Caesar's Women (33 page)

The group dispersed to go to work, and for a month they worked very hard indeed. Much to Catulus's chagrin it became obvious that Cato, barely thirty years old, was the one who had the most clout. The Great Treasury War and all those proscription rewards safely back in the State coffers had made a terrific impression on the First Class, who had been the ones to suffer most under Sulla's proscriptions. Cato was a hero to the Ordo Equester, and if Cato said to vote for Cicero and Hybrida, then that was whom every knight lower than the Eighteen would vote for!

The result was that the consuls-elect were Marcus Tullius Cicero in senior place and Gaius Antonius Hybrida as his junior colleague. Cicero was jubilant, never really understanding that he owed his victory to circumstances having nothing to do with merit or integrity or clout. Had Catilina not been a candidate, Cicero would never have been elected at all. But as no one told him this, he strutted around Forum Romanum and Senate in a daze of happiness liberally larded with conceit. Oh, what a year! Senior consul in suo anno, the proud father of a son at last, and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Tullia, formally betrothed to the wealthy and august Gaius Calpurnius Piso Frugi. Even Terentia was being nice to him

!

When Lucius Decumius heard that the present consuls, Lucius Caesar and Marcius Figulus, proposed to legislate the crossroads colleges out of existence, he was thrown into a panic-stricken rage and horror, and ran immediately to see his patron, Caesar.

“This,” he said wrathfully, “is just not fair! When has we ever done anything wrong? We minds our own business!”

A statement which threw Caesar into a dilemma, for he of course knew the circumstances leading to the proposed new law.

It all went back to the consulship of Gaius Piso three years earlier, and to the tribunate of the plebs of Pompey's man, Gaius Manilius. It had been Aulus Gabinius's job to secure the eradication of the pirates for Pompey; now it became Gaius Manilius's job to secure the command against the two kings for Pompey. In one way an easier job, thanks to Pompey's brilliant handling of the pirates, yet in another way a more difficult job, as those opposed to special commands could see only too clearly that Pompey was a man of enormous ability who might just use this new commission to make himself Dictator when he returned victorious from the East. And with Gaius Piso as sole consul, Manilius faced an adamant and irascible foe in the Senate.

At first glance Manilius's initial bill seemed harmless and irrelevant to Pompey's concerns: he merely asked the Plebeian Assembly to distribute Rome's citizen freedmen across the full gamut of the thirty-five tribes, instead of keeping them confined to two urban tribes, Suburana and Esquilina. But no one was fooled. Manilius's bill directly affected senators and senior knights, as they were both the major slave owners and those who had multitudes of freedmen in their clienteles.

A stranger to the way Rome worked might have been pardoned for assuming that the law of numbers would ensure that any measure altering the status of Rome's freedmen would make no difference, for the definition of abject poverty in Rome was a man's inability to own one slave— and there were few indeed who did not own one slave. Therefore on the surface any plebiscite distributing freedmen across all thirty-five tribes should have little effect on the top end of society. But such was not the case.

The vast majority of slave owners in Rome kept no more than that single slave, or perhaps two slaves. But these were not male slaves; they were female. For two reasons: the first, that her master could enjoy a female slave's sexual favors, and the second, that a male slave was a temptation to the master's wife, and the paternity of his children suspect in consequence. After all, what need had a poor man for a male slave? Servile duties were domestic—washing, fetching water, preparing meals, assisting with the children, emptying chamber pots—and not well done by men. Attitudes of mind didn't change just because a person was unlucky enough to be slave rather than free; men liked to do men's things, and despised the lot of women as drudgery.

Theoretically every slave was paid a peculium and got his or her keep besides; the little sum of money was hoarded to buy freedom. But practically, freedom was something only the well-to-do master could afford to bestow, especially since manumission carried a five percent tax. With the result that the bulk of Rome's female slaves were never freed while useful (and, fearing destitution more than unpaid labor, they contrived to remain useful even after they grew old). Nor could they afford to belong to a burial club enabling them to buy a funeral after death, together with decent interment. They wound up in the lime pits without so much as a grave marker to say they had ever existed.

Only those Romans with a relatively high income and a number of households to maintain owned many slaves. The higher a Roman's social and economic status, the more servants in his employ—and the more likely he was to have males among them. In these echelons manumission was common and a slave's service limited to between ten and fifteen years, after which he (it was usually he) became a freedman in the clientele of his previous master. He donned the Cap of Liberty and became a Roman citizen; if he had a wife and adult children, they too were freed.

His vote, however, was useless unless—as did happen from time to time—he made a large amount of money and bought himself membership in one of the thirty-one rural tribes, as well as being economically qualified to belong to a Class in the Centuries. But the great majority remained in the urban tribes of Suburana and Esquilina, which were the two most enormous tribes Rome owned, yet were able to deliver only two votes in the tribal Assemblies. This meant that a freedman's vote could not affect a tribal Assembly vote result.

Gaius Manilius's projected bill therefore had huge significance. Were Rome's freedmen to be distributed across the thirty-five tribes, they might alter the outcome of tribal elections and legislation, and this despite the fact that they were not in a majority among the citizens of Rome. The prospective danger lay in the fact that freed-men lived inside the city; were they to belong to rural tribes, they could by voting in these rural tribes outnumber the genuine rural tribe members present inside Rome during a vote. Not such a problem for the elections, held during summer when many rural people were inside Rome, but a serious peril for legislation. Legislation happened at any time of year, but was particularly prevalent during December, January and February, the months which saw the lawmaking pinnacle of the new tribunes of the plebs—and months when rural citizens did not come to Rome.

Manilius's bill went down to decisive defeat. The freedmen remained in those two gigantic urban tribes. But where it spelled trouble for men like Lucius Decumius lay in the fact that Manilius had sought out Rome's freedmen to drum up support for his bill. And where did Rome's freedmen congregate? In crossroads colleges, as they were convivial places as stuffed with slaves and freedmen as they were with ordinary Roman lowly. Manilius had gone from one crossroads college to another, talking to the men his law would benefit, persuading them to go to the Forum and support him. Knowing themselves possessed of worthless votes, many freedmen had obliged him. But when the Senate and the senior knights of the Eighteen saw these masses of freedmen descend on the Forum, all they could think of was the danger. Anyplace where freedmen gathered ought to be outlawed. The crossroads colleges would have to go.

A crossroads was a hotbed of spiritual activity, and had to be guarded against evil forces. It was a place where the Lares congregated, and the Lares were the myriad wraiths which peopled the Underworld and found a natural focus for their forces at a crossroads. Thus each crossroads had a shrine to the Lares, and once a year around the start of January a festival called the Compitalia was devoted to the placation of the Lares of the crossroads. On the night before the Compitalia every free resident of the district leading to a crossroads was obliged to hang up a woolen doll, and every slave a woolen ball; in Rome the shrines were so overwhelmed by dolls and balls that one of the duties of the crossroads colleges was to rig up lines to hold them. Dolls had heads, and a free person had a head counted by the censors; balls had no heads, for slaves were not counted. Slaves were, however, an important part of the festivities. As on the Saturnalia, they feasted as equals with the free men and women of Rome, and it was the duty of slaves (stripped of their servile insignia) to make the offering of a fattened pig to the Lares. All of which was under the authority of the crossroads colleges and the urban praetor, their supervisor.

Thus a crossroads college was a religious brotherhood. Each one had a custodian, the vilicus, who made sure that the men of his district gathered regularly in rent-free premises close to the crossroads and the Lares shrine; they kept the shrine and the crossroads neat, clean, unattractive to evil forces. Many of Rome's intersections did not have a shrine, as these were limited to the major junctions.

One such crossroads college lay in the ground-floor apex of Aurelia's insula under the care of Lucius Decumius. Until Aurelia had tamed him after she moved into her insula, Lucius Decumius had run an extremely profitable side business guaranteeing protection to the shop owners and factory proprietors in his district; when Aurelia exerted that formidable strength of hers and demonstrated to Lucius Decumius that she was not to be gainsaid, he solved his quandary by moving his protection business to the outer Sacra Via and the Vicus Fabricii, where the local colleges were lacking in such enterprise. Though his census was of the Fourth Class and his tribe urban Suburana, Lucius Decumius was definitely a power to be reckoned with.

Allied with his fellow custodians of Rome's other crossroads colleges, he had successfully fought Gaius Piso's attempt to close down all the crossroads colleges because Manilius had exploited them. Gaius Piso and the boni had therefore been forced to look elsewhere for a victim, and chose Manilius himself, who managed to survive a trial for extortion, then was convicted of treason and exiled for life, his fortune confiscated to the last sestertius.

Unfortunately the threat to the crossroads colleges did not go away after Gaius Piso left office. The Senate and the knights of the Eighteen had got it into their heads that the existence of crossroads colleges provided rent-free premises wherein political dissidents might gather and fraternize under religious auspices. Now Lucius Caesar and Marcius Figulus were going to ban them.

Which led to Lucius Decumius's wrathful appearance at Caesar's rooms on the Vicus Patricii.

“It isn't fair!” he repeated.

“I know, dad,” said Caesar, sighing.

“Then what are you going to do about it?” the old man demanded.

“I'll try, dad, that goes without saying. However, I doubt there's anything I can do. I knew you'd come to see me, so I've already talked to my cousin Lucius, only to learn that he and Marcius Figulus are quite determined. With very few exceptions, they intend to outlaw every college, sodality and club in Rome.”

“Who gets excepted?'' Lucius Decumius barked, jaw set.

“Religious sodalities like the Jews. Legitimate burial clubs. The colleges of civil servants. Trade guilds. That's all.”

“But we're religious!”

“According to my cousin Lucius Caesar, not religious enough. The Jews don't drink and gossip in their synagogues, and the Salii, the Luperci, the Arval Brethren and others rarely meet at all. Crossroads colleges have premises wherein all men are welcome, including slaves and freedmen. That makes them potentially very dangerous, it's being said.”

“So who's going to care for the Lares and their shrines?”

“The urban praetor and the aediles.”

“They're already too busy!”

“I agree, dad, I agree wholeheartedly,” said Caesar. “I even tried to tell my cousin that, but he wouldn't listen.”

“Can't you help us, Caesar? Honestly?”

“I'll be voting against it and I'll try to persuade as many others as I can to do the same. Oddly enough, quite a few of the boni oppose the law too—the crossroads colleges are a very old tradition, therefore to abolish them offends the mos maiorum. Cato is shouting about it loudly. However, it will go through, dad.”

“We'll have to shut our doors.”

“Oh, not necessarily,” said Caesar, smiling.

“I knew you wouldn't let me down! What does we do?”

“You'll definitely lose your official standing, but that merely puts you at a financial disadvantage. I suggest you install a bar and call yourselves a tavern, with you as its proprietor.”

“Can't do that, Caesar. Old Roscius next door would complain to the urban praetor in a trice—we've been buying our wine from him since I was a boy.”

“Then offer Roscius the bar concession. If you close your doors, dad, he's severely out of purse.”

“Could all the colleges do it?”

“Throughout Rome, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I don't see why not. However, due to certain activities I won't name, you're a wealthy college. The consuls are convinced the colleges will have to shut their doors because they'll have to pay ground-floor rents. As you will to my mother, dad. She's a businesswoman, she'll insist. In your case you might get a bit of a discount, but others?” Caesar shrugged. “I doubt the amount of wine consumed would cover expenses.”

Brows knitted, Lucius Decumius thought hard. “Does the consuls know what we does for a real living, Caesar?”

“If I didn't tell them—and I didn't!—then I don't know who would.”

“Then there's no problem!” said Lucius Decumius cheerfully. “We're most of us in the same protection business.” He huffed with great content. “And we'll go on caring for the crossroads too. Can't have the Lares running riot, can we? I'll call a meeting of us custodians—we'll beat 'em yet, Pavo!”

“That's the spirit, dad!”

And off went Lucius Decumius, beaming.

Autumn that year brought torrential rains to the Apennines, and the Tiber flooded its valley for two hundred miles. It had been some generations since the city of Rome had suffered so badly. Only the seven hills protruded out of the waters; the Forum Romanum, Velabrum, Circus Maximus, Forums Boarium and Holitorium, the whole of the Sacra Via out to the Servian Walls and the manufactories of the Vicus Fabricii drowned. The sewers back-washed; buildings with unsafe foundations crumbled; the sparsely settled heights of Quirinal, Viminal and Aventine became vast camps for refugees; and respiratory, diseases raged. Miraculously the incredibly ancient Wooden Bridge survived, perhaps because it lay farthest downstream, whereas the Pons Fabricius between Tiber Island and the Circus Flaminius perished. As this happened too late in the year to stand for next year's tribunate of the plebs, Lucius Fabricius, who was the current promising member of his family, announced that he would stand next year for the tribunate of the plebs. Care of bridges and highways into Rome lay with the tribunes of the plebs, and Fabricius was not about to allow any other man to rebuild what was his family's bridge! The Pons Fabricius it was; and the Pons Fabricius it would remain.