Caesar's Women Read online

  It hadn't been necessary for Clodius to ascertain this information now; even legates as sour as Sextilius did speak from time to time, and usually about Silius or the primus pilus centurion of the other Fimbriani legion, Lucius Cornificius, who was not of the rising family with that name.

  Nor was it hard to find Silius's lair inside Tigranocerta; he and Cornificius had commandeered a minor palace which had belonged to a Tigranic son, and moved in together with some very delectable women and enough slaves to serve a cohort.

  Publius Clodius, patrician member of an august clan, went visiting, and like the Greeks before Troy, he bore gifts. Oh, not the size of wooden horses! Clodius brought a little bag of mushrooms Lucullus (who liked to experiment with such substances) had given him, and a flagon of superlative wine so large it took three servants to manhandle it.

  His reception was wary. Both the centurions knew well enough who he was; what relationship he bore to Lucullus; how he had done on the march, in the camp before the city, during the battle. None of which impressed them any more than the person of Clodius did, for he was of no more than average size and far too mediocre of physique to stand out in any crowd. What they did admire was his gall: he barged in as if he owned the place, ensconced himself chattily on a big tapestry cushion between the couches where each man lay wrapped around his woman of the moment, produced his bag of mushrooms and proceeded to tell them what was going to happen when they partook of this unusual fare.

  "Amazing stuff!" said Clodius, mobile brows flying up and down in a comical manner. "Do have some, but chew it very slowly and don't expect anything to happen for quite a long time."

  Silius made no attempt to avail himself of this invitation; nor, he was quick to note, did Clodius set an example by chewing one of the shrunken little caps, slowly or otherwise.

  "What do you want?" he asked curtly.

  "To talk," said Clodius, and smiled for the first time.

  That was always a shock for those who had never seen the smiling Publius Clodius; it transformed what was otherwise a rather tense and anxious face into something suddenly so likable, so appealing, that smiles tended to break out all around. As smiles did in the moment Clodius triggered his, from Silius, Cornificius, both the women.

  But a Fimbrianus was not to be caught so easily. Clodius was the Enemy, a far more serious enemy than any Armenian or Syrian or Caucasian. So after his smile died, Silius maintained his independence of mind, remained skeptical of Clodius's motives.

  All of which Clodius half expected, had planned for. It had come to his notice during those four humiliating years he had slunk around Rome that anyone highborn was going to be viewed with extreme suspicion by those beneath him, and that on the whole those beneath him could find absolutely no reasonable reason why someone highborn would want to slum it. Rudderless, ostracized by his peers, and desperate for something to do, Clodius set out to remove mistrust among his inferiors. The thrill of victory when he succeeded was warming, but he had also found a genuine pleasure in low company; he liked being better educated and more intelligent than anyone else in the room, it gave him an advantage he would never have among his peers. He felt a giant. And he transmitted a message to his inferiors that here was a highborn chap who really did care, who really was attracted to simpler people, simpler circumstances. He learned to wriggle in and make himself at home. He basked in a new kind of adulation.

  His technique consisted in talk. No big words, no inadvertent allusions to obscure Greek dramatists or poets, not one indication that his company or his drink or his surroundings did not please him tremendously. And while he talked, he plied his audience with wine and pretended to consume huge amounts of it himself—yet made sure that at the end he was the soberest man in the room. Not that he looked it; he was adept at collapsing under the table, falling off his stool, bolting outside to vomit. The first time he worked on his chosen quarry they preserved a measure of skepticism, but he'd be back to try again, then be back a third and a fourth time, until eventually even the wariest man present had to admit that Publius Clodius was a truly wonderful fellow, someone ordinary who had been unfortunate enough to be born into the wrong sphere. After trust was established, he discovered he could manipulate everyone to his heart's content provided that he never betrayed his inner thoughts and feelings. The lowly he courted, he soon decided, were urban hayseeds, uncouth, ignorant, unread—desperately eager to be esteemed by their betters, longing for approval. And just waiting to be shaped.

  Marcus Silius and Lucius Cornificius were no different from any tavernload of Roman urban lowly, even if they had left Italy at seventeen. Hard they were, cruel they were, ruthless they were. But to Publius Clodius the two centurions seemed as malleable as clay in the hands of a master sculptor. Easy game. Easy ...

  Once Silius and Cornificius admitted to themselves that they liked him, that he amused them, then Clodius began to defer to them, to ask their opinions on this and that—always choosing things they knew, could feel authoritative about. And after that he let them see that he admired them—their toughness, their stamina in their job, which was soldiering, and therefore of paramount importance to Rome. Finally he became their equal as well as their friend, one of the boys, a light in the darkness; he was one of Them, but as one of Us he was in a position to bring every plight he saw to the attention of Them in Senate and Comitia, on Palatine and Carinae. Oh, he was young, still a bit of a boy! But boys grew up, and when he turned thirty Publius Clodius would enter the hallowed portals of the Senate; he would ascend the cursus honorum as smoothly as water flowing over polished marble. After all, he was a Claudian, a member of a clan which had never skipped the consulship through all the many generations of the Republic. One of Them. Yet one of Us.

  It was not until his fifth visit that Clodius got around to the subject of booty and Lucullus's division of the spoils.

  "Miserable skinflint!" said Clodius, slurring his words.

  "Eh?" asked Silius, pricking up his ears.

  "My esteemed brother-in-law Lucullus. Palming off troops like your chaps with a pittance. Thirty thousand sesterces each when there were eight thousand talents in Tigranocerta!"

  “Did he palm us off?'' asked Cornificius, astonished. "He has always said he preferred to divide the spoils on the field instead of after his triumph because the Treasury couldn't cheat us!"

  "That's what he intends you to think," said Clodius, his cup of wine slopping drunkenly. "Can you do sums?"

  "Sums?"

  "You know, add and subtract and multiply and divide."

  "Oh. A bit," said Silius, not wanting to seem untutored.

  "Well, one of the advantages of having your own pedagogue when you're young is that you have to do sum after sum after sum after sum. Flogged raw if you don't!" Clodius giggled. "So I sat down and did a few sums, like multiplying talents into good old Roman sesterces, then dividing by fifteen thousand. And I can tell you, Marcus Silius, that the men in your two legions should have got ten times thirty thousand sesterces each! That supercilious, haughty mentula of a brother-in-law of mine went out into that marketplace looking generous and proceeded to shove his fist right up every Fimbrianus arse!" Clodius smacked his right fist into his left palm. "Hear that? Well, that's soft compared to Lucullus's fist up your arses!"

  They believed him not only because they wanted to believe him, but also because he spoke with such absolute authority, then proceeded to reel off one set of figures after another as quickly as he could blink, a litany of Lucullus's peculations since he had come east six years before to take command of the Fimbriani yet again. How could anyone who knew so much be wrong? And what was in it for him to lie? Silius and Cornificius believed him.

  After that it was easy. While the Fimbriani roistered their way through winter in Tigranocerta, Publius Clodius whispered in the ears of their centurions, and their centurions whispered in the ears of the rankers, and the rankers whispered in the ears of the Galatian troopers. Some of the men had left women behind in A
misus, and when the two Cilician legions under Sornatius and Fabius Hadrianus marched from Amisus to Zela, the women trailed behind as soldiers' women always do. Hardly anyone could write, and yet the word spread all the way from Tigranocerta to Pontus that Lucullus had consistently cheated the army of its proper share in the booty. Nor did anyone bother to check Clodius's arithmetic. It was preferable to believe they had been cheated when the reward for thinking so was ten times what Lucullus said they were to get. Besides which, Clodius was so brilliant! He was incapable of making an arithmetical or statistical mistake! What Clodius said was sure to be right! Clever Clodius. He had learned the secret of demagoguery: tell people what they want most to hear, never tell them what they don't want to hear.

  In the meantime Lucullus had not been idle, despite voyages into rare manuscripts and underaged girls. He had made quick trips to Syria, and sent all the displaced Greeks back to their homes. The southern empire of Tigranes was disintegrating, and Lucullus intended to be sure that Rome inherited. For there was a third eastern king who represented a threat to Rome, King Phraates of the Parthians. Sulla had concluded a treaty with his father giving everything west of the Euphrates to Rome, and everything east of the Euphrates to the Kingdom of the Parthians.

  When Lucullus sold the thirty million medimni of wheat he found in Tigranocerta to the Parthians, he had done so to prevent its filling Armenian bellies. But as barge after barge sped down the Tigris toward Mesopotamia and the Kingdom of the Parthians, King Phraates sent him a message asking for a fresh treaty with Rome along the same lines: everything west of the Euphrates to be Rome's, everything east to belong to King Phraates. Then Lucullus learned that Phraates was also treating with the refugee Tigranes, who was promising to hand back those seventy valleys in Media Atropatene in return for Parthian aid against Rome. They were devious, these eastern kings, and never to be trusted; they owned eastern values, and eastern values shifted about like sand.

  At which point visions of wealth beyond any Roman dream suddenly popped into Lucullus's mind. Imagine what would be found in Seleuceia-on-Tigris, in Ctesiphon, in Babylonia, in Susa! If two Roman legions and fewer than three thousand Galatian cavalrymen could virtually eliminate an Armenian grand army, four Roman legions and the Galatian horse could conquer all the way down Mesopotamia to the Mare Erythraeum! What could the Parthians offer by way of resistance that Tigranes had not? From cataphracts to Zoroastrian fire, the army of Lucullus had dealt with everything. All he needed to do was fetch the two Cilician legions from Pontus.

  Lucullus made up his mind within moments. In the spring he would invade Mesopotamia and crush the Kingdom of the Parthians. What a shock that would be for the knights of the Ordo Equester and their senatorial partisans! Lucius Licinius Lucullus would show them. And show the entire world.

  Off went a summons to Sornatius in Zela: bring the Cilician legions to Tigranocerta immediately. We march for Babylonia and Elymais. We will be immortal. We will drag the whole of the East into the province of Rome and eliminate the last of her enemies.

  Naturally Publius Clodius heard all about these plans when he visited the wing of the main palace wherein Lucullus had set up his residence. In fact, Lucullus was feeling more kindly disposed toward his young brother-in-law these days, for Clodius had kept out of his way and hadn't tried to make mischief among the junior military tribunes, a habit he had fallen into on the march from Pontus the year before.

  "I'll make Rome richer than she's ever been," said Lucullus happily, his long face softer these days. "Marcus Crassus prates on about the wealth to be had for the taking in Egypt, but the Kingdom of the Parthians makes Egypt look impoverished. From the Indus to the Euphrates, King Phraates exacts tribute. But after I'm done with Phraates, all that tribute will flow into our dear Rome. We'll have to build a new Treasury to hold it!"

  Clodius hastened to see Silius and Cornificius.

  "What do you think of his idea?" asked Clodius prettily.

  The two centurions thought very little of it, as they made clear through Silius.

  "You don't know the plains," he said to Clodius, "but we do. We've been everywhere. A summer campaign working down the Tigris all the way to Elymais? In that kind of heat and humidity? Parthians grow up in heat and humidity. Whereas we'll die."

  Clodius's mind had been on plunder, not climate, but he thought of climate now. A march into sunstroke and sweat cramps under Lucullus? Worse than anything he had endured so far!

  "All right," he said briskly, "then we had better make sure the campaign never happens."

  "The Cilician legions!" said Silius instantly. "Without them we can't march into country as flat as a board. Lucullus knows that. Four legions to form a perfect defensive square."

  "He's sent off to Sornatius already," said Clodius, frowning.

  "His messenger will travel like the wind, but Sornatius won't muster for a march in under a month," said Cornificius confidently. "He's on his own in Zela, Fabius Hadrianus went off to Pergamum."

  "How do you know that?" asked Clodius, curious.

  "We got our sources," said Silius grinning. "What we have to do is send someone of our own to Zela."

  "To do what?"

  "To tell the Cilicians to stay where they are. Once they hear where the army's going, they'll down tools and refuse to budge. If Lucullus was there he'd manage to shift them, but Sornatius don't have the clout or the gumption to deal with mutiny."

  Clodius pretended to look horrified. "Mutiny?" he squeaked.

  "Not really proper mutiny," soothed Silius. "Those chaps will be happy to fight for Rome—provided they does it in Pontus. So how can it be classified as a proper mutiny?"

  "True," said Clodius, appearing relieved. "Whom can you send to Zela?" he asked.

  "My own batman," said Cornificius, rising to his feet. "No time to waste, I'll get him started now."

  Which left Clodius and Silius alone.

  "You've been a terrific help to us," said Silius gratefully. "We're real glad to know you, Publius Clodius."

  "Not as glad as I am to know you, Marcus Silius."

  "Knew another young patrician real well once," said Silius, reflectively turning his golden goblet between his hands.

  “Did you?'' asked Clodius, genuinely interested; one never knew where such conversations led, what might emerge to become grist in a Clodian mill. "Who? When?"

  "Mitylene, a good eleven or twelve years ago." Silius spat on the marble floor. "Another Lucullus campaign! Never seem to get rid of him. We was herded together into one cohort, the chaps Lucullus decided were too dangerous to be reliable—we still thought a lot about Fimbria in those days. So Lucullus decided to throw us to the arrows, and put this pretty baby in command. Twenty, I think he was. Gaius Julius Caesar."

  "Caesar?" Clodius sat up alertly. "I know him— well, I know of him, anyway. Lucullus hates him."

  "Did then too. That's why he was thrown to the arrows along with us. But it didn't work out that way. Talk about cool! He was like ice. And fight? Jupiter, he could fight! Never stopped thinking, that was what made him so good. Saved my life in that battle, not to mention everyone else's. But mine was personal. Still don't know how he managed to do it. I thought I was ashes on the fire, Publius Clodius, ashes on the fire."

  "He won a Civic Crown," said Clodius. "That's how I remember him so well. There aren't too many advocates appear in a court wearing a crown of oak leaves on their heads. Sulla's nephew."

  "And Gaius Marius's nephew," said Silius. "Told us that at the start of the battle."

  "That's right, one of his aunts married Marius and the other one married Sulla." Clodius looked pleased. "Well, he's some sort of cousin of mine, Marcus Silius, so that accounts for it."

  "Accounts for what?"

  "His bravery and the fact you liked him!"

  "Did like him too. Was sorry when he went back to Rome with Thermus and the Asian soldiers."

  "And the poor old Fimbriani had to stay behind as always," said Clodius softly.
"Well, be of good cheer! I'm writing to everyone I know in Rome to get that senatorial decree lifted!"

  "You," said Silius, his eyes filling with tears, "are the Soldiers' Friend, Publius Clodius. We won't forget."

  Clodius looked thrilled. "The Soldiers' Friend? Is that what you call me?"

  "That's what we call you."

  "I won't forget either, Marcus Silius."

  Halfway through March a frostbitten and exhausted messenger arrived from Pontus to inform Lucullus that the Cilician legions had refused to move from Zela. Sornatius and Fabius Hadrianus had done everything they could think of, but the Cilicians would not budge, even after Governor Dolabella sent a stern warning. Nor was that the only unsettling news from Zela. Somehow, wrote Sornatius, the troops of the two Cilician legions had been led to believe that Lucullus had cheated them of their fair share in all booty divided since Lucullus had returned to the East six years earlier. It was undoubtedly the prospect of the heat along the Tigris had caused the mutiny, but the myth that Lucullus was a cheat and a liar had not helped.

  The window at which Lucullus sat looked out across the city in the direction of Mesopotamia; Lucullus stared blindly toward the distant horizon of low mountains and tried to cope with the dissolution of what had become a possible, tangible dream. The fools, the idiots! He, a Licinius Lucullus, to exact petty sums from men under his command? He, a Licinius Lucullus, to descend to the level of those grasping get-rich-quick publicani in Rome? Who had done that? Who had spread a rumor like that? And why hadn't they been able to see for themselves that it was untrue? A few simple calculations, that was all it would have taken.