The Throne of Caesar by Steven Saylor

Author:Steven Saylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

XXVII

I had never met Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, our host. About him I knew only what most Romans would know. He was of patrician birth, about my age, and had been allied with Caesar for a long time. When the civil war began, it was to Lepidus that Caesar entrusted the keeping of Rome while Caesar chased Pompey to Greece. It was Lepidus who put forward the motion that granted Caesar his first, temporary, dictatorship. Later, Caesar dispatched Lepidus to Spain to quell a rebellion there, and was so impressed that Lepidus was granted a triumph when he returned to Rome. While Lepidus’s procession paled compared to the staggering grandeur of Caesar’s own four triumphs the following year, a triumph is never a small affair, and that of Lepidus had been sufficient to impress his name on the minds of even the least attentive citizens. Currently, he was serving as Master of the Horse, essentially a deputy of the Dictator. On Caesar’s departure to Parthia, Lepidus was to leave Rome and become governor of Spain.

Among his family connections was his marriage to a half sister of Marcus Brutus, which united two of the oldest and most distinguished patrician clans in Rome. But Lepidus and Brutus had never been political allies. Lepidus had always been loyal to Caesar.

Lepidus’s house followed the rule of inverse opulence that I had often observed when admitted to the homes of the powerful in Rome: The more austere the exterior—in this case, a very simple white plaster wall fronting the street, and a wooden door without a single ornament, not even a bronze knocker—the more sprawling and opulent the interior. The vestibule, crowded with wax images of ancestors, was the size of my garden; the garden, populated by some notable Greek bronzes, was the size of my house. The dining room, open on one side to the garden but warmed by two massive braziers, was small but exquisitely furnished with three very fine dining couches. On the walls, painted roses bloomed and peacocks displayed shimmering plumage.

The three long couches were arranged at right angles to one another with the open side toward the garden. By custom, no more than two guests would share a couch, each reclining on one elbow, head to head. With only three couches for six guests, the dinner was not to be a grand affair, where a simple guest like myself could recede into the background, but something more like an old-fashioned Greek symposium. There would be a host, a guest of honor to his right on the center couch, and two pairs of guests on the couches to either side, with food and entertainment arriving from the open side facing the garden.

Our host stood at the center of the dining room. Meto, who had been acquainted with him for years, introduced us. Lepidus was clean shaven. His full head of silver hair was stylishly cut to look a bit tousled and unkempt, but I had no doubt that each lock had been carefully laid in place by the slave who groomed him.

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