Rome For Sale, page 41
Sempronia looked at him with sharp interest. Was he mad or had he blundered on some net of intrigue that had escaped even her notice? She showed no surprise, but nodded again. “Will you help me?” asked Curius. “I think you loved Catalina like I did. Surely you’d like to see Cæsar pay for what he did?” He felt very cunning as he stared piteously at her; he was becoming used to handling people.
“But how can you injure him?”
Curius answered eagerly. “He betrayed Catalina, but he has many enemies on the other side. Cicero’s shielding him, but there’s some true men like Catulus who want to see justice done. If I can supply them with proof, they’ll bring Cæsar to trial.”
Sempronia considered. The man was undoubtedly somewhat unhinged, but his meaning was clear and feasible. He was so exactly the instrument for her animosity against Cæsar that she felt suspicious. “Why do you come to me?”
“I can’t go home,” burst out Curius. “Not until I’ve got something definite. I thought you might be able to help. Will you come forward and swear Cæsar met Catalina here?”
“I certainly will not,” replied Sempronia, “and if you mention me at any point, I shall have you not merely branded as a liar but flung out of Rome. I possess much influence, let me remind you.”
Curius sank back, a beaten man. He was so utterly crushed that she saw him precisely as he was, a man crazed with drink and nervous exacerbation into an obsession. At once she decided to use him. “But I can help you in another way.” He shivered, a little life crept back into his clayey face, his hands jumped nervously. “I shall give you the letter Cæsar wrote to Catalina. It was dropped here. But my name must not be mentioned.”
She rose and left the room. Curius sat with burning head. It couldn’t be true. If it was true, it meant that his luck was turning; he would soon be rich and then he could deal with Fulvia. Sempronia returned and threw a scrap of paper into his lap. “There you are, and don’t forget what I said, or it will be the worse for you.”
Curius read the paper with trembling hands. His eyes swam, and he could scarcely read. It was too good to be true. He felt life warming back into his veins. Seizing Sempronia’s hand, he covered it with kisses.
10
He went straight to the Palatine and was distressed to find Catulus absent. In his fascinated search he could not imagine that anyone else in the world had any other form of activity. But he scribbled a note. “I have what you want. Send me another personal loan to the Three Cranes Tavern and tell me when you want me to appear before the Senate.” He read this through again and underlined the word personal. Then he retired to the tavern, hugging Cæsar’s letter in his bosom. He would give that letter up only to Catulus; he would hold it against his flesh till he produced it before the gaping Senate. Ah, what a glory. Fulvia would admire him then, and perhaps the Senate would readmit him to their ranks.
Two hours later a messenger arrived with money and a message that he was to meet Catulus in the porch of the Senate’s meeting-place on the sixth, the day after the morrow.
Catulus had received the note from Curius as he was talking with some friends in the cool portico of the Temple of Concord. He read the note through with delight and could not forbear from an exclamation of triumph to the group, particular friends and confidants whom he could trust. “Gentlemen, the matter we were discussing is fixed. Cæsar’s doom is sealed. Let Cicero have his way to-morrow. On the sixth I shall introduce the impeachment of Cæsar.”
He passed the note round. Gaius Piso, whom Cæsar had charged at his extortion-trial with illegally putting to death a Transpadane Gaul, smiled as he read. “Nothing could be better. I have already offered Cicero more money than he’s worth, but he pretends not to understand. This will make him understand.”
Piso was a talkative man. He held forth at great length to his wife that evening on the fate awaiting Cæsar, and she was properly excited at being the recipient of such exclusive information. When next morning she met Clodia in the rooms of a beauty specialist, she took her aside, as she had already taken six other friends, and gave her this latest piece of inside-politics. “Don’t breathe a word about it, my dear. I haven’t said a thing to anyone else, but I can rely on you, I know.” Clodia was not very interested; her only internal comment was that the woman would be well-advised to think more of her teeth than secret political reports. Probably the whole story was an invention; Clodia remembered having invented several such stories in the past.
11
Clodius had ridden back to Rome on the morning of the third, having decided that Catalina would have no hope. There was nothing to do except to keep quiet. As brother-in-law of Metellus Celer he would be reasonably safe. After all he had played a very small part in the conspiracy. But how was he to obliterate the memory of Flaviola? He spent the next two days in a dull agony of recovery from drunkenness, lying in his room, trying to read, and talking with his little Greek page Amphion. The boy was very quick-witted and graceful. Clodius resolved to foreswear the company of women.
But on the morning of the fifth he felt physically recovered. He had argued himself into the belief that Nacca loved Flaviola too much to hurt her and that the best thing for all concerned would be for him, Clodius, to stay away. Tiring of books, he set out to visit his sister. As he passed along the streets, he looked at the women and felt his blood quicken. Appetite was god-implanted after all; a man must not deny his genius and its love of all that warms and fructifies. In a reaction from Flaviola he wanted a full-grown woman, generously limbed, full of sleek contentment, hidden behind her enduring smile like the earth under the harvest-haze. Who among his women-friends answered that description?
As he entered Clodia’s portico he recalled the escapade in the Temple of the Good Goddess. At once the memory of the tall well-built Pompeia returned. She was the kind of woman he wanted. How had he forgotten her after that splendid chance to impress her with his adventuresome passion? What could she be thinking of him after his failure to follow up such an opening? He felt curious about her. She had promised at the time to write, but had done nothing himself.
“Have you seen Cæsar’s wife lately?” he asked Clodia.
“She was here a few weeks ago. Why?”
Clodius made up his mind. It was disgraceful to let the woman down; she must have come in the hope of meeting him. “I want to see her.”
“Rather belated of you. She’s rather empty-headed, but not unattractive. One of the baby-kind, very serious. Might become a problem.”
“Will you invite her along this afternoon?”
Clodia pondered. She remembered what Piso’s wife had told her a few hours previously. Perhaps Cæsar was truly in danger. It would be a shameful trick to help the seduction of a man’s wife while foes were plotting to destroy the man himself. There must be a balance somewhere. “Certainly. I will,” she said thoughtfully. “But first I have a letter to write to Servilia.”
12
There was a crowded Senate although some faint-hearts had stayed away. The senators had spent much of the preceding day talking among themselves; and though they felt exhausted, drained of words, they had gained a mounting encouragement from the unanimity of all the propertied classes. The men must die. Silanus found himself in a difficult position. As Consul-elect, he would probably be the first man called on for an opinion; and in the past he had resolutely attacked the right of the Senate to inflict a death-penalty. But that was not in days of revolution, and now that revolution had come he found his views changing. What the world needed was a strong man, but a man entirely without sordid ambition. He re-read the political treatises of Aristotle, Plato, and the Stoics, and came more and more to the conclusion that the saviour of society must be a man perfectly able to order because perfectly able to obey. That concise statement, so satisfactory on paper, was however not so easy to apply to life. Silanus began to believe that he alone of mankind could understand that simple epigram.
Cicero rose, and there was a profound silence of anticipation. He called on Decimus Iunius Silanus.
Silanus paled. It was a moment of great responsibility. He meditated the words of wisdom which he had prepared. Certainly the old constitution would no longer serve; the man whose will was service must be king. But how to explain that? He felt the rows of faces pressing in upon him, squeezing out his breath. They were demanding victims, not a king. They did not understand. Quickly reshuffling his thoughts, he decided that order must be preserved at all costs. The men must die.
Silanus moved that the prisoners in custody and those named in the warrants should be condemned to death as public enemies.
The hush deepened, then rippled and flustered in a murmur of wordless satisfaction along the rows of faces. Silanus sat down. He had done the best under the circumstances. He must write a pamphlet to explain. The finer points could not possibly be appreciated at such a moment of stress as this. One could deal only with the wider issues. Property was sacred, and the paramount state must assert itself. In other respects, of course, the proceedings were all wrong, a mere compromise, unpleasant to men of sensitive views. He wiped the sweat from his brow.
Cicero was pleased. To call on Silanus first had been a risk, but he had judged rightly in believing that Silanus after a shiver would make the plunge with the majority. And the conversion of Silanus incomparably strengthened and eased the others. Man after man arose and voted for death in tones of implacable certainty. Here at last was moral cohesion.
Cæsar had been sitting quietly in his seat, taking the measure of the House. He knew well enough what schemes were afoot against him, and he knew also that if he went abjectly with the tide he would lose his hold on the popular imagination. He felt strong at last and realised with full confidence that he had not abandoned Catalina through cowardice. Under the show of strength he sensed the weakness of the gathering before him. Once this moment of fear and conquest was past the Senate would break up again into quarrelling factions; what assurance it gained would help to destroy rather than rebuild. He must weather this one dangerous moment with fearless dignity, and then he must take up the popular leadership with apparent recklessness. Then he would dominate Rome at last. The Senate was basically uneasy; they would condemn the prisoners and then grow afraid of their act. Cæsar would take his chance on the margin of doubt whether they relapsed into worse febrility or were panicked by the diehards into proscription.
“Your opinion, Gaius Iulius.”
All turned to watch. The senators were surprised that he should dare the meeting where to vote for the death would incur the odium of the people and to vote against it would aid the allegations of his enemies. Crassus had stayed away.
Cæsar began calmly, “Conscript Fathers, it is right that men who are faced with complex and dark issues should be influenced neither by hatred nor by love, neither by anger nor by pity. Such emotions discolour the mind and obstruct its view of the problem that it wishes to contemplate.” He passed on in equable tones to deprecate all excesses of act or thought. Admitting to the full the guilt of the prisoners, he urged that the guilt must be considered coolly and that there was no need for the rhetoric of horror employed by the previous speakers. Why did they need to infuriate themselves with descriptions of rapine and lust?
With sceptical ease he continued to deflate the excitement generated by the windy words of the others. Cicero could not stop from furrowing his brows. At what did the man aim? The senators felt uncomfortable. There was nothing in Cæsar’s speech to which they could object, but it hurt them in the delicate way whereby it pricked the bubbles of moral orgasm. Cæsar went on in his softly pitched voice with its hint of a high bird-note of violence, inculcating the virtues of an outlook based on freedom from passion. Subtly he conveyed the effect that all the speeches with their appeal to rage and revenge were somehow a justification of the very plot which they attacked —that those who thus exposed a lust for bloody retorts had precipitated bloody issues.
Then he came to the question of penalty. It was necessary for him to oppose the death-penalty. It did not matter what terms he used for the purpose. People would merely remember that he alone had spoken against the death-vote. Yet he must not give a handle to his enemies. He therefore spoke of the inexpiable guilt of the prisoners and broke the ground for an assault on the death-sentence by pointing out its doubtful legality. This he knew would awaken the slumbering fears of the minor senators. Then he declared that the death-sentence was too weak. It was bad policy, an admission of fear; and why should the Senate fear when such an active and illustrious consul was guarding the welfare of Rome? Surely to kill the men was to rouse unnecessary constitutional problems, to give a false appearance of weakness and panic, and to release the prisoners from the torment of their consciences. Death was the end of all things.
He developed these points, losing no opportunity to work on the suppressed fears of his audience and to edge them from the death-sentence. Why had Silanus not proposed scourging? Because the Porcian Law forbade it? But the Sempronian Law forbade death without appeal. Was scourging omitted as crueller than death? Yet what could be too cruel for such men? And if scourging was milder than death, why should the law be observed in the milder issue and disregarded in the greater? Moreover precedents were dangerous things. Behind his words loomed the threat of revolutionary reprisals. Without overemphasis he unfolded this thesis, while the senators, hating all that he said, were yet compelled into attention. Cicero felt a slow misery steal over him. Would the prize be snatched from his grasp at the last moment? That was unthinkable, and yet Cæsar’s voice was quietly eating through the morale which had seemed so indestructible a few moments before.
The senators rustled like a forest in the first breath of a storm. They wanted to howl and rage, but the quiet voice dominated them. They felt behind it the threat of a revengeful world, the accusation of their own hatreds. Quietly Cæsar drew to the summing-up:
“I propose therefore that the property of the prisoners be confiscated, that they be kept in custody at such of the municipalities as can best bear the expenses, and that it be illegal for anyone to bring their case before the Senate or the People henceforth.”
He sat down. Sweat broke from the pores of his entire body; for it had needed a great effort to preserve his quietly forcible accent throughout the speech in that room of hostile faces. But he had done it and knew that he had done it well. From this moment he would stand on his own feet. To-morrow he would begin reorganising the popular movement. He would lead attacks on the death-sentence which he knew would be inflicted. He would harry Cicero and the conservatives. He had no fear.
The next speakers were despondent. For the first time the voices wavered and sought compromise. Cicero saw the rot setting in and felt unable to stop it. A senator, Tiberius Nero, even proposed that the prisoners should be kept in the state-prison with increased guards until the tumults lessened and a regular trial for Treason could be instituted. Only thus, he said, could the state express its stability and lack of fear. The effect would be far greater than a hurried execution of which the legality could be questioned.
Silanus had listened to Cæsar’s speech with an envy that faded into something between despair and indignation. The man had the audacity to say the very things that Silanus had meant to say, but which had been crowded out by a recognition of the exigencies of the situation. The speech was a kind of malignant plagiarism. Silanus almost groaned as he heard each point that he would have loved to enunciate. After Nero’s speech he could bear it no more. He took the unusual step of rising to explain. His proposal had been completely misunderstood; he had not meant the death-penalty but “the full rigour of the law.” To support Cæsar was more than his feelings could tolerate; so he declared that the only man who had made a sensible speech was Nero. Nero’s speech was the correct commentary on the speech of Silanus.
Cæsar saw that his words were having far more effect than he had expected or even intended. Cicero sat helpless. He had lost heart. What was the use of fighting to help such feeble creatures? Then as a last effort he called on Cato.
Cato rose with a sour smile. He at once demolished the whole of the preceding debate by positing the realistic issue. All the speakers had missed the entire meaning of the problem. The quibblers about legality were fools who couldn’t value their own existences. There was only one question: Who was to wield the power of the state? Cynically, Cato mocked at the men who could not even in their hour of danger face the facts of a situation.
He enjoyed thoroughly the spectacle of these cowards who could be demoralised by the side-stepping tactics of Cæsar; they would plot and oppress and murder for money; and yet when they were brought into the open as here, a legalistic dilemma could make them wander and doubt and fall into the trap. Fools. Cicero listened with growing fear; he had felt at home in the early moral fulminations, but this speech of Cato was crudely candid. Cato was insulting the very men on whom the authorities had to rely, and he was exposing their motives at the lowest possible evaluation.
But, curiously, Cato’s speech stirred the senators, like a drench of cold water. Further fulminations would only have intensified the sense of moral confusion shrewdly introduced by Cæsar, but Cato’s realism brought the Senate back to an actual sense of conflict. The men squirmed under his abuse, but they were enlivened. What he said was true. Either they or the enemy struck first. That was the whole issue. They sat up straight, lashed into activity. They wanted him to cease so that they could get at once to the voting. They wanted to show him that they were men who could stand up for their own rights.
