Colleen McCullough - 6. The October Horse - A Novel of Caesar and Cleopatra

The two Quintus Cicerones perished shortly thereafter, though their heads were not displayed. What the divorced Pomponia felt, at least for her son, an appalled Rome soon learned. She kidnaped the slave who had informed on them and killed him by making him carve slices off his own body, broil them, and eat them.

The barbarity of Antony's revenge on Cicero did not sit well with Octavian, but, since there was nothing he could do about it, he made no reference to it in public or in private; he simply avoided Antony's company whenever possible. When he had first set eyes on Claudia, he had thought that perhaps he could learn to love her, for she was very pretty, very dark (he liked dark women), and suitably virginal. But after he saw Cicero's skewered tongue and listened to Fulvia's describing the pleasure she had taken in doing this particular indignity to Cicero's flesh, Octavian decided that Claudia was not going to bear any children of his. "Therefore," he said to Maecenas, "she will be my wife in name only. Find six big, strapping German women slaves and make sure that Claudia is never left alone. I want her a virgin against the day when I can return her to Antonius and her vulgar harpy of a mother." "You're sure?" asked Maecenas, knitting his brows. "Believe me, Gaius, I would as soon touch a decayed black dog as any daughter of Fulvia's!" Because Philippus chose to die on the same day, the wedding itself was a very quiet affair; Atia and Octavia couldn't come, and the moment the ceremony was over, Octavian joined his mother and sister, leaving his wife alone with her German guards. The bereavement gave him an excellent excuse for not consummating the marriage. But as time went on it became obvious to Claudia that consummation was unlikely to occur at all. She found her husband's attitude and her guards inexplicable; on meeting him, she had thought him handsome, alluringly aloof. Now she lived as a virtual prisoner, untouched and apparently undesired. "What do you expect me to do about it?" Fulvia asked when appealed to for help. "Mama, take me home!" "I can't do that. You're a peace offering between Antonius and your husband." "But he doesn't want me! He doesn't even talk to me!" "That sometimes happens with arranged marriages." Fulvia got up, chucked her daughter under the chin bracingly. "He'll come to his senses in time, girl. Wait him out." "Ask Marcus Antonius to intercede for me!" Claudia pleaded. "I'll do no such thing. He's far too busy to be bothered with trivialities." And off went Fulvia, absorbed in her latest family; Clodius had been a long time ago. With no one left to whom she could appeal, Claudia had no choice other than to suffer her existence, which did improve after Octavian bought Quintus Hortensius's enormous old mansion at the proscription auctions. Its size allowed her a suite of rooms to herself, which removed her entirely from Octavian's vicinity; youth being resilient, she made friends of her German women, and set out to have as happy a life as a married virgin could.

Octavian was not sleeping alone. He had taken a mistress. Never plagued by strong sexual impulses, the youngest of the Triumvirs had contented himself with masturbation until after his marriage, when the perceptive and subtle Maecenas took a hand. It was high time, he decided, that Octavian had a woman. So he cruised the premises of Mercurius Stichus, famous for his sex slaves, and found Octavian's ideal woman. A girl of twenty who had a small boy child, she hailed from Cilicia, had been the toy of a pirate chieftain in Pamphylia, and bore the name of Sappho, just like the poet. Ravishingly pretty, dark of hair and eye, round and cuddly, she had, said Mercurius Stichus, a sweet nature. Maecenas brought her home and popped her into Octavian's bed on his first night in Hortensius's old mansion. The ploy worked; there was no disgrace in a slave, no possibility of her gaining ascendancy over a master like Octavian. He liked her docile submission, he appreciated her situation, he let her have time with her child, he esteemed the new maturity taking sexual liberties gave him. In fact, were it not for Sappho, Octavian's life during the early days of the Triumvirate would have been extremely unpleasant. Controlling Antony was always difficult, sometimes as in the affair of Cicero's death impossible. The proscription auctions weren't fetching nearly enough, and it fell to Octavian to cull the informants' lists to see who had sufficient ready money to warrant posting as a Liberator sympathizer. Additional taxes had to be found, hints dropped to the inviolate plutocrats and bankers that they had better start giving large donations toward buying grain, the price of which kept spiraling. Not very many days into December, all the Classes from First to Fifth discovered that they had to pay the state a year's income in cash forthwith. But even that wasn't enough. At the end of December the tribune of the plebs Lucius Clodius, a creature of Antony's, brought in a lex Clodia that compelled all women who were sui iuris in control of their own money to pay a year's income forthwith. This annoyed Hortensia very much. The widow of Cato's half brother Caepio and the mother of Caepio's only daughter (married to the son of Ahenobarbus), Hortensia had inherited far more of her father's famous rhetorical skills than had her brother, now proscribed because he had offered Macedonia to Brutus. With Cicero's widow, Terentia, and a group of women who included Marcia, Pomponia, Fabia the ex-Chief Vestal, and Calpurnia, Hortensia marched into the Forum and mounted the rostra, the others in her wake. And there they stood, wearing chain mail shirts, helmets on their heads, shields at rest on the ground, swords in their hands. Such an extraordinary sight that every Forum frequenter collected; so too, though at first it wasn't remarked upon, did a great many women from all walks of life, including a good number of professional whores in flame-colored togas, gaudy wigs and paint. "I am a Roman citizen!" Hortensia roared in a voice that was audible in the Porticus Margaritaria. "I am also a woman! A woman of the First Class! And what exactly does that mean? Why, that I go to my marriage bed a virgin, and then become the chattel of my husband! Who can execute me for unchastity, though I cannot reproach him for having sex with other women or men! And when I am widowed, I am not supposed to marry again. Instead, I must depend upon the charity of my family to house me, for under the lex Voconia I cannot inherit any fortunes, and if my husband wants to plunder my dowry, it is very hard to prevent him!" Boom! came the sound of the flat of her sword against the boss of her shield; the audience jumped. "That is the lot of a woman of the First Class! But how would it differ were I a woman of a lower Class, or if I had no Class at all? I would still be a Roman citizen! I would still be a virgin when I went to my marriage bed, and I would still be the chattel of my husband! I would still have to depend upon the charity of my family when I was widowed. But at least I would have the opportunity to espouse more than a man! I could espouse a profession, a trade, a craft. I could earn a living for myself as a painter or a carpenter, a physician or a herbalist. I could sell the produce of my garden or my hen house. If I wished, I could sell my body by working as a whore. I could save a little of what I earned and put it away for my old age!" Boom! This time all the swords on the rostra thumped the shield bosses; the female segment of the audience stood rapt, the male segment scandalized. "Therefore, as a Roman citizen and a woman, I feel entitled to register the outrage of every Roman citizen woman who earns an income of any kind and has the power to control her income! I stand here on behalf of my own First Class, whose income is derived from dowry or meager inheritance, and on behalf of all those women of lower Class or no Class whose income is derived from eggs! vegetables! plumbing! painting! construction! whoredom! et cetera, et cetera! For all of us are to lose a year's income to fund the insanities of Roman men! Insanities I say, and insanities I mean!" Boom! Boom! Boom! This time the swords on shields were joined by the cymbals of whores, the feet of women in the crowd, and went on longer. The Forum frequenters looked angrier and angrier, were growling and shaking their fists. Up went Hortensia's sword, waved around her head. "Do the citizen women of Rome vote?" she yelled. "Do we elect magistrates? Do we vote for or against laws? Did we have a chance to vote against this disgraceful lex Clodia that says we must pay a year's income to the Treasury? No, we did not have a chance to vote against this insanity! An insanity sponsored by a trio of smug, privileged, moronic men named Marcus Antonius, Caesar Octavianus and Marcus Lepidus! If Rome wants to tax us, then Rome must give us the franchise as well as citizenship! If Rome wants to tax us, then Rome will have to let us vote for magistrates, vote for or against laws!" Up went the sword again, this time joined by all the other swords, and accompanied by shrill cheers from the listening women, howls of rage from the listening Forum frequenters. "And just how are the idiots who run Rome going to collect this iniquitous tax?" Hortensia demanded. "The men of the five Classes are enrolled by the censors, their incomes written down! But we Roman citizen women aren't entered on any rolls, are we? So how are the idiots who run Rome going to decide what our incomes are? Is some brute of a Treasury agent going to stride up to some poor little old woman in the marketplace selling her embroideries or her lamp wicks or her eggs, and ask her what she earns in a year? Or, even worse, arbitrarily decide what she earns on the evidence of his own bigoted misogynism? Are we to be badgered and bullied, browbeaten and bludgeoned? Are we? Are we?" "No!" screamed several thousand female throats. "No, no!" The male throats were suddenly silent; it had suddenly dawned on the Forum frequenters that they were shockingly outnumbered. "I should think not! All of us standing on the rostra are widows Caesar's widow, Cato's widow, Cicero's widow among us! Did Caesar tax women? Did Cato tax women? Did Cicero tax women? No, they did not! Cicero and Cato and Caesar understood that women have no public voice! The only power at law we have is the right to own our little bit of money free and clear, and now this lex Clodia is going to strip us even of that! Well, we refuse to pay this tax! Not one sestertius! Unless we are accorded different rights the right to vote, the right to sit in the Senate, the right to stand for election as magistrates!" Her voice was drowned in a huge cheer. "And what of the Triumvir Marcus Antonius's wife, Fulvia?" thundered Hortensia, eyes noting the entire College of Lictors appear at the back of the crowd and start to push their way toward the rostra. "Fulvia is the richest woman in Rome, and sui iuris! But is she to pay this tax? No! No, she is not! Why? Because she's given Rome seven children! By, I add, three of the most reprehensible villains ever to mount a rostra or a woman! While we, who obeyed the mos maiorum and remained widowed, are to pay!" She strode to the edge of the rostra and thrust her face at the lictors, nearing the front. "Don't you dare try to arrest us!" she roared. "Go back to your masters and tell them from Quintus Hortensius's daughter that the sui iuris women of Rome from highest to lowest will not pay this tax! Will not pay it! Go on, shoo! Shoo, shoo!" The women in the crowd took it up: "Shoo! Shoo!"