Colleen McCullough: 3. Fortune's Favorites

The crowd had wept desolately, but when the actors wearing the masks of Gaius Marius and Young Marius stepped forward to make their obesiances to the stiff still figure on the bier, a murmuring began that swelled into a chorus of exclamations and then exploded into a full throated roar. And Hortensius and Metellus Little Goat, watching appalled from the top of the Senate House steps, turned away in defeat. Gaius Julius Caesar's crime would have to be suffered in legal and disciplinary silence, for Rome wholeheartedly approved. "It was brilliant," said Hortensius to Catulus a little later. "Not only did he defy Sulla's and the Senate's laws, but he used the opportunity to remind every last face in that crowd that he is descended from kings and gods!"

"Well, Caesar, you got away with it," said Aurelia at the end of that very long day. "I knew I would," he said, dropping his black toga on the floor with a sigh of sheer weariness. "The conservative rump of the Senate may be in power this year, but not one member of it can be sure that next year's electors will feel the same way. Romans like a change of government. And Romans like a man with the courage of his convictions. Especially if he elevates old Gaius Marius to the pedestal from which the people of this city have never torn him down, no matter how many of his statues toppled." Moving like an ancient dropsical woman, Cinnilla dragged herself into the room and went to sit at Caesar's side on the couch. "It was wonderful," she said, pushing her hand into his. "I am glad I felt well enough to attend the eulogy, even if I couldn't get any further. And how well you spoke!" Turning side on, he cupped her face in his fingers and pushed a stray strand of hair away from her brow. My poor little one," he said tenderly, "not much longer to go now." He swept her feet from the floor and placed them in his lap. "You ought not to sit with your legs dangling, you know that." "Oh, Caesar, it has been so long! I carried Julia with no trouble whatsoever, yet here I am this second time in such a mess! I don't understand it," she said, eyes filling with tears. "I do," said Aurelia. "This one is a boy. I carried both my girls without trouble, but you, Caesar, were a burden." "I think," said Caesar, putting Cinnilla's feet on the couch beside him and rising, "that I'll go to my own apartment to sleep tonight." "Oh, please, Caesar, don't!" begged his wife, face puckering. "Stay here tonight. I promise we won't talk of babies and women's troubles. Aurelia, you must stop or he'll leave us." "Pah!" said Aurelia, getting up from her chair. "Where is Eutychus? What all of us need is a little food." "He's settling Strophantes in," said Cinnilla sadly, her face clearing when Caesar, resigned, sank back onto the couch. "Poor old man! They're all gone." "So will he be soon," said Caesar. "Oh, don't say that!" "It's in his face, wife. And it will be a mercy." "I hope," said Cinnilla, "that I don't live to be the last one left. That is the worst fate of all, I think." "A worse fate," said Caesar, who didn't want to be reminded of painful things, "is to speak of nothing except gloom." "It's just Rome," she said, smiling to reveal that little pink crease of inner lip. "You'll be better when you get to Spain. You're never really as happy in Rome as you are when you're traveling." Next nundinus, wife, by sea at the start of winter. You are quite right. Rome isn't where I want to be. So how about having this baby anytime between now and the next nundinus! I'd like to see my son before I leave."

He saw his son before he left at the next nundinus, but the child when finally the midwife and Lucius Tuccius managed to remove it from the birth canal had obviously been dead for several days. And Cinnilla, swollen and convulsing, one side paralyzed from a massive stroke, died at almost the same moment as she put forth her stillborn boy. No one could believe it. If Julia had been a shock and a grief, the loss of Cinnilla was unbearable. Caesar wept as he never had in his life before, and cared not who saw him. Hour after hour, from the moment of that first horrible convulsion until it was time to bury her too. One was possible. Two was a nightmare from which he never expected to awaken. Of the dead child he had neither room nor inclination to think; Cinnilla was dead, and she had been a part of his family life from his fourteenth year, a part of the pain of his flaminate, the chubby dark mite whom he had loved as a sister for as long as he had loved her as a wife. Seventeen years! They had been children together, the only children in that house. Her death smote Aurelia as Julia's could not, and that iron woman wept as desolately as her son did. A light had gone out that would dim the rest of her life. Part grandchild, part daughter in law, a sweet little presence left only in echoes, an empty loom, half of an empty bed. Burgundus wept, Cardixa wept, their sons wept, and Lucius Decumius, Strophantes, Eutychus, all the servants who scarcely remembered Aurelia's apartment without Cinnilla there. The tenants of the insula wept, and a great many people in the Subura. This funeral was different from Julia's. That had been a glory of sorts, a chance for the orator to show off a great woman and his own family. There were similarities; Caesar extracted the Cornelius Cinna imagines from the storage room in which he had hidden them alongside the masks of the two Marii, and they were worn by actors to scandalize Hortensius and Metellus Little Goat anew; and though it was not accepted practice to eulogize a young woman from the rostra, Caesar went through that public ordeal too. But not in a kind of glory. This time he spoke softly, and confined his remarks to the pleasure he had known in her company and the years during which she had consoled him for the loss of his boy's freedom. He talked about her smile and those dismal hairy garments she had dutifully woven for her destiny as flaminica Dialis. He talked about his daughter, whom he held in his arms while he spoke. He wept. And he ended by saying, "I know nothing of grief beyond what I feel inside myself. That is griefs tragedy that each of us must always deem his or her own grief greater than anyone else's. But I am prepared to confess to you that perhaps I am a cold, hard man whose greatest love is for his own dignitas. So be it. Once I refused to divorce Cinna's daughter. At the time I thought I refused to obey Sulla's command to divorce her for my own private benefit and the possibilities it opened up. Well, I have explained to you what griefs tragedy is. But that tragedy is as nothing to the tragedy of never knowing how much someone has meant to you until after that someone is dead." No one cheered the imago of Lucius Cornelius Cinna, nor those of his ancestors. But Rome wept so deeply that for the second time in two nundinae, Caesar's enemies found themselves rendered impotent.

His mother was suddenly years older, absolutely heartbroken. A difficult business for the son, whose attempts to comfort her with hugs and kisses were still repulsed. Am I so cold and hard because she is so cold and hard? But she isn't cold and hard with anyone except me! Oh, why does she do this to me? Look how she grieves for Cinnilla. And how she grieved for awful old Sulla. If I were a woman, my child would be such a consolation. But I am a Roman nobleman, and a Roman nobleman's children are at best on the periphery of his life. How many times did I see my father? And what did I ever have to talk to him about? "Mater," he said, "I give you little Julia to be your own. She's almost exactly the same age now as Cinnilla was when she came to live here. In time she'll fill the largest part of your vacant space. I won't try to suborn her away from you." "I've had the child since she was born," said Aurelia, "and I know all that." Old Strophantes shuffled in, looked rheumily at mother and son, shuffled out again. "I must write to Uncle Publius in Smyrna," Aurelia said. "He's another one who has outlived everybody, poor old man." "Yes, Mater, you do that." "I don't understand you, Caesar, when you behave like the child who cries because he's eaten all his honey cake yet thinks it ought never to diminish." "And what has provoked that remark?" "You said it during Julia's funeral oration. That I had to be both mother and father to you, which meant I couldn't give you the hugs and kisses Julia did. When I heard you say that, I was relieved. You understood it at last. But now I find you just as bitter as ever. Accept your lot, my son. You mean more to me than life, than little Julia, than Cinnilla, than anyone. You mean more to me than your father did. And more by far than Sulla ever could have, even had I weakened. If there cannot be peace between us, can't we at least declare a truce?" He smiled wryly. "Why not?" he asked. "You'll come good once you get out of Rome, Caesar." "That's what Cinnilla said." "She was right. Nothing will ever blow away your grief at this death, but a brisk sea voyage will blow away the rubbish cluttering up your mind. It will function again. It can't not." It can't not, echoed Caesar, riding the short miles between Rome and Ostia, where his ship waited. That is a truth. My spirit might be bruised to pulp, but my mind is unharmed. New things to do, new people to meet, a new country to explore and no sign of Lucullus! I will survive.