Caesar's Women

by Colleen McCullough

  "But," she said as she led Caesar up the curving central ramp of the vestibule to another set of beautiful bronze doors at its top, “I intend to retire as soon as possible. My cousin Murena is standing for consul this year, and begged me to remain Chief Vestal long enough to assist him in his canvassing."

  A plain and pleasant woman, Licinia, though not nearly strong enough to fill her position adequately, Caesar knew. As a pontifex he had had dealings with the adult Vestals over the years, and as a pontifex he had deplored their fate since the day Metellus Pius the Piglet had become their paterfamilias. First Metellus Pius had spent ten years fighting Sertorius in Spain, then he had returned aged beyond his years and in no mood to worry about the six female creatures whom he was supposed to care for, supervise, instruct, advise. Nor had his doleful, negative wife been of much help. And, in the way things usually did happen, none of the three women who had in turn become Chief Vestal could cope without firm guidance. As a consequence the College of Vestal Virgins was in decline. Oh, the sacred fire was rigorously tended and the various festivals and ceremonies conducted as was proper. But the scandal of Publius Clodius's accusations of unchastity still hung like a pall over the six women thought to be a personification of Rome's good luck, and none of them old enough to have been in the College when it had occurred had emerged from it without terrible scars.

  Licinia struck the right-hand door three times with the flat of her right hand, and Fabia admitted them to the temple with a low reverence. Here within these hallowed portals the Vestal Virgins had assembled to greet their new paterfamilias on the only ground within the Domus Publica which was common to both lots of tenants.

  So what did their new paterfamilias do? Why, he gave them a cheerful, unreligious smile and walked straight through their midst in the direction of a third set of double doors at the far end of the dimly lit hall!

  "Outside, girls!" he said over his shoulder.

  In the chilly precinct of the peristyle garden he found a sheltered spot where three stone benches lay alongside each other in the colonnade, then—effortlessly, it seemed—he lifted one around to face the other two. He sat upon it in his gorgeous scarlet-and-purple-striped toga, now wearing the scarlet-and-purple-striped tunic of the Pontifex Maximus beneath it, and with a casual flap of his hand indicated that they were to sit. A terrified silence fell, during which Caesar looked his new women over.

  Object of the amorous intentions of both Catilina and Clodius, Fabia was held to be the prettiest Vestal Virgin in generations. Second in seniority, she would succeed Licinia when that lady retired soon. Not a very satisfactory prospect as Chief Vestal; had the College been inundated with candidates when she had been admitted to it, she would never have been admitted at all. But Scaevola, who had been Pontifex Maximus at the time, had no other alternative than to stifle his wish that a plain girl child would be offered, and take this ravishing scion of Rome's oldest (albeit now entirely adoptive) Famous Family, the Fabii. Odd. She and Cicero's wife, Terentia, shared the same mother. Yet Terentia possessed none of Fabia's beauty or sweetness of nature—though she was very much the more intelligent of the two. At the present moment Fabia was twenty-eight years old, which meant that the College would keep her for another eight to ten years.

  Then there were two the same age, Popillia and Arruntia. Both charged with unchastity by Clodius, citing Catilina. Far plainer than Fabia, thanks the Gods! When they had stood trial the jury had found no difficulty in deeming them completely innocent, though they had been but seventeen. A worry! Three of these present six would retire within two years of each other, which left the new Pontifex Maximus with the job of finding three new little Vestals to replace them. However, that was ten years away. Popillia of course was a close cousin of Caesar's, whereas Arruntia, of a less august family, had almost no blood tie to him. Neither had ever recovered from the stigma of alleged unchastity, which meant they clung together and led very sequestered lives.

  The two replacements for Perpennia and Fonteia were still children, again of much the same age, eleven.

  One was a Junia, sister of Decimus Brutus, daughter of Sempronia Tuditani. Why she had been offered to the College at six years of age was no mystery: Sempronia Tuditani couldn't stomach a potential rival, and Decimus Brutus was proving ruinously expensive. Most of the little girls came healthily provided for by their families, but Junia was dowerless. Not an insuperable problem, as the State was always willing to provide a dowry for those who lacked one from their families. She would be quite attractive once the pangs of puberty were done with — how did these poor creatures cope with that in such a restricted and motherless environment?

  The other child was a patrician from an old though somewhat decayed family, a Quinctilia who was very fat. She too was dowerless. An indication, thought Caesar grimly, of the present College's reputation: no one who could dower a girl well enough to get her a reasonable husband was going to give her to the Vestals. Costly for the State, and bad luck as well. Of course they had been offered a Pompeia, a Lucceia, even an Afrania, a Lollia, a Petreia; Pompey the Great was desperate to entrench himself and his Picentine followers within Rome's most revered institutions. But old and sick though he had been, the Piglet was not about to accept any of that stock! Preferable by far to have the State dower children with the proper ancestors — or at least a father who had won the Grass Crown, like Fonteia.

  The adult Vestals knew Caesar about as well as he knew them, a knowledge acquired mostly through attendance at the formal banquets and functions held within the priestly Colleges — not, therefore, a deep or even a particularly friendly knowledge. Some private feasts in Rome might degenerate into affairs of too much wine and too many personal confidences, but never the religious ones. The six faces turned in Caesar's direction held — what? It would take time to find out. Yet his breezy and cheerful manner had thrown them a little off balance. That was deliberate on his part; he didn't want them shutting him out or concealing things from him, and none of these Vestals had been born when there was last a young Pontifex Maximus in the person of the famous Ahenobarbus. Essential then to make them think that the new Pontifex Maximus would be a paterfamilias to whom they could turn with real security. Never a salacious glance from him, never the familiarity of touch from him, never an innuendo from him. Nor, on the other hand, any coldness, lack of sympathy, off-putting formality, awkwardness.

  Licinia coughed nervously, wet her lips, ventured to speak. "When will you be moving in, domine?”

  He was, of course, in truth their lord, and he had already decided that it was fitting they should always address him as such. He could call them his girls, but they would never have any excuse to call him their man.

  "Perhaps the day after tomorrow," he said with a smile, stretching his legs out and sighing.

  "You will want to be shown over the whole building."

  "Yes, and again tomorrow, when I bring my mother."

  They had not forgotten that he had a highly respected mother, nor were they ignorant of all the aspects of his family structure, from the engagement of his daughter and Caepio Brutus to the dubious folk with whom his empty-headed wife associated. His answer told them clearly what the pecking order would be: mother first. That was a relief!

  "And your wife?" asked Fabia, who privately thought Pompeia very beautiful and alluring.

  "My wife," said Caesar coolly, "is not important. I doubt that you'll ever see her, she leads a busy social life. Whereas my mother is bound to be interested in everything." He said the last with another of those wonderful smiles, thought for a moment, and added, "Mater is a pearl beyond price. Don't be afraid of her, and don't be afraid to talk to her. Though I am your paterfamilias, there are corners of your lives which you will prefer to discuss with a woman. Until now you have had either to go outside this house or confine such discussions to yourselves. Mater has a fount of experience and a mine of common sense. Bathe in the one, and delve in the other. She never gossips, even to me."

&
nbsp; "We look forward to her advent," said Licinia formally.

  [CW 320.jpg]

  [CW 321.jpg]

  "As for you two," said Caesar, addressing the children, "my daughter isn't much older than you, and she's another pearl beyond price. You'll have a friend to play with."

  Which produced shy grins, but no attempt at conversation. He and his family, he saw with an inward sigh, had a long way to go before these hapless victims of the mos maiorum managed to settle down and accept the new order.

  For some moments more he persevered, looking absolutely at ease, then he rose. "All right, girls, that's enough for one day. Licinia, you may show me over the Domus Publica, please."

  He commenced by walking out into the middle of the sunless peristyle garden and gazing about.

  "This, of course, is the public courtyard," said Licinia. "You know it from the functions you have attended here."

  "At none of which I've ever had the leisure or the isolation to see it properly," said Caesar. "When something belongs to you, you regard it through different eyes."

  Nowhere was the height of the Domus Publica more apparent than from the middle of this main peristyle; it was walled up on all four sides to the apex of the roofs. A covered colonnade of deep-red Doric pillars surrounded it, with the arched and shuttered windows of the top floor rearing above its beautifully painted back walls, done in the red style and displaying against that rich background some of the famous Vestals and their deeds, the faces faithfully reproduced because Chief Vestals were quite entitled to own imagines, wax masks tinted to lifelike truth surmounted by wigs accurate in color and style.

  "The marble statues are all by Leucippus, and the bronzes by Strongylion," said Licinia. "They were the gift of one of my own ancestors, Crassus Pontifex Maximus."

  "And the pool? It's lovely."

  "Donated by Scaevola Pontifex Maximus, domine."

  Obviously someone gardened, but Caesar knew who was going to be the new guiding light: Gaius Matius. At which moment he turned to observe the back wall, and saw what seemed like hundreds of windows peering down from the Via Nova, most of them filled with faces; everyone knew that today the new Pontifex Maximus underwent inauguration, and was bound to call in to see his residence and his charges, the Vestals.

  "You have absolutely no privacy," he said, pointing.

  "None, domine, from the main peristyle. Our own peristyle was added by Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, and he built its walls so high we are invisible." She sighed. "Alas, we get no sun."

  They moved then into the only public room, the cella between the building's two sides that constituted the temple. Though it contained no statues, it too was frescoed and lavishly gilded; the light unfortunately was too dim to appreciate the quality of the work the way it demanded. Down either side, each on a precious stand, marched a row of miniature temples, the cabinets in which lived the imagines of the Chief Vestals since the order had been started in the misty days of the earliest kings of Rome. No use opening one to peer in at the color of Claudia's skin or the way she had worn her hair; the light was too poor.

  "We will have to see what we can do about that," said Caesar, proceeding back to the vestibule, the first room he had entered.

  Here, he realized now, the antiquity of the place showed best, for it was so old Licinia could not tell him exactly why it was the way that it was, or what the purpose of its features might have been. The floor rose ten feet from the outer doors to the temple doors in three separate ramps tiled with a truly fabulous mosaic of what he guessed might be glass or faience in convoluted but abstract patterns. Dividing the ramps from each other and giving them their curving outline were two amygdalae, almond-shaped wells paved with time-blackened blocks of tufa, each one containing at its ritual middle a pedestal of polished black stone upon which stood the halves of a hollow spherical rock lined with garnet-colored crystals glittering like beads of blood. On either side of the outer doors lay another tufa-paved well, inner edge curved. The walls and ceiling were much newer, a complex riot of plaster flowers and lattices, painted in shades of green and picked out with gilt.

  "The sacred car upon which we move our dead passes easily down either side ramp—Vestals use one, the Pontifex Maximus the other—but we do not know who used the central ramp, or what for. Perhaps the death car of the King, but I do not know. It is a mystery," said Licinia.

  "There must be answers somewhere," said Caesar, fascinated. He gazed at the Chief Vestal with brows raised. "Where now?"

  "Whichever side you prefer to see first, domine."

  "Then let it be your side."

  The half of the Domus Publica which accommodated the Vestals also housed an industry, plain to see when Licinia ushered Caesar into an L-shaped room fifty feet long. What would have been the atrium or reception room of an ordinary domus was here the workplace of the Vestals, who were the formal custodians of Roman wills. It had been most intelligently converted to serve its purpose, with box shelves to the lofty ceiling for book buckets or unprotected scrolls, desks and chairs, ladders and stools, and a number of stands from which hung big sheets of Pergamum parchment made up of smaller rectangles carefully and minutely sewn together.

  "We accept custody of the will through there," said the Chief Vestal, pointing toward the area closest to the outside doors through which entered those who wished to lodge their wills within the Atrium Vestae. "As you can see, it is walled off from the main part of the room. Would you like to look, domine?”

  "Thank you, I know the spot well," said Caesar, executor of many wills.

  "Today, of course, being feriae, the doors are closed and no one is on duty. Tomorrow we'll be busy."

  "And this part of the room contains the wills."

  "Oh, no!" gasped Licinia, horrified. "This is just our record room, domine."

  "Record room?"

  "Yes. We keep a record of every will lodged with us as well as the testament itself—name, tribe, address, age when lodged, and so forth. When the will is executed it leaves us. But the records never do. Nor do we ever discard them."

  "So all these book buckets and pigeonholes are stuffed with records, nothing but records?"

  "Yes."

  “And these?'' he asked, walking across to one of the stands to count the number of parchment sheets suspended from it.

  "Those are our master plans, an instruction manual for finding everything from which names belong to which tribes, to lists of municipia, towns all over the world, maps of our storage system. Some of them contain the full roll of Roman citizens."

  The stand held six parchment sheets two feet wide and five feet long, each of them written upon both sides, the script clear and fine and darkly delineated, quite the equal of any trained Greek scribe's writing that Caesar had ever known. His eyes roamed the room and counted thirty stands in all. "They list more than you've told me."

  "Yes, domine. We archive everything we can, it interests us to do so. The first Aemilia who was ever a Vestal was wise enough to know that the everyday tasks, tending the sacred fire and carrying all of our water from the well—it was the Fountain of Egeria in those days, admittedly a lot farther away than Juturna—were not enough to keep our minds busy and our intentions and our vows pure. We had been custodians of wills when all the Vestals were daughters of the King, but under Aemilia we expanded the work we did, and commenced to archive."

  "So here I see a veritable treasure-house of information."

  "Yes, domine."

  "How many wills do you have in your care?"

  "About a million."

  "All listed here," he said, hand sweeping around the high, crammed walls.

  "Yes and no. The current wills are confined to pigeonholes; we find it easier to consult a naked scroll than to struggle in and out of book buckets all the time. We keep things well dusted. The buckets contain the records of wills departed from our custody."

  "How far do your records go back, Licinia?"

  "To the two youngest daughters of King
Ancus Marcius, though not in the detail Aemilia instituted."

  "I begin to understand why that unorthodox fellow Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus installed your plumbing and reduced the taking of water from the Well of Juturna to a ritual daily pitcherful. You have more important work to do, though at the time Ahenobarbus did it, he created a furor."

  “We will never cease to be grateful to Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus," said Licinia, leading the way to a flight of stairs. "He added the second storey not only to make our lives healthier and more comfortable, but also to give us room to store the wills themselves. They used to be in the basement, we had nowhere else. Even so, storage is once again a problem. In earlier times wills were confined to Roman citizens, and mostly citizens who lived within Rome herself at that. These days we accept almost as many wills from citizens and non-citizens who live all over the world." She coughed and sniffled as she reached the top of the stairs and opened the door into a vast cavern lit from windows on one side only, that looking at the House of Vesta.

  Caesar understood her sudden attack of respiratory distress; the place exuded a miasma of paper particles and bone-dry dust.

  "Here we store the wills of Roman citizens, perhaps three quarters of a million," said Licinia. "Rome, there. Italia, here. The various provinces of Rome, there and there and there. Other countries, over here. And a new . section for Italian Gaul, here. It became necessary after the Italian War, when all the communities south of the Padus River were enfranchised. We had to expand our section for Italia too."

  They were pigeonholed in rank after rank of wooden box shelves, each one tagged and labeled, perhaps fifty to one single box; he withdrew a specimen from Italian Gaul, then another and another. All different in size and thickness and the sort of paper, all sealed with wax and someone's insignia. This one hefty—a lot of property! That one slender and humble—perhaps a tiny cottage and a pig to bequeath.

  "And where are the wills of non-citizens stored?" he asked as Licinia descended the stairs ahead of him.