Caesar's Women
Now that Caepio was a man of thirty, his true origins were known to everyone in Rome who mattered. What a laugh! And what justice! The Gold of Tolosa had passed in the end to a cuckoo in the Servilius Caepio nest.
     
    Brutus winced, wrenched out of his preoccupation; his mother had ground her teeth as she strode along, a hideous sound which caused all who heard it to blanch and flee. But Brutus couldn't flee. All he could hope was that she ground her teeth for some reason unconnected with him. So too hoped the slaves who preceded her, rolling terrified eyes at each other as their hearts pattered and the sweat suddenly poured off them.
    None of this did Servilia so much as notice, her short and sturdy legs opening and closing like the shears of Atropos as she stormed along. Wretched Caepio! Well, it was too late for Brutus to inherit now. Caepio had married the daughter of Hortensius the advocate, of one of Rome's oldest and most illustrious plebeian families, and Hortensia was healthily pregnant with their first child. There would be many more children; Caepio's fortune was so vast even a dozen sons couldn't dent it. As for Caepio himself, he was as fit and strong as were all the Cato breed of that ludicrous and disgraceful second marriage Cato the Censor had contracted in his late seventies, to the daughter of his slave, Salonius. It had happened a hundred years ago, and Rome at the time had fallen down laughing, then proceeded to forgive the disgusting old lecher and admit his slave-offspring into the ranks of the Famous Families. Of course Caepio might die in an accident, as his blood father, Cato Salonianus, had done. Came the sound of Servilia's teeth again: faint hope! Caepio had survived several wars unscathed, though he was a brave man. No, it was bye-bye to the Gold of Tolosa. Brutus would never inherit the things it had purchased. And that just wasn't fair! At least Brutus was a genuine Servilius Caepio on his mother's side! Oh, if only Brutus could inherit that third fortune, he would be richer than Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Crassus combined!
    Some few feet short of the Silanus front door both slaves bolted for it, pounded on it, vanished the moment they scrambled inside. So that by the time Servilia and her son were admitted, the atrium was deserted; the household knew Servilia had ground her teeth. She therefore received no warning as to who waited for her in her sitting room, just erupted through its entrance still fulminating about Brutus's ill luck in the matter of the Gold of Tolosa. Her outraged eyes fell upon none other than her half brother, Marcus Porcius Cato. Brutus's much-beloved Uncle Cato.
    He had adopted a new conceit, taken to wearing no tunic under his toga because in the early days of the Republic no one had worn a tunic under his toga. And, had Servilia's eyes been less filled with loathing of him, she might have admitted that this startling and extraordinary fashion (which he could prevail on no one to emulate) suited him. At twenty-five years of age he was at the peak of his health and fitness, had lived hard and sparingly as an ordinary ranker soldier during the war against Spartacus, and ate nothing rich, drank nothing save water. Though his short and waving hair was a red-tinged chestnut and his eyes were large and a light grey, his skin was smooth and tanned, so he contrived to look wonderful in exposing all of the right side of his trunk from shoulder to hip. A lean and hard and nicely hairless man, he had well-developed pectoral muscles, a flat belly, and a right arm which produced sinewy bulges in the proper places. The head on top of a very long neck was beautifully shaped, and the mouth was distractingly lovely. In fact, had it not been for his amazing nose, he might have rivaled Caesar or Memmius or Catilina for spectacular good looks. But the nose reduced everything else to sheer insignificance, so enormous, thin, sharp and beaked was it. A nose with a life of its own, so people
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