Caesar's Women (15 page)

Thus it was that when Piso the consul convoked the Senate at dawn the next morning, the leading lights of that body had found no rival general to put up against Pompey; Catulus's interview with Crassus had foundered.

News of what was in the wind had spread from one back tier clear across to the other, of course, and opposition from all sides had hardened, much to the delight of the boni. The demise of Sulla was just too recent for most men to forget how he had held the Senate to ransom, despite his favors; and Pompey had been his pet, his executioner. Pompey had killed too many senators of Cinnan and Carboan persuasion, then killed Brutus too, and had forced the Senate to allow him to be elected consul without ever having been a senator. That last crime was the most unforgivable of all. The censors Lentulus Clodianus and Poplicola were still influential in Pompey's favor, but his most powerful employees, Philippus and Cethegus, were gone, the one into retirement as a voluptuary, the other through the offices of death.

Not surprising then that when they entered the Curia Hostilia this morning in their solid-purple censors' togas, Lentulus Clodianus and Poplicola resolved after looking at so many set faces that they would not speak up for Pompey the Great today. Nor would Curio, another Pompeian employee. As for Afranius and old Petreius, their rhetorical skills were so limited that they were under orders not to try. Crassus was absent.

“Isn't Pompeius coming to Rome?” asked Caesar of Gabinius when he realized Pompey himself was not there.

“On his way,” said Gabinius, “but he won't appear until his name is mentioned in the Plebs. You know how he hates the Senate.”

Once the auguries had been taken and Metellus Pius Pontifex Maximus had conducted the prayers, Piso (who held the fasces for February because Glabrio had vanished east) began the meeting.

“I realize,” he said from his curule chair on the elevated platform at the far end of the chamber, “that today's meeting is not, under the recent legislation of Aulus Gabinius, tribune of the plebs, germane to February's business. In one way! But in another, as it concerns a foreign command, it definitely is. All of which is beside the point. Nothing in that lex Gabinia can prevent this body's meeting to discuss urgent affairs of any kind during the month of February!”

He rose to his feet, a typical Calpurnius Piso, being tall, very dark, and possessed of bushy eyebrows. “This same tribune of the plebs, Aulus Gabinius from Picenum”—he gestured with one hand at the back of Gabinius 's head, below him and on the far left end of the tribunician bench—“yesterday, without first notifying this body, convoked the Assembly of the Plebs and told its members—or those few who were present, anyway—how to get rid of piracy. Without consulting us, without consulting anyone! Toss unlimited imperium, money and forces into one single man's lap, he said! Not mentioning any names, but which one of us can doubt that only one name was inside his Picentine head? This Aulus Gabinius and his fellow Picentine tribune of the plebs, Gaius Cornelius of no distinguished family despite his nomen, have already given us who have inherited Rome as our responsibility more trouble than enough since they entered office. I, for example, have been forced to draft counter-legislation for bribery at the curule elections. I, for example, have been cunningly deprived of my colleague in this year's consulship. I, for example, have been accused of numberless crimes to do with electoral bribery.

“All of you present here today are aware of the seriousness of this proposed new lex Gabinia, and aware too how greatly it infringes every aspect of the mos maiorum. But it is not my duty to open this debate, only to guide it. So as it is too early in the year for any magistrates-elect to be present, I will proceed first to this year's praetors, and ask for a spokesman.”

As the debating order had already been worked out, no praetor offered his services, nor did any aedile, curule or plebeian; Gaius Piso passed to the ranks of the consulars in the front rows on either side of the House. That meant the most powerful piece of oratorical artillery would fire first: Quintus Hortensius.

“Honored consul, censors, magistrates, consulars and senators,” he began, “it is time once and for all to put paid to these so-called special military commissions! We all know why the Dictator Sulla incorporated that clause in his amended constitution—to purchase the services of one man who did not belong to this august and venerable body—a knight from Picenum who had the presumption to recruit and general troops in Sulla's employ while still in his early twenties, and who, having tasted the sweetness of blatant unconstitutionality, continued to espouse it— though espouse the Senate he would not! When Lepidus revolted he held Italian Gaul, and actually had the temerity to order the execution of a member of one of Rome's oldest and finest families—Marcus Junius Brutus. Whose treason, if treason it really was, this body defined by including Brutus in its decree outlawing Lepidus. A decree which did not give Pompeius the right to have Brutus's head lopped off by a minion in the marketplace at Regium Lepidum! Nor to cremate the head and body, then casually send the ashes to Rome with a short, semiliterate note of explanation!

“After which, Pompeius kept his precious Picentine legions in Mutina until he forced the Senate to commission him—no senator, no magistrate!—with a proconsular imperium to go to Spain, govern the nearer province in the Senate's name and make war on the renegade Quintus Sertorius. When all the time, Conscript Fathers, in the further province we had an eminent man of proper family and background, the good Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Pontifex Maximus, already in the field against Sertorius— a man who, I add, did more to defeat Sertorius than this extraordinary and unsenatorial Pompeius ever did! Though it was Pompeius who took the glory, Pompeius who collected the laurels!”

Quite a good-looking man of imposing presence, Hortensius turned slowly in a circle and seemed to look into every pair of eyes, a trick he had used to good effect in law courts for twenty and more years. “Then what does this Picentine nobody Pompeius do when he returns to our beloved country? Against every provision of the constitution, he brings his army across the Rubico and into Italia, where he sits it down and proceeds to blackmail us into allowing him to stand for consul! We had no choice. Pompeius became consul. And even today, Conscript Fathers, I refuse with every fiber of my being to accord him that abominable name of Magnus he awarded himself! For he is not great! He is a boil, a carbuncle, a putrid festering sore in Rome's maltreated hide!

“How dare Pompeius assume he can blackmail this body yet again? How dare he put his fellating minion Gabinius up to this? Unlimited imperium and unlimited forces and unlimited money, if you please! When all the time the Senate has an able commander in Crete doing an excellent job! An excellent job, I repeat! An excellent job! Excellent, excellent!” Hortensius's Asianic style of oratory was now in full flight, and the House had settled down (particularly as it was in agreement with every word he said) to listen to one of its all-time great speakers. “I tell you, fellow members of this House, that I will never, never, never consent to this command, no matter whose name might be put up to fill it! Only in our time has Rome ever needed to resort to unlimited imperium, unlimited commands! They are unconstitutional and unconscionable and unacceptable! We will clear Our Sea of pirates, but we will do it the Roman way, not the Picentine way!”

At which point Bibulus began to cheer and drum his feet, and the whole House joined him. Hortensius sat down, flushed with a sweet victory.

Aulus Gabinius had listened impassively, and at the end shrugged his shoulders, lifted his hands. “The Roman way,” he said loudly when the cheering died down, “has degenerated to such a point of ineffectuality that it might better be called the Pisidian way! If Picenum is what the job needs, then Picenum it has to be. For what is Picenum, if it is not Rome? You draw geographical boundaries, Quintus Hortensius, which do not exist!”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” screamed Piso, leaping to his feet and down off the curule dais to face the tribunician bench beneath it. “You dare to prate of Rome, you Gaul from a nest of Gauls? You dare to lump Gaul with Rome? Beware then, Gabinius the Gaul, that you do not suffer the same fate as Romulus, and never return from your hunting expedition!”

“A threat!” shouted Gabinius, leaping to his feet. “You hear him, Conscript Fathers? He threatens to kill me, for that is what happened to Romulus! Killed by men who weren't his bootlace, lurking in the Goat Swamps of the Campus Martius!”

Pandemonium broke out, but Piso and Catulus quelled it between them, unwilling to see the House dissolve before they had had their say. Gabinius had returned to his perch on the end of the bench where the tribunes of the plebs sat, and watched bright-eyed as the consul and the consular went their rounds, soothing, clucking, persuading men to put their behinds back on their stools.

And then, when quiet had more or less returned and Piso was about to ask Catulus his opinion, Gaius Julius Caesar rose to his feet. As he wore his corona civica and therefore ranked with any consular in the speaking order, Piso, who disliked him, threw him a dirty look which invited him to sit down again. Caesar remained standing, Piso glaring.

“Let him speak, Piso!” cried Gabinius. “He's entitled!”

Though he didn't exercise his oratorical privilege in the House very often, Caesar was acknowledged as Cicero's only real rival; Hortensius's Asianic style had fallen out of favor since the advent of Cicero's plainer but more powerful Athenian style, and Caesar too preferred to be Attic. If there was one thing every member of the Senate had in common, it was a connoisseur's appreciation for oratory. Expecting Catulus, they all opted for Caesar.

“As neither Lucius Bellienus nor Marcus Sextilius has yet been returned to our bosom, I believe I am the only member of this House present here today who has actually been captured by pirates,” he said in that high, absolutely clear voice he assumed for public speech. “It makes me, you might say, an expert on the subject, if expertise can be conveyed by firsthand experience. I did not find it an edifying experience, and my aversion began in the moment I saw those two trim war galleys bearing down on my poor, plodding merchant vessel. For, Conscript Fathers, I was informed by my captain that to attempt armed resistance was as certain to produce death as it was bound to be futile. And I, Gaius Julius Caesar, had to yield my person to a vulgar fellow named Polygonus, who had been preying upon merchantmen in Lydian, Carian and Lycian waters for over twenty years.

“I learned a lot during the forty days I remained the prisoner of Polygonus,” Caesar went on in more conversational tones. “I learned that there is an agreed sliding scale of ransom for all prisoners too valuable to be sent to the slave markets or chained up to wait on these pirates back home in their lairs. For a mere Roman citizen, slavery it is. A mere Roman citizen isn't worth two thousand sesterces, which is the bottom price he could fetch in the slave markets. For a Roman centurion or a Roman about halfway up the hierarchy of the publicani, the ransom is half a talent. For a top Roman knight or publicanus, the price is one talent. For a Roman nobleman of high family who is not a member of the Senate, the price is two talents. For a Roman senator of pedarius status, the ransom is ten talents. For a Roman senator of junior magisterial status— quaestor or aedile or tribune of the plebs—the ransom is twenty talents. For a Roman senator who has held a praetorship or consulship, the ransom is fifty talents. When captured complete with lictors and fasces, as in the case of our two latest praetor victims, the price goes up to one hundred talents each, as we have learned only days ago. Censors and consuls of note fetch a hundred talents. Though I am not sure what value pirates put on consuls like our dear Gaius Piso here—perhaps one talent? I wouldn't pay more for him myself, I do assure you. But then, I am not a pirate, though I sometimes wonder about Gaius Piso in that respect!

“One is expected during one's imprisonment,” Caesar continued in that same casual manner, “to blanch in fear and fall down with great regularity to beg for one's life. Not something these Julian knees of mine are accustomed to doing—nor did. I spent my time spying out the land, assessing possible resistance to attack, discovering what was guarded and whereabouts. And I also spent my time assuring everyone that when my ransom was found— it was fifty talents—I would return, capture the place, send the women and children to the slave markets, and crucify the men. They thought that a wonderful joke. I would never, never find them, they told me. But I did find them, Conscript Fathers, and I did capture the place, and I did send the women and children to the slave markets, and I did crucify all the men. I could have brought back the beaks of four pirate ships to adorn the rostra, but since I used the Rhodians for my expedition, the beaks stand now on a column in Rhodus next door to the new temple of Aphrodite that I caused to be built by my share of the spoils.

“Now Polygonus was only one of hundreds of pirates at that end of Our Sea, and not even a major pirate, if they are to be graded. Mind you, Polygonus had been having such a lucrative time of it working on his own with a mere four galleys that he saw no point in joining forces with other pirates to form a little navy under a competent admiral like Lasthenes or Panares—or Pharnaces or Megadates, to move a little closer to home. Polygonus was happy to pay five hundred denarii to a spy in Miletus or Priene in return for information as to which ships were worth boarding. And how assiduous his spies were! No fat pickings escaped their attention. Among his hoard were many items of jewelry made in Egypt, which indicates that he raided vessels between Pelusium and Paphos too. So his network of spies must have been enormous. Paid only for information which found him good prey, of course, not routinely paid. Keep men short and their noses keen, and in the end it's cheaper as well as more effective.

“Noxious and of great nuisance value though they are, however, pirates like Polygonus are a minor affair compared to the pirate fleets under their pirate admirals. They don't need to wait for lone ships to come along, or ships in unarmed convoys. They can attack grain fleets escorted by heavily armed galleys. And then they proceed to sell back to Roman middlemen what was Rome's in the first place, already bought and paid for. Little wonder Roman bellies are empty, half of that vacuum from lack of grain, half because what grain there is sells at three and four times what it should, even from the aedile's dole list.”