'And leaves his long neck exposed to daggers,' said Eco. 'A sharp observation.'
'A sharper pun.' We both winced, then laughed. I reached out and clutched his hand for a moment. 'Oh, Eco, you say these conspirators are deluded, but not half so deluded as I've been, imagining. I could escape from Rome. No one can! Ask any slave who's fled all the way to the Pillars of Hercules or the Parthian border, only to be trapped and carted back to his master in a cage. We're all slaves of Rome, no matter how we're born, no matter what the law says. Only one thing makes men free: the truth. I've tried to turn my back on the truth, thinking that by ignorance I could escape the Fates. I should have known better. A man can't turn his back on his own nature. I've lived my lite searching for justice, knowing how rare it is and how hard it is to find, — still, if we can't find justice, sometimes we can at least find the truth and be satisfied with that. Now I've given up on justice altogether, and I even seem to have lost my appetite, not to mention my instinct, for finding the truth, until I despair of ever finding it again; but to give up on that search is to be utterly lost.' I sighed and shut my eyes against the brightness of the shimmering leaves above. 'Do these rumblings make any sense to you, Eco? Or am I too old, and you too young?'
I opened my eyes to see him smiling sadly at me. 'I think you sometimes forget how much alike we are, Papa.'
'Perhaps I do, especially when we're apart. When you're with me, I'm a stronger, better man.'
'No son could ask for more. I only wish you felt the same…' His voice trailed off and he bit his Hp, but I knew he was thinking of another who was not with us — of Meto, up in the house with his mother and sister, excluded once again from his father's counsel.
XXVIII
'So,' I said, making myself comfortable on the grass, 'tell me all you know of Catilina and his circle.'
Eco made a rueful expression.
'I accept the responsibility of knowing,' I said.
'It's not only you I'm thinking of but myself. If word ever got back to Catilina that there had been a breach in his secrecy and that I was responsible—'
‘You know you can trust me to keep quiet.'
He sighed and settled his hands on his knees, locking his elbows. I recognized the posture as if I looked in the mirror. 'Very well. To begin with, there are more of them than you might think. Cicero and Caelius always speak as if their enemies were legion, but you know how Cicero tends to exaggerate.'
'Cicero exaggerate?' I said, feigning shock.
'Exacdy. But in this case, he has good reason to be alarmed.'
'What exactly are these conspirators conspiring to do?'
'That remains unclear, probably even among themselves, but some sort of armed insurrection is definitely in their plans, and Cicero's death is their first priority.'
'Do you mean to say that all those bodyguards and that absurd breastplate were not just for show? I thought it was merely a vulgar display to frighten the voters.'
'I'm not so certain that Catilina wanted Cicero dead before the elections, at least not badly enough to actually plot his assassination. If Catilina had won the consulship, things might have gone very differently. But now the conspirators are all resolved on one point, if on nothing else: that Cicero must be eliminated, partly from revenge, partly as a lesson to others who serve the Optimates, partly as a practical matter.'
'Who are these men? Name names.'
'There's Catilina himself, of course. Everywhere he goes nowadays he's attended by a young man named Tongilius.'
'I know them both, from the time they spent under my roof. Who else?'
'Chief among them, after Catilina, is Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura.'
'Lentulus? "Legs" Lentulus? Not that old reprobate!' 'The very one.'
'Well, Catilina has chosen a colourful enough character for his chief conspirator. You know the man's history?'
'Everyone does within Catilina's circle. And like you, they smile at the mention of his name.'
'He's an old charmer, I won't deny that. I did some work for him myself, six or seven years ago, right after he was expelled from the Senate. Everything about the man cried out "scoundrel", but I couldn't help liking him. I suspect his fellow senators liked him, in a begrudging sort of way, even as they were voting to expel him from their ranks. Does anyone call him "Legs" to his face?'
'Only his fellow patricians,' said Eco.
Sura is the nickname, meaning the calf of the leg, that had been earned by Lentulus in the days of Sulla's dictatorship, when Lentulus held the office of quaestor. A rather substantial sum of state money disappeared under Lentulus's administration. The Senate called on him to explain the matter. In response, Lentulus came forth and in an offhand and contemptuous manner stated that he had no account to render (the accounts being empty), but that he would offer them this — whereupon he stuck out his leg, as boys do when they play trigon and miss the ball. Lentulus got away with his show of contempt, thanks in no small part to his kinship with Sulla, under whose dictatorship a mere crime of embezzlement was child's play, but the nickname stuck.
At another point in his career Lentulus was brought to trial for some malfeasance or other, and was acquitted with a plurality of two judges voting in his favour. Later he was heard complaining that he had wasted his money by bribing one judge too many. A scoundrel, as I have said, but not without a sense of humour.
The scandals surrounding him did not prevent him from attaining
the praetorship and finally the consulship; unfortunately, he was elected to the office at the worst possible time, during the slave revolt led by Spartacus. Virtually everyone in power at the time was discredited by the state's faltering attempts to contain the rebel slaves; an orgy of recriminations and finger-pointing erupted when Spartacus was finally defeated. A year after his consulship, bereft of allies and vulnerable to his political enemies, Lentulus was expelled from the Senate on charges of misconduct. This time he showed his fellow senators not his bony leg but the back of his bowed head as he departed in disgrace.
But Lentulus persevered. At a time in life when most men would have been crushed by such a humiliation and too weary to recover, he reentered the electoral fray, beginning at the bottom like a young man. A year ago he was elected to a praetorship, more than ten years after his first term as a praetor, and thus won readmission to the Senate. Sheer brazenness had fuelled his re-emergence, but he possessed many other assets — the distinguished patrician name of Cornelius; a populist pedigree handed down by a famous grandfather who died sixty years ago in the anti-Gracchan riots; his marriage to the ambitious Julia, kinswoman of Julius Caesar, with whom he was raising her young son Marcus Antonius; and not least, a seemingly lazy but shrewdly calculated oratorical style which imparted the full charm of his jaundiced sense of humour and his compelling ambition.
'What are the man's motives in conspiring against the state?' I asked. 'After all, he's recovered his senatorial rank. He could actually run for consul again.'
'With no hope of ever winning. Behind his jaded sense of humour there's a great store of bitterness, and a burning impatience. Here's a man who had to start over at the middle of his life; he's eager for a shortcut to reach his destiny.'
'His destiny?'
'There seems to be something new in his character of late: a weakness for fortune-tellers. It seems there are some rather shady soothsayers. They've regaled Lentulus with verses purportedly from the Sibylline books that prophesy that three men of the Cornelius family will rule Rome. We all know of two — Cinna and Sulla. Who could be the third?'
'These soothsayers tell Lentulus outright that he's to be dictator?'
'Nothing as obvious as that. Oh, these fortune-tellers are clever. You know how the Sibylline verses are said to be written in acrostic, with the first letters of each line spelling out hidden words? Well, what do you think the first letters of these particular verses spell?'
I pursed my lips. 'Does it begin with an L?'
'Exactly: L-E-N-T-U-L-U-S. Naturally, they didn't point this out to Lentulus, but left him to notice it for himself. Now he's convinced that he's meant by the gods to rule Rome.'
'He's mad,' I said. 'I see what you mean by delusions. Still, a man like that, having risen so high, fallen so low, and risen again — he must feel that Fortune has some special role in store for him.' I stretched my legs on the grass and gazed up at the sun-spangled leaves. 'So Lentulus is the "leg" on which Catilina stands?'
Eco winced. 'The chief leg, yes, but as with most bodies there are two. The other is not quite so strong.'
' "Why does Catilina's conspiracy limp?" Please, no more riddles concerning body parts!'
'Even so, the second leg is another senator of the Cornelius clan, Gaius Cornelius Cethegus.'
'No nickname?'
'Not yet. Perhaps he's too young to have acquired one. If he did, it might be Hotheaded.'
'Young, you say, but if he's in the Senate he must be at least thirty-two.'
'Barely. Like Catilina and Lentulus, a patrician, with all the trappings. Men are different who are brought up from infancy to think so highly of themselves.'
'Yes, they are,' I agreed, thinking of Catilina's effortless poise and self-assurance, and thinking also of how an ambitious New Man like Cicero must envy and despise that natural, unaffected assumption of superiority.