Man Eater

He treated himself to a goblet of chilled wine from a street vendor. In theory senators were not allowed to dabble in trade, having to content themselves with their magisterial posts and, if that proved too dull, their estates. Few, though, walked within those lines and a blind eye was turned to surplus sold for profit, to the odd quarry managed through a middleman, to property bought and sold through an agent. He didn’t know what all the fuss was about. She’d run up debts and, to pay for her gambling, she’d put one of Seferius’ tenements on the market. Quintilian had bought it fair and square, yet the silly bitch went ape.

It was a hovel, for gods’ sake! He’d told her straight. Much better to throw the scum out, do the place up, give it a bit of class. You should know about class, m’dear, you’ve got it coming out of your ears.

My word, did you ever hear such language from a prettier mouth? Class my arse, she’d said, all you wanted was an income the size of your fat belly. He’d humoured her, reminding her that if she was such a philanthropist, why sell the building in the first place, but all the while she was shouting and wagging her finger (such a suggestive little finger, too), he could think about nothing else but straddling her. Perhaps, if he asked nicely, she’d use language like that in his bed?

Now that his wife had buggered up his Umbrian estate, he’d had to find land further afield and what started out as a straightforward deal escalated into a game of move and counter-move as once again he found himself pitted against the formidable Claudia Seferius. Could she have done what she did out of spite? Gazumped him to teach him a lesson? Who knows, but no sooner had she bought that bloody piece in Campania, she sold it again-and made a sodding great profit. That was the point when Quintilian decided to take action. The Campania Campaign might have been simple retaliation, but he could not afford to take chances.

He acquired himself a spy under her immaculately tiled roof.

Quintilian’s original intention was to discredit her. Remus, the very notion of women in trade was repellent enough, not only to himself but to every decent-minded merchant in Rome, but far from indulging in wild orgies or torrid lesbian affairs (as he’d very much hoped), her sole vice appeared to be gambling. In less than a week, she’d squandered the whole of the Campanian profit.

Several students were clotted round the golden milestone, virtually obliterating it in their efforts to hear their master’s rhetoric, even though this wasn’t a school day. That’s because the master was Pera, and Quintilian intended that his sons, when they were old enough, should also learn from Pera. He was truly inspirational, that man.

Unfortunately, although gambling wasn’t strictly legal, the senator was not prepared to pee in waters where his own friends swam. He had waited, patiently paying his spy and biding his time. When not at the races or the games, Claudia Seferius had spent a very dull winter poring over her accounts and when, divinely inspired, he put in an offer for the whole wine business (via a middleman, of course) he was incensed to his gills that she rejected it out of hand.

I’ll teach you, you arrogant, long-legged bitch, not to dabble in matters outside your sphere.

To that end he had sacrificed a pig to Mercury, well renowned for his chicanery in the world of commerce, and, exactly ten days later, Quintilian’s spy reported Claudia Seferius intended extending her estates in Etruria.

Hundreds of other plots were going begging up and down the country, but masculine pride was at stake. Quintilian could not afford to lose this round, and he made his enquiries. With the Seferius bint, it boiled down to a straight choice between Hunter’s Grove and Vixen Hill, both neglected by their peasant owners for reasons stretching back to the civil wars, when conscription took men away for months at a time. With permanent peace came the disbanding of a staggering sixty percent of the army, leaving Augustus acutely vulnerable over his responsibility to his veterans, which he also had to balance against a huge number of prisoners-of-war and the problem of feeding an ever-swelling populace. Not for nothing was this man called a genius.

Many peasants, too poor, too weary, too battle-scarred to start over from scratch, leapt at his Land Purchase Scheme and happily upped sticks to Rome, where they could be housed and fed by the State and where someone else’s back broke under the plough. For others, like the owners of Hunter’s Grove and Vixen Hill, it was more of a gravitational pull, but the Land Purchase Scheme kept on rolling, the answers to everybody’s prayers. So what if the rich got richer? So what if estates grew to obscene proportions? We’ve got slaves from the wars, haven’t we? Let them work my lands, I’ve deserved this break.