A Friend of Caesar | Page 4

off those chains. Tell the
wretches they are to remain unshackled only so long as they behave.
Give them three skins to-night from which to drink their master's health.
Drive on, Cappadox!"
[12] Slave household.
And before the fettered slaves could comprehend their release from
confinement, and break out into a chorus of barbarous and uncouth
thanksgivings and blessings, the carriage had vanished from sight down
the turn of the road.
II
Who was Quintus Livius Drusus? Doubtless he would have felt highly
insulted if his family history had not been fairly well known to every
respectable person around Præneste and to a very large and select circle
at Rome. When a man could take Livius[13] for his gentile name, and
Drusus for his cognomen, he had a right to hold his head high, and
regard himself as one of the noblest and best of the imperial city. But of
course the Drusian house had a number of branches, and the history of
Quintus's direct family was this. He was the grandson of that Marcus
Livius Drusus[14] who, though an aristocrat of the aristocrats, had
dared to believe that the oligarchs were too strong, the Roman

Commons without character, and that the Italian freemen were
suffering from wrongs inflicted by both of the parties at the capital. For
his efforts to right the abuses, he had met with a reward very common
to statesmen of his day, a dagger-thrust from the hand of an
undiscovered assassin. He had left a son, Sextus, a man of culture and
talent, who remembered his father's fate, and walked for a time warily
in politics. Sextus had married twice. Once to a very noble lady of the
Fabian gens, the mother of his son Quintus. Then some years after her
death he took in marriage a reigning beauty, a certain Valeria, who
soon developed such extravagance and frivolity, that, soon after she
bore him a daughter, he was forced "to send her a messenger"; in other
words, to divorce her. The daughter had been put under the
guardianship of Sextus's sister-in-law Fabia, one of the Vestal virgins at
Rome. Sextus himself had accepted an appointment to a tribuneship in
a legion of Cæsar in Gaul. When he departed for the wars he took with
him as fellow officer a life-long friend, Caius Cornelius Lentulus; and
ere leaving for the campaign the two had formed a compact quite in
keeping with the stern Roman spirit that made the child the slave of the
father: Young Quintus Drusus should marry Cornelia, Lentulus's only
child, as soon as the two came to a proper age. And so the friends went
away to win glory in Gaul; to perish side by side, when Sabinus's
ill-fated legion was cut off by the Eburones.[15]
[13] Every Roman had a prænomen, or "Christian name"; also a gentile
name of the gens or clan to which he belonged; and commonly in
addition a cognomen, usually an epithet descriptive of some personal
peculiarity of an ancestor, which had fastened itself upon the immediate
descendants of that ancestor. The Livii Drusi were among the noblest of
the Roman houses.
[14] Died in 91 B.C.
[15] In 54 B.C.
The son and the daughter remained. Quintus Drusus had had kindly
guardians; he had been sent for four years to the "University" at Athens;
had studied rhetoric and philosophy; and now he was back with his
career before him,--master of himself, of a goodly fortune, of a noble

inheritance of high-born ancestry. And he was to marry Cornelia. No
thought of thwarting his father's mandate crossed his mind; he was
bound by the decree of the dead. He had not seen his betrothed for four
years. He remembered her as a bright-eyed, merry little girl, who had
an arch way of making all to mind her. But he remembered too, that her
mother was a vapid lady of fashion, that her uncle and guardian was
Lucius Cornelius Lentulus Crus, Consul-elect,[16] a man of little
refinement or character. And four years were long enough to mar a
young girl's life. What would she be like? What had time made of her?
The curiosity--we will not call it passion--was overpowering. Pure
"love" was seldom recognized as such by the age. When the carriage
reached a spot where two roads forked, leading to adjacent estates,
Drusus alighted.
[16] The two Roman consuls were magistrates of the highest rank, and
were chosen each year by the people.
"Is her ladyship Cornelia at the villa of the Lentuli?" was his demand of
a gardener who was trimming a hedge along the way.
"Ah! Master Drusus," cried the fellow, dropping his sickle in delight.
"Joy to see you! Yes, she is in the grove by the villa; by the great
cypress you know so