Lucius Gallus Pastor

BIOGRAPHY

Lucius Gallus Pastor was a Minotaur born on October 27th 52 BR in a farmhouse near the small town of Gieru in Zebusylvania Province of the Aurean Dominate.  He was the oldest of five children born to Alexandrus Gallus Structor and Lucia Thandeca. He was given the name Lucius as the male equivalent of his mother's name. He had a brother, Decius Gallus Scriptor, and three sisters: Thandeca Galla, Elisabeta Galla, and Claudia Galla. Through his mother, he was a distant descendant of Aurelian the Great, generally considered the most important philosopher in Aurean history and the de facto founder of the Sahulist religion. Lucius grew up poor, with his father being a gambling addict and alcoholic who was constantly losing money through those habits. They made meager profits as toxodon ranchers, as the soil in the area was too dry and rocky for much farming. 

Lucius was the first in his family to attend formal schooling, as the "Education Revolution" under Domini Gavicus XXVII and Theodosius III had recently both made public education mandatory for all children in the Aurean Dominate and built hundreds of thousands of new schools in rural areas across the Aurean Dominate that lacked prior access to them. While his father was too busy drinking and blowing the family's money on gambling to pay much attention to the children, Lucius's mother pushed for him and his siblings to do well in school, as she wanted a better future for them than toxodon ranching. A diligent but talkative student, Lucius graduated in 37 BR, having skipped three grades and been elected Class Imperator his final year. 

After Lucius graduated, he moved to Salva, the nearest large city, where he interned for his cousin, who worked as an avocatus (Aurean attorney equivalent). Here, he learned of Mababane University, the prestigious college in Zebusylvania's provincial capital Mababane and decided he wanted to attend. However, he was still too young due to graduating high school too early and his parents could not afford the tuition anyway. While Lucius was interning in Salva, his parents divorced after his mother discovered that his father was having an affair with a neighbor's slave. From this affair, Lucius would gain a half sister named Fabia Licinia, who was born into slavery.  For the next three years, Lucius went back and forth between interning for his cousin, working odd jobs to save money, and helping his mother with the toxodon ranch at home.

In 34 BR, Lucius enrolled in Salva College, which despite being far less prestigious than Mababane University, was both much more affordable and much closer to home.  He worked his way through college, participated in debate and campus politics, and edited the campus newspaper. For nine months, from 32 to 31 BR, he paused his studies to teach former slaves and their children at a nonprofit school for freedmen in the city of Ralerus on the coast. It was through this experience, as well as from Fabia Licinia's suffering under slavery, that Lucius developed a strong distaste for slavery and became a zealous abolitionist. He graduated in 30 BR with degrees in History and Rhetoric. In college, other students from wealthier backgrounds would often poke fun at Lucius's rural upbringing and poverty, calling him "lu pastor", meaning "the herder" in Aurean. He got back at them by taking pride in this nickname and wearing his rural background as a badge of honor, even adopting "Pastor" as his official Cognomen.

After graduating from Salva College, Pastor briefly taught History at the same school in Gieru he attended as a child, but this did not last long. During college, he had met a candidate for the local Aurean Senate seat named Valeria Fausta, and in 30 BR, she was elected as the first woman to represent the district in the Aurean Senate. She chose Lucius to be her Legislative Secretary, Pastor moved to the distant Aurean capital of Astras, and this marked the beginning of Pastor's long career in politics. Fausta had little interest in the day-to-day duties of being a Senator, instead delegating much of the grunt work to Pastor. Around this time, the triumph of the reformer Dominus Theodosius IV over the incompetent and regressive Dominus Majorian IX cemented Pastor's support of Theodosius's Vox Populi Aurei party, with Pastor becoming a strong supporter of Theodosius's pro-labor reforms and expansion of the food dole. Pastor was elected to the "Little Senate", an informal group of Senatorial aides, where he cultivated connections with aides, Senators, newspapermen, and lobbyists. Pastor's friends soon included several members of Theodosius IV's staff, as well as many prominent people in Zebusylvanian politics, such as Theodosius IV's Consigliere, Quintus Floridius Longinus, who hailed from the city of Ralerus where Pastor had once taught freedmen.

In 26 BR, Pastor was appointed head of the Zebusylvanian division of the Aurean Youth Administration, a new program created by Theodosius tasked with expanding government-funded education and job opportunities for young people. He resigned two years later to run for the open Senate seat after Valeria Fausta died unexpectedly in childbirth. He returned home to the Gieru area to campaign, and while there he married Olivia Crescentia, a woman he had met in college and maintained a long-distance relationship with in the time since. During his marriage, Pastor would have numerous extramarital affairs, most notably with the beautiful and cunning Centronesian noblewoman Diana Dukakis, who Pastor considered the most important relationship in his life outside his family and marriage and whose advice he frequently sought when making big political decisions. Pastor ran for Fausta's old Senate seat on a platform supportive of Theodosius's policies, as he was very popular in the district. However, Pastor had to tone back his abolitionism, as many voters in the area owned slaves, a decision which he would feel guilty about for years.  Pastor's only opposition in the Primary Election was a random blacksmith with no political connections whom he beat easily, and he went on to face only token opposition in the General Election, as the Vox Populi had a stranglehold on northern Zebusylvania and none of their rival parties really had much pull there.

Once Pastor was elected to the Senate, Theodosius found him to be a useful ally, using him for information on the local politics of Zebusylvania and to deal with the machinations of Theodosius's Zebusylvanian Consigliere, Quintus Floridius Longinus, due to Theodosius's and Longinus's poor relationship. Pastor worked hard for rural education, securing approval and funding for hundreds of new schools in the Zebusylvanian countryside. He was a notoriously tough boss to his staff, often demanding long workdays and even sometimes work on weekends.

Despite having just been elected to the Senate, Pastor soon found himself being drafted into the Aurean military, as Theodosius was facing a manpower crisis in the wars with both the Hoc Nostrum crime syndicate and the Haxamanian Empire. He served in the Aurean legions during the brief final push against the Hoc Nostrum that defeated them for good that year, and was transferred to the Planet Awal to battle the Haxamanian Empire. As a result, Pastor was often unavailable for key votes in the Senate, especially resenting having to miss a vote on a bill that provided Government benefits for farmers and ranchers in areas stricken by drought or crop failure.

The next year, the front against the Haxamanians began to heat up, with the Aureans being dealt several crushing defeats that saw them losing almost all their possessions on the Planet Awal. Pastor served under Alexandros Pappas, a talented young Legate from Thoronodos, who was killed in battle. Despite only being a Centurion at the time, Pastor assumed leadership of the beleaguered legions in the area, in extreme danger of being surrounded and captured en masse by the Haxamanians, and managed to beat them to the nearest harbor, evacuating what was left of Pappas's force from the Exarchate of Nova Aurea. When he returned to Aurea after this, Pastor was hailed as a war hero, and the Senate soon voted to make him a Legate, or a Senator given command over one or more legions. With Legate status came both much more social prestige and money, and Pastor used this extra pay to buy Fabia Licinia's freedom from slavery as well as to help his mother expand and renovate the family ranch.  

Around this time, Pastor learned that his father, who he had not had contact with since he was in high school, had been killed by criminals over a gambling debt. As his mother was starting to ail around this time and no one else was around to care for the then eleven-year-old Fabia Licinia, Pastor brought her back to Astras with him and let her live with him in his apartment. Despite trying to do as much of his work from home as possible to spend more time with her, he still had to hire a nanny to watch her when long work hours couldn't be avoided or when he was away on military campaign. Despite not always being able to be there for her, he made sure to get her a quality education to compensate for her time as a slave, spending much of his earnings on expensive private tutors for her. Within another year, Pastor's mother died of a heart attack and he inherited the family ranch. 

Although Pastor had to tone back his abolitionism somewhat in order to win his district, he did not drop it completely, and supported Theodosius's bill to ban the trading of slaves across provincial lines shortly after being elected. While Theodosius's efforts to completely ban slavery a few years earlier failed, this narrower-in-scope bill was able to pass, severely weakening slavery across the Aurean Dominate. As a result, pro-slavery voters left the Vox Populi in droves, and in 25 BR, Pastor won a closer reelection than his first run, winning only 62% of the vote in the general election compared to 84% previously. While Pastor and other members of his party in northern Zebusylvania, which had a much smaller slaveholding population and was much more amenable to abolition, were able to weather the storm, the Vox Populi was dealt a shellacking in the much more pro-slavery southern Zebusylvania and the previously pro-Vox Populi province became competitive for the first time in decades. Several of Pastor's friends and colleagues in the province lost reelection to the Vox Populi's main rival party, the Vox Aureae Nationis, and the latter's new, militantly pro-slavery ally, the Planter's Party. This was mitigated somewhat by the Vox Populi picking up many urban seats that would normally vote for the Vox Nationis, as the more educated urban elite did not like the Vox Nationis openly allying with slaveholders. As the Vox Populi's coalition in Zebusylvania became smaller but more concentrated in the north and cities, Pastor began scheming to take control of the now smaller and easier-to-control provincial party. 

As Pastor was already friends with most of the remaining Vox Populi Senators in the province, much of his work was already done. In 24 BR, Pastor was elected Chair of the Vox Populi Aurei's Zebusylvanian Division, giving him access to the vast resources and networks of the province-wide party apparatus. This made his subsequent reelections to the Aurean Senate, especially in the much more contested primary elections, far easier. In 24 BR, Olivia Crescentia gave birth to her and Pastor's first child, a boy named Marcus Gallus. Also that year, Theodosius again took action on slavery, drafting a referendum on whether or not the Aurean Dominate would "create a process" in which slavery would be abolished within the next 20 years. The referendum was fiercely debated and filibustered, clearing the Senate by only 20 votes. Pastor was among the Senators in favor, developing an intense dislike of Vox Nationis Senator Julius Arius II of Argentolia after having to sit through his 15-hour filibuster. After obtaining consent from the Senate, Theodosius put the referendum up to a popular vote, with it winning a surprisingly large 58.4% support from the Aurean Dominate's voters. This was lauded as a decisive victory for the Aurean abolitionist movement, but this drove what few retentionists remained in the Vox Populi coalition out and into the Vox Nationis, and elections in Zebusylvania became even closer. While this had fairly little impact on Pastor's district, with him winning 60% of the vote in his 24 BR reelection, but for the first time in centuries, the Vox Nationis coalition won a majority of the province's Senate seats that year.

In 21 BR, the deadly Blood Bleaching Pandemic, which had killed hundreds of millions across the galaxy, reached Aurea. Licinia caught the disease very early on and nearly died, but eventually recovered. However, its complications would leave her blind in her right eye for the rest of her life. Much of the rest of Pastor's family was not as lucky, with Decius Gallus Scriptor and Thandeca Galla both dying of the disease. Pastor worked with Theodosius to pass pandemic safety legislation mandating practices such as social distancing for the pandemic's duration. This greatly weakened the pandemic compared to many other areas it infected, with the Aurean Dominate only losing a relatively small 15% of its population from 21-14 BR, while many harder hit areas such as the Kingdom of Arturia or Iteru lost half or more of theirs in the same time period. This year was not all bad for Pastor, however, as he and his wife had their second child, a girl named Fabia Galla, that year.

Two years after the Blood Bleaching reached Aurea, the political earthquake known as the Great Nicopolitan Scandal shook the Aurean Dominate to its foundations, as thousands of Aurean politicians at every level of government were found to have had clandestine ties to the remnants of the Hoc Nostrum and impeached on corruption, bribery, or other similar charges. The list of people chased out of politics after this ran all the way up the ladder to Quintus Floridius Longinus, who Theodosius replaced with Galerius Decimus Tranio, a Legate from Thoronodos Province who Pastor had little working relationship with. It has been widely speculated in later years that Pastor was implicated in the Great Nicopolitan Scandal as well, but like a few others, covered his tracks well enough to avoid being caught. The next year, he would be called back into military service to command a legion on Awal against the Haxamanians, as that war had flared up again. Pastor was particularly praised for his command at the Battle of the Olive Orchard, where his legion was caught in a pincer by two Haxamanian cavalry wings and could have easily disintegrated had Pastor not painstakingly rode to both his right and left flanks to rally them. The Aureans won the battle and made more gains in the area, capturing the city of Nicopolis Novum. However, Theodosius caught the Blood Bleaching while in the city and died, resulting in Tranio becoming the next Dominus. Upon ascension, Tranio took the name Gavicus XXIX.

While Gavicus and Pastor had little if any interaction up until that point, Gavicus picked Tiverios Theodosiopoulos, one of Theodosius's sons, as his Consigliere. Pastor had a great relationship with Theodosiopoulos and viewed him almost as a surrogate son, so Theodosiopoulos would essentially serve as Pastor's liaison to Gavicus. With Theodosiopoulos's support, Pastor was elected as the Vox Populi's Senate whip in 18 BR, and served in this position until 16 BR. For much of the next three years, Pastor focused on drafting and finding support for a final referendum to decide whether slavery would be immediately or gradually abolished, though he had much difficulty finding this support because in the 17 BR elections, the Vox Populi coalition lost its Senate majority and the Vox Nationis took power. As a result, Pastor also worked on other projects during this time period, most notably doing his best to peel off some Vox Nationis support for taking in refugees from the Iteru Genocide. This was successful, although Pastor had to massively water the original bill down to get the necessary Vox Nationis votes, with the Aurean Dominate only agreeing to take in 60,000 refugees despite millions of Iteru seeking to flee their doomed homeworld.

By 14 BR, the Blood Bleaching had completely disappeared from the Aurean Dominate, and Pastor was highly influential in drafting the recovery bill, which Gavicus signed. As this recovery bill was well-received by the public, the elections that year reduced the Vox Nationis majority to only a hair. Seizing the opportunity, Pastor worked through Theodosiopoulos with Gavicus to get the 2nd abolition referendum through. While they were able to peel the needed Vox Nationis Senators off early the following year, it took the referendum being amended to exclude the servi agri of Tangolia, the de facto slaves of that province's politically powerful elite. Clearing the Senate by 1 vote, the referendum was put to a popular vote, with immediate abolition winning decisively with 56.2% of Aurean voters. A constitutional amendment, which Pastor had already written and been sitting on for years, immediately abolished slavery throughout the Aurean Dominate except for the servi agri, passing the Senate with almost three quarters of the vote, with only the Planter's Party and the entire Tangolian delegation opposing. While Pastor tried to get to work on bills to assist the millions of new freedmen, this would have to wait, as the Haxamanians sponsored a Tangolian revolt in response to the abolition of slavery despite the servi agri being excluded from it, and Pastor was called back into military service as a Legate to put the rebellion down. This was easier said than done, however, as the Haxamanians decided to assist the revolt directly, sending an army of their own to the province under their talented commander Bacha Hilazai. 

By the time Pastor's legion was even deployed, essentially all of Tangolia Province had been lost to the Haxamanians and rebels, and the combined enemy force had already broken through the poorly defended Limes Tangolicus, penetrated deeply into Argentolia Province, and sacked several cities in the Aurean heartland. Pastor, with his own legion and a few others, tried to attack the Haxamanians and Tangolians in unfavorable terrain in the mountains near Sacrini, but the battle ended in a draw due to the Haxamanian lines not breaking as completely under Aurean heavy cavalry pressure as Pastor predicted and harassment of the Aurean infantry by Tangolian horse archers. Although this did the most damage to the Haxamanians and Tangolians since they invaded Argentolia, it failed to blunt their offensive, and soon after this, the combined enemy force had reached the doorstep of Astras, the first enemy army to do so in millennia. The combined Haxamanian-Tangolian force laid siege to Astras, the first army to do so since the Aurean Dominate's foundation, but the siege eventually disintegrated due to the Haxamanian and Tangolian forces being unable to coordinate with each other across the Sparteian Strait.  Pastor participated in both defending the city walls during the siege and chasing the Tangolians through the countryside after its conclusion, seeing some success in both actions, receiving particular acclaim for stranding several Tangolian siege towers by ordering the Aurean crossbowmen to shoot the horses and oxen pulling them.  

In 12 BR, the Vox Populi retook the Aurean Senate after the Vox Nationis leader was implicated in a scandal involving three prostitutes, drugs smuggled illegally from Ishga, and a psittacosaurus. Upon his party coming back into power, Pastor was rewarded with the speakership, making him the most powerful Senator in the body. Many Aurean historians consider Pastor the most effective Speaker of the Senate in at least the last millennium. He excelled on gathering intelligence, knowing where every important Senator stood on issues, their philosophies and prejudices, their strengths and weaknesses, and what it took to get their votes. He used the war with the Haxamanians to his advantage, often sending dissenting Senators on trips to inspect the troops in far-flung provinces so they would miss key votes. Most of Gavicus's industrialization agenda would not have been possible without Gavicus strongarming hundreds of Senators into voting for it.

He became particularly famous (or infamous depending on your perspective) for "The Pastor Method". According to Tiverios Theodosiopoulos, "The Pastor Method could last ten minutes or four hours. It came, enveloping its target, at Pastor's ranch, in one of Pastor's offices, in the Senate cloakroom, on the floor of the Senate itself – wherever Pastor might find a fellow Senator within his reach. Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, and the hint of threat. It was all of these together. It ran the gauntlet of human emotions. Its velocity was breathtaking and it was all in one direction. Interjections from the target were rare. Pastor anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made The Pastor Method an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless." He would keep the speakership on-and-off for the next 12 years, only taking breaks when the Vox Nationis was in the majority or he was called up on military campaign.