Rome For Sale, page 18
Clodia had a headache. Beating at the slave girl masseuse who had failed to bring relief, she climbed the stairway with its carved rail and stood on the roof gazing down over the city. She leaned on the balustrade with her hands under her chin. Her interest was more taken by the grinning head of a satyr-rainspout than by the Forum below with its ant-heap of hurrying people. The goat-face was mocking at her, despising mortals whose energy knotted with pain instead of flooding out into nature. She rubbed herself against the stone-coping felinely, and unexpectedly felt better. The satyr’s grin had done more than medicines.
Lying on the couch, she opened a tablet and began scribbling verses on the wax with a steel pen; then losing heart, she let the tablet slip to the floor, took up a roll instead, Lovegames by Lævius, and read on, marking the experimental words. Lævius liked queer compounds, but perhaps he went too far. O to the ravens with critical catchwords. Nobody could go too far if they were going anywhere at all. The younger poets now rather frowned at these tricks, it wasn’t pure Latinity; and yet what they called pure Latinity was the result of a Greek sense of discipline. So much for the learned poets. They wanted to fix Latin and become cosmopolitan; they objected flatly to all nationalistic themes and copied the elegiac poets of Alexandria to make themselves original. Good for Lævius. “Beautycoloured.” It was a long word, why not? Women were longer than they were short.
She retrieved the tablet and scribbled, watching the words show up black through the white wax:
Beauty is my hue I think
but is it blue or is it pink?
blue when I’m sitting in the cold
but red when I’m in kisses rolled.
However that was disgracefully immoral in metre; it wouldn’t pass with the purists. All the better.
A maid appeared at the top of the stairs. “The consul Cicero to see you, mistress.”
“Send him up,” said Clodia, yawning and yet awakened from her drowse. There was something ridiculous about Cicero that appealed to her, something solidly, worthily ridiculous. Anyone could be a fool, but Cicero was funnily sublime. She did not make any effort to tidy herself, but left the loose ringlets which she knew were hanging over her brow, and the creases which she knew were obvious in her dress.
Cicero mounted the stairs, bidding his escort wait below. “Ah, alone,” he said with an air of surprise. “Where is the good Metellus?”
“Being good somewhere else,” replied Clodia. “Where, I fortunately don’t know. He may have gone to Africa or the Lawcourts down there in the Forum, for all I can tell you. No, that’s wrong. He’s city-prætor of course, and can’t leave Rome without special permission. Do you want to see him? Is there a war to declare or has the price of cabbages risen? I hear all the news from my hairdresser, but I haven’t seen him for two days, so I’m out of touch with things.”
Cicero hemmed. This was one of her talkative moods; last time she had been haughty and reserved, with just a touch of cordiality like a small rouge-spot on a snow-white face. She patted the couch near her, and he took his seat, at a loss for words. It wasn’t often that happened.
“Which do you think is the more important,” she asked, “poetry or the marriage-tie?”
Cicero could not follow the remark “I don’t think they’re incompatible. I’m married, and yet I’ve dabbled.”
Clodia sighed. “I think you’d make a wonderful poet if you’d only grow a beard.”
He fingered his chin and turned to her. “I’ll tell you a great secret. I did once grow a beard when I was very young. I admired the old Roman farmer-heroes so tremendously that I wanted to be bristly-bearded like they were, as the first step on my career.”
She smiled on him. He was refreshingly boyish sometimes, and capable of betraying his greatest pomposity with a revealing aside. There was really much more in him than people allowed.
“Well, now you’re an antique hero,” she said with a faint note of sarcasm, “though you shed your beard.”
He flushed at the insinuation of mockery. “I’m only doing my best,” he said with a mixture of feeble apology and arrogance which she considered charming.
“I’m serious,” she answered, suppressing her smiles and looking into his eyes with a passionate intentness. “I think you’re the best consul that ever was. Everyone says so. Quintus says so before breakfast, when he’s so grumpy that he’s never once kissed me.” She was trying not to laugh, but managed to keep the deep warm note in her voice. Cicero was not sure of her intentions but could not resist that pulsating huskiness.
“I’m not,” he said, stirred and wanting to show her the real profundity of his character, the conflict which no one guessed. “I feel I’m a failure at times. All the parties are against me. I’m alone. Yet I could do so much if I were given a chance. I know I could. If people would only trust me, I could do anything. But they follow any cheap phrase-maker or they join together in wretched cliques. Perhaps a great danger would shake them out of their scheming apathy and give me my chance. You wouldn’t laugh at me then.”
He was entirely pathetic and she almost loved him. She continued looking at him with her dark slumberous eyes, but there was no mockery in them now. It was a shame to tease him. He was a good man, and there weren’t many of them nowadays. She would give herself to him then and there if it would help him.
“Reach me that cushion,” she said, and he leaned forwards across her. He felt that she wanted him to make some gesture of approach, and he was about to touch her cheek when she wriggled out and walked to the balustrade. He was disappointed. Not that he wanted anything vulgar like an affair; he was a family-man; but there were ways of arranging things. If he and Clodia came to an understanding, divorces could be arranged. There would be a wrench repaying Terentia’s dowry; but he could raise almost as much as he wanted now among the bankers, he was thoroughly respected in financial quarters. Tullia’s marriage would make the separation easier. Clodia would be a fitter wife for a man who meant to play so great a part in history. A Claudian wife, that would be a fine culmination for the conquering son of a petty Volscian burgher. Marius had ended by marrying a Iulian woman, and the Ciceros were weightier people than the Marii at Arpinum. In fact three generations ago a Cicero wouldn’t have entertained a Marius at all.
Clodia had intended to make him embrace her, but at the last moment she had pitied him. “Look at them,” she said, pointing down to the crowded streets. “Human activity is never realised as so meaningless, so irritatingly and insensately driven, as when one looks down on a mob from a height. No wonder poets put the gods on Olympus. What are they all doing, those people? It’s awful to think that each one of those scurrying, bustling figures is hurled along in a world of his own which he thinks desperately important. Yet if we were down there, we’d never notice it, we’d be hurled too.” Rather silly kind of talk, but the stuff that he liked.
Cicero rose and stood at her side. Indeed he felt her rightful mate as they stood there, Olympian over the fleeting tribes of men. “Rome is a great city,” he said, assured that at last he had reached the Claudian level. “So many trades, so many interests and powers. The heart of the world beats below there. It’s the clearing-house of the world. Soon the Syrians will have to buy at Rome the scents that their own fields produce. It’s a great privilege to have a hand in ruling its destiny.”
She was pleased that she had restored him his faith in rhetoric and ended his embarrassing sincerity. Yet she couldn’t resist pricking at his confidence.
“Nobody rules it. Greed rules it, or madness, or lust. Nothing else. It’s for sale. Every man down there is thinking of himself.”
“There is something else,” said Cicero grandly. “There is a need of power, a piety of government, that is ours alone; and by the God Stone, that need shall flow through me into the veins of Rome. It shall not be lost.”
Clodia was silenced. There was a rightness in the words. For once rhetoric had coincided with the drama of the moment, but she knew that he would bluster in the next breath and spoil it all.
There was a sound on the stairs and someone was heard pushing aside the protesting maid. The face of Mucia appeared, framed in a tall coiffure of hair with an emerald tiara. “Come up,” said Clodia languidly to her sister-in-law, “and save Marcus from being bored.”
Cicero flushed at the use of his praenomen, a mark of familiarity, and stammered that he was charmed, not bored, charmed to see Mucia also, entirely charmed with the world. Mucia, a woman with regularly modelled face, beautiful but slightly running to fat, came and stood beside them, settling her embroidered yellow dress about her.
“Nothing new,” she said complainingly.
“What did you expect to see?” asked Clodia. “It would be too expensive to buy the scene and lay it out afresh.”
Mucia looked at Cicero with her head coquettishly on one side. “Do you think Quintus will soon be back?” she said to Clodia. “I really must be off.”
“I never ask him where he’s going. The only time I can’t help knowing when he’s at home is when he’s snoring.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t snore,” said Mucia. “Aren’t you?” She addressed Cicero. “He doesn’t look like it at all. After all he’s my half-brother.”
Cicero was annoyed at having been found alone with Clodia, and he decided that he disliked Mucia. Sometimes she said such imbecile things that it was hard not to think she meant them to ridicule; but she was transparently stupid and very virtuous of conversation. She now drifted into a glibly shocked account of the latest adulteries, with details in a hushed voice. Cicero cleared his throat to announce his departure; but Metellus, a short, impassive-faced man, came up the stairs. Cicero took him aside and discussed the points of law which he wished settled. No loophole must be left against Catalina.
The family of Metellus was plebeian, but had so early thrust its way into the ranks of the official nobility that it stood almost as high as a patrician family like the Claudian. The Metelli had been long famed for industrious honesty, for thorough-going but unoriginal capacity; and Metellus Celer was typical. His sole rash act had been marriage with Clodia, but that could be excused in view of her lineage; it was after marriage that she and her two sisters had become notorious as leaders of the emancipated women. Metellus, however, refused to listen to scandal; that was part of the opaque frankness of his nature; and though busybodies had tried often to cause trouble, and though he found Clodia at times a nagging nuisance and unconventional enigma, he did his best to shut his eyes and continue undisturbed on the path of civic duty.
He did not approve of Cicero’s visit, but was so used to finding his wife surrounded by puppyish young admirers, poets and fops, that he had no objection to make. He merely expected better of Cicero, but did not like to show his attitude. He talked courteously. Only once did he allow himself a dry retort.
“Such a course,” he said, “would not befit the tradition of our ancestors.”
Cicero reddened, though Metellus had laid no emphasis on the pronoun; but both knew that Cicero had no ancestors in the legal sense of the Right of Images. The ancestors of Cicero and those of Metellus were as different as a shapeless mass of clay from the figures shaped out of it.
Metellus affected not to notice Cicero’s discomfiture. Unlike the more intolerant conservatives, he respected Cicero, though he considered that as consul he should have summoned the prætor and not gone gadding on a visit to his private house.
“What do you men find so much to talk about?” said Mucia, coming up. “I really am always being left without a word in my mouth, and I do envy you men. I wish I could follow politics, but it all seems to me like saying the same words in different ways. If I was in the Senate I’m sure I’d always vote for the wrong side.”
“Luckily,” said Metellus aridly, “you are not in the Senate. Women are still in theory tethered to their proper area. I want a word with you, Mucia.”
He took her aside. Clodia knew he was rating her for the stories that were going round about her equerry, a Greek youth; he feared that Pompeius would hear reports and divorce her. Mucia was of course denying everything. She looked up at Metellus with wide-open eyes and quivering underlip. Clodia knew that she was saying, “You can’t really believe such cruel things about me. I’d die before I’d ever think of doing such things.”
Cicero was savouring the nearness of Clodia. Would he ever come to the point of suggesting an understanding? Not unless she was very kind, as she had been this afternoon. People said that she bullied Metellus unmercifully. Well, Terentia wasn’t exactly a cooing dove. Clodia would be different with him; he wasn’t a sour, meticulously correct abstraction like Metellus.
Tears were bright in Mucia’s eyes. Cicero wondered what Metellus was saying. To all appearances it was the man who liked bullying. Clodia was murmuring to herself, and Cicero tried to listen. It sounded like: But is it blue or is it pink? It couldn’t be that.
19
Cato had received a note from his brother-in-law Lucullus, asking him to call. Disdaining all forms of carriage, he set out alone; for he had no fears of assault, and his fearlessness protected him. Unpopular as his views were, the people admired him and said, “He’s a hard man, but he’s not after lining his own purse.” He walked now with rapid strides, striking northwards for the magnificent house on the Pincian Hill which Lucullus had been building for years and which seemed as if it would never be finished. Cato disliked the display, but admired Lucullus as administrator and general, and had been one of the few who had resolutely but vainly opposed the intriguing efforts of Pompeius to supplant Lucullus in his command. Lucullus on his return had divorced his wife Tertia, Clodia’s younger sister, for adultery, affirming that Clodius, besides others, had been seen lying with his sister by more than a score of slaves who were ready so to testify. He had then married a half-sister of Cato, the younger sister of Servilia.
Objecting to pointless cogitation, Cato did not meditate on the possible reasons for the message. He spent his time during the fairly long walk in reckoning over the state-expenses for the first three months of the year. During his year at the Treasury he had instituted many practical reforms, and ever since kept a forbidding eye on the clerks.
He was welcomed effusively at the palatial doors of the mansion by a red-liveried butler and half a dozen footmen. Tightening his lips silently, he suffered himself to be passed through the hands of a series of ushers. Lucullus was pacing up and down the floor of a cosy side-room to the enormous library.
“So you’re here,” he said nervously. Cato made no reply; self-evident propositions should be ignored. Lucullus wiped his brow. “Of course you got my note. Take a seat.” Cato sat down on the edge of a chair with padded leather seat and back, beside which stood a slanting desk where rolls could be placed for reading. Lucullus kicked at a knot in the thick camel’s hair carpet.
“I may as well come to the point. It’s my wife.”
Cato’s lips tightened again, but he still made no reply. Nothing could astonish the man whose wisdom was virtue in a rabid world. He refused to help Lucullus to speak.
“She’s no better than my first one,” blurted Lucullus. He stopped beside a shelf, took out a roll, snapped it in half, and then stared in dismay at his work. “Bad, bad,” he said. “I don’t like destroying things. I always hated war. That’s why I always won. No one could have won those battles with less loss of life than I did. But even more than human lives I love the beautiful things into which men have put the best of themselves. No poet was ever worth his least poem. That’s the madness of life.”
Cato frowned. He objected to these philosophisings; they demeaned Lucullus. He knew that Lucullus had loved fighting, and he admired him for it, he respected the way Lucullus, with nerves of iron in his own limbs, had exacted every ounce of energy remorselessly from his men till they could bear it no longer. Lucullus was the last of the patriot-generals. Love for mankind? Pah! Make the brutes decent first, and let love take care of itself.
Lucullus had lost the train of his thoughts; he did so occasionally nowadays. He leant against the shelves with the pieces of the broken roll in his hands. He was back in the city of Amisus on the shores of the Black Sea, that beautiful Greek city which his soldiers had burned and plundered and destroyed. He had tried to stop them. When the rioting had began, he stood in the way of the largest body of plunderers, he besought them to spare the city; he wept, he who had had no tears to spare for fatigue or danger or battle. The men had been in an ugly state. They swept him aside and cursed him. If it hadn’t been for that centurion, he would have been trampled to death. The beautiful city was burned, and the soldiers danced like Furies, tearing rich cloths and golden plate and screaming women from the houses that fell with a crash of timbers on their drunken faces. Beautiful things burning aimlessly in the streets, and women moaning who would never know the fathers of their children. He, Lucullus, had been responsible; for the soldiers were his, the men he had driven and loved. The thought of the beautiful city burning sickened him, but not the mounds of corpses when he had hacked the huge Armenian army to shreds beside the river bank. He had snuffed that air of slaughter and been proud of the small army that he had led to victory.
“You were speaking of my sister,” said Cato harshly.
Lucullus recalled himself. “She has committed adultery—with a slave.”
Cato sat silent for a while. Then he said: “Bring her in.”
Lucullus clapped his hands and gave the order. The two men did not speak. Then the sound of rustling steps was heard, the curtains parted, and the woman entered, a slimmer version of Servilia with Cato’s pale cold blue eyes. She stood looking at the floor after one shrinking glance at Cato.
“You have disgraced yourself,” said Cato in his roughest tones, staring at her. “You have played the wanton. You are a filthy creature.”
