The Year of Confusion(7)

“I fear you’re right. The people love Caesar almost unreservedly, the ‘almost’ part being his connection with Cleopatra. He should pack her and the boy back to Egypt, but he indulges her and I wonder why.”

“It’s so unfair to poor Calpurnia!” Julia said heatedly. This was perhaps the only subject upon which she was critical of her uncle.

“Since Cornelia, his marriages have been for the sake of political alliances,” I noted. Cornelia was Caesar’s first wife, the one he refused to divorce when Sulla had ordered him to. “I doubt that Calpurnia’s feelings carry much weight with him.” Calpurnia was the daughter of Calpurnius Piso, a man of great political importance at the time.

“It is not like him to be casually cruel to a wife, though,” Julia insisted. “I think he must have some important reason for tolerating Cleopatra in Rome.”

“Misdirection, perhaps,” I said. “Caesar is the master of that. Look at the way he sent me out to take the blame for his silly calendar, which I now perceive will be the cause of endless trouble until people get used to it.”

“Oh, you exaggerate. You always do when you’re inconvenienced in some little way.”

“A riot is not an inconvenience.”

“It was just a little riot. And how does Cleopatra constitute misdirection?”

“To the crowd Cleopatra is just a foreign queen wielding a bad influence on their beloved Caesar. Do you know what the Senate thinks about her?”

“The Senate these days is nothing but toadies and treacherous false friends who plot behind Caesar’s back.”

“True enough, but it is also full of old-fashioned men who smell a would-be king anytime one of their number rises above the rest, as Caesar has. Crassus showed the world that great wealth buys armies, and what is the greatest source of wealth in the world?”

“Egypt, of course,” she said uncomfortably.

“Precisely. We could have taken Egypt any time in the last hundred years, but no Roman would tolerate the possibility of another Roman getting his hands on all that wealth, so we kept hands off and supported the Ptolemys as our puppets. Cleopatra is for all practical purposes the last of that line, and she has declared herself body and soul for Caesar. How do you think that makes all those old-fashioned senators feel?”

“The last lot who opposed him are dead and they should be thinking of that.”

“They are, believe me, but the holdouts aren’t all dead. Sextus Pompey is still at large, for instance. Many are talking Caesar up as a Roman pharaoh. Quietly, of course.”

“He would never try to make himself king, with or without Cleopatra’s fortune!” Julia said hotly.

“As it occurs, I agree. That is what I meant by misdirection. He has the Senate focused on Cleopatra when they should be paying more attention to his other activities.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“This calendar is only one of his reforms. He has a great many more to institute, and some of them are huge and radical. He is going to completely rebuild the city: new forums, expanded walls, vast public works, even a permanent stone amphitheater.”

“So? Such changes are long overdue. Rome is the hub of a great empire and it is little more than an Italian city-state. That needs to change.”

“That’s the least of it. He wants to reform the Senate as well.”

“I can’t say that’s a bad idea either.”

“He plans to bring in provincials. Not just long-time provincials like those in northern Italy and southern Gaul, but Spaniards and Gauls from his newly conquered provinces. All of them his own clients, of course, because he is the one who got the citizenship for them.”

That sobered her. “So soon? I knew he had plans for them, but I had thought in a generation, perhaps two, after they have had a chance to become fully Romanized, and then just the sons of chieftains who have been his allies. Does he really plan to extend the franchise to this generation?”

“Within the next year,” I told her, “and the Germans won’t be far behind. Who knows what plans he has for the Parthians.” At that time Caesar was about to embark upon a war with Parthia, to recover the eagles lost by Crassus at Carrhae and retrieve Roman honor in that part of the world.

“It is radical,” Julia agreed, “and it won’t go down well with the remaining conservatives, the Brutii and their allies.”

“It won’t go down well with anyone in Rome,” I said, “but Caesar thinks his position as dictator makes him unassailable. I know otherwise.”

“I must speak with him.”