When Lucius Appuleius Saturninus was elected a tribune of the plebs, his gratitude to Gaius Marius knew no bounds. Now he could vindicate himself! Nor was he completely without allies, as he soon discovered; one of the other tribunes of the plebs was a client of Marius’s from Etruria, one Gaius Norbanus, who had considerable wealth but no senatorial clout because he had no senatorial background. And there was a MarcusBaebius, one of the ever-tribuning Baebius clan who were justly notorious for their bribe taking; he might be bought if it proved necessary.
Unfortunately the opposite end of the tribunes’ bench was occupied by three formidably conservative opponents. On the very end of the bench was Lucius Aurelius Cotta, son of the dead consul Cotta, nephew of the ex-praetor Marcus Cotta, and half brother of Aurelia, the wife of young Gaius Julius Caesar. Next to him sat Lucius Antistius Reginus, of respectable but not spectacular background, and rumored to be a client of the consular Quintus Servilius Caepio, therefore faintly smeared with Caepio’s odium. The third man was Titus Didius, a very efficient and quiet man whose family had originally hailed from Campania, and who had made himself a considerable reputation as a soldier.
Those in the middle of the bench were very humble tribunes of the plebs, and seemed to think that their chief role throughout the coming year was going to be keeping the opposite ends of the bench from tearing each other’s throats out. For indeed there was no love lost between the men Scaurus would have apostrophized as demagogues and the men Scaurus commended for never losing sight of the fact that they were senators before they were tribunes of the plebs.
Not that Saturninus was worried. He had swept into office at the top of the college, followed closely by Gaius Norbanus, which gave the conservatives notice that the People had lost none of their affection for Gaius Marius—and that Marius had thought it worthwhile to spend a great deal of his money buying votes for Saturninus and Norbanus. It was necessary that Saturninus and Norbanus strike swiftly, for interest in the Plebeian Assembly waned dramatically after some three months of the year had gone by; this was partly due to boredom on the part of the People, and partly due to the fact that no tribune of the plebs could keep up the pace for longer than three months. The tribune of the plebs spent himself early, like Aesop’s hare, while the old senatorial tortoise kept plodding on at the same rate.
“All they’ll see is my dust,” Saturninus said to Glaucia as the tenth day of the month of December drew near, the day upon which the new college would enter office.
“What’s first?” asked Glaucia idly, a little put out that he, older than Saturninus, had not yet found the opportunity to seek election as a tribune of the plebs.
Saturninus grinned wolfishly. “A little agrarian law,” he said, “to help my friend and benefactor Gaius Marius.”
With great care in his planning and through the medium of a magnificent speech, Saturninus tabled for discussion a law to distribute the ager Africanus insularum, reserved in the public domain by Lucius Marcius Philippus one year before; it was now to be divided among Marius’s Head Count soldiers at the end of their service in the legions, at the rate of a hundred iugera per man. Oh, how he enjoyed it! The howls of approbation from the People, the howls of outrage from the Senate, the fist that Lucius Cotta raised, the strong and candid speech Gaius Norbanus made in support of his measure.
“I never realized how interesting the tribunate of the plebs can be,” he said after the contio meeting was dissolved, and he and Glaucia dined alone at Glaucia’s house.
“Well, you certainly had the Policy Makers on the defensive,” said Glaucia, grinning at the memory. “I thought Metellus Numidicus was going to rupture a blood vessel!”
“A pity he didn’t.” Saturninus lay back with a sigh of content, eyes roaming reflectively over the patterns sooty smoke from lamps and braziers had made on the ceiling, which was badly in need of new paint. “Odd how they think, isn’t it? Even breathe the words ‘agrarian bill’ and they’re up in arms, yelling about the Brothers Gracchi, horrified at the idea of giving something away for nothing to men without the wit to acquire anything. Even the Head Count doesn’t approve of giving something away for nothing!”
“Well, it’s a pretty novel concept to all right-thinking Romans, really,” said Glaucia.
“And after they got over that, they started to yell about the huge size of the allotments—ten times the size of a smallholding in Campania, moaned the Policy Makers. You’d think they’d know without being told that an island in the African Lesser Syrtis isn’t one tenth as fertile as the worst smallholding in Campania, nor the rainfall one tenth as reliable,” said Saturninus.
“Yes, but the debate was really about so many thousands of new clients for Gaius Marius, wasn’t it?” asked Glaucia. “That’s where the shoe actually pinches, you know. Every retired veteran in a Head Count army is a potential client for his general—especially when his general has gone to the trouble of securing him a piece of land for his old age. He’s beholden! Only he doesn’t see that it’s the State that is his true benefactor, since the State has to find the land. He thanks his general. He thanks Gaius Marius. And that’s what the Policy Makers are up in arms about.’’
“Agreed. But fighting it isn’t the answer, Gaius Servilius. The answer is to enact a general law covering all Head Count armies for all time—ten iugera of good land to every man who completes his time in the legions—say, fifteen years? Twenty, even? Given irrespective of how many generals the soldier serves under, or how many different campaigns he sees.”
Glaucia laughed in genuine amusement. “That’s too much like good sound common sense, Lucius Appuleius! And think of the knights a law like that would alienate. Less land for them to lease—not to mention our esteemed pastoralist senators!”
“If the land was in Italy, I’d see it,” said Saturninus. “But the islands off the coast of Africa? I ask you, Gaius Servilius! Of what conceivable use are they to these dogs guarding their stinking old bones? Compared to the millions of iugera Gaius Marius gave away in the name of Rome along the Ubus and the Chelif and around Lake Tritonis— and all to exactly the same men currently screaming!—this is a pittance!”
Glaucia rolled his long-lashed grey-green eyes, lay flat on his back, flapped his hands like a stranded turtle his flippers, and started to laugh again. “I liked Scaurus’s speech best, though. He’s clever, that one. The rest of them don’t matter much apart from their clout.” He lifted his head and stared at Saturninus. “Are you prepared for tomorrow in the Senate?” he asked.
“I believe so,” said Saturninus happily. “Lucius Appuleius returns to the Senate! And this time they can’t throw me out before my term in office is finished! It would take the thirty-five tribes to do that, and they won’t do that.
Whether the Policy Makers like it or not, I’m back inside their hallowed portals as angry as a wasp—and just as nasty.”
He entered the Senate as if he owned it, with a sweeping obeisance to Scaurus Princeps Senatus, and flourishes of his right hand to each side of the House, which was almost full, a sure sign of a coming battle. The outcome, he decided, did not matter very much, for the arena in which the real conflict would be decided lay outside the Curia Hostilia’s doors, down in the well of the Comitia; this was brazening-it-out day, the disgraced grain quaestor transmogrified into the tribune of the plebs, a bitter surprise indeed for the Policy Makers.
And for the Conscript Fathers of the Senate he took a new tack, one he fully intended to present later in the Plebeian Assembly; this would be a trial run.
“Rome’s sphere of influence has not been limited to Italy for a very long time,” he said. “All of us know the trouble King Jugurtha caused Rome. All of us are forever grateful to the esteemed senior consul, Gaius Marius, for settling the war in Africa so brilliantly—and so finally. But how can we in Rome today guarantee the generations to come that our provinces will be peaceful and their fruits ours to enjoy? We have a tradition concerning the customs of peoples not Roman, though they live in our provinces—they are free to pursue their religious practices, their trade practices, their political practices. Provided these pursuits do not hamper Rome, or offer a threat to Rome. But one of the less desirable side effects of our tradition of noninterference is ignorance. Not one of our provinces further from Italy than Italian Gaul and Sicily knows enough about Rome and Romans to favor co-operation over resistance. Had the people of Numidia known more about us, Jugurtha would never have managed to persuade them to follow him. Had the people of Mauretania known more about us, Jugurtha would never have managed to persuade King Bocchus to follow him.”
He cleared his throat; the House was taking it well so far—but then, he hadn’t reached his conclusion. Now he did. “Which brings me to the matter of the ager Africanus insularum. Strategically these islands are of little importance. In size they are modest. None of us here in this House will miss them. They contain no gold, no silver, no iron, no exotic spices. They are not particularly fertile when compared to the fabulous grainlands of the Bagradas River, where quite a few of us here in this House own properties, as do many knights of the First Class. So why not give them to Gaius Marius’s Head Count soldiers upon their retirement? Do we really want close to forty thousand Head Count veterans frequenting the taverns and alleys of Rome? Jobless, aimless, penniless after they’ve spent their tiny shares of the army’s booty? Isn’t it better for them — and for Rome! — to settle them on the ager Africanus insularum? For, Conscript Fathers, there is one job left that they in their retirement can do. They can bring Rome to the province of Africa! Our language, our customs, our gods, our very way of life! Through these brave and cheerful expatriate Roman soldiers, the peoples of Africa Province can come to understand Rome better, for these brave and cheerful expatriate Roman soldiers are ordinary — no richer, no brighter, no more privileged than many among the native peoples they will mingle with on a day-to-day basis. Some will marry local girls. All will fraternize. And the result will be less war, greater peace.”
It was said persuasively, reasonably, without any of the grander periods and gestures of Asianic rhetoric, and as he warmed to his peroration Saturninus began to believe that he would make them, the pigheaded members of this elite body, see at last where the vision of men like Gaius Marius — and himself! — would lead their beloved Rome.
And when he moved back to his end of the tribunes’ bench, he sensed nothing in the silence to gainsay his conviction. Until he realized that they were waiting. Waiting for one of the Policy Makers to point the way. Sheep. Sheep, sheep, sheep. Wretched woolly pea-brained sheep.
“May I?” asked Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus of the presiding magistrate, the junior consul, Gaius Flavius Fimbria.
“You have the floor, Lucius Caecilius,” said Fimbria.
He took the floor, his anger, well concealed until that moment, breaking the bounds of control with the sudden flare of tinder. “Rome is exclusive!” he trumpeted, so loudly that some of the listeners jumped. “How dare any Roman elevated to membership of this House propose a program aimed at turning the rest of the world into imitation Romans?”
Dalmaticus’s normal pose of superior aloofness had vanished; he swelled up, empurpled, the veins beneath his plump pink cheeks no darker than those selfsame cheeks. And he trembled, he vibrated almost as quickly as the wings of a moth, so angry was he. Fascinated, awed, every last man present in the House sat forward to listen to a Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus no one had ever dreamed existed.
“Well, Conscript Fathers, we all know this particular Roman, don’t we?” he brayed. “Lucius Appuleius Saturninus is a thief—an exploiter of food shortages—an effeminate vulgarity—a polluter of little boys who harbors filthy lusts for his sister and his young daughter—a puppet manipulated by the Arpinate dollmaster in Gaul-across-the-Alps—a cockroach out of Rome’s vilest stew—a pimp—a pansy—a pornographer—the creature on the end of every verpa in town! What does he know of Rome, what does his peasant dollmaster from Arpinum know of Rome? Rome is exclusive! Rome cannot be tossed to the world like shit to sewers, like spit to gutters! Are we to endure the dilution of our race through hybrid unions with the raggle-taggle women of half a hundred nations? Are we in the future to journey to places far from Rome and have our Roman ears defiled by a bastard Latin argot? Let them speak Greek, I say! Let them worship Serapis of the Scrotum or Astarte of the Anus! What does that matter to us? But we are to give them Quirinus? Who are the Quirites, the children of Quirinus? We are! For who is this Quirinus? Only a Roman can know! Quirinus is the spirit of the Roman citizenship; Quirinus is the god of the assembly of Roman men; Quirinus is the unconquered god because Rome has never been conquered—and never will be conquered, fellow Quirites!”
The whole House erupted into screaming cheers; while Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus staggered to his stool and almost fell onto it, men wept, men stamped their feet, men clapped until their hands were numb, men turned to each other with the tears streaming down their faces, and embraced.
But so much emotion uncontained spent itself like sea foam on basaltic rock, and when the tears dried and the bodies ceased to shake, the men of the Senate of Rome found themselves with nothing more to give that day, and dragged their leaden feet home to live again in dreams that one magical moment when they actually saw the vision of faceless Quirinus rear up to throw his numinous toga over them as a father over his truehearted and unfailingly loyal sons.
The House was nearly empty when Crassus Orator, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, Metellus Numidicus, Catulus Caesar, and Scaurus Princeps Senatus recollected themselves enough to break off their euphoric conversation and think about following in the footsteps of the rest. Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus was still sitting on his stool, back straight, hands folded in his lap as neatly as a well-bred girl’s. But his head had fallen forward, chin on chest, the thinning wisps of his greying hair blowing gently in a little breeze through the open doors.
“Brother of mine, that was the greatest speech I have ever heard!” cried Metellus Numidicus, putting his hand out to squeeze Dalmaticus’s shoulder.
Dalmaticus sat on, and did not speak or move; only then did they discover he was dead.
“It’s fitting,” said Crassus Orator. “I’d die a happy man to think I gave my greatest speech on the very threshold of death.”
*
But not the speech of Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus nor the passing of Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus nor all the ire and power of the Senate could prevent the Plebeian Assembly from passing Saturninus’s agrarian bill into law. And the tribunician career of Lucius Appuleius Saturninus was off to a resounding start, a curious compound of infamy and adulation.
“I love it,” said Saturninus to Glaucia over dinner late in the afternoon of the day the agrarian lex Appuleia was voted into law. They often did dine together, and usually at Glaucia’s house; Saturninus’s wife had never properly recovered from the awful events following Scaurus’s denunciation of Saturninus when the quaestor at Ostia. “Yes, I do love it! Just think, Gaius Servilius, I might have had quite a different kind of career if it hadn’t been for that nosy old mentula, Scaurus.”
“The rostra suits you, all right,” said Glaucia, eating hot-house grapes. “Maybe there is something shapes our lives after all.”
Saturninus snorted. “Oh, you mean Quirinus!”
“You can sneer if you want. But I maintain that life is a very bizarre business,” said Glaucia. “There’s more pattern and less chance to it than there is in a game of cottabus.”
“What, no element of Stoic or Epicure, Gaius Servilius? Neither fatalism nor hedonism? You’d better be careful, or you might confound all the old Greek killjoys who maintain so loudly that we Romans will never produce a philosophy we didn’t borrow from them,” laughed Saturninus.
“Greeks are. Romans do. Take your pick! I never met a man yet who managed to combine both states of being. We’re the opposite ends of the alimentary canal, we Greeks and Romans. Romans are the mouth—we shove it in. Greeks are the arsehole—they shove it out. No disrespect to the Greeks intended, simply a figure of speech,” said Glaucia, punctuating his statement by popping grapes into the Roman end of the alimentary canal.
“Since one end has no job to do without the contributions of the other, we’d better stick together,” said Saturninus.
Glaucia grinned. “There speaks a Roman!” he said.
“Through and through, despite Metellus Dalmaticus’s saying I’m not one. Wasn’t that a turnup for the books, the old fellator up and dying so very timely? If the Policy Makers were more enterprising, they might have made an undying example of him. Metellus Dalmaticus—the New Quirinus!” Saturninus swirled the lees in his cup and tossed them expertly onto an empty plate; the splatter they made was counted according to the number of arms radiating out of the central mass. “Three,” he said, and shivered. “That’s the death number.”
“And where’s our Skeptic now?” gibed Glaucia.
“Well, it’s unusual, only three.”
Glaucia spat expertly, and destroyed the form of the splash with three grape seeds. “There! Three done in by three!”
“We’ll both be dead in three years,” said Saturninus.
“Lucius Appuleius, you’re a complete contradiction! You are as white as Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and with far less excuse. Come, it’s only a game of cottabus!” said Glaucia, and changed the subject. “I agree, life on the rostra is far more exciting than life as a darling of the Policy Makers. It’s a great challenge, politically manipulating the People. A general has his legions. A demagogue has nothing sharper than his tongue.” He chuckled. “And wasn’t it a pleasure to watch the crowd chase Marcus Baebius from the Forum this morning, when he tried to interpose his veto?”
“A sight to cure sore eyes!” grinned Saturninus, the memory banishing ghostly fingers, three or thirty-three.
“By the way,” said Glaucia with another abrupt change of subject, “have you heard the latest rumor in the Forum?”
“That Quintus Servilius Caepio stole the Gold of Tolosa himself, you mean?” asked Saturninus.
Glaucia looked disappointed. “Dis take you, I thought I’d got in first!”
“I had it in a letter from Manius Aquillius,” Saturninus said. “When Gaius Marius is too busy, Aquillius writes to me instead. And I confess I don’t repine, since he’s a far better man of letters than the Great Man.”
“From Gaul-across-the-Alps? How do they know?”
“That’s where the rumor began. Gaius Marius has acquired a prisoner. The King of Tolosa, no less. And he alleges that Caepio stole the gold—all fifteen thousand talents of it.”
Glaucia whistled. “Fifteen thousand talents! Mazes the mind, doesn’t it? A bit much, though—I mean, everyone understands that a governor is entitled to his perquisites, but more gold than there is in the Treasury? A trifle excessive, surely!”
“True, true. However, the rumor will work very well for Gaius Norbanus when he brings his case against Caepio, won’t it? The story of the gold will be around the whole city in less time than it takes Metella Calva to lift her dress for a lusty gang of navvies.”
“I like your metaphor!” said Glaucia. And suddenly he looked very brisk. “Enough of this idle chatter! You and I have work to do on treason bills and the like. We can’t afford to let anything go unnoticed.”
The work Saturninus and Glaucia did on treason bills and the like was as carefully planned and co-ordinated as any grand military strategy. They intended to remove treason trials from the province of the Centuries and the impossible sequence of dead ends and stone walls this entailed; after which, they intended to remove extortion and bribery trials from the control of the Senate by replacing the senatorial juries with juries composed entirely of knights.
“First, we have to see Norbanus convict Caepio in the Plebeian Assembly on some permissible charge—as long as the charge isn’t worded to say treason, we can do that right now, with popular feeling running so high against Caepio because of the stolen gold,” said Saturninus.
“It’s never worked before in the Plebeian Assembly,” said Glaucia dubiously. “Our hot-headed friend Ahenobarbus tried it when he charged Silanus with illegally causing a war against the Germans—no mention of treason there! But the Plebeian Assembly still threw the case out. The problem is that no one likes treason trials.”
“Well, we keep working on it,” said Saturninus. “In order to get a conviction out of the Centuries, the accused has to stand there and say out of his own mouth that he deliberately connived at ruining his country. And no one is fool enough to say that. Gaius Marius is right. We have to clip the wings of the Policy Makers by showing them that they’re not above either moral reproach or the law. And we can only do that in a body of men who are not senators.”
“Why not pass your new treason law at once, then try Caepio in its special court?” asked Glaucia. “Yes, yes, I know the senators will squeal like trapped pigs—don’t they always?”
Saturninus grimaced. “We want to live, don’t we? Even if we do only have three more years, that’s better than dying the day after tomorrow!”
“You and your three years!”
“Look,” Saturninus persevered, “if we can actually get Caepio convicted in the Plebeian Assembly, the Senate will take the hint we’re aiming to give it—that the People are fed up with senators sheltering fellow senators from just retribution. That there’s not one law for senators and another for everybody else. It’s time the People woke up! And I’m the boy to administer the whack that will wake them up. Since this Republic began, the Senate has gulled the People into believing that senators are a better breed of Roman, entitled to do and say whatever they want. Vote for Lucius Tiddlypuss—his family gave Rome her first consul! And does it matter that Lucius Tiddlypuss is a self-seeking gold-hungry incompetent? No! Lucius Tiddlypuss has the family name, and the family tradition of service in Rome’s public sphere. The Brothers Gracchi were right. Take the courts away from the Lucius Tiddlypuss cohort by giving them to the knights!”
Glaucia was looking thoughtful. “Something has just occurred to me, Lucius Appuleius. The People are at least a responsible and well-educated lot. Pillars of Roman tradition. But—what if one day someone starts talking about the Head Count the way you’re talking about the People?”
Saturninus laughed. “As long as their bellies are full, and the aediles put on a good show at the games, the Head Count are happy. To make the Head Count politically conscious, you’d have to turn the Forum Romanum into the Circus Maximus!”
“Their bellies aren’t quite as full as they ought to be this winter,” said Glaucia.
“Full enough, thanks to none other than our revered Leader of the House, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus himself. You know, I don’t mourn the fact that we’ll never persuade Numidicus or Catulus Caesar to see things our way, but I can’t help thinking it a pity we’ll never win Scaurus over,” said Saturninus.
Glaucia was gazing at him curiously. “You never have held it against Scaurus for throwing you out of the House, have you?”
“No. He did what he thought was right. But one day, Gaius Servilius, I’ll find out who the real culprits were, and then—they’ll wish they had as easy a time of it as Oedipus!’’ said Saturninus savagely.
*
Early in January the tribune of the plebs Gaius Norbanus arraigned Quintus Servilius Caepio in the Plebeian Assembly on a charge that was phrased as “the loss of his army.”
Feelings ran high from the very beginning, for by no means all of the People were opposed to senatorial exclusivity, and the Senate was there in its full plebeian numbers to fight for Caepio. Long before the tribes were called upon to vote, violence flared and blood flowed. The tribunes of the plebs Titus Didius and Lucius Aurelius Cotta stepped forward to veto the whole procedure, and were hauled down from the rostra by a furious crowd. Stones flew viciously, clubs cracked around ribs and legs; Didius and Lucius Cotta were manhandled out of the Comitia well and literally forced by the pressure of the throng into the Argiletum, then kept there. Bruised and shocked though they were, they tried screaming their vetos across a sea of angry faces, but were shouted down again and again.
The rumor about the Gold of Tolosa had tipped the balance against Caepio and the Senate, there could be no doubt of it; from Head Count clear to First Class, the whole city shrieked imprecations at Caepio the thief, Caepio the traitor, Caepio the self-seeker. People—women included—who had never evinced any kind of interest in Forum or Assembly events came to see this man Caepio, a criminal on a scale hitherto unimaginable; there were debates about how high the mountain of gold bricks must have been, how heavy, how many. And the hatred was a tangible presence, for no one likes to see a single individual make off with money deemed the property of everyone. Especially so much money.
Determined the trial would proceed, Norbanus ignored the peripheral turmoil, the brawls, the chaos when habitual Assembly attenders impinged upon the crowds who had come solely to see and abuse Caepio, standing on the rostra amid a guard of lictors deputed to protect him, not detain him. The senators whose patrician rank meant they could not participate in the Plebeian Assembly were clustered on the Curia Hostilia steps hectoring Norbanus, until a segment of the crowd began to pelt them with stones. Scaurus fell, inanimate, bleeding from a wound on his head. Which didn’t stop Norbanus, who continued the trial without even pausing to discover whether the Princeps Senatus was dead or merely unconscious.
The voting when it came was very fast; the first eighteen of the thirty-five tribes all condemned Quintus Servilius Caepio, which meant no more tribes were called upon to vote. Emboldened by this unprecedented indication of the degree of hatred felt for Caepio, Norbanus then asked the Plebeian Assembly to impose a specific sentence by vote— a sentence so harsh that every senator present howled a futile protest. Again the first eighteen tribes chosen by lot all voted the same way, to visit dreadful punishment upon Caepio. He was stripped of his citizenship, forbidden fire and water within eight hundred miles of Rome, fined fifteen thousand talents of gold, and ordered confined in the cells of the Lautumiae under guard and without speech with anyone, even the members of his own family, until his journey into exile began.
Amid shaking fists and triumphant yells that he was not going to get the chance to see his brokers or his bankers and bury his personal fortune, Quintus Servilius Caepio, ex-citizen of Rome, was marched between his guard of lictors across the short distance between the well of the Comitia and the tumbledown cells of the Lautumiae.
Thoroughly satisfied with the final events of what had been a deliciously exciting and unusual day, the crowds went home, leaving the Forum Romanum to the tenure of a few men, all senatorial in rank.
The ten tribunes of the plebs were standing in polarized groups: Lucius Cotta, Titus Didius, Marcus Baebius, and Lucius Antistius Reginus huddled gloomily together, the four middlemen looked helplessly from their left to their right, and an elated Gaius Norbanus and Lucius Appuleius Saturninus talked with great animation and much laughter to Gaius Servilius Glaucia, who had strolled over to congratulate them. Not one of the ten tribunes of the plebs still wore his toga, torn away in the melee.
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus was sitting with his back against the plinth of a statue of Scipio Africanus while Metellus Numidicus and two slaves tried to stanch the blood flowing freely from a cut on his temple; Crassus Orator and his boon companion (and first cousin) Quintus Mucius Scaevola were hovering near Scaurus, looking shaken; the two shocked young men Drusus and Caepio Junior were standing on the Senate steps, shepherded by Drusus’s uncle Publius Rutilius Rufus, and by Marcus Aurelius Cotta; and the junior consul, Lucius Aurelius Orestes, not a well man at the best of times, was lying full length in the vestibule being tended by an anxious praetor.
Rutilius Rufus and Cotta both moved quickly to support Caepio Junior when he suddenly sagged against the dazed and white-faced Drusus, who had one arm about his shoulders.
“What can we do to help?” asked Cotta.
Drusus shook his head, too moved to speak, while Caepio Junior seemed not to hear.
“Did anyone think to send lictors to guard Quintus Servilius’s house from the crowds?” asked Rutilius Rufus.
“I did,” Drusus managed to say.
“The boy’s wife?” asked Cotta, nodding at Caepio Junior.
“I’ve had her and the baby sent to my house,” Drusus said, lifting his free hand to his cheek as if to discover whether he actually existed.
Caepio Junior stirred, looking at the three around him in wonder. “It was only the gold,” he said. “All they cared about was the gold! They didn’t even think of Arausio. They didn’t condemn him for Arausio. All they cared about was the gold!”
“It is human nature,” said Rutilius Rufus gently, “to care more about gold than about men’s lives.”
Drusus glanced at his uncle sharply, but if Rutilius Rufus had spoken in irony, Caepio Junior didn’t notice.
“I blame Gaius Marius for this,” said Caepio Junior.
Rutilius Rufus put his hand under Caepio Junior’s elbow. “Come, young Quintus Servilius, Marcus Aurelius and I will take you to young Marcus Livius’s house.”
As they moved off the Senate steps, Lucius Antistius Reginus broke away from Lucius Cotta, Didius, and Baebius. He strode across to confront Norbanus, who backed away and took up a stance of aggressive self-defense.
“Oh, don’t bother!” spat Antistius. “I wouldn’t soil my hands with the likes of you, you cur!” He drew himself up, a big man with obvious Celt in him. “I’m going to the Lautumiae to free Quintus Servilius. No man in the history of our Republic has ever been thrown into prison to await exile, and I will not let Quintus Servilius become the first! You can try to stop me if you like, but I’ve sent home for my sword, and by living Jupiter, Gaius Norbanus, if you try to stop me, I’ll kill you!”
Norbanus laughed. “Oh, take him!” he said. “Take Quintus Servilius home with you and wipe his eyes—not to mention his arse! I wouldn’t go near his house, though, if I were you!”
“Make sure you charge him plenty!” Saturninus called in the wake of Antistius’s diminishing figure. “He can afford to pay in gold, you know!”
Antistius swung round and flipped up the fingers of his right hand in an unmistakable gesture.
“Oh, I will not! “yelled Glaucia, laughing. “Just because you’re a queen doesn’t mean the rest of us are!”
Gaius Norbanus lost interest. “Come on,” he said to Glaucia and Saturninus, “let’s go home and eat dinner.”
Though he was feeling very sick, Scaurus would sooner have died than demean himself by vomiting in public, so he forced his churning mind to dwell upon the three men walking away, laughing, animated, victorious.
“They’re werewolves,” he said to Metellus Numidicus, whose toga was stained with Scaurus’s blood. “Look at them! Gaius Marius’s tools!”
“Can you stand yet, Marcus Aemilius?” Numidicus asked.
“Not until I’m feeling surer of my stomach.”
“I see Publius Rutilius and Marcus Aurelius have taken Quintus Servilius’s two young men home,” said Numidicus.
“Good. They’ll need someone to keep an eye on them. I’ve never seen a crowd so out for noble blood, even in the worst days of Gaius Gracchus,” said Scaurus, drawing deep breaths. “We will have to go very quietly for a while, Quintus Caecilius. If we push, those werewolves will push us harder.”
“Rot Quintus Servilius and the gold!” snapped Numidicus.
Feeling better, Scaurus allowed himself to be helped to his feet. “So you think he took it, eh?”
Metellus Numidicus looked scornful. “Oh, come, don’t try to hoodwink me, Marcus Aemilius!” he said. “You know him as well as I do. Of course he took it! And I’ll never forgive him for taking it. It belonged to the Treasury.’’
“The trouble is,” said Scaurus as he began to walk on what felt like a series of very uneven clouds, “that we have no internal system whereby men like you and me can punish those among our own who betray us.”
Metellus Numidicus shrugged. “There can be no such system, you are aware of that. To institute one would be to admit that our own men do sometimes fall short of what they should be. And if we show our weaknesses to the world, we’re finished.”
“I’d rather be dead than finished,” said Scaurus.
“And I.” Metellus Numidicus sighed. “I just hope our sons feel as strongly as we do.”
“That,” said Scaurus wryly, “was an unkind thing to say.”
“Marcus Aemilius, Marcus Aemilius! Your boy is very young! I can’t see anything very wrong with him, truly.”
“Then shall we exchange sons?”
“No,” said Metellus Numidicus, “if for no other reason than that the gesture would kill your son. His worst handicap is that he knows very well he lives under your disapproval.’’
“He’s a weakling,” said Scaurus the strong.
“Perhaps a good wife might help,” said Numidicus.
Scaurus stopped and turned to face his friend. “Now that’s a thought! I hadn’t earmarked him for anyone yet, he’s so—grossly immature. Have you someone in mind?”
“My niece. Dalmaticus’s girl, Metella Dalmatica. She’ll be eighteen in about two years. I’m her guardian now that dear Dalmaticus is dead. What do you say, Marcus Aemilius?”
“It’s a deal, Quintus Caecilius! A deal!”
*
Drusus had sent his steward Cratippus and every physically fit slave he owned to the Servilius Caepio house the moment he realized that Caepio the father was going to be convicted.
Unsettled by the trial and the very little she had managed to overhear of conversation between Caepio Junior and Caepio the father, Livia Drusa had gone to work at her loom for want of something else to do; no book could keep her enthralled, even the love poetry of the spicy Meleager. Not expecting an invasion by her brother’s servants, she took alarm from the expression of controlled panic on Cratippus’s face.
“Quick, dominilla, get together anything you want to take away with you!” he said, glancing around her sitting room. “I have your maid packing your clothes, and your nanny taking care of the baby’s needs, so all you have to do is show me what you want to bring away for yourself— books, papers, fabrics.”
Eyes enormous, she stared at the steward. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
“Your father-in-law, dominilla. Marcus Livius says the court is going to convict him,” said Cratippus.
“But why should that mean I have to leave?” she asked, terrified at the thought of going back to live in the prison of her brother’s house now that she had discovered freedom.
“The city is out for his blood, dominilla.”
What color she still retained now fled. “His blood! Are they going to kill him?”
“No, no, nothing quite as bad as that,” Cratippus soothed. “They’ll confiscate his property. But the crowd is so angry that your brother thinks it likely when the trial is over that many of the most vengeful may come straight here to loot.”
Within an hour Quintus Servilius Caepio’s house was devoid of servants and family, its outer gates bolted and barred; as Cratippus led Livia Drusa away down the Clivus Palatinus, a big squad of lictors came marching up it, clad only in tunics and bearing clubs instead of fasces. They were going to take up duty outside the house and keep any irate crowds at bay, for the State wanted Caepio’s property intact until it could be catalogued and auctioned.
Servilia Caepionis was there at Drusus’s door to bring her sister-in-law inside, her face as pale as Livia Drusa’s.
“Come and look,” she said, hurrying Livia Drusa through peristyle-garden and house, guiding her out to the loggia, which overlooked the Forum Romanum.
And there it was, the end of the trial of Quintus Servilius Caepio. The milling throng was sorting itself out into tribes to vote about the sentence of far-away exile and huge damages, a curious swaying series of surging lines which were orderly enough in the well of the Comitia, but became chaotic where the huge crowds of onlookers fused into them. Knots indicated fights in progress, eddies revealed where the fights had begun to escalate into something approaching riot nuclei; on the Senate steps many men were clustered, and on the rostra at the edge of the well of the Comitia stood the tribunes of the plebs and a small, lictor-hedged figure Livia Drusa presumed was her father-in-law, the accused.
Servilia Caepionis had begun to weep; too numb yet to feel like crying, Livia Drusa moved closer to her.
“Cratippus said the crowd might go to Father’s house to loot it,” she said. “I didn’t know! Nobody told me anything!”
Dragging out her handkerchief, Servilia Caepionis dried her tears. “Marcus Livius has feared it all along,” she said. “It’s that wretched story about the Gold of Tolosa! Had it not got around, things would have been different. But most of Rome seems to have judged Father before his trial—and for something he’s not even on trial for!”
Livia Drusa turned away. “I must see where Cratippus has put my baby.”
That remark provoked a fresh flood of tears in Servilia Caepionis, who so far had not managed to become pregnant, though she wanted a baby desperately. “Why haven’t I conceived?” she asked Livia Drusa. “You’re so lucky! Marcus Livius says you’re going to have a second baby, and I haven’t even managed to start my first one!”
“There’s plenty of time,” Livia Drusa comforted. “They were away for months after we were married, don’t forget, and Marcus Livius is much busier than my Quintus Servilius. It’s commonly said that the busier the husband is, the harder his wife finds it to conceive.”
“No, I’m barren,” Servilia Caepionis whispered. “I know I’m barren; I can feel it in my bones! And Marcus Livius is so kind, so forgiving!” She broke down again.
“There, there, don’t fret about it so,” said Livia Drusa, who had managed to get her sister-in-law as far as the atrium, where she looked about her for help. “You won’t make it any easier to conceive by becoming distraught, you know. Babies like to burrow into placid wombs.”
Cratippus appeared.
“Oh, thank the gods!” cried Livia Drusa. “Cratippus, fetch my sister’s maid, would you? And perhaps you could show me whereabouts I am to sleep, and whereabouts little Servilia is?”
In such an enormous house, the accommodation of several additional important people was not a problem; Cratippus had given Caepio Junior and his wife one of the suites of rooms opening off the peristyle-garden, and Caepio the father another, while baby Servilia had been located in the vacant nursery along the far colonnade.
“What shall I do about dinner?” the steward came to ask Livia Drusa as she began to direct the unpacking.
“That’s up to my sister, Cratippus, surely! I’d much rather not do anything to usurp her authority.”
“She’s lying down in some distress, dominilla.”
“Oh, I see. Well, best have dinner ready in an hour— the men might want to eat. But be prepared to postpone it.”
There was a stir outside in the garden; Livia Drusa went out to see, and found her brother Drusus supporting Caepio Junior along the colonnade.
“What is it?” she asked. “How may I help?” She looked at Drusus. “What is it?” she repeated.
“Quintus Servilius our father-in-law is condemned. Exile no closer than eight hundred miles from Rome, a fine of fifteen thousand talents of gold—which means confiscation of every lamp wick and dead leaf the whole of his family owns—and imprisonment in the Lautumiae until Quintus Servilius can be deported,” said Drusus.
“But everything Father owns won’t amount to a hundred talents of gold!” said Livia Drusa, aghast.
“Of course. So he’ll never be able to come home again.’’
Servilia Caepionis came running, looking, thought Livia Drusa, like Cassandra flying from the conquering Greeks, hair wild, eyes huge and blurred with tears, mouth agape.
“What is it, what is it?” she cried,
Drusus coped with her firmly but kindly, dried her tears, forbade her to cast herself on her brother’s chest. And under this treatment she calmed with magical swiftness.
“Come, let’s all go to your study, Marcus Livius,” she said, and actually led the way.
Livia Drusa hung back, terrified.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Servilia Caepionis.
“We can’t sit in the study with the men!”
“Of course we can!’’ said Servilia Caepionis impatiently. “This is no time to keep the women of the family in ignorance, as Marcus Livius well knows. We stand together, or we fall together. A strong man must have strong women around him.”
Head spinning, Livia Drusa tried to assimilate all the mood twists of the previous moments, and understood at last what a mouse she had been all her life. Drusus had expected a wildly disturbed wife to greet him, but then expected her to calm down and become extremely practical and supportive; and Servilia Caepionis had behaved exactly as he expected.
So Livia Drusa followed Servilia Caepionis and the men into the study, and managed not to look horrified when Servilia Caepionis poured unwatered wine for the whole company. Sitting sipping the first undiluted liquor she had ever tasted, Livia Drusa hid her storm of thoughts. And her anger.
At the end of the tenth hour Lucius Antistius Reginus brought Quintus Servilius Caepio to Drusus’s house. Caepio looked exhausted, but more annoyed than depressed.
“I took him out of the Lautumiae,” said Antistius, tight-lipped. “No Roman consular is going to be incarcerated while I’m a tribune of the plebs! It’s an affront to Romulus and Quirinus as much as it is to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. How dare they!”
“They dared because the People encouraged them, and so did all those neck-craning refugees from the games,” said Caepio, downing his wine at a gulp. “More,” he said to his son, who leaped to obey, happy now his father was safe. “I’m done for in Rome,” he said then, and stared with black snapping eyes first at Drusus, only second at his son. “It is up to you young men from now on to defend the right of my family to enjoy its ancient privileges and its natural pre-eminence. With your last breaths, if necessary. The Mariuses and the Saturninuses and the Norbanuses must be exterminated—by the knife if that is the only way, do you understand?”
Caepio Junior was nodding obediently, but Drusus sat with his wine goblet in his hand and a rather wooden look on his face.
“I swear to you, Father, that our family will never suffer the loss of its dignitas while I am paterfamilias,” said Caepio Junior solemnly; he appeared more tranquil now.
And, thought Livia Drusa, loathing him, more like his detestable father than ever! Why do I hate him so much? Why did my brother make me marry him?
Then her own plight faded, for she saw an expression on Drusus’s face which fascinated her, puzzled her. It wasn’t that he disagreed with anything their father-in-law said, more as if he qualified it, filed it away inside his mind along with a lot of other things, not all of which made sense to him. And, Livia Drusa decided suddenly, my brother dislikes our father-in-law intensely! Oh, he had changed, had Drusus! Where Caepio Junior would never change, only become more what he had always been.
“What do you intend to do, Father?” Drusus asked.
A curious smile blossomed on Caepio’s face; the irritation died out of his eyes, and was replaced by a most complex meld of triumph, slyness, pain, hatred. “Why, my dear boy, I shall go into exile as directed by the Plebeian Assembly,” he said.
“But where, Father?” asked Caepio Junior.
“Smyrna.”
“How will we manage for money?” Caepio Junior asked. “Not so much me—Marcus Livius will help me out—but you yourself. How will you be able to afford to live comfortably in exile?”
“I have money on deposit in Smyrna, more than enough for my needs. As for you, my son, there is no need to worry. Your mother left a great fortune, which I have held in trust for you. It will sustain you more than adequately,” said Caepio.
“But won’t it be confiscated?”
“No, for two reasons. First of all, it’s already in your name, not in mine. And secondly, it’s not on deposit in Rome. It’s in Smyrna, with my own money.” The smile grew. “You must live here in Marcus Livius’s house with him for several years, after which I’ll begin to send your fortune home. And if anything should happen to me, my bankers will carry on the good work. In the meantime, son-in-law, keep an account of all the monies you expend on my son’s behalf. In time he will repay you every last sestertius.”
A silence fraught with so much energy and emotion it was almost visible fell upon the entire group, while each member of it realized what Quintus Servilius Caepio was not saying; that he had stolen the Gold of Tolosa, that the Gold of Tolosa was in Smyrna, and that the Gold of Tolosa was now the property of Quintus Servilius Caepio, free and clear, safe and sound. That Quintus Servilius Caepio was very nearly as rich as Rome.
Caepio turned to Antistius, silent as the rest. “Have you considered what I asked you on the way here?”
Antistius cleared his throat loudly. “I have, Quintus Servilius. And I’d like to accept.”
“Good!” Caepio looked at his son and his son-in-law. “My dear friend Lucius Antistius has agreed to escort me to Smyrna, to give me both the pleasure of his company and the protection of a tribune of the plebs. When we reach Smyrna, I shall endeavor to persuade Lucius Antistius to remain there with me.”
“I haven’t decided about that yet,” said Antistius.
“There’s no hurry, no hurry at all,” said Caepio smoothly. He rubbed his hands together as if to warm them. “I do declare, I’m hungry enough to eat a baby! Is there any dinner?”
“Of course, Father,” said Servilia Caepionis. “If you men go into the dining room, Livia Drusa and I will see to things in the kitchen.”
That, of course, was a gross inaccuracy; Cratippus saw to things in the kitchen. But the two women did search for him, and finally found him on the loggia squinting down into the Forum Romanum, where the shadows of dusk were growing.
“Look at that! Did you ever see such a mess?” the steward asked indignantly, pointing. “Litter every where! Shoes, rags, sticks, half-eaten food, wine flagons—it’s a disgrace!”
And there he was, her red-haired Odysseus, standing with Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus on the balcony of the house below; like Cratippus, the two of them seemed to be waxing in anger about the litter.
Livia Drusa shivered, licked her lips, stared in starved anguish at the young man so near to her—and yet so far. The steward rushed away toward the kitchen stairs; now was her chance, now while it would seem a casual inquiry.
“Sister,” she asked, “who is that red-haired man on the terrace with Gnaeus Domitius? He’s been visiting there for years, but I don’t know who he is, I just can’t place him. Do you know? Can you tell me?”
Servilia Caepionis snorted. “Oh, him! That’s Marcus Porcius Cato,” she said, voice ringing contemptuously.
“Cato? As in Cato the Censor?”
“The same. Upstarts! He’s Cato the Censor’s grandson.”
“But wouldn’t his grandmother have been Licinia, and his mother Aemilia Paulla? Surely that makes him acceptable!” objected Livia Drusa, eyes shining.
Servilia Caepionis snorted again. “Wrong branch, my dear. He’s no son of Aemilia Paulla’s—if he were, he’d have to be years older than he is. No, no! He’s not a Cato Licinianus! He’s a Cato Salonianus. And the great-grandson of a slave.”
Livia Drusa’s imaginary world shifted, grew a network of tiny cracks. “I don’t understand,” she said, bewildered.
“What, you don’t know the story? He’s the son of the son of Cato the Censor’s second marriage.”
“To the daughter of a slave?” gasped Livia Drusa.
“The daughter of his slave, to be exact. Salonia, her name was. I think it’s an absolute disgrace that they’re allowed the same license to mingle with us as the descendants of Cato the Censor’s first wife, Licinia! They’ve even wormed their way into the Senate. Of course,” Servilia Caepionis said, “the Porcii Catones Liciniani don’t speak to them. Nor do we.”
“Why does Gnaeus Domitius suffer him, then?”
Servilia Caepionis laughed, sounding very much like her insufferable father. “Well, the Domitii Ahenobarbi aren’t such an illustrious lot, are they? More money than ancestors, in spite of all the tales they tell about Castor and Pollux touching their beards with red! I don’t know exactly why he’s accepted among them. But I can guess. My father worked it out.”
“Worked out what?” asked Li via Drusa, heart in her feet.
“Well, it’s a red-haired family, Cato the Censor’s second lot. Cato the Censor was red-haired himself, for that matter. But Licinia and Aemilia Paulla were both dark, so their sons and daughters have brown hair and brown eyes. Whereas Cato the Censor’s slave Salonius was a Celtiberian from Salo in Nearer Spain, and he was fair. His daughter Salonia was very fair. And that’s why the Catones Saloniani have kept the red hair and the grey eyes.” Servilia Caepionis shrugged. “The Domitii Ahenobarbi have to perpetuate the myth they started about the red beards they inherited from the ancestor touched by Castor and Pollux. So they always marry red-haired women. Well, red-haired women are scarce. And if there’s no better-born red-haired woman about, I imagine a Domitius Ahenobarbus would marry a Cato Salonianus. They’re so stuck up they think their own blood capable of absorbing any old rubbish.”
“So Gnaeus Domitius’s friend must have a sister?”
“He has a sister.” Servilia Caepionis shook herself. “I must go inside. Oh, what a day! Come, dinner will be there.”
“You go ahead,” said Livia Drusa. “I’ll have to feed my daughter before I feed myself.’’
Mention of the baby was enough to send poor child-hungry Servilia Caepionis hurrying off; Livia Drusa returned to the balustrade and looked over it. Yes, they were still there, Gnaeus Domitius and his visitor. His visitor with a slave for a great-grandfather. Perhaps the burgeoning gloom was responsible for the dimming of the hair on the man below, for the diminishing of his height, the width of his shoulders. His neck now looked slightly ridiculous, too long and skinny to be really Roman. Four tears dropped to star the yellow-painted railing, but no more.
I have been a fool as usual, thought Livia Drusa. I have dreamed and mooned for four whole years over a man who turns out to be the recent descendant of a slave—a fact-slave, not a myth-slave. I confabulated him into a king, noble and brave as Odysseus. I made myself into patient Penelope, waiting for him. And now I find out he’s not noble. Not even decently born! After all, who was Cato the Censor but a peasant from Tusculum befriended by a patrician Valerius Flaccus? A genuine harbinger of Gaius Marius. That man on the terrace below is the recent descendant of a Spanish slave and a Tusculan peasant. What a fool I am! What a stupid, stupid idiot!
When she reached the nursery she found little Servilia thriving and hungry, so she sat for fifteen minutes and fed the small one, whose regular routine had been thrown out of kilter this momentous day.
“You’d better find her a wet nurse,” she said to the Macedonian nanny as she prepared to leave. “I’d like a few months of rest before I bear again. And when this new baby comes, you can get in wet nurses from the start. Feeding a child oneself obviously doesn’t prevent conception, or I wouldn’t be pregnant right now.”
She slipped into the dining room just as the main courses were being served, and sat down as inconspicuously as she could on a straight chair opposite Caepio Junior. Everyone seemed to be making a good meal; Livia Drusa discovered she too was hungry.
“Are you all right, Livia Drusa?” asked Caepio Junior, a trifle anxiously. “You look sort of sick.”
Startled, she stared at him, and for the first time in all the many years she had known him, the sight of him did not arouse all those inchoate feelings of revulsion. No, he did not have red hair; no, he did not have grey eyes; no, he was not tall and graceful and broad-shouldered; no, he would never turn into King Odysseus. But he was her husband; he had loved her faithfully; he was the father of her children; and he was a patrician Roman nobleman on both sides.
So she smiled at him, a smile which reached her eyes. “I think it’s only the day, Quintus Servilius,” she said gently. “In myself, I feel better than I have in years.”
*
Encouraged by the result of the trial of Caepio, Saturninus began to act with an arbitrary arrogance that rocked the Senate to its foundations. Hard on the heels of Caepio’s trial, Saturninus himself prosecuted Gnaeus Mallius Maximus for “loss of his army” in the Plebeian Assembly, with a similar result: Mallius Maximus, already deprived of his sons by the battle of Arausio, was now deprived of his Roman citizenship and all his property, and sent into exile a more broken man by far than the gold-greedy Caepio.
Then late in February came the new treason law, the lex Appuleia de maiestate, which took treason trials off the cumbersome Centuries and put them into a special court staffed entirely by knights. The Senate was to have no part in this court at all. In spite of which, the senators said little derogatory about the bill during their obligatory debate, nor attempted to oppose its passage into law.
Monumental though these changes were, and of an unimaginable importance to the future government of Rome, they could not capture the interest of Senate or People the way the pontifical election held at the same time did. The death of Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus Pontifex Maximus had left not one, but two vacancies in the College of Pontifices; and yet, since these two vacancies were held by one and the same man, there were those who argued only one election was necessary. But, as Scaurus Princeps Senatus pointed out, voice wobbling dangerously, mouth quivering, that would only be possible if the man who was elected ordinary pontifex was also a candidate for the big job. Finally it was agreed that the Pontifex Maximus would be elected first.
“Then we shall see what we shall see,” said Scaurus, taking deep breaths, and only once hooting with laughter.
Both Scaurus Princeps Senatus and Metellus Numidicus had put their names up as candidates for Pontifex Maximus, as had Catulus Caesar. And Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus.
“If I am elected, or Quintus Lutatius is elected, then we must hold a second poll for the ordinary pontifex, as we are both already in the college,” said Scaurus, voice control heroic.
Among this field were a Servilius Vatia, an Aelius Tubero, and Metellus Numidicus. And Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus.
The new law stipulated that seventeen of the thirty-five tribes be chosen by casting the lots, and that they alone vote. So the lots were cast, and the seventeen tribes which would vote determined. All this was done in a spirit of high good humor and great tolerance; no violence in the Forum Romanum that day! For many more than Scaurus Princeps Senatus were enjoying a wonderful chuckle. Nothing appealed to the Roman sense of humor more than a squabble involving the most august names on the censors’ rolls, especially when the aggrieved party had managed so neatly to turn the tables on those who had caused the grievance.
Naturally Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus was the hero of the hour. So no one was very surprised when Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus was elected Pontifex Maximus, and thereby made a second election unnecessary. Amid cheers and flying ropes of flowers, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus scored the perfect revenge on those who had given his dead father’s priesthood to young Marcus Livius Drusus.
Scaurus rolled about in paroxysms of laughter the moment the verdict came in—much to the disgust of Metellus Numidicus, who couldn’t see the funny side at all.
“Really, Marcus Aemilius, you are the limit! It’s an outrage!” he bleated. “That bad-tempered and dirty-livered pipinna as Pontifex Maximus? After my dear brother, Dalmaticus? And versus you? Or me?” He pounded his fist against one of the Volscian ship’s beaks which had given the rostra its name. “Oh, if there is any time when I detest Romans, it’s when their perverted sense of the ridiculous overcomes their normal sense of fitness! I can forgive the passage of a Saturninus law easier than I can forgive this! At least in a Saturninus law, people’s deep-rooted opinions are involved. But this—this farce? Sheer irresponsibility! I feel like joining Quintus Servilius in his exile, I’m so ashamed.”
But the greater the fury Metellus Numidicus worked himself into, the harder Scaurus laughed. Finally, clutching his sides and looking at Metellus Numidicus through a curtain of tears, he managed to gasp, “Oh, stop behaving like an old Vestal confronted by a pair of hairy balls and a stiff prick! It is hilarious! And we deserve everything he’s dished out to us!” Off he went again into a fresh convulsion; emitting a noise like a squeezed kitten, Metellus Numidicus stalked off.
Said Gaius Marius in a rare letter to Publius Rutilius Rufus, which its recipient got in September:
I know I ought to write more often, old friend, but the trouble is, I’m not a comfortable correspondent. Now your letters are like a piece of cork thrown to a drowning man, full of yourself as you are—no frills, no fringes, no formality. There! I managed a little bit of style, but at what price you wouldn’t believe.
No doubt you’ve been going to the Senate to endure our Piggle-wiggle oink-oinking against the cost to the State of keeping up a Head Count army through a second year of inertia on the far side of the Alps? And how am I going to get myself elected to a fourth term as consul, for the third time in a row? That of course is what I have to do. Otherwise—I lose everything I stand to gain. Because next year, Publius Rutilius, is going to be the year of the Germans. I know it in my bones. Yes, I admit I have no real basis yet for this feeling, but when Lucius Cornelius and Quintus Sertorius return, I am sure that is what they’re going to say. I haven’t heard from either of them since they came last year to bring me King Copillus. And though I’m glad my two tribunes of the plebs managed to convict Quintus Servilius Caepio, I’m still rather sorry I didn’t have the chance to do the job myself, with Copillus testifying. Never mind. Quintus Servilius got his just reward. A pity however that Rome will never lay eyes on the Gold of Tolosa. It would have paid for many a Head Count army.
Life goes on here much as always. The Via Domitia is now in mint condition all the way from Nemausus to Ocelum, which will make it a great deal easier for legions on the march in the future. It had been let go to ruin. Parts of it had not been touched since our new Pontifex Maximus’s tata was through here nearly twenty years ago. Floods and frosts and the runoff from sudden cloudbursts had taken an awful toll. Of course it’s not like building a new road. Once the stones are fitted into place in the roadbed, the base is there forever. But you can’t expect men to march and wagons to roll and hooves to trot safely across the ups and downs of outsized cobbles, now can you? The top surface of sand and gravel and quarry dust has to be kept as smooth as an egg, and watered until it packs down like concrete. Take it from me, the Via Domitia at the moment is a credit to my men.
We also built a new causeway across the Rhodanus marshes all the way from Nemausus to Arelate, by the way. And we’ve just about finished digging a new ship canal from the sea to Arelate, to bypass the swamps and mud flats and sandbars of the natural waterway. All the big Greek fish in Massilia are groveling with their noses pressed against my arse in thanks—slimy gang of hypocrites they are! Gratitude hasn’t caused any price cuts in whatever they sell my army, I note!
In case you should come to hear of it and the story gets distorted—as stories about me and mine always seem to—I will tell you what happened with Gaius Lusius. You remember, my sister-in-law’s sister’s boy? Came to me as a tribune of the soldiers. Only it turned out that wasn’t what he wanted to be of the soldiers. My provost marshal came to me two weeks ago with what he thought was going to be a very bad piece of personal news. Gaius Lusius had been found dead down in the rankers’ barracks, split from gizzard to breadbasket by the neatest bit of sword work any commander could ask for from a ranker. The guilty soldier had given himself up—nice young chap too—finest type, his centurion told me. Turns out Lusius was a pansy and took a fancy to this soldier. And he kept on pestering, wouldn’t let up. Then it became a joke in the century, with everyone mincing around flapping their hands and fluttering their eyelashes. The poor young ranker couldn’t win. Result—murder. Anyway, I had to court-martial the soldier, and I must say it gave me great pleasure to acquit him with praise, a promotion, and a purse full of money. There. Did it again, got in a bit of literary style.
The business turned out well for me too. I was able to prove that Lusius wasn’t a blood relation, first off. And in close second place, it was a chance for me to show the rankers that their general sees justice done as justice should be done, no favoritism for members of the family. I suppose there must be jobs a pansy can do, but the legions are no place for him, that’s definite, eh, Publius Rutilius? Can you imagine what we’d have done to Lusius at Numantia? He wouldn’t have got off with a nice clean death; he’d have been singing soprano. Though you grow up eventually. I’ll never forget what a shock I got listening to some of the things that were said about Scipio Aemilianus at his funeral! Well, he never put the hard word on me, so I still don’t know. Odd fellow, but—I think these stories get around when men don’t sire children.
And that’s about it. Oh, except I made a few changes in the pilum this year, and I expect my new version will become standard issue. If you’ve got any spare cash, go out and buy some shares in one of the new factories bound to spring up to make them. Or found a factory yourself—as long as you own the building, the censors can’t accuse you of unsenatorial practices, can they, now?
Anyway, what I did was change the design of the junction between the iron shaft and the wooden shaft. The pilum is such an efficient piece of work compared to the old hasta-type spear, but there’s no doubt they’re a lot more expensive to make—little properly barbed head instead of big leafy head, long iron shaft, and then a wooden shaft shaped to suit the throwing action instead of the old hasta broom handle. I’ve noticed over the years that the Enemy love to get their fingers on a pilum, so they deliberately provoke our green troops into throwing when there’s no chance of hitting anything other than an Enemy shield. Then they either keep the pilum for another day, or they throw it back at us.
What I did was work out a way of joining the iron shaft to the wooden shaft with a weak pin. The minute the pilum hits anything, the shafts break apart where they join, so the Enemy can’t throw them back at us, or make off with them. What’s more, if we retain the field at the end of a battle, the armorers can go round and pick up all the broken bits, and fix them together again. Saves us money because it saves us losing them, and saves us lives because they can’t be thrown back at us by the Enemy.
And that’s definitely all the news. Write soon.
Publius Rutilius Rufus laid the letter down with a smile. Not too grammatical, not too graceful, not at all stylish. But then, that was Gaius Marius. He too was like his letters. This obsession about the consulship was worrying, however. On the one hand he could understand why Marius wanted to remain consul until the Germans were defeated— Marius knew no one else could defeat the Germans. On the other hand, Rutilius Rufus was too much a Roman of his class to approve, even taking the Germans into account. Was a Rome so altered by Marian political innovations it was no longer the Rome of Romulus really worth it? Rutilius Rufus wished he knew. It was very difficult to love a man the way he loved Marius, yet live with the trail of blasted traditions he left in his wake. The pilum, for Juno’s sake! Could he leave nothing the way he found it?
Still, Publius Rutilius Rufus sat down and replied to the letter at once. Because he did love Gaius Marius.
This being a rather sluggish kind of summer, I’m afraid I haven’t a great deal to report, dear Gaius Marius. Nothing of moment, anyway. Your esteemed colleague Lucius Aurelius Orestes, the junior consul, isn’t well, but then, he wasn’t well when he was elected. I don’t understand why he stood, except I suppose he felt he deserved the office. It remains to be seen whether the office has deserved him. Somehow I doubt the latter.
A couple of juicy scandals are about all the news, but I know you’ll enjoy them as much as I did. Interestingly enough, both involve your tribune of the plebs, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. An extraordinary fellow, you know. A mass of contradictions. Such a pity, I always think, that Scaurus singled him out like that. Saturninus entered the Senate, I am sure, with the avowed intention of becoming the first Appuleius to sit in the consul’s chair. Now he burns to tear the Senate down to the point where the consuls are no more effective than a wax mask. Yes, yes, I can hear you saying I’m being unduly pessimistic, and I’m exaggerating, and my view of things is warped by my love of the old ways. But I’m right, all the same! You will excuse me, I hope, that I refer to everyone by cognomen only. This is going to be a long letter, and I’ll save a few words that way.
Saturninus has been vindicated. What do you think about that? An amazing business, and one which has redounded very much to the credit of our venerated Princeps Senatus, Scaurus. You must admit he’s a far finer man than his boon companion, Piggle-wiggle. But then, that’s the difference between an Aemilius and a Caecilius.
You know—I know you know because I told you— that Scaurus has continued in his role as curator of the grain supply, and spends his time shuttling between Ostia and Rome, making life thoroughly miserable for the grain lords, who can get away with nothing. We have only one person to thank for the remarkable stability of grain prices these last two harvests, in spite of the shortages. Scaurus!
Yes, yes, I’ll cease the panegyric and get on with the story. It seems that when Scaurus was down in Ostia about two months ago, he ran into a grain-buying agent normally stationed in Sicily. There’s no need to fill you in on the slave revolt there, since you get the Senate’s dispatches regularly, except to say that I do think we sent the right man to Sicily as governor this year. He might be a pokered-up aristocrat with a mouth like a cat’s arsehole, but Lucius Licinius Lucullus is as punctilious over matters like his reports to the House as he is in tidying up his battlefields.
Would you believe, incidentally, that an idiot praetor—one of the more dubiously antecedented (isn’t that a good phrase?) plebeian Servilians who managed to buy himself election as an augur on the strength of his patron Ahenobarbus’s money and now calls himself Gaius Servilius Augur, if you please!—actually had the gall the other day to stand up in the House and accuse Lucullus of deliberately prolonging the war in Sicily to ensure that his command is prorogued into next year?
On what grounds did he make this astonishing charge? I hear you ask. Why, because after Lucullus defeated the slave army so decisively, he didn’t rush off to storm Triocala, leaving thirty-five thousand dead slaves on the field and all the pockets of servile resistance in the area of Heracleia Minoa to grow into fresh sores in our Roman hide! Lucullus did the job properly. Having defeated the slaves in battle, he then took a week to dispose of the dead, and flush out those pockets of servile resistance, before he moved on to Triocala, where the slaves who survived the battle had gone to earth. But Servilius the Augur says Lucullus should have flown like the birds of the sky straight to Triocala from the battle, for—alleges Servilius the Augur—the slaves who did go to earth in Triocala were in such a state of panic that they would have surrendered to him immediately! Where, as things turned out in the real world, by the time that Lucullus did get to Triocala, the slaves had got over their panic and decided to keep on fighting. Now from whom does Servilius the Augur get his information, you ask? Why, from his auguries, naturally! How else could he know what sort of state of mind a crowd of rebel slaves shut inside an impregnable fortress were in? And did you ever find Lucullus sufficiently devious to fight a huge battle, then work out a plan whereby he ensured that his term as governor was prorogued? What a mountain of rubbish! Lucullus did as his nature dictated—he tidied up alpha before he proceeded to start beta.
I was disgusted by Servilius the Augur’s speech, and even more disgusted when Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus started roaring out his support for Servilius the Augur’s preposterous tissue of completely unsubstantiated allegations! Of course, all the armchair generals on the back benches who wouldn’t know one end of a battlefield from the other thought the disgrace was Lucullus’s! We shall see what we shall see, but do not be surprised if you hear that the House decides, one, not to prorogue Lucullus, and two, to give the job as governor of Sicily next year to none other than Servilius the Augur. Who only started this treason hunt in order to have himself made next year’s governor of Sicily! It’s a peachy post for someone as inexperienced and addled as Servilius the Augur, because Lucullus has really done all the work for him. The defeat at Heracleia Minoa has driven what slaves there are left inside a fortress they can’t leave because Lucullus has them under siege, Lucullus managed to push enough farmers back onto their land to ensure that there’ll be a harvest of some kind this year, and the open countryside of Sicily is no longer being ravaged by the slave army. Enter the new governor Servilius the Augur onto this already settled stage, bowing to right and to left as he collects the accolades. I tell you, Gaius Marius, ambition allied to no talent is the most dangerous thing in the world.
Edepol, edepol, that was quite a digression, wasn’t it? My indignation at the plight of Lucullus got the better of me. I do feel desperately sorry for him. But on with the tale of Scaurus down at Ostia, and the chance meeting with the grain-buying agent from Sicily. Now when it was thought that one quarter of Sicily’s grain slaves would be freed before the harvest of last year, the grain merchants calculated that one quarter of the harvest would remain lying on the ground due to lack of hands to reap the wheat. So no one bothered to buy that last quarter. Until the two-week period during which that rodent Nerva freed eight hundred Italian slaves. And Scaurus’s grain-buying agent was one of a group who went around Sicily through those two weeks, frantically buying up the last quarter of the harvest at a ridiculously cheap price. Then the growers bullied Nerva into closing down his emancipation tribunals, and all of a sudden Sicily was given back enough labor to ensure that the complete harvest would be gathered in. So the last quarter, bought for a song from a marketplace beggar, was now in the ownership of a person or persons unknown, and the reason for a massive hiring of every vacant silo between Puteoli and Rome was becoming apparent. The last quarter was to be stored in those silos until the following year, when Rome’s insistence that the Italian slaves be freed would indeed have produced a smaller than normal Sicilian harvest. And the price of grain would be high.
What those enterprising persons unknown didn’t count upon was the slave revolt. Instead of all four quarters of the crop being harvested, none of it was. So the grand scheme to make an enormous profit from the last quarter came to nothing, and those waiting empty silos remained empty.
However, to go back to the frantic two weeks during which Nerva freed some Italian slaves and the group of grain buyers scrambled to purchase the last quarter of the crop, the moment this was done and the tribunals were closed, our group of grain buyers was set upon by armed bandits, and every last man was killed. Or so the bandits thought. But one of them, the fellow who talked to Scaurus in Ostia, shammed dead, and so survived.
Scaurus sniffed a gigantic rat. What a nose he has! And what a mind! He saw the pattern at once, though the grain buyer had not. And how I do love him, in spite of his hidebound conservatism. Burrowing like a terrier, he discovered that the persons unknown were none other than your esteemed consular colleague of last year, Gaius Flavius Fimbria, and this year’s governor of Macedonia, Gaius Memmius! They had laid a false scent for our terrier Scaurus last year that very cleverly led straight to the quaestor of Ostia—none other than our turbulent tribune of the plebs Lucius Appuleius Saturninus.
Once he had assembled all his evidence, Scaurus got up and apologized to Saturninus twice—once in the House, once in the Comitia. He was mortified, but lost no dignitas, of course. All the world loves a sincere and graceful apologist. And I must say that Saturninus never singled Scaurus out when he returned to the House as a tribune of the plebs. Saturninus got up too, once in the House and once in the Comitia, and told Scaurus that he had never borne a grudge because he had understood how very crafty the real villains were, and he was now extremely grateful for the recovery of his reputation. So Saturninus lost no dignitas either. All the world loves a modestly gracious recipient of a handsome apology.
Scaurus also offered Saturninus the job of impeaching Fimbria and Memmius in his new treason court, and naturally Saturninus accepted. So now we look forward to lots of sparks and very little obscuring smoke when Fimbria and Memmius are brought to trial. I imagine they will be convicted in a court composed of knights, for many knights in the grain business lost money, and Fimbria and Memmius are being blamed for the whole Sicilian mess. And what it all boils down to is that sometimes the real villains do get their just desserts.
The other Saturninus story is a lot funnier, as well as a lot more intriguing. I still haven’t worked out what our vindicated tribune of the plebs is up to.
About two weeks ago, a fellow turned up in the Forum and climbed up on the rostra—it was vacant at the time, there being no Comitial meeting and the amateur orators having decided to take a day off—and announced to the whole bottom end of the Forum that his name was Lucius Equitius, that he was a freedman Roman citizen from Firmum Picenum, and—now wait for it, Gaius Marius, it’s glorious!—that he was the natural son of none other than Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus!
He had his tale off pat, and it does hang together, as far as it goes. Briefly, it goes like this: his mother was a free Roman woman of good though humble standing, and fell in love with Tiberius Gracchus, who also fell in love with her. But of course her birth wasn’t good enough for marriage, so she became his mistress, and lived in a small yet comfortable house on one of Tiberius Gracchus’s country estates. In due time Lucius Equitius—his mother’s name was Equitia—was born.
Then Tiberius Gracchus was murdered and Equitia died not long after, leaving her small son to the care of Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi. But Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi was not amused at being appointed the guardian of her son’s bastard, and put him in the care of a slave couple on her own estates at Misenum. She then had him sold as a slave to people in Firmum Picenum.
He didn’t know who he was, he says. But if he has done the things he says he has, then he was no infant when his father, Tiberius Gracchus, died, in which case he’s lying. Anyway, sold into slavery in Firmum Picenum, he worked so diligently and became so beloved of his owners that when the paterfamilias died, he was not only manumitted, but fell heir to the family fortunes, there being no heirs of the flesh, so to speak. His education was excellent, so he took his inheritance and went into business. Over the next however many years, he served in our legions and made a fortune. To hear him talk, he ought to be about fifty years old, where in actual fact he looks about thirty.
And then he met a fellow who made a great fuss about his likeness to Tiberius Gracchus. Now he had always known he was Italian rather than foreign, and he had wondered greatly, he says, about his parentage. Emboldened by the discovery that he looked like Tiberius Gracchus, he traced the slave couple with whom Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi had boarded him for a while, and learned from them the story of his begetting. Isn’t it glorious? I haven’t made up my mind yet whether it’s a Greek tragedy or a Roman farce.
Well, of course our gullible sentimental Forum-frequenters went wild, and within a day or two Lucius Equitius was being feted everywhere as Tiberius Gracchus’s son. A pity his legitimate sons are all dead, isn’t it? Lucius Equitius does, by the way, bear a most remarkable resemblance to Tiberius Gracchus—quite uncanny, as a matter of fact. He speaks like him, walks like him, grimaces like him, even picks his nose the same way. I think the thing that puts me off Lucius Equitius the most is that the likeness is too perfect. A twin, not a son. Sons don’t resemble their fathers in every detail, I’ve noticed it time and time again, and there’s many a woman brought to bed of a son who is profoundly thankful for that fact, and expends a great deal of her postpartum energy assuring the sprog’s tata that the sprog is a dead ringer for her great-uncle Lucius Tiddlypuss. Oh, well!
Then the next thing all we old fogies of the Senate know, Saturninus takes this Lucius Equitius up, and starts climbing onto the rostra with him, and encourages Equitius to build a following. Thus, not a week had gone by before Equitius was the hero of everyone in Rome on an income lower than a tribune of the Treasury and higher than the Head Count—tradesmen, shopkeepers, artisans, smallholding farmers—the flower of the Third and Fourth and Fifth Classes. You know the people I mean. They worshiped the ground the Brothers Gracchi walked on, all those little honest hardworking men who don’t often get to vote, but vote in their tribes often enough to feel a distinct cut above freedmen and the Head Count. The sort who are too proud to take charity, yet not rich enough to survive astronomical grain prices.
The Conscript Fathers of the Senate, particularly those wearing purple-bordered togas, began to get a bit upset at all this popular adulation—and a bit worried too, thanks to the participation of Saturninus, who is the real mystery. Yet what could be done about it? Finally none other than our new Pontifex Maximus, Ahenobarbus (he’s got a new nickname and it’s sticking—pipinna!), proposed that the sister of the Brothers Gracchi (and the widow of Scipio Aemilianus, as if we could ever forget the brawls that particular married couple used to have!) should be brought to the Forum and hied up onto the rostra to confront the alleged imposter.
Three days ago it was done, with Saturninus standing off to one side grinning like a fool — only he isn’t a fool, so what’s he up to? — and Lucius Equitius gazing blankly at this wizened-up old crab apple of a woman. Ahenobarbus Pipinna struck a maximally pontifical pose, took Sempronia by the shoulders — she didn’t like that a bit, and shook him off like a hairy-legged spider — and asked in tones of thunder, “Daughter of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus Senior and Cornelia Africana, do you recognize this man?”
Of course she snapped that she’d never seen him before in her life, and that her dearest, most beloved brother Tiberius would never, never, never loosen the stopper of his wine flask outside the sacred bonds of marriage, so the whole thing was utter nonsense. She then began to belabor Equitius with her ivory and ebony walking stick, and it really did turn into the most outrageous mime you ever saw — I kept wishing Lucius Cornelius Sulla had been there. He would have reveled in it!
In the end Ahenobarbus Pipinna (I do love that nickname! Given to him by none other than Metellus Numidicus!) had to haul her down off the rostra while the audience screamed with laughter, and Scaurus fell about hooting himself to tears and only got worse when Pipinna and Piggle-wiggle and Piglet accused him of unsenatorial levity.
The minute Lucius Equitius had the rostra to himself again, Saturninus marched up to him and asked him if he knew who the old horror was. Equitius said no, he didn’t, which proved either that he hadn’t been listening when Ahenobarbus roared out his introduction, or he was lying. But Saturninus explained to him in nice short words that she was his Auntie Sempronia, the sister of the Brothers Gracchi. Equitius looked amazed, said he’d never set eyes on his Auntie Sempronia in all his astonishingly full life, and then said he’d be very surprised if Tiberius Gracchus had ever told his sister about the mistress and child in a snug little love nest down on one of the Sempronius Gracchus farms.
The crowd appreciated the good sense of this answer, and goes merrily on believing implicitly that Lucius Equitius is the natural son of Tiberius Gracchus. And the Senate—not to mention Ahenobarbus—is fulminating. Well, all except Saturninus, who smirks; Scaurus, who laughs; and me. Three guesses what I’m doing!
Publius Rutilius Rufus sighed and stretched his cramped hand, wishing that he could feel as uncomfortable writing a letter as Gaius Marius did; then perhaps he might not be driven to putting in all the delicious details which made the difference between a five-column missive and a fifty-five-column missive.
And that, dear Gaius Marius, is positively all. If I sit here a moment longer I’ll think of more entertaining tales, and end in falling asleep with my nose in the inkpot. I do wish there was a better—that is, a more traditionally Roman—way of going about safeguarding your command than running yet again for the consulship. Nor do I see how you can possibly pull it off. But I daresay you will. Keep in good health. Remember, you’re no spring chicken anymore, you’re an old boiler, so don’t go tail over comb and break any bones. I will write again when something interesting happens.
Gaius Marius got the letter at the beginning of November, and had just got it worked out so he could read it through with real enjoyment when Sulla turned up. That he was back for good he demonstrated by shaving off his now enormously long and drooping moustaches, and having his hair barbered. So while Sulla soaked blissfully in the bath, Marius read the letter out to him, and was ridiculously happy at having Sulla back to share such pleasures.
They settled in the general’s private study, Marius having issued instructions that he was not to be disturbed, even by Manius Aquillius.
“Take off that wretched torc!” Marius said when the properly Roman, tunic-clad Sulla leaned forward and brought the great gold thing into view.
But Sulla shook his head, smiling and fingering the splendid dragon heads which formed the ends of the torc’s almost complete circle. “No, I don’t think I ever will, Gaius Marius. Barbaric, isn’t it?”
“It’s wrong on a Roman,” grumbled Marius.
“The trouble is, it’s become my good-luck talisman, so I can’t take it off in case my luck goes with it.” He settled himself on a couch with a sigh of voluptuous ease. “Oh, the bliss of reclining like a civilized man again! I’ve been carousing bolt upright at tables with my arse on hard wooden benches for so long that I’d begun to think I had only dreamed there were races lay down to eat. And how good it is to be continent again! Gauls and Germans alike, they do everything to excess—eat and drink until they spew all over each other, or else starve half to death because they went out to raid or do battle without thinking to pack a lunch. Ah, but they’re fierce, Gaius Marius! Brave! I tell you, if they had one tenth of our organization and self-discipline, we couldn’t hope to beat them.”
“Luckily for us, they don’t have as much as a hundredth of either, so we can beat them. At least I think that’s what you’re saying. Here, drink this. It’s Falernian.”
Sulla drank, deeply, yet slowly. “Wine, wine, wine! Nectar of the gods, balm for the sore heart, glue for the shredded spirit! How did I ever exist without it?” He laughed. “I don’t care if I never see another horn of beer or tankard of mead in all the rest of my life! Wine is civilized. No belches, no farts, no distended belly—on beer, a man becomes a walking cistern.”
“Where’s Quintus Sertorius? All right, I hope?”
“He’s on his way, but we traveled separately, and I wanted to brief you alone, Gaius Marius,” said Sulla.
“Any way you want it, Lucius Cornelius, as long as I hear it,” said Marius, watching him with affection.
“I hardly know where to start.”
“At the beginning, then. Who are they? Where do they come from? How long has their migration been going on?”
Relishing his wine, Sulla closed his eyes. “They don’t call themselves Germani, and they don’t regard themselves as a single people. They are the Cimbri, the Teutones, the Marcomanni, the Cherusci, and the Tigurini. The original homeland of the Cimbri and the Teutones is a long, wide peninsula lying to the north of Germania, vaguely described by some of the Greek geographers, who called it the Cimbrian Chersonnese. It seems the half farthest north was the home of the Cimbri, and the half joining onto the mainland of Germania was the home of the Teutones. Though they regard themselves as separate peoples, it’s very difficult to see any physical characteristics peculiar to either people, though the languages are somewhat different—they can understand each other, however.
“They weren’t nomads, but they didn’t grow crops, and didn’t farm in our sense. It would seem that their winters were more wet than snowy, and that the soil produced wonderful grass all year round. So they lived with and off cattle, eked out by a little oats and rye. Beef eaters and milk drinkers, a few vegetables, a little hard black bread, and porridge.
“And then about the time that Gaius Gracchus died— almost twenty years ago, at any rate—they had a year of inundations. Too much snow on the mountains feeding their great rivers, too much rain from the skies, ferocious gales, and very high tides. The ocean Atlanticus covered the whole peninsula. And when the sea receded, they found the soil too saline to grow grass, and their wells brackish. So they built an army of wagons, gathered together the cattle and horses which had survived, and set off to find a new homeland.”
Marius was stiff with interest and excitement, sitting very straight in his chair, his wine forgotten. “All of them? How many were there?” he asked.
“Not all of them, no. The old and the feeble were knocked on the head and buried in huge barrows. Only the warriors, the younger women, and the children migrated. As far as I can estimate, about six hundred thousand started to walk southeast down the valley of the great river we call the Albis.”
“But I believe that part of the world is hardly peopled,” said Marius, frowning. “Why didn’t they stay along the Albis?”
Sulla shrugged. “Who knows, when they don’t? They just seem to have given themselves into the hands of their gods, and waited for some sort of divine signal to tell them they had found a new homeland. Certainly they didn’t seem to encounter much opposition as they walked, at least along the Albis. Eventually they came to the sources of the river, and saw high mountains for the first time in the memory of the race. The Cimbrian Chersonnese was flat and low-lying.”
“Obviously, if the ocean could flood it,” said Marius, and lifted a hand hastily. “No, I didn’t mean that sarcastically, Lucius Cornelius! I’m not good with words, or very tactful.” He got up to pour more wine into Sulla’s cup. “I take it that the mountains affected them powerfully?”
“Indeed. Their gods were sky gods, but when they saw these towers tickling the underbellies of the clouds, they began to worship the gods they were sure lived beneath the towers, and shoved them up out of the ground. They’ve never really been very far from mountains since. In the fourth year they crossed an alpine watershed, and passed from the headwaters of the Albis to the headwaters of the Danubius, a river we know more about, of course. And they turned east to follow the Danubius toward the plains of the Getae and the Sarmatae.”
“Was that where they were going, then?” Marius asked. “To the Euxine Sea?”
“It appears so,” said Sulla. “However, they were blocked by the Boii from entering the basin of northern Dacia, and so were forced to keep following the course of the Danubius where it bends sharply south into Pannonia.”
“The Boii are Celts, of course,” said Marius thoughtfully. “Celt and German didn’t mix, I take it.”
“No, they certainly didn’t. But the interesting thing is that nowhere have the Germans decided to stay put and fight for land. At the least sign of resistance from the local tribes, they’ve moved on. As they did away from the lands of the Boii. Then somewhere near the confluence of the Danubius with the Tisia and the Savus, they ran up against another wall of Celts, this time the Scordisci.”
“Our very own enemies, the Scordisci!” Marius exclaimed, grinning. “Well, isn’t it comforting to find out now that we and the Scordisci have a common enemy?”
One red-gold brow went up. “Considering that it happened about fifteen years ago and we knew nothing of it, it’s hardly comforting,” Sulla said dryly.
“I’m not saying anything right today, am I? Forgive me, Lucius Cornelius. You’ve been living it; I’m merely sitting here so excited at finding out at last that my tongue has developed a forest of thumbs,” said Marius.
“It’s all right, Gaius Marius, I do understand,” said Sulla, smiling.
“Go on, go on!”
“Perhaps one of their greatest problems was that they had no leader worthy of the name. Nor any semblance of a—a—master plan, for want of a better phrase to describe it. I think they just waited for the day when some great king would give them permission to settle down on some of his vacant land.”
“And of course great kings are not prone to do that,” said Marius.
“No. Anyway, they turned back and began to travel west,” Sulla went on, “only they left the Danubius. They followed the Savus first, then skewed a little north, and picked up the course of the Dravus, which they then tracked toward its sources. By this time they had been walking for over six years without staying for more than a few days anywhere.”
“They don’t travel on the wagons?” asked Marius.
“Rarely. They’re harnessed to cattle, so they’re not driven, just guided. If someone is ill or near term with a child, the wagon becomes a vehicle of transport, not otherwise,” said Sulla. He sighed. “And of course we all know what happened next. They entered Noricum, and the lands of the Taurisci.”
“Who appealed to Rome, and Rome sent Carbo to deal with the invaders, and Carbo lost his army,” said Marius.
“And, as always, the Germans turned away from trouble,” said Sulla. “Instead of invading Italian Gaul, they walked right into the high mountains, and came back to the Danubius a little to the east of its confluence with the Aenus. The Boii weren’t going to let them go east, so they headed west along the Danubius, through the lands of the Marcomanni. For reasons I haven’t been able to fathom, a large segment of the Marcomanni joined the Cimbri and the Teutones in this seventh year of the migration.”
“What about the thunderstorm?” Marius asked. “You know, the one which interrupted the battle between the Germans and Carbo, and saved at least some of Carbo’s men. There were those who believed the Germans took the storm as a sign of divine wrath, and that that was what saved us from invasion.”