Caesar's Women Read online

  Catilina's defense was simple. Yes, he had indeed lopped off the head of his brother-in-law, Marcus Marius Gratidianus; he did not deny the deed because he could not deny the deed. But at the time he had been one of Sulla's legates, and he had acted under Sulla's orders. Sulla had wanted Marius Gratidianus's head to fire into Praeneste as a missile aimed at convincing Young Marius that he couldn't succeed in defying Sulla any longer.

  Caesar presided over a court which listened patiently to the prosecutor Lucius Lucceius and his team of supporting counsel, and realized very soon that it was a court which had no intention of convicting Catilina. Nor did it. The verdict came in ABSOLVO by a large majority, and even Cato afterward was unable to find hard evidence that Crassus had needed to bribe.

  "I told you so," said Caesar to Cato.

  "It isn't over yet!" barked Cato, and stalked off.

  There were seven candidates for the consulship when the nominations closed, and the field was an interesting one. His acquittal meant Catilina had declared himself, and he had to be regarded as a virtual certainty for one of the two posts. As Cato had said, he had the blood. He was also the same charming and persuasive man he had been at the time he wooed the Vestal Virgin Fabia, so his following was very large. If too it consisted of too many men who skated perilously close to ruin, that did not negate its power. Besides which, it was now generally known that Marcus Crassus supported him, and Marcus Crassus commanded very many of the First Class of voters.

  Servilia's husband Silanus was another candidate, though his health was not good; had he been hale and hearty, he would have had little trouble in gathering enough votes to be elected. But the fate of Quintus Marcius Rex, doomed to be sole consul by the deaths of his junior colleague and then the suffect replacement, intruded into everyone's mind. Silanus didn't look as if he would last out his year, and no one thought it wise to let Catilina hold the reins of Rome without a colleague, Crassus notwithstanding.

  Another likely candidate was the vile Gaius Antonius Hybrida, whom Caesar had tried unsuccessfully to prosecute for the torture, maiming and murder of many Greek citizens during Sulla's Greek wars. Hybrida had eluded justice, but public opinion inside Rome had forced him to go into a voluntary exile on the island of Cephallenia; the discovery of some grave mounds had yielded him fabulous wealth, so when he returned to Rome to find himself expelled from the Senate, Hybrida simply started again. First he re-entered the Senate by becoming a tribune of the plebs; then in the following year he bribed his way into a praetorship, ardently supported by that ambitious and able New Man Cicero, who had cause to be grateful to him. Poor Cicero had found himself in a severe financial embarrassment brought about by his passion for collecting Greek statues and installing them in a plethora of country villas; it was Hybrida who lent him the money to extricate himself. Ever since then Cicero spoke up for him, and was doing so at the moment so strenuously that it could safely be deduced that he and Hybrida were planning to run as a team for the consulship, Cicero lending their campaign respectability and Hybrida putting up the money.

  The man who might have offered Catilina the stiffest competition was undoubtedly Marcus Tullius Cicero, but the trouble was that Cicero had no ancestors; he was a homo novus, a New Man. Sheer legal and oratorical brilliance had pushed him steadily up the cursus honorum, but much of the First Class of the Centuries deemed him a presumptuous hayseed, as did the boni. Consuls ought to be men of proven Roman origins, and from illustrious families. Though everyone knew Cicero to be an honest man of high ability (and knew Catilina to be extremely shady), still and all the feeling in Rome was that Catilina deserved the consulship ahead of Cicero.

  After Catilina was acquitted, Cato held a conference with Bibulus and Ahenobarbus, who had been quaestor two years before; all three were now in the Senate, which meant they were now fully entrenched within the ultra-conservative rump, the boni.

  "We cannot permit Catilina to be elected consul!" brayed Cato. "He's seduced the rapacious Marcus Crassus into supporting him."

  "I agree," said Bibulus calmly. "Between the two of them, they'll wreak havoc on the mos maiorum. The Senate will be full of Gauls, and Rome will have another province to worry about."

  "What do we do?" asked Ahenobarbus, a young man more famous for the quality of his temper than his intellect.

  "We seek an interview with Catulus and Hortensius," Bibulus said, "and between us we work out a way to swing opinion in the First Class from the idea of Catilina as consul." He cleared his throat. "However, I suggest that we appoint Cato the leader of our deputation."

  "I refuse to be a leader of any kind!" yelled Cato.

  "Yes, I know that," Bibulus said patiently, "but the fact remains that ever since the Great Treasury War you've become a symbol to most of Rome. You may be the youngest of us, but you're also the most respected. Catulus and Hortensius are well aware of that. Therefore you will act as our spokesman."

  "It ought to be you" from Cato, annoyed.

  "The boni are against men thinking themselves better than their peers, and I am of the boni, Marcus. Whoever is the most suitable on a particular day is the spokesman. Today, that's you."

  "What I don't understand," said Ahenobarbus, "is why we have to seek an audience at all. Catulus is our leader, he ought to be summoning us."

  "He's not himself," Bibulus explained. "When Caesar humiliated him in the House over that battering-ram business, he lost clout." The cool silvery gaze transferred to Cato. "Nor were you very tactful, Marcus, when you humiliated him in public while Vibius was on trial for fraud. Caesar was self-evident, but a man loses huge amounts of clout when his own adherents upbraid him."

  "He shouldn't have said what he did to me!"

  Bibulus sighed. "Sometimes, Cato, you're more a liability than an asset!"

  The note asking Catulus for an audience was under Cato's seal, and written by Cato. Catulus summoned his brother-in-law Hortensius (Catulus was married to Hortensius's sister, Hortensia, and Hortensius was married to Catulus's sister, Lutatia) feeling a small glow of pleasure; that Cato should seek his help was balm to his wounded pride.

  "I agree that Catilina cannot be allowed the consulship," he said stiffly. "His deal with Marcus Crassus is now public property because the man can't resist an opportunity to boast, and at this stage he's convinced he can't lose. I've been thinking a lot about the problem, and I've come to the conclusion that we ought to use Catilina's boasting of his alliance with Marcus Crassus. There are many knights who esteem Crassus, but only because there are limitations to his power. I predict that droves of knights won't want to see Crassus's influence increased by an influx of clients from across the Padus, as well as from all that Egyptian money. If they thought Crassus would share Egypt with them, it would be different, but luckily everyone knows Crassus won't share. Though technically Egypt would belong to Rome, in actual fact it would become the private kingdom of Marcus Licinius Crassus to rape to his heart's content."

  "The trouble is," said Quintus Hortensius, "that the rest of the field is horribly unappealing. Silanus, yes—if he were a well man, which he's so obviously not. Besides which, he declined to take a province after his term as praetor on the grounds of ill health, and that won't impress the voters. Some of the candidates—Minucius Thermus, for example—are hopeless."

  "There's Antonius Hybrida," said Ahenobarbus.

  Bibulus's lip curled. "If we take Hybrida—a bad man, but so monumentally inert that he won't do the State any harm—we also have to take that self-opinionated pimple Cicero."

  A gloomy silence fell, broken by Catulus.

  “Then the real decision is, which one of two unpalatable men is the preferable alternative?" he said slowly. "Do the boni want Catilina with Crassus triumphantly pulling his strings, or do we want a low-class braggart like Cicero lording it over us?"

  "Cicero," said Hortensius.

  "Cicero," said Bibulus.

  "Cicero," said Ahenobarbus.

  And, very reluctantly from Cato
, "Cicero."

  "Very well," said Catulus, "Cicero it is. Ye Gods, I'll find it hard to hang on to my gorge in the House next year! A jumped-up New Man as one of Rome's consuls. Tchah!"

  "Then I suggest," said Hortensius, pulling a face, “that we all eat very sparingly before meetings of the Senate next year."

  The group dispersed to go to work, and for a month they worked very hard indeed. Much to Catulus's chagrin it became obvious that Cato, barely thirty years old, was the one who had the most clout. The Great Treasury War and all those proscription rewards safely back in the State coffers had made a terrific impression on the First Class, who had been the ones to suffer most under Sulla's proscriptions. Cato was a hero to the Ordo Equester, and if Cato said to vote for Cicero and Hybrida, then that was whom every knight lower than the Eighteen would vote for!

  The result was that the consuls-elect were Marcus Tullius Cicero in senior place and Gaius Antonius Hybrida as his junior colleague. Cicero was jubilant, never really understanding that he owed his victory to circumstances having nothing to do with merit or integrity or clout. Had Catilina not been a candidate, Cicero would never have been elected at all. But as no one told him this, he strutted around Forum Romanum and Senate in a daze of happiness liberally larded with conceit. Oh, what a year! Senior consul in suo anno, the proud father of a son at last, and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Tullia, formally betrothed to the wealthy and august Gaius Calpurnius Piso Frugi. Even Terentia was being nice to him

  !

  When Lucius Decumius heard that the present consuls, Lucius Caesar and Marcius Figulus, proposed to legislate the crossroads colleges out of existence, he was thrown into a panic-stricken rage and horror, and ran immediately to see his patron, Caesar.

  "This," he said wrathfully, "is just not fair! When has we ever done anything wrong? We minds our own business!"

  A statement which threw Caesar into a dilemma, for he of course knew the circumstances leading to the proposed new law.

  It all went back to the consulship of Gaius Piso three years earlier, and to the tribunate of the plebs of Pompey's man, Gaius Manilius. It had been Aulus Gabinius's job to secure the eradication of the pirates for Pompey; now it became Gaius Manilius's job to secure the command against the two kings for Pompey. In one way an easier job, thanks to Pompey's brilliant handling of the pirates, yet in another way a more difficult job, as those opposed to special commands could see only too clearly that Pompey was a man of enormous ability who might just use this new commission to make himself Dictator when he returned victorious from the East. And with Gaius Piso as sole consul, Manilius faced an adamant and irascible foe in the Senate.

  At first glance Manilius's initial bill seemed harmless and irrelevant to Pompey's concerns: he merely asked the Plebeian Assembly to distribute Rome's citizen freedmen across the full gamut of the thirty-five tribes, instead of keeping them confined to two urban tribes, Suburana and Esquilina. But no one was fooled. Manilius's bill directly affected senators and senior knights, as they were both the major slave owners and those who had multitudes of freedmen in their clienteles.

  A stranger to the way Rome worked might have been pardoned for assuming that the law of numbers would ensure that any measure altering the status of Rome's freedmen would make no difference, for the definition of abject poverty in Rome was a man's inability to own one slave— and there were few indeed who did not own one slave. Therefore on the surface any plebiscite distributing freedmen across all thirty-five tribes should have little effect on the top end of society. But such was not the case.

  The vast majority of slave owners in Rome kept no more than that single slave, or perhaps two slaves. But these were not male slaves; they were female. For two reasons: the first, that her master could enjoy a female slave's sexual favors, and the second, that a male slave was a temptation to the master's wife, and the paternity of his children suspect in consequence. After all, what need had a poor man for a male slave? Servile duties were domestic—washing, fetching water, preparing meals, assisting with the children, emptying chamber pots—and not well done by men. Attitudes of mind didn't change just because a person was unlucky enough to be slave rather than free; men liked to do men's things, and despised the lot of women as drudgery.

  Theoretically every slave was paid a peculium and got his or her keep besides; the little sum of money was hoarded to buy freedom. But practically, freedom was something only the well-to-do master could afford to bestow, especially since manumission carried a five percent tax. With the result that the bulk of Rome's female slaves were never freed while useful (and, fearing destitution more than unpaid labor, they contrived to remain useful even after they grew old). Nor could they afford to belong to a burial club enabling them to buy a funeral after death, together with decent interment. They wound up in the lime pits without so much as a grave marker to say they had ever existed.

  Only those Romans with a relatively high income and a number of households to maintain owned many slaves. The higher a Roman's social and economic status, the more servants in his employ—and the more likely he was to have males among them. In these echelons manumission was common and a slave's service limited to between ten and fifteen years, after which he (it was usually he) became a freedman in the clientele of his previous master. He donned the Cap of Liberty and became a Roman citizen; if he had a wife and adult children, they too were freed.

  His vote, however, was useless unless—as did happen from time to time—he made a large amount of money and bought himself membership in one of the thirty-one rural tribes, as well as being economically qualified to belong to a Class in the Centuries. But the great majority remained in the urban tribes of Suburana and Esquilina, which were the two most enormous tribes Rome owned, yet were able to deliver only two votes in the tribal Assemblies. This meant that a freedman's vote could not affect a tribal Assembly vote result.

  Gaius Manilius's projected bill therefore had huge significance. Were Rome's freedmen to be distributed across the thirty-five tribes, they might alter the outcome of tribal elections and legislation, and this despite the fact that they were not in a majority among the citizens of Rome. The prospective danger lay in the fact that freed-men lived inside the city; were they to belong to rural tribes, they could by voting in these rural tribes outnumber the genuine rural tribe members present inside Rome during a vote. Not such a problem for the elections, held during summer when many rural people were inside Rome, but a serious peril for legislation. Legislation happened at any time of year, but was particularly prevalent during December, January and February, the months which saw the lawmaking pinnacle of the new tribunes of the plebs—and months when rural citizens did not come to Rome.

  Manilius's bill went down to decisive defeat. The freedmen remained in those two gigantic urban tribes. But where it spelled trouble for men like Lucius Decumius lay in the fact that Manilius had sought out Rome's freedmen to drum up support for his bill. And where did Rome's freedmen congregate? In crossroads colleges, as they were convivial places as stuffed with slaves and freedmen as they were with ordinary Roman lowly. Manilius had gone from one crossroads college to another, talking to the men his law would benefit, persuading them to go to the Forum and support him. Knowing themselves possessed of worthless votes, many freedmen had obliged him. But when the Senate and the senior knights of the Eighteen saw these masses of freedmen descend on the Forum, all they could think of was the danger. Anyplace where freedmen gathered ought to be outlawed. The crossroads colleges would have to go.

  A crossroads was a hotbed of spiritual activity, and had to be guarded against evil forces. It was a place where the Lares congregated, and the Lares were the myriad wraiths which peopled the Underworld and found a natural focus for their forces at a crossroads. Thus each crossroads had a shrine to the Lares, and once a year around the start of January a festival called the Compitalia was devoted to the placation of the Lares of the crossroads. On the night before the Compitalia every free resident of t
he district leading to a crossroads was obliged to hang up a woolen doll, and every slave a woolen ball; in Rome the shrines were so overwhelmed by dolls and balls that one of the duties of the crossroads colleges was to rig up lines to hold them. Dolls had heads, and a free person had a head counted by the censors; balls had no heads, for slaves were not counted. Slaves were, however, an important part of the festivities. As on the Saturnalia, they feasted as equals with the free men and women of Rome, and it was the duty of slaves (stripped of their servile insignia) to make the offering of a fattened pig to the Lares. All of which was under the authority of the crossroads colleges and the urban praetor, their supervisor.

  Thus a crossroads college was a religious brotherhood. Each one had a custodian, the vilicus, who made sure that the men of his district gathered regularly in rent-free premises close to the crossroads and the Lares shrine; they kept the shrine and the crossroads neat, clean, unattractive to evil forces. Many of Rome's intersections did not have a shrine, as these were limited to the major junctions.

  One such crossroads college lay in the ground-floor apex of Aurelia's insula under the care of Lucius Decumius. Until Aurelia had tamed him after she moved into her insula, Lucius Decumius had run an extremely profitable side business guaranteeing protection to the shop owners and factory proprietors in his district; when Aurelia exerted that formidable strength of hers and demonstrated to Lucius Decumius that she was not to be gainsaid, he solved his quandary by moving his protection business to the outer Sacra Via and the Vicus Fabricii, where the local colleges were lacking in such enterprise. Though his census was of the Fourth Class and his tribe urban Suburana, Lucius Decumius was definitely a power to be reckoned with.