Colleen McCullough - 4. Caesar's Women

"What do you think?" he asked his mother as they walked up the Clivus Orbius after their inspection on the following day. "It is superb, Caesar." She frowned. "Only one aspect does worry me Pompeia. Too easy for people to creep upstairs! The place is vast, no one will see who comes and goes." "Oh, Mater, don't sentence me to keeping her downstairs right next door to me!" he cried. "No, my son, I won't do that. However, we have to find a way to police Pompeia's comings and goings. In the apartment it was so easy to make sure Polyxena attended her the moment she ventured out the door, but here? We'd never know. Nor can she smuggle men into the apartment, whereas here? We'd never know." "Well," said Caesar with a sigh, "my new position carries a good number of public slaves with it. On the whole they're lazy and irresponsible because they're not supervised and no one thinks to praise them if they do good work. That will most definitely change. Eutychus is getting old, but he's still a wonderful steward. Burgundus and Cardixa can come back from Bovillae with their four youngest. Their four oldest can caretake Bovillae. It will be your job to organize a new regimen and a better frame of mind among the servants, both those we bring with us and those already here. I won't have the time, so it must devolve upon you." "I understand that," she said, "but it doesn't answer our problem with Pompeia." "What that amounts to, Mater, is adequate supervision. We both know you can't put just one servant on door duty or any kind of watch. He goes to sleep, from boredom if not from weariness. Therefore we'll put two on permanent duty at the bottom of the front stairs. Day and night. And we set them some sort of task folding linens without a crease, polishing knives and spoons, washing dishes, mending clothes you know the duties better than I do. A certain amount must be done on each shift. Luckily there is a good sized alcove between the beginning of the stairs and the end wall. I'll put a loudly creaking door on it to shut it from view of the reception room, and that means whoever uses the stairs has to open it first. If our sentries should doze off, that at least will alert them. When Pompeia appears at the bottom to go out, one of them will notify Polyxena immediately. As well for us that Pompeia hasn't got the gumption to run off before Polyxena can be found! If her friend Clodia tries to put her up to that, it will only happen once, I can assure you. For I shall inform Pompeia conduct of that kind is a good way to be divorced. I shall also instruct Eutychus to put servants on sentry duty who won't collude with each other to accept bribes." "Oh, Caesar, I hate it!" cried Aurelia, striking her hands together. "Are we legionaries guarding the camp from attack?" "Yes, Mater, I rather think we are. Her own silly fault. She's mixing in the wrong circles and refuses to abandon them." "As the result of which we are obliged to imprison her." "Not really. Be fair! I haven't forbidden her access to her women friends, either here or elsewhere. She and they can come and go as they please, including beauties like Sempronia Tuditani and Palla. And the appalling Pompeius Rufus. But Pompeia is now the wife of Caesar Pontifex Maximus, a social elevation of no mean order. Even for Sulla's granddaughter. I can't trust her good sense, because she hasn't any. We all know the story of Metella Dalmatica and how she managed despite Scaurus Princeps Senatus to make Sulla's life a misery when he was trying to be elected to the praetorship. Sulla spurned her then evidence of his instinct for self preservation, if nothing else. But can you see Clodius or Decimus Brutus or young Poplicola behaving with Sulla's circumspection? Hah! They'd whip Pompeia off in a trice." "Then," said Aurelia with decision, "when you see Pompeia to inform her of the new rules, I suggest you have her mother there as well. Cornelia Sulla is a splendid person. And she knows what a fool Pompeia is. Reinforce your authority with the authority her mother wields. It is no use bringing me into it, Pompeia detests me for chaining her to Polyxena." No sooner decided upon than done. Though the move to the Domus Publica took place the next day, Pompeia had been fully acquainted with the new rules before she and her handful of personal servants set eyes upon her palatial suite upstairs. She had wept, of course, and protested the innocence of her intentions, but to no avail. Cornelia Sulla was sterner than Caesar, and adamant that in the event of a fall from grace, her daughter would not be welcome to return to Uncle Mamercus's house divorced on grounds of adultery. Fortunately Pompeia was not the type to nurse grudges, so by the time the move occurred she was completely immersed in the transfer of her tasteless but expensive knickknacks, and planning shopping trips to overfill those areas she considered denuded. Caesar had wondered how Aurelia would cope with the change from landlady of a thriving insula to doyenne of the closest thing Rome had to a palace. Would she insist upon continuing to keep her books? Would she break the ties of more than forty years in the Subura? But by the time the afternoon of his inaugural feast came round, he knew that he need not have worried about that truly remarkable lady. Though she would personally audit, she said, the insula's accounts would now be done by a man whom Lucius Decumius had found and vouched for. And it turned out that most of the work she had done was not on behalf of her own property; to fill in her days she had acted as agent for more than a dozen other landlords. How horrified her husband would have been if he had known that! Caesar just chuckled. In fact, he realized, his elevation to Pontifex Maximus had given Aurelia a new lease on life. She was absolutely everywhere on both sides of the building, had established ascendancy over Licinia effortlessly and painlessly, made herself liked by all six Vestals, and would soon be, her son thought with silent laughter, absorbed in improving the efficiency not only of the Domus Publica, but also of its testamentary industry. Caesar, we ought to be charging a fee for this service," she said, looking determined. "So much work and effort! Rome's purse should see a return." But that he refused to countenance. "I agree that a fee would increase the Treasury's profits, Mater, but it would also deprive the lowly of one of their greatest pleasures. No. On the whole, Rome has no trouble with her proletarii. Keep their bellies full and the games coming, and they're content. If we begin to charge them for the entitlements of their citizenship, we'll turn the Head Count into a monster which would devour us."

As Crassus had predicted, Caesar's election as Pontifex Maximus quietened his creditors magically. The office besides gave him a considerable income from the State, as was also true of the three major flamines, Dialis, Martialis and Quirinalis. Their three State residences stood on the opposite side of the Sacra Via from the Domus Publica, though of course there was no flamen Dialis, had not been since Sulla had let Caesar take off the helmet and cape of Jupiter Optimus Maximus's special priest; that had been the bargain, no new flamen Dialis until after Caesar's death. No doubt his State house had been let go to rack and ruin since it had lost Merula as tenant twenty five years ago. As it was in his province now, he would have to see it, decide what needed to be done, and allocate the funds for repairs from the unused salary Caesar would have collected had he lived in it and practised as flamen. After that, he'd rent it for a fortune to some aspiring knight dying to have a Forum Romanum address. Rome would see a return. But first he had to deal with the Regia and the offices of the Pontifex Maximus. The Regia was the oldest building in the Forum, for it was said to have been the house of Numa Pompilius, second King of Rome. No priests save the Pontifex Maximus and the Rex Sacrorum were permitted to enter it, though the Vestals served as the attendants of the Pontifex Maximus when he offered to Ops, and when the Rex Sacrorum sacrificed his ram on the dies agonales he employed the usual priestlings to help him and clean up afterward. Thus when Caesar entered it he did so with flesh crawling and hair on end, so awesome an experience was it. Earthquakes had necessitated its rebuilding on at least two occasions during the Republic, but always on the same foundations, and always in the same unadorned tufa blocks. No, thought Caesar, gazing around, the Regia had never been a house. It was too small and it had no windows. The shape, he decided, was probably deliberate, too strange to have been anything other than a part of some ritual mystery. It was a quadrilateral of the kind the Greeks termed a trapezium, having no side parallel to any other. What religious meaning had it held for those people who had lived so long ago? It didn't even face in any particular direction, if to do so meant considering one of its four walls a front. And perhaps that was the reason. Face no compass point and offend no God. Yes, it had been a temple from its inception, he was sure. This was where King Numa Pompilius had celebrated the rites of infant Rome. There was one shrine against the shortest wall; that of course was to Ops, a numen with no face and no substance and no sex (for convenience, Ops was spoken of as feminine) who directed the forces which kept Rome's Treasury replete and her people full bellied. The roof at the far end contained a hole below which in a minute courtyard there grew two laurel trees, very slender and branchless until they poked out of the hole to drink up a little sun. This court was not walled off to the ceiling, the builder having contented himself with a waist high tufa surround. And between the surround and the end wall there lay stacked neatly in four rows the twenty four Shields of Mars, with the twenty four Spears of Mars racked in the Sacra Via corner. How fitting that it should be Caesar finally to come here as the servant of this place! He, a Julian descended from Mars. With an invocation to the God of War he carefully peeled off the covers of soft hide that hid one row of shields, and gazed down on them with breath suspended in awe. Twenty three of them were replicas; one was the actual shield which had fallen from the sky at the behest of Jupiter to protect King Numa Pompilius from his foes. But the replicas were of the same age, and no one except King Numa Pompilius would ever know which was the genuine shield. He had done that on purpose, so the legend went, to confuse potential thieves; for only the real shield had the real magic. The only others like them were in wall paintings in Crete and the Peloponnese of Greece; they were almost man high and shaped like two teardrops joined to form a slender waist, made from beautifully turned frames of hardwood upon which were stretched the hides of black and white cattle. That they were still in reasonably good condition was probably only because they were taken out for an airing every March and every October, when the patrician priests called Salii did their war dance through the streets to mark the opening and closing of the old campaign season. And here they were, his shields. His spears. He had never seen them at close quarters before, because at the age when he might have come to belong to the Salii, he had been flamen Dialis instead. The place was dirty and dilapidated he would have to speak to Lucius Claudius, the Rex Sacrorum, about smartening up his bevy of priestlings! A stench of old blood lay everywhere, despite the hole in the roof, and the floor was smothered in rat droppings. That the Sacred Shields had not suffered was truly a miracle. By rights the rats ought to have eaten every scrap of hide off them centuries ago. A haphazard collection of book buckets stacked against the longest wall had not been so lucky, but some dozen stone tablets ranged next to them would defeat the sharpest incisors. Well, no time like the present to start repairing the ravages of time and rodents! "I suppose," he said to Aurelia over dinner that afternoon, "that I can't introduce a busy little dog or a couple of needy mother cats into the Regia, it might contravene our religious laws. So how can I get rid of the rats?" "I would say their presence in the Regia contravened our religious laws quite as much as any dog or cat would,'' said Aurelia. "However, I do see what you mean. It is not a great difficulty, Caesar. The two old women who take care of the public latrine across the road from us in the Subura Minor can tell me the name of the man who makes their rat traps. Very clever! A sort of longish small box with a door on one end. The door is poised on a balance, and the balance is connected to a string, and the string is connected to a piece of cheese impaled on a hooked spike at the back of the box. When the rat tries to remove the cheese, the door falls down. The trick is to make sure that the fellow you depute to take the rats out of the box and kill them isn't afraid of them. If he is, they escape." "Mater, you know everything! May I leave the acquisition of a few rat traps to you?" "Certainly, '* she said, pleased with herself. "There were never any rats in your insula." "I should hope not! You know perfectly well that dear Lucius Decumius is never without a dog." "And every one of them named Fido." "And every one of them an excellent ratter." "I notice that our Vestals prefer to keep cats." "Very handy animals provided they are females." She looked mischievous. "One can of course understand why they keep no males, but it is the female cats which hunt, you know. Unlike dogs in that respect. Their litters are a nuisance, so Licinia tells me, but she is very firm, even with the children when they plead. The kittens are drowned at birth." "And Junia and Quinctilia drown in tears." "We must all," said Aurelia, "grow used to death. And to not getting the desire of our hearts." As this was inarguable, Caesar changed the subject. I was able to rescue some twenty book buckets and their contents, a little mangled but reasonably intact. It would seem that my predecessors did think to put the contents into new buckets whenever the old ones started to disintegrate from the rats, but it would have been more sensible, surely, to have eliminated the rats. For the time being I'll keep the documents here in my study I want to read them and catalogue them." "Archives, Caesar?" "Yes, but not of the Republic. They date back to some of the earliest kings." "Ah! I understand why they interest you so much. You've always had a passion for ancient laws and archives. But can you read them? Surely they're indecipherable." "No, they're in good sound Latin of the kind written about three hundred years ago, and they're on Pergamum parchment. I imagine one of the Pontifices Maximi of that era deciphered the originals and made these copies." He leaned back on his couch. "I also found stone tablets, inscribed in the same writing as that on the stele in the well of the Lapis Niger. So archaic one can hardly recognize the language as Latin. A precursor of it, I suppose, like the song of the Salii. But I shall decipher them, never fear!" His mother gazed at him fondly enough, yet with a little sternness too. "I hope, Caesar, that in the midst of all this religious and historical exploration you find the time to remember that you are standing for election as praetor this year. You must pay proper attention to the duties of the Pontifex Maximus, but you cannot neglect your career in the Forum."