Caesar's Women by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online

both Plebeian and Popular Assemblies met. When jam-packed it could hold about three thousand men. In its back wall, facing the side of the Curia Hostilia steps, was the rostra, from which the politicians addressed the crowd clustered in the Well below. And there was the venerably ancient Curia Hostilia itself, home of the Senate through all the centuries since King Tullus Hostilius had built it, too tiny for Sulla's larger enrollment, looking shabby despite the wonderful mural on its side. The Pool of Curtius, the sacred trees, Scipio Africanus atop his tall column, the beaks of captured ships mounted on more columns, statues galore on imposing plinths glaring furiously like old Appius Claudius the Blind or looking smugly serene like wily and brilliant old Scaurus Princeps Senatus. The flagstones of the Sacra Via were more worn than the travertine paving around it (Sulla had replaced the paving, but the mos maiorum forbade any improvement in the road). On the far side of the open space cluttered by two or three tribunals stood the two dowdy basilicae Opimia and Sempronia, with the glorious temple of Castor and Pollux to their left. How meetings and courts and Assemblies managed to occur between so many groups of impedimenta was a mystery, but they did—always had, always would.
    To the north there reared the bulk of the Capitol, one hump higher than its twin, an absolute confusion of temples with gaudily painted pillars, pediments, gilded statues atop orange-tiled roofs. Jupiter Optimus Maximus's new home (the old one had burned down some years earlier) was still a-building, Caesar noted with a frown; Catulus was definitely a tardy custodian of the process, never in enough of a hurry. But Sulla's enormous Tabularium was now well and truly finished, filling in the whole front-central side of the mount with arcaded storeys and galleries designed to house all of Rome's archives, laws, accounts. And at the bottom of the Capitol were other public premises—the temple of Concord, and next to it the little old Senaculum, in which foreign delegations were received by the Senate.
    In the far corner beyond the Senaculum, dividing the Vicus Iugarius from the Clivus Capitolinus, lay Caesar's destination. This was the temple of Saturn, very old and large and severely Doric except for the garish colors bedaubing its wooden walls and pillars, home of an ancient statue of the God that had to be kept filled with oil and swaddled with cloth to prevent its disintegration. Also— and more germane to Caesar's purpose—it was the home of the Treasury of Rome.
    The temple itself was mounted atop a podium twenty steps high, a stone infrastructure within which lay a labyrinth of corridors and rooms. Part of it was a repository for laws once they had been engraved on stone or bronze, as Rome's largely unwritten constitution demanded that all laws be deposited there; but time and the plethora of tablets now dictated that a new law be whisked in one entrance and out another for storage elsewhere.
    By far the bulk of the space belonged to the Treasury. Here in strong rooms behind great internal iron doors lay Rome's tangible wealth as bullion—ingots of gold and silver amounting to many thousands of talents. Here in dingy offices lit by flickering oil lamps and grilles high in the outside walls there worked the nucleus of the civil servants who kept Rome's public account books, from those senior enough to qualify as tribuni aerarii to humble ledger-enterers and even humbler public slaves who swept the dusty floors but usually contrived to ignore the cobwebs festooning the walls.
    Growth of Rome's provinces and profits had long rendered Saturn too small for its fiscal purpose, but Romans were loath to give up anything once designated as a place for some governmental enterprise, so Saturn floundered on as the Treasury. Subhoards of coined money and bullion had been relegated to other vaults beneath other temples, the accounts belonging to years other