The Tribune's Curse(19)

It was just as crowded in the atrium, but there the great man’s servants regulated the flow of callers so that they entered by ones and twos and small groups to present their petitions and questions and complaints. These servants stood aside as I passed through with Silvius.

“Tribune Ateius Capito,” Silvius announced grandly, “I present the senator Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger!”

“Welcome to my house, Senator,” Ateius said, rising with hand extended. I took it and got my first close look at the man. He was lean as a dagger, with a dark, small-featured face dominated by unusually large, intense eyes. As a matter of fact, the whole man was intense. Even standing still, he seemed to vibrate like a plucked lyre string. “You do me great honor.”

“The honor is mine. I can see how busy you must be.”

“I am at the disposal of the citizens at all times,” he said. “However, I think they will grant us a few minutes’ leave.” He went to the doorway and held up his hands. “My friends, fellow citizens, I must confer with the distinguished senator Metellus for a brief time. I promise that I will hear all your petitions.” With sounds of disappointment, people backed away from the door, leaving us alone beside the pool of the compluvium.

Not that we were precisely alone. There remained behind a dozen or so friends of Ateius, most of them, like himself, of the equestrian order. They were all prosperous-looking men, as indeed was to be expected, a sizable fortune being the only real qualification for enrollment in that order. Ateius provided introductions.

“Private and formal meals are all but out of the question for a tribune,” Ateius said, “but if you aren’t finicky, I keep a simple buffet here.” He led me to a long table heaped with food.

“This is more than adequate,” I assured him, generously. Indeed, it was food of the plainest sort: bread and cheeses and fresh fruit, but that was to be expected. He couldn’t rightly refuse food to his callers, and that mob would bankrupt him quickly if he laid on the delicacies. And for a man who had been living for months at a time on army rations when he could get them, there was nothing wrong with plain food. I heaped a plate and set it on a small table, and Ateius took a chair opposite me. The other men stood around attentively, far enough away to give us a sort of privacy, near enough so that Ateius could summon them without raising his voice. There is an art to this sort of attendance, although Romans have never mastered it the way they have in Eastern courts.

While we ate, we spoke of this and that, nothing serious. He bemoaned the travails of the tribuneship; I bewailed the forthcoming burdens of the aedileship; we both savored our own importance. Then, when we were finished eating, he got down to it.

“It’s good to have you among us, Senator Metellus. The rest of your family have been maddeningly noncommittal.”

It occurred to me that I had missed something important. “I beg your pardon? Whom have I joined?”

He smiled. “No need to be coy. By now everybody knows that you’ve turned down Crassus’s offer to assume your debts, and did it at some personal danger, too. We admire that.”

“ ‘We’?”

He waved a hand at the men around him. “The anti-Crassus faction. The men who know that the man is about to bring disaster upon us.”

This was tricky. In the politics of the Republic, one never admitted to belonging to a factio. You, public-spirited statesman that you were, thought of nothing but the good of the State. On the contrary, it was your opponents, your enemies, whom you accused of belonging to factiones. Unlike you, they were self-seeking curs without honor or dignity.

It was all claptrap, of course. Everyone belonged to one factio, and many belonged to several. It was never formal or codified, like being a supporter of one of the racing companies in the Circus, where we Metelli had been Reds for centuries. In fact, it was from the Circus that we got the word factio.

At this time there were two major parties to which everyone subscribed to one extent or other. There were the Optimates: the “Good Men”, i.e., the wellborn, and the Populares: the “Men of the People”, i.e., all the rest. We Metelli were Optimates. So was Cicero. Clodius and Caesar were leaders of the Populares despite the fact that they were born patricians. Clodius was a Claudius and had changed his name when, with Caesar’s collusion and over the objections of Cato and Cicero, he had been transferred to the plebs. He had taken this drastic step so that he could stand for the tribuneship, an office from which patricians were barred. Stripped of their powers by Sulla, the tribunes had gradually been regaining them in the twenty-four years since the Dictator’s death, and now the tribuneship was in many ways the most powerful office in Rome.