Pompey sat on his stool without moving while the senators scuttled out of his curia, though he found no joy now in gazing at his own countenance on the curule dais. Nor, significantly, did Cato, Ahenobarbus, Brutus or any of the other boni make one overture toward him which he might have construed as a request to come and talk. Only Metellus Scipio joined him; when the egress was over, they left the dazzling chamber together. "I'm stunned," said Pompey. "No more than I." "What did I ever do to Curio?" "Nothing." "Then why has he singled me out?" "I don't know." "He belongs to Caesar." "We know that much now." "He never did like me, though. He used to call me all kinds of nasty things when Caesar was consul, and then he kept it up after Caesar left for Gaul." "He belonged to Publius Clodius before he sold himself to Caesar, we are all aware of that. And Clodius hated you then." "Why did he pick on me?" "Because you're Caesar's enemy, Pompeius." The bright blue eyes tried to widen in Pompey's puffy face. "I am not Caesar's enemy!" he said indignantly. "Rubbish. Of course you are." "How can you say that, Scipio? You're not famous for your brilliance." "That's true," said Metellus Scipio, unruffled. "That's why I said at first that I didn't know why he singled you out. But then I worked it out. I remembered what Cato and Bibulus always used to say, that you're jealous of Caesar's ability. That in your most secret heart, you're afraid he's better than you are." They had not left the Curia Pompeia through its outside doors, choosing instead to exit through a small door inside; using this put them in the peristyle of the villa Pompey had tacked onto his theater complex like, as Cicero said, a dinghy behind a yacht. The First Man in Rome bit his lips savagely and held on to his temper. Metellus Scipio always said exactly what he thought because he cared nothing for the good opinions of other men; one who was born a Cornelius Scipio and also had the blood of Aemilius Paullus in his veins did not need the good opinions of other men. Even of the First Man in Rome. For Metellus Scipio owned more than impeccable ancestries. He also owned the vast fortune which had come to him upon his adoption into the plebeian Caecilii Metelli. Yes. Well, it was true, though Pompey couldn't voice that admission. There had been misgivings in the early years of Caesar's career in Gaul of the Long-hairs, but Vercingetorix had confirmed them, set them in concrete form. Pompey had devoured the dispatch to the Senate which detailed the exploits of that year his own year as consul for the third time, half of it without a colleague. Eclipsed. Not a military foot wrong. How consummately skilled the man was! How incredibly quickly he moved, how decided he was in his strategies, how flexible he was in his tactics. And that army of his! How did he manage to make his men worship him as a god? For they did, they did. He flogged them through six feet of snow, he wore them out, he asked them to starve for him, he took them out of their winter cantonments and made them work even harder. Oh, what fools the men were who attributed it to his generosity! Avaricious troops who fought purely for money were never prepared to die for their general, but Caesar's troops were prepared to die for him a thousand times. I have never had that gift, though I thought I did back in the days when I called up my own Picentine clients and marched off to soldier for Sulla. I believed in myself then, and I believed my Picentine legionaries loved me. Maybe Spain and Sertorius took it out of me. I had to grind through that awful campaign, I had to see my troops die because of my own military blunders. Blunders he has never made. Spain and Sertorius taught me that numbers do count, that it's prudent to have lots more weight than the enemy on a battlefield. I've never fought undermanned since. I never will fight undermanned again. But he does. He believes in himself; he is never shaken by doubt. He will breeze into a battle so outnumbered that it's ludicrous. And yet he doesn't waste men nor seek battles. He'd rather do it peacefully if he can. Then he'll turn around and lop the hands off four thousand Gauls. Calling that a way to ensure a lasting cessation of hostilities. He's probably right. How many men did he lose at Gergovia? Seven hundred? And he wept for it! In Spain I lost almost ten times that many in a single battle, but I couldn't weep. Perhaps what I fear most is his frightening sanity. Even in the midst of that shocking temper he remains capable of real thought, of turning events to his advantage. Yes, Scipio is right. In my most secret heart I am afraid that Caesar is better than I am.... His wife greeted them in the atrium, offering her cool cheek for a kiss, then beaming upon that monumental fool, her father. Oh, Julia, where are you? Why did you have to go? Why couldn't this one be like you? Why did this one have to be so cold? "I didn't think the meeting would end before sunset," said Cornelia Metella, ushering them into the dining room, "but naturally I ordered enough dinner for all of us." She was quite handsome, no disgrace in marrying her on that account. Her lustrous, thick brown hair was rolled into sausages which partly covered each ear, her mouth was full enough to be kissable, her breasts considerably plumper than Julia's had been. And her grey eyes were widely spaced, if a trifle heavy-lidded. She had submitted to the marriage bed with commendable resignation, not a virgin because she had been married to Publius Crassus, yet not, he discovered, either experienced or ardent enough to want to learn to enjoy what men did to women. Pompey prided himself on his skills as a lover, but Cornelia Metella had defeated him. On the whole she evinced no distaste or displeasure, but six years of marriage to the deliciously responsive, easily aroused Julia had sensitized him in some peculiar way; the old Pompey would never have noticed, but the post-Julia Pompey was uncomfortably aware that a part of Cornelia Metella's mind dwelled upon the foolishness of it while he kissed her breasts or pressed himself closely against her. And on the single occasion when he had wriggled his tongue inside her labia to provoke a genuine response, he had got that response: she reared back in outraged revulsion. "Don't do that!" she snarled. "It's disgusting!" Or perhaps, thought the post-Julia Pompey, it might have led to helpless delight; Cornelia Metella wished to own herself.
Cato walked home alone, longing for Bibulus. Without him, the boni ranks were thin, at least when it came to ability. The three Claudii Marcelli were good enough men, and this middle one showed great promise, but they lacked the years-long, passionate hatred of Caesar that Bibulus nursed and nurtured. Nor did they know Caesar the way Bibulus did. Cato could appreciate the reason behind the five-year law about governing provinces, but neither he nor Bibulus had realized that its first victim would be Bibulus himself. So there he was, stuck in Syria and saddled with none other than that pompous, self-righteous fool Cicero right next door in Cilicia. With whom Bibulus was expected to fight his wars in tandem. How did the Senate expect a team composed of a walking horse and a pack horse to pull the chariot of Mars satisfactorily? While Bibulus dealt capably with the Parthians through his bought minion, the Parthian nobleman Ornadapates, Cicero spent fifty-seven days besieging Pindenissus in eastern Cappadocia. Fifty-seven days! Fifty-seven days to secure the capitulation of a nothing! And in the same year that Caesar built twenty-five miles of fortifications and took Alesia in thirty days! The contrast was so glaring it was little wonder the Senate smiled when Cicero's dispatch reached it. In forty-five days. Twelve days less to get a communication from eastern Cappadocia to Rome than consumed by the siege of Pindenissus! Cato let himself into his house. Since he had divorced Marcia he had seen little use for many servants, and after Porcia married Bibulus and moved out, he sold off more of them. Neither he nor his two tame live-in philosophers, Athenodorus Cordylion and Statyllus, had any interest in food beyond the fact that it was necessary to eat in order to live, so the kitchen was staffed by one man who called himself a cook and one lad who assisted him. A steward was a wasteful expenditure; Cato existed without one. There was a man to do the cleaning and the marketing (Cato checked all the figures and doled out the money personally), and the bit of laundry was sent out. All of which had reduced the household expenditures to ten thousand sesterces a year. Plus the wine, which tripled it despite the fact that the wine was second pressing and quite horribly vinegary. Irrelevant. Cato and his two philosophers bibbed for the effect, not the taste. Taste was an indulgence for wealthy men, men li
ke Quintus Hortensius, who had married Marcia. The thought nudged, burned, prickled, wouldn't vanish on this bitterly disappointing day. Marcia. Marcia. He could still remember the look of her in that first glance, when he had gone to the house of Lucius Marcius Philippus for dinner. Seven years ago, all save a couple of months. Elated at what he had managed to do for Rome as a result of that ghastly special command Publius Clodius had forced him to take, the annexation of Cyprus. Well, he had duly annexed Cyprus. Shrugged when informed that its Egyptian regent, Ptolemy the Cyprian, had committed suicide. Then proceeded to sell off all the treasures and works of art for good solid cash, and put the good solid cash into two thousand chests seven thousand talents all told. Kept two sets of books, retaining one in his own custody and giving the other to his freedman Philargyrus. No one in the Senate was going to have any grounds for accusing Cato of sticky fingers! One or the other set of accounts would get to Rome intact, Cato was sure of it. He had pressed the royal fleet into service to take the two thousand chests of money home why spend money hiring a fleet when there was one to hand? Then he devised a way to retrieve the chests should a ship sink during the voyage, by tying one hundred feet of rope to each chest and attaching a big chunk of cork to the end of each rope; if a ship should sink, the ropes would uncoil and the corks bob to the surface, enabling the chests to be pulled up and saved. As a further safeguard, he put Philargyrus and his set of accounts on a ship far removed from his own. The royal Cypriot ships were very pretty, but never intended to sail the open waters of Our Sea in places like Cape Taenarum at the bottom of the Peloponnese. They were undecked biremes sitting low in the water, two men to an oar, each owning a skimpy sail. This meant, of course, that there was no deck to impede the unwinding of those cork-ended ropes should a ship sink. But the weather was good, though marred by a calamitous storm as the fleet rounded the Peloponnese. Even so, only one ship sank: the ship bearing Philargyrus and the second set of account books. Searching a calm sea afterward revealed not one bobbing bit of cork, alas. Cato had severely underestimated the depth of the waters. Still, the loss of one ship among so many wasn't bad. Cato and the rest sought shelter on Corcyra when another storm seemed likely to blow up. Unfortunately that beautiful isle could not provide roofs for a horde of unexpected visitors, who were obliged to pitch tents in the agora of the port village where they fetched up. True to the tenets of Stoicism, Cato elected a tent rather than avail himself of the richest citizen's house. As it was very cold, the Cypriot sailors built a huge bonfire to keep warm. Up came the threatened gale; brands from the bonfire blew everywhere. Cato's tent burned completely, and with it his set of accounts. Devastated at the loss, Cato realized he would never be able to prove that he hadn't pilfered the profits of the annexation of Cyprus; perhaps because of that, he elected not to trust his money chests to the Via Appia. Instead he sailed his fleet around the Italian foot and up the west coast, made landfall at Ostia, and was able, his ships were so shallow-drafted, to sail up the Tiber right to the wharves of the Port of Rome. Most of Rome came to greet him, so novel was the sight; among the welcoming committee was the junior consul of that year, Lucius Marcius Philippus. Gourmet, bon vivant, Epicurean. All the things Cato most despised. But after Cato had personally supervised the porterage of those two thousand chests (the ship of Philargyrus had not held a great many) to the Treasury beneath the temple of Saturn, Cato accepted Philippus's invitation to dinner. "The Senate," said Philippus, greeting him at the door, "is consumed with admiration, my dear Cato. They have all kinds of honors for you, including the right to wear the toga praetexta on public occasions, and a public thanksgiving." "No!" barked Cato loudly. "I will not accept honors for doing a duty clearly laid out in the terms of my command, so don't bother to table them, let alone vote on them. I ask only that the slave Nicias, who was Ptolemy the Cyprian's steward, be given his freedom and awarded the Roman citizenship. Without Nicias's help I could not have succeeded in my task." Philippus, a very handsome, dark man, was moved to blink, though not to argue. He led Cato into his exquisitely appointed dining room, ensconced him in the locus consularis position of honor on his own couch, and introduced him to his sons, lying together on the lectus imus. Lucius Junior was twenty-six, as dark as his father and even handsomer; Quintus was twenty-three, less inspiring in coloring and looks. Two chairs were set on the far side of the lectus medius couch where Philippus and Cato reclined, the low table which would bear the food separating chairs from couch. "You may not know," drawled Philippus, "that I have remarried fairly recently." "Have you?" asked Cato, ill at ease; he hated these socially obligatory dinners, for they always seemed to comprise people he had nothing in common with, from political to philosophical leanings. "Yes. Atia, the widow of my dear friend Gaius Octavius." "Atia ... Who's she?" Philippus laughed heartily; his two sons grinned. "If a woman is neither a Porcia nor a Domitia, Cato, you never know who she is! Atia is the daughter of Marcus Atius Balbus from Aricia, and the younger of Gaius Caesar's two sisters." Feeling the skin of his jaw tighten, Cato produced a rictus of a smile. "Caesar's niece," he said. "That's right, Caesar's niece." Cato strove to be polite. "Whose is the other chair?" "My only daughter's. Marcia. My youngest chick." "Not old enough yet to be married, obviously." "As a matter of fact, she's fully eighteen. She was engaged to young Publius Cornelius Lentulus, but he died. I haven't yet decided on another husband." "Does Atia have children by Gaius Octavius?" "Two, a girl and a boy. And a stepdaughter as well, Octavius's by an Ancharia," said Philippus. At which moment the two women came in, a telling contrast in beauty. Atia was a typical Julian, golden-haired and blue-eyed, with a distinct look of Gaius Marius's wife about her and striking grace of movement; Marcia was black-haired and black-eyed, and very much resembled her older brother. Who never took his gaze away from his father's wife, had Cato noticed. Cato didn't notice because he couldn't take his gaze away from Philippus's daughter, seated opposite him on her stiff straight chair, her hands folded demurely in her lap. Her eyes were fixed with equal intensity upon Cato. They looked at each other and fell in love, something Cato had never believed could happen, nor Marcia believed would happen to her. Marcia recognized it for what it was; Cato did not. She smiled at him, revealing brilliantly white teeth. "What a wonderful thing you've done, Marcus Cato," she said as the first course was brought in. Normally Cato would have despised the fare, upon which Marcia's father had expended considerable thought: sniffed baby cuttlefish, quail's eggs, gigantic olives imported from Further Spain, smoked baby eels, oysters brought live in a tank-cart from Baiae, crabs from the same source, little shrimps in a creamy garlic sauce, the finest virgin olive oil, crunchy bread hot from the oven. "I haven't done anything except my duty," said Cato in a voice he hadn't known he possessed, soft, almost caressing. "Rome deputed me to annex Cyprus, and I have done so." "But with such honesty, such care," she said, eyes adoring. He blushed deeply, dipped his head and concentrated upon eating the oysters and crabs, which were, he was forced to admit, absolutely delicious. "Do try the shrimps," said Marcia, took his hand and guided it to the dish. Her touch enraptured him, the more so because he couldn't do what prudence screamed at him to do snatch the hand away. Instead he prolonged the contact by pretending the dish was elsewhere, and actually smiled at her. How enormously attractive he was! thought Marcia. That noble nose! What beautiful grey eyes, so stern and yet so luminous. Such a mouth! And that neatly cropped head of softly waving red-gold hair... broad shoulders, long graceful neck, not an ounce of superfluous flesh, long and well-muscled legs. Thank all the Gods that the toga was too clumsy to dine in, that men reclined clad only in a tunic! Cato gobbled shrimps, dying to pop one between her gorgeous lips, letting her keep on guiding his hand to the dish. And while all this was going on, the rest of Marcia's family, startled and amused, exchanged glances and suppressed smiles. Not upon Marcia's account; about her virtue and obedience no one thought to wonder, for she was extremely sheltered and would always do as she was told. No, it was Cato fascinated them. Who
would ever have dreamed Cato could speak softly, or relish a woman's touch? Only Philippus was old enough to remember the time not long before the war against Spartacus when Cato, a youth of twenty, had been so violently in love with Aemilia Lepida, Mamercus's daughter who had married Metellus Scipio. But that, all of Rome had long ago assumed, had killed something in Cato, who married an Attilia when he was twenty-two and proceeded to treat her with cold, harsh indifference. Then, because Caesar had seduced her, Cato had divorced her, cut her off from all contact with her daughter and son, whom he had reared in a house utterly devoid of women. "Let me wash your hands," said Marcia as the first course was removed and the second course came in: roast baby lamb, roast baby chicken, a myriad of vegetables cooked with pine nuts or shaved garlic or crumbled cheese, roast pork in a peppery sauce, pork sausages patiently coated with layers of watered honey as they broiled gently enough not to burn. To Philippus, constrained because he was aware that his guest ate plainly, a pedestrian meal; to Cato, an indigestibly rich one. But for Marcia's sake he ate of that and nibbled at this. "I hear," said Cato, "that you have two stepsisters and one stepbrother." Her face lit up. "Yes, aren't I lucky?" "You like them, then." "Who could not?" she asked innocently. "Which one is your favorite?" "Oh, that's easy," she said warmly. "Little Gaius Octavius." "And how old is he?" "Six, going on sixty." And Cato actually laughed, not his habitual neigh but quite an attractive chuckle. "A delightful child, then." She frowned, considering that. "No, not at all delightful, Marcus Cato. I'd call him fascinating. At least, that's the adjective my father uses. He's very cool and composed, and he never stops thinking. Everything is picked apart, analyzed, weighed in his balance." She paused, then added, "He's very beautiful." "Then he takes after his great-uncle Gaius Caesar," said Cato, harshness creeping into his voice for the first time. She noticed it. "In some ways, yes. The intellect is very formidable. But he isn't universally gifted, and he's lazy when it comes to learning. He hates Greek, and won't try at it." "Meaning Gaius Caesar is universally gifted." "Well, I think that's generally conceded," she said pacifically. "Where are young Gaius Octavius's gifts, then?" "In his rationality," she said. "In his lack of fear. In his self-confidence. In his willingness to take risks." "Then he is like his great-uncle." Marcia giggled. "No," she said. "He is more like himself." The main course departed, and Philippus grew gastronomically animated. "Marcus Cato," he said, "I have a brand-new dessert for you to try!" He eyed the salads, raisin-filled pastries, honey-soaked cakes, huge variety of cheeses, and shook his head. "Ah!" he cried then; the brand-new dessert appeared, a pale yellow chunk of what might have passed for cheese, save that it was borne upon a platter tucked inside another big plate loaded with snow? "It's made on the Mons Fiscellus, and in another month you wouldn't have been able to taste it. Honey, eggs and the cream off milk from two-year-old ewes, churned inside a barrel inside a bigger barrel lined with salted snow, then galloped all the way to Rome packed in more snow. I call it Mons Fiscellus ambrosia." Perhaps discussing Caesar's great-nephew had left a sour taste in Cato's mouth; he declined it, and not even Marcia could persuade him to taste it. Soon after that the two women retired. Cato's pleasure in this visit to a den of Epicureans dimmed immediately; he began to feel nauseated, and in the end was obliged to seek the latrine to vomit discreetly. How could people live so sybaritically? Why, even the Philippus latrine was luxurious! Though, he admitted, it was very nice to be able to avail himself of a little jet of cool water to rinse out his mouth and wash his hands afterward. On the way back down the colonnade in the direction of the dining room he passed an open door. "Marcus Cato!" He stopped, peered inside to see her waiting. "Come in for a moment, please." That was absolutely forbidden by every social rule Rome owned. But Cato went in. "I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your company," said Marcia, limpid gaze fixed not on his eyes but on his mouth. Oh, unbearable! Intolerable! Watch my eyes, Marcia, not my mouth, or I'll have to kiss you! Don't do this to me! The next moment, how he didn't know, she was in his arms and the kiss was real more real than any kiss he had ever experienced, but that wasn't saying much beyond indicating the depth of his self-inflicted starvation. Cato had kissed only two women, Aemilia Lepida and Attilia, and Attilia only rarely, and never with genuine feeling. Now he found a pair of soft yet muscular lips clinging to his own with a sensuous pleasure made manifest in the way she melted against him, sighed, coiled her tongue around his, pulled his hand up to her breast. Gasping, Cato wrenched himself away from her and fled. He went home so confused that he couldn't remember which door on that narrow Palatine alley of a hundred doors was his, his empty stomach churning, her kiss invading his mind until he could think of nothing except the fabulous feel of her in his arms. Athenodorus Cordylion and Statyllus were waiting for him in the atrium, agog to discover what dinner at the house of Philippus had been like, the food, the company, the conversation. "Go away!" he shouted, and bolted for his study. Where he walked the floor until morning dawned without one gulp of wine. He didn't want to care. He didn't want to love. Love was an entrapment, a torment, a disaster, an endless horror. All those years of loving Aemilia Lepida, and what had happened? She preferred an over-bred moron like Metellus Scipio. But Aemilia Lepida and that adolescent love founded in the senses were nothing. Nothing compared to the love he had borne for his brother Caepio, who died alone and waiting for Cato to come, who died without a hand to hold or a friend to comfort him. The agony of living on without Caepio there the ghastly spiritual amputation the tears the desolation which never went away, even now, eleven long years later. An all-pervasive love of any kind was a betrayal of mind, of control, of the ability to deny weakness, to live a selfless life. And it led to a grief he knew himself too old now to bear again, for he was thirty-seven, not twenty, not twenty-seven. Yet as soon as the sun was high enough he donned a fresh, chalk-whitened toga and returned to the house of Lucius Marcius Philippus, there to request the hand of Philippus's daughter in marriage. Hoping against hope that Philippus would say no. Philippus said yes. "It gives me a foot in both camps," the unashamed voluptuary said cheerfully, wringing Cato's hand. "Married to Caesar's niece and guardian of his great-nephew, yet father-in-law to Cato. What a perfect state of affairs! Perfect!" The marriage had been perfect too, except that the sheer joy of it gnawed at Cato perpetually. He didn't deserve it; it could not possibly be a right act to wallow in something so intensely intimate. He had received absolute proof that Philippus's daughter was a virgin on her wedding night, but where did she get that power and passion from, that knowledge? For Cato knew nothing of women, had no idea how much or how little girls learned from conversation, erotic murals, Priapic objects scattered around their homes, noises and glimpses through doors, sophisticated older brothers. Nor did it edify him to know that he was helpless against her wiles, that the violence of his feelings for her ruled him completely. Marcia was a bride straight from the hands of Venus, but Cato came from the iron claws of Dis. So when, two years after the marriage, senile old Hortensius had come around begging to espouse Cato's daughter or one of Cato's nieces, he hadn't taken umbrage at Hortensius's incredible final demand: that he be permitted to marry Cato's wife. Suddenly Cato saw the only way out of his torment, the only way he could prove to himself that he did own himself. He would give Marcia to Quintus Hortensius, a disgusting old lecher who would insult her flesh in unspeakable ways, who would fart and dribble in the throes of his addiction to ecstatics and priceless vintage wines, who would compel her to fellate his limpness into some sort of rigidity, whose toothlessness, hairlessness and inelastic body would revolt her, his darling Marcia whom he couldn't bear to see hurt or made unhappy. How could he sentence her to that fate? Yet he had to, or go mad. He did it. He actually did it. The gossip was wrong; Cato took not one sestertius from Hortensius, though of course Philippus had accepted millions. "I am divorcing you," he said to her in his loudest, brassiest voice, "and then I'm going to marry you to Quintus Hortensius. I expect you to be a good wife to him. Your fathe
r has agreed." She had stood absolutely erect, wide eyes full of unshed tears, then reached out and touched his cheek very gently, with so much love. "I understand, Marcus," she said. "I do understand. I love you. I will love you beyond death." "I don't want you to love me!" he howled, fists clenched. "I want peace, I want to be left alone, I don't want anyone loving me, I don't want to be loved beyond death! Go to Hortensius and learn to hate me!" But all she did was smile.
5. Caesar Page 46
