The First Man in Rome (62 page)
"Ye gods, my niece would be a common landlady!" cried Cotta, revolted by the idea.
"And why not?" asked Caesar, smiling tiredly. "I hear she's a colossal beauty. Won't the two roles marry? If they won't, perhaps she should think twice about marrying my son."
"It is true that she's a colossal beauty," said Cotta, smiling broadly at a secret joke. "I shall bring her to meet you, Gaius Julius, and let you make of her what you will." He got to his feet, leaned over to pat the thin shoulder. "My last word is this: it shall be left to Aurelia to decide what happens to her dowry. You put your proposition of the insula to her yourself, and I shall put my suggestion of a house forward. Is it a deal?"
"It's a deal," said Caesar. "But send her quickly, Marcus Aurelius! Tomorrow, at noon."
"Will you tell your son?"
"Indeed I will. He can fetch her to me tomorrow."
Under normal circumstances Aurelia didn't dither about what she was going to wear; she loved bright colors and she liked to mix them, but the decision was as crisp and no-nonsense as was all else about her. However, having been notified that she was to be fetched by her betrothed to meet her prospective parents-in-law, she dithered. Finally she chose an underdress of fine cerise wool, and overlaid it with a drapery of rose-pink wool, fine enough to let the deeper color below show through, and overlaid that with a second drapery of palest pink, as fine as her wedding veil. She bathed, then scented herself with attar of roses, but her hair was dragged back into its uncompromising bun, and she refused her mother's offering of a little rouge and
stibium.
"You're too pale today," Rutilia protested. "It's the tension. Go on, look your best, please! Just a dab of rouge on your cheeks, and a line around your eyes."
"No," said Aurelia.
Pallor turned out not to matter, anyway, for when Gaius Julius Caesar Junior called to fetch her, Aurelia produced all the color her mother could have wished.
"Gaius Julius," she said, holding out her hand.
"Aurelia," he said, taking it.
After that, they didn't know what to do.
"Well, go on, goodbye!" said Rutilia irritably; it felt so odd to be losing her first child to this extremely attractive young man, when she only felt eighteen herself.
They set off, Cardixa and the Gauls trailing behind.
"I should warn you that my father isn't well," said young Caesar with tight control. "He has a malignant growth in his throat, and we fear he will not be with us much longer."
"Oh," said Aurelia.
They turned a corner. "I got your note," he said, "and hurried to see Marcus Aurelius immediately. I can't believe you chose me!"
"I can't believe I found you," she said.
"Do you think Publius Rutilius did it deliberately?"
That triggered a smile in her. "Definitely."
They walked the rest of the block, turned a corner. "I see you're not a talker," said young Caesar.
"No," said Aurelia.
And that was all the conversation they managed before the Caesar residence was reached.
One look at his son's chosen bride caused Caesar to change his thinking somewhat. This was no spoiled, capricious beauty! Oh, she was everything he had heard she was—colossally beautiful—but not in any accepted mode. Then again, he reasoned, that was probably why to her alone did they append the hyperbole "colossal." What wonderful children they would have! Children he would not live to see.
"Sit down, Aurelia." His voice was scarcely audible, so he pointed to a chair right alongside his own, but enough to the front for him to see her. His son he placed upon his other side.
"What did Marcus Aurelius tell you about the talk we had?" he asked then.
"Nothing," said Aurelia.
He went right through the discussion of her dowry he had had with Cotta, making no bones about his own feelings, or about Cotta's.
"Your uncle your guardian says the choice is yours. Do you want a house or an insula?" he asked, eyes on her face.
What would Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi do? This time she knew the answer: Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi would do the most honorable thing, no matter how hard. Only now she had two honors to consider, her beloved's as well as her own. To choose the house would be more comfortable and familiar by far, but it would injure her beloved's pride to know his wife's money provided their house.
She took her gaze off Caesar and stared at his son very gravely. "Which would you prefer?" she asked him.
"It's your decision, Aurelia," he said.
"No, Gaius Julius, it's your decision. I am to be your wife. I intend to be a proper wife, and know my proper place. You will be the head of our house. All I ask in return for yielding the first place to you is that you always deal with me honestly and honorably. The choice of where we live is yours. I will abide by it, in deed as well as word."
“Then we will ask Marcus Aurelius to find you an insula, and register the deeds of ownership in your name," young Caesar said without hesitation. "It must be the most profitable and well-built real estate he can find, and I agree with my father—its location is of no moment. The income from the rents will be yours. We will live in one of its ground-floor apartments until I am in a position to buy us a private dwelling. I will support you and our children from the income of my own land, of course. Which means that you will have the full responsibility for your insula—I will not be a part of it."
She was pleased, it showed at once, but she said nothing.
"You're not a talker!" said Caesar, amazed.
"No," said Aurelia.
Cotta got to work with a will, though his intention was to find his niece a snug property in one of the better parts of Rome. However, it was not to be; look though he would, the wisest and shrewdest investment was a fairly big insula in the heart of the Subura. Not a new apartment block (it had been built by its single owner some thirty years before, and since this owner had lived in the larger of its two ground-floor apartments, he had built to last), it had stone-and-concrete footings and foundations up to fifteen feet in depth and five feet in width; the outer and load-bearing walls were two feet thick, faced on either side with the irregular brick-and-mortar called
opus incertum,
and filled with a stout mixture of cement and small-stone aggregate; the windows were all relief-arched in brick; the whole was reinforced with wooden beams at least a foot square and up to fifty feet in length; foot-square wooden beams supported floors of concrete aggregate in the lower storeys and wooden planks in the upper storeys; the generous light-well was load-bearing yet retained its open nature through a system of two-foot-thick square pillars every five feet around its edge, joined at every floor by massive wooden beams.
At nine storeys of nine feet each in height including the foot-thick floors, it was quite modest—most of the insulae in the same neighborhood were two to four storeys higher— but it occupied the whole of a small triangular block where the Subura Minor ran into the Vicus Patricii. Its blunted apex faced the crossroads, its two long sides ran one down the Subura Minor and the other down the Vicus Patricii, and its base was formed by a lane which ran through from one street to the other.
Their first sight of it had come at the end of a long string of other properties; Cotta, Aurelia, and young Caesar were by this inured to the patter of a small, glib salesman of impeccably Roman ancestry—no Greek freedman sales staff for the real-estate firm of Thorius Postumus!
"Note the plaster on the walls, both inside and out," droned the agent. "Not a crack to be seen, foundations as firm as a miser's grip on his last bar of gold . .. eight shops, all under long lease, no trouble with the tenants or the rents . . . two apartments ground-floor with reception rooms two storeys high . .. two apartments only next floor up ... eight apartments per floor to the sixth floor.. . twelve apartments on the seventh, twelve on the eighth .. . shops all have an upper floor for living in... additional storage above false ceilings in the sleep cubicles of the ground-floor apartments ..."
On and on he extolled the virtues of the property; after a while Aurelia shut him out and concentrated upon her own thoughts. Uncle Marcus and Gaius Julius could listen to him and take heed. It was a world she didn't know, but one she was determined to master, and if it meant a very different life-style than the one she knew, that was surely all to the good.
Of course she had her fears, wasn't panting eagerly to embark upon two new life-styles at once, namely the lifestyle of marriage and the life-style of insula living. And yet she was discovering in herself a fearlessness too, born of a sense of freedom too new to assimilate fully. Ignorance of any other kind of life had excluded conscious boredom or frustration during her childhood, which indeed had been busy enough, involving as it had many learning processes. But as marriage had loomed, she had found herself wondering what she would do with her days if she couldn't fill them with as many children as had Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi—and it was a rare nobleman who wanted more than two children. By nature Aurelia was a doer, a worker; by birth she was excluded from very much in the way of action. Now here she was about to become a landlady as well as a wife, and she was shrewd enough to see that the first at least promised rare opportunities to work. Not only work, but interesting and stimulating work.
So she looked about her with shining eyes, and plotted and schemed, tried to imagine what it was going to be like.
There was a difference in size between the two ground-floor apartments, for the owner-builder had done himself proud in the matter of the apartment he had occupied. After the Cotta mansion on the Palatine it was very small; in fact, the Cotta mansion was bigger in floor area than the whole of the ground floor of this insula, including shops, crossroads tavern, and both apartments.
Though the dining room would barely fit the standard three couches in, and the study was smaller than any study in any private house, they were lofty; the wall between them was more a partition and did not reach the ceiling, thus enabling air and light to flow from the light-well through the dining room into the study beyond. The reception room (it could not properly be called an atrium) had a good terrazzo floor and well-decorated plaster walls, and the two columns down its center were of solid wood painted to look like fancifully colored marble; air and light came in from the street through a huge iron grille high up on the outside wall between the end of a shop along its front and the stairwell which led to the upper floors. Three typically windowless sleeping cubicles led off the reception room, and two more, one of them larger, off the study. There was a little room she could use as her sitting room, and between it and the stairwell was a smaller room Cardixa could have. But the greatest relief of all was to discover that the apartment contained a bathroom and a latrine—for, as the agent gleefully explained, the insula lay right athwart one of Rome's main sewers, and was legally supplied with an adjutage to the water supply.
"There's a public latrine right opposite on the Subura Minor, and the Subura Baths are right next door to that," said the agent. "Water is no problem. You're at an ideal height here, low enough to get good feed from the Agger reservoirs, but too high to be troubled by backwashes when the Tiber floods, and the size of the adjutage into the mains is larger than the water companies are supplying now—
if
the new blocks can even get connected to the mains, that is! Naturally the previous owner kept the water and sewer for himself—the tenants are well served because of the crossroads just outside, and the latrine and baths opposite."
Aurelia listened to this fervently, for she had heard that her new life-style would not include the luxuries of laid-on water and a latrine; if any aspect of living in an insula had dismayed her, it was the idea of going without her private bath and her private excretions. None of the other insulae they had inspected provided either water or sewer, even though most of them had been in better districts. If Aurelia had not made up her mind this insula was the right one before, she now certainly did.
"How much rent can we expect?" asked young Caesar.
"Ten talents a year—a quarter of a million sesterces."
"Good, good!" said Cotta, nodding.
"Upkeep on the building is negligible because it was built to top standards," said the agent. "That in itself means it is never without a full complement of tenants—so many of these insulae come tumbling down, you know, or go up like dry bark. Not this place!
And
it has a street frontage on two of its three sides as well as a somewhat wider than usual lane behind, which means it is less likely to catch fire if a neighboring building does go up. Yes, this place is as sound as a Granius ship. I can say it with truth."
Since it was senseless to battle through the Subura encumbered by a litter or a sedan chair, Cotta and young Caesar had brought along the pair of Gauls as extra protection, and undertook to escort Aurelia safely on foot. Not that there was much risk involved, for it was high noon, and everyone on the jam-packed streets seemed more interested in his or her own business than in molesting the beautiful Aurelia.
"What do you think?" Cotta asked her as they came down the slight slope of the Fauces Suburae into the Argiletum and prepared to cross the lower end of the Forum Romanum.
"Oh, Uncle, I think it's ideal!" she said, then turned to look at young Caesar. "Do you agree, Gaius Julius?"
"I think it will suit us very well," he said.
"All right then, I'll close the deal this afternoon. At ninety-five talents, it's a good buy, if not a bargain. And you'll have five talents left to use on furniture."
"No," said young Caesar firmly, "the furniture is my responsibility—and I'm not destitute, you know! My land at Bovillae brings me in a good income."
"I know it does, Gaius Julius," said Cotta patiently. "You told me, remember?"