Caesar (17 page)

from JANUARY until APRIL of 52 B.C.

New Year's Day dawned without any magistrates entering office; Rome existed at the whim of the Senate and the ten tribunes of the plebs. Cato had been true to his word and blocked last year's elections until Pompey's nephew, Gaius Memmius, stepped down as a consular candidate. But it was not until the end of Quinctilis that Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus and Messala Rufus the augur were returned as consuls for the five months of the year remaining. Once in office, they held no elections for this year's men, their reason being the street war which broke out between Publius Clodius and Titus Annius Milo. One, Milo, wanted to be consul, and the other, Clodius, wanted to be praetor; but neither man could condone the presence of his enemy as a fellow senior magistrate. Both Clodius and Milo marshaled their gangs, and Rome erupted into constant violence. Which was not to say that everyday life in most of the city was inconvenienced; the terror was confined to the Forum Romanum and the streets nearest it. So remorseless was the urban conflict that the Senate gave up meeting in its own hallowed chamber, the Curia Hostilia, and meetings of the People and the Plebs in their tribal assemblies were not held at all.

This state of affairs seriously hampered the career of one of Clodius's greatest friends, Mark Antony. He was turned thirty and should already have gone into office as a quaestor, which carried automatic elevation to the Senate among its benefits and offered an enterprising man many opportunities to plump out his purse. If he was appointed quaestor to a province, he managed the governor's finances, usually without supervision; he could fiddle the books, sell tax exemptions, adjust contracts. It was also possible to profit from appointment as one of the three quaestors who remained inside Rome to manage the Treasury's finances; he could (for a price) alter the records to wipe out someone's debt, or make sure someone else received sums from the Treasury to which he was not entitled. Therefore Mark Antony, always in debt, was hungry to assume his quaestor ship. No one had asked for him by name among the governors, which rather annoyed him when he summoned up the energy to think about it. Caesar, the most open-handed of all governors, was his close cousin and should have asked for him by name. He'd asked for the sons of Marcus Crassus by name, yet the only claim they had on him was the great friendship between their father and Caesar. Then this year Caesar had asked for Servilia's son, Brutus, by name! And been turned down for his pains, a fact which Brutus's uncle Cato had trumpeted from one end of Rome to the other. While Brutus's monster of a mother, who reveled in being Caesar's mistress, tormented her half brother by feeding the gossip network with delicious little titbits about Cato's selling of his wife to silly old Hortensius!

Antony's uncle Lucius Caesar (invited to Gaul this year as one of Caesar's senior legates) had refused to ask Caesar to name him as quaestor, so Antony's mother (who was Lucius Caesar's only sister) had written instead. Caesar's reply was cool and abrupt: “it would do Marcus Antonius a great deal of good to take his chances in the lots, so no, Julia Antonia, I will not request your precious oldest son.”

After all, said Antony discontentedly to Clodius, “I did very well out in Syria with Gabinius! Led his cavalry like a real expert. Gabinius never moved without me.”

“The new Labienus,” said Clodius, grinning.

The Clodius Club still met, despite the defection of Marcus Caelius Rufus and those two famous fellatrices Sempronia Tuditani and Palla. The trial and acquittal of Caelius on the charge of attempting to poison Clodius's favorite sister, Clodia, had aged that pair of repulsive sexual acrobats so strikingly that they preferred to stay at home and avoid mirrors. While the Clodius Club flourished regardless. The members were meeting, as always, in Clodius's house on the Palatine, the new one he had bought from Scaurus for fourteen and a half million sesterces. A lovely place, spacious and exquisitely furnished. The dining room, where they all lolled at the moment on Tyrian purple couches, was adorned with startlingly three-dimensional panels of black-and-white cubes sandwiched between softly dreamy Arcadian landscapes. Since the season was early autumn, the big doors onto the peristyle colonnade were flung open, allowing the Clodius Club to gaze at a long marble pool decked with tritons and dolphins, and, atop the fountain in the pool's center, a stunning sculpture of the merman Amphitryon driving a scallop shell drawn by horses with fish's tails, superbly painted to lifelike animation. Curio the Younger was there; Pompeius Rufus, full brother of Caesar's abysmally stupid ex-wife, Pompeia Sulla; Decimus Brutus, son of Sempronia Tuditani; and a newer member, Plancus Bursa. Plus the three women, of course. All of them belonged to Publius Clodius: his sisters, Clodia and Clodilla, and his wife, Fulvia, to whom Clodius was so devoted he never moved without her.

“Well, Caesar's asked me to come back to him in Gaul, and I'm tempted to go,” said Decimus Brutus, unconsciously rubbing salt into Antony's wounds.

Antony stared at him resentfully. Not much to look at aside from a certain air of ruthless competence—slight, of average height, so white-blond that he had earned the cognomen of Albinus. Yet Caesar loved him, esteemed him so much he had been given jobs more properly in the purlieus of senior legates. Why wouldn't Caesar love his cousin Marcus Antonius? Why?

The pivot around whom all these people turned, Publius Clodius, was a slight man of average height too, but as dark as Decimus Brutus was fair. His face was impish, with a slightly anxious expression when it wasn't smiling, and his life had been extraordinarily eventful in a way which perhaps could not have happened to anyone other than a member of that highly unorthodox patrician clan the Claudii Pulchri. Among many other things, he had provoked the Arabs of Syria into circumcising him, Cicero into mercilessly ridiculing him in public, Caesar into permitting him to be adopted into the Plebs, Pompey into paying Milo to start up rival street gangs, and all of noble Rome into believing that he had enjoyed incestuous relations with his sisters, Clodia and Clodilla. His greatest failing was an insatiable thirst for revenge. Once a person insulted or injured his dignitas, he put that person's name on his revenge list and waited for the perfect opportunity to pay the score in full. Among these persons were Cicero, whom he had succeeded in legally banishing for a time; Ptolemy the Cyprian, whom he had pushed into suicide by annexing Cyprus; Lucullus, his dead brother-in-law, whose career as one of Rome's greatest generals Clodius had sent crashing by instigating a mutiny; and Caesar's mother, Aurelia, whose celebration of the winter feast of Bona Dea, the Good Goddess of Women, he had mocked and ruined. Though this last revenge still haunted him whenever his enormous self-confidence suffered a check, for he had committed a terrible sacrilege against Bona Dea. Tried in a court of law for it, Clodius was acquitted because his wife and other women bought the jury—Fulvia because she loved him, the other women because they wanted him preserved for Bona Dea's own revenge. It would come, it would come ... and that was what haunted Clodius. His latest act of revenge was founded in a very old grudge. Over twenty years ago, aged eighteen, he had charged the beautiful young Vestal Virgin Fabia with unchastity, a crime punishable by death. He lost the case. Fabia's name went immediately onto his list of victims; the years passed, Clodius waited patiently while others involved, like Catilina, bit the dust. Then, aged thirty-seven and still a beautiful woman, Fabia (who, to add to her score, was the half sister of Cicero's wife, Terentia) retired. Having served her thirty years, she removed from the Domus Publica to a snug little house on the upper Quirinal, where she intended to live out the rest of her life as an honored ex-Chief Vestal. Her father had been a patrician Fabius Maximus (it was a mother she shared with Terentia), and he had dowered her richly when she had entered the Order at seven years of age. As Terentia, extremely shrewd in all money matters, had always administered Fabia's dowry with the same efficiency and acumen she brought to the management of her own large fortune (she never let Cicero get his hands on one sestertius of it), Fabia left the Order a very wealthy woman.

It was this last fact which started the seed germinating in Clodius's fertile mind. The longer he waited, the sweeter revenge became. And after a whole twenty years he suddenly saw how to crush Fabia completely. Though it was perfectly acceptable for an ex-Vestal to marry, few ever did; it was thought to be unlucky. On the other hand, few ex-Vestals were as attractive as Fabia. Or as wealthy. Clodius cast round in his mind for someone who was as penurious as he was handsome and wellborn, and came up with Publius Cornelius Dolabella. A part-time member of the Clodius Club. And of much the same kind as that other brute, Mark Antony: big, burly, bullish, bad. When Clodius suggested that he woo Fabia, Dolabella leaped at the idea. Patrician of impeccable ancestry though he was, every father whose daughter he eyed whisked her out of sight and said a firm no to any proposal of marriage. Like another patrician Cornelius, Sulla, Dolabella had no choice other than to live on his wits. Ex-Vestals were sui iuris-— they answered to no man; they were entirely in charge of their own lives. How fortuitous! A bride of blood as good as his own, still young enough to bear children, very rich—and no paterfamilias to thwart him. But where Dolabella differed from that other brute, Antony, lay in his personality. Mark Antony was by no means unintelligent, but he utterly lacked charm; his attractions were of the flesh. Dolabella, to the contrary, possessed an easy, happy, light manner and a great talent for conversation. Antony's amours were of the “I love you, lie down!” variety, whereas Dolabella's were more “Let me drink in the sight of your dear, sweet face!”

The outcome was a marriage. Not only had the ingratiating Dolabella swept Fabia off her feet, he had also swept the female members of Cicero's household off their feet. That Cicero's daughter, Tullia (unhappily married to Furius Crassipes), should deem him divine was perhaps not surprising, but that the sour, ugly Terentia should also deem him divine rocked Rome of the gossips to its foundations. Thus Dolabella wooed Fabia with her sister's fervent blessing; poor Tullia cried.Clodius was still enjoying his revenge, for the marriage was a disaster from its first day. A late-thirties virgin cloistered among women for thirty years required a kind of sexual initiation Dolabella was not qualified—or interested enough—to pursue. Though the rupture of Fabia's hymen could not be classified as a rape, neither was it an ecstasy. Exasperated and bored, Fabia's money safely his, Dolabella went back to women who knew how to do it and were willing at least to pretend ecstasy. Fabia sat at home and wept desolately, while Terentia kept yapping that she was a fool who didn't know how to handle a man. Tullia, on the other hand, cheered up enormously and began thinking of divorce from Furius Crassipes.

However, Clodius's genuine glee at this latest successful revenge was already beginning to pall; politics were always his first priority. He was determined to be the First Man in Rome, but would not go about achieving this end in the usual fashion—the highest political office allied to a degree of military prowess bordering on legendary. Mainly because Clodius's talents were not martial. His method was demagoguery; he intended to rule through the Plebeian Assembly, dominated by Rome's knight-businessmen. Others had taken that path, but never the way Clodius intended to. Where Clodius differed was in his grand strategy. He did not woo these powerful, plutocratic knight-businessmen. He intimidated them. And in order to intimidate them he employed a section of Roman society which all other men ignored as totally valueless—the proletarii, the Head Count who were the Roman citizen lowly. No money, no votes worth the tablets they were written on, no influence with the mighty, no other reason for existence beyond giving Rome children and enlisting as rankers in Rome's legions. Even this latter entitlement was relatively recent, for until Gaius Marius had thrown the legions open to men who had no property, Rome's armies had consisted solely of propertied men. The Head Count were not political people. Far from it. Provided their bellies were full and they were offered regular free entertainment at the games, they had no interest whatsoever in the political machinations of their betters. Nor was it Clodius's intention to turn them into political people. He needed their numbers, that was all; it was no part of his purpose to fill them with ideas of their own worth, or draw their attention to the power their sheer numbers potentially wielded. Very simply, they were Clodius's clients. They owed him cliental loyalty as the patron who had obtained huge benefits for them: a free issue of grain once a month; complete liberty to congregate in their sodalities, colleges or clubs; and a bit of extra money once a year or so. With the assistance of Decimus Brutus and some lesser lights, Clodius had organized the thousands upon thousands of lowly men who frequented the crossroads colleges which littered Rome. On any one day when he scheduled gangs to appear in the Forum and the streets adjacent to it, he needed at most a mere one thousand men. Due to Decimus Brutus, he had a system of rosters and a set of books enabling him to distribute the load and share out the five-hundred-sestertius fee paid for a sortie among the whole of the crossroads colleges lowly; months would go by before the same man was called again to run riot in the Forum and intimidate the influential Plebs. In that way the faces of his gang members remained anonymous.

After Pompey the Great had paid Milo to set up rival gangs composed of ex-gladiators and bully-boys, the violence became complicated. Not only did it have to achieve Clodius's objective, intimidation of the Plebs, it now also had to contend with Milo and his professional thugs. Then after Caesar concluded his pact with Pompey and Marcus Crassus at Luca, Clodius was brought to heel. This had been accomplished by awarding him an all-expenses-paid embassage to Anatolia, which afforded him the chance to make a lot of money during the year he was away. Even after he returned, he was quiet. Until Calvinus and Messala Rufus were elected the consuls at the end of last Quinctilis. At this time the war between Clodius and Milo had broken out afresh.