The River God's Vengeance(28)

“Have you consulted with your family?” he asked.

“Not yet. What do you mean?”

“Talk this over with old Cut Nose and Scipio and Nepos. They may have some cautious advice for you.”

This made no sense. “Just yesterday Scipio was ready to give the case to his son for prosecution.”

“See if he feels the same way today.”

He was making me angry, but I felt a chill from my scalp to my toes. “Titus, what is going on?”

“Our political situation, you may have noticed, has been fiuid.”

“Chaotic is the word I would have used, but I suppose ‘fluid’ is a reasonable euphemism. What of it?”

He fiexed his big hands. “Just what is it that keeps us functioning at all, lacking as we do the institutions of monarchy?”

“We have our ancient customs,” I said, “our republican tradition, the citizen’s respect for office—” I trailed off. It was a good question. Just what did keep us going? “And I suppose the gods help out from time to time.”

He nodded solemnly. “In other words, we have absolutely nothing we can count on.”

“I’ll grant you it doesn’t work very well, but it works, after a fashion. What would you have us do, go back to kings?”

“Not me. A man of my birth would have little chance to rise in a monarchy. But it’s not all that easy to do it here, either. Look, Decius, for centuries the Senate has drawn its members from a few families, families like your own. You are the landed gentry. Any citizen may stand for office, but there’s little point in it for most people.”

“Certainly,” I said, wondering where this was leading. “Public office is notoriously expensive. We spend years serving the State, and we aren’t paid for it. On the contrary. Only in the propraetorian and proconsular positions do you ever have a chance of enriching yourself. Maybe one senator in ten ever makes it to praetor. Even then riches are not assured, unless you draw a rich province to govern or a profitable war. And you’d better win your wars. It’s foolish to aspire to office unless you have landed wealth.”

There were exceptions to this, of course. Caius Marius had soldiered hard as a young man, making himself a popular hero as well as attracting the patronage of wealthy men. When the time came to stand for higher office, the money and the votes were there for him. Cicero, from the same obscure town as Marius, had made his reputation as a lawyer beyond peer. It was, of course, unlawful for a lawyer to accept fees, but his grateful clients always gave him lavish Saturnalia gifts. It didn’t hurt that grateful provincials remembered his honest administration fondly and sent him plenty of business.

But even acknowledging these exceptions, the general rule held that it was futile to aspire to office without the resources of a wealthy family. Thus the Senate was full of equites who had been willing to undertake the onerous but relatively cheap office of quaestor in order to enter the Senate and share in its prestige. This, under the constitution Sulla had given us, was the minimum necessary for admission to that august body.

“The connection with falling buildings still eludes me.”

“There was a time when only patricians could be senators. They lost that privilege long ago, but they set the fashion. They were the nobles, they derived their incomes from the land, and they decreed that income from any other source was dishonorable.”

“It seems to me I had this same conversation just a little while ago with Sallustius.”

“Then the little toad, as usual, was talking in hints and innuendoes. Let me give it to you straight. The patricians are nearly extinct. The old families have been dying out generation by generation. How many are left? The Cornelians, the Scipios, the Claudians, the Caesars, maybe ten others at most, and the bulk of them are so obscure that you never hear of them anymore. In another generation they’ll be all but gone. Yet we follow their ancient customs as if they were decreed by the gods.”

This was an incredibly long speech for the usually reticent Milo. Clearly, this was something he felt deeply about, but he still hadn’t made his point. I followed an equally uncharacteristic path and kept my mouth shut.

“Who owns all that land now? A handful of great magnates, most of them living down in the southern part of the peninsula, who take little interest in State politics. The land the patrician families still cling to doesn’t produce a third of what it used to now that it’s worked by slaves instead of industrious peasants. And yet, as you’ve pointed out, public office is expensive. Where does our money come from, Decius?” He did not wait for me to answer. “It comes from the equites and the resident alien merchants. From the businessmen!”