Saturnalia(28)
“… a law to protect the individual citizen from public or private violence; a law forbidding anyone who lays hands on a citizen illegally from holding office; a law to deal with judges who accept bribes; several laws to deal with tax dodgers; laws against debasing the coin; laws against sacrilege; laws against corrupt state contracts; laws against election bribery; and, finally, a law to regulate the accounting each promagistrate renders to the Senate concerning his period of governance abroad, one account to be filed in Rome, the other in the province, and any discrepancy to be made up from the governor’s own estate.”
“Don’t forget the Acta Diurna,” Clodia said. “He decreed that a daily record be kept of all the Senate’s debates and activities and published the next morning.”
“And,” Crassus said with satisfaction, “he rammed every bit of that legislation through over the heads of the Senate, addressing the Popular Assemblies in a group, directly.”
It was a staggering circumvention of custom. “From what you say,” I put in, “it sounds as if Caesar is not acting as consul at all; he’s behaving like a sort of supertribune!”
“That is very much the case,” Vatinius said. “And it was necessary. Most of those laws have been bandied around in the Senate for years, and they never got anywhere because the Senate has become an intransigent body of self-seeking little men who will always ignore the best interests of the state in favor of their own.”
I found it profoundly depressing. An arrogant, ambitious demagogue like Julius Caesar passed a huge, just, and enlightened body of laws, while my own class behaved like pigheaded Oriental lordlings.
“How did Cicero stand in all this?” I asked.
“With the aristocrats, as usual,” Crassus said. “He’s getting into deeper and deeper trouble, but he won’t face it. We’ve given him every opportunity to work with us, then he’d have nothing to fear, but he won’t believe he’s in any danger. He thinks the people love him! Pompey and I can put up with him and Caesar actually admires Cicero, but he’s become totally self-deluded and thinks he doesn’t need us.”
“What a waste of fine talent,” Clodia said. “Years ago I thought Cicero was the coming man in Roman politics. The most brilliant mind I’d ever encountered; and coming from outside as he did, without all the baggage of a family history in Rome and a lot of useless political ties …” She paused and sighed. “He could have had the world, and in the end all he wants is to be accepted as some sort of pseudoaristocrat.”
The talk got looser and more frivolous as the wine flowed and I took little part in it. During it all I brooded on one inescapable fact: Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer had been a man with enemies.
After a while we rose, groaning and full-bellied, from our couches. Some went out to the peristyle to walk off their dinner, for the house had no formal garden. Antonius and Fulvia slipped away somewhere. The two parasites made fulsome thanks and left. Such men, if they are skillful at both cadging and timing, can work in two free dinners a night.
I now realized that Rome, along with myself, was now suspended in a brief breathing space between the upheavals of Caesar’s consulship and the one to come. This frequently happened at the end of a year, when the outgoing consuls were getting ready to proceed to their provinces and the newcomers were arranging their staffs and, often as not, collecting bribes prior to taking office. It was at this time that the whole populace was celebrating Saturnalia, giving gifts, settling debts, and sloughing off the old year for the new. After that, it would be shield up and sword out, and the fighting would start all over.
And the year to come would surely be worse than the last.
Clodia came to me when most of the guests were gone. I hadn’t seen Antonius take his leave.
“Now I think we can talk, Decius. I have a sitting room just off my bedroom. It’s very comfortable. Come along.” I followed her into a small, neat room furnished with two lounge chairs with a small table between them. Much of one wall had been turned into a large window overlooking a small, delightfully picturesque gully carpeted with myrtle, from which rose the sounds of night insects. Thirty yards away, on the other side of the little gorge, was a circular temple of Venus in one of her many aspects.
“I had no idea this house commanded such a prospect,” I said, leaning out the window and hearing the sound of a spring running over the gravel below.
“Isn’t it lovely? Celer never would have noticed, since this is the rear of the house. This was a storeroom until I took it over and had the window made. My maids make me up here in the mornings. It catches the early light.” She clapped her hands and a pair of slave girls brought in a pitcher of wine and goblets. They were typical of Clodia’s purchases. They were twins, barely nubile, and quite beautiful, except for the barbaric designs tattooed over their faces and bodies.