Read Online The Grass Crown by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online Page A

Rome’s most heavily populated and poorest district, wedged into the declivity between the Esquiline Mount and the Viminal Hill—a seething mass of people of all races and creeds, with Romans of the Fourth and Fifth Classes and the Head Count mingled among it.
    Yet Aurelia had found her metier, there in the Suburan insula. And the moment Caesar was gone and her first pregnancy over, she plunged with heart and mind into the business of being a landlady. The agents were dismissed, the books her own to keep, the tenants soon friends as well as clients. She dealt competently, sensibly and fearlessly with everything from murder to vandalism, and even compelled the crossroads college housed within her premises to behave itself. This club, formed of local men, was supposed—with the official sanction of the urban praetor—to care for the religious welfare and facilities of the big crossroads which lay beyond the apex of Aurelia’s triangular apartment building—its fountain, its roadbed and sidewalks, its shrine to the Lares of the Crossroads.
     
    Aurelia’s Insula
     
    The custodian of the college and the leader of its denizens was one Lucius Decumius, a Roman of the Romans, though only of the Fourth Class. When Aurelia took over the management of her insula, she discovered that Lucius Decumius and his minions ran a protection agency on the side, terrorizing shopkeepers and caretakers for a mile around. But that she put a stop to; and in the process made a friend of Lucius Decumius.
    Lacking milk, she had farmed out her children to the women of her insula, and opened the doors of a world to those impeccably aristocratic little patricians that under more normal circumstances they would never have dreamed existed. With the result that long before they could be expected to commence their formal schooling, the three of them spoke several different grades of Greek, Hebrew, Syrian, several Gallics, and three kinds of Latin—that of their ancestors, that of the lower Classes, and the argot peculiar only to the Subura. They had seen with their own eyes how the people of Rome’s stews lived and eaten all sorts of meals foreigners called good food, and were on first-name terms with the evil fellows of Lucius Decumius’s crossroads college tavern and officially sanctioned sodality.
    All of which, Aurelia was convinced, could do them no real harm. She was not, however, an iconoclast or a reformer, and she held sternly to the tenets of her origins. But alongside all that, there lay in her a genuine love of proper work, and an abiding curiosity about and interest in humanity. Whereas in her sheltered youth she had clung to the example of Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi, deeming that heroic and star-crossed lady the greatest Roman woman who ever lived, now in her growing maturity she clung to something more tangible and valuable—her mine of good sound common sense. So she saw nothing wrong in the polyglot chatter of her three little impeccably aristocratic patricians, and thought it excellent training for them to have to learn to cope with the fact that those they mixed with could never know or hope to know the heights of distinction theirs by birthright.
    What Aurelia dreaded was the return of Gaius Julius Caesar, the husband and father who had never actually been either husband or father. Familiarity would have bred some degree of expertise in these two roles, but Gaius Julius Caesar had never grown at ease, let alone familiar. A Roman of her class, Aurelia neither knew nor much cared about the women he undoubtedly used from time to time to rid himself of his more basic needs, though she did know from her exposure to the lives of her tenants that women of other walks could be driven to screaming fits and murder for love of or jealousy of their men. To Aurelia, rather inexplicable. But a fact nonetheless. She just thanked the gods that she had been brought up to know better, and discipline her emotions better; it did not occur to