Fortune's Favorites (71 page)

This time, Caesar sailed to the east. His mother's steward, Eutychus (really his steward, but Caesar never made the mistake of thinking that), soft and semi-sedentary for years, discovered that traveling with Gaius Julius Caesar was no leisurely progress. On land- particularly when the road was as respectable as the Via Appia-he would cover forty miles in a day, and anyone who did not keep up was left behind. Only dread of disappointing Aurelia enabled Eutychus to hang on, especially during the first few days, when the steward's fat smooth legs and pampered bottom dissolved into one enormous pain.

“You're saddlesore!” laughed Caesar unsympathetically when he found Eutychus weeping miserably after they stopped at an inn near Beneventum.

“It's my legs hurt the worst,” sniffled Eutychus.

“Of course they do! On a horse they're unsupported weight, they just dangle off the end of your behind and flop about-particularly true of yours, Eutychus! But cheer up! By the time we get to Brundisium they'll feel much better. So will you. Too much easy Roman living.”

The thought of reaching Brundisium did nothing to elevate the steward's mood; he burst into a fresh spate of tears at the prospect of a heaving Ionian Sea.

“Caesar’s a beggar,” said Burgundus, grinning, after Caesar had departed to make sure their accommodation was clean.

“He's a monster!” wailed Eutychus. “Forty miles a day!”

“You're lucky. This is just the beginning. He's going easy on us. Mostly because of you.”

“I want to go home!”

Burgundus reached out to give the steward's shoulder a clumsy pat. “You can't go home, Eutychus, you know that.” He shivered, grimaced, his wide and slightly vacant-looking eyes filled with horror. “Come on, dry your face and try to walk a bit. It's better to suffer with him than go back to face his mother-brrr! Besides, he's not as unfeeling as you think he is. Right at this moment he's arranging for a nice hot bath for your nice sore arse.”

Eutychus survived, though he wasn't sure he would survive the sea crossing. Caesar and his small entourage took nine days to cover the three hundred and seventy miles between Rome and Brundisium, where the relentless young man shepherded his hapless flock onto a ship before any of them could find the breath to petition him for a few days' rest first. They sailed to the lovely island of Corcyra, took another ship there for Buthrotum in Epirus, and then rode overland through Acarnania and Delphi to Athens. This was a Greek goat path, not a Roman road; up and down the tall mountains, through wet and slippery forests.

“Obviously even we Romans don't move armies along this route,'' Caesar observed when they emerged into the awesome vale of Delphi, more a gardened lap on a seated massif. The idea had to be finished before he could gaze about and admire; he said, “That's worth remembering. An army could move along it if the men were stouthearted. And no one would know because no one would believe it. Hmmm.”

Caesar liked Athens, and Athens liked him. In contrast to his noble contemporaries, he had nowhere solicited hospitality from the owners of large houses or estates, contenting himself with hostelries where available, and a camp beside the road where they were not. So in Athens he had found a reasonable-looking inn below the Acropolis on its eastern side, and taken up residence. Only to find himself summoned immediately to the mansion of Titus Pomponius Atticus. He didn't know the man, of course, though (like everyone else in Rome) he knew the history of the famous financial disaster Atticus and Crassus had suffered the year after Gaius Marius died.

“I insist you stay with me,” said the urbane man-of-the-world, who (despite that earlier miscalculation) was a very shrewd judge of his peers. One look at Caesar told him what reports had hinted; here was someone who was going to matter.

“You are too generous, Titus Pomponius,” Caesar said with a wide smile. “However, I prefer to remain independent.”

“Independence in Athens will only give you food poisoning and dirty beds,” Atticus answered.

The cleanliness fanatic changed his mind. “Thank you, I will come. I don't have a large following-two freedmen and four servants, if you have room for them.”

“More than enough room.”

And so it was arranged. As were dinner parties and tourist expeditions; Caesar found an Athens suddenly opened to him that demanded a longer stay than expected. Epicurean and lover of luxury though Atticus was reputed to be, he was not soft, so there were plenty of opportunities to engage in some rough scrambling up cliffs and mountain shoulders of historical note, and good hard gallops across the flats at Marathon. They rode down to Corinth, up to Thebes, looked at the marshy foreshores of Lake Orchomenus where Sulla had won the two decisive battles against the armies of Mithridates, explored the tracks which had enabled Cato the Censor to circumvent the enemy at Thermopylae-and the enemy to circumvent the last stand of Leonidas.

“Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their command,'' Caesar read off the stone commemorating that valiant last stand. He turned to Atticus. “The whole world can quote this inscription, but it has a resonance here on the spot that it doesn't when read off a piece of paper.”

“Would you be content to be so remembered, Caesar?”

The long, fair face closed up. “Never! It was a stupid and futile gesture, a waste of brave men. I will be remembered, Atticus, but not for stupidity or futile gestures. Leonidas was a Spartan king. I am a patrician Roman of the Republic. The only real meaning his life had was the manner in which he threw it away. The meaning of my life will lie in what I do as a living man. How I die doesn't matter, provided I die like a Roman.”

“I believe you.”

Because he was a natural scholar and very well educated, Caesar found himself with much in common with Atticus, whose tastes were intellectual and eclectic. They found themselves with a similar taste in literature and works of art, and spent hours poring over a Menander play or a Phidias statue.

“There are not, however, very many good paintings left in Greece,” Atticus said, shaking his head sadly. “What Mummius didn't carry off to Rome after he sacked Corinth- not to mention Aemilius Paullus after Pydna!-have successfully vanished in the decades since. If you want to see the world's best paintings, Caesar, you must go to the house of Marcus Livius Drusus in Rome,”

“I believe Crassus owns it now.”

Atticus's face twisted; he disliked Crassus, colleagues in speculation though they had been. “And has probably dumped the paintings in a dusty heap somewhere in the basement, where they will lie until someone drops a hint to him that they're worth more than tutored slaves on the market or insulae bought up cheap.”

Caesar grinned. “Well, Atticus my friend, we can't all be men of culture and refinement! There's room for a Crassus.”

“Not in my house!”

“You're not married,” said Caesar toward the end of his time in Athens. He had his ideas as to why Atticus had avoided the entanglements of matrimony, but the statement as he put it was not insulting because the answer did not need to be revealing.

Atticus's long, ascetic and rather austere face produced a faint moue of disgust. “No, Caesar. Nor do I intend to marry.”

“Whereas I have been married since I was thirteen. And to a girl who is still not old enough to take to my bed. That is a strange fate.”

“Stranger than most. Cinna's younger daughter. Whom you would not divorce, even for Jupiter Optimus Maximus.”

“Even for Sulla, you mean,” said Caesar, laughing. “It was very fortunate. I escaped Gaius Marius's net-with Sulla's active connivance!-and ceased to be the flamen Dialis.”

“Speaking of marriages, are you acquainted with Marcus Tullius Cicero?” asked Atticus.

“No. I've heard of him, of course.”

“You ought to get on well together, but I suspect you may not,” said Atticus thoughtfully. “Cicero is touchy about his intellectual abilities, and dislikes rivals. You may well be his intellectual superior.”

“What has this to do with marriage?”

“I've just found him a wife.”

“How splendid,” said Caesar, uninterested.

“Terentia. Varro Lucullus's adoptive sister.”

“A dreadful woman, I hear.”

“Indeed. But socially better than he could have hoped for.”

Caesar made up his mind; time to go, when one's host was reduced to aimless conversation. Whose fault that was, the guest knew. His reading of this Roman plutocrat in self-imposed exile was that Atticus's sexual preferences were for young boys, which imposed upon Caesar a degree of reserve normally foreign to his outgoing nature. A pity. There might otherwise have grown out of this first meeting a deep and lasting friendship.

From Athens, Caesar took the Roman-built military road north from Attica through Boeotia and Thessaly and the pass at Tempe, with a casual salute to Zeus as they rode at Caesar's remorseless pace past the distant peak of Mount Olympus. From Dium just beyond the party took ship again and sailed from island to island until it reached the Hellespont. From there to Nicomedia was a voyage of three days.

His reception in the palace at Nicomedia was ecstatic. The old King and Queen had quite given up hope of ever seeing him again, especially after word had come from Mitylene that Caesar had gone back to Rome in company with Thermus and Lucullus. But it was left to Sulla the dog to express the full extent of the joy Caesar's advent provoked. The animal tore about the palace yelping and squealing, would leap up at Caesar, race over to the King and Queen to tell them who was here, then back to Caesar; its antics quite paled the royal hugs and kisses into insignificance.

“He almost talks,” said Caesar when the dog finally let him sink into a chair, so winded that it contented itself with sitting on his feet and producing a series of strangled noises. He leaned down to give the dog's belly a rub. “Sulla, old man, I never thought I'd be so glad to see your ugly face!”

His own parents, Caesar reflected much later that evening, when he had retired to his room and lay unclothed upon his bed, had always been rather distant figures. A father rarely home who when he was home seemed more intent upon conducting some sort of undeclared war upon his wife than in establishing a rapport with any of his children; and a mother who was unfailingly just, unsparingly critical, unable to give physical affection. Perhaps, thought Caesar from his present vantage point, that had been a large part of his father's inexplicable but patent disapproval of his mother-her fleshly coolness, her aloofness. What the young man could not see, of course, was that the real root of his father's dissatisfaction had lain in his wife's unstinting love for her work as landlady-work he considered utterly beneath her. Because they had never not known Aurelia the landlady, Caesar and his sisters had no idea how this side of her had galled their father. Instead, they had equated their father's attitude with their own starvation for hugs and kisses; for they could not know how pleasurable were the nights their parents spent together. When the dreadful news had come of the father's death-borne as it had been by the bearer of his ashes-Caesar's immediate reaction had been to take his mother in his arms and comfort her. But she had wrenched herself away and told him in clipped accents to remember who he was. It had hurt until the detachment he had inherited from her asserted itself, told him that he could have expected no other behavior from her.

And perhaps, thought Caesar now, that was no more than a sign of something he had noticed all around him-that children always wanted things from their parents that their parents were either not willing to give, or incapable of giving. His mother was a pearl beyond price, he knew that. Just as he knew how much he loved her. And how much he owed her for pointing out to him perpetually where the weaknesses lay within him-not to mention for giving him some wonderfully worldly and unmaternal advice.

And yet-and yet... How lovely it was to be greeted with hugs and kisses and unquestioning affection, as Nicomedes and Oradaltis had greeted him today. He didn't go so far as to wish consciously that his own parents had been more like them; he just wished that they had been his parents.

This mood lasted until he broke the night's fast with them on the next morning, and the light of day revealed the wish's manifest absurdity. Sitting looking at King Nicomedes, Caesar superimposed his own father's face upon the King's (in deference to Caesar, Nicomedes had not painted himself), and wanted to laugh. As for Oradaltis-a queen she might be, but not one-tenth as royal as Aurelia. Not parents, he thought then: grandparents.

It was October when he had arrived in Nicomedia and he had no plans to move on quickly, much to the delight of the King and Queen, who strove to fall in with all their guest's wishes, be it to visit Gordium, Pessinus, or the marble quarries on the island of Proconnesus. But in December, when Caesar had been in Bithynia two months, he found himself asked to do something very difficult and passing strange.

In March of that year the new governor of Cilicia, the younger Dolabella, had started out from Rome to go to his province in the company of two other Roman noblemen and a retinue of public servants. The more important of his two companions was his senior legate, Gaius Verres; the less important was his quaestor, Gaius Publicius Malleolus, apportioned to his service by the lots.

One of Sulla's new senators through election as quaestor, Malleolus was by no means a New Man; there had been consuls in his family, there were imagines in his atrium. Of money, however, there was little; only some lucky buys in the proscriptions had enabled the family to pin their hopes on the thirty-year-old Gaius, whose duty was to restore the family's old status by rising to the consulship. Knowing how small Gaius's salary would be and how expensive maintaining the younger Dolabella's life-style was going to be, his mother and sisters sold their jewels to plump out Malleolus's purse, which he intended to plump out further when he reached his province. And the women had eagerly pushed on him the greatest family treasure left, a magnificent collection of matching gold and silver plate. When he gave a banquet for the governor, the ladies said, it would increase his standing to use the family plate.