5. Caesar Read online

  "They can get to the sea for fish, eels and sea-bird eggs," said Trebonius. "Thank you, I'm happy with freshwater fish, and my servants can keep chickens." "Caesar definitely thinks there's going to be trouble." "Either that, or he's cultivating an excuse not to have to return to Italian Gaul for the winter." "Eh?" "Oh, Trebonius, he doesn't want to have to face all those Romans! He'd be accepting condolences from Salona to Ocelum, and spend the whole winter terrified that he might break down." Trebonius stopped, his rather mournful grey eyes startled. "I didn't know you understood him so well, Labienus." "I've been with him since he came among the Long-hairs." "But Romans don't consider it unmanly to weep!" "Nor did he when he was young. But he wasn't Caesar then in anything but name." "Eh?" "It's not a name anymore," said Labienus with rare patience. "It's a symbol." "Oh!" Trebonius resumed walking. "I miss Decimus Brutus!" he said suddenly. "Sabinus is no substitute." "He'll be back. You all itch for Rome occasionally." "Except you." Caesar's senior legate grunted. "I know when I'm well off." "So do I. Samarobriva! Imagine, Labienus! I'll be living in a real house with heated floors and a bathtub." "Sybarite," said Labienus.

  Correspondence with the Senate was copious and had to be attended to before anything else, which kept Caesar busy for three days. Outside the General's wooden house the legions were on the move, not a process which created a great deal of fuss or noise; the paperwork could proceed in tranquillity. Even the torpid Gaius Trebatius was flung into the whirlpool, for Caesar had a habit of dictating to three secretaries at once, pacing between the figures hunched over their waxed tablets, giving each a couple of rapid sentences before going on to the next one, never tangling subjects or thoughts. It was his awesome capacity for work had won Trebatius's heart. Difficult to hate a man who could keep so many pots on the boil at one and the same time. But finally the personal letters had to be dealt with, for more communications from Rome kept coming in every day. It was eight hundred miles from Portus Itius to Rome along roads which were often rivers in Gaul of the Long-hairs until, way down in the Province, the highways of Via Domitia and Via Aemilia took over. Caesar kept a group of couriers perpetually riding or boating between Rome and wherever he was, and expected a minimum of fifty miles a day from them. Thus he received the latest news from Rome in less than two nundinae, and ensured that his isolation did not negate his influence. Which grew and grew in direct proportion to his ever-increasing wealth. Britannia may not have provided much, but Gaul of the Long-hairs had yielded mountains. Caesar had a German freedman, Burgundus, whom he had inherited from Gaius Marius when Marius had died in Caesar's fifteenth year of life. A happy bequest; Burgundus had fitted into adolescence and manhood indispensably. Until as recently as a year ago he had still been with Caesar, who, seeing his age, had retired him to Rome, where he cared for Caesar's lands, Caesar's mother and Caesar's wife. His tribe had been the Cimbri, and though he had been a boy when Marius had annihilated the Cimbri and the Teutones, he knew the story of his people. According to Burgundus, the tribal treasures of the Cimbri and the Teutones had been left for safekeeping among their relatives the Atuatuci, with whom they had stayed over the winter before embarking on their invasion of Italia. Only six thousand of them had made it back to the lands of the Atuatuci out of a horde numbering over three-quarters of a million men, women and children, and there the survivors of Marius's massacre had settled down, become Atuatuci rather than Cimbri. And there the tribal treasures of the Cimbri and Teutones had remained. In his second year in Gaul of the Long-hairs Caesar had gone into the lands of the Nervii, who fought on foot and lived along the Mosa below the lands of the Eburones, to which a dismayed and unhappy Sabinus was at present conveying the Thirteenth Legion and an even more dismayed and unhappy Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta. A battle had been fought, the famous one during which the Nervii stayed on the field to die rather than live as defeated men; but Caesar had been merciful and allowed their women, children and old ones to return unmolested to their undamaged homes. The Atuatuci were the next people upstream of the Nervii on the Mosa. Even though Caesar himself had sustained heavy losses, he was able to continue campaigning, and moved next on the Atuatuci. Who retreated inside their oppidum, Atuatuca, a fortress upon a hill overlooking the mighty forest of the Arduenna. Caesar had besieged and taken Atuatuca, but the Atuatuci did not fare as well as the Nervii had. Because they had lied to him and tried to trick him, Caesar massed the whole tribe in a field near the razed oppidum, summoned the slavers who always lurked among the Roman baggage train, and sold the entire tribe in one unculled lot to the highest bidder. Fifty-three thousand Atuatuci had gone on the auction block, a seemingly endless crocodile of bewildered, weeping and dispossessed people who had been driven through the lands of the other tribes all the way to the great slave market of Massilia, where they were divided, culled, and sold again. It had been a shrewd move. Those other tribes had all been on the verge of revolt, unable to believe that the Nervii and the Atuatuci in their many thousands would not annihilate the Romans. But the crocodile of captives told a different story; the revolt never happened. Gaul of the Long-hairs began to wonder just who these Romans were, with their tiny little armies of splendidly equipped troops who behaved as if they were one man, didn't just fall on the enemy in a screaming, undisciplined mass, nor work themselves into a battle frenzy capable of carrying them through anything. They had been feared for generations, but not with realism; until Caesar, they were bogeys to terrify children. Inside the Atuatuci oppidum Caesar found the tribal treasures of the Cimbri and Teutones, the masses of gold artifacts and bullion they had brought with them centuries before when they emigrated from the lands of the Scythians, rich in gold, emeralds, sapphires, then left behind in Atuatuca. It was the General's right to take all the profits from the sale of slaves, but spoils belonged to the Treasury and every echelon of the army from its commander-in-chief to the ranker soldiers. Even so, by the time that the inventories had been done and the great wagon train bearing the booty was on its way under heavy guard to Rome for storage against the day the General triumphed, Caesar knew that his money worries were over for life. Sale of the Atuatuci tribe into slavery had netted him two thousand talents, and his share of the booty would net him more than that. His ranker soldiers would be rich men, his legates able to buy their way to the consulship. Which had been only the start. The Gauls mined silver and panned and sluiced for alluvial gold in the rivers which came down from the Cebenna massif. They were consummate artisans and clever steel-smiths; even a confiscated pile of iron-tired wheels or properly cooped barrels represented money. And every sestertius Caesar sent to Rome increased his personal share of public worth and standing his dignitas. The pain of losing Julia would never go away, and Caesar was no Crassus. Money to him was not an end in itself; it was merely a means to the end of enhancing his dignitas, a lifeless commodity which those years of frightful debt as he climbed the magisterial ladder had taught him was of paramount importance in the scheme of things. Whatever enhanced his dignitas would contribute to the dignitas of his dead daughter. A consolation. His efforts and her own instinct to inspire love would ensure that she was remembered for herself, not remembered because she had been the daughter of Caesar and the wife of Pompey the Great. And when he returned to Rome in triumph, he would celebrate the funeral games which the Senate had denied her. Even if, as he had once said to the assembled Conscript Fathers of the Senate on another subject, he had to crush their genitals with his boot to achieve his purpose.

  * * *

  There were many letters. Some were mainly devoted to business, as was true of those from his most faithful adherent, Balbus the Spanish banker from Gades, and Gaius Oppius the Roman banker. His present wealth had also caught an even shrewder financial magician in his net: Gaius Rabirius Postumus, whose thanks for reorganizing the shambles of the Egyptian public accounting system had been to be stripped naked by King Ptolemy Auletes and his Alexandrian minions, and shoved penniless on a ship bound for Rome. It had been Caesar who lent him the mon
ey to get started again. And Caesar who made a vow that one day he would collect the money Egypt owed Rabirius Postumus in person. There were letters from Cicero, squawking and clucking about the welfare of his younger brother, Quintus. Warm with sympathy for Caesar's loss, for Cicero was, despite all that vainglorious posturing and conceit, a genuinely kind and loving sort of man. Ah! A scroll from Brutus! Turning thirty this coming year, and therefore about to enter the Senate as a quaestor. Caesar had written to him just before leaving for Britannia, asking him to join the staff as his personally requested quaestor. Crassus's older son, Publius, had quaestored for him through several years, and this year he had Publius's younger brother, Marcus Crassus, as quaestor. A wonderful pair of fellows, but the main duties of a quaestor were to run the finances; Caesar had assumed that sons of Crassus were bound to have accounting talents, but it hadn't worked out that way. Terrific leading legions, but couldn't add X and X. Whereas Brutus was a plutocrat in senatorial clothing, had a genius for making money and managing money. At the moment fat Trebatius was doing the figure-work, but, strictly speaking, it was not his job. Brutus... Even after so long, Caesar still experienced a twinge of guilt every time he thought of that name. Brutus had loved Julia so much, patiently waited through more than ten years of betrothal for her to grow up to proper marriageable age. But then a veritable gift from the Gods had landed in Caesar's lap: Julia had fallen madly in love with Pompey the Great, and he with her. Which meant that Caesar could bind Pompey to his cause with the most delicate and silken of ropes, his own daughter. He broke her engagement to Brutus (who had been known by his adopted name of Servilius Caepio in those days) and married her to Pompey. Not an easy situation, quite above and beyond Brutus's shattered heart. Brutus's mother, Servilia, had been Caesar's mistress for years. To keep her sweet after that insult had cost him a pearl worth six million sesterces.

  I thank you for your offer, Caesar. Very kind of you to think of me and remember that I am due for election as a quaestor this year. Unfortunately I am not yet sure that I have my quaestorship, as the elections are still pending. We hope to know in December, when they say the People in their tribes will elect the quaestors and the tribunes of the soldiers. But I doubt we will see any elections for the senior magistrates. Memmius refuses to step down as a candidate for the consulship, and Uncle Cato has sworn that until Memmius does step down, he will allow no curule elections. Do not, by the way, take any notice of those scurrilous rumors going around about Uncle Cato's divorce from Marcia. Uncle Cato cannot be bought. I am going to Cilicia as the personally requested quaestor of the new governor for next year, Appius Claudius Pulcher. He is now my father-in-law. I married his oldest daughter, Claudia, a month ago. A very nice girl. Once again, thank you for your kind offer. My mother is well. She is, I understand, writing to you herself.

  Take that! Caesar put the curled single sheet of paper down, blinking not with tears but with shock. For six long years Brutus never married. Then my daughter dies, and he is married within nundinae of it. He cherished hope, it seems. Waited for her, sure she would grow very tired of being married to an old man without anything to recommend him beyond his military fame and his money. No birth, no ancestors worth naming. How long would Brutus have waited? I wonder. But she had found her true mate in Pompeius Magnus, nor would he have tired of her. I've always disliked myself for hurting Brutus, though I didn't know how much Julia meant to him until after I had done the deed. Yet it had to be done, no matter who was hurt or how badly. Lady Fortuna gifted me with a daughter beautiful and sprightly enough to enchant the one man I needed desperately. But how can I hold Pompeius Magnus now? Like Brutus, Servilia had written only once to, for example, Cicero's fourteen separate epics. Not a long letter, either. Odd, however, the feeling he experienced when he touched the paper she had touched. As if it had been soaked in some poison designed to be drunk through the fingertips. He closed his eyes and tried to remember her, the sight and the taste, that destructive, intelligent, fierce passion. What would he feel when he saw her again? Almost five years. She would be fifty now to his forty-six. But probably still extremely attractive; she took care of herself, kept her hair as darkly moonless as her heart. For it was not Caesar responsible for the disaster who was Brutus; the blame for Brutus had to be laid squarely at his mother's door.

  I imagine you've already seen Brutus's refusal. Everything always in order, that's you, so men first. At least I have a patrician daughter-in-law, though it isn't easy sharing my house with another woman who is not my own blood daughter and therefore unused to my authority, my way of doing things. Luckily for domestic peace, Claudia is a mouse. I do not imagine Julia would have been, for all her air of fragility. A pity she lacked your steel. That's why she died, of course. Brutus picked Claudia for his wife for one reason. That Picentine upstart Pompeius Magnus was dickering with Appius Claudius to get the girl for his own son, Gnaeus. Who might be half Mucius Scaevola, but doesn't show it in either his face or his nature. He's Pompeius Magnus without the mind. Probably pulls the wings off flies. It appealed to Brutus to steal a bride off the man who had stolen his bride from him. He did it too. Appius Claudius not being Caesar. A shoddy consul and no doubt next year a particularly venal governor for poor Cilicia. He weighed the size of my Brutus's fortune and his impeccable ancestry against Pompeius Magnus's clout and the fact that Pompeius's younger boy, Sextus, is the one who's likely to go farthest, and the scales came down in Brutus's favor. Whereupon Pompeius Magnus had one of those famous temper tantrums. How did Julia deal with them? You could hear the bellows and screeches all over Rome. Appius then did a very clever thing. He offered Pompeius Magnus his next girl, Claudilla, for Gnaeus. Not yet seventeen, but the Pompeii have never been averse to cradle-snatching. So everybody wound up happy. Appius got two sons-in-law worth as much as the Treasury, two horribly plain and colorless girls got eminent husbands, and Brutus won his little war against the First Man in Rome. He's off to Cilicia with his father-in-law, this year they hope, though the Senate is being sticky about granting Appius Claudius leave to go to his province early. Appius responded by informing the Conscript Fathers that he'd go without a lex curiata if he had to, but go he would. The final decision has not yet been made, though my revolting half brother Cato is yammering about special privileges being extended to patricians. You did me no good turn there, Caesar, when you took Julia off my son. He's been as thick as syrup with Uncle Cato ever since. I can't bear the way Cato gloats over me because my son listens more to him these days than he does to me. He's such a hypocrite, Cato. Always prating about the Republic and the mos maiorum and the degeneracy of the old ruling class, yet he can always find a reason why what he wants is a Right Act. The most beautiful thing about having a philosophy, it seems to me, is that it enables its owner to find extenuating circumstances for his own conduct in all situations. Look at his divorcing Marcia. They say every man has a price. I believe that. I also believe that senile old Hortensius coughed up Cato's price. As for Philippus well, he's an Epicure, and the price of infinite pleasure comes high. Speaking of Philippus, I had dinner there a few afternoons ago. It's just as well your niece, Atia, is not a loose woman. Her stepson, young Philippus a very handsome and well-set-up fellow! gazed at her all through dinner the way a bull gazes at the cow on the other side of the fence. Oh, she noticed, but she pretended she didn't. The young man will get no encouragement from her. I just hope Philippus doesn't notice. Otherwise the cozy nest Atia has found herself will go up in flames. She produced the only occupant of her affections for my inspection after the meal was over. Her son, Gaius Octavius. Your great-nephew, he must be. Aged exactly nine it was his birthday. An amazing child, I have to admit it. Oh, if my Brutus had looked like that, Julia would never have consented to marry Pompeius Magnus! The boy's beauty quite took my breath away. And so Julian! If you said he was your son, everybody would believe it. Not that he's very like you, feature by feature, just that he has I really don't know how to describe it. There is something of yo
u about him. On his inside rather than his outside. I was pleased to see, however, that little Gaius Octavius is not utterly perfect. His ears stick out. I told Atia to keep his hair a trifle on the long side. And that is all. I do not intend to offer you my condolences for the death of Julia. You can't make good babies with inferior men. Two tries, neither successful, and the second one cost her life. You gave her to that oaf from Picenum instead of to a man whose breeding was the equal of her own. So be it on your own head.