The First Man in Rome (59 page)

Because as the only girl she needed, her parents felt, a domain of her own marked off-limits to all the boys, she had been given a modestly large and brilliantly sunny room off the peristyle-garden for her own, and a maidservant of her own, the Gallic girl Cardixa, who was a gem. When Aurelia married, Cardixa would go with her to her new husband's home.

One quick glance at Aurelia's face when she walked into her workroom told Cardixa that something of importance had just occurred; but she said nothing, nor did she expect to be told what it was, for the kind and comfortable relationship between mistress and maidservant contained no girlish confidences. Aurelia clearly needed to be alone, so Cardixa departed.

The tastes of its owner were emblazoned on the room, most of the walls of which were solidly pigeonholed and held many rolls of books; a desk held scrolls of blank paper, reed pens, wax tablets, a quaint bone stylus for inscribing the wax, cakes of compressed sepia ink waiting to be dissolved in water, a covered inkwell, a full shaker of fine sand for blotting work in progress, and an abacus.

In one corner was a full-sized Patavian loom, the walls behind it pegged to hold dozens of long hanks of woolen thread in a myriad of thicknesses and colors—reds and purples, blues and greens, pinks and creams, yellows and oranges—for Aurelia wove the fabric for all her clothes, and loved brilliant hues. On the loom was a wide expanse of misty-thin flame-colored textile woven from wool spun hair-fine; Aurelia's wedding veil, a real challenge. The saffron material for her wedding dress was already completed, and lay folded upon a shelf until the time came to make it up; it was unlucky to start cutting and sewing the dress until the groom was fully contractually committed.

Having a talent for such work, Cardixa was halfway through making a carved fretwork folding screen out of some striking African cabinet-wood; the pieces of polished sard, jasper, carnelian, and onyx with which she intended to inlay it in a pattern of leaves and flowers were all carefully wrapped within a carved wooden box, an earlier example of her skill.

Aurelia went along the room's exposed side closing the shutters, the grilles of which she left open to let in fresh air and a muted light; the very fact that the shutters were closed was signal enough that she did not wish to be disturbed by anyone, little brother or servant. Then she sat down at her desk, greatly troubled and bewildered, folded her hands on its top, and thought.

What would Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi do?

That was Aurelia's criterion for everything. What would Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi do? What would Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi think? How would Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi feel? For Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi was Aurelia's idol, her exemplar, her ready-reckoner of conduct in speech and deed.

Among the books lining the walls of her workroom were all of Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi's published letters and essays, as well as any work by anyone else which so much as mentioned the name Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi.

And who was she, this Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi? Everything a Roman noblewoman ought to be, from the moment of her birth to the moment of her death. That was who.

The younger daughter of Scipio Africanus—who rolled up Hannibal and conquered Carthage—she had been married to the great nobleman Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in her nineteenth year, which was his forty-fifth year; her mother, Aemilia Paulla, was the sister of the great Aemilius Paullus, which made Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi patrician on both sides.

Her conduct while wife to Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was unimpeachable, and patiently over the almost twenty years of their marriage, she bore him twelve children. Gaius Julius Caesar would probably have maintained that it was the endlessly intermarried bloodlines of two very old families—Cornelius and Aemilius—that rendered her babies sickly, for sickly they all were. But, indefatigable, she persisted, and cared for each child with scrupulous attention and great love; and actually succeeded in rearing three of them. The first child who lived to be grown up was a girl, Sempronia; the second was a boy, who inherited his father's name, Tiberius; and the third was another boy, Gaius Sempronius Gracchus.

Exquisitely educated and a worthy child of her father, who adored everything Greek as the pinnacle of world culture, she herself tutored all three of her children (and those among the nine dead who lived long enough to need tutoring) and oversaw every aspect of their upbringing. When her husband died, she was left with the fifteen-year-old Sempronia, the twelve-year-old Tiberius Gracchus, and the two-year-old Gaius Gracchus, as well as several among the nine dead who had survived infancy.

Everyone lined up to marry the widow, for she had proven her fertility with amazing regularity, and she was still fertile; she was also the daughter of Africanus, the niece of Paullus, and the relict of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus; and she was fabulously wealthy.

Among her suitors was none other than King Ptolemy Euergetes Gross Belly—at that moment in time, late King of Egypt, current King of Cyrenaica—who was a regular visitor to Rome in the years between his deposition in Egypt and his reinstatement as its sole ruler nine years after the death of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. He would turn up to bleat incessantly in the Senate's weary ear, and agitate and bribe to be let climb back upon the Egyptian throne.

At the time of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus's death, King Ptolemy Euergetes Gross Belly was eight years younger than the thirty-six-year-old Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi—and considerably thinner in his middle regions than he would be later, when Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi's first cousin and son-in-law, Scipio Aemilianus, boasted that he had made the indecently clad, hideously fat King of Egypt
walk
!
He sued as persistently and incessantly for her hand in marriage as he did for reinstatement on the Egyptian throne, but with as little success. Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi could not be had by a mere foreign king, no matter how incredibly rich or powerful.

In fact, Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi had resolved that a true Roman noblewoman married to a great Roman nobleman for nearly twenty years had no business remarrying at all. So suitor after suitor was refused with gracious courtesy; the widow struggled on alone to rear her children.

When Tiberius Gracchus was murdered during his tribunate of the plebs, she carried on living with head unbowed, holding herself steadfastly aloof from all the innuendo about her first cousin Scipio Aemilianus's implication in the murder; and held herself just as steadfastly aloof from the marital hideousnesses which existed between Scipio Aemilianus and his wife, her own daughter, Sempronia. Then when Scipio Aemilianus was found mysteriously dead and it was rumored that he too had been murdered—by his wife, no less, her own daughter—still she held herself steadfastly aloof. After all, she was left with one living son to nurture and encourage in his blossoming public career, her dear Gaius Gracchus.

Gaius Gracchus died with great violence about the time she turned seventy years of age, and everyone assumed that here at last was the blow strong enough to break Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi. But no. Head unbowed, she carried on living, widowed, minus her splendid sons, her only surviving child the embittered and barren Sempronia.

"I have my dear little Sempronia to bring up," she said, referring to Gaius Gracchus's daughter, a tiny babe.

But she did retire from Rome, though never from life or from the pursuit of it. She went to live permanently in her huge villa at Misenum, it no less than her a monument to everything of taste and refinement and splendor Rome could offer the world. There she collected her letters and essays and graciously permitted old Sosius of the Argiletum to publish them, after her friends beseeched her not to let them go unknown to posterity. Like their author, they were sprightly, full of grace and charm and wit, yet very strong and deep; in Misenum they were added to, for Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi never lost intellect or erudition or interest as she piled up the total of her years.

When Aurelia was sixteen and Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi eighty-three, Marcus Aurelius Cotta and his wife, Rutilia, paid a duty call—no duty call really, it was an event eagerly looked forward to—upon Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi as they were passing through Misenum. With them they had the full tribe of children, even including the lofty Lucius Aurelius Cotta, who naturally at twenty-six did not consider himself a true member of the tribe. Everyone was issued orders to be quiet as mice, demure as Vestals, still as cats before the pounce—no fidgeting, no jiggling, no kicking the chair legs—under pain of death by indescribably agonizing torture.

But Cotta and Rutilia needn't have bothered issuing threats foreign to their natures. Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi knew just about everything there was to know of little boys and big boys too, and her granddaughter, Sempronia, was a year younger than Aurelia. Delighted to be surrounded by such interesting and vivid children, she had a wonderful time, and for much longer than her household of devoted slaves thought wise, for she was frail by this time, and permanently blue about the lips and earlobes.

And the girl Aurelia came away captured, inspired— when she grew up, she vowed, she was going to live by the same standards of Roman strength, Roman endurance, Roman integrity, Roman patience, as Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi. It was after this that her library grew rich in the old lady's writings; then that the pattern of a life to be equally remarkable was laid down.

The visit was never repeated, for the following winter Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi died, sitting up straight in a chair, head unbowed, holding her granddaughter's hand. She had just informed the girl of her formal betrothal to Marcus Fulvius Flaccus Bambalio, only survivor of that family of the Fulvius Flaccuses who had died supporting Gaius Gracchus; it was fitting, she told the young Sempronia, that as sole heiress to the vast Sempronian fortune, she should bring that fortune as her gift to a family stripped of its fortune in the cause of Gaius Gracchus. Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi was also pleased to be able to tell her granddaughter that she still possessed enough clout in the Senate to procure a decree waiving the provisions of the
lex Voconia de mulierum hereditatibus,
just in case some remote male cousin appeared and lodged a claim to the vast Sempronian fortune under this antiwoman law. The waiver, she added, extended to the next generation, just in case another woman should prove the only direct heir.

The death of Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi happened so quickly, so mercifully, that the whole of Rome rejoiced; truly the gods had loved—and sorely tried—Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi! Being a Cornelian, she was inhumed rather than cremated; alone among the great and small families of Rome, the members of the
gens
Cornelius kept their bodies intact after death. A magnificent tomb on the Via Latina became her monument, and was never without offerings of fresh flowers laid all around it. And with the passing of the years it became both shrine and altar, though the cult was never officially recognized. A Roman woman in need of the qualities associated with Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi would pray to her, and leave her fresh flowers. She had become a goddess, but of a kind new to any pantheon; a figure of unconquerable spirit in the face of bitter suffering.

What would Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi do? For once Aurelia had no answer to that question; neither logic nor instinct could graft Aurelia's predicament onto one whose parents would never, never, never have given her the freedom to choose her own husband. Of course Aurelia could appreciate the reasons why her crafty Uncle Publius had suggested it; her own classical education was more than broad enough to appreciate the parallel between herself and Helen of Troy, though Aurelia did not think of herself as fatally beautiful—more as irresistibly eligible.

Finally she came to the only conclusion Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi would have approved; she must sift through her suitors with painstaking care, and choose the best one. That did not mean the one who attracted her most strongly. It meant the one who measured up to the Roman ideal. Therefore he must be wellborn, of a senatorial family at least—and one whose
dignitas,
whose public worth and standing in Rome went down the generations since the founding of the Republic without slur or smear or scar; he must be brave, untempted by excesses of any kind, contemptuous of monetary greed, above bribery or ethical prostitution, and prepared if necessary to lay down his life for Rome or for his honor.

A tall order! The trouble was, how could a girl of her sheltered background be sure she was judging aright? So she decided to talk to the three adult members of her immediate family—to Marcus Cotta and to Rutilia and to her elder half brother, Lucius Aurelius Cotta—and ask them for their candid opinions about each of the men on the list of suitors. The three applied to were taken aback, but they tried to help as best they could; unfortunately, each of them when pressed admitted to personal prejudices likely to warp judgment, so Aurelia ended up no better off.

"There's no one she really fancies," said Cotta to his wife gloomily.

"Not a solitary one!" said Rutilia, sighing.

"It's unbelievable, Rutilia! An eighteen-year-old girl without a hankering for
anyone!
What's the matter with her?"

"How should I know?" asked Rutilia, feeling unfairly put on the defensive. "She doesn't get it from
my
side of the family!"

"Well, she certainly doesn't get it from mine!" snapped Cotta, then shook himself out of his exasperation, kissed his wife to make up, and slumped back into simple depression. "I would be willing to bet, you know, that she ends up deciding none of them are any good!"

"I agree," said Rutilia.

"What are we going to do, then? If we're not careful, we'll end up with the first voluntary spinster in the entire history of Rome!"