Colleen McCullough - 4. Caesar's Women

Only eight years old how could she already be so beautiful? wondered the dazzled Brutus, who knew her well because his mother was a great friend of her grandmother's. Fair like ice and snow, chin pointed, cheekbones arched, faintly pink lips as delicious as a strawberry, a pair of widely opened blue eyes that gazed with gentle liveliness on all that they beheld; if Brutus had dipped into the poetry of love, it was because of her whom he had loved for oh, years! Not truly understanding that it was love until quite recently, when she had turned her gaze on him with such a sweet smile that realization had dawned with the shock of a thunderclap. He had gone to his mother that very evening, and informed her that he wished to marry Julia when she grew up. Servilia had stared, astonished. "My dear Brutus, she's a mere child! You'd have to wait nine or ten years for her." "She'll be betrothed long before she's old enough to marry," he had answered, his anguish plain. "Please, Mama, as soon as her father returns home, petition for her hand in marriage!" "You may well change your mind." "Never, never!" "Her dowry is minute." "But her birth is everything you could want in my wife." "True." The black eyes which could grow so hard rested on his face not unsympathetically; Servilia appreciated the strength of that argument. So she had turned it over in her mind for a moment, then nodded. Very well, Brutus, when her father is next in Rome, I'll ask. You don't need a rich bride, but it is essential that her birth match your own, and a Julia would be ideal. Especially this Julia. Patrician on both sides." And so they had left it to wait until Julia's father returned from his post as quaestor in Further Spain. The most junior of the important magistracies, quaestor. But trust Servilia to know that Julia's father had filled it extremely well. Odd that she had never met him, considering how small a group the true aristocrats of Rome were. She was one; he was another. But, feminine rumor had it, he was something of an outsider among his own kind, too busy for the social round most of his peers cultivated whenever they were in Rome. It would have been easier to sue for his daughter's hand on Brutus's behalf did she know him already, though she had little doubt what his answer would be. Brutus was highly eligible, even in the eyes of a Julian.

Aurelia's reception room could not compare to a Palatine atrium, but it was quite large enough comfortably to hold the dozen or so women who had invaded it. Open shutters looked out onto what was commonly regarded as a lovely garden, thanks to Gaius Matius in the other ground floor apartment; his was the hand had found roses able to bloom in the shade, coaxed grapevines into scaling the twelve storeys of latticed walls and balconies, trimmed box bushes into perfect globes, and rigged a cunning gravity feed to the chaste marble pool that allowed a rearing two tailed dolphin to spout water from its fearsome mouth. The walls of the reception room were well kept up and painted in the red style, the floor of cheap terrazzo had been burnished to an appealing reddish pink glow, and the ceiling had been painted to simulate a cloud fluffed noon sky, though it could claim no expensive gilding. Not the residence of one of the Mighty, but adequate for a junior senator, Brutus supposed as he sat watching Julia, watching the women; Julia caught him, so he looked too. His mother had seated herself next to Aurelia on a couch, where she managed to display herself to good advantage despite the fact that her hostess was, even at the age of fifty five, still held one of Rome's great beauties. Aurelia's figure was elegantly slim and it suited her to be in repose, for one didn't notice then that when she moved it was too briskly for grace. No hint of grey marred her ice brown hair, and her skin was smooth, creamy. It was she who had recommended Brutus's school to Servilia, for she was Servilia's chief confidante. From that thought Brutus's mind skipped to school, a typical digression for a mind which did tend to wander. His mother had not wished to send Brutus to school, afraid her little boy would be exposed to children of inferior rank and wealth, and worried that his studious nature would be laughed at. Better that Brutus have his own tutor at home. But then Brutus's stepfather had insisted that this only son needed the stimulus and competition of a school. "Some healthy activity and ordinary playmates'' was how Silanus had put it, not precisely jealous of the first place Brutus held in Servilia's heart, more concerned that when Brutus matured he should at least have learned to associate with various kinds of people. Naturally the school Aurelia recommended was an exclusive one, but pedagogues who ran schools had a distressingly independent turn of mind that led them to accept bright boys from less rarefied backgrounds than a Marcus Junius Brutus, not to mention two or three bright girls. With Servilia for mother, it was inevitable that Brutus should hate school, though Gaius Cassius Longinus, the fellow pupil of whom Servilia approved most, was from quite as good a family as a Junius Brutus. Brutus, however, tolerated Cassius only because to do so kept his mother happy. What had he in common with a loud and turbulent boy like Cassius, enamored of war, strife, deeds of great daring? Only the fact that he had quickly become teacher's pet had managed to reconcile Brutus to the awful ordeal of school. And fellows like Cassius. Unfortunately the person Brutus most yearned to call friend was his Uncle Cato; but Servilia refused to hear of his establishing any kind of intimacy with her despised half brother. Uncle Cato was descended, she never tired of reminding her son, from a Tusculan peasant and a Celtiberian slave, whereas in Brutus were united two separate lines of exalted antiquity, one from Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Republic (who had deposed the last King of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus), and the other from Gaius Servilius Ahala (who had killed Maelius when Maelius had attempted to make himself King of Rome some decades into the new Republic). Therefore a Junius Brutus who was through his mother also a patrician Servilius could not possibly associate with upstart trash like Uncle Cato. "But your mother married Uncle Cato's father and had two children by him, Aunt Porcia and Uncle Cato!" Brutus had protested on one occasion. "And thereby disgraced herself forever!" snarled Servilia. "I do not acknowledge either that union or its progeny and neither, my lad, will you!" End of discussion. And the end of all hope that he might be allowed to see Uncle Cato any more frequently than family decency indicated. What a wonderful fellow Uncle Cato was! A true Stoic, enamored of Rome's old austere ways, averse to splash and show, quick to criticize the pretensions to potentatic grandeur of men like Pompey. Pompey the Great. Another upstart dismally lacking in the right ancestors. Pompey who had murdered Brutus's father, made a widow of his mother, enabled a lightweight like sickly Silanus to climb into her bed and sire two bubble headed girls Brutus grudgingly called sisters What are you thinking, Brutus?'' asked Julia, smiling. "Oh, nothing much," he answered vaguely. "That's an evasion. I want the truth!" I was thinking what a terrific fellow my Uncle Cato is." Her wide brow crinkled. "Uncle Cato?" "You wouldn't know him, because he's not old enough to be in the Senate yet. In fact, he's almost as close to my age as he is to Mama's." "Is he the one who wouldn't permit the tribunes of the plebs to pull down an obstructing column inside the Basilica Porcia?'' "That's my Uncle Cato!" said Brutus proudly. Julia shrugged. "My father said it was stupid of him. If the column had been demolished, the tribunes of the plebs would have enjoyed more comfortable headquarters." "Uncle Cato was in the right. Cato the Censor put the column there when he built Rome's first basilica, and there it belongs according to the mos maiorum.

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