The Sacrilege(31)

“Now disqualified.”

“Decidedly. The main contender now seems to be Lucius Afranius,” I said. “Did I just hear you groan, sir?”

“I groan because I am not a philosopher,” Cicero said, “and only a philosopher could look upon Lucius Afranius without groaning. The man is a nonentity.”

“I think that’s what Celer likes about him,” I admitted.

“These times call for firm direction from our Consuls. I shudder to think of Afranius in such a position.”

“It will essentially be a one-man administration, and Celer will be the man,” I said. “You must admit that his withdrawal of opposition to the Pompeian demands was a wise political move, however much he may have disliked it.”

Cicero shook his head. “No, no, I mean no disrespect to your kinsman, but he is too firm an adherent of the aristocratic party. It was foolish to oppose the triumph, that is obvious. But the settlements for the demobilized veterans are another matter entirely. This involves land, and lowborn men getting control of it, a thing that horrifies the extreme aristocrats. And it means a landed power base for Pompey, whom the aristocrats hate. Believe me, Decius, by this time next year Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer will be firmly aligned with the extreme end of the aristocratic party.”

It did not escape me that Cicero spoke of the “extreme” aristocrats. He was an adherent of that party himself, despite the fact that many of its leaders openly snubbed him. Cicero had an ideal of a Republic led by the “best” men, who would be drawn from the prosperous and propertied classes of free citizens, who would be educated, patriotic and concerned with the welfare of the state. It was a fine ideal, but Plato had had such a concept and had not had conspicuous success in convincing his fellow Greeks to adopt it as a governing principle.

I would never claim that I had more than a fraction of Cicero’s intellectual capacity, for he had the finest mind I have encountered in my long lifetime. But he had a certain blindness, an almost naive belief in the inherent capacity of aristocrats to govern.

I was born an aristocrat, and I had no illusions about my class. Aristocrats are persons who possess privilege by virtue of having inherited land. They prefer rule by the very worst of aristocrats to that by the most virtuous of commoners. They detested Pompey, not because he was a conqueror of the Alexandrine mold who might overthrow the Republic, but because he was not an aristocrat, and he led an army of the Marian type that was not composed of men of property.

At the time of which I write, my whole class was engaged in a form of mass suicide by means of political stupidity. Some rejected our best men for reasons of birth, while others, like Caesar and Clodius, curried favor with the worst elements of Roman society. Most wanted a return to their nostalgic image of what they thought the ancient Republic to have been: a place of unbelievable virtue where an aristocratic rural gentry lorded it over the peasants. What they got was our present system: a monarchy masquerading as a “purified” Republic.

Cicero was right about Celer, though. Within a year he was back among the most extreme aristocrats, opposing the land settlements for Pompey’s veterans.

“It is not surprising that they dislike the idea of Pompey having a powerful private army settled near Rome,” I said. “I find the idea rather upsetting myself.”

“I am not so easily terrified,” Cicero said. “With the Asian menace settled, there are no glorious campaigns in the offing. He will have no interest in the sort of desultory combat that Hibrida is bungling so terribly in Macedonia.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that, for now, Pompey must stay home and devote himself to politics. The very concept is ludicrous. Pompey is a political dunce. He held most of his military commands without holding any of the offices required by the constitution. He was made Consul by force alone. He has no experience of civil administration or the real politics of the Senate. The man’s never even served as quaestor! You’ll be a more effective Senator than Pompey, and you’ve had less than a week’s experience as Senator.”

It was an odd sort of compliment, if compliment it was. At least I was now fairly certain that I would not be hauled into court for snooping.

I now had some people to call upon. I decided to begin at the very site of the enormity. I went to the house of Caius Julius Caesar, whose wife, we were given to believe, must be above suspicion. The house of the Pontifex Maximus was a sizable mansion, one of the few residences in the Forum, adjacent to the palace of the Vestals.

The gatekeeper let me in and conducted me through the atrium, where the household slaves went about in the gingerly fashion that bespoke uncertainty in their lives. Doubtless they were wondering which of them would stay with the master and which would accompany the divorced mistress. I noticed that the male statues still wore palls. The sun had broken through the clouds and I was conducted to the enclosed garden, where the roof-tiles still dripped musically. In a corner stood a small statue of Priapus, covered by a scarlet cloth. In front, the cloth hung from the god’s outsized phallus like a ludicrous flag.