The Pillars of Rome Read Free Page B

white garment, worn short and loose in the Greek fashion. The muffled moans of his wife, attended by a single young midwife, seemed to cause him an actual physical pain he struggled to contain. For all his pre-eminence as the foremost general of the Roman world, no guests attended this birth and nosupplicants crowded the room. The walls of this borrowed villa were as bare as the altar and the single tallow wad guttering in the sconce lent the colonnaded room a ghostly feel. None of the normal rules of celebration were to be gifted to the birth of this child and the fact that it was taking place on the day of the Festival of Lupercalia was something that mocked rather than honoured the event.
    ‘Hot, honeyed wine,’ said Cholon, his young personal slave, proffering an unadorned stone goblet. Aulus shivered slightly in the chill of the early spring air as he took the drink. ‘Your cloak, master?’
    ‘No, thank you,’ Aulus replied automatically, his voice a hoarse whisper.
    His servant was unsure if he had heard him right, though he never doubted any response would be polite. It always was, whether the person addressed was a common soldier or the noble monarch of a Roman client-state. No one exemplified more than Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus the virtues of which Rome was so proud; he was upright, honest and brave, a soldier’s soldier revered by his men. The fickle Rome mob cheered him too, as a man who paid more than lip service to ancient freedoms, yet when his city was in turmoil and he was desperately needed in Rome, here he was skulkingin this empty country villa. The mob would not cheer him for that!
    Cholon knew that lesser men, enmeshed in the dirty world of politics, sneered derisively at what they saw as his master’s arrogance. They would hold that a senator and ex-consul showed insufficient gravitas when he discarded his home, his responsibilities, his friends, even his toga on such an occasion, but the general who had humbled the heirs of Alexander the Great and brought powerful Macedonia to heel, so that it was now a vassal-state to the Roman Republic, could ignore and withstand the disapproval of anyone. His family was as ancient as any in Rome: the death masks of his ancestors stood proud in their decorated cupboards. These lined the walls of the family chapel in the home of the Cornelii on the Palatine Hill, situated right above the broad avenue of the Via Triumphalis .
    Had he been in that chapel and sensed the disapproval of those ancestors at this clandestine birth, he would have looked at their masks with disdain. Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus was the greatest of his tribe, the foremost exemplar of the family Genius. His mask, on his death, would take pride of place above the family altar when future generations gathered for prayers. He prized his reputation as much as the next man, just as he felt keenly the need to maintain his honour, yet hewould not see another suffer to retain that, especially one he loved. He could not bear that his wife should be shamed in public for something he held to be entirely his own fault.
     
    Marcia, feeling nervous, stifled a yawn as she sat watching the nameless woman cradle the child to her breast, encouraging it to feed, but the infant, having already taken its fill, did not respond. Occasionally the lady moaned, exactly reproducing the sounds she had uttered in labour through the tooth-marked leather strap, now discarded. She had given birth, fists clenched, several minutes earlier, flat on her back like a peasant. An inexperienced midwife, who had never before attended on a birth unsupervised, Marcia knew that very few deliveries would be as uncomplicated as this, yet for all the ease of the birth, things seemed set to change. The girl sensed trouble and the manner of her summons to attend this lady provided little reassurance. She had been dragged from the Lupercalian celebrations, so pertinent to her trade, with the promise of a rich reward if she came at