Fortune's Favorites (129 page)

“So will he be soon,” said Caesar.

“Oh, don't say that!”

“It's in his face, wife. And it will be a mercy.”

“I hope,” said Cinnilla, “that I don't live to be the last one left. That is the worst fate of all, I think.”

“A worse fate,” said Caesar, who didn't want to be reminded of painful things, “is to speak of nothing except gloom.”

“It's just Rome,” she said, smiling to reveal that little pink crease of inner lip. “You'll be better when you get to Spain. You're never really as happy in Rome as you are when you're traveling.”

“Next nundinus, wife, by sea at the start of winter. You are quite right. Rome isn't where I want to be. So how about having this baby anytime between now and the next nundinus! I'd like to see my son before I leave.”

He saw his son before he left at the next nundinus, but the child when finally the midwife and Lucius Tuccius managed to remove it from the birth canal had obviously been dead for several days. And Cinnilla, swollen and convulsing, one side paralyzed from a massive stroke, died at almost the same moment as she put forth her stillborn boy.

No one could believe it. If Julia had been a shock and a grief, the loss of Cinnilla was unbearable. Caesar wept as he never had in his life before, and cared not who saw him. Hour after hour, from the moment of that first horrible convulsion until it was time to bury her too. One was possible. Two was a nightmare from which he never expected to awaken. Of the dead child he had neither room nor inclination to think; Cinnilla was dead, and she had been a part of his family life from his fourteenth year, a part of the pain of his flaminate, the chubby dark mite whom he had loved as a sister for as long as he had loved her as a wife. Seventeen years! They had been children together, the only children in that house.

Her death smote Aurelia as Julia's could not, and that iron woman wept as desolately as her son did. A light had gone out that would dim the rest of her life. Part grandchild, part daughter-in-law, a sweet little presence left only in echoes, an empty loom, half of an empty bed. Burgundus wept, Cardixa wept, their sons wept, and Lucius Decumius, Strophantes, Eutychus, all the servants who scarcely remembered Aurelia's apartment without Cinnilla there. The tenants of the insula wept, and a great many people in the Subura.

This funeral was different from Julia's. That had been a glory of sorts, a chance for the orator to show off a great woman and his own family. There were similarities; Caesar extracted the Cornelius Cinna imagines from the storage room in which he had hidden them alongside the masks of the two Marii, and they were worn by actors to scandalize Hortensius and Metellus Little Goat anew; and though it was not accepted practice to eulogize a young woman from the rostra, Caesar went through that public ordeal too. But not in a kind of glory. This time he spoke softly, and confined his remarks to the pleasure he had known in her company and the years during which she had consoled him for the loss of his boy's freedom. He talked about her smile and those dismal hairy garments she had dutifully woven for her destiny as flaminica Dialis. He talked about his daughter, whom he held in his arms while he spoke. He wept.

And he ended by saying, “I know nothing of grief beyond what I feel inside myself. That is grief’s tragedy-that each of us must always deem his or her own grief greater than anyone else's. But I am prepared to confess to you that perhaps I am a cold, hard man whose greatest love is for his own dignitas. So be it. Once I refused to divorce Cinna's daughter. At the time I thought I refused to obey Sulla's command to divorce her for my own private benefit and the possibilities it opened up. Well, I have explained to you what grief’s tragedy is. But that tragedy is as nothing to the tragedy of never knowing how much someone has meant to you until after that someone is dead.”

No one cheered the imago of Lucius Cornelius Cinna, nor those of his ancestors. But Rome wept so deeply that for the second time in two nundinae, Caesar's enemies found themselves rendered impotent.

His mother was suddenly years older, absolutely heartbroken. A difficult business for the son, whose attempts to comfort her with hugs and kisses were still repulsed.

Am I so cold and hard because she is so cold and hard? But she isn't cold and hard with anyone except me! Oh, why does she do this to me? Look how she grieves for Cinnilla. And how she grieved for awful old Sulla.

If I were a woman, my child would be such a consolation. But I am a Roman nobleman, and a Roman nobleman's children are at best on the periphery of his life. How many times did I see my father? And what did I ever have to talk to him about?

“Mater,” he said, “I give you little Julia to be your own. She's almost exactly the same age now as Cinnilla was when she came to live here. In time she'll fill the largest part of your vacant space. I won't try to suborn her away from you.”

“I've had the child since she was born,” said Aurelia, “and I know all that.”

Old Strophantes shuffled in, looked rheumily at mother and son, shuffled out again.

“I must write to Uncle Publius in Smyrna,” Aurelia said. “He's another one who has outlived everybody, poor old man.”

“Yes, Mater, you do that.”

“I don't understand you, Caesar, when you behave like the child who cries because he's eaten all his honey cake yet thinks it ought never to diminish.”

“And what has provoked that remark?”

“You said it during Julia's funeral oration. That I had to be both mother and father to you, which meant I couldn't give you the hugs and kisses Julia did. When I heard you say that, I was relieved. You understood it at last. But now I find you just as bitter as ever. Accept your lot, my son. You mean more to me than life, than little Julia, than Cinnilla, than anyone. You mean more to me than your father did. And more by far than Sulla ever could have, even had I weakened. If there cannot be peace between us, can't we at least declare a truce?”

He smiled wryly. “Why not?” he asked.

“You'll come good once you get out of Rome, Caesar.”

“That's what Cinnilla said.”

“She was right. Nothing will ever blow away your grief at this death, but a brisk sea voyage will blow away the rubbish cluttering up your mind. It will function again. It can't not.”

It can't not, echoed Caesar, riding the short miles between Rome and Ostia, where his ship waited. That is a truth. My spirit might be bruised to pulp, but my mind is unharmed. New things to do, new people to meet, a new country to explore-and no sign of Lucullus! I will survive.

FINIS

Fortune's Favorites, though by no means the last book in this series, does mark the end of that period of Roman history wherein the ancient sources are a little thin, due to the absence of Livy and Cassius Dio, not to mention Cicero at his most prolific. In effect, this has meant that in the first three books I have been able to encompass almost all the historical events from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. So Fortune's Favorites also marks a turning point in how I treat my subject, which is the fall of the Roman Republic. The books still to come will have to concentrate upon fewer aspects than the full sweep of the history of the time, which I think will be an advantage to both reader and writer.

However, even Fortune's Favorites is enriched by increasing ancient source material, as marked by the appearance as characters of. two animals-the dog belonging to the wife of King Nicomedes of Bithynia, and the famous pet fawn of Quintus Sertorius. Both are attested; the dog by Strabo, the fawn by Plutarch.

Fortune's Favorites also arrives at the beginning of a period of Roman history flirted with by Hollywood, to the detriment of history, if not Hollywood. The reader will find a rather different version of Spartacus than the celluloid one. I have neither the room nor the inclination to argue here why I have chosen to portray Spartacus in the way I have; scholars will be able to see the why-and the who-of my argument in the text.

The glossary has been completely rewritten specifically to suit this book; please note that some of the general articles, like steel and wine, have been lifted out. As the books go on, I would have to keep increasing the size of the glossary did I not cull the entries, and time and space dictate the impossibility of a glossary which would eventually be longer than the book.

For those interested readers, the glossaries of the earlier books if combined with this one will yield information on most things. The entries on the governmental structure of Republican Rome will always be incorporated, though in a changing form as various laws and men worked upon it. Only those places and/or peoples about which the reader might want to refresh his or her knowledge are included. The most interesting new entries concern ships, which are now becoming more important. Hence find bireme, hemiolia, merchantman, myoparo, quinquereme, sixteener and trireme in the glossary of Fortune's Favorites.

Of the drawings, both the “youthened” young Pompey and the Pompey in his thirties are taken from authenticated busts. The young man Caesar is a “youthened'' drawing taken from a bust of the middle-aged man-a somewhat easier exercise than with Pompey, as Caesar kept his figure. The drawing of Sulla is taken from a bust. Dissension rages as to which of two extant busts is actually Sulla: one is of a handsome man in his late thirties, the other is of an old man. I think both are Sulla. Ears, nose, chin, face shape and face folds are identical. But the handsome mature man is now wearing a wig of tight curls (that it is a wig is confirmed by two tongues of absolutely straight hair projecting down in front of the ears), has lost his teeth (a phenomenon which lengthens the chin, of course), and at some time in the recent past has lost a great deal of weight. As Sulla was at most sixty-two when he died, illness must have taken a terrible toll-a fact quite consistent with what Plutarch has to say. Lucius Licinius Lucullus is also an authenticated bust.

Which leaves Metellus Pius, Quintus Sertorius, and Crassus, all drawn from unidentified portrait busts of Republican date. In The First Man in Rome, I “youthened'' an anonymous bust to suit the young Sertorius; that bust is now drawn as it was, except that I have removed the left eye and replaced it with scar tissue (taken from a photograph in one of my medical textbooks).

Alone among the really great men of that time, Marcus Licinius Crassus has no authenticated likeness passed down to our time. So I chose an unidentified bust of a thickset, placid-looking man to portray, as what we know of Crassus strongly suggests that he was a heavy, phlegmatic individual-at least on his surface. Otherwise the jokes about oxen would have had little point.

King Nicomedes is not an authenticated likeness; though there are coin profiles, debate still rages as to whether there were two kings after Nicomedes II (the King Nicomedes whom Marius met in 97 B.C.), Nicomedes III and Nicomedes IV, or whether the two reigns separated by an exile in Rome were both Nicomedes III. I think the last Nicomedes to reign was Nicomedes III. Be that as it may, I chose to draw from an unidentified bust of Republican date which in profile looks somewhat Nicomedian, though the bust wears no diadem, therefore cannot have been a king. Chiefly I wanted my readers to see what the diadem looked like when worn.

To save people the trouble of writing to me, I am aware that Suetonius describes Caesar's eyes as “nigris vegetisque oculis,” usually translated as ”keen black eyes“ or ”piercing black eyes“ or ”lively black eyes.” However, Suetonius also calls him fair, and was writing a hundred and fifty years after Caesar's death; a length of time which could well have meant those portrait busts kept up by repainting no longer reflected the true eye color. To be both fair and black-eyed is very rare. Caesar's great-nephew, Augustus, was also fair; his eyes are said to have been grey, a color more in keeping with fairness. Pale eyes with a dark ring around the outside of the iris always have a piercing quality, so I elected to depart from Suetonius's eye color rather than from his general description of a fair man; Plutarch, disappointingly unforthcoming about Caesar's looks, does mention Caesar's white skin. Velleius Paterculus says Caesar "surpassed all others in the beauty of his person.” It is from Suetonius that one discovers he was tall and slender, but excellently built. I wouldn't like any of my readers to think that I have succumbed to the temptations of a lady novelist and endowed a major historical character with a physical appeal he did not in fact have! Poor Caesar really did have everything-brains, beauty, height, and a good body.

One further comment and I will desist from the portrait busts: the drawings are rendered exactly to scale, so those faces with preternaturally large eyes simply reflect the whim of the original sculptor, who perhaps chose to flatter his sitter by making the eyes too large. Big eyes were the greatest mark of beauty to a Roman.

To enlighten those who may scratch their heads because Pompey's letters to the Senate differ markedly from Sallust, and Cicero's court speeches from the published speeches which have come down to us: there is considerable doubt about the veracity of Sallust on the subject of Pompey's correspondence, and Cicero rewrote his speeches for publication. I have therefore elected to stay with my own words. On the subject of elephants, it must be borne in mind that the Romans were acquainted with African pachyderms, not Indian ones, and that the African species was both larger and far less amenable to taming.

Those who would like a bibliography are welcome to write to me care of my publishers.

The next book in the series will be called Caesar's Women.

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