Free Boy Caesar by Jeremy Reed

he had come to Rome. Here everything awaited him, and his excitement was uncontainable.
    There were girls, too, who caught his eye, hair piled up in elaborate constructs, bodies made off-limits by the hauteur with which they screened out the invasive spectator. They walked in a way quite different from the Syrians, who were lazier in their indolent emphasis on the hips. He liked the pretty blondes with their inscrutable green eyes and hieratic gestures.
    The way to Senate House was his first real taste of the city. He could sight the up and down sides of the chaotic metropolis andlonged to be left alone to explore the slums and dockside areas. It was there that he knew he would find the rent boys for whom he was looking. He wanted real life in the form of sailors, thieves and those who had invented themselves according to the mythic terms of the underworld.
    The exact and rigid system that comprised the senatorial order was of the sort he inwardly despised. The elitist landowners fed off the food chain of slave labour. They were the fat cats who sat on top of the social pyramid. While it was within his power to appoint a senator to act as legate or proconsul in most of the important provinces, to administer the chief services of the city or to hold the higher posts in the priesthood, he was aware that his powers of appointment were limited. He disliked them for the stranglehold they had on all dissenting factions. Their networking was responsible in his mind for the likes of Antony being subjugated to the role of servant. He objected immediately to their imperiousness and absurd sense of self-importance. By contrast, he felt grateful to Serge for having always reminded him of the need for humility as a check on ambition.
    He could tell straight away that the Senate were suspicious of his motives and the strategies he had prepared. His announcement that he was to build an Eastern-style temple to his god in the suburbs rather than the capital, and that his own religion was to take precedence over Mithraism, was greeted with a note of silent disapproval. Worse was to follow, and he had deliberately saved his lemon-squeezer effect until last: his demand that women should be permitted to enter the Senate was greeted with open hostility. He proposed setting up a women’s senate, on the Quirinal Hill, to be presided over by his mother. It was the chance for which he had been waiting, and the effects were devastating. Most of the assembly rose to their feet in protest, except for one who remained seated and applauding his proposal. He wondered who this was who dared entertain the courage to differ from his opinionated colleagues. He decided then and there that he had most probably found a friend and would reward the individual by asking him to dinner at a later date.
    Having scored a spectacular personal victory with these innovative and unpopular measures he decided to appease the Senate’sanger by promising to make gifts to the public. He made it clear that he was to open a public baths in the palace and to make the baths of Plautianus available to the people. He was to have coins minted and distributed to his subjects as well as reprieving criminals tried under Macrinus. These were the general measures expected of him, and on this score he was anxious not to offend.
    He was high for having acquitted himself so well and felt that despite his vulnerability he hadn’t faltered. He had always trusted in real personal conviction having the edge on those who lived by received opinions. It was the force of his beliefs that had carried the day. The rest of the proceedings were given over to judicial trivia in which he took no interest.
    His business over, he asked for a detour to be made on the route back to the palace. He wanted to explore the dockside complex and sniff out his future territory. The river’s ropy smell had left him fascinated. It came up in the air with the pungent scent of pollution. He longed to see its vertebrae