Caesar's Women (19 page)

She closed the door behind him and stood for a moment so weak that she swayed. Right, she had been right! Brutus was his heir because Cato would never consent to being adopted into a patrician clan like Servilius Caepio! Oh, what a wonderful day this was! Even Caesar's defection wasn't hurting the way it had a few hours before.

* * *

Having Marcus Porcius Cato on one's staff, even if his duties were technically confined to the consuls' legions, was an ordeal the governor of Macedonia could never have imagined until it happened. If the young man had been a personal appointment, home he would have gone no matter if his sponsor had been Jupiter Optimus Maximus; but as the People had appointed him through the medium of the Popular Assembly, there was nothing Governor Marcus Rubrius could do save suffer the continuing presence of Cato.

But how could one deal with a young man who poked and pried, questioned incessantly, wanted to know why this was going there, why that was worth more on the books than in the marketplace, why so-and-so was claiming tax exemptions? Cato never stopped asking why. If he was reminded tactfully that his inquisitions were not relevant to the consuls' legions, Cato would simply answer that everything in Macedonia belonged to Rome, and Roma as personified by Romulus had elected him one of her magistrates. Ergo, everything in Macedonia was legally and morally and ethically his business.

Governor Marcus Rubrius was not alone. His legates and his military tribunes (elected or unelected), his scribes, wardens, bailiffs, publicani, mistresses and slaves all detested Marcus Porcius Cato. Who was a fiend for work, couldn't even be gotten rid of by being sent to some outpost of the province, because he'd come back in two or three days at most, his task well done.

A great deal of his conversation—if a loud harangue could be called a conversation—revolved around his great-grandfather, Cato the Censor, whose frugality and old-fashioned ways Cato esteemed immensely. And since Cato was Cato, he actually emulated the Censor in every way save one: he walked everywhere instead of riding, he ate abstemiously and drank nothing but water, his habit of living was no better than that of a ranker soldier, and he kept only one slave to attend to his needs.

So what was that one transgression of his great-grandfather’s tenets? Cato the Censor had abhorred Greece, Greeks and things Greek, whereas young Cato admired them, and made no secret of his admiration. This let him in for considerable chaffing from those who had to bear his presence in Grecian Macedonia, all of them dying to pierce his incredibly thick skin. But none of the chaffing so much as made a dent in Cato's integument; when someone twitted him about betraying his great-grandfather’s precepts by espousing Greek modes of thought, that person found himself ignored as unimportant. Alas, what Cato did consider important was what drove his superiors, peers and inferiors maddest: living soft, he called it, and was as likely to criticize evidence of living soft in the governor as in a centurion. Since he dwelled in a two-roomed mud brick house on the outskirts of Thessalonica and shared it with his dear friend Titus Munatius Rufus, a fellow tribune of the soldiers, no one could say Cato himself lived soft.

He had arrived in Thessalonica during March, and by the end of May the governor came to the conclusion that if he didn't get rid of Cato somehow, murder would be done. The complaints kept piling up on the gubernatorial desk from tax-farming publicani, grain merchants, accountants, centurions, legionaries, legates, and various women Cato had accused of unchastity.

“He even had the gall to tell me that he had kept himself chaste until he married!” gasped one lady to Rubrius; she was an intimate friend. “Marcus, he stood me up in the agora in front of a thousand smirking Greeks and lambasted me about the behavior appropriate to a Roman woman living in a province! Get rid of him, or I swear I'll pay someone to assassinate him!”

Luckily for Cato, it was somewhat later on the same day that he happened to pass a remark to Marcus Rubrius about the presence in Pergamum of one Athenodorus Cordylion.

“How I would love to hear him!” barked Cato. “Normally he's located in Antioch and Alexandria; this present tour is unusual.”

“Well,” said Rubrius, tongue tripping rapidly in the wake of a brilliant idea, “why don't you take a couple of months off and go to Pergamum to hear him?”

“I couldn't do that!” said Cato, shocked. “My duty is here.”

“Every tribune of the soldiers is entitled to leave, my dear Marcus Cato, and none is more deserving of leave than you. Go, do! I insist upon it. And take Munatius Rufus with you.”

So Cato went, accompanied by Munatius Rufus. Thessalonica's Roman contingent went almost mad with joy, for Munatius Rufus so hero-worshiped Cato that he imitated him assiduously. But exactly two months after departing he was back in Thessalonica, the only Roman whom Rubrius had ever known to take a casual suggestion of how long to be away so literally. And with him in his train came none other than Athenodorus Cordylion, Stoic philosopher of some renown, ready to play Panaetius to Cato's Scipio Aemilianus. Being a Stoic, he didn't expect or want the kind of luxuries Scipio Aemilianus had poured upon Panaetius—which was just as well. The only change he made in Cato's way of living was that he, Munatius Rufus and Cato rented a three-roomed mud brick house instead of a two-roomed one, and that there were three slaves in it instead of two. What had prompted this eminent philosopher to join Cato? Simply that in Cato he had seen someone who would one day matter enormously, and to join the Cato household would ensure his own name was remembered. If it hadn't been for Scipio Aemilianus, who would ever remember the name of Panaetius?

The Roman element in Thessalonica had groaned mightily when Cato returned from Pergamum; Rubrius demonstrated that he was not prepared to suffer Cato by declaring that he had urgent business in Athens, and departing in a hurry. No consolation for those he left behind! But then Quintus Servilius Caepio arrived en route to Pergamum in Pompey's service, and Cato forgot about tax-farmers and living soft, so happy was he to see this beloved brother.

The bond between them had been created shortly after Cato's birth, at which time Caepio was only three years old. Ailing, their mother (she was to die within two months) gave baby Cato into toddler Caepio's willing hands. Nothing save duty had parted them since, though even in duty they had usually managed to stay together. Perhaps the bond would naturally have weakened as they grew, had it not been that their Uncle Drusus was stabbed to death in the house they had all shared; when it happened Caepio was six and Cato barely three. That ghastly ordeal forged the bond in fires of horror and tragedy so intense it endured afterward even stronger. Their childhood had been lonely, war torn, unloving, humorless. No close relatives were left, their guardians aloof, and the two oldest of the six children involved, Servilia and Servililla, loathed the two youngest, Cato and his sister Porcia. Not that the battle between oldest and youngest was weighted in favor of the two Servilias! Cato might have been the littlest, but he was also the loudest and the most fearless of all six.

Whenever the child Cato was asked, “Whom do you love?,” his answer was the same: “I love my brother.” And if he was pressed to qualify this statement by declaring whom else he loved, his answer was always the same: “I love my brother.”

In truth he never had loved anybody else except for that awful experience with Uncle Mamercus's daughter, Aemilia Lepida; and if loving Aemilia Lepida had taught Cato nothing else, it taught him to detest and mistrust women—an attitude helped along by a childhood spent with Servilia.

Whereas what he felt for Caepio was totally ineradicable, completely reciprocated, heartfelt, a matter of sinew and blood. Though he never would admit, even to himself, that Caepio was more than half a brother. There are none so blind as those who will not see, and none blinder than Cato when he wanted to be blind.

They journeyed everywhere, saw everything, Cato for once the expert. And if the humble little freedman Sinon who traveled in Caepio's train on Servilia's business had ever been tempted to treat her warning about Cato lightly, one look at Cato made him understand entirely why she had thought Cato worth mentioning as a danger to Sinon's real business. Not that Sinon was drawn to Cato's attention; a member of the Roman nobility did not bother with introductions to inferiors. Sinon looked from behind a crowd of servants and underlings, and made sure he did absolutely nothing to provoke Cato into noticing him.

But all good things must come to an end, so at the beginning of December the brothers parted and Caepio rode on down the Via Egnatia, followed by his retinue. Cato wept unashamedly. So did Caepio, all the harder because Cato walked down the road in their wake for many miles, waving, weeping, calling out to Caepio to take care, take care, take care.…

Perhaps he had had a feeling of imminent danger to Caepio; certainly when Caepio's note came a month later, its contents did not surprise him as they ought to have done.

My dearest brother, I have fallen ill in Aenus, and I fear for my life. Whatever is the matter, and none of the local physicians seem to know, I worsen every day.

Please, dear Cato, I beg you to come to Aenus and be with me at my end. It is so lonely, and no one here can comfort me as your presence would. I can ask to hold no hand dearer than yours while I give up my last breath. Come, I beg of you, and come soon. I will try to hang on.

My will is all in order with the Vestals, and as we had discussed, young Brutus will be my heir. You are the executor, and I have left you, as you stipulated, no more than the sum of ten talents. Come soon.

When informed that Cato needed emergency leave immediately, Governor Marcus Rubrius put no obstacles in his path. The only advice he offered was to go by road, as late-autumn storms were lashing the Thracian coast, and there had already been several shipwrecks reported. But Cato refused to listen; by road his journey could not take less than ten days no matter how hard he galloped, whereas the screaming winds from the northwest would fill the sails of a ship and speed it along so swiftly he could hope to reach Aenus in three to five days. And, having found a ship's captain rash enough to agree to take him (for a very good fee) from Thessalonica to Aenus, the feverish and frantic Cato embarked. Athenodorus Cordylion and Munatius Rufus came too, each man accompanied by only one slave.

The voyage was a nightmare of huge waves, breaking masts, tattered sails. However, the captain had carried extra masts and sails with him; the little ship ploughed and wallowed on, afloat and, it seemed to Athenodorus Cordylion and Munatius Rufus, powered in some inscrutable way out of the mind and will of Cato. Who, when harbor was reached at Aenus on the fourth day, didn't even wait for the ship to tie up. He leaped the few feet from ship to dock and began running madly through the driving rain. Only once did he pause, to discover from an astonished and shelterless peddler whereabouts lay the house of the ethnarch, for there he knew Caepio would be.

He burst into the house and into the room where his brother lay, an hour too late to hold that hand while Caepio knew he was holding it. Quintus Servilius Caepio was dead.

Water pooling around him on the floor, Cato stood by the bed looking down at the core and solace of his entire life, a still and dreadful figure bleached of color, vigor, force. The eyes had been closed and weighted down with coins, a curved silver edge protruded between the slightly parted lips; someone else had given Caepio the price of his ferry ride across the river Styx, thinking Cato would not come.

Cato opened his mouth and produced a sound which terrified everyone who heard it, neither wail nor howl nor screech, but an eldritch fusion of all three, animal, feral, hideous. All those present in the room recoiled instinctively, shook as Cato threw himself onto the bed, onto dead Caepio, covered the dreaming face with kisses, the lifeless body with caresses, while the tears poured until nose and mouth ran rivers as well, and those dreadful noises erupted out of him time and time again. And the paroxysm of grief went on without let, Cato mourning the passing of the one person in his world who meant everything, had been comfort in an awful childhood, anchor and rock to boy and man. Caepio it had been who drew his three-year-old eyes away from Uncle Drusus bleeding and screaming on the floor, turned those eyes into the warmth of his body and took the burden of all those ghastly hours upon his six-year-old shoulders; Caepio it had been who listened patiently while his dunce of a baby brother learned every fact the hardest way, by repeating it endlessly; Caepio it had been who reasoned and coaxed and cajoled during the unbearable aftermath of Aemilia Lepida's desertion, persuaded him to live again; Caepio it had been who took him on his first campaign, taught him to be a brave and fearless soldier, beamed when he had received armillae and phalerae for valor on a field more usually famous for cowardice, for they had belonged to the army of Clodianus and Poplicola defeated thrice by Spartacus; Caepio it had always, always been.

Now Caepio was no more. Caepio had died alone and friendless, with no one to hold his hand. The guilt and remorse sent Cato quite mad in that room where Caepio lay dead. When people tried to take him away, he fought. When people tried to talk him away, he just howled out. For almost two days he refused to move from where he lay covering Caepio, and the worst of it was that no one— no one!—even began to understand the terror of this loss, the loneliness his life would now forever be. Caepio was gone, and with Caepio went love, sanity, security.

But finally Athenodorus Cordylion managed to pierce the madness with words concerning a Stoic's attitudes, the behavior fitting to one who, like Cato, professed Stoicism. Cato got up and went to arrange his brother's funeral, still clad in rough tunic and smelly sagum, unshaven, face smeared and crusted with the dried remains of so many rivers of grief. The ten talents Caepio had left him in his will would be spent on this funeral, and when no matter how he tried to spend all of it with the local undertakers and spice merchants, all he could procure amounted to one talent, he spent another talent on a golden box studded with jewels to receive Caepio's ashes, and the other eight on a statue of Caepio to be erected in the agora of Aenus.