The Catiline Conspiracy (9 page)

The time was fast approaching when there would be no space in the middle for anyone who had no wish to align himself with either faction. The Senate was primarily
optimate
. The moneyed class of the
equites
had long been at odds with the Senate, but was, as a group, beginning to coalesce into the
optimate
camp. The Centuriate Assembly was closely tied to the senatorial class by clientage and patronage while the Popular Assemblies were, naturally overwhelmingly
populate
.

Pompey was the darling of the
populates
. The Senate had once supported him, but now it feared him. He used the power of the Tribunes to block other generals' triumphs. He was popular with the veterans in their settlements throughout Italy.

Two years before, Caesar, as
aedile
, had put on public games more lavish than anyone had ever seen before. He had bought and trained so many gladiators that the Senate had hastily put through legislation limiting the number a citizen could own, for fear that he was building his own army. He had subsidised the people's housing for his year in office, and given free doles of grain above what was already allotted. In doing this, he had gone into debt to such an extravagant degree that many believed him to be mad. In this Caesar proved himself to be the shrewdest politician of all time. He had bought popularity with the masses at the expense of moneylenders. Besides the professional financiers, he had borrowed from friends, from Senators, from provincial governors, from anyone with money to lend. Now those men were beginning to realize that the only way they were ever going to collect on those loans was to push Caesar's career, to make sure that he received lucrative commands where there was loot to be had, high offices where rich bribes would come his way, and the governorship of wealthy provinces. He had built a spectacular political future for himself with other people's money.

The great and rich Crassus had tried to steer clear of faction politics, but he was drifting into the
populate
camp. Like Pompey, he had been a supporter of Sulla, but he saw the future belonging to the rising politicians. Like the other financiers, he had been hurt by Lucullus's magnanimous cancellation of the Asian debt, but he was too rich to be truly hurt by anything.

It must be said in all honesty that none of these men had the good of the Roman people at heart. The
optimates
spoke of saving the Roman state from would-be tyrants, but they merely wanted to perpetuate aristocratic privilege. The leaders of the
populares
claimed to be on the side of the common man, but they sought only to aggrandize themselves. It was a struggle for raw power by two groups of self-seeking men. The only truly enlightened men of the times, Lucullus and Sertorius, had done their good work outside of Italy, in places where the corruptions of Roman Government had not yet taken hold.

And me? Sometimes I wonder myself. I fondly believed that I was trying to save the Republic in something like its old form, even though my own cynicism told me that it had never been as good and just as we liked to think it was. I did not want to see our whole empire fall into the hands of men like Caesar, or Pompey, or Crassus or, most unthinkable of all, Clodius.

But I was soon to find that there were even more ominous developments in store.

When I arrived at my house I found a slave messenger waiting for me. He gave me a tiny scroll tied with a ribbon, my name written on its outside in a feminine hand.

The Lady Fulvia
, it said,
requests the company of the
Quaestor
Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger for dinner tomorrow evening. If you can come, as I pray you will, please send your reply by this slave
.

I promptly sat and wrote out my acceptance and gave it to the slave. Things were looking up. Fulvia was a beautiful young widow of excellent family, as lively and accomplished as Sempronia. She was also, as everyone in Rome knew, the mistress of Quintus Curius.

A Greek slave woman conducted me into the atrium, where other slaves were hanging flower chains and fussing with plants in huge Persian vases. As was common with women who were mistresses of their own households, Fulvia owned a staff made up largely of women. Hers were quiet, efficient and well educated, almost all of them Greek. The lady of the house was more than fluent in that language.

It was an oddity of the times that the women of the better classes were often better educated than the men, who were usually so busy with business, politics and war that they had little time for the gentler arts of civilization. Beyond the necessities of war, politics and estate management, a man was expected to be proficient in public speaking and rhetoric, subjects of limited interest outside the political arena.

Women like Fulvia and Sempronia knew more about poetry, history, drama, painting and sculpture and so forth than almost any man in Rome. For men, proficiency in these subjects was suspect, a sign of Greek decadence and probable effeminacy. Many men did not like their women carrying on in such a fashion. After all, if one wanted to have educated persons in one's home, one simply bought them.

Truth to tell, there was little for a highborn woman to do in the home anymore. There was no point in sitting and spinning and weaving like Penelope. The slave staff took care of the house and nurses raised the children. No woman could practice law or enter politics or, join a legion. The alternatives were to become scholars or behave scandalously; there were some who did both.

Fulvia came to greet me dressed in a gown that did little to stop the passage of lamplight. Her hair, like that of many Roman ladies, was a mass of elaborate blonde curls. Unlike most, hers had not been shorn from the scalp of a Gallic girl. We exchanged the usual greetings and compliments.

"I am so happy you could come, Decius. It was thoughtless of me to expect you to accept an invitation on such short notice."

"Nothing could have prevented me," I assured her. "I would have canceled an appointment with a Consul to attend one of your famous gatherings." This was only moderately insincere. Fulvia was famed for having varied and interesting guests at her entertainments. Poets and playwrights, philosophers, noted wits and women of questionable antecedents. Neither wealth nor high birth were necessary, but one had to be amusing. Fulvia was one of the first highborn Romans to allow actors into her house as guests rather than as performers. There were those, of course, who considered this the very nadir of degeneracy, but invitations to her evenings were much sought-after.

Her taste in men was more questionable. Her long liaison with Quintus Curius was a matter of much city gossip. He had been a Senator, but was expelled by the Censors for scandalous behavior. When one considers what a Senator could get away with and remain in the Senate in those days, some idea of the enormity of his transgressions may be formed. By all accounts, his courtship of Fulvia had been stormy, including threats against her life. Politically, he was of no consequence, a mere hanger-on of greater men, whose favor he cultivated in hopes that they would help defray his crushing debts.

I could never understand how a woman like Fulvia could dote on a loathsome, worthless parasite like Curius, but then there is much about women I have never understood. Philosophers tell me that women and men do not properly belong to the same species, and therefore can never understand each other. This may well be true. I have noticed that the finest women are often drawn to the very worst men, while my own fortune in that area has not been of the best.

The man in question had already arrived, and Curius greeted me as if we were long-separated friends. I expected a touch for a loan before the night was over.

"Decius! How good to see you! I hear great things of your work." How he could have heard any such thing was beyond me. "And in less than three months you will take your place in the Senate. Richly deserved, my friend." I am not averse to flattery, but I prefer it from a more savory source.

"You must miss that august body of men," I said.

He shrugged. "What is done by one Censor may be undone by another." That sounded ominous. He took me to a pair of men who had also arrived early. "Decius, I believe you know Marcus Laeca and Caius Cethegus?" I did, slightly. They were Senators by virtue of having held, like me, the quaestorship, and were unlikely to rise any higher in office. We exchanged small talk for a few minutes. It seemed that this gathering was going to be entirely political. Dull as the company was, it looked promising as far as my investigation was concerned. Low-level functionaries with no prospects for higher office form the classic breeding ground for rebellion. Neither Curius nor Laeca, though, seemed to me to be either desperate or courageous enough for any truly violent enterprise, however great the rewards. Caius Cornelius Cethegus Sura, on the other hand, was a notorious firebrand and a well-known scatterbrain, just the sort to be involved in something sublimely violent and stupid.

Sempronia arrived, accompanied by a matched pair of Nubian slaves dressed in feathers and zebra skins. She was explaining to Fulvia that the two were gifts from Lisas, the Egyptian ambassador. They were twins and therefore a great rarity, because the Nubians usually smothered twins at birth for some barbaric reason of their own. I wondered what favor Sempronia had done for Lisas to earn such a gift.

Soon after, the last guests arrived. They were a man and a woman. I instantly recognized the red hair and ruddy face of Lucius Sergius Catilina. The way the others fell silent and turned toward him, I knew that he was the reason for this night's gathering. I shuddered to think that Catilina might be behind the matter I was investigating. He was a dangerous man. He went around the room greeting and clasping hands. When he reached me he brought the young woman forward.

"Decius, have you met my stepdaughter, Aurelia?"

"No," I said, "but I am happy to say that she greatly favors her mother." Orestilla, Catilina's second or perhaps third wife, was a famous beauty. Her daughter was about nineteen or twenty, but she had as much poise as Sempronia or Fulvia. She was not as brazenly clad as the older women, but she was so lavishly endowed by nature that she needed nothing artful to call attention to her figure. Her chestnut hair was short, set in tight ringlets. She had huge gray eyes, startlingly direct.

"Your mother and mine were close friends," she said. "She still speaks often of Servilla." The young face was beautiful but solemn, as if she did not smile frequently. I did not remember my mother mentioning Orestilla, but she had died when I was very young.

"Young Decius is marked out for a remarkable career," Catilina said heartily. He looked at me searchingly. "I suppose you have a good position lined up when you leave office?"

"I'd expected a decent offer from one of the Consuls or
Praetores
," I said, playing the role, "but nothing so far."

"Incredible!" Catilina said. "Why, a staff appointment should come almost automatically to a young man of your birth and experience."

"So you would think," I said. Aurelia was giving me disturbingly close attention. She did not wear the rings, bracelets, necklaces, tiaras and other jewelry that adorned the other women. To make up for it, she wore the longest rope of pearls I had ever seen. It looped behind her neck, crossed between her breasts and circled her waist three times. I did not know whether it was intended to emphasize the shapeliness of her neck, the size of her breasts or the slenderness of her waist, but it did all three and damaged my concentration. It must have been worth a small city.

"Disgraceful that our officials do so little to advance the careers of deserving young statesmen." I must admit that this was much better than being flattered by Quintus Curius. Catilina could at least sound as if he meant it.

"There is little I can do about it," I said. "Junior officials have little enough power, and soon I'll be an ex-junior official."

"Perhaps there is something you can do," Catilina said. "We must speak more of this."

At that moment the female majordomo announced dinner and we filed into the dining room. To my great delight, I found myself reclining next to Aurelia. This should have been an irrelevance, since I was supposed to be uncovering a seditious plot, but I saw no reason why I should be deprived of pleasant feminine company while I pursued my duties. I was still very young.

I will not bore you with a recitation of the wines and dishes served, although my memory for this sort of detail improves as the years advance. More important was the company. Each of the men present, saving myself, had been prosecuted at some time or other for corruption, although it was a rare politician in those days who escaped that charge. The traditional way for a newly arrived Senator to make his name was to prosecute somebody for corruption, the usual charges being graft, bribe taking and extortion. These men, however, had been proven guilty on every count with overwhelming evidence. And all of them were deeply in debt.

Catilina was the same sort, only to a far higher degree, and the crimes imputed to him were not all political. His bloodthirstiness in carrying out Sulla's proscriptions was legendary, but that had typed him as merely one of the more opportunistic young men of a rough time. I have already made mention of his alleged illicit liaison with the Vestal Fabia, a charge brought against him by Clodius. Even in the usually gentle realm of courtship, Catilina's behavior had been more than ordinarily violent. When he had wished to marry Orestilla, his grown son by a former marriage had objected. Rumor had it that Catilina had then murdered his son. True or not, he was the sort of man around whom this sort of story grew. More recently, each time he had announced himself a candidate for Consul, charges of extortion had been brought against him, barring him from candidacy. At the time of the last election, charges of more direct criminal activity had been brought against him. Cicero had charged him with plotting against his life and had surrounded himself with bodyguards, contributing to Catilina's already bad reputation. I cannot say how many of these charges may have been true. Catilina always complained bitterly that he had many enemies in high places. But then, few men have deserved enemies more.

I was more interested in who his friends were. Boisterous as he was, I could not believe that Catilina, unaided, represented a credible threat to the state. He was too profligate, too headstrong, too heedless of future consequences. And he was notoriously poor. He was not as intelligent as Caesar, who could turn indebtedness to his own advantage. Even less threatening were his lackeys. But just being in their company made me suspect, and I was glad that I had gone to Celer for semi-official status. If Catilina was truly behind a conspiracy against the state, then someone was behind Catilina.

"Do you know my stepfather well?" Aurelia asked. All the diners were conversing among themselves in low voices.

"Lucius Sergius and I have met from time to time, mostly under informal circumstances, such as this. We haven't had much call to meet officially. He was a
praetor
long before I was even eligible to stand for
quaestor
."