The spring rains didn’t fall in Sicily or Sardinia, and in Africa they were scanty. Then when what wheat had come up started to form ears, the rains came in torrents; floods and blights utterly destroyed the crop. Only from Africa would a tiny harvest find its way to Puteoli and Ostia. Which meant that Rome faced her fourth year of high grain prices, and a shortage in quantity spelling famine.
The junior consul and flamen Martialis, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, found himself with empty granaries beneath the cliffs of the Aventine adjacent to the Port of Rome, and the private granaries along the Vicus Tuscus held very little. This very little, the grain merchants informed Flaccus and his aediles, would sell for upward of fifty sesterces permodius, a mere thirteen pounds in weight. Few if any Head Count families could afford to pay a quarter so much. There were other and cheaper foods available, but a shortage of wheat sent all foodstuffs up in price because of increased consumption and limited production. And bellies used to good bread found no satisfaction in thin gruel and turnips, which became the staples of the lowly in times of famine; the strong and healthy survived, but the old, the weak, the very young, and the sickly all too often died.
By October the Head Count was growing restive; thrills of fear began to run through the ordinary residents of the city. For the Head Count of Rome deprived of food was a prospect no one living cheek by jowl with them could face without a thrill of fear. Many of the Third and Fourth Class citizens, who would find it difficult anyway to buy such costly grain, began to lay in weapons to defend their larders from the depredations of those owning even less.
Lucius Valerius Flaccus conferred with the curule aediles—responsible for grain purchases on behalf of the State as well as for the storage and sale of State grain—and applied to the Senate for additional funds to buy in grain from anywhere it could be obtained, and of any kind— barley, millet, emmer wheat as well as bread wheat. However, few in the Senate were really worried; too many years and too much insulation from the lower classes of citizens separated them from the last Head Count famine riots.
To make matters worse, the two young men serving as Rome’s Treasury quaestors were of the most exclusive and unpitying kind of senator, and thought little of the Head Count at the best of times. Both when elected quaestor had asked for duty inside Rome, declaring that they intended to “arrest the unwarranted drains upon Rome’s Treasury”—an impressive way of saying that they had no intention of releasing money for Head Count armies—or Head Count grain. The urban quaestor—more senior of the two—was none other than Caepio Junior, son of the consul who had stolen the Gold of Tolosa and lost the battle of Arausio; the other was Metellus Piglet, the son of the exiled Metellus Numidicus. Both had scores to settle with Gaius Marius.
It was not senatorial practice to run counter to the recommendations of the Treasury quaestors. Questioned in the House as to the state of fiscal affairs, both Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet said flatly there was no money for grain. Thanks to the massive outlays it had been called upon to make for a number of years outfitting and paying and feeding Head Count armies, the State was broke. Neither the war against Jugurtha nor the war against the Germans had brought in anything like enough money in spoils and tributes to rectify the State’s negative financial balance, said the two Treasury quaestors. And produced their tribunes of the Treasury and their account books to prove their point. Rome was broke. Those without the money to pay the going price for grain would have to starve. Sorry, but that was the reality of the situation.
By the beginning of November the word had reached all of Rome that there would be no reasonably priced State grain, for the Senate had refused to vote funds for its purchase. Couched in the form of rumor, the word didn’t mention crop failures or cantankerous Treasury quaestors; it simply stated that there would be no cheap grain.
The Forum Romanum immediately began to fill up with crowds of a nature not usually seen there, while the normal Forum frequenters melted away or tacked themselves onto the back of the newcomers. These crowds were Head Count and the Fifth Class, and their mood was ugly. Senators and other togate men found themselves hissed by thousands of tongues as they walked what they regarded as their traditional territory, but at first were not easily cowed; then the hissing became showers of pelted filth—faeces, manure, stinking Tiber mud, rotten garbage. Whereupon the Senate extricated itself from these difficulties by suspending all meetings, leaving unfortunates like bankers, knight merchants, advocates, and tribunes of the Treasury to suffer the besmirching of their persons without senatorial support.
Not strong enough to take the initiative, the junior consul, Flaccus, let matters drift, while Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet congratulated themselves upon a job well done. If the winter saw a few thousand Head Count Romans die, that meant there would be fewer mouths to feed.
At which point the tribune of the plebs Lucius Appuleius Saturninus convoked the Plebeian Assembly, and proposed a grain law to it. The State was to buy immediately every ounce of wheat, barley, and millet in Italy and Italian Gaul and sell it for the ridiculously cheap price of one sestertius per modius. Of course Saturninus made no reference to the impossible logistics of shipping anything from Italian Gaul to regions south of the Apennines, nor the fact that there was almost no grain to buy anywhere south of the Apennines. What he wanted was the crowd, and that meant placing himself in the eyes of the crowd as its sole savior.
Opposition was almost nonexistent in the absence of a convened Senate, for the grain shortage affected everyone in Rome below the level of the rich. The entire food chain and its participants were on Saturninus’s side. So were the Third and Fourth Classes, and even many of the centuries of the Second Class. As November edged over the hump of its middle and down the slope toward December, all Rome was on Saturninus’s side.
“If people can’t afford to buy wheat, we can’t afford to make bread!” cried the Guild of Millers and Bakers.
“If people are hungry, they don’t work well!” cried the Guild of Builders.
“If people can’t afford to feed their children, what’s going to happen to their slaves?” cried the Guild of Freedmen.
“If people have to spend their money on food, they won’t be able to pay rent!” cried the Guild of Landlords.
“If people are so hungry they start pillaging shops and overturning market stalls, what will happen to us?” cried the Guild of Merchants.
“If people descend on our allotments in search of food, we won’t have any produce to sell!” cried the Guild of Market Gardeners.
For it was not the simple matter of a famine killing off a few thousand of the Head Count; the moment Rome’s middle and poorer citizens could not afford to eat, a hundred and one kinds of businesses and trades suffered in their turn. A famine, in short, was an economic disaster. But the Senate wasn’t coming together, even in temples off the beaten track, so it was left to Saturninus to propose a solution, and his solution was based upon a false premise; that there was grain for the State to buy. He himself genuinely thought there was, deeming every aspect of the crisis a manufactured one, and the culprits an alliance between the Policy Makersof the Senate and the upper echelons of the grain barons.
Every one of the thousands of faces in the Forum turned to him as heliotropes to the sun; working himself into a passion through the force of his oratory, he began to believe every single word he shouted, he began to believe every single face his eyes encountered in the crowd, he began to believe in a new way to govern Rome. What did the consulship really matter? What did the Senate really matter, when crowds like these made it shove its tail between its legs and slink home? When the bets were on the table and the moment to throw the dice arrived, they were all that mattered, these faces in this enormous crowd. They held the real power; those who thought they held it did so only as long as the faces in the crowd permitted it.
So what did the consulship really matter? What did the Senate really matter? Talk, hot air, a nothing! There were no armies in Rome, no armies nearer to Rome than the recruit training centers around Capua. Consuls and Senate held their power without force of arms or numbers to back them up. But here in the Forum was true power, here were the numbers to back that true power. Why did a man have to be consul to be the First Man in Rome? It wasn’t necessary! Had Gaius Gracchus too realized that? Or was he forced to kill himself before he could realize it?
I, thought Saturninus, gobbling up the vision of the faces in his mighty crowd, shall be the First Man in Rome! But not as consul. As tribune of the plebs. Genuine power lay with the tribunes of the plebs, not with the consuls. And if Gaius Marius could get himself elected consul in what promised to be perpetuity, what was to stop Lucius Appuleius Saturninus’s getting himself elected tribune of the plebs in perpetuity?
However, Saturninus chose a quiet day to pass his grain bill into law, chiefly because he retained the wisdom to see that senatorial opposition to providing cheap grain must continue to appear high-handed and elitist; therefore no enormous crowd must be present in the Forum to give the Senate an opportunity to accuse the Plebeian Assembly of disorder, riot, violence, and denounce the law as invalid. He was still simmering about the second agrarian bill, Gaius Marius’s treachery, Metellus Numidicus’s exile; that in fact the law was still engraved on the tablets was his doing, not Gaius Marius’s. Which made him the real author of land grants for the Head Count veterans.
November was short on holidays, especially holidays on which the Comitia could meet. But his opportunity to find a quiet day came when a fabulously wealthy knight died, and his sons staged elaborate funeral gladiatorial games in their father’s honor; the site chosen for the games—normally the Forum Romanum—was the Circus Flaminius, in order to avoid the crowds gathering every day in the Forum Romanum.
It was Caepio Junior who spoiled Saturninus’s plans. The Plebeian Assembly was convoked; the omens were auspicious; the Forum was inhabited by its normal frequenters because the crowd had gone off to the Circus Flaminius; the other tribunes of the plebs were busy with the casting of the lots to see which order the tribes were going to vote in; and Saturninus himself stood to the front of the rostra exhorting the groups of tribes forming in the well of the Comitia to vote the way he wanted.
In the conspicuous absence of senatorial meetings, it had not occurred to Saturninus that any members of the Senate were keeping an eye on events in the Forum, barring his nine fellow tribunes of the plebs, who simply did as they were told these days. But there were some members of the Senate who felt quite as much contempt for that body’s craven conduct as did Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. They were all young, either in their quaestorian year or at most two years beyond that point, and they had allies among the sons of senators and First Class knights as yet too young to enter the Senate or senior posts in their fathers’ firms. Meeting in groups at each other’s homes, they were led by Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, and they had a more mature confidant-adviser to give direction and purpose to what might otherwise have ended up merely a series of angry discussions foundering in an excess of wine.
Their confidant-adviser was rapidly becoming something of an idol to them, for he possessed all those qualities young men so admire—he was daring, intrepid, cool-headed, sophisticated, something of a high liver and womanizer, witty, fashionable, and had an impressive war record. His name was Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
With Marius laid low in Cumae for what seemed months, Sulla had taken it upon himself to watch events in Rome in a way that, for instance, Publius Rutilius Rufus would never have dreamed of doing. Sulla’s motives were not completely based on loyalty to Marius; after that conversation with Aurelia, he had looked very detachedly at his future prospects in the Senate, and come to the conclusion that Aurelia was right: he would, like Gaius Marius, be what a gardener would call a late bloomer. In which case it was pointless for him to seek friendship and alliance among those senators older than himself. Scaurus, for instance, was a lost cause. And how convenient that particular decision was! It would keep him out of the way of Scaurus’s delectable little child-bride, now the mother of baby Aemilia Scaura; when he had heard the news that Scaurus had fathered a girl, Sulla experienced a shaft of pure pleasure. Served the randy old goat right.
Thinking to safeguard his own political future while preserving Marius’s, Sulla embarked upon the wooing of the senatorial younger generation, choosing as his targets those who were malleable, able to be influenced, not very intelligent, extremely rich, from important families, or so arrogantly sure of themselves they left themselves open to a subtle form of flattery. His primary targets were Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, Caepio Junior because he was an intellectually dense patrician with access to young men like Marcus Livius Drusus (whom Sulla did not even try to woo), and Metellus Piglet because he knew what was going on among the older Good Men. No one knew better than Sulla how to woo young men, even when his purposes held no kind of sexuality, so it was not long before he was holding court among them, his manner always tinged with amusement at their youthful posturings in a way which suggested to them that there was a hope he would change his mind, take them seriously. Nor were they adolescents; the oldest among them were only some seven or eight years his junior, the youngest fifteen or sixteen years his junior. Old enough to consider themselves fully formed, young enough to be thrown off balance by a Sulla. And the nucleus of a senatorial following which in time would be of enormous importance to a man determined to be consul.
At this moment, however, Sulla’s chief concern was Saturninus, whom he had been watching very closely since the first crowds began to gather in the Forum, and the harassment of togate dignitaries began. Whether the lex Appuleia frumentaria was actually passed into law or not was far from Sulla’s main worry; what Saturninus needed, Sulla thought, was a demonstration that he would not have things all his own way.
When some fifty of the young bloods met at the house of Metellus Piglet on the night before Saturninus planned to pass his grain law, Sulla lay back and listened to the talk in an apparent idle amusement until Caepio Junior rounded on him and demanded to know what he thought they ought to do.
He looked marvelous, the thick red-gold hair barbered to bring out the best of its waves, his white skin flawless, his brows and lashes dark enough to show up (had they only known it, he touched them with a trace of stibium, otherwise they virtually disappeared), his eyes as glacially compelling as a blue-eyed cat’s. “I think you’re all hot air,” he said.
Metellus Piglet had been brought to understand that Sulla was anything but Marius’s tame dog; like any other Roman, he didn’t hold it against a man that he attached himself to a faction, any more than he assumed that man could not be detached. “No, we’re not all hot air,” he growled without a single stammer. “It’s just that we don’t know what’s the right tactic.”
“Do you object to a little violence?” Sulla asked.
“Not when it’s to protect the Senate’s right to decide how Rome’s public money is to be spent,” said Caepio Junior.
“And there you have it,” said Sulla. “The People have never been accorded the right to spend the city’s moneys. Let the People make the laws—we don’t object to that. But it’s the Senate’s right to provide any money the People’s laws demand—and the Senate’s right to deny funding. If we’re stripped of our right to control the purse-strings, we have no power left at all. Money is the only way we can render the People’s laws impotent when we don’t agree with them. That’s how we dealt with the grain law of Gaius Gracchus.”
“We won’t prevent the Senate’s voting the money when this grain law goes through,” said Metellus Piglet, still without a stammer; when with his intimates he didn’t stammer.
“Of course not!” said Sulla. “We won’t prevent its being passed, either. But we can show Lucius Appuleius a little of our strength all the same.”
Thus as Saturninus stood exhorting his voters to do the right thing by the lex Appuleia frumentaria, the crowds no closer than the Circus Flaminius and the meeting as orderly as any consular could demand, Caepio Junior led some two hundred followers into the lower Forum Romanum. Armed with clubs and billets of wood, most of them were beefy muscular fellows with the slack midriffs which suggested they were ex-gladiators now reduced to hiring out their services for any sort of job requiring strength or the capacity to turn nasty. However, all the fifty present at Metellus Piglet’s house the night before led the vanguard, Caepio Junior very much the leader of the pack. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was not among them.
Saturninus shrugged and watched impassively as the gang marched across the Forum, then turned back to the well of the Comitia and dismissed the meeting.
“There’ll be no heads broken on my account!” he shouted to the voters, dissolving their tribal clumps in alarm. “Go home, come back tomorrow! We’ll pass our law then!”
On the following day the Head Count was back in attendance on the Comitia; no gang of senatorial toughs appeared to break up the meeting, and the grain bill passed into law.
“All I was trying to do, you thick-headed idiot,” said Saturninus to Caepio Junior when they met in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, where Valerius Flaccus had felt the Conscript Fathers would be safe from the crowds while they argued about funding for the lex Appuleia frumentaria, “was pass a lawful law in a lawfully convoked assembly. The crowds weren’t there, the atmosphere was peaceful, and the omens were impeccable. And what happens? You and your idiot friends come along to break a few heads!” He turned to the clusters of senators standing about.
“Don’t blame me that the law had to be passed in the middle of twenty thousand Head Count! Blame this fool!”
“This fool is blaming himself for not using force where force would have counted most!” shouted Caepio Junior. “I ought to have killed you, Lucius Appuleius!”
“Thank you for saying that in front of all these impartial witnesses,” said Saturninus, smiling. “Quintus Servilius Caepio Junior, I hereby formally charge you with minor treason, in that you did attempt to obstruct a tribune of the plebs in the execution of his duty, and that you did threaten to harm the sacrosanct person of a tribune of the plebs.”
“You’re riding a half-mad horse for a fall, Lucius Appuleius,” said Sulla. “Get off before it happens, man!”
“I have laid a formal charge against Quintus Servilius, Conscript Fathers,” said Saturninus, ignoring Sulla as nobody of importance, “but that matter can now be left to the treason court. Today I’m here to demand money.”
There were fewer than eighty senators present, in spite of the safe location, and none of significance; Saturninus glared at them contemptuously. “I want money to buy grain for the People of Rome,” he said. “If you haven’t got it in the Treasury, I suggest you go out and borrow it. For money I will have!”
Saturninus got his money. Red-faced and protesting, Caepio Junior the urban quaestor was ordered to mint a special coinage from an emergency stockpile of silver bars in the temple of Ops, and pay for the grain without further defiance.
“I’ll see you in court,” said Saturninus sweetly to Caepio Junior as the meeting finished, “because I’m going to take great pleasure in prosecuting you myself.”
But in this he overstepped himself; the knight jurors took a dislike to Saturninus, and were already favorably disposed toward Caepio Junior when Fortune showed that she too was most favorably disposed toward Caepio Junior. Right in the middle of the defending counsel’s address came an urgent letter from Smyrna to inform his son that Quintus Servilius Caepio had died in Smyrna, surrounded by nothing more comforting than his gold. Caepio Junior wept bitterly; the jury was moved, and dismissed the charges.
Elections were due, but no one wanted to hold them, forstill each day the crowds gathered in the Forum Romanum, and still each day the granaries remained empty. The junior consul, Flaccus, insisted the elections must wait until time proved Gaius Marius incapable of conducting them; priest of Mars though he was, Lucius Valerius Flaccus had too little of Mars in him to risk his person by supervising elections in a climate like this present one.
*
Marcus Antonius Orator had had a very successful three-year campaign against the pirates of Cilicia and Pamphylia, which he finished in some style from his headquarters in the delightfully cosmopolitan and cultured city of Athens. Here he had been joined by his good friend Gaius Memmius, who on his return to Rome from governing Macedonia had found himself arraigned in Glaucia’s extortion court along with Gaius Flavius Fimbria, his partner-in-crime in the grain swindle. Fimbria had been convicted heavily, but Memmius was unlucky enough to be convicted by one vote. He chose Athens as his place of exile because his friend Antonius spent so much time there, and he needed his friend Antonius’s support in the matter of an appeal to the Senate to quash his conviction. That he was able to defray the costs of this expensive exercise was due to pure chance; while governing Macedonia, he had almost literally tripped over a cache of gold in a captured Scordisci village—one hundred talents of it. Like Caepio at Tolosa, Memmius had seen no reason why he ought to share the gold with anybody, so he didn’t. Until he dropped some of it into Antonius’s open hand in Athens. And a few months later got his recall to Rome and his seat in the Senate reinstated.
Since the pirate war was properly concluded, Gaius Memmius waited in Athens until Marcus Antonius Orator was ready to go home as well. Their friendship had prospered, and they formed a pact to seek the consulship as joint candidates.
It was the end of November when Antonius sat down with his little army on the vacant fields of the Campus Martius, and demanded a triumph. Which the Senate, able to meet in the safety of the temple of Bellona to deal with this, was pleased to grant him. However, Antonius was informed that his triumph would have to wait until after the tenth day of December, as no tribunician elections had yet been held, and the Forum Romanum was still packed with the Head Count. Hopefully the tribunician elections would be held and the new college would enter office on the tenth day of the month, but a triumphal parade with the city in its current mood, Antonius was informed, was out of the question.
It began to look to Antonius as if he would not be able to stand for the office of consul, for until his triumph was held, he had to remain outside the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city; he still held imperium, which put him in exactly the same position as a foreign king, forbidden to enter Rome. And if he couldn’t enter Rome, he couldn’t announce himself as a candidate in the consular elections.
However, his successful war had made him tremendously popular with the grain merchants and other businessmen, for traffic on the Middle Sea was safer and more predictable than in half a century. Could he stand for the consulship, there was every chance that he would win the senior position, even against Gaius Marius. And in spite of his part in Fimbria’s grain swindle, Gaius Memmius’s chances were not bad either, for he had been an intrepid foe of Jugurtha’s, and fought Caepio bitterly when he returned the extortion court to the Senate. They were, as Catulus Caesar said to Scaurus Princeps Senatus, as popular a pair with the knights who formed the majority of the First and Second Classes as the boni could possibly ask—and both of them were infinitely preferable to Gaius Marius.
For of course everyone expected Gaius Marius back in Rome at the very last minute, all set to stand for his seventh consulship. The story of the stroke had been verified, but it didn’t seem to have incapacitated Marius very much, and those who had made the journey to Cumae to see him had come away convinced it had not in any way affected the quality of his mind. No doubt of it in anyone’s thoughts; Gaius Marius was sure to declare himself a candidate.
The idea of presenting the electorate with a pair of candidates eager to stand as partners appealed to the Policy Makers very strongly; Antonius and Memmius together stood a chance of breaking Marius’s iron hold on the senior chair. Except that Antonius stubbornly refused to give up his triumph for the sake of the consulship by yielding his imperium and stepping across the pomerium to declare himself a candidate.
“I can run for the consulship next year,” he said when Catulus Caesar and Scaurus Princeps Senatus came to see him on the Campus Martius. “The triumph is more important—I’ll probably never fight another good war again as long as I live.” And from that stand he could not be budged.
“All right,” said Scaurus to Catulus Caesar as they came away from Antonius’s camp despondent, “we’ll just have to bend the rules a little. Gaius Marius thinks nothing of breaking them, so why should we be scrupulous when so much is at stake?”
But it was Catulus Caesar who proposed their solution to the House, meeting with just enough members present to make a quorum in yet another safe location, the temple of Jupiter Stator near the Circus Flaminius.
“These are trying times,” Catulus Caesar said. “Normally all the candidates for the curule magistracies must present themselves to the Senate and the People in the Forum Romanum to declare their candidacies. Unfortunately the shortage of grain and the constant demonstrations in the Forum Romanum have rendered this location untenable. Might I humbly beg the Conscript Fathers to shift the candidates’ tribunal—for this one extraordinary year only!— to a special convocation of the Centuriate Assembly in the saepta on the Campus Martius? We must do something about holding elections! And if we do shift the curule candidates’ ceremony to the saepta, it’s a start—the requisite time between the declarations and the elections can elapse. It would also be fair to Marcus Antonius, who wants to stand for the consulship, but cannot cross the pomerium without abandoning his triumph, yet cannot hold his triumph because of the unrest in our hungry city. On the Campus Martius he can present himself as a candidate. We all expect that the crowds will go home after the tribunes of the plebs are elected and take office. So Marcus Antonius can hold his triumph as soon as the new college goes in, after which we can hold the curule elections.”
“Why are you so sure the crowds will go home after the new College of Tribunes of the Plebs takes office, Quintus Lutatius?” asked Saturninus.
“I should have thought you of all people could answer that, Lucius Appuleius!” snapped Catulus Caesar. “It’s you draws them to the Forum—it’s you up there day after day haranguing them, making them promises neither you nor this august body can keep! How can we buy grain that doesn’t exist?”
“I’ll still be up there speaking to the crowd after my term is over,” said Saturninus.
“You will not,” said Catulus Caesar. “Once you’re a privatus again, Lucius Appuleius, if it takes me a month and a hundred men, I’ll find some law on the tablets or some precedent that makes it illegal for you to speak from the rostra or any other spot in the Forum!”
Saturninus laughed, roars of laughter, howls of laughter; and yet no one there made the mistake of thinking he was amused. “Search to your heart’s content, Quintus Lutatius! It won’t make any difference. I’m not going to be a privatus after the current tribunician year is finished, because I’m going to be a tribune of the plebs all over again! Yes, I’m taking a leaf out of Gaius Marius’s book, and with no legal constraints to have you yammering after my blood! There’s nothing to stop a man’s seeking the tribunate of the plebs over and over again!”
“There are custom and tradition,” said Scaurus. “Enough to stop all men save you and Gaius Gracchus from seeking a third term. And you ought to take warning from Gaius Gracchus. He died in the Grove of Furrina with only a slave for company.”
“I have better company than that,” countered Saturninus. “We men of Picenum stick together—eh, Titus Labienus?—eh, Gaius Saufeius? You’ll not get rid of us so easily!”
“Don’t tempt the gods,” said Scaurus. “They do love a challenge from men, Lucius Appuleius!”
“I’m not afraid of the gods, Marcus Aemilius! The gods are on my side,” said Saturninus, and left the meeting.
“I tried to tell him,” said Sulla, passing Scaurus and Catulus Caesar. “He’s riding a half-mad horse for a fall.”
“So’s that one,” said Catulus Caesar to Scaurus after Sulla was out of earshot.
“So is half the Senate, if only we knew it,” said Scaurus, lingering to look around him. “This truly is a beautiful temple, Quintus Lutatius! A credit to Metellus Macedonicus. But it was a lonely place today without Metellus Numidicus.” Then he shrugged his shoulders, cheered up. “Come, we’d better catch our esteemed junior consul before he bolts to the very back of his warren. He can perform the sacrifice to Mars as well as to Jupiter Optimus Maximus—if we make it an all-white suovetaurilla, that should surely buy us divine approval to hold the curule candidacy ceremony on the Campus Martius!”
“Who’s going to foot the bill for a white cow, a white sow, and a white ewe?” asked Catulus Caesar, jerking his head to where Metellus Piglet and Caepio Junior were standing together. “Our Treasury quaestors will squeal louder than all three of the sacrificial victims.”
“Oh, I think Lucius Valerius the white rabbit can pay,” said Scaurus, grinning. “He’s got access to Mars!”
*
On the last day of November a message came from Gaius Marius, convening a meeting of the Senate for the next day in the Curia Hostilia. For once the current turmoil in the Forum Romanum couldn’t keep the Conscript Fathers away, so agog were they to see what Gaius Marius was like. The House was packed and everyone came earlier than the dawn did on the Kalends of December to be sure they beat him, speculations flying as they waited.
He walked in last of the entire body, as tall, as broad-shouldered, as proud as he had ever been, nothing in his gait to suggest the cripple, his left hand curled normally around the folds of his purple-bordered toga. Ah, but it was there for all the world to see upon his poor face, its old beetling self on the right side, a mournful travesty on the left.
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus put his hands together and began to applaud, the first clap echoing about the ancient hall’s naked rafters and bouncing off the ruddy bellies of the terracotta tiles which formed both ceiling and roof. One by one the Conscript Fathers joined in, so that by the time Marius reached his curule chair the whole House was thundering at him. He didn’t smile; to smile was to accentuate the clownlike asymmetry of his face so unbearably that every time he did it, whoever watched grew moist in the eyes, from Julia to Sulla. Instead, he simply stood by his ivory seat, nodding and bowing regally until the ovation died away.
Scaurus got up, smiling broadly. “Gaius Marius, how good it is to see you! The House has been as dull as a rainy day these last months. As Leader of the House, it is my pleasure to welcome you home.”
“I thank you, Princeps Senatus—Conscript Fathers—my fellow magistrates,” Marius said, his voice clear, not one slurred word. In spite of his resolve, a slight smile lifted the right side of his mouth upward, though the left corner stayed dismally slumped. “If it is a pleasure for you to welcome me home, it cannot be one tenth the pleasure it is to me to be home! As you can see, I have been ill.”
He drew a long breath everyone could hear; and hear the sadness in its quaver halfway through. “And though my illness is past, I bear its scars. Before I call this House to order and we get down to business which seems sorely in need of our attention, I wish to make a statement. I will not be seeking re-election as consul—for two reasons. The first, that the emergency which faced the State and resulted in my being allowed the unprecedented honor of so many consecutive consulships is now conclusively, finally, positively over. The second, that I do not consider my health would enable me to perform my duties properly. The responsibility I must bear for the present chaos here in Rome is manifest. If I had been here in Rome, the senior consul’s presence would have helped. That is why there is a senior consul. I do not accuse Lucius Valerius or Marcus Aemilius or any other official of this body. The senior consul must lead. I have not been able to lead. And that has taught me that I cannot seek re-election. Let the office of senior consul pass to a man in good health.”
No one replied. No one moved. If his twisted face had indicated this was in the wind, the degree of stunned shock every last one of them now felt was proof of the ascendancy he had gained over them during the past five years. A Senate without Gaius Marius in the consul’s chair? Impossible! Even Scaurus Princeps Senatus and Catulus Caesar sat shocked.
Then came a voice from the back tier behind Scaurus. “Guh-guh-good!” said Metellus Piglet. “Now my fuh-fuh-father can cuh-cuh-cuh-come home.”
“I thank you for the compliment, young Metellus,” Marius said, looking directly up at him. “You infer that it is only I who keeps your father in his exile on Rhodes. But such is not the case, you know. It is the law of the land keeps Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus in exile. And I strictly charge each and every member of this august body to remember that! There will be no decrees or plebiscites or laws upset because I am not consul!”
“Young fool!” muttered Scaurus to Catulus Caesar. “If he hadn’t said that, we could quietly have brought Quintus Caecilius back early next year. Now he won’t be allowed to come. I really think it’s time young Metellus was presented with an extra name.”
“What?” asked Catulus Caesar.
“Puh-Puh-Puh-Pius!” said Scaurus savagely. “Metellus Pius the pious son, ever striving to bring his tata home! And stuh-stuh-stuffing it up!”
It was extraordinary to see how quickly the House got down to business now that Gaius Marius was in the consul’s chair, extraordinary too to feel a sense of wellbeing permeating the members of the House, as if suddenly the crowds outside couldn’t matter the way they had until Gaius Marius reappeared.
Informed of the change in venue for the presentation of the curule candidates, Marius simply nodded consent, then curtly ordered Saturninus to call the Plebeian Assembly together and elect some magistrates; until this was out of the way, no other magistrates could be elected.
After which, Marius turned to face Gaius Servilius Glaucia, sitting in the urban praetor’s chair just behind and to his left. “I hear a rumor, Gaius Servilius,” he said to Glaucia, “that you intend to seek the consulship on the grounds of invalidities you have allegedly found in the lex Villia. Please do not. The lex Villia annalis unequivocally says that a man must wait two years between the end of his praetorship and the beginning of any consulship.”
“Look at who’s talking!” gasped Glaucia, staggered to find opposition in the one senatorial corner where he had thought to find support. “How can you stand there so brazenly, Gaius Marius, accusing me of thinking of breaking the lex Villia when you’ve broken it in fact for the last five years in a row? If the lex Villia is valid, then it unequivocally states that no man who has been consul may seek a second consulship until ten years have elapsed!”
“I did not seek the consulship beyond that once, Gaius Servilius,” said Marius levelly. “It was bestowed upon me—and three times in absentia!—because of the Germans. When a state of emergency exists, all sorts of customs—even laws!—come tumbling down. But when the danger is finally over, whatever extraordinary measures were taken must cease.”
“Ha ha ha!” said Metellus Piglet from the back row, this being an interjection in perfect accord with his speech impediment.
“Peace has come, Conscript Fathers,” said Marius as if no one had spoken, “therefore we return to normal business and normal government. Gaius Servilius, the law forbids you to stand for the consulship. And as the presiding officer of the elections, I will not allow your candidacy. Please take this as fair warning. Give up the notion gracefully, for it does not become you. Rome needs lawmakers of your undeniable talent. For you cannot make the laws if you break the laws.”
“I told you so!” said Saturninus audibly.
“He can’t stop me, and nor can anyone else,” said Glaucia, loudly enough for the whole House to hear him.
“He’ll stop you,” said Saturninus.
“As for you, Lucius Appuleius,” Marius said, turning now to look at the tribunes’ bench, “I hear a rumor that you intend to seek a third term as a tribune of the plebs. Now that is not against the law. Therefore I cannot stop you. But I can ask you to give up the notion. Do not give our meaning of the word ‘demagogue’ a new interpretation. What you have been doing during the past few months is not customary political practice for a member of the Senate of Rome. With our immense body of laws and our formidable talent for making the cogs and gears of government work in the interests of Rome as we know it, there is no necessity to exploit the political gullibility of the lowly. They are innocents who should not be corrupted. It is our duty to look after them, not to use them to further our own political ends.”
“Are you finished?” asked Saturninus.
“Quite finished, Lucius Appuleius.” And the way Marius said it, it had many meanings.
*
So that was over and done with, he thought as he walked home with the crafty new gait he had developed to disguise a tiny tendency to foot-drop on the left side. How odd and how awful those months in Cumae had been, when he had hidden away and seen as few people as possible because he couldn’t bear the horror, the pity, the gloating satisfaction. Most unbearable of all were those who loved him enough to grieve, like Publius Rutilius. Sweet and gentle Julia had turned into a positive tyrant, and flatly forbidden anyone, even Publius Rutilius, to say one word about politics or public business. He hadn’t known of the grain crisis, he hadn’t known of Saturninus’s wooing of the lowly; his life had constricted to an austere regimen of diet, exercise, and reading the Classics. Instead of a nice bit of bacon with fried bread, he ate baked watermelon because Julia had heard it purged the kidneys, both the bladders, and the blood of stones; instead of walking to the Curia Hostilia, he hiked to Baiae and Misenum; instead of reading senatorial minutes and provincial dispatches, he plodded through Isocrates and Herodotus and Thucydides, and ended in believing none of them, for they didn’t read like men who acted, only like men who read.
But it worked. Slowly, slowly, he got better. Yet never again would he be whole, never again would the left side of his mouth go up, never again would he be able to disguise the fact that he was weary. The traitor within the gates of his body had branded him for all the world to see. It was this realization which finally prompted his rebellion; and Julia, who had been amazed that he remained docile for so long, gave in at once. So he sent for Publius Rutilius, and returned to Rome to pick up what pieces he could.
Of course he knew Saturninus would not stand aside, yet felt obliged to give him the warning; as for Glaucia, his election would never be allowed, so that was no worry. At least the elections would go ahead now, with the tribunes of the plebs set for the day before the Nones and the quaestors on the Nones, the day they were supposed to enter office. These were the disturbing elections, for they had to be held in the Comitia of the Forum Romanum, where the crowd milled every day, and shouted obscenities, and pelted the togate with filth, and shook their fists, and listened in blind adoration to Saturninus.
Not that they hissed or pelted Gaius Marius, who walked through their midst on his way home from that memorable meeting feeling nothing but the warmth of their love. No one lower than the Second Class would ever look unkindly upon Gaius Marius; like the Brothers Gracchi, he was a hero. There were those who looked upon his face, and wept to see it ravaged; there were those who had never set eyes on him in the flesh before, and thought his face had always been like that, and admired him all the more; but none tried to touch him, all stepped back to make a little lane for him, and he walked proudly yet humbly through them reaching out to them with heart and mind. A wordless communion. And Saturninus, watching from the rostra, wondered.
“The crowd is an awesome phenomenon, isn’t it?” Sulla asked Marius over dinner that evening, in the company of Publius Rutilius Rufus and Julia.
“A sign of the times,” said Rutilius.
“A sign that we’ve failed them,” said Marius, frowning. “Rome needs a rest. Ever since Gaius Gracchus we’ve been in some kind of serious trouble—Jugurtha—the Germans— the Scordisci—Italian discontent—slave uprisings—pirates—grain shortages—the list is endless. We need a respite, a bit of time to look after Rome rather than ourselves. Hopefully, we’ll get it. When the grain supply improves, at any rate.”
“I have a message from Aurelia,” said Sulla.
Marius, Julia, and Rutilius Rufus all turned to look at him curiously.
“Do you see her, Lucius Cornelius?” Rutilius Rufus the watchful uncle demanded.
“Don’t get clucky, Publius Rutilius, there’s no need!
Yes, I see her from time to time. It takes a native to sympathize, which is why I go. She’s stuck down there in the Subura, and it’s my world too,” he said, unruffled. “I still have friends there, so Aurelia’s on my way, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh dear, I should have asked her to dinner!” said Julia, distressed at her oversight. “Somehow she tends to be forgotten.”
“She understands,” said Sulla. “Don’t mistake me, she loves her world. But she likes to keep a little abreast of what’s happening in the Forum, and that’s my job. You’re her uncle, Publius Rutilius, you tend to want to keep the trouble from her. Where I tell her everything. She’s amazingly intelligent.”
“What’s the message?” asked Marius, sipping water.
“It comes from her friend Lucius Decumius, the odd little fellow who runs the crossroads college in her insula, and it goes something like this—if you think there have been crowds in the Forum, you haven’t seen anything yet. On the day of the tribunician elections, the sea of faces will become an ocean.”
*
Lucius Decumius was right. At sunrise Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla walked up onto the Arx of the Capitol and stood leaning on the low wall barring the top of the Lautumiae cliff to take in the sight of the whole Forum Romanum spread below. As far as they could see was that ocean of people, densely packed from the Clivus Capitolinus to the Velia. It was orderly, somber, shot with menace, breathtaking.
“Why?” asked Marius.
“According to Lucius Decumius, they’re here to make their presence felt. The Comitia will be in session to elect the new tribunes of the plebs, and they’ve heard that Saturninus is going to stand, and they think he’s their best hope for full bellies. The famine has only just begun, Gaius Marius. And they don’t want a famine,” said Sulla, voice even.
“But they can’t influence the outcome of a tribal election, any more than they can elections in the Centuries! Almost all of them will belong to the four city tribes.”
“True. And there won’t be many voters from the thirty-one rural tribes apart from those who live in Rome,” said Sulla. “There’s no holiday atmosphere today to tempt the rural voters. So a handful of what’s below will actually vote. They know that. They’re not here to vote. They’re just here to make us aware they’re here.”
“Saturninus’s idea?” asked Marius.
“No. His crowd is the one you saw on the Kalends, and every day since. The shitters and pissers, I call them. Just rabble. Denizens of crossroads colleges, ex-gladiators, thieves and malcontents, gullible shopkeepers bleeding from the lack of money, freedmen bored with groveling to their ex-masters, and many who think there might be a denarius or two to be made out of keeping Lucius Appuleius a tribune of the plebs.”
“They’re actually more than that,” said Marius. “They’re a devoted following for the first man ever to stand on the rostra and take them seriously.’’ He shifted his weight onto his paretic left foot. “But these people here today don’t belong to Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. They don’t belong to anyone. Ye gods, there weren’t more Cimbri on the field at Vercellae than I see here! And I don’t have an army. All I have is a purple-bordered toga. A sobering thought.”
“Indeed it is,” said Sulla.
“Though, I don’t know.... Maybe my purple-bordered toga is all the army I need. All of a sudden, Lucius Cornelius, I’m looking at Rome in a different light than ever before. Today they’ve brought themselves down there to show themselves to us. But every day they’re inside Rome, going about whatever is their business. Within an hour they could be down there showing themselves to us again. And we believe we govern them?”
“We do, Gaius Marius. They can’t govern themselves. They put themselves in our keeping. But Gaius Gracchus gave them cheap bread to eat, and the aediles give them wonderful games to watch. Now Saturninus comes along and promises them cheap bread in the midst of a famine. He can’t keep his promise, and they’re beginning to suspect he can’t. Which is really why they’ve come to show themselves to him during his elections,” said Sulla.
Marius had found his metaphor. “They’re a gigantic yet very good-natured bull. When he comes to meet you because you have a bucket in your hand, all he’s interested in is the food he knows you’ve got in the bucket. But when he discovers the bucket is empty, he doesn’t turn in terrible rage to gore you. He just assumes you’ve hidden his food somewhere on your person, and crushes you to death looking for it without even noticing he’s turned you into pulp beneath his feet.”
“Saturninus is carrying an empty bucket,” said Sulla.
“Precisely,’’ said Marius, and turned away from the wall. “Come, Lucius Cornelius, let’s take the bull by his horns.”
“And hope,” said Sulla, grinning, “that he doesn’t have any hay on them after all!”
No one in the gargantuan crowd made it difficult for the senators and politically minded citizens who normally always cast their votes in the Comitia to get through; while Marius mounted the rostra, Sulla went to stand on the Senate steps with the rest of the patrician senators. The actual voters of the Plebeian Assembly that day found themselves an island in the ocean of fairly silent onlookers—and a sunken island at that, the rostra like a flat-topped rock standing above the well of the Comitia and the top surface of the ocean. Of course Saturninus’s thousands of rabble had been expected, which had led many of the senators and normal voters to secret knives or clubs beneath their togas, especially Caepio Junior’s little band of conservative young boni; but here was no Saturninian rabble. Here was all of lowly Rome in protest. Knives and clubs were suddenly felt to be a mistake.
One by one the twenty candidates standing for election as tribunes of the plebs declared themselves, while Marius stood by watchfully. First to do so was the presiding tribune, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. And the whole vast crowd began to cheer him deafeningly, a reception which clearly amazed him, Marius discovered, shifting to where he could keep his eyes on Saturninus’s face. Saturninus was thinking, and transparently: what a following was this for one man! What might he not be able to do with three hundred thousand Roman lowly at his back? Who would ever have the courage to keep him out of the tribunate of the plebs when this monster cheered its approval?
Those who followed Saturninus in declaring their candidacies were greeted with indifferent silence; Publius Furius, Quintus Pompeius Rufus of the Picenum Pompeys, Sextus Titius whose origins were Samnite, and the red-haired, grey-eyed, extremely aristocratic-looking Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus, grandson of the Tusculan peasant Cato the Censor and great-grandson of a Celtic slave.
Last of all appeared none other than Lucius Equitius, the self-styled bastard son of Tiberius Gracchus whom Metellus Numidicus when censor had tried to exclude from the rolls of the Ordo Equester. The crowd began to cheer again, great billows of wildly enthusiastic sound; here stood a relic of the beloved Tiberius Gracchus. And Marius discovered how accurate his metaphor of the gigantic gentle bull had been, for the crowd began to move toward Lucius Equitius elevated on the rock of the rostra, utterly oblivious of its power. Its inexorable tidal swell crushed those in the Comitia and its environs closer and closer together. Little waves of panic began among these intending voters as they experienced the suffocating sense of helpless terror all men feel who find themselves at the center of a force they cannot resist.
While everyone else stood paralyzed, the paralyzed Gaius Marius stepped forward quickly and held out his hands palms facing-out, miming a gesture which commanded HALT HALT HALT! The crowd halted immediately, the pressure decreased a little, and now the cheers were for Gaius Marius, the First Man in Rome, the Third Founder of Rome, the Conqueror of the Germans.
“Quickly, you fool!” he snapped at Saturninus, who stood apparently rapt, entranced by the noise emanating from those cheering throats. “Say you heard thunder— anything to dismiss the meeting! If we don’t get our voters out of the Comitia, the crowd will kill them by sheer weight of numbers!’’ Then he had the heralds sound their trumpets, and in the sudden silence he lifted his hands again. “Thunder!” he shouted. “The voting will take place tomorrow! Go home, people of Rome! Go home, go home!”
And the crowd went home.
Luckily most of the senators had sought shelter inside their own Curia, where Marius followed as soon as he could make his way. Saturninus, he noted, had descended from the rostra and was walking fearlessly into the maw of the crowd, smiling and holding out his arms like one of those peculiar Pisidian mystics who believed in the laying-on of hands. And Glaucia the urban praetor? He had ascended the rostra, and stood observing Saturninus among the crowd, the broadest of smiles upon his fair face.
The faces turned to Marius when he entered the Curia were white rather than fair, drawn rather than smiling.
“And what a vat of pickles is this!” said Scaurus Princeps Senatus, unbowed as usual, but definitely a little daunted.
Marius looked at the clusters of Conscript Fathers and said, very firmly, “Go home, please! The crowd won’t hurt you, but slip up the Argiletum, even if you’re heading for the Palatine. If all you have to complain about is a very long walk home, you’re doing well. Now go! Go!”
Those he wanted to stay he tapped on the shoulder; just Sulla, Scaurus, Metellus Caprarius the censor, Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, Crassus Orator, and Crassus’s cousin Scaevola, who were the curule aediles. Sulla, he noticed with interest, went up to Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, murmured something to them, and gave them what looked suspiciously like affectionate pats on the shoulder as they left the building. I must find out what’s going on, said Marius to himself, but later. When I have the time. If I ever do, judging by this mess.
“Well, today we’ve seen something none of us has ever seen before,” he began. “Frightening, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think they mean any harm,” said Sulla.
“Nor do I,” said Marius. “But they’re still the gigantic bull who doesn’t know his own strength.” He beckoned to his chief scribe. “Find someone to run up the Forum, will you? I want the president of the College of Lictors here at once.”
“What do you suggest we do?” asked Scaurus. “Postpone the plebeian elections?”
“No, we may as well get them over and done with,” Marius said positively. “At the moment our crowd-bull is a docile beast, but who knows how angry he might become as the famine worsens? Let’s not wait until he has to have hay wrapped round his horns to signify he gores, because it will be one of our chests he plugs if we do wait. I’ve sent for the head lictor because I think our bull will be bluffed tomorrow by a fence he could easily walk through. I’ll have the public slaves work all night to set up a harmless-looking barricade all the way around the well of the Comitia and the ground between the Comitia and the Senate steps—just the usual sort of thing we erect in the Forum to fence off the area of combat from the spectators during funeral games, because they’ll know the look of that, and not see it as a manifestation of fear on our part. Then I’ll put every lictor Rome possesses on the inside of the barricade—all in crimson tunics, not togate, but unarmed except for staves. Whatever we do, we mustn’t give our bull the dangerous idea that he’s bigger and stronger than we are—bulls can think, you know! And tomorrow we hold the tribunician elections—I don’t care if there are only thirty-five men there to vote. Which means all of you will go visiting on your ways home today, and command the senators in your vicinity to turn up ready to vote tomorrow. That way, we’ll be sure to have at least one member of each of the tribes. It may be a skinny vote, but a vote it will be nonetheless. Understood, everyone?”
“Understood,” said Scaurus.
“Where was Quintus Lutatius today?” asked Sulla of Scaurus.
“Ill, I believe,” said Scaurus. “It would be genuine—he doesn’t lack courage.”
Marius looked at Metellus Caprarius the censor. “You, Gaius Caecilius, have the worst job tomorrow,” he said, “for when Equitius declares himself a candidate, I’m going to have to ask you if you will allow him to stand. How will you say?”
Caprarius didn’t hesitate. “I’ll say no, Gaius Marius. A man who was a slave, to become a tribune of the plebs? It’s unthinkable.”
“All right, that’s all, thank you,” Marius said. “Be on your way, and get all our quivering fellow members here tomorrow. Lucius Cornelius, stay. I’m putting you in charge of the lictors, so you’d better be here when their head man comes.”
*
The crowd was back in the Forum at dawn, to find the well of the Comitia cordoned off by the simple portable post-and-rope fencing they saw every time the Forum became the site of someone’s gladiatorial funeral games; a crimson-tunicked lictor holding a long thick stave was positioned every few feet on the inside of the barricade’s perimeter. Nothing nasty in that. And when Gaius Marius stepped forward and shouted his explanation, that he wanted no one inadvertently crushed, he was cheered as loudly as on the previous day. What the crowd couldn’t see was the group inside the Curia Hostilia, positioned there well before dawn by Sulla: his fifty young members of the First Class, all clad in cuirasses and helmets, swords and daggers belted on, and carrying shields. An excited Caepio Junior was only their deputy leader, however, for Sulla was in command himself.
“We move only if I say we move,” Sulla said, “and I mean it. If anyone moves without an order from me, I’ll kill him.”
On the rostra everyone was set to go; in the well of the Comitia a surprisingly large number of regular voters clustered along with perhaps half the Senate, while the patrician senators stood as always on the Senate steps. Among them was Catulus Caesar, looking ill enough to have been provided with a chair; also among them was the censor Caprarius, another whose plebeian status should have meant he went into the Comitia, but who wanted to be where everyone could see him.
When Saturninus declared his candidacy once more, the crowd cheered him hysterically; clearly his laying-on-of-hands visit on the previous day had worked wonders. As before, the rest of the candidates were greeted with silence. Until in last place came Lucius Equitius.
Marius swung to face the Senate steps, and lifted his one mobile eyebrow in a mute question to Metellus Caprarius; and Metellus Caprarius shook his head emphatically. To have spoken the question was impossible, for the crowd went on cheering Lucius Equitius as if it never intended to stop.
The heralds sounded their trumpets, Marius stepped forward, silence fell. “This man, Lucius Equitius, is not eligible for election as a tribune of the plebs!” he cried as loudly as he could. “There is an ambiguity about his citizen status which the censor must clarify before Lucius Equitius can stand for any public office attached to the Senate and People of Rome!”
Saturninus brushed past Marius and stood on the very edge of the rostra. “I deny any irregularity!”
“I declare on behalf of the censor that an irregularity does exist,” said Marius, unmoved.
So Saturninus turned to appeal to the crowd. “Lucius Equitius is as much a Roman as any of you!” he shrieked. “Look at him, only look at him! Tiberius Gracchus all over again!”
But Lucius Equitius was staring down into the well of the Comitia, a place below the vision of the crowd, even those in its forefront. Here senators and sons of senators were pulling knives and cudgels from beneath their robes, and moved as if to drag Lucius Equitius down into their midst.
Lucius Equitius, brave veteran of ten years in the legions—according to his own story, anyway—shrank back, turned to Marius, and clutched his free right arm. “Help me!” he whimpered.
“I’d like to help you with the toe of my boot, you silly troublemaker,” growled Marius. “However, the business of the day is to get this election over and done with. You can’t stand, but if you stay on the rostra someone’s going to lynch you. The best I can do to safeguard your hide is put you in the cells of the Lautumiae until everyone’s gone home.”
Two dozen lictors stood on the rostra, a dozen of them carrying the fasces because they belonged to the consul Gaius Marius; the consul Gaius Marius formed them around Lucius Equitius and had him marched away toward the Lautumiae, his progress through the crowd marked by a kind of parting of the people-ocean in response to the authority inherent in those simple crimson-corded bundles of rods.
I don’t believe it, thought Marius, eyes following the parting of the people-ocean. To hear them cheer, they adore the man the way they adore no gods. To them it must look as if I’ve put the creature under arrest. But what are they doing? What they always, always do whenever they see a line of lictors marching-along with fasces on their shoulders and some purple-bordered toga strutting at their rear— they’re standing aside to permit the majesty of Rome the right of way. Not even for a Lucius Equitius will they destroy the power of the rods and the purple-bordered toga. There goes Rome. What’s a Lucius Equitius, when all is said and done? A pathetic facsimile of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, whom they loved, loved, loved. They’re not cheering Lucius Equitius! They’re cheering the memory of Tiberius Gracchus.
And a new kind of pride-filled emotion welled up in Gaius Marius as he continued to watch that lictorial dorsal fin cleave the ocean of Roman lowly—pride in the old ways, the customs and traditions of six hundred and fifty-four years, so powerful still that it could turn a tide greater than the German invasion with no more effort than the shouldering of a few bundles of sticks. And I, thought Gaius Marius, stand here in my purple-bordered toga, unafraid of anything because I wear it, and know myself greater than any king who ever walked this globe. For I have no army, and inside their city I have no axes thrust into the rods, nor a bodyguard of swords; and yet they stand aside for the mere symbols of my authority, a few sticks and a shapeless piece of cloth rimmed with less purple than they can see any day on some unspeakable saltatrix tonsa parading his stuff. Yes, I would rather be consul of Rome than king of the world.
Back came the lictors from the Lautumiae, and shortly thereafter back came Lucius Equitius, whom the crowd gently rescued from the cells and popped back on the rostra with a minimum of fuss—almost, it seemed to Marius, apologetically. And there he stood, a shivering wreck, wishing himself anywhere but where he was. To Marius the crowd’s message was explicit: fill my bucket, I’m hungry, don’t hide my food.
In the meantime Saturninus was proceeding with his election as quickly as he could, anxious to make sure he got himself returned before anything untoward could happen. His head was filled with dazzled dreams of the future, the might and majesty of that crowd, the way it showed its adoration of him. Did they cheer Lucius Equitius, just because he looked like Tiberius Gracchus? Did they cheer Gaius Marius, broken old idiot that he was, because he’d saved Rome from the barbarians? Ah, but they didn’t cheer Equitius or Marius the way they cheered him! And what material to work with—no rabble out of the Suburan stews, this crowd! This crowd was made up of respectable people whose bellies were empty yet whose principles remained intact.
One by one the candidates stepped forward, and the tribes voted, while the tally clerks scribbled busily and both Marius and Saturninus kept watch; until the moment when, in last place of all, it came time to deal with Lucius Equitius. Marius looked at Saturninus. Saturninus looked at Marius. Marius looked across to the Senate steps.
“What do you wish me to say this time, Gaius Caecilius Metellus Caprarius Censor?” Marius called out. “Do you wish me to continue denying this man the right to stand for election, or do you withdraw your objection?”
Caprarius looked helplessly at Scaurus, who looked at the grey-faced Catulus Caesar, who looked at Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, who refused to look at anyone. A long pause ensued; the crowd watched in silence, fascinated, not having the remotest idea what was going on.
“Let him stand!” shouted Metellus Caprarius.
“Let him stand,” said Marius to Saturninus.
And when the results were tallied, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus came in in first place for a third term as a tribune of the plebs; Cato Salonianus, Quintus Pompeius Rufus, Publius Furius, and Sextus Titius were elected; and, in second place, only three or four behind Saturninus, the ex-slave Lucius Equitius was returned as a tribune of the plebs.
“What a servile college we’re going to have this year!” said Catulus Caesar, sneering.’ ‘Not only a Cato Salonianus, but an actual freedman!”
“The Republic is dead,” said Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, with a look of loathing for Metellus Caprarius.
“Well, what else could I do?” bleated Metellus Billy Goat.
Other senators were coming up, and Sulla’s armed guard, divested of its accoutrements, emerged from the interior of the Curia. The Senate steps seemed the safest place, though it was becoming obvious that the crowd, having seen its heroes elected, was going home.
Caepio Junior spat in the direction of the crowd. “Goodbye to the rabble for today!” he said, face contorted. “Look at them! Thieves, murderers, rapists of their own daughters!”
“They’re not rabble, Quintus Servilius,” said Marius sternly. “They’re Roman and they’re poor, but not thieves or murderers. And they’re fed up with millet and turnips already. You’d better hope that friend Lucius Equitius doesn’t stir them up. They’ve been very well behaved throughout these wretched elections, but that could change as the millet and turnips get dearer and dearer in the markets.”
“Oh, there’s no need to worry about that!” said Gaius Memmius cheerfully, pleased that the tribunes of the plebs were duly elected and his joint candidacy with Marcus Antonius Orator for the consulship looked more promising than ever. “Things will improve in a few days. Marcus Antonius was telling me that our agents in Asia Province managed to buy in a great deal of wheat from way up at the north of the Euxine somewhere. The first of the grain fleets should arrive in Puteoli any day.”
Everyone was staring at him, openmouthed.
“Well,” said Marius, forgetting that he could not smile in sweet irony anymore, and so producing a terrifying grimace, “all of us are aware that you seem to have a gift for seeing the future of the grain supply, but how exactly do you happen to be privy to this information when I—the senior consul!—and Marcus Aemilius here—Princeps Senatus as well as curator annonae!—are not privy to it?”
Some twenty pairs of eyes were fixed on his face; Memmius swallowed. “It’s no secret, Gaius Marius. The subject came up in conversation in Athens when Marcus Antonius returned from his last trip to Pergamum. He saw some of our grain agents there, and they told him.”
“And why hasn’t Marcus Antonius seen fit to apprise me, the curator of our grain supply?” asked Scaurus icily.
“I suppose because—like me, really—he just assumed you knew. The agents have written, why wouldn’t you know?”
“Their letters haven’t arrived,” said Marius, winking at Scaurus. “May I thank you, Gaius Memmius, for bearing this splendid news?”
“Indeed,” said Scaurus, temper evaporating.
“We had better hope for all our sakes that no tempest blows up and sends the grain to the bottom of the Middle Sea,” Marius said, deciding the crowd had now dispersed enough for him to walk home, and not averse to talking with some of its members. “Senators, we meet here again tomorrow for the quaestorian elections. And the day after that, we will all go out to the Campus Martius to see the candidates for consuls and praetors declare themselves. Good day to you.”
“You’re a cretin, Gaius Memmius,” said Catulus Caesar crushingly from his chair.
Gaius Memmius decided he didn’t need an argument with one of the high aristocracy, and walked off in Gaius Marius’s wake, having decided he would visit Marcus Antonius in his hired villa on the Campus Martius and apprise him of the day’s events. As he strode out briskly he saw how he and Marcus Antonius could pick up additional merit with the electors. He would make sure their agents went among the Centuries as they gathered to witness the declaration of the curule candidates the day after tomorrow; they could spread the news of the coming grain fleets as if he and Marcus Antonius were responsible. The First and Second Classes might deplore the cost of cheap grain to the State, but having seen the size of the crowd in the Forum, Memmius thought they might be very grateful to think of Roman bellies full of bread baked from cheap grain.
At dawn on the day of the presentation of candidates in the saepta, he set off to walk from the Palatine to the Campus Martius, accompanied by an elated throng of clients and friends, all sure he and Antonius would get in. Buoyant and laughing, they walked briskly through the Forum Romanum in the cold breeze of a fine late-autumn morning, shivering a little when they passed through the deep shade of the Fontinalis Gate, but positive that down on the sunny plain spread beneath the Arx lay victory. Gaius Memmius would be consul.
Other men were walking to the saepta too, in groups, couples, trios, but rarely alone; a man of the classes important enough to vote in the curule elections liked company in public, for it added to his dignitas.
Where the road coming down from the Quirinal ran into the Via Lata, Gaius Memmius and his companions encountered some fifty men escorting none other than Gaius Servilius Glaucia.
Memmius stopped in his tracks, astounded. “And where do you think you’re going dressed like that?” he asked, eyeing Glaucia’s toga Candida. Specially bleached by days hanging in the sun, then whitened to blinding purity by copious applications of powdered chalk, the toga Candida could be worn only by one who was standing for election to a public office.
“I’m a candidate for the consulship,” said Glaucia.
“You’re not, you know,” said Memmius.
“Oh yes I am!”
“Gaius Marius said you couldn’t stand.”
“Gaius Marius said I couldn’t stand,” Glaucia mimicked in a namby-pamby voice, then ostentatiously turned his back on Memmius and began to speak to his followers in a loud voice which dripped homosexual overtones. “Gaius Marius said I couldn’t stand! Well! I must say it’s a bit stiff when real men can’t stand, but pretty little pansies can!”
The exchange had gathered an audience, not unusual under the circumstances, for part of the general enjoyment of the proceedings were the clashes between rival candidates; that this clash had occurred before the open field of the saepta had been reached made little difference to the audience, swelling as more and more men came along the Via Lata from town.
Painfully aware of the audience, Gaius Memmius writhed. All his life he had suffered the curse of being too good-looking, with its inevitable taunts—he was too pretty, he couldn’t be trusted, he liked boys, he was a lightweight—on and on and on. Now Glaucia saw fit to mock him in front of all these men, these voters. Oh, he didn’t need to have them reminded of the old homosexual tag on this day above all others!
And understandably Gaius Memmius saw red. Before anyone with him could anticipate his intention, he stepped forward, put his hand on Glaucia’s left shoulder, and ripped the pristine toga off it. Then as Glaucia spun round to see who was assaulting him, Memmius swung a wild punch at Glaucia’s left ear, and connected. Down went Glaucia, Memmius on top of him, both pristine togas now grimed and smeared. But Glaucia’s men had concealed clubs and cudgels about their persons; out they came swinging; Glaucia’s men waded into the stunned ranks of Memmius’s companions, laying about with furious glee. The Memmius entourage disintegrated at once, its members flying in all directions crying for help.
Typical of uninvolved bystanders, the audience made no move to help, just watched with avid interest; to do it justice, however, no one looking on dreamed that what he saw was anything more than a brawl between two candidates. The weapons were a surprise, but the supporters of candidates had been known to carry weapons before.
Two big men lifted Memmius up and held him between them, struggling furiously, while Glaucia got to his feet kicking away his ruined toga. Glaucia said not a word. He plucked a club from someone standing near him, then looked at Memmius for a long moment. Up went the club, held in both hands like a mallet; and down it came upon Gaius Memmius’s strikingly handsome head. No one attempted to interfere as Glaucia bent to follow Memmius fall, and kept on beating, beating that head, handsome no longer. Only when it was reduced to pulp and brains and splatters did Glaucia cease his attack.
A look of incredulous and outraged frustration spread then across Glaucia’s face; he flung the bloodied club away and stared at his friend Gaius Claudius, watching ashen-faced.
“Will you shelter me until I can get away?” he asked.
Claudius nodded, speechless.
The audience was beginning to mutter and move in upon the group, while other men were running from the direction of the saepta; Glaucia turned and raced toward the Quirinal, his companions following him.
*
The news was carried to Saturninus as he prowled up and down the saepta, canvassing persuasively for Glaucia’s illegal candidacy. Covert yet angry glances told him how most of those hearing the news of Memmius’s murder felt, and he was branded as Glaucia’s best friend. Among the young senators and sons of senators a furious buzz was starting, while some of the sons of the more powerful knights gathered around their senatorial peers, and that enigmatic man Sulla was in the midst of it.
“We’d better get out of here,” said Gaius Saufeius, only the day before elected an urban quaestor.
“You’re right, I think we’d better,” said Saturninus, growing more and more uneasy at the anger he could feel all around.
Accompanied by his Picentine henchmen Titus Labienus and Gaius Saufeius, Saturninus left the saepta in a hurry. He knew whereabouts Glaucia would have gone—to Gaius Claudius’s house on the Quirinal—but when he got there Saturninus found its doors bolted and barred. Only after considerable yelling did Gaius Claudius open up and let the three friends in.
“Where is he?” Saturninus demanded.
“My study,” said Gaius Claudius, who had been weeping.
“Titus Labienus,” said Saturninus, “go and find Lucius Equitius, will you? We need him, the crowd thinks he’s lovely.”
“What are you up to?” Labienus asked.
“I’ll tell you when you bring me Lucius Equitius.”
Glaucia was sitting grey-faced in Gaius Claudius’s study; when Saturninus entered he looked up, but said not a word.
“Why, Gaius Servilius? Why?”
Glaucia shivered. “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said. “I just—I just lost my temper.”
“And lost us our chance at Rome,” said Saturninus.
“I lost my temper,” Glaucia said again.
He had stayed the night before the presentation of the curule candidates in this same house, for Gaius Claudius threw a party in his honor; more a creature than a man, Gaius Claudius admired Glaucia’s boldness in challenging the provisions of the lex Villia, and thought the best way to show his admiration was to use some of his large amounts of money to give Glaucia a memorable send-off down the canvassing path. The fifty men who later accompanied Glaucia on his walk to the saepta were all invited to the party, but no women of any sort had been invited, and the result was a comedy remarkable only for its bibulousness and its biliousness. At dawn no one was feeling very well, yet they had to go to the saepta with Glaucia to support him; clubs and cudgels seemed like a good idea. Just as unwell as the .rest, Glaucia gave himself an emetic and a bath, wrapped himself in his whitened toga, and set off with eyes screwed up against the thousand tiny hammers of a severe headache.
To meet the immaculate and laughing Memmius, his handsome head already held like a victor’s, was more than Glaucia’s frayed nerves could cope with. So he responded to Memmius ‘s opposition with a cruel taunt, and when Memmius tore away his toga, Glaucia lost all control. Now the deed was done, and could not be undone. Everything lay in ruins around Gaius Memmius’s shattered head.
Saturninus’s silent presence in the study was a different kind of shock; Glaucia began to understand the enormity of his deed, its ramifications and repercussions. Not only had he destroyed his own career, he had probably destroyed the career of his best friend as well. And that he couldn’t bear.
“Say something, Lucius Appuleius!” he cried.
Blinking, Saturninus emerged from his trancelike thoughts. “I think we have only one alternative left,” he said calmly. “We must get the crowd on our side, and use the crowd to make the Senate give us what we want — safe office, a ruling of extenuating circumstances for you, a guarantee none of us will face prosecution. I’ve sent Titus Labienus off to fetch Lucius Equitius, because it’s easier to sway the crowds with him there.” He sighed, flexed His hands. “The moment Labienus comes back, we’re off to the Forum. There’s no time to waste.”
“Should I come?” asked Glaucia.
“No. You stay here with your men, and have Gaius Claudius arm his slaves. And don’t let anyone in until you hear my voice, or Labienus’s, or Saufeius’s.” He got up. “By nightfall I have to control Rome. Otherwise—I’m finished too.”
“Abandon me!” said Glaucia suddenly. “Lucius Appuleius, there’s no need for this! Throw up your hands in horror at my deed, then put yourself in the forefront of the pack baying for my condemnation! It is the only way. Rome isn’t ready for a new form of government! That crowd is hungry, yes. It’s fed up with bungling government, yes. It wants some justice, yes. But not enough to beat in heads and tear out throats. They’ll Cheer you until they’re hoarse. But they won’t kill for you.”
“You’re wrong,” said Saturninus, who felt a little as if he walked on wool, light, free, invulnerable. “Gaius Servilius, all those people filling our Forum are greater in numbers and power than an army! Didn’t you see how the Policy Makers caved in at the knees? Didn’t you see Metellus Caprarius back down over Lucius Equitius? There was no bloodshed! The Forum’s run redder by far from the brawls of a hundred men, yet there were hundreds of thousands of them! No one is going to defy that crowd, yet it will never be necessary to arm them, or set them to beating in heads or tearing out throats. Their power is in their mass! A mass I can control, Gaius Servilius! All I need is my own oratory, proof of my devotion to their cause, and a wave or two from Lucius Equitius! Who can resist the man who runs that crowd like some gigantic siege apparatus? The straw men of the Senate?”
“Gaius Marius,” said Glaucia.
“No, not even Gaius Marius! And anyway, he’s with us!”
“He’s not,” said Glaucia.
“He may think he’s not, Gaius Servilius, but the fact that the crowd cheers him the way it cheers me and Lucius Equitius will make the Policy Makers and everyone else in the Senate see him in the same light as they see us! I don’t mind sharing the power with Gaius Marius—for a little while. He’s getting old, he’s had a stroke. What more natural than for him to die from another one?’’ asked Saturninus eagerly.
Glaucia was feeling better; he straightened in his chair and looked at Saturninus in mingled doubt and hope. “Could it work, Lucius Appuleius? Do you really think it could?”
And Saturninus stretched his arms toward the ceiling, vibrating confidence, a smile of savage joy upon his face. “It will work, Gaius Servilius. Leave everything to me.”
So Lucius Appuleius Saturninus went from the house of Gaius Claudius down to the rostra in the Forum Romanum, accompanied by Labienus, Saufeius, Lucius Equitius, and some ten or twelve other close adherents. He cut across the Arx, feeling that he should enter his arena from above, a demigod descending from a region on high filled with temples and divinities; so his first sight of the Forum was from the top of the Gemonian Steps, down which he intended to walk like a king. Shock made him stop. The crowd! Where was the crowd? Gone home after the quaestorian elections of the day before, was the answer; and with nothing scheduled to happen in the Forum, it saw no point in coming back. Nor was a single member of the Senate present anywhere, with events of that day all occurring out on the green field of the saepta.
However, the Forum wasn’t deserted; perhaps two or three thousand of Saturninus’s less reputable rabble paraded up and down, shouting and waving their fists, demanding free grain of the empty air. Sheer disappointment brought tears very close to the surface; then Saturninus looked sternly at the hard-bitten men roiling around the lower end of the Forum, and made a decision. They would do. They would have to do. He would use them as a spearhead; through them he would draw the vast crowd back into the Forum— for they mingled with the members of that vast crowd, where he did not.
Wishing he had heralds to trumpet his arrival, Saturninus walked down the Gemonian Steps and strode to the rostra, his little band of followers shouting to the rabble to gather round and hear Lucius Appuleius.
“Quirites!” he addressed them amid howling cheers, holding out his arms for silence. “Quirites, the Senate of Rome is about to sign our death warrants! I, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, as well as Lucius Equitius and Gaius Servilius Glaucia, are to be accused of the murder of a minion of the nobility, an effeminate puppet whose only purpose in putting himself up for election as consul was to make sure that you, People of Rome, continue to starve!” The dense collection about the rostra was silent and still, listening; Saturninus took confidence and energy from his intent auditors, and expanded upon his theme. “Why do you think you have received no grain, even after I passed my law to give it to you for a pittance? Because the First and Second Classes of our great city would prefer to buy less and sell it for more! Because the First and Second Classes of our city don’t want your hungry mouths turned in their direction! They think of you as the cuckoo in their nest, an extravagance Rome doesn’t need! You are the Head Count and the lower classes-—you’re not important any more, with all the wars won and the loot from them safe in the Treasury! Why spend that loot filling your worthless bellies? asks the Senate of Rome, and refuses to give me the funds I need to buy grain for your worthless bellies! For it would suit the Senate of Rome and the First and Second Classes of Rome very, very well if several hundred thousand of Rome’s so-called worthless bellies shrank to the point where their owners died of starvation! Imagine it! All that money saved, all those smelly overcrowded insulae emptied—what a green and spacious park could Rome become! Where you cramped yourselves to live, they would stroll in pleasure gardens, the money jingling in their purses and their bellies full! They don’t care about you! You’re a nuisance they’d be glad to be rid of, and what better way than an artificially induced famine?”
He had them, of course; they were growling in the backs of their throats like angry dogs, a rumble that filled the air with menace and Saturninus’s heart with triumph.
“But I, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, have fought to fill your bellies so long and so hard that now I am to be eliminated for a murder I did not commit!” That was a good one; he hadn’t committed murder either, he could speak the truth and have the truth ring unmistakably in every word! “With me will perish all my friends, who are your friends too. Lucius Equitius here, the heir to Tiberius Gracchus’s name and aims! And Gaius Servilius Glaucia, who so brilliantly frames my laws that not even the nobles who run the Senate can tamper with them!” He paused, he sighed, he lifted his arms helplessly. “And when we are dead, Quirites, who will be left to look after you? Who will carry on the good fight? Who will battle the privileged to fill your bellies? No one!”
The growl was now a roar, the mood of the throng was shot with potential violence, they were his to do with as he pleased. “Quirites, it is up to you! Do you want to stand by while we who love you and esteem you are put to death, innocent men? Or will you go home and arm yourselves, and run to every house in your neighborhood, and bring out the crowds?”
They began to move, but the shrieking Saturninus pulled them up with his voice. “Come back to me here in all your thousands upon thousands! Bring yourselves to me, and put yourselves in my charge! Before night has fallen, Rome will belong to you because it will belong to me, and then we shall see whose bellies are full! Then we’ll break open the Treasury, and buy grain! Now go, bring the whole city to me, meet me here in the heart of Rome, and show the Senate and the First and Second Classes who really rules our city and our empire!”
Like a vast number of tiny balls shocked by a single blow from a hammer on the rim containing them, the rabble scattered in all directions at a run, screaming incoherent babbles of words, while Saturninus sank back on his heels, and turned on the rostra to face his henchmen.
“Oh, wonderful!” cried Saufeius, straining at the leash.
“We’ll win, Lucius Appuleius, we’ll win!” cried Labienus.
Surrounded by men pounding his back in euphoric glee, Saturninus stood royally and contemplated the enormity of his future.
At which point Lucius Equitius burst into tears. “But what are you going to do?” he blubbered, mopping his face with the edge of his toga.
“Do? What do you think it sounded like, you imbecile? I’m going to take over Rome, of course!”
“With that lot?”
‘“Who is there to oppose them? And anyway, they’ll bring the giant crowd. You wait, Lucius Equitius! No one will be able to resist us!”
“But there’s an army of marines on the Campus Martius—two legions of them!” cried Lucius Equitius, still sniffling and shivering.
“No Roman army has ever ventured inside Rome except to triumph, and no man who ordered a Roman army to venture inside Rome would survive,” said Saturninus, contemptuous of this mean necessity; as soon as he was firmly in control, Equitius would have to go, likeness to Tiberius Gracchus or not.
“Gaius Marius would do it,” sobbed Equitius.
“Gaius Marius, you fool, will be on our side!” Saturninus said with a sneer.
“I don’t like it, Lucius Appuleius!”
“You don’t have to like it. If you’re with me, shut up the bawling. If you’re against me, I’ll shut up the bawling!” And Saturninus drew his finger across his throat.
*
One of the first to answer the call for help from Gaius Memmius’s friends was Gaius Marius. He arrived at the scene of the confrontation not more than a few moments after Glaucia and his cronies had gone running to the Quirinal, and found a hundred toga-clad members of the Centuries clustered around what was left of Gaius Memmius. They parted to let the senior consul through; with Sulla at his shoulder, he gazed down at the pulped remnants of head, then looked toward the place where the bloodstained club still lay bedaubed with fragments of hair and muscle and skin and skull.
“Who did this?” asked Sulla.
The answer came from a dozen men: “Gaius Servilius Glaucia.”
Sulla blew through his nose. “Himself?”
Everyone nodded.
“Does anyone know where he went from here?”
This time the answers conflicted, but Sulla finally established that Glaucia and his gang had raced toward the Sanqualis Gate onto the Quirinal; since Gaius Claudius had been one of them, it seemed likely they were heading for his house on the Alta Semita.
Marius hadn’t moved, hadn’t lifted his head from his silent contemplation of Gaius Memmius. Gently Sulla touched him on the arm; he stirred then, wiping the tears from his face with a fold of toga because he didn’t want to betray his left hand’s clumsiness by hunting for his handkerchief.
“On the field of war, this is natural. On the Field of Mars beneath the walls of Rome, it is an abomination!” he shouted, turning to face the men crowding around.
Other senior senators were arriving, among them Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, who took one swift look at Marius’s tear-streaked face, then down at the ground, and caught his breath.
“Memmius! Gaius Memmius?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes, Gaius Memmius,” said Sulla. “Murdered in person by Glaucia, all the witnesses say.”
Marius was weeping again, but made no attempt to conceal the fact as he looked at Scaurus. “Princeps Senatus,” he said, “I am convoking the Senate in the temple of Bellona immediately. Do you concur?”
“I do,” said Scaurus.
Some lictors were straggling up, their charge the senior consul having outdistanced them by several hundred paces despite his stroke.
“Lucius Cornelius, take my lictors, find the heralds, cancel the presentation of the candidates, send the flamen Martialis to the temple of Venus Libitina to bring the sacred axes of the fasces to us in Bellona, and summon the Senate,” said Marius. “I will go on ahead with Marcus Aemilius.”
“This has been,” said Scaurus, “an absolutely horrible year. In fact, in spite of all our recent vicissitudes, I don’t recall a year so horrible since the last year of Gaius Gracchus’s life.”
Marius’s tears had dried. “Then we’re overdue for it, I suppose,” he said.
“Let us hope at least there will be no worse violence done than the murder of Memmius.”
But Scaurus’s hope proved vain, though at first it seemed reasonable. The Senate met in the temple of Bellona and discussed the murder of Memmius; sufficient of its members had been eyewitnesses to make the guilt of Glaucia manifest.
“However,” said Marius firmly, “Gaius Servilius must be tried for his crime. No Roman citizen can be condemned without trial unless he declares war on Rome, and that is not an issue here today.”
“I’m afraid it is, Gaius Marius,” said Sulla, hurrying in.
Everyone stared at him. No one spoke.
“Lucius Appuleius and a group of men including the quaestor Gaius Saufeius have taken over the Forum Romanum,” announced Sulla. “They’ve displayed Lucius Equitius to the rabble, and Lucius Appuleius has announced that he intends to supplant the Senate and the First and Second Classes with a rule of the People administered by himself. They haven’t yet hailed him as King of Rome, but it’s being said already in every street and marketplace between here and the Forum—which means it’s being said everywhere.”
“May I speak, Gaius Marius?” asked the Leader of the House.
“Speak, Princeps Senatus.”
“Our city is in crisis,” Scaurus said, low-voiced yet clear-voiced, “just as it was during the last days of Gaius Gracchus. At that time, when Marcus Fulvius and Gaius Gracchus seized upon violence as the only means of attaining their desperate ends, a debate took place within the House—did Rome need a dictator to deal with a crisis so urgent, yet so short-lived? The rest is history. The House declined to appoint a dictator. Instead, it passed what might be called its ultimate decree—the Senatus Consultum de republica defendenda. By this decree the House empowered its consuls and magistrates to defend the sovereignty of the State in any way they considered necessary, and immunized them in advance from prosecution and the tribunician veto.”
He paused to look about him with immense seriousness. “I suggest, Conscript Fathers, that we deal with our present crisis in the same way—by a Senatus Consultum de republica defendenda.”
“I will see a Division,” said Marius. “All those in favor will pass to my left, all those against to my right.” And moved to his left first of them all.
No one moved to the right; the House passed its second Senatus Consultum de republica defendenda unanimously, which it had not done the first time.
“Gaius Marius,” said Scaurus, “I am empowered by the members of this House to instruct you as Rome’s senior consul to defend the sovereignty of our State in any way you deem fit or necessary. Furthermore, I hereby declare on behalf of this House that you are not subject to the tribunician veto, and that nothing you do or order done shall be held against you for future action in a court of law. Provided that they act under your instructions, this commission together with its indemnity is extended to the junior consul, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, and all the praetors. But you, Gaius Marius, are also empowered to choose deputies from among the members of this House who do not sit as consuls or praetors, and provided these deputies act under your instructions, this commission together with its indemnity is also extended to them.” Thinking of Metellus Numidicus’s face were he present to see Gaius Marius virtually made dictator by none other than Scaurus Princeps Senatus, Scaurus shot Marius a wicked look, but managed to keep his grin on the inside. He filled his lungs with air, and bellowed, “Long live Rome!”
“Oh, my stars!” said Publius Rutilius Rufus.
But Marius had no time or patience with the wits of the House, who would, he thought, wittify while Rome burned around them. Voice crisp yet calm, he proceeded to depute Lucius Cornelius Sulla to act as his second-in-command, ordered the store of weapons in the basement of the temple of Bellona to be broken out and distributed to those who lacked personal arms and armor, and told those who did own arms and armor to go home and get it while they could still move freely through the streets.
Sulla concentrated upon his young bloods, sending them flying in all directions, Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet the most eager of all. Incredulity was giving way to an outrage almost too great for mere anger; that a senator of Rome would attempt to seize rabble-fueled power in order to set himself up as a king was anathema. Political differences were forgotten, mere factions dissolved; ultra-conservatives lined up shoulder to shoulder with the most progressive Marians, all with their faces set obdurately against the wolfshead in the Forum Romanum.
Even as he organized his little army and those awaiting arms and armor from their houses bustled mouthing imprecations here and there, Sulla remembered her; not Dalmatica, but Aurelia. He sent four lictors on the double to her insula with a message to her to bar herself in, and a message to Lucius Decumius to make sure neither he nor his tavernload of operators were in the Forum Romanum for the next few days. Knowing Lucius Decumius, they wouldn’t be in the Forum anyway; while the rest of Rome’s rabble were rampaging up and down the Forum making noise and beating up innocent passers-by, the territory they normally patrolled was delightfully open to a raid or two, and no doubt that had been Lucius Decumius’s choice. Even so, a message couldn’t hurt, and Aurelia’s safety he cared about.
Two hours later everything and everyone was ready. Outside the temple of Bellona was the big open courtyard always known as Enemy Territory. Halfway down the temple steps was a square stone pillar about four feet high. When a just and rightful war was declared upon a foreign enemy—and were there any other kinds of wars?—a special fetial priest was called upon to hurl a spear from the steps of the temple over the exact top of the ancient stone pillar into the earth of Enemy Territory. No one knew how or why the ritual had started, but it was a part of tradition, and so it was still observed. But today there was no foreign enemy upon whom to declare war, just a senatorial decree to obey; so no fetial priest hurled a spear, and Enemy Territory was filled with Romans of the First and Second Classes.
The whole gathering—perhaps a thousand strong—was now girt for war, chests and backs encased in cuirasses, a few sporting greaves upon their shins, most also clad in leather undersuits flapping fringed pteryges as kilts and sleeves, and all wearing crested helmets. No one carried a spear; all were armed with the good Roman short-sword and dagger, and old-fashioned pre-Marian oval shields five feet high.
Gaius Marius stepped to the front of the Bellona podium and spoke to his little army. “Remember that we are Romans and we are entering the city of Rome,” he said gravely. “We will step across the pomerium. For that reason I will not call the marines of Marcus Antonius to arms. We ourselves can deal with this, we do not need a professional army. I am adamantly set against any more violence than is absolutely necessary, and I warn all of you most solemnly—the young among you particularly—that no blade is to be raised against a man with no blade. Take clubs and billets upon your shields, and use the flats of your swords only. Where possible, wrest a wooden weapon from one of the crowd, sheath your sword, and use wood. There will be no heaps of dead and dying in the heart of Rome! That would break the Republic’s good luck, and then the Republic would be no more. All we have to do today is avert violence, not make it.
“You are my troops,” he went on sternly, “but few among you have served under me in any army until this one. So take heed of this, my only warning. Those who disobey my orders or the orders of my legates will be killed. This is not an occasion for factions. Today there are no types of Romans. Just Romans. There are many among you who have no love for the Head Count and Rome’s other lowly. But I say to you—and mark me well!—that a Head Count Roman is a Roman, and his life is as sacred and protected by the law as my life is, or your lives are. There will be no bloodbath! If I see so much as the start of one, I will be down there with my sword raised against those raising swords—and under the conditions of the Senate’s decree, your heirs cannot exact retribution of any kind from me should I kill you! You will take your orders from only two men—from me, and from Lucius Cornelius Sulla here. Not from any other curule magistrate empowered under this decree. I want no attack unless I call for it or Lucius Cornelius calls for it. We do this thing as gently as we can. Understood?”
Catulus Caesar tugged his forelock in mock obsequiousness. “We hear and obey, Gaius Marius. I have served under you before—I know you mean what you say.”
“Good!” said Marius cordially, ignoring the sarcasm. He turned to his junior consul. “Lucius Valerius, take fifty men and go to the Quirinal. If Gaius Servilius Glaucia is at the house of Gaius Claudius, arrest him. If he refuses to come out, you and your men will remain on guard without attempting to get inside. And keep me informed.”
*
It was early afternoon when Gaius Marius led his little army out of Enemy Territory and into the city through the Carmentalis Gate. Coming from the Velabrum, they appeared out of the alleyway which led between the temple of Castor and the Basilica Sempronia, and took the crowd in the lower Forum completely by surprise. Armed with whatever they could lay their hands upon—cudgels, clubs, billets, knives, axes, picks, pitchforks—Saturninus’s men had swelled to perhaps four thousand in number; but compared to the competent thousand who marched tightly packed into the Forum and formed up in front of the Basilica Sempronia, they were a paltry gang. One look at the breastplates, helmets, and swords of the newcomers was enough to send almost half of them running headlong up the Argiletum and the eastern side of the Forum toward the anonymity of the Esquiline and the safety of home ground.
“Lucius Appuleius, give this up!” roared Marius, in the forefront of his force with Sulla beside him.
Atop the rostra with Saufeius, Labienus, Equitius, and some ten others, Saturninus stared at Marius slack-jawed; then he threw back his head and laughed; meant to sound confident and defiant, it came out hollow.
“Your orders, Gaius Marius?” Sulla asked.
“We take them in a charge,” said Marius. “Very sudden, very hard. No swords drawn, just shields to the front. I never thought they’d be such a motley lot, Lucius Cornelius! They’ll break easily.”
Sulla and Marius went round their little army and readied it, shields swung to the front, a line of men two hundred long, and five men deep.
And then: “Charge!” shrieked Gaius Marius.
The maneuver was immediately effective. A solid wall of shields carried at a run hit the rabble like an enormous wave of water. Men and makeshift weapons flew everywhere and not a retaliatory blow was struck; then before Saturninus’s men could organize themselves better, the wall of shields crashed into them again, and again.
Saturninus and his companions came down from the rostra to join the fray, brandishing naked swords. To no effect. Though they had started out thirsting for real blood, Marius’s cohort was now enjoying the novelty of this battering-ram approach, and had got into a rhythm which kept cannoning into the disordered rabble, pushing its men up like stones into a heap, drawing off to form the wall again, cannoning again. A few of the rabble were trampled underfoot, but nothing like a battle developed; it was a debacle instead.
Only a short time elapsed before Saturninus’s entire force was fleeing the field; the great occupation of the Forum Romanum was over, and almost bloodlessly. Saturninus, Labienus, Saufeius, Equitius, a dozen Romans, and some thirty armed slaves ran up the Clivus Capitolinus to barricade themselves inside the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, calling upon the Great God to give them succor and send that gigantic crowd back into the Forum.
“Blood will flow now!” screamed Saturninus from the podium of the temple atop the Capitol, his words clearly audible to Marius and his men. “I will make you kill Romans before I am done, Gaius Marius! I will see this temple polluted with the blood of Romans!’’
“He might be right,” said Scaurus Princeps Senatus, looking extremely satisfied and happy in spite of this fresh worry.
Marius laughed heartily. “No! He’s posturing like one of those defenseless little animals plumed with fierce-looking eyes, Marcus Aemilius. There’s a simple answer to this siege, believe me. We’ll have them out of there without spilling one drop of Roman blood.” He turned to Sulla. “Lucius Cornelius, find the city water company engineers, and have them cut off all water to the Capitoline Hill at once.”
The Leader of the House shook his head in wonder. “So simple! But so obvious I for one would never have seen it. How long will we have to wait for Saturninus to surrender?”
“Not long. They’ve been engaged in thirsty work, you see. Tomorrow is my guess. I’m going to send enough men up there to ring the temple round, and I’m going to order them to taunt our fugitives remorselessly with their lack of water.”
“Saturninus is a very desperate character,” said Scaurus.
That was a judgment Marius disagreed with, and said so. “He’s a politician, Marcus Aemilius, not a soldier. It’s power he’s come to understand, not force of arms, and he can’t make a workable strategy for himself.” The twisted side of Marius’s face came round to frighten Scaurus, its drooping eye ironic, and the smile which pulled the good side of his face up was a terrible thing to see. “If I was in Saturninus’s shoes, Marcus Aemilius, you’d have cause to worry! Because by now I’d be calling myself the King of Rome, and you would all be dead.”
Scaurus Princeps Senatus stepped back a pace instinctively. “I know, Gaius Marius,” he said. “I know!”
“Anyway,” said Marius cheerfully, removing the awful side of his face from Scaurus’s view, “luckily I’m not King Tarquinius, though my mother’s family is from Tarquinia! A night in the same room as the Great God will bring Saturninus round.”
Those in the rabble who had been caught and detained when it broke and fled were rounded up and put under heavy guard in the cells of the Lautumiae, where a scurrying group of censor’s clerks sorted out the Roman citizens from the non-Romans; those who were not Romans were to be executed immediately, while the Romans would be summarily tried on the morrow, and flung down from the Tarpeian Rock of the Capitol straight after.
Sulla returned as Marius and Scaurus began to walk away from the lower Forum.
“I have a message from Lucius Valerius on the Quirinal,’’ he said, looking considerably fresher for the day’s events. “He says Glaucia is there inside Gaius Claudius’s house all right, but they’ve barred the gates and refuse to come out.”
Marius looked at Scaurus. “Well, Princeps Senatus, what will we do about that situation?”
“Like the lot in the company of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, why not leave matters lie overnight? Let Lucius Valerius guard the house in the meantime. After Saturninus surrenders, we can have the news shouted over Gaius Claudius’s wall, and then see what happens.”
“A good plan, Marcus Aemilius.”
And Scaurus began to laugh. “All this amicable concourse with you, Gaius Marius, is not going to enhance my reputation among my friends the Good Men!” he spluttered, and caught at Marius’s arm. “Nonetheless, Good Man, I am very glad we had you here today. What say you, Publius Rutilius?”
“I say—you could not have spoken truer words.”
*
Lucius Appuleius Saturninus was the first of all those in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus to surrender; Gaius Saufeius was the last. The Romans among them, some fifteen altogether, were detained on the rostra in full view of all who cared to come and see—not many, for the crowd stayed home. Under their eyes those among the rabble who were Roman citizens—almost all, for this was not a slave uprising—were tried in a specially convened treason court, and sentenced to die from the Tarpeian Rock.
Jutting out from the southwest side of the Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock was a basaltic overhang above a precipice only eighty feet in height; that it killed was due to the presence of an outcrop of needle-sharp rocks immediately below.
The traitors were led up the slope of the Clivus Capitolinus, past the steps of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, to a spot on the Servian Walls in front of the temple of Ops. The overhang of the Tarpeian Rock projected out of the wall, and was clearly visible in profile from the lower part of the Forum Romanum, where crowds suddenly appeared to watch the partisans of Lucius Appuleius Saturninus go to their deaths—crowds with empty bellies, but no desire to demonstrate their displeasure on this day. They just wanted to see men thrown off the Tarpeian Rock, for it hadn’t happened in a long time, and the gossip grapevine had told them there were almost a hundred to die. No eyes in that crowd rested upon Saturninus or Equitius with love or pity, though every element in it was the same who cheered them mightily during the tribunician elections. The gossip grapevine was saying there were grain fleets on the way from Asia, thanks to Gaius Marius. So it was Gaius Marius they cheered in a desultory way; what they really wanted to see, for this was a Roman holiday of sorts, was the bodies pitched from the Tarpeian Rock. Death at a decent distance, an acrobatic display, a novelty.
*
“We can’t hold the trials of Saturninus and Equitius until feelings have died down a little,” said Scaurus Princeps Senatus to Marius and Sulla as the three of them stood on the Senate Steps while the parade of flailing miniature men dropped into space off the end of the Tarpeian Rock.
Neither Marius nor Sulla mistook his meaning; it was not the Forum crowd which worried Scaurus, but the more impulsive and angry among his own kind, growling more fiercely now that the worst was over. Rancor had shifted from Saturninus’s rabble to Saturninus himself, with special viciousness reserved for Lucius Equitius. The young senators and those not quite old enough to be senators were standing in a group on the edge of the Comitia with Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet in their forefront, eyeing Saturninus and his companions on the rostra very hungrily.
“It will be worse when Glaucia surrenders and joins them,” said Marius thoughtfully.
“What a paltry lot!” sniffed Scaurus. “You’d have thought at least some of them would have done the proper thing, and fallen on their swords! Even my slack-livered son did that!”
“I agree,” said Marius. “However, here we are with fifteen of them—sixteen when Glaucia comes out—to try for treason, and some very resentful fellows down there who remind me of a pack of wolves eyeing a herd of deer.’’
“We’ll have to hold them somewhere for at least several days,” said Scaurus, “only where? For the sake of Rome we cannot permit them to be lynched.”
“Why not?” asked Sulla, contributing his first mite to the discussion.
“Trouble, Lucius Cornelius. We’ve avoided bloodshed in the Forum, but the crowd’s going to appear in force to see that lot on the rostra tried for treason. Today they’re entertained by the executions of men who don’t matter. But can we be sure they won’t turn nasty when we try Lucius Equitius, for instance?” asked Marius soberly. “It’s a very difficult situation.”
“Why couldn’t they have fallen on their swords?” asked Scaurus fretfully. “Think of all the trouble they would have saved us! Suicide an admission of guilt, no trials, no strangler in the Career Tullianum—we don’t dare throw them off the Tarpeian Rock!”
Sulla stood listening, his ears absorbing what was said, but his eyes resting thoughtfully upon Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet. However, he said nothing.
“Well, the trial is something we’ll worry about when the time comes,” said Marius. “In the meantime, we have to find somewhere to put them where they’ll be safe.”
“The Lautumiae is out of the question,” said Scaurus at once. “If for some reason—or at someone’s instigation— a big crowd decides to rescue them, those cells will never withstand attack, not if every lictor we have is standing guard. It’s not Saturninus I’m concerned about, but that ghastly creature Equitius. All it will take is for one silly woman to start weeping and wailing because the son of Tiberius Gracchus is going to die, and we could have trouble.” He grunted. “And as if that weren’t enough, look at our young bloods down there, slavering. They wouldn’t mind lynching Saturninus in the least.”
“Then I suggest,” said Marius joyously, “that we shut them up inside the Curia Hostilia.”
Scaurus Princeps Senatus looked stunned. “We can’t do that, Gaius Marius!”
“Why not?”
“Imprison traitors in the Senate House! It’s—it’s—why, it’s like offering our old gods a sacrifice of a turd!”
“They’ve already fouled the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, everything to do with the State religion is going to have to be purified anyway. The Curia has absolutely no windows, and the best doors in Rome. The alternative is for some of us to volunteer to hold them in our own homes— would you like Saturninus? Take him, and I’ll take Equitius. I think Quintus Lutatius should have Glaucia,” said Marius, grinning.
“The Curia Hostilia is an excellent idea,” said Sulla, still looking thoughtfully at Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet.
“Grrrr!” snarled Scaurus Princeps Senatus, not at Marius or Sulla, but at circumstances. Then he nodded decisively. “You are quite right, Gaius Marius. The Curia Hostilia it must be, I’m afraid.”
“Good!” said Marius, clapped Sulla on the shoulder in a signal to move off, and added with a frightful lopsided grin, “While I see to the details, Marcus Aemilius, I’ll leave it to you to explain to your fellow Good Men why we need to use our venerable meeting-house as a prison.”
“Why, thank you!” said Scaurus.
“Think nothing of it.”
When they were out of earshot of all who mattered, Marius glanced at Sulla curiously. “What are you up to?” he asked.
“I’m not sure I’m going to tell you,” said Sulla.
“You’ll be careful, please. I don’t want you hauled up for treason.”
“I’ll be careful, Gaius Marius.”
*
Saturninus and his confederates had surrendered on the eighth day of December; on the ninth, Gaius Marius reconvened the Centuriate Assembly and heard the declaration of candidates for the curule magistracies.
Lucius Cornelius Sulla didn’t bother going out to the saepta; he was busy doing other things, including having long talks with Caepio Junior and Metellus Piglet, and squeezing in a visit to Aurelia, though he knew from Publius Rutilius Rufus that she was all right, and that Lucius Decumius had kept his tavern louts away from the Forum Romanum.
The tenth day of the month was the day upon which the new tribunes of the plebs entered office; but two of them, Saturninus and Equitius, were locked up in the Senate House. And everyone was worried that the crowd might reappear, for it seemed to be most interested in the doings of the tribunes of the plebs.
Though Marius would not permit his little army of three days before to come to the Forum Romanum clad in armor or girt with swords, he had the Basilica Porcia closed off to its normal complement of merchants and bankers, and kept it purely for the storage of arms and armor; on its ground floor at the Senate House end were the offices of the College of Tribunes of the Plebs, and here the eight who were not involved in the Saturninus business were to assemble at dawn, after which the inaugural meeting of the Plebeian Assembly would be conducted as quickly as possible, and with no reference to the missing two.
But dawn had not yet broken and the Forum Romanum was utterly deserted when Caepio Junior and Metellus Pius Piglet led their raiding party down the Argiletum toward the Curia Hostilia. They had gone the long way round to make sure no guard detected them, but when they spread out around the Curia, they discovered they had the whole area to themselves.
They carried long ladders which they propped against both sides of the building, reaching all the way up to the ancient fan-shaped tiles of the eaves, lichen-covered, brittle.
“Remember,” said Caepio Junior to his troops, “that no sword must be raised, Lucius Cornelius says. We must abide by the letter of Gaius Marius’s orders.”
One by one they scaled the ladders until the entire party of fifty squatted along the edge of the roof, which was shallow in pitch, and not an uncomfortable place to roost. There in the darkness they waited until the pale light in the east grew from dove-grey to bright gold, and the first rays of the sun came stealing down from the Esquiline Hill to bathe the roof of the Senate House. Some people were beginning to arrive below, but the ladders had been drawn up onto the Curia’s roof too, and no one noticed anything untoward because no one thought to look upward.
“Do it!” cried Caepio Junior.
Racing time—for Lucius Cornelius had told them they would not have very long—the raiding party began ripping tiles off the oak frames between the far more massive cedar beams. Light flooded into the hall below, bouncing off fifteen white faces staring up, more startled than terrified. And when each man on the roof had a stack of tiles beside him, he began to hurl them down through the gap he had made, straight into those faces. Saturninus fell at once, as did Lucius Equitius. Some of the prisoners tried to shelter in the hall’s farthest corners, but the young men on the roof very quickly became skilled at pitching their tiles in any direction accurately. The hall held no furniture of any kind, its users bringing their own stools with them, and the clerks a table or two from the Senate Offices next door on the Argiletum. So there was nothing to shield the prisoners below from the torrent of missiles, more effective as weapons than Sulla had suspected. Each tile broke upon impact with razor-sharp edges, and each weighed ten pounds.
By the time Marius and his legates—including Sulla— got there, it was all over; the raiding party was descending the ladders to the ground, where its members stood quietly, no one trying to escape.
“Shall I arrest them?” asked Sulla of Marius.
Marius jumped, so deep in thought had he been when the quick question came. “No!” he said. “They’re not going anywhere.” And he glanced at Sulla, a covert sideways look which asked a silent question. And got his answer with the ghost of a wink.
“Open the doors,” said Marius to his lictors.
Inside the early sun threw rays and beams through a pall of slowly settling dust and lit up the lichen-grey heaps of tiles lying everywhere, their broken edges and more sheltered undersides a rich rust-red, almost the color of blood. Fifteen bodies lay squeezed into the smallest huddles or splayed with arms akimbo and legs twisted, half-buried by shattered tiles.
“You and I, Princeps Senatus,” said Marius. “No one else.”
Together they entered the hall and picked their way from one body to the next, looking for signs of life. Saturninus had been struck so quickly and effectively that he hadn’t tried to hunch himself up protectively; his face was hidden below a carapace of tiles, and when revealed looked sightlessly into the sky, his black lashes caked with tile dust and plaster dust. Scaurus bent to close the eyes, and winced fastidiously; so much dust lay upon the drying eyeballs that the lids refused to come down. Lucius Equitius had fared worst. Hardly an inch of him was not bruised or cut or swollen from a tile, and it took Marius and Scaurus many moments to toss aside the heap burying him. Saufeius— who had run into a corner—had died from a shard which apparently struck the floor and bounced up to lodge itself like a huge fat spearhead in the side of his neck; his head was almost severed. And Titus Labienus had taken the long edge of an unfractured tile in the small of his back, gone down without feeling anything below the colossal break in his spine.
Marius and Scaurus conferred.
“What am I to do with those idiots out there?” Marius asked.
“What can you do?”
The right half of Marius’s upper lip lifted. “Oh, come, Princeps Senatus! Take some of the burden upon your scraggy old carcass! You’re not going to skip away from any of this, so much do I promise. Either back me—or be prepared for a fight that will leave everything done here today looking like the women’s Bona Dea festival!”
“All right, all right!” said Scaurus irritably. “I didn’t mean I wouldn’t back you, you literal-minded rustic! All I meant was what I said—what can you do?”
“Under the powers invested in me by the Senatus Consultum I can do whatever I like, from arresting every last one of that brave little band outside, to sending them home without so much as a verbal chastisement. Which do you consider expedient?”
“The expedient thing is to send them all home. The proper thing is to arrest them and charge them with the murder of fellow Romans. Since the prisoners hadn’t stood trial, they were still Roman citizens when they met their deaths.”
Marius cocked his only mobile eyebrow. “So which course shall I take, Princeps Senatus? The expedient one—or the proper one?’’
Scaurus shrugged. “The expedient one, Gaius Marius. You know that as well as I do. If you take the proper one, you’ll drive a wedge so deeply into Rome’s tree that the whole world might fall along with it.”
They walked out into the open air and stood together at the top of the Senate steps, looking down into the faces of the people in the immediate vicinity; beyond these scant hundreds, the Forum Romanum was empty, clean, dreamy in the morning sun.
“I hereby proclaim a general amnesty!” cried Gaius Marius at the top of his voice. “Go home, young men,” he said to the raiding party, “you are indemnified along with everyone else.” He turned to the main body of his listeners.
“Where are the tribunes of the plebs? Here? Good! Call your meeting, there is no crowd. The first business of the day will be the election of two more tribunes of the plebs. Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Lucius Equitius are dead. Chief lictor, send for some of your fellows and the public slaves, and clear up the mess inside the Curia Hostilia. Give the bodies to their families for honorable burial, for they had not been tried for their crimes, and are therefore still Roman citizens of good standing.”
He walked down the steps and crossed to the rostra, for he was senior consul and supervisor of the ceremonies which would inaugurate the new tribunes; had he been a patrician, his junior colleague would have seen to it, which was why one at least of the consuls had to be a plebeian, to have access to the concilium plebis.
And then it happened, perhaps because the gossip grapevine was in its usual splendid working order, and the word had sparkled up and down its tendrils with the speed of sunbeams. The Forum began to fill with people, thousands upon thousands of them hurrying from Esquiline, Caelian, Viminal, Quirinal, Subura, Palatine, Aventine, Oppian. The same crowd, Gaius Marius saw at once, which had jammed into the Forum during the elections of the tribunes of the plebs.
And, with the trouble largely over and a feeling of peace within his heart, he looked out into that ocean of faces and saw what Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had seen: a source of power as yet untapped, innocent of the guile experience and education brought, ready to believe some passionately eloquent demagogue’s self-seeking kharisma and put themselves under a different master. Not for me, thought Gaius Marius; to be the First Man in Rome at the whim of the gullible is no victory. I have enjoyed the status of First Man in Rome the old way, the hard way, battling the prejudices and monstrosities of the cursus honorum.
But, Gaius Marius concluded his thoughts gleefully, I shall make one last gesture to show Scaurus Princeps Senatus, Catulus Caesar, Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus, and the rest of the boni that if I had chosen Saturninus’s way, they’d be dead inside the Curia Hostilia all covered in tiles, and I’d be running Rome single-handed. For I am to Saturninus what Jupiter is to Cupid.
He stepped to that edge of the rostra which faced the lower Forum rather than the well of the Comitia, and held out his arms in a gesture which seemed to embrace the crowd, draw it to him as a father beckons his children. “People of Rome, go back to your houses!” he thundered. “The crisis is past. Rome is safe. And I, Gaius Marius, have great pleasure in announcing to you that a fleet of grain ships arrived in Ostia harbor yesterday. The barges will be coming upstream all day today, and by tomorrow there will be grain available from the State granaries of the Aventine at one sestertius the modius, the price which Lucius Appuleius Saturninus’s grain law laid down. However, Lucius Appuleius is dead, and his law invalid. It is I, Gaius Marius, consul of Rome, who gives to you your grain! The special price will continue until I step down from office in nineteen days’ time. After that, it is up to the new magistrates to decide what price you will pay. The one sestertius I shall charge you is my parting gift to you, Quirites! For I love you, and I have fought for you, and I have won for you. Never, never forget it! Long—live—Rome!”
And down from the rostra he stepped amid a wave of cheers, his arms above his head, that fierce twisted grin a fitting farewell, with its good side and its bad side.
Catulus Caesar stood rooted to the spot. “Did you hear that?” he gasped to Scaurus. “He just gave away nineteen days of grain—in his name! At a cost to the Treasury of thousands of talents! How dare he!”
“Are you going to get up on the rostra and contradict him, Quintus Lutatius?” asked Sulla, grinning. “With all your loyal young Good Men standing there getting off free?”
“Damn him!” Catulus Caesar was almost weeping.
Scaurus broke into peals of laughter. “He did it to us again, Quintus Lutatius!” he said when he was able. “Oh, what an earthshaker that man is! He stuck it to us, and he’s left us to pay the bill! I loathe him—but by all the gods, I do love him too!’’ And away he went into another paroxysm.
“There are times, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, when I do not even begin to understand you!” Catulus Caesar said, and stalked off in his best camel manner.
“Whereas I, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, understand you all too well,’’ said Sulla, laughing even harder than Scaurus.
*
When Glaucia killed himself with his sword and Marius extended the amnesty to Gaius Claudius and his followers, Rome breathed more easily; the Forum strife might be presumed to be over. But that was not so. The young Brothers Luculli brought Gaius Servilius Augur to trial in the treason court, and violence broke out afresh. Senatorial feelings ran high because the case split the Good Men; Catulus Caesar and Scaurus Princeps Senatus and their followers were firmly aligned with the Luculli, whereas Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus and Crassus Orator were committed by ties of patronage and friendship to Servilius the Augur.
The unprecedented crowds which had filled the Forum Romanum during the troubles with Saturninus had disappeared, but the habitual Forum frequenters turned out in force to witness this trial, attracted by the youth and pathos of the two Luculli—who were fully aware of this, and determined to use it in every way they could. Varro Lucullus, the younger brother, had donned his toga of manhood only days before the trial began; neither he nor the eighteen-year-old Lucius Lucullus yet needed to shave. Their agents, cunningly placed among the crowd, whispered that these two poor lads had just received the news that their exiled father was dead—and that the long-ennobled family Licinius Lucullus now had only these two poor lads to defend its honor, its dignitas.
Composed of knights, the jury had decided ahead of time that it was going to side with Servilius the Augur, who was a knight elevated to the Senate by his patron Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus. Even when this jury was being chosen, violence had played its part; the hired ex-gladiators of Servilius the Augur tried to prevent the trial’s going on. But the handy little band of young nobles run by Caepio Junior and Metellus Pius Piglet had driven the bully-boys from the scene, killing one as it did so. The jury understood this message, and resigned itself to listening to the Brothers Luculli with more sympathy than it had originally intended.
“They’ll convict the Augur,” said Marius to Sulla as they stood off to one side, watching and listening keenly.
“They will indeed,” said Sulla, who was fascinated by Lucius Lucullus, the older boy. “Brilliant!” he exclaimed when young Lucullus finished his speech. “I like him, Gaius Marius!”
But Marius was unimpressed. “He’s as haughty and pokered up as his father was.”
“You’re known to support the Augur,” said Sulla stiffly.
That shaft went wide; Marius just grinned. “I would support a Tingitanian ape if it made life difficult for the Good Men around our absent Piggle-wiggle, Lucius Cornelius.”
“Servilius the Augur is a Tingitanian ape,” said Sulla.
“I’m inclined to agree. He’s going to lose.”
A prediction borne out when the jury (eyeing Caepio Junior’s band of young nobles) returned a unanimous verdict of DAMNO, even after being moved to tears by the impassioned defense speeches of Crassus Orator and Mucius Scaevola.
Not surprisingly, the trial ended in a brawl which Marius and Sulla viewed from a suitably aloof distance, and with huge enjoyment from the moment when Ahenobarbus Pontifex Maximus punched an intolerably jubilant Catulus Caesar on the mouth.
“Pollux and Lynceus!” said Marius, delighted when the pair settled down to engage in serious fisticuffs. “Oh, go it, Quintus Lutatius Pollux!” he roared.
“Not a bad classical allusion, given that the Ahenobarbi all swear it was Pollux put the red in their inky beards,” said Sulla when a punch properly directed by Catulus Caesar smeared Ahenobarbus’s whole face with blood.
“And hopefully,” said Marius, turning away as soon as the brawl ended in defeat for Ahenobarbus, “that brings events in the Forum to an end for this hideous year.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Gaius Marius. We’ve still to endure the consular elections.”
“They’re not held in the Forum, one mercy.”
*
Two days later Marcus Antonius held his triumph, and two days after that he was elected senior consul for the coming year; his colleague in the consulship was to be none other than Aulus Postumius Albinus, whose invasion of Numidia had, ten years ago, precipitated the war against Jugurtha.
“The electors are complete asses!” said Marius to Sulla with some passion. “They’ve just elected as junior consul one of the best examples I know of ambition allied to no talent of any kind! Tchah! Their memories are as short as their turds!”
“Well, they say constipation causes mental dullness,” said Sulla, grinning despite the emergence of a new fear. He was hoping to run for praetor in the next year’s elections, but had today sensed a mood in the electors of the Centuriate Assembly that boded ill for Marian candidates in future. Yet how do I dissociate myself from this man who has been so good to me? he asked himself unhappily.
“Luckily, I predict it’s going to be a mentally dull year, and Aulus Albinus won’t be given a chance to ruin things,” Marius went on, unaware of Sulla’s thoughts. “For the first time in a long time, Rome has no enemies worth a mention. We can rest. And Rome can rest.”
Sulla made an effort, swung his mind away from a praetorship he knew was going to prove elusive. “What about the prophecy?” he asked abruptly. “Martha distinctly said you’d be consul of Rome seven times.”
“I will be consul seven times, Lucius Cornelius.”
“You believe that.”
“I do.”
Sulla sighed. “I’d be happy to reach praetor.”
A facial hemiparesis enabled its sufferer to blow the most wonderfully derisive noises; Marius blew one now. “Rubbish!” he said vigorously. “You are consul material, Lucius Cornelius. In fact, one day you’ll be the First Man in Rome.”
“I thank you for your faith in me, Gaius Marius.” Sulla turned a smile upon Marius almost as twisted as Marius’s were these days. “Still, considering the difference in our ages, I won’t be vying with you for the title,” he said.
Marius laughed. “What a battle of the Titans that would be! No danger of it,” he said with absolute certainty.
“With your retiring from the curule chair and not planning to attend the House, you’ll no longer be the First Man in Rome yourself, Gaius Marius.”
“True, true. But oh, Lucius Cornelius, I’ve had a good run! And as soon as this awful affliction of mine goes away, I’ll be back.”
“In the meantime, who will be the First Man in Rome?” asked Sulla. “Scaurus? Catulus?”
“Nemo!” bellowed Gaius Marius, and laughed uproariously. “Nobody! That’s the best joke of all! There’s not one of them can fill my shoes!”
Joining in the laughter, Sulla put his right arm across Marius’s togate back, gave it a squeeze of pure affection, and set their feet upon the road home from the saepta. In front of them reared the Capitoline Mount; a broad finger of chilly sun alighted upon the gilding of Victory’s four-horse chariot atop Jupiter Optimus Maximus’s temple pediment, and turned the city of Rome to dazzling gold.
“It hurts my eyes!” cried Sulla in real pain. But could not look away.
FINIS
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