt you. For it is imperative, Sinon, that you do what I require you to do and then go without disturbing one single tiny thing. His brother Cato is a tribune of the soldiers in Macedonia, and his brother Cato is a far different fellow. Suspicious and hard, ruthless when offended. No doubt his brother Cato will go east to arrange my brother Caepio's obsequies, it is in character for him to do so. And when he arrives, Sinon, there must be no suspicion that anything more than illness has put paid to the life of my brother Quintus Servilius Caepio."

  "I understand," said Sinon, not moving a muscle.

  "Do you?"

  "Fully, domina."

  "You may have tomorrow to find your tool. Is that possible?"

  "That is possible."

  "Good. Then you may run round the corner now to my brother Quintus Servilius Caepio's house, and ask him to visit me today on a matter of some urgency," said Servilia.

  Sinon left. Servilia lay back on her couch, closed her eyes and smiled.

  She was still like that when Caepio returned not long after; their houses were in close proximity.

  "What is it, Servilia?" he asked, concerned. "Your servant seemed most anxious."

  "Dear me, I hope he didn't frighten you!" said Servilia sharply.

  "No, no, I assure you."

  "You didn't take a dislike to him?"

  Caepio blinked. "Why should I?"

  "I have no idea," said Servilia, patting the end of her couch. "Sit down, brother. I have a favor to ask you, and something to make sure you have done."

  "The favor?"

  "Sinon is my most trusted servant, and I have some business in Pergamum for him to do. I should have thought of it when you were here earlier, but I didn't, so I do apologize for having to drag you back. Would you mind if Sinon traveled in your party?''

  "Of course not!" cried Caepio sincerely.

  "Oh, splendid," purred Servilia.

  "And what was I supposed to do?"

  "Make your will," said Servilia.

  He laughed. "Is that all? What sensible Roman doesn't have a will lodged with the Vestals the moment he becomes a man?"

  "But is yours current? You have a wife and a baby daughter, but no heir in your own house."

  Caepio sighed. “Next time, Servilia, next time. Hortensia was disappointed to produce a girl first, but she's a dear little thing, and Hortensia had no trouble in labor. There'll be sons."

  "So you've left it all to Cato," said Servilia, making it a statement.

  The face so like Cato's registered horror. "To Cato?" he asked, voice squeaking. "I can't leave the Servilius Caepio fortune to a Porcius Cato, much and all as I love him! No, no, Servilia! It's left to Brutus because Brutus won't mind being adopted as a Servilius Caepio, won't mind taking the name. But Cato?'' He laughed. “Can you see our baby brother Cato consenting to bear any other name than his own?"

  "No, I can't," said Servilia, and laughed a little too. Then her eyes filled, her lips quivered. "What a morbid conversation! Still, it was one I had to have with you. One never knows."

  "Cato is my executor, however," said Caepio, preparing to leave this same room for the second time within an hour. "He'll make sure Hortensia and baby Servilia Caepionis inherit as much as the lex Voconia lets me leave them, and he'll make sure Brutus is properly endowed."

  "What a ridiculous subject this is!" said Servilia, rising to see him to the door, and surprising him with a kiss. “Thank you for letting Sinon go with you, and thank you even more for allaying my fears. Futile fears, I know. You'll be back!"

  She closed the door behind him and stood for a moment so weak that she swayed. Right, she had been right! Brutus was his heir because Cato would never consent to being adopted into a patrician clan like Servilius Caepio! Oh, what a wonderful day this was! Even Caesar's defection wasn't hurting the way it had a few hours before.

  * * *

  Having Marcus Porcius Cato on one's staff, even if his duties were technically confined to the consuls' legions, was an ordeal the governor of Macedonia could never have imagined until it happened. If the young man had been a personal appointment, home he would have gone no matter if his sponsor had been Jupiter Optimus Maximus; but as the People had appointed him through the medium of the Popular Assembly, there was nothing Governor Marcus Rubrius could do save suffer the continuing presence of Cato.

  But how could one deal with a young man who poked and pried, questioned incessantly, wanted to know why this was going there, why that was worth more on the books than in the marketplace, why so-and-so was claiming tax exemptions? Cato never stopped asking why. If he was reminded tactfully that his inquisitions were not relevant to the consuls' legions, Cato would simply answer that everything in Macedonia belonged to Rome, and Roma as personified by Romulus had elected him one of her magistrates. Ergo, everything in Macedonia was legally and morally and ethically his business.

  Governor Marcus Rubrius was not alone. His legates and his military tribunes (elected or unelected), his scribes, wardens, bailiffs, publicani, mistresses and slaves all detested Marcus Porcius Cato. Who was a fiend for work, couldn't even be gotten rid of by being sent to some outpost of the province, because he'd come back in two or three days at most, his task well done.

  A great deal of his conversation—if a loud harangue could be called a conversation—revolved around his great-grandfather, Cato the Censor, whose frugality and old-fashioned ways Cato esteemed immensely. And since Cato was Cato, he actually emulated the Censor in every way save one: he walked everywhere instead of riding, he ate abstemiously and drank nothing but water, his habit of living was no better than that of a ranker soldier, and he kept only one slave to attend to his needs.

  So what was that one transgression of his great-grandfather’s tenets? Cato the Censor had abhorred Greece, Greeks and things Greek, whereas young Cato admired them, and made no secret of his admiration. This let him in for considerable chaffing from those who had to bear his presence in Grecian Macedonia, all of them dying to pierce his incredibly thick skin. But none of the chaffing so much as made a dent in Cato's integument; when someone twitted him about betraying his great-grandfather’s precepts by espousing Greek modes of thought, that person found himself ignored as unimportant. Alas, what Cato did consider important was what drove his superiors, peers and inferiors maddest: living soft, he called it, and was as likely to criticize evidence of living soft in the governor as in a centurion. Since he dwelled in a two-roomed mud brick house on the outskirts of Thessalonica and shared it with his dear friend Titus Munatius Rufus, a fellow tribune of the soldiers, no one could say Cato himself lived soft.

  He had arrived in Thessalonica during March, and by the end of May the governor came to the conclusion that if he didn't get rid of Cato somehow, murder would be done. The complaints kept piling up on the gubernatorial desk from tax-farming publicani, grain merchants, accountants, centurions, legionaries, legates, and various women Cato had accused of unchastity.

  "He even had the gall to tell me that he had kept himself chaste until he married!" gasped one lady to Rubrius; she was an intimate friend. "Marcus, he stood me up in the agora in front of a thousand smirking Greeks and lambasted me about the behavior appropriate to a Roman woman living in a province! Get rid of him, or I swear I'll pay someone to assassinate him!"

  Luckily for Cato, it was somewhat later on the same day that he happened to pass a remark to Marcus Rubrius about the presence in Pergamum of one Athenodorus Cordylion.

>   "How I would love to hear him!" barked Cato. "Normally he's located in Antioch and Alexandria; this present tour is unusual."

  "Well," said Rubrius, tongue tripping rapidly in the wake of a brilliant idea, "why don't you take a couple of months off and go to Pergamum to hear him?"

  "I couldn't do that!" said Cato, shocked. "My duty is here."

  “Every tribune of the soldiers is entitled to leave, my dear Marcus Cato, and none is more deserving of leave than you. Go, do! I insist upon it. And take Munatius Rufus with you."

  So Cato went, accompanied by Munatius Rufus. Thessalonica's Roman contingent went almost mad with joy, for Munatius Rufus so hero-worshiped Cato that he imitated him assiduously. But exactly two months after departing he was back in Thessalonica, the only Roman whom Rubrius had ever known to take a casual suggestion of how long to be away so literally. And with him in his train came none other than Athenodorus Cordylion, Stoic philosopher of some renown, ready to play Panaetius to Cato's Scipio Aemilianus. Being a Stoic, he didn't expect or want the kind of luxuries Scipio Aemilianus had poured upon Panaetius—which was just as well. The only change he made in Cato's way of living was that he, Munatius Rufus and Cato rented a three-roomed mud brick house instead of a two-roomed one, and that there were three slaves in it instead of two. What had prompted this eminent philosopher to join Cato? Simply that in Cato he had seen someone who would one day matter enormously, and to join the Cato household would ensure his own name was remembered. If it hadn't been for Scipio Aemilianus, who would ever remember the name of Panaetius?

  The Roman element in Thessalonica had groaned mightily when Cato returned from Pergamum; Rubrius demonstrated that he was not prepared to suffer Cato by declaring that he had urgent business in Athens, and departing in a hurry. No consolation for those he left behind! But then Quintus Servilius Caepio arrived en route to Pergamum in Pompey's service, and Cato forgot about tax-farmers and living soft, so happy was he to see this beloved brother.