Colleen McCullough - 5. Caesar

I have been betrayed, and I have every reason to think that it was your doing, Caesar. You don't keep men working for you who disobey orders or act on their own initiative to this extent. I had thought you honorable, so I write this with a grief as painful as my head. You can keep your high kingship. I will throw in my lot with my own people, who are above this kind of assassination. We kill each other, yes, but not without honor. You have none. I have made a vow. That never again as long as I live will I come into the presence of a Roman voluntarily.

"The world at the moment seems to be an endless torment of severed heads," said Caesar, white about the lips, "but I tell you, Aulus Hirtius, that it would give me great pleasure to lop the head off Labienus's shoulders! A fraction of an inch at a time. But not before I had him flogged just enough." "What do you intend to do in actuality?" "Nothing whatsoever." Hirtius looked shocked. "Nothing?" "Nothing." "But but you can at least say what happened in your next dispatch to the Senate!" cried Hirtius. "It may not be the kind of punishment you would prefer to dish out to Labienus, but it will certainly kill any hopes he might have of a public career." The expression on Caesar's face as he turned his head and tucked his chin in was derisive, angrily amused. "I can't do that, Hirtius! Look at the trouble Cato made for me over the so-called German ambassadors! Were I to breathe a word of this to the Senate or any other persons who would leak it to Cato, my name would stink to the farthest reaches of the sky. Not Labienus's. Those senatorial dogs wouldn't waste an expirated breath in baying for Labienus's hide. They'd be too busy fixing their teeth in mine." "You're right, of course," said Hirtius, sighing. "Which means that Labienus will get away with it." "For the moment," said Caesar tranquilly. "His time will come, Hirtius. When next I see him, he'll know exactly where he stands in my estimation. And where his career is going to go if I have any say in the matter. As soon as his usefulness in Gaul is over, I'll divorce him more thoroughly than Sulla did his poor dying wife." "And Commius? Perhaps if I worked very hard, Caesar, I could persuade him to meet with you privately. It wouldn't take long to make him see your side of it." Caesar shook his head. "No, Hirtius. It wouldn't work. My relationship with Commius was based on complete mutual trust, and that is gone. From this time forward each of us would look askance at the other. He took a vow never again voluntarily to come into the presence of a Roman. The Gauls take such vows quite as seriously as we do. I've lost Commius."

Lingering in Ravenna was not a hardship. Caesar kept a villa there because he also kept a school for gladiators there; the climate was considered the best in all Italia and was ague-free, which made Ravenna a wonderful place for hard physical training. Keeping gladiators was a profitable hobby, one Caesar found so absorbing he had several thousand, though most of them were billeted in a school near Capua. Ravenna was reserved for the cream of them, the ones Caesar had plans for after they finished their time in the sawdust ring. His agents bought or acquired through the military courts none but the most promising fellows, and the five or six years these men spent exhibition-fighting were good years if Caesar was their owner. They were mainly deserters from the legions (offered a choice between disenfranchisement and life as a gladiator), though some were convicted murderers, and a few volunteered their services. These last Caesar would never accept, saying that a free Roman with a taste for battle should enlist in the legions. They were well housed, well fed and not overworked, as indeed was true of most gladiatorial schools, which were not prisons. The men came and went as they pleased unless they were booked for a bout, before which they were expected to stay in school, remain sober and train industriously; no man who owned gladiators wanted to see his expensive investment killed or maimed in the ring. Gladiatorial combat was an extremely popular spectator sport, though it was not a circus activity; it required a smaller venue like a town marketplace. Traditionally a rich man who had suffered a bereavement celebrated the memory of the dead relative with funeral games, and funeral games consisted of gladiatorial combat. He hired his sawdust soldiers from one of the many gladiatorial schools, usually between four and forty pairs, for whom he paid very heavily. They came to the town, they fought, they departed back to school. And at the end of six years or thirty bouts they retired, having completed their sentence. Their citizenship was secure, they had saved some money, and the really good ones had become public idols whose names were known all over Italia. One of the reasons the sport interested Caesar lay in the fate of these men once they had served their time. To Caesar, men with the kind of skills these men had acquired were wasted once they drifted to Rome or some other city and there hired themselves out as bodyguards or bouncers. He preferred to woo them for his legions, but not as rankers. A good gladiator who hadn't suffered too many blows to the head made an excellent instructor in military training camp, and some made splendid centurions. It also amused him to send deserters from the legions back to the legions as officers. Thus the school in Ravenna, where he kept his best men; the majority lived in the school he owned near Capua. The Capuan school of course had not seen him since he assumed his governorships, for the governor of a province could not set foot in Italia proper while ever he commanded an army. There were other reasons too why Ravenna saw Caesar for longer than any other place in Illyricum or Italian Gaul. It was close to the Rubicon River, the boundary between Italian Gaul and Italia proper, and the roads between it and Rome, two hundred miles away, were excellent. Which meant fast travel for the couriers who rode back and forth constantly, and comfortable travel for the many people who came from Rome to see Caesar in person, since he could not go to see them. After the death of Clodius he followed events in Rome with some anxiety, absolutely sure that Pompey was aiming at the dictatorship. For this reason had he written to Pompey with his marriage and other proposals, though afterward he wished he had not; rejection left a sour taste in the mouth. Pompey had grown so great that he didn't think it necessary to please anyone save himself, even Caesar. Who perhaps was becoming a trifle too famous these days for Pompey's comfort. Yet when Pompey's Law of the Ten Tribunes of the Plebs gave Caesar permission to stand for the consulship in absentia, he wondered if his misgivings about Pompey were simply the imaginings of a man forced to obtain all his news at second hand. Oh, for the chance to spend a month in Rome! But one drip of one hour was impossible. A governor with eleven legions under his command, Caesar was forbidden to cross the river Rubicon into Italia. Would Pompey succeed in being appointed Dictator? Rome and the Senate in the persons of men like Bibulus and Cato were resisting it strenuously, but sitting in Ravenna at a distance from the convulsions which wracked Rome every day, it wasn't difficult to see whose was the hand behind the violence. Pompey's. Yearning to be Dictator. Trying to force the Senate's hand. Then when the news came that Pompey had been made consul without a colleague, Caesar burst out laughing. As brilliant as it was unconstitutional! The boni had tied Pompey's hands even as they put the reins of government into them. And Pompey had been naive enough to fall for it. Yet another unconstitutional extraordinary command! While failing to see that in accepting it, he had shown all of Rome and especially Caesar that he did not have the sinew or the gall to keep grinding on until he was offered a perfectly constitutional command: the dictatorship. You'll always be a country boy, Pompeius Magnus! Not quite up to every trick in town. They outfoxed you so deftly that you don't even see what they've done. You're sitting there on the Campus Martius congratulating yourself that you're the winner. But you are not. Bibulus and Cato are the winners. They exposed your bluff and you backed down. How Sulla would laugh!