They considered this for a while. They weren’t accustomed to my sort of reasoning. Finally, Nepos spoke up.
“I can see men conspiring this way against a really great man, a Pompey or a Caesar. But why a nobody like Marcus Fulvius? He was nothing.”
“Yes,” I said, “but what might he have become?”
“Decius,” Scipio said impatiently, “you are not Socrates, and we are certainly not your adoring students. Stop asking questions and give us some answers!”
“Hear, hear!” chimed in the other two. I loved nettling them like this.
“Just this morning, while conferring with the Greek lady who is working on the code for me, we talked about what family names and bloodlines mean to us Romans, to the common plebs no less than to the patricians and the aristocrats. Marcus Fulvius was the brother-in-law of Clodius, whom the commons still mourn. He and his sister, Fulvia, are also the grandchildren of Caius Gracchus. The commons revere nobody the way they revere the name of Caius and Tiberius Gracchus.”
“Gracchus!” Father said. “I’d forgotten that. Scipio, what’s the connection?” Scipio, with his patrician antecedents, was the acknowledged expert. He could reel off Roman lineages the way most of us could recite the bloodlines of chariot horses.
“The wife of Caius Gracchus was a Licinia, of the Licinius Crassus line. Their daughter was Sempronia and she married—let me see—Fulvius Flaccus. The slut Fulvia and the dead fool must be their children. I think there’s another.”
“Manius Fulvius,” I said. “He’s duumvir of Baiae. Now tell me who was the mother of the Gracchi?”
“Cornelia,” they all said at once. This took no great feat of memory. Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, was the most famous Roman mother since Rhea Silvia, mother of Romulus and Remus. Predictably, it was Metellus Scipio who first grasped the implications.
“Jupiter! Cornelia was the daughter of Scipio Africanus, my own ancestor!”
“Exactly,” I affirmed. “Marcus Fulvius’s brother-in-law was the most popular tribune of his generation. His grandfather was the glorious hero of the plebs. His great grandmother was the most revered woman in Roman history. His great-great grandfather was the man who defeated Hannibal, then was cheated of all his honors by Cato the Censor, the most reactionary aristocrat who ever lived.”
I sat back and took a long drink. I needed one. “Picture it: There I am, standing for trial in the court of Juventius. The jury are all members of the equestrian order. Very few members of that body who are not our clients are very friendly toward us in the first place. Marcus Fulvius gets up to introduce himself and reels off that list of recent ancestors and family connections. What happens next?” I looked at them, from one to the other in turn. Father spoke first.
“He steps right into the spot vacated by Clodius.”
“And,” said Nepos, “he demands to be elected tribune, even though he hasn’t served a quaestorship. It’s been done before.”
Father’s scarred face flamed. “This has been going on and we didn’t know about it?”
“Why should we?” I asked him. “There’s a revolution in the making, and it’s directed against people like us.”
“Against the Roman Constitution, you mean,” Scipio said.
“No, against a few entrenched families that have wielded power for far too long. Who has held power in Rome these thirty years past? Men like Pompey and Crassus, Hortensius Hortalus, Lucullus, families like the Claudia Marcella, and, yes, the Caecilia Metella. All of them supporters of Sulla. The old dictator killed all his enemies and theirs, and left them the Republic to run as they saw fit under his new constitution.
“People are growing tired of them—tired of us, I should say. Caesar gained power with the populares by identifying himself with his uncle-by-marriage, Marius, the sworn enemy of Sulla. Should it be any surprise that another man would try to do the same by stressing his descent from the Gracchi and Africanus?”
Father surprised me by, for once, not berating me for having such disloyal thoughts. He brooded for a while, then said, “I believe my son is right in this. By whatever pseudo-Greek process of logic, he has found the basis of this threat. But we still don’t know who killed this Marcus Fulvius or why. We had the most reason to, and we know we didn’t do it.” He glared at the others. “We didn’t do it, did we?”
Nepos and Scipio vigorously denied any involvement. “Face it,” Nepos said, “none of us was clever enough even to have seen the threat. We had no reason to kill him until Decius here just explained it, and now he is already dead. But where does Caius Claudius Marcellus fit into this? As you just said, Decius, the Claudia Marcella are old Sullans and they’re rabidly against Caesar. Why give patronage to this putative Man of the People?”