Colleen McCullough - 4. Caesar's Women

He had not forgotten, nor did the vigor and pace of his election campaign suffer because the lamps in his study burned until very late each night while he worked his way through what he had decided to call the Commentaries of the Kings. And thank all the Gods for that unknown Pontifex Maximus who had deciphered and copied them onto Pergamum parchment! Just where or what the originals were, Caesar did not know. They were certainly not in the Regia, nor were they similar to the stone tablets he had found. Those, he decided from his preliminary work, were annalistic and dated from the earliest kings, perhaps even from Numa Pompilius. Or Romulus? What a thought! Chilling. Nothing on parchment or stone was a history of the times, however. Both related to laws, rules, religious rites, precepts, functions and functionaries. At some moment soon they would have to be published; all of Rome must know what lay in the Regia. Varro would be ecstatic, and Cicero fascinated. Caesar would plan a dinner party.

As if to cap what had been an extraordinary year of ups and downs for Caesar, when the curule elections were held early in Quinctilis, he came in at the top of the praetors' poll. Not one Century failed to name him, which meant he was able to rest secure long before the last man returned was sure he had been elected. Philippus, his friend from Mitylene days, would be a colleague; so too would Cicero's irascible younger brother, tiny Quintus Cicero. But, alas, Bibulus was a praetor too. When the lots were cast to decide which man should have which job, Caesar's victory was complete. His name was on the first ball out of the spout; he would be urban praetor, the most senior man among the eight. That meant Bibulus couldn't annoy him (he had received the Violence Court) but he could certainly annoy Bibulus! Time to break Domitia's heart by discarding her. She had turned out to be discreet, so as yet Bibulus had no idea. But he would the moment she started weeping and wailing. They all did. Except Servilia. Perhaps that was why she alone had lasted.

PART IV from JANUARY 1 until DECEMBER 5 of 63 B.C.

It was Cicero's misfortune to enter upon his year as consul in the midst of a severe economic depression, and as economics was not his speciality, he faced his year of office in a rather gloomy mood. Not the sort of consulship he had hoped for! He wanted people to say of him after his year was over that he had given Rome the same kind of halcyon prosperity commonly attributed to the joint consulship of Pompey and Crassus seven years earlier. With Hybrida as his junior colleague, it was inevitable all the credit would go to him, which meant he wouldn't need to end on bad terms with Hybrida, as Pompey had with Crassus and vice versa. Rome's economic troubles emanated from the East, which had been closed to Roman businessmen for over twenty years. First King Mithridates had conquered it, then when Sulla wrested it off him, Sulla introduced praiseworthy financial regulations there and thus prevented the knight community of Rome from going back to the old days of milking the East dry. Added to which, the problem of piracy on the high seas did not encourage business ventures east of Macedonia and Greece. Consequently those who farmed taxes, lent money, or traded in goods and commodities like wheat, wine and wool kept their capital at home; a phenomenon which increased when the war against Quintus Sertorius broke out in Spain and a series of droughts diminished the harvest. Both ends of Our Sea became risky or impracticable areas for business endeavors. All of these things had contrived to concentrate capital and investment within Rome and Italy for twenty years. No seductive overseas opportunities presented themselves to Rome's knight businessmen, who as a result had little need to find large amounts of money. The borrowing interest rate was low, rents were low, inflation was high, and creditors were in no hurry to call in debts. Cicero's misfortune was to be laid entirely at Pompey's door. First the Great Man had cleaned up the pirates, then he chased Kings Mithridates and Tigranes out of those areas which used to be a part of Rome's business sphere. He also abolished Sulla's financial regulations, though Lucullus had persisted in retaining them the sole reason why the knights had lobbied to remove Lucullus and give his command to Pompey. And so just as Cicero and Hybrida assumed office, a literal wealth of business opportunities was opening up in the East. Where once had been Asia Province and Cilicia were now four provinces; Pompey had added the new provinces of Bithynia Pontus and Syria to the empire. He set them up the same way as the other two by giving the great companies of publicani based in Rome the right to farm their taxes, tithes and tributes. Private contracts let out by the censors saved the State the burden of gathering taxes and prevented the proliferation of civil servants. Let the publicani have the headaches! All the Treasury wanted was its stipulated share of the profits. Capital flowed out of Rome and Italy in obedience to the new drive to obtain control of these eastern business ventures. As a result the interest rate went up dramatically, usurers suddenly called in old debts, and credit was hard to come by. In the cities rents soared; in the country farmers were strapped by mortgage repayments. Inevitably the price of grain even that supplied by the State increased. Huge amounts of money were pouring out of Rome, and nobody in government knew how to control the situation. Informed by friends like the knight plutocrat Titus Pomponius Atticus (who had no intention of letting Cicero in on too many commercial secrets) that the money drain was due to resident alien Jews in Rome sending the proceeds home, Cicero quickly brought in a law forbidding the Jews to send any money home. Of course it had little effect, but what else he could do the senior consul did not know nor was Atticus about to enlighten him. It was not in Cicero's nature to turn his year as consul into a mission he now saw would be as vain as it would prove unpopular, so instead he turned his attention toward matters he regarded as well within his sphere of excellence; the economic situation would solve itself given time, whereas laws required a personal touch. His year meant that for once Rome had a legislating consul in office, so he would legislate. First he attacked the law the consul Gaius Piso had brought in four years earlier against electoral bribery in the consular polls. Himself guilty of massive bribery, Piso had been forced into legislating against it. Perhaps not illogically, what Piso passed leaked in all directions, but after Cicero patched up the worst of the holes it began to look quite presentable. And where to from that? Ah! Ah yes, men returning from a term governing a praetorian province who had extorted in that province and intended to wriggle out of prosecution by getting elected consul in absentia! Praetors sent out to govern provinces were more likely to extort than consul governors; there were eight of them and only two consul governors, which meant that the majority of them knew their only chance to make a fortune governing a province was as a praetor governor. Yet how, after squeezing his province dry, was a returning praetor governor to avoid prosecution for extortion? If he was a strong contender for the consulship, then the best way was to petition the Senate to be allowed to stand for the consular elections in absentia. No holder of imperium could be prosecuted. Provided a returning praetor governor did not cross the sacred boundary into the city of Rome itself, he retained the imperium Rome had given him to govern his province. So he could sit on the Campus Martius just outside the city, imperium intact, petition the Senate to stand for consul in absentia, conduct his campaign from the Campus Martius, and then, if he was lucky enough to be elected consul, he walked straight into a fresh imperium. This ploy meant he managed to elude prosecution for two more years, by which time the wrathful provincials who had originally intended to prosecute him would have given up and gone home. Well, thundered Cicero in the Senate and Comitia, that sort of thing must cease! Therefore he and his junior colleague, Hybrida, proposed to forbid any returning praetor governor standing for consul in absentia. Let him come inside Rome, take his chances with prosecution! And as the Senate and People deemed this excellent, the new law passed. Now what else could he do? Cicero thought of this and that, all useful little laws which would enhance his reputation. Though not, alas, make his reputation. As consul rather than as legal luminary. What Cicero needed was a crisis, and not an economic one.