The Catiline Conspiracy (3 page)

Father nodded as if he hadn't been thinking the same thing for years. "True," he grumbled. "And it
is
a family tradition."

This set my mind at ease. He was not seriously considering a run for the consulship. The censorship, on the other hand, carried no
imperium
and thus was not coveted by generals. What it did carry was the power to purge the roll of Senators deemed unworthy. I was sure that Father was already at work on his list.

The wine, an excellent Caecuban, struck my senses with inspiration. "Father, why wasn't I named Quintus?"

"Eh? Why, because you were named after me, idiot!"

"It's just that it seems every other male in the family is named Quintus except for the odd Lucius."

"Your grandfather, whose mask you pass every time you enter my house, was visited by the Dioscuri in a dream. They promised him victory over the Samnites the next day if he would name his firstborn son Decius, a name never before used in
gens
Caecilii."

"Did he win?" I asked.

Father glared at me. It was something he did well. "This is a rather large banquet. I am sure there are many fools who would relish your company and conversation. And get a wreath."

I went in search of more congenial company. Heeding Father's warning, I took a wreath and a garland from a slave girl. Vine leaves, guaranteed to forestall drunkenness. In the center of the garden had been set up the paintings of Lucullus's battles that had been carried in the triumph. I went to examine them while the light held. Soon the torches would be lit, providing excellent illumination for intrigue or seduction, but not the best for appreciating art.

These huge panels had been commissioned from the best studios of Athens and Rhodes. They depicted, with wonderful liveliness and detail, the greatest battles of the campaigns against Mithridates and Tigranes. Lucullus was always shown slightly outsized, in the middle of the action. The foreign kings were likewise larger than life, but were always depicted in terrified flight. In their usual fashion, the Greek artists had depicted the Roman soldiers armed like the warriors of Alexander's day or even earlier, in muscled breastplate, high-plumed helmet and great, round shield and bearing a long pike. But the dead and dismembered barbarians littering the bottom of each panel were painted most realistically.

"Nicely executed, don't you think?" The man who spoke was an old friend, the physician Asklepiodes, who treated the gladiators of the Statilian school. He had become famous for his writings about the human body and how to treat its wounds.

"Beautiful," I said. "But the artists ought to take the trouble to find out what Roman soldiers look like before they try to paint them."

"It would make no difference," he said. "Greek artists are taught to revere the ideal and paint what is beautiful. Roman military equipment is ugly and functional, so they go back to the graceful designs of antiquity." He leaned forward and peered at a picture of Lucullus. "You see, the general is shown here as a handsome young man, which is not how he looked when I spoke to him a few minutes ago."

I leaned closer to see for myself. "You are right. He didn't look that good in red paint and a purple robe." I straightened and strolled down to another painting. "How goes your work?"

"I may remove to Capua for a while. The Statilian school in Rome will close down temporarily, until a new one is built."

"Closing down? Why?"

"Haven't you heard? General Pompey has bought the property. He plans to
demolish the school and its anciliary buildings to erect a magnificent new theater with an attached meetinghouse for the Senate. It will be a permanent building of stone, in the Greek fashion."

"Leave it to Pompey to come up with something outrageous like that," I commented. About a century before this time, somebody had begun a permanent, Greek-style theater, but the Censors had ordered it demolished before it was completed in order to combat encroaching Greek laxness of morals. We had only had temporary, wooden theaters since that time, complete, now, with their fourteen infamous rows reserved for the
equites
. As it turned out, Pompey forestalled criticism by building his tremendous theater with a little temple to Venus Victrix atop it, so that he could say that the seats were actually steps to a temple. He was not without a sense of humor.

A bellow from the heralds announced the beginning of the feast, and I sought my place eagerly. A servant guided me to the central table, at the head of which reclined Lucullus himself. A single, long couch ran the length of the table, beyond which was a narrow space for the servers, and then a lovely pool at one end of which stood a statue of Juno with one of Venus at the other. In the water, performers costumed as Tritons and Nereids frolicked. This was the most distinguished table, with the Consuls and
praetores
, along with proconsuls and
pontifices
, further down the
aediles
and
quaestores
. As the least of these, I was well down toward the foot of the table, but it was nonetheless a great honor to lie at his table on such a day. I could almost have hit his couch with a javelin.

A slave took my sandals and I sprawled on the couch just as the servers began to set platters before us. Lucullus had always been noted for his taste for luxury, but this was the first of the banquets for which he became even more famed than for his victories. These were noted not only for the excellence of the food, but for their theatrical effects. The first platter set before me and the diners near me, for instance, consisted of hard-boiled and baked eggs of many species of birds in a framework of pastry, ascending tier upon tier, forming a model of the great Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria. Perfumed oil burned in a bowl at its crest.

The succeeding dishes continued the nautical theme. A trireme sailed by rowed by roast suckling pigs, which slaves dressed as sailors transferred to the table. Roast fowl were brought, with their feathers replaced so that they appeared to be alive, but they had been cunningly joined to the bodies and tails of mullets, so that they looked like mythical, hybrid sea creatures.

Lest we starve between these imaginative servings, the tables were heaped with more prosaic eatables: breads, cheeses, nuts, olives, tiny grilled sausages and so forth. All of this was washed down with excellent wines, any one of which would have been the showpiece of an ordinary banquet. Besides the noble Falernian, Lucullus served the finest wines of Gaul and Judea, the Greek islands, Africa and Spain. For the adventurous, there were novelties such as date wine from Egypt and berry wines from Armenia, taken at the siege of Tigranocerta. One of the best was from nearer home; an unusually fine vintage from the slopes of Vesuvius.

"I think our host is confused," said someone to my left. I twisted around so I could see who it was.

"Confused?" I said.

"Yes," said a red-haired, red-faced man who examined the beautiful embossed figures decorating the bottom of his cup. Instantly, a slave filled it. "I think he should have built that temple to Bacchus, not Minerva."

"Hello, Lucius," I said. "I've been so busy gorging myself I didn't notice who was near me."

"We can always socialize. How often do we get a chance to eat like this?" He reached out and seized a grilled rib of a wild German aurochs. The whole rack of ribs had been formed into the likeness of Neptune's crown.

This was Lucius Sergius Catilina, a man I knew slightly. He had sought the consulship more than once and the most recent time had come close to winning. There had been such hard feelings that Cicero had worn armor to the elections. Catilina could put up a jovial front, but inwardly he was consumed with envy for all who were richer and more successful.

"I never thought to see you at the same table as Cicero, even at such a distance." It was not the most diplomatic thing to say, but I had been loath to waste all that splendid wine. Luckily, he took it with good humor.

"Even the sight of that face won't spoil my appetite for a feast like this. Here, boy," he called, holding up his cup, "more of that Judaean."

"Too bad Cato doesn't share your delight in this bounty," I observed. Several places up from me, Cato was restricting himself to bread, cheese, olives, and occasional bits of grilled meat or fish. He drank as much as anyone else, though.

"Do you know why Cato drinks so much while he rails against all other forms of indulgence?" Catilina asked.

"Why is that?" I tore into a roast kid that had been part of the
Argo's
crew just moments before. The ship made its stately way along the table as the slaves reduced its crew at each place.

"It's because it hurts so much the next morning." We both found this extremely funny and laughed immoderately. Catilina could be good company when he put himself out, and he was putting himself out that evening.

"Someday, Decius," he said, pouring a bit of wine on the ground in token of a vow, "I'll be able to give a banquet like this."

"The way Pompey's going," I said, "there won't be anybody left to triumph over."

"There will always be plenty of enemies," he assured me. "At least men like Pompey and Lucullus have earned their places of honor. What is Rome coming to when a jumped-up lawyer reaches the highest position over men who have given their lives in service to the state? Men who are of the highest birth?" That was more like Catilina. He was a patrician and, like most such, thought his birth entitled him to office. Then he changed direction again.

"Ah, don't listen to me. I can talk like that every day. This is an occasion for rejoicing. Hard to believe, isn't it, old Mithridates dead, I mean? He was causing us grief back in the consulship of Claudius and Perperna, back when Sulla was still
propraetor
in Cilicia." He took on a nostalgic look as the next course was served; lark's tongues in caper sauce, as I recall. Catilina had been one of Sulla's more bloodthirsty supporters during the proscriptions and had done well out of them. He had good cause to be nostalgic, for the newer generation of politicians, men like Cato and Caesar, were pushing for prosecution of Sulla's executioners as his old supporters faded from power.

Thinking of this, I looked around to see where Caius Julius might be. He and his brother Lucius were not in office that year, but they had been given a praetorian appointment under a bill introduced by the Tribune Labienus to try the
eques
and financier Rabirius for the murder, almost forty years before, of the Tribune Saturninus. Considering what the times had been like, this was rather like prosecuting a gladiator for his victories, so the obsolete charge of
perduellio
had to be brought against the old man, relating to the semi-sacred status of the Tribunes of the Plebs. Oddly, his son later became a fervent supporter of Caesar, but then, sons and fathers often do not agree, I have noticed.

Finally, I spotted Caius Julius at another table, keeping company with that gaggle of Allobroges. This struck me as odd, because I never knew Caius Julius to socialize with anybody unless he had a political motive, and those long-haired barbarians certainly had no votes in the assemblies. All I could imagine was that he had arrived late and that was the only place left.

Trained slaves appeared, white-robed and carrying lyres, their brows wreathed with laurel leaves. These began to stroll among the tables, declaiming Homer and the odes of Pindar. This was a signal for the first break in the banquet. Most of us pushed heavily to our feet, put on our sandals and staggered off to let some of our intake settle. There was a public bathhouse next to the garden, and this was being kept open, manned and luxuriously equipped for the whole night.

The light of hundreds of lamps shimmered off the agitated water as I entered. I put off my admiration until later, for I had more urgent business to transact and made a straight line for the privy. That facility had more than a hundred seats, but there was still some jostling, as a few of the feasters had to be helped onto their seats by slaves. Elsewhere, others, even more overcome by their overindulgence, vomited in prolonged, roaring convulsions. I ignored these with a superior air. I was proud of my absorptive capacities in those days.

Intensely relieved, I reentered the main room, which in this house contained a swimming pool in which a number of the younger guests disported themselves. Respectable women did not mingle promiscuously with men at the public baths, but there were a few decidedly nonrespectable women circulating, some of them quite highborn. I recognized at least two senator's wives and the sister of a
pontifex
. As I made my way toward the steam bath, a feminine voice hailed me. I looked to see who it was but the crowd had grown dense.

"Down here, in the water." I walked to the lip of the pool and knelt by a damp, brown-locked head. It was my cousin Caecilia who, since all of my female cousins are named Caecilia, we called Felicia, not because she was happy but for her catlike looks and temperament. She was the daughter of that Creticus who waited outside the walls of Rome, and had recently wed Marcus Crassus, eldest son of the ex-Consul who had defeated Spartacus.

"This is naughty for a lady so recently married in so respectable a ceremony," I chided.

She rested her chin on crossed forearms and kicked her pretty feet in the water. "Don't be silly. I was married off because our family and the Crassi wanted to mend fences after being at odds for so long and with Pompey coming back soon. I am just a knucklebone on the great game board of politics."

"Knucklebones are hard and knobby, which scarcely describes you, cousin. Where is your fortunate husband, by the way?"

"Snoring on the couch, when I left him. I have no intention of missing any part of an occasion like this, so I came here to refresh myself. Why don't you join me?"

I stood. "Some other time, Felicia. Dignity of office, and so forth."

"
Quaestor
?" she snorted. "That's not an office, it's a sentence!"

I winced at her cruel but accurate assessment of my place in the scheme of things, and took my leave. In the exercise yard, a troupe of gladiators were going through a series of mock duels, using blunted weapons but wearing their most splendid armor. I passed their clash and clatter and found the steam room. There I gave my clothes and wreaths to an attendant, took a pile of towels and went into the muggy heat. In the dimness, I found a bench and sat. In moments, I was sweating like a legionary at the end of a long day.