SPQR IX: The Princess and the Pirates Read online

  Very slowly, considering each word carefully and with many repetitions at the woman’s puzzled expressions, she got the question across. The woman began to speak in a gush of words but Cleopatra, by gestures, managed to slow her down. Finally she turned to me.

  “Her name is Chryse. The village has no name and she knows no place but this island. The day before yesterday, five ships appeared offshore in the late morning. The people thought they wanted to trade for fish and wool so they rushed to the shore. But the strangers came ashore armed and began herding them together, tying the women and children with ropes, binding some of the younger men, killing others, and cutting down all the old people. With some others, she ran to the interior. She hid under a rock overhang she knew about. She does not know how these others managed to conceal themselves. She does not know what became of her man and her children.”

  “Ask her about the attitude of these raiders.”

  She looked at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Were they angry, as if these islanders had done them some harm? Were they joyous, laughing as they killed, raping and having a good time? How did they look and sound?”

  Once again Cleopatra managed to get her meaning across, and the woman answered, having to repeat herself many times for full comprehension.

  “She says that they were grim, but they showed no anger, as if they were doing a job. ‘Like men gutting fish for dinner’ is how she put it. She saw no rape.”

  “Did she see their leader?”

  Once more the byplay, which was growing quicker. “She saw a big man by the shore, with long hair and a beard, and the others seemed to defer to him. But he scarcely glanced toward the islanders, and she was too terrified to notice much beyond that.”

  “Can she describe their ships?”

  Cleopatra asked. “Like yours, but the same color as the sea.” “Thank her. Tell her we will take her and the others to Cyprus and find a place for them. They will not suffer further.”

  The woman spoke and Cleopatra turned to me. “She does not want to go to Cyprus. She does not think the others will either. This island is all they know.”

  “But there is nothing left for them here. Tell her that even if they find food to eat, they will die here alone in time.”

  Cleopatra tried. “She wants to stay.”

  We went back to Cleopatra’s tent.

  “Ready for some conclusions now?” she asked, handing me another cup.

  “This was an example,” I said. “It’s the only explanation. Those raiders were ordered to devastate this place utterly. That is why they went about it so methodically. It was just a task—a disagreeable one, perhaps, but a task to be carried out nevertheless.”

  “For whom was this example intended?” she asked. “For you?” “You can’t intimidate a Roman with slaughter, and this Spurius knows it. No, this was intended to let everyone in the eastern sea know what will happen to anyone who cooperates with us. Word of this butchery will be all over Cyprus when we return, and that means it will be all over the eastern sea in days. It’s a very efficient system of communication.”

  “That means this Spurius knows you are here and hunting him.” “He struck this place two days ago. He must have heard of my arrival and my mission as soon as I set foot on Cyprus. I would like to know how that happened.”

  The next morning we set sail from the blighted island. None of the survivors would come with us, despite our fervent urging. We left them there, relics of a lost world. It was sad, but the world is full of sadness.

  6

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON WHEN WE GOT back to Paphos. Ariston came up to me just as we pulled into the naval harbor.

  “They’ll strike very soon now,” he said. “They may be hitting someplace this very hour. When word of what we saw on that island spreads, you can expect little cooperation even from the people you are trying to help.”

  “Where?” I asked him.

  “Anywhere they want to go,” he assured me. I could have tried swearing everyone to silence, but I knew the futility of that. Several hundred men cannot keep a secret, even if they are all Romans and honor the same gods. Here I had the sweepings of the whole sea, not to mention Cleopatra’s Egyptians and her gaggle of servants. Even to try such a thing would start rumors far worse than the truth.

  A small crowd of citizens, sailors, and dockside idlers had come to view our return; but the little throng quickly dispersed when it was clear we were coming back without pirate heads, freed captives, and heaps of loot. It was a little early for that. An elaborate litter remained on the wharf as I stepped off the gangplank, its liveried bearers squatting patiently by its poles. A delicate, multiply ringed hand drew its curtain aside.

  “Senator! Did you have a pleasant voyage?” It was Flavia. She wore an expensive but relatively modest gown, and the elaborately dressed blond wig was back in place. She looked every inch the noble Roman lady, and it was hard to believe that I had seen so many more inches just two nights previously.

  “It was a tolerable outing, no more than a shakedown cruise really.” “Did you see any pirates?”

  “No, but we saw where they’d been. It was instructive.” She slid over to one side of the litter. “Please join me, Senator. I am sure that your labors have given you an appetite. An early dinner at my home will do you a world of good.” She caught my raised eyebrow and smiled. “My husband would like very much to talk with you.”

  “Then if you will allow me to make a few arrangements here, I will be most honored.”

  “Go right ahead. I like to watch sailors at their work.”

  I told Hermes to haul our gear back to our quarters at the house of Silvanus and wait for me there. He didn’t like it but knew better than to argue. I left orders with my captains to be with their ships and crews at dawn, ready to sail at my orders. Out in the harbor, I could see Cleopatra’s gilded barge carrying her to the commercial wharf. I left word with Harmodias where I would be for the next few hours should I be needed.

  Then I crawled into the litter beside Flavia, and she dropped the curtain. Immediately I was enveloped in a cloud of her perfume. I was not unaffected. Of course a man of my station should properly be repelled by a noble woman who wallows with the lowest dregs of society, but then I have never been very proper. And there is something undeniably exciting about such a concentration of raw, animal appetites and energies.

  But, to my credit, I retained my distance. Bitter experience had taught me that many of my personal catastrophes had been brought about through my weakness for very bad women. And I had known some of the worst. Clodia, for instance. And then there was that German princess, Freda. She wasn’t really evil, just a savage like all her race, but fearsome for all that. I had encountered the younger Fulvia and a score of less famous but equally shameless women, and I had been involved with some of them and attracted by all. A bronze founder had once explained to me that glowing metal was beautiful, mysterious, and exciting; but one should never touch it with bare hands. It was sound advice.

  She laid a warm hand on my arm. “Everyone says that you are a man of the world, Decius Caecilius. You are a friend of Caesar, and the old bores like Cato consider you degenerate.”

  “I have been so complimented,” I admitted.

  “Wonderful. The moralists are so tedious. I would appreciate it though if you would not bring up the subject of my nocturnal escapades when you speak with my husband.”

  “Flavia, your pleasures are your own business and I will seek to advise neither you nor your husband, but he must be more than a bit obtuse if he does not know already.”

  “Oh, he knows perfectly well how I amuse myself. It is something we have simply agreed not to discuss in the company of our peers. He has his own pastimes, and I do not interfere with them. It is a comfortable arrangement, don’t you think?”

  “The world would be a happier place if other couples were so understanding,” I assured her. In truth, such liberal marital arrangements were not uncommon in Ro
me. Flavia was just more extreme than most in pursuit of gratification.

  The house of Sergius Nobilior was only slightly less grand than that of Silvanus. Roman equites of that day, which is to say the wealthiest plebeian families, dominated banking, finance, and other businesses. Though most of them were perfectly happy to make money and stay out of the Senate, with its endless duties and burdensome military obligations, they formed a very influential power group and they dominated the Popular Assemblies. This was the class to which Sergius Nobilior belonged.

  The man himself greeted me in his atrium.

  “Senator! You do my house great honor. When we heard your ships had been sighted my wife swore that she would bring you back, and she usually catches her man.” He said this without seeming irony. “Please join us for some dinner. Living on ship’s food is tedious.”

  “It wasn’t much of a voyage,” I told him, “but I gladly accept.” We went into the beautifully decorated triclinium and confined our talk to inconsequential things while we ate. There were no other guests, an uncommon thing in a wealthy man’s household, so I assumed he had some sort of business he wished to discuss privately. I therefore drank cautiously. So, I noted, did the two of them.

  “Was your voyage productive?” he asked, as the fruit was brought out. So I told them about the island we had visited with its devastated village and its few stunned survivors.

  “How terrible!” Nobilior said. “What inhuman beasts they must be to do such a thing. I cannot believe this report that their leader is a Roman.” Flavia, on the other hand, sipped sweet Egyptian wine and did not seem unduly shocked by such goings-on.

  “Well, if we Romans are nothing else, we are versatile. Personally, it seems to me that no one but a Roman could cause so much trouble with so few ships and men.”

  He chuckled. “You are certainly right about that. Sometimes I think that the rest of the world makes it too easy for us. Have you heard how Ptolemy got his throne back?”

  “I was in Gaul much of that time, but I heard rumors concerning the passing of heroic bribes.”

  “More godlike than heroic,” he said. “It seems that his subjects thought him remiss in allowing us to annex Cyprus. When his brother committed suicide, the subjects drove Auletes from his throne. After all, he had taken the surname Philadelphus: ‘he who loves his brother.’ The Egyptians thought that a bitter irony. But they must have some sort of Ptolemy so they put his daughter Berenice on the throne. According to Ptolemaic custom, a queen cannot rule by herself, so she cast about for a royal husband and eventually chose Archelaus of Pontus.

  “Auletes immediately fled to Rome, where he petitioned the Senate to restore him to his throne. Do you know by what right he made this petition?”

  I thought back. “He’d been voted the status of ‘friend and ally’ a few years earlier, hadn’t he? I think it was during the consulship of Caesar and Bibulus.”

  “He had. He paid handsomely to get that title, too. Pompey and Caesar guaranteed him the title, but they told him it would be expensive—no less than six thousand talents.”

  “Six thousand!” Even by the standards of the time that was an enormous bribe.

  He nodded. “Six thousand. That represents, roughly, half a year’s income for Egypt. But Auletes is a beggar and everyone knows it, so where do you suppose he came up with the sum?”

  This was his story and I’d just eaten his dinner so I played along. “Where?”

  “He borrowed it from Rabirius Postumus. Do you know him?” “I met him once, several years ago, at a party at the Egyptian embassy. He’d just been appointed Ptolemy’s financial advisor. Surely even Rabirius wasn’t rich enough to lend six thousand. Crassus couldn’t have come up with that much in one lump sum.”

  “Rabirius is an old friend of mine,” Nobilior said complacently. “He took a number of us on as partners in this enterprise. Of course, that was just to have the title so that the Senate would have to back his claims. Getting Rome to provide him with the military force he needed was going to cost a further ten thousand. Mind you, at this time he still owed for part of the original six.”

  “I think I see where this is going,” I said. “He agreed to pay, but first we had to restore his throne so he could start looting his own country to pay it off.”

  Nobilior smiled. “Exactly. Caesar isn’t the only one who knows how to use indebtedness to his own advantage. Now, by this time, Caesar himself was busy in Gaul, and Pompey had affairs of his own to manage, but there was our friend Aulus Gabinius, waging war in Syria with a perfectly good army at his disposal. He couldn’t break off his war against the Parthians and go to Egypt with his whole force, but Caesar sent him a strong force of auxilia, Gabinius recruited others locally, and off he went, accompanied by Rabirius to keep an eye on everyone’s money.”

  “I wonder,” I said, “how the voters would feel if they knew that so many of our wars are just business arrangements? A lot of them still think that things like the glory and honor of the Republic are involved.”

  He shrugged. “Nobody objects to the heaps of loot and the cheap slaves our victorious generals bring back. That’s what they really care about. That and keeping the barbarians as far away as possible. There are plenty of voters now alive who remember the Cimbri and Teutones camped a few day’s march from Rome, before Marius crushed them. Remember, kings all over the world bankrupt their kingdoms through foolish wars even when they don’t suffer conquest themselves. Should the Roman people complain because our own wars are so profitable?”

  “You have a point.” I wondered what other point he had but suspected that he would get around to it sooner or later.

  “A versatile man, our Gabinius,” Flavia observed. She may have had multiple meanings here, but I had too little information to sort them out.

  “A Roman statesman has to be versatile,” I pointed out. “Do you remember how Pompey got his extraordinary command against the pirates?” Nobilior asked.

  I thought about it. “That was when Piso and Glabrio were consuls, wasn’t it? It was four years before my quaestorship. My family had me in Campania that whole year, administering a training camp for recruits to be sent to Crete for Metellus Creticus’s army there. I was out of touch with Roman politics that year and most of the next.”

  “Pompey’s imperium was to last three years,” Nobilior said, “and it encompassed the entire sea and fifty miles inland, overriding the imperium of every provincial governor. And it was conferred by a lex Gabinia.”

  “Gabinius was the tribune who got that law passed?” I had forgotten that.

  “After a good deal of fighting, yes. The tribune Trebillius interposed his veto and was supported by Otho. There were weeks of brawling.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it.”

  “They were lively times. In the end the Senate had to bring in a whole rural voting bloc to break the deadlock. The country people were great supporters of Pompey, of course, so the law got passed.”

  “Are you telling me that Gabinius is Pompey’s man?”

  “I am telling you that war, politics, and business are very complicated in this part of the world. As to his current affiliation”—he made an eloquent gesture with his hands—“these things change. The lex Gabinia was many years ago, and Pompey’s sun is in eclipse.”

  “Here in the East,” Flavia added, “the people have a different view of Rome. The current politics of the Forum mean little to them. In the West, Caesar is the man of the hour. Here he is all but unknown. The great names in the East are still Pompey, Gabinius, even Lucullus. Their paid-off veterans and mercenaries are settled all over the islands and seaboard, many of them active in the various armies of the region.”

  “In Egypt,” Nobilior said, “a sizable contingent of the king’s forces bear the name ‘Gabinians.’ Some are Romans, but most are those auxilia sent by Caesar—Gauls and Germans, many of them.”

  Here, it seemed, he was coming to the crux of the matter. “And not only those,” Flavia add
ed. “He picked up recruits from a lot of settlements in Cilicia and Illyria.”

  “Including,” I asked, “those settlements founded by Pompey to separate the erstwhile pirates from the sea?”

  “That I could not say,” Nobilior asserted. “It would have been in violation of the surrender terms after all. These men were not to take up arms again. Still, few laws lack flexibility where power and ambition are concerned.”

  “All too true. Well, then, it may be that this man Spurius is one of those paid-off veterans now set up in business for himself.”

  “Quite likely.” Nobilior nodded. “Would you care for some of this excellent Lesbian?”

  I left his house no more than pleasantly tipsy. Flavia saw me to the door personally.

  “You must visit us again soon, Senator,” she said.

  “I would not forego the pleasure,” I assured her. Her parting kiss was far more ardent than commonly sanctioned by the rules of etiquette, but at least she kept her clothes on.

  As I walked away I reminded myself to steer a wide course around that woman. Julia would, after all, be here soon, Flavia was a deterrent to clear thinking, but I managed to draw my thoughts upward from my nether regions sufficiently to ponder what I had just heard.

  Nobilior implied that these pirates were Gabinius’s men. But, if so, where did that leave me? Gabinius had no imperium, was no more than an exile like many others, awaiting his chance to go back to Rome and resume his Senate seat. If some of his veterans turned outlaw, that did not mean he had put them up to it, although the implication could not have been clearer.

  When I reached my quarters at the governor’s mansion I sent Hermes to fetch Ariston.

  “How do the accommodations here suit you?” I asked him when he arrived.

  “Fine so far. The serving girls here have taken a shine to me. When you consider the quality of the men they usually have to put up with, that’s not too surprising. The food and wine and the room are all better than I can afford at most times.” He stretched his powerful arms. “It would get boring as a steady diet, but for now I like it just fine.”