5. Caesar

by Colleen McCullough

  At the beginning of November the eight legions gathered at Placentia marched for Brundisium, with almost two months to complete that five-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey; once they reached the Adriatic coast they were to proceed down its length, rather than cross the Apennines to skirt the vicinity of Rome. The pace was set at twenty miles a day, which meant that every second or third day was one of rest. To Caesar's legions, a glorious holiday, especially at this autumnal time of year. From Ariminum, which welcomed him just as enthusiastically at the end of this year as it had at its beginning, Caesar turned to take the Via Flaminia to Rome. Up and over the lovely mountains of the homeland, their little fortified towns sitting atop this crag and that, the grass richly yellowed for nutritious grazing, the great forests of fir, larch, pitch-pine and pine stretching to the heights of the peaks, enough building timber for centuries to come. The careful husbanding which saw virtue in pure beauty, the natural affinity all Italians seemed to have for visual harmony. For Caesar, a kind of healing, that journey, taken at something less than his usual headlong pace; he stopped in every town of any size to enquire how things were, what was needed, where Rome's omissions lay. Speaking to the duumvirs of the smallest municipia as if they mattered to him quite as much as the Senate of Rome. Truth was, he reflected, they mattered more. Like all great cities, Rome was to some extent an artificial growth; as with all such excrescences, it sucked vitality unto itself, and often at the expense of the less numerous and less powerful places doomed to feed it. The cuckoo in the Italian nest. Owning the numbers, Rome owned the clout. Owning the numbers, its politicians favored it. Owning the numbers, it overshadowed all else. Which it did, he had to admit, approaching it from the north; that other visit at the beginning of April had been a dim and nightmarish business, so much so that he hadn't noticed the city herself. Not as he did now, looking at the seven hills asprawl with orange-tiled roofs, glitters of gold from gilded temple eaves, tall cypresses, umbelliferous pines, arched aqueducts, the deep blue and strongly flowing width of Father Tiber with the grassy plains of Martius and Vaticanus on either bank. They came out to meet him in thousands upon thousands, faces beaming, hands throwing flowers like a heady carpet for Toes to walk upon would he have entered riding any but Toes? They cheered him, they blew him kisses, they held up their babies and small children for him to smile at, they shouted love and encouragement. And he, clad in his finest silver armor, his Civic Crown of oak leaves upon his head, rode at a slow walk behind the twenty-four crimson-clad lictors who belonged to the Dictator and carried the axes in their bundles of rods. Smiling, waving, vindicated at last. Weep, Pompeius! Weep, Cato! Weep, Bibulus! Never once for any of you, this ecstasy. What matters the Senate, what matters the Eighteen? These people are Rome, and these people still love me. They outnumber you as the stars do a cluster of lanterns. And they belong to me. He rode into the city through the Fontinalis Gate alongside the Arx of the Capitol and down the Hill of the Bankers to the fire-blackened ruins of the Basilica Porcia, the Curia Hostilia and the Senate offices; good then to find that Paullus had used that huge bribe to better effect than he had his consulship by finishing the Basilica Aemilia. And his own Basilica Julia on the opposite side of the lower Forum, where the Basilicae Opimia and Sempronia had been, was growing from nothing. It would cast the Basilica Aemilia in the shade. So would the Curia Julia, the new home of the Senate, once he had seen the architects and commenced. Yes, he would put that temple pediment on the Domus Publica, make it more appealing from the Sacra Via, and clothe its facade all the way around with marble. But his first visit was to the Regia, tiny temple of the Pontifex Maximus; there he entered alone, saw to his satisfaction that the hallowed place was clean and free from vermin, its altar unstained, its twin laurel trees thriving. A brief prayer to Ops, then it was out and across to his home, the Domus Publica. Not a formal occasion; he went in through his own entrance and closed its door upon the sighing, satiated crowd. As Dictator he could wear armor within the pomerium, have his lictors bear the axes; when he disappeared within the Domus Publica they nodded genially to the people and walked to their own College behind the inn on the corner of the Clivus Orbius. But the formalities were not over for Caesar, who had not set foot inside the Domus Publica on that hasty visit in April; he had now as Pontifex Maximus to greet his charges, the Vestal Virgins. Who waited for him in the great temple common to both sides of that divided house. Oh, where had the time gone? The Chief Vestal had been little more than a child when he had departed for Gaul how Mater had railed at her liking for food! Quinctilia, now twenty-two and Chief Vestal. No thinner, but, he saw now with relief, a jolly young woman whose good sense and practical disposition shone out of her round, homely face. Beside her, Junia, not much younger, quite pretty. And there was his blackbird, Cornelia Merula, a tall and fine young lady of eighteen. Behind them, three little girls, all new since his time here. The three adult Vestals were clad in full regalia, white robes, white veils perched upon the mandatory seven sausages of wool, their bulla medallions upon their breasts. For the children, white robes but no veils; they wore wreaths of flowers instead. "Welcome, Caesar," said Quinctilia, smiling. "How good it is to be home!" he said, longing to embrace her, knowing he could not. "Junia and Cornelia, grown up too!" They smiled, nodded. "And who are the little ones?" "Licinia Terentia, daughter of Marcus Varro Lucullus." Yes, she had that look long face, grey eyes, brown hair. "Claudia, daughter of the Censor's eldest son." Dark and pretty, very Claudian. "Caecilia Metella, of the Caprarian Metelli." A stormy one, fierce and proud. "Fabia, Arruntia and Popillia, all gone!" he marveled. "I have been away too long." "We have kept Vesta's hearth burning," said Quinctilia. "And Rome is safe because of you." Smiling, he dismissed them and turned then to enter his own half of the great house. An ordeal without Aurelia. It was indeed a reunion full of tears, but these were tears that had to be shed. They had all come to see him who belonged to the days in the Subura Eutychus, Cardixa and Burgundus. How old they were! Seventies? Eighties? Did it matter? They were so glad to see him! Oh, all those sons of Cardixa and Burgundus! Some of them were grizzled! But no one was allowed to remove the scarlet cloak, the cuirass and the skirt of pteryges save Burgundus; Caesar had to fight to remove the sash of his imperium himself. Then finally he was free to find his wife, who had not come to him. That was her nature, to wait. Patient as Penelope weaving her shroud. He found her in Aurelia's old sitting room, though it bore no sign of his mother anymore. Barefoot, he moved as quietly as one of her cats; she didn't see him. Sitting in a chair with fat orange Felix in her lap. Had he ever realized she was lovely? It didn't seem so, from this distance. Dark hair, long and graceful neck, fine cheekbones, beautiful breasts. "Calpurnia," he said. She turned at once, dark eyes wide. "Domine," she said. "Caesar, not domine." He bent to kiss her, the perfectly correct salutation for a wife of scant months not seen for many years: affectionate, appreciative, promising more. He sat down in a chair close to her, where he could see her face. Smiling, he pushed a strand of hair off her brow; the dozing cat, sensing a foreign presence, opened one yellow eye and rolled onto its back, all four feet in the air. "He likes you," she said, surprise in her voice. "So he should. I rescued him from a watery grave." "You never told me that." "Didn't I? Some fellow was about to toss him into Father Tiber." "Then he and I are grateful, Caesar." Later that night, his head comfortably cushioned between her breasts, Caesar sighed and stretched. "I am very glad, wife," he said, "that Pompeius refused to let me marry that battle-axe of a daughter of his. I'm fifty-one, a little old for tantrums and power tactics in my home as well as my public life. You suit me well." If perhaps in the very depths of her that wounded Calpurnia, yet she was able to see both the sense of it and the lack of malice in it. Marriage was a business, no less so in her own case than it would have been in the case of the strapping, pugnacious Pompeia Magna. Circumstances had conspired to keep her Caesar's wife, stave off the advent of Pompeia Magna. Which had delighted her at the time. Those nundinae between her fat
her's informing her that Caesar wished to divorce her in order to marry Pompey's daughter and the news that Pompey had turned Caesar's offer down had been fraught with anxiety, with terrible misgivings. All Lucius Calpurnius Piso, her father, had seen was the huge endowment Caesar was willing to give Calpurnia in order to be free of her; all Calpurnia had seen was another marriage which her father would, of course, arrange. Even had love not formed a part of Calpurnia's attachment to Caesar, she would have hated it the moving, the loss of her cats, the adjusting to a completely different kind of life. The cloistered style of the Domus Publica suited her, for it had its freedoms too. And when Caesar did visit, it was a visitation from some god who knew so perfectly how to please, how to make love comfortable. Her husband was the First Man in Rome.