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"UNTO CÆSAR"
BARONESS ORCZY
By BARONESS ORCZY
"UNTO CAESAR"
EL DORADO
MEADOWSWEET
THE NOBLE ROGUE
THE HEART OF A WOMAN
PETTICOAT RULE
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK
[Illustration: "LOOK INTO MY EYES NOW!... DO THEY LOOK AS IF THEY MEANT
TO RELENT?"]
UNTO CÆSAR
BY BARONESS ORCZY
AUTHOR OF 'THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL', 'ELDORADO'
[Illustration: Coin inscribed C CAESAR AVG GERMANICVS PON M TR POT]
"RENDER THEREFORE UNTO
CÆSAR THE THINGS WHICH
ARE CÆSAR'S; AND UNTO
GOD THE THINGS THAT
ARE GOD'S"
ST. MATTHEW XX. 21.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
Copyright, 1914,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
TO ALL THOSE WHO BELIEVE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. 1
CHAPTER II. 9
CHAPTER III. 19
CHAPTER IV. 30
CHAPTER V. 39
CHAPTER VI. 54
CHAPTER VII. 72
CHAPTER VIII. 83
CHAPTER IX. 107
CHAPTER X. 119
CHAPTER XI. 128
CHAPTER XII. 146
CHAPTER XIII. 155
CHAPTER XIV. 161
CHAPTER XV. 183
CHAPTER XVI. 193
CHAPTER XVII. 199
CHAPTER XVIII. 204
CHAPTER XIX. 209
CHAPTER XX. 212
CHAPTER XXI. 220
CHAPTER XXII. 226
CHAPTER XXIII. 233
CHAPTER XXIV. 239
CHAPTER XXV. 247
CHAPTER XXVI. 257
CHAPTER XXVII. 267
CHAPTER XXVIII. 277
CHAPTER XXIX. 286
CHAPTER XXX. 296
CHAPTER XXXI. 321
CHAPTER XXXII. 329
CHAPTER XXXIII. 343
CHAPTER XXXIV. 355
CHAPTER XXXV. 370
CHAPTER XXXVI. 376
"UNTO CÆSAR"
CHAPTER I
"Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount
Zion...."--PSALM XLVIII. 2.
And it came to pass in Rome after the kalends of September, and when
Caius Julius Cæsar Caligula ruled over Imperial Rome.
Arminius Quirinius, the censor, was dead. He had died by his own hand,
and thus was a life of extortion and of fraud brought to an ignominious
end through the force of public opinion, and by the decree of that same
Cæsar who himself had largely benefited by the mal-practices of his
minion.
Arminius Quirinius had committed every crime, sunk to every kind of
degradation which an inordinate love of luxury and the insatiable
desires of jaded senses had suggested as a means to satisfaction, until
the treachery of his own accomplices had thrown the glaring light of
publicity on a career of turpitude such as even these decadent times had
seldom witnessed ere this.
Enough that the end had come at last. A denunciation from the rostrum, a
discontented accomplice thirsting for revenge, an angry crowd eager to
listen, and within an hour the mighty, much-feared censor was forced to
flee from Rome to escape the fury of a populace which would have torn
him to pieces, and was ready even to massacre his family and his
womenfolk, his clients and his slaves.
He escaped to his villa at Ostia. But the Emperor Caligula, having duly
enjoyed the profits derived from his favourite's extortions, hurled
anathema and the full weight of his displeasure on the man who had been
not only fool enough to be found out, but who had compromised the
popularity of the Cæsar in the eyes of the people and of the army.
Twenty-four hours later the imperial decree went forth that the
disgraced censor must end his days in any manner which he thought
best--seeing that a patrician and member of the Senate could not be
handed over to common justice--and also that the goods of Arminius
Quirinius should be publicly sold for the benefit of the State and the
profit of those whom the extortioner had wronged.
The latter phrase, though somewhat vague, pleased the people and soothed
public irritation, and the ephemeral popularity of a half-crazy tyrant
was momentarily restored. Be it said however, that less than a month
later the Cæsar decided that he himself had been the person most wronged
by Arminius, and that the bulk of the profits derived from the sale of
the late censor's goods must therefore find its way into the imperial
coffers.
The furniture of Arminius' house within the city and that of his villa
at Ostia had fetched vast sums at a public auction which had lasted
three days. Everything had been sold, from the bed with the gilt legs on
which the body of the censor had been laid after his death, to the last
vase of murra that adorned his walls and the cups of crystal from which
his guests had drunk. His pet monkeys were sold and his tame magpies,
the pots of flowers out of the hothouses and the bunches of melons and
winter grapes ripening under glass.
After that it was the turn of the slaves. There were, so I understand,
over seven thousand of these: scribes and carpenters, litter-bearers and
sculptors, cooks and musicians; there were a quantity of young children,
and some half-witted dolts and misshapen dwarfs, kept for the amusement
of guests during the intervals of supper.
The bulk of them had been sent to the markets of Delos and Phaselis, but
the imperator had had the most valuable items amongst the human goods
set aside for himself, and not a few choice pieces had found their way
into the households of the aediles in charge of the sales: the State too
had appropriated some hundreds of useful scribes, sculptors and
mechanics, but there were still a thousand or so who--in compliance with
the original imperial edict--would have to be sold by public auction in
Rome for the benefit of the late censor's defrauded victims.
And thus, on this ninth day of September, a human load panting under the
heat of this late summer's sun, huddled one against the other, pushed
and jostled by the crowd, was exposed to the public gaze in the Forum
over against the rostrum Augustini, so that all who had a mind, and a
purse withal, might suit their fancy and buy.
A bundle of humanity--not over-wretched, for the condition of the slaves
in the household of Arminius Quirinius had not been an unhappy one--they
all seemed astonished, some even highly pleased, at thus finding
themselves the centre of attraction in the Forum, they who had spent
their lives in getting humbly out of other people's way.
Fair and dark, ivory skin and ebony, male and female, or almost sexless
in the excess of deformity, there were some to suit all tastes. Each
wore a tablet hung round the neck by a green cord: on this were writ the
chief merits of the wearer, and also a list of his or her defects, so
that intending purchasers might know what to expect.
There were the Phrygians with fair curly hair and delicate hands skilled
in the limner's art; the Numidians with skins of ebony and keen black
eyes that shone like dusky rubies; they were agile at the chase, could
capture a lion or trap the wild beasts that are so useful in
gladiatorial games. There were Greeks here, pale of face and gentle of
manner who could strike the chords of a lyre and sing to its
accompaniment, and there were swarthy Spaniards who fashioned
breast-plates of steel and fine chain mail to resist the assassin's
dagger: there were Gauls with long lithe limbs and brown hair tied in a
knot high above the forehead, and Allemanni from the Rhine with
two-coloured hair heavy and crisp like a lion's mane. There was a
musician from Memphis whose touch upon the sistrum would call a dying
spirit back to the land of the living, and a cook from Judæa who could
stew a peacock's tongue so that it melted like nectar in the mouth:
there was a white-skinned Iceni from Britain, versed in the art of
healing, and a negress from Numidia who had killed a raging lion by one
hit on the jaw from her powerful fist.
Then there were those freshly brought to Rome from overseas, whose
merits or demerits had not yet been appraised--they wore no tablet round
the neck, but their feet were whitened all over with chalk; and there
were those whose heads were surmounted by an ugly felt hat in token that
the State treasury tendered no guarantee for them. Their period of
servitude had been so short that nothing was known about them, about
their health, their skill, or their condition.
Above them towered the gigantic rostrum with tier upon tier of massive
blocks of marble, and in the centre, up aloft, the bronze figure of the
wolf--the foster-mother of the great city--with metal jaws distended and
polished teeth that gleamed like emeralds in the sun.
And all around the stately temples of the Forum, with their rich
carvings and colonnades and walls in tones of delicate creamy white,
scarce less brilliant than the clouds which a gentle morning breeze was
chasing westwards to the sea. And under the arcades of the temples cool
shadows, dense and blue, trenchant against the white marble like an
irregular mosaic of lapis lazuli, with figures gliding along between the
tall columns, priests in white robes, furtive of gait, slaves of the
pontificate, shoeless and silent and as if detached from the noise and
bustle of the Forum, like ghosts that haunt the precincts of graves.
Throughout all this the gorgeous colouring that a summer's mid-morning
throws over imperial Rome. Above, that canopy of translucent blue,
iridescent and scintillating with a thousand colours, flicks of emerald
and crimson, of rose and of mauve that merge and dance together, divide
and reunite before the retina, until the gaze loses consciousness of all
colour save one all-pervading sense of gold.
In the distance the Capitol, temple-crowned, rearing its deified summit
upwards to the dome of heaven above, holding on its triple shoulders a
throng of metal gods, with Jupiter Victor right in the centre, a
thunderbolt in his hand which throws back ten thousand reflections of
dazzling light--another sun engendered by the sun. And to the west the
Aventine wrapped in its mantle of dull brown, its smooth incline barren
and scorched, and with tiny mud-huts dotted about like sleepy eyes that
close beneath the glare.
And far away beyond the Aventine, beyond the temples and palaces, the
blue ribbon of the Tiber flowing lazily to the sea: there where a
rose-coloured haze hung in mid-air, hiding with filmy, transparent veil
the vast Campania beyond, its fever-haunted marshes and its reed-covered
fastnesses.
The whole, a magnificent medley of cream and gold and azure, and deep
impenetrable shadows trenchant as a thunder cloud upon an horizon of
gold, and the moving crowd below, ivory and bronze and black, with here
and there the brilliant note of a snow-white robe or of crimson
head-band gleaming through dark locks.
Up and around the rostrum, noise that was almost deafening had prevailed
from an early hour. On one of the gradients some ten or a dozen scribes
were squatting on mats of twisted straw, making notes of the sales and
entries of the proceeds on rolls of parchment which they had for the
purpose, whilst a swarthy slave, belonging to the treasury, acted as
auctioneer under direct orders from the praefect of Rome. He was perched
high up aloft, immediately beneath the shadow of the yawning bronze
wolf; he stood bare-headed under the glare of the sun, but a linen tunic
covered his shoulders, and his black hair was held close to his head by
a vivid crimson band.
He shouted almost incessantly in fluent Latin, but with the lisp
peculiar to the African races.
A sun-tanned giant whose massive frame and fair hair, that gleamed ruddy
in the sun, proclaimed some foreign ancestry was the praefectus in
command of this tangled bundle of humanity.
He had arrived quite early in the day and his litter stood not far from
the rostrum; its curtains of crimson silk, like vivid stains of blood
upon the walls of cream and gold, fluttered restlessly in the breeze.
Around the litter a crowd of his own slaves and attendants remained
congregated, but he himself stood isolated on the lowest gradient of the
central rostrum, leaning his powerful frame against the marble, with
arms folded across his mighty chest; his deep-set eyes were overshadowed
by heavy brows and his square forehead cut across by the furrow of a
perpetual frown which gave the whole face a strange expression of
untamed will and of savage pride, in no way softened by the firm lines
of the tightly closed lips or the contour of the massive jaws.
His lictors, at some little distance from him, kept his person well
guarded, but it was he who, with word or nod, directed the progress of
the sale, giving occasional directions to the lictors who--wielding
heavy flails--had much ado to keep the herd of human cattle within the
bounds of its pens. His voice was harsh and peremptory and he pronounced
the Latin words with but the faintest semblance of foreign intonation.
Now and then at a word from a likely purchaser he would with a sign
order a lictor to pick out one of his wares, to drag him forward out of
a compact group and set him up on the catasta. A small crowd would then
collect round the slave thus exposed, the tablet on his neck would be
carefully perused and the chattel made to turn round and round, to walk
backwards and forwards, to show his teeth and his muscle, whilst the
African up on the rostrum would with loud voice and profuse gesture
point out every line of beauty on a lithe body and expatiate on the full
play of every powerful muscle.
The slave thus singled out for show seemed neither resentful nor
distressed, ready enough most times to exhibit his merits, anxious only
for the chance of a good master and the momentary avoidance of the
lictor's flail. At the praefect's bidding he cracked his knuckles or
showed his teeth, strained the muscles of his arm to make them stand up
like cords, turned a somersault, jumped, danced or stood on his head if
ordered so to do.
The women were more timid and very frightened of blows, especially the
older ones; the younger shoulders escaped a chastisement which would
have marred their beauty, and the pretty maids from Corinth or
Carthage, conscious of their own charms, displayed them with
good-natured _naïveté_, deeming obedience the surest way to comfort.
Nor did the praefect perform his duty with any show of inhumanity or
conscious cruelty. Himself a wealthy member of the patriciate, second
only to the Cæsar, with a seat in the Senate and a household full of
slaves, he had neither horror nor contempt for the state of slavery--a
necessary one in the administration of the mightiest Empire in the
world.
Many there were who averred that the praefect of Rome was himself the
descendant of a freedman--a prisoner of war brought over by Cæsar from
the North--who had amassed wealth and purchased his own freedom. Indeed
his name proclaimed his foreign origin, for he was called Taurus Antinor
Anglicanus, and surnamed Niger because of his dark eyes and sun-tanned
skin. Certain it is that when the sale of Arminius' goods was ordered by
imperial edict for the benefit of the State, no one complained that the
praefect decided to preside over the sale himself.
He had discharged such duties before and none had occasion to complain
of the manner in which he did it. In these days of unbridled excesses
and merciless outbursts of rage, he remained throughout--on these
occasions--temperate and even impassive.
He only ordered his lictor to use the flail when necessary, when the
bundle of human goods was so huddled up that it ceased to look
attractive, and likely purchasers seemed to fall away. Then, at his
command, the heavy thongs would descend indiscriminately on the bronze
shoulder of an Ethiopian or the fair skin of a barbarian from the North;
but he gave the order without any show of cruelty or passion, just as he
heard the responsive cry of pain without any outward sign of pity.