Of Merchants & Heros Page 5

  She turned from the books and looked at me with her big eyes.

  ‘I just wanted to say . . . I am glad you are here. Everyone needs a home, so this is yours, for as long as ever you want. Don’t forget.’

  Priscus our neighbour stopped calling at the house. But about a month after the marriage, when I had gone up to the town on some farm matter, I ran into him at the market.

  For a little while we spoke inconsequentially. Then there was a pause and he said lightly, as if carrying on from what had gone before, ‘I met your stepfather the other day, while I was walking in the orchard.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, catching his eye. ‘Then you are fortunate. He seldom ventures from the house.’

  He paused and coughed, and pretended to look over a stall selling knives and hooks. ‘He called me over . . . I think, actually, he thought I was one of the farmhands. He was looking up at a tree and wanted to know what was wrong with the apples. I told him there was nothing wrong with the apples, if I was any judge, but that he was looking at a plumtree.’

  I laughed out loud.

  ‘Still,’ went on Priscus, frowning, ‘it is an easy enough mistake, after all, and I suppose he grew up in the city, where one does not learn such things.’

  ‘The city? Not at all. He’s from Campania, where the people take in farming with their mother’s milk. But not Caecilius, it seems. He despises farming. He is a man of business, so he says.’

  Priscus raised his grey brows and walked on, and when I caught his eye he said, ‘Ah, a man of business. Well, indeed.’

  We carried on down the narrow cobbled street in silence. Then I could restrain myself no longer and I burst out, ‘I tell you, Priscus, Father would have hated such a man. Everything has a price, and he makes it his business to know it. He thinks all things may be bought and sold. He calls it “business”, and now he says I must learn it.’

  Priscus nodded into his beard. One never quite knew, with Priscus, whether he was amused or not. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s no harm in learning the value of things, or how else will you learn judgement? What price, I wonder, does he buy friendship at?’

  I laughed. ‘Friendship?’

  ‘Or love?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Then, it seems, he does not know the price of everything, after all. But what of you, Marcus, who know so much less than he about “business”? What price, would you say, do these things fetch?’

  ‘Why, no price at all, Priscus!’ I cried. ‘A man cannot buy and sell such things!’

  ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘they have a value.’

  We had come out at a small, paved square. I had often played here as a child, and knew it well. On one side, shaded by a spreading lime, there was a stone bench beside a fountain. Here we sat, and looked out over the valley. The sound of goat-clappers came tinkling across the terraced fields, and, from somewhere beyond my view, the voice of a herdboy singing.

  Priscus said, ‘You see, Marcus, some things have value yet have no price, and a wise man learns them and their worth. So do not let the standard of the marketplace be your guide. A man goes there for flour and greens, but not for virtue.’

  I drew down my brows and gazed out at the distant hills, the oak groves and the descending rows of cypresses, and was seized suddenly by the beauty of the place, and by Priscus’s gentle wisdom, which, in my youthful hurry, I seldom heeded. My father had said to me once that it was the burden of the wise never to be listened to. I remembered his words now, though I could not recall why he had spoken them. I said, ‘He is going to take me away from here.’

  ‘You will be back. In the meantime, think of it this way: there are things you can learn from your stepfather; though not the things, I suspect, that he imagines. But you will draw what you need nevertheless, and leave what you do not. Remember, it is in your power to fashion yourself into what you will be. And your stepfather is right in this at least, that you cannot stay here for ever. The world is stirring, and you serve nobody’s good by hiding from it, least of all your own.’

  I turned to him. ‘Is that my fate, then, Priscus, to be some merchant?’

  ‘I doubt it. But that is for you to decide. Besides, you made a vow, as I recall. Have you told your stepfather of it?’

  ‘I have told no one,’ I said, ‘least of all him. He would not understand.’

  ‘No, perhaps he would not. And such things are best kept between you and the god. But you have not forgotten it, I see.’

  ‘I will never forget,’ I said, in a voice of iron.

  THREE

  SOON AFTER, WHEN THE grapes were ripening on the vines, and the upland mornings were cool with the first hint of autumn, Caecilius summoned me to his study.

  He had set old Postumus to repaint the walls, and had hung veils of pink and saffron about the windows. It looked more like a bridal chamber than a study. My father’s furniture had gone, all except his broad-topped desk of polished oak. Caecilius sat behind it, looking pleased with himself.

  ‘How is your Greek?’ he said, slapping his palms down on the table.

  I told him I could manage it well enough.

  ‘Then good. Since I have gained a son, I may as well make use of him.’ This, for Caecilius, passed for humour, and he broke into a loud barking laugh, his small eyes narrowing in his plump face. Then he went on, ‘I have received the news I was waiting for. You had better get the slave to pack your things; we leave the day after tomorrow.

  For Tarentum.’

  He returned his eyes to his papers – a sign that I was dismissed.

  I said, ‘Why are we going to Tarentum?’

  He pretended not to hear – this was a habit of his – but when I waited standing before the desk he finally huffed and jerked his head up. ‘You will find out soon enough, since you are coming with me.

  For now, all you need to know is that I have been granted a contract by the censors in Rome, a great opportunity and a sign of their favour. Now, as you can see, I am a busy man, and you have preparations to make.’

  I said no more. This was how he was. He liked to hoard knowledge as a miser hoards gold, not for any good it did him, but merely for the pleasure of knowing he had something another man lacked. And when he shared it, it was done grudgingly, passed out in small irritating useless gobbets. He liked to pretend it was that he did not care to be questioned. But, in truth, it was merely that knowledge was a form of power over others. He knew I was curious, so it pleased him not to tell me.

  In the meantime I prepared to leave home. Tarentum was one of the great Greek cities in the south of Italy, colonized by settlers from Greece when they first began to venture westwards. It had been a great metropolis when Rome was no more than a village of mud- and-wattle huts on a hill. I remembered, for it had been much spoken of when I was a young boy, that there had been a great siege there, one of the many battles in the long war with Carthage.

  But this was all I knew. Eager to find out more, I went off across the fields to visit Priscus.

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘it was in the dark days after Cannae. Hannibal’s army were crawling all over Italy, and our allies, sensing how the wind was blowing, were turning against us one by one.’

  He paused as the serving-girl brought a dish of figs and honey- cakes and set them down on the terrace where we were sitting. He poured me a cup of watered wine, and then went on, ‘There was a faction at Tarentum that declared for Hannibal and Carthage; but we had a garrison in the citadel, and though the city turned against us, the garrison held out. Do you remember the year my hay barn caught fire, and you all came to help, and afterwards your father gave me half his fodder to see me through the winter? You must have been – what? – ten, at the time.’

  ‘Eleven,’ I said, remembering the day of the fire; it had almost spread up the hillside, through the dry oaks and pines. Half the town had gone to help. We had stayed up all night, passing buckets and beating back the flames.

  ‘Ah yes. Well, that was the year General
Fabius was consul. He marched to Tarentum and laid siege, and before Hannibal and his army could come to its defence the city fell.’ He took a fig from the bowl, bit into it and frowned. ‘But what business has your stepfather there?’

  I told him what I had got from Caecilius. When I mentioned the censors in Rome he said, ‘Ah, the censors, so that’s it. Fabius confiscated a great deal of land after the siege, and the censors were given the task of allotting it to our citizens. They have been trying to give it away to colonists ever since; but no one wants it. Indeed, last time I was in Rome, one of their agents even offered an estate to me – for nothing, if I would farm it. But I told him I had land enough of my own, and was not interested in taking another man’s. There is too much trouble in it . . . Here, take another fig, they’re here to be eaten.’

  We paused, and ate, and looked out across the land.

  It had rained that morning. The air was cool and damp, and fragrant with the smell of woodsmoke from the vineyards. I recalled that I should have been out on the slopes, helping with the grape harvest, if I had not been going away.

  ‘And yet,’ said Priscus, meeting my eye, ‘I really can’t suppose your stepfather has decided to take up farming.’

  I thought of how, that morning, I had seen Caecilius picking his way across the muddy yard in his expensive shoes, his mantle hitched up, a look of distaste on his face.

  ‘No,’ I said smiling. ‘Nor can I.’

  We exchanged a look, and talked of something else.

  And so, soon after, I came to Tarentum, with its great enclosed harbour, and mighty citadel overlooking the bay. From the carriage I stared in wonder at the long, colonnaded walkways with their shops and crowds, and the bright-painted gilded temples in their tree-filled enclosures. For the first time in my life I thought: This, surely, is civilization, many men coming together to build what no man could build alone. And, with that feeling of awe, I felt for the first time my own great ignorance. This was a whole new world, and I knew nothing of it.

  Caecilius had taken a lease on a house – an imposing mansion on a slope overlooking the inner harbour, between the temple of Apollo and the marketplace.

  He went strutting into the high, marbled, light-filled entrance hall, and then looked out to the fine garden beyond. ‘Ah, yes,’ he declared with satisfaction, ‘this will suit me. You can see the house once belonged to a nobleman. Whatever else these Greeks lack, they know how to build for comfort.’

  I ran my fingers over the delicate fluted columns. Everywhere was space and brightness. It made our home in Praeneste seem rough and dark and ancient. Then I asked what had happened to the nobleman.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Really, Marcus, why do you ask such foolish questions? I daresay he perished when the city was taken, or went away. Who can say? Not there you fools!’ – suddenly shouting at the slaves who were struggling with his luggage – ‘Can’t you see it belongs in my study? Marcus, see to all this, will you? I need to go and rest.’

  Later, two men arrived, agents whom Caecilius had sent ahead of him from Rome to arrange his affairs. One was fat and full of self- consequence. The other had a pinched, failed-looking face.

  The old Greek slave who should have admitted them at the door was in the house unpacking; there being no one to see them in, they had come wandering through the entrance hall and onto the garden terrace.

  ‘You, boy!’ the fat one shouted. ‘Don’t stand idling. Go and fetch your master.’

  He had taken me for one of the slaves.

  Before I could answer, Caecilius, who must have heard, stuck his head out from the upper balcony. It was pleasant to see their faces when I was introduced. But these, Caecilius said, were the men I had to work with. It was a bad start.

  When I had time to myself, I explored the city, and wandered along the wide boulevards and shaded alleyways, looking in at the shops and temples and gardens. I had never seen so many people all in one place. Like all visitors, I climbed the steep path up to the citadel – which the Greeks call the akropolis – the fortified hill with the squat-columned temple of Poseidon on top. From there, looking out from the walls, I could survey all of Tarentum laid out below me on its narrow peninsula, with the sea and curving coastline on one side, and the great lagoon– harbour on the other. But most of those first weeks were taken up with work.

  I began to learn something of Caecilius’s business; and something of him, too.

  In Praeneste, there were pigs that could smell out fungi that were good to eat, even when they lay hidden beneath the earth. In just the same way, I found, Caecilius could sense where profit was to be made, where other men saw nothing but waste and emptiness.

  Priscus had been partly right. Caecilius was in Tarentum because of the confiscated land. But he was not there to farm it himself. He was hiring bailiffs – failed stewards from elsewhere, or men from Rome without work – who would oversee the farming estates until the censors found colonists who would take them over. They were not farmers; they knew as little of husbandry as he did.

  ‘But that does not matter,’ he told me. Their job was to manage the bands of slaves – Carthaginians captured in the wars; Sicilians; Libyans for the most part – and it was these who would plough and harvest and see to the animals. ‘And you shall be my eyes and ears, making sure they do not rob me.’ For he knew the type of men he had hired well enough. They would deceive him as soon as his back was turned.

  I daresay, if I had discovered all this at once, I should have contrived a way to leave, with no thought for the consequences. But, in the way he had, Caecilius told me only a little at a time, and what he told me he dressed up as something other than it was.

  It was ugly, sordid, boring work. The agents – Florus and Virilis – resented me; the land-bailiffs, who were little more than criminals, were bristling and suspicious.

  And as well as this spying dressed up as supervision, there were other tasks too. He had not abandoned his shipping business, or his contract to supply the fleet in Kerkyra. And, Tarentum being a great port, there were ships to meet, cargoes to inspect, and manifests to check.

  One morning, Caecilius called me to his study and gave me a note to take to the praetor’s residence. The praetor, he explained, was a man called Caeso, a politician of some importance in Rome, who had been sent to govern Tarentum after the siege. I was to take the note and wait for a reply. Such relationships, he told me with the air of one imparting a mystery, must be cultivated. Indeed, he said, he was surprised he had not yet been invited. ‘But no doubt the praetor is a busy man, and his good-for-nothing clerks have overlooked it.’

  I went off. The praetor’s residence was not far from ours, a large walled house on the edge of the sanctuary of Aphrodite. Returning, I heard the loud self-satisfied voice of the fat agent in my stepfather’s study, so I decided to wait in the garden, among the palms and oleanders.

  But Caecilius must have seen me pass the door. He called, ‘Come here, Marcus, please.’ I went in. Florus and Virilis were there.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Did you take the note as I instructed?’ He inclined his head at Florus, and addressing him in his listen-and- learn tone went on, ‘As I was telling you, significant men are always useful to one another. The praetor will know my name from Rome, of course, and he will want to meet me as soon as possible.’

  He returned his gaze to me and there was a pause. They all looked at me expectantly. This was just what I had hoped to avoid.

  ‘Well?’ said Caecilius again, tapping the desktop with his ring.

  In a hesitating voice I said, ‘I took the note, sir, but—’ I tried to signal with my eyes that it would be better for us to speak alone, but Caecilius burst out impatiently, ‘But what? Come along, boy, pull yourself together, what was the reply? When does the praetor wish to see me?’

  ‘There was no reply,’ I said.

  ‘No reply?’ he repeated, the colour rising in his plump cheeks.

  Now, finally, I had his attention. I could see
his mind working.

  Quickly he said, ‘Of course, you saw the praetor himself?’

  He could hardly have supposed this. Even Caecilius did not see messengers himself. He left it to the steward, or one of the slaves.

  But I knew what he was doing. He was saving face, at my expense.

  Awkwardly I explained what he must have known very well, that it was one of the praetor’s staff who took the note.

  ‘Some idiot clerk,’ he said, nodding at Florus and Virilis. ‘And did he read it? I don’t suppose he did. I don’t suppose he could read Latin at all.’

  ‘Yes, sir. He read it while I waited. He was Roman. He spoke Latin to me.’

  There was a silence. Florus had developed a sudden interest in the oleander beyond the window. Virilis was looking at his boots.

  My stepfather cleared his throat. ‘Well, Caeso is a busy man. He has a whole city of Greeks to take care of, after all. But really, Marcus, you might have waited for an answer . . . No!’ – raising his hand as I drew my breath – ‘do not attempt to answer me back! Let me finish. Must I always see to a job myself, if I want it done properly? I suppose you went hurrying off to waste your time in the market, or were gaping at the shops. I have told you before. Work comes first!’

  In fact I had come straight back. I did not tell him this now. Nor did I say that I had pressed the man at the praetor’s residence for an answer. He had been no mere clerk, but a quaestor or some other senior official: a Roman, dressed in a white tunic bordered with red.

  He had been courteous, and, when I asked, he had looked over the note again, and repeated that there was no reply, adding, ‘Who is this Aulus Caecilius, anyway, some sort of merchant?’

  None of this I mentioned now to my stepfather. Instead I said, ‘Do you want me to go back again, sir?’

  ‘Oh, no; leave it, leave it.’ He fluttered his thick hand at me in a gesture of irritated dismissal. ‘I expect I shall hear something during the course of the day.’

  In fact he heard nothing. It was I who met the praetor first. And in circumstances neither of us could have foreseen.