The Year of Confusion(6)
“You’ll have an extra three months next year!” I shouted.
“Who dreamed up this abomination?” demanded Senator Roscius. “And don’t tell me it was Caesar! I know him well, and he could never have conceived of anything as—as un-Roman as this. This thing is the work of foreigners!”
“Actually,” I said amid rising grumbles, “this fine and elegant calendar was created by the astronomers of the Museum of Alexandria, by—”
“You mean,” someone shouted, “this thing is being foisted upon us by Orientals?”
“Not all of them are eastern,” I maintained stoutly. “Oh, there’s a turban or two and a fellow calls himself Polasser of Kish, but mostly they’re Greeks. Alexandria is a Greek city, despite being located in Egypt.” I thought I was being reasonable, but I had forgotten how much the lower classes despise the Greeks. The upper classes, too, for that matter. “The distinguished Sosigenes himself—”
“I don’t care if he’s Alexander the buggering Great!” bawled the landlord. “Romans can’t let their calendar be dictated to them by foreigners!” The crowd growled agreement, temporarily forgetting that they hated landlords.
“This is the command of your dictator!” I yelled, getting desperate.
“This isn’t our Caesar’s doing!” shouted a man with the look of a centurion. “It’s that foreign bitch Cleopatra! She’s bewitched him! Next thing, she’ll be annexing Rome as part of Egypt!” This raised a truly frightening outcry from the mob. Irrationality had taken hold, and that usually meant it was time to run.
“I should have seen it,” I said to Hermes. “They’ll never blame anything on Caesar. They love Caesar. It has to be foreigners. It has to be Cleopatra.”
“You’d better hope so,” Hermes said.
“What’s that?” But the truth was already dawning.
“You’re the one standing in front of them. You’re the one who just announced the new calendar. Maybe they’ll go storm Cleopatra’s house instead of coming up here to tear us apart.” Cleopatra had come to visit Rome and renew her liaison with Caesar, much to the annoyance of the Roman populace and that of Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia.
“Good idea,” I said. “Go to the other side of the mob and raise a cry to go kill Cleopatra.”
“They might do it,” he said.
“Then they have a long walk ahead of them. She’s taking the waters at Cumae. Caesar told me so himself.” This was much to Caesar’s relief. He had paid ardent court to her in Alexandria, but she was an embarrassment in Rome, where nobody would regard her as anything but his Egyptian concubine.
“They’ll set fire to her house and it could spread to the whole city.”
“I suppose so,” I said. Romans feared fire above all else, but they were all too ready to set them when they formed a mob, regardless of the inevitable consequences. They’d burned a good part of the Forum in the riots that followed the death of Clodius. “But she’s living across the river on the Janiculum. By the time they get there they’ll have forgotten what they’re rioting about.”
So Hermes left the Rostra and made his way around the crowd and found a few idlers to bribe and soon he had the rioters off down the Vicus Tuscus toward the Forum Boarium and the Aemilian Bridge across the river.
* * *
“So what happened then?” Julia asked me over dinner that evening.
“Well, nobody was really clear exactly where Cleopatra has been staying. Some went to the Janiculum, but others hared off into the Trans-Tiber, and you know how the people over there feel about City mobs intruding on their district. Well, pretty soon there were fights all over the place and the gladiators from the Statilian school came out to join the fun. By then I don’t think anyone remembered that it was all about the new calendar. At least there were no fires or killings last I heard.” I dipped a duck leg into some excellent garum.
“In a way it’s unfortunate that Cleopatra wasn’t home,” Julia mused. “That woman is a menace.”
“I thought you liked Cleopatra.”
I do. She’s wonderful company and better educated than any woman in Rome, by far, except for Callista, and she’s a Greek. I can think of no one I’d rather be with when visiting Alexandria, but here in Rome she’s a disruptive influence. She has ambitions for that boy of hers that bodes very ill for the future.”
The boy in question was Caesarion, who she claimed to have been fathered by Caesar, and whom Caesar himself acknowledged, but I had my doubts. Caesar was famously infertile, having sired only one daughter who had lived, out of four marriages and innumerable liaisons. Yet Cleopatra had presented him with a son, the thing he most wanted, barely nine months after meeting him, at a time when it was tremendously in her interest to do just that. She regarded Caesar as a king and a god and she believed a son would unite Rome and Egypt under her descendants. It was entirely too convenient for my skeptical taste.