“The most exciting thing that’s happened during the last fifteen months,’’ said Gaius Marius, “is the elephant Gaius Claudius showed at the ludi Romani.”
Aelia’s face lit up. “Wasn’t it wonderful?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair to reach the dish of huge green olives imported from Further Spain. “To be able to stand on its back legs and walk! And dance on all four legs! And sit on a couch and feed itself with its trunk!”
Turning a contemptuous face to his wife, Lucius Cornelius Sulla said very coldly, “Why is it people are charmed to see animals aping men? The elephant is the noblest creature in the world. Gaius Claudius Pulcher’s beast I found a double travesty—of man and elephant both.”
The pause which followed was infinitesimal, though everyone present in the dining room was uncomfortably aware of it; then Julia diverted all eyes from the blighted Aelia by laughing merrily. “Oh, come, Lucius Cornelius, it was the absolute favorite of the whole crowd!” she said. “I know I admired it—so clever and busy!—and when it lifted its trunk and trumpeted in time to the drum—amazing! Besides,” she added, “no one hurt it.”
“Well, I liked its color,” said Aurelia, thinking it wise to contribute her mite. “Pink!”
All of which Lucius Cornelius Sulla ignored by swiveling on his elbow and talking to Publius Rutilius Rufus.
Eyes sad, Julia sighed. “I think, Gaius Marius,” she said to her husband, “that it’s time we women withdrew and let you men enjoy your wine. Would you excuse us?”
Out went Marius’s hand across the narrow table between his couch and Julia’s chair; she lifted her own hand to clasp it warmly, and tried not to feel even sadder at the sight of his warped smile. So long now! Yet still his face bore the evidence of that insidious stroke. But what the loyal and loving wife could not admit, even to herself, was that the stroke had wrought a tiny havoc within Gaius Marius’s mind; the temper that now flared too easily, the increased emphasis he placed upon largely imagined slights, a hardening in his attitude toward his enemies.
She rose, disengaged her hand from Marius’s with a very special smile for him, and put the hand upon Aelia’s shoulder. “Come, my dear,” she said, “we’ll go down to the nursery.”
Aelia got up. So did Aurelia. The three men did not, though their conversation ceased until the women had gone from the room. A gesture from Marius sent the servants scurrying to clear the women’s chairs from the dining room after which they too vanished. Now only the three couches remained, forming a U; to make conversation easier, Sulla shifted from where he had lain beside Marius to the vacant couch facing Rutilius Rufus. Both of them were then able to see Marius as well as they could each other.
“So Piggle-wiggle is to come home at last,” said Lucius Cornelius Sulla when he was sure his detested second wife was out of earshot.
Marius shifted restlessly on the middle couch, frowning, but less direfully than of yore, for the lingering paralysis gave the left half of the grimace a mournful quality.
“What do you want to hear from me by way of answer, Lucius Cornelius?” Marius asked finally.
Sulla laughed shortly. “Why should I want anything but an honest answer? Though, you know, I did not phrase what I said as a question, Gaius Marius.”
“I realize that. But it required an answer nonetheless.”
“True,” said Sulla. “All right, I’ll rephrase it. How do you feel about Piggle-wiggle’s being recalled from exile?”
“Well, I’m not singing paeans of joy,” said Marius, and gave Sulla a piercing glance. “Are you?”
They have drifted subtly apart, thought Publius Rutilius Rufus, reclining on the second couch. Three years ago—or even two years ago—they could not have had such a tensely wary conversation. What happened? And whose fault is it?
“Yes and no, Gaius Marius.” Sulla stared down into his winecup. “I’m bored!” he said then through clenched teeth. “At least when Piggle-wiggle returns to the Senate, things might take an interesting turn. I miss those titanic battles you and he used to have.”
“In which case, Lucius Cornelius you’re going to be disappointed. I’m not going to be here when Piggle-wiggle arrives in Rome.”
Both Sulla and Rutilius Rufus sat up.
“Not going to be in Rome?” asked Rutilius Rufus, squeaking.
“Not going to be in Rome,” said Marius again, and grinned in sour satisfaction. “I’ve just remembered a vow I made to the Great Goddess before I beat the Germans. That if I won, I’d make a pilgrimage to her sanctuary at Pessinus.”
“Gaius Marius, you can’t do that!” said Rutilius Rufus.
“Publius Rutilius, I can! And I will!”
Sulla flopped on his back, laughing. “Shades of Lucius Gavius Stichus!” he said.
“Who?” asked Rutilius Rufus, always ready to be sidetracked if there was a possibility of gossip.
“My late lamented stepmother’s late lamented nephew,” said Sulla, still grinning. “Many years ago he moved into my house—it belonged to my late lamented stepmother then. His aim was to get rid of me by destroying Clitumna’s fondness for me, and his thinking was that if the two of us were there together in Clitumna’s house, he’d show me up. So I went away. Right away from Rome. With the result that he had nobody to show up except himself—which he did very effectively. Clitumna was fed up in no time.” He rolled over, belly down now. “He died not long afterward,” Sulla said reflectively, and heaved a stagey sigh through the middle of his smile. “I ruined all his plans!”
“Here’s hoping then that Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle finds his return a hollow victory,” said Marius.
“I’ll drink to that,” said Sulla, and did.
A silence fell that was not easy to break, for the old accord was missing, and Sulla’s answer had not brought it back. Perhaps, thought Publius Rutilius Rufus, that old accord was a matter of expedience and the battlefield, rather than a truly deep-seated friendship. Only how can they forget all those years when together they fought Rome’s foreign enemies? How can they let this Rome-induced discontent blot out all that’s gone before? The tribunate of Saturninus was the end of the old life. Saturninus, who had wanted to be king of Rome—and that unfortunate stroke of Marius’s. Then, said he to himself, Nonsense, Publius Rutilius Rufus! They’re both men who have to be up and doing important things, they’re just not the sort to like sitting at home—and being out of office when they are at home. Give them another war to fight together, or a Saturninus inciting revolution, and they’d be purring like a pair of cats washing each other’s faces.
Time got away, of course. He and Gaius Marius were in their sixtieth year, and Lucius Cornelius Sulla was forty-two. Not being addicted to peering into the uneven depths of a mirror, Publius Rutilius Rufus wasn’t sure how he himself had weathered the vicissitudes of age, but there was nothing wrong with his eyes at the distance from which he now viewed Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
Gaius Marius was sufficiently heavier these days to warrant the making of new togas; a big man always—but a fit and well-proportioned one—his extra weight was distributed on shoulders, back, hips and thighs as well as a rather muscular-looking paunch; and to some extent this additional burden he carried had smoothed out his face, which was bigger, rounder, higher in the forehead thanks to receding hair. Deliberately Rutilius Rufus ignored the left-sided paresis, dwelt instead upon those amazing eyebrows, as huge and bushy and undisciplined as ever. Oh, what storms of artistic consternation Gaius Marius’s brows had raised in many a sculptor’s breast! Commissioned to take the Marian portrait in stone for some town or guild or vacant plot just crying for a statue, those sculptors who lived in Rome or Italy knew before they set eyes on Gaius Marius what they had to contend with. But the look of horror on the face of some much-vaunted Greek sent by Athens or Alexandria to do a likeness of the most sculpted man since Scipio Africanus when he saw the Marian brows—! Each artist did what he could; yet even painted on a piece of board or linen, Gaius Marius’s face ended up as mere background for his eyebrows.
Whereas the best portrait of his old friend that Rutilius Rufus had ever seen had been a crude drawing in some black substance upon the outside wall of Rutilius Rufus’s own house. Just a few lines was all—a single voluptuous curve to suggest that full lower lip, a sort of glitter for the eyes—how could whoever did it make black seem a glitter?—and no more than ten lines for each eyebrow. Yet it was Gaius Marius to the life, with all the pride, the intelligence, the indomitability, the sheer character. Only how did one describe it, that form of art? Vultum in peius fingere ... A face fashioned out of malice. But so good that the malice had turned into truth. Alas, before Rutilius Rufus could work out how he might remove the piece of plaster without its crumbling into a thousand fragments, there had been a heavy fall of rain, and Gaius Marius’s best likeness was no more.
No backstreet scrawler upon walls could ever do that to Lucius Cornelius Sulla, however. Without the magic of color, Sulla could have been any of a thousand fairly handsome men. Regular face, regular features, a proper Romanness about him that Gaius Marius could never own. Yet seen in color, he was unique. At forty-two he showed no signs of thinning hair—such hair! Neither red, nor gold. Thick, waving, worn perhaps a little too long. And eyes like the ice in a glacier, the palest of blues, ringed around with a blue as dark as a thundercloud. Tonight his thin, upcurving brows were a good brown, as were his long thick lashes. But Publius Rutilius Rufus had seen him in more urgent circumstances, and knew that tonight, as was his wont, he had applied stibium to them; for in reality, Sulla’s brows and lashes were so fair they only showed at all because his skin was a pallid, almost unpigmented white.
Women lost sanity, virtue, judgment over Sulla. They threw caution to the winds, outraged their husbands and fathers and brothers, gushed and giggled if he so much as glanced at them in passing. Such an able, intelligent man! A superlative soldier, an efficient administrator, brave as any man could hope to be, little short of perfection at organizing himself or others. And yet women were his downfall. Or so thought Publius Rutilius Rufus, whose nice but homely face and ordinary mousy coloring had never distinguished him from a myriad other men. Not that Sulla was a philanderer, or even an occasional ladykiller; as far as Rutilius Rufus knew, he behaved with admirable rectitude. But there was no doubt that a man who hungered to reach the top of the Roman political ladder stood a much better chance of doing so if he did not have a face like Apollo’s; handsome men who were enormously attractive to women were generally mistrusted by their peers, dismissed as lightweights, or as effeminate fellows, or as potential cuckolders.
Last year, thought Rutilius Rufus, his reminiscences meandering on, Sulla had run for election as a praetor. Everything seemed to be in his favor. His war record was splendid—and well advertised, for Gaius Marius had made sure the electors knew how invaluable Sulla had been to him, as quaestor, tribune, and finally legate. Even Catulus Caesar (who had no real cause to love Sulla, the author of his embarrassment in Italian Gaul, when Sulla, by instigating a mutiny, had saved Catulus Caesar’s army from annihilation) had come forth and praised his services in Italian Gaul, the year the German Cimbri had been defeated. Then, during the few short days when Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had threatened the State, it had been Sulla, tirelessly energetic and efficient, who had enabled Gaius Marius to put an end to the business. For when Gaius Marius had issued an order, it had been Sulla who implemented it. Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus—he whom Marius, Sulla and Rutilius Rufus called Piggle-wiggle—had been assiduous before he went into exile in explaining to everyone he knew that in his opinion, the successful conclusion of the war in Africa against King Jugurtha was entirely due to Sulla, that Marius had claimed the credit unfairly. For it had been thanks to Sulla’s solo efforts that Jugurtha himself had been captured, and everyone knew that until Jugurtha was captured, the war in Africa would drag on. When Catulus Caesar and some of the other ultra-conservative leaders in the Senate agreed with Piggle-wiggle that the credit for the Jugurthine War should by rights go to Sulla, Sulla’s star seemed sure to rise, his election as one of the six praetors a certainty. To all of which had to be added Sulla’s own conduct in the matter—admirably modest, deprecating, fair-minded. Until the very end of the electoral campaign, he had insisted that his capture of Jugurtha must be attributed to Marius, as he himself had only been acting under Marius’s orders. This kind of conduct the voters usually appreciated; loyalty to one’s commander in the field or the Forum was highly prized.
And yet, when the Centuriate electors assembled in the saepta on the Campus Martius and the Centuries one by one gave their choices, the name of Lucius Cornelius Sulla—so aristocratic and acceptable in itself—was not among the six successful candidates; to add insult to injury, some of the men who were elected were as mediocre in achievement as in their ability to show the proper ancestors.
Why? Immediately after polling day, that was the question everyone attached to Sulla asked, though he said nothing. However, he knew why; a little later, Rutilius Rufus and Marius learned what Sulla already knew. The reason for his failure had a name, and was not physically very large. Caecilia Metella Dalmatica. Barely nineteen years old. And the wife of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus, he who had been consul in the year the Germans first appeared, censor in the year Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle had gone off to Africa to fight Jugurtha, and Leader of the House since his consulship, now seventeen years in the past. It had been Scaurus’s son who was contracted to marry Dalmatica, but he had killed himself after Catulus Caesar’s retreat from Tridentum, a self-confessed coward. And Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle, guardian of his seventeen-year-old niece, promptly gave her in marriage to Scaurus himself, though there were forty years between husband and wife.
No one, of course, had asked Dalmatica how she felt about the union, and at first she hadn’t been very sure herself. A little dazzled by the immense auctoritas and dignitas her new husband possessed, she was also glad to be free of her uncle Metellus Numidicus’s stormy household, which at that time contained his sister, a woman whose sexual proclivities and hysterical behavior had made her a torment to live with. Dalmatica became pregnant at once (a fact which increased Scaurus’s auctoritas and dignitas even more), and bore Scaurus a daughter. But in the meantime she had met Sulla at a dinner party given by her husband, and the attraction between them had been powerful, mutual, distressing.
Aware of the danger she presented, Sulla had made no attempt to pursue an acquaintance with Scaurus’s young wife. She, however, had different ideas. And after the shattered bodies of Saturninus and his friends were burned with all the honor their properly Roman status decreed, and Sulla began to go about the Forum and the city making himself known as part of his campaign to win a praetorship, Dalmatica too began to go about the Forum and the city. Wherever Sulla went, there too would be Dalmatica, all muffled in draperies, hiding behind a plinth or a column, sure that no one noticed her.
Very quickly Sulla learned to avoid places like the Porticus Margaritaria, where indeed a woman of a noble house might be expected to haunt the jeweler’s shops, and could claim innocent presence. That reduced her chances of actually speaking to him, but to Sulla her conduct was a resurrection of an old and awful nightmare—of the days when Julilla had buried him beneath an avalanche of love letters she or her girl had slipped into the sinus of his toga at every opportunity, in circumstances where he didn’t dare draw attention to their actions. Well, that had ended in a marriage, a virtually indissoluble confarreatio union which had lasted—bitter, importunate, humiliating—until her death by suicide, yet one more terrible episode in an endless procession of women hungry to tame him.
So Sulla had gone into the mean and stinking, crowded alleys of the Subura, and confided in the only friend he owned with the detachment he needed so desperately at that moment—Aurelia, sister-in-law of his dead wife, Julilla.
“What can I do?” he had cried to her. “I’m trapped, Aurelia; it’s Julilla all over again! I can’t be rid of her!”
“The trouble is, they have so little to do with their time,” said Aurelia, looking grim. “Nursemaids for their babies, little parties with their friends chiefly distinguished by the amount of gossip they exchange, looms they have no intention of using, and heads too empty to find solace in a book. Most of them feel nothing for their husbands because their marriages are made for convenience—their fathers need extra political clout, or their husbands the dowries or the extra nobility. A year down the road, and they’re ripe for the mischief of a love affair.” She sighed. “After all, Lucius Cornelius, in the matter of love they can exercise free choice, and in how many areas can they do that? The wiser among them content themselves with slaves. But the most foolish are those who fall in love. And that, unfortunately, is what has happened here. This poor silly child Dalmatica is quite out of her mind! And you are the cause of it.”
He chewed his lip, hid his thoughts by staring at his hands. “Not a willing cause,” he said.
“I know that! But does Marcus Aemilius Scaurus?”
“Ye gods, I hope he knows nothing!”
Aurelia snorted. “I’d say he knows plenty.”
“Then why hasn’t he come to see me? Ought I to see him?”
“I’m thinking about that,” said the landlady of an insula apartment building, the confidante of many, the mother of three children, the lonely wife, the busy soul who was never a busybody.
She was sitting side-on to her work table, a large area completely covered by rolls of paper, single sheets of paper, and book buckets; but there was no disorder, only the evidence of many business matters and much work.
If she could not help him, Sulla thought, no one could, for the only other person to whom he might have gone was not reliable in this situation. Aurelia was purely friend; Metrobius was also lover, with all the emotional complications that role meant, as well as the further complication of his male sex. When he had seen Metrobius the day before, the young Greek actor had made an acid remark about Dalmatica. Shocked, Sulla had only then realized that all of Rome must be talking about him and Dalmatica, for the world of Metrobius was far removed from the world Sulla now moved in.
“Ought I see Marcus Aemilius Scaurus?” Sulla asked again.
“I’d prefer that you saw Dalmatica, but I don’t see how you possibly can,” said Aurelia, lips pursed.
Sulla looked eager. “Could you perhaps invite her here?’’
“Certainly not!” said Aurelia, scandalized. “Lucius Cornelius, for a particularly hard-headed man, sometimes you don’t seem to have the sense you were surely born with! Don’t you understand? Marcus Aemilius Scaurus is undoubtedly having his wife watched. All that’s saved your white hide so far is lack of evidence to support his suspicions.”
His long canines showed, but not in a smile; for an unwary moment Sulla dropped his mask, and Aurelia caught a glimpse of someone she didn’t know. Yet—was that really true? Better to say, someone she had sensed lived there inside him, but never before had seen. Someone devoid of human qualities, a naked clawed monster fit only to scream at the moon. And for the first time in her life, she felt terrible fear.
Her visible shiver banished the monster; Sulla put up his mask, and groaned.
“Then what do I do, Aurelia? What can I do?”
“The last time you talked about her—admittedly that was two years ago—you said you were in love with her, though you’d only met her that once. It’s very like Julilla, isn’t it? And that makes it more unbearable by far. Of course, she knows nothing of Julilla beyond the fact that in the past you had a wife who killed herself—exactly the sort of fact to enhance your attractiveness. It suggests you’re dangerous for a woman to know, to love. What a challenge! No, I very much fear poor little Dalmatica is hopelessly caught in your toils, however unintentionally you may have thrown them.”
She thought for a moment in silence, then held his eyes. “Say nothing, Lucius Cornelius, and do nothing. Wait until Marcus Aemilius Scaurus comes to you. That way, you look utterly innocent. But make sure he can find no evidence of infidelity, even of the most circumstantial nature. Forbid your wife to be out of your house when you are at home, in case Dalmatica bribes one of your servants to let her in. The trouble is, you neither understand women, nor like them very much. So you don’t know how to deal with their worst excesses—and they bring out the worst in you. Her husband must come to you. But be kind to him, I beg you! He will find his visit galling, an old man with a young wife. Not a cuckold, but only because of your disinterest. Therefore you must do everything in your power to keep his pride intact. After all, his clout is only equaled by Gaius Marius’s.” She smiled. “I know that’s one comparison he wouldn’t agree with, but it’s true. If you want to be praetor, you can’t afford to offend him.”
Sulla took her advice, but unfortunately not all of it; and made a bad enemy because he was not kind, not helpful, did not strive to keep Scaurus’s pride intact.
For sixteen days after his interview with Aurelia, nothing happened, except that now he searched for Scaurus’s watchers, and he took every precaution to give Scaurus no evidence of infidelity. There were furtive winks and covert grins among Scaurus’s friends, and among his own; no doubt they had always been there to see, but he had closed his eyes to them.
The worst of it was that he still wanted Dalmatica—or loved her—or was obsessed by her—or all three. Julilla once more. The pain, the hatred, the hunger to lash out in any direction at anyone who got in his way. From a dream about making love to Dalmatica, he would pass in a flash to a dream about breaking her neck and seeing her dance insanely across a patch of moonlit grass in Circei—no, no, that was how he had killed his stepmother! He began frequently to open the secret drawer in the cupboard which housed the mask of his ancestor Publius Cornelius Sulla Rufinus Flamen Dialis, take from it his little bottles of poisons and the box containing white foundry powder—that was how he had killed Lucius Gavius Stichus and Hercules Atlas the strongman. Mushrooms? That was how he had killed his mistress—eat these, Dalmatica!
But time and experience had accumulated since Julilla died, and he knew himself better; he couldn’t kill Dalmatica any more than he had been able to kill Julilla. With the women of noble and ancient houses, there was no other alternative than to see the business out to its last and bitterest flicker. One day—some day—he and Caecilia Metella Dalmatica would finish what he at this moment did not dare to start.
Then Marcus Aemilius Scaurus came knocking on his door, that same door which had felt the hands of many ghosts, and oozed a drop of malice from out of its woody cells. The act of touching it contaminated Scaurus, who thought only that this interview was going to be even harder than he had envisioned.
Seated in Sulla’s client’s chair, the doughty old man eyed his host’s fair countenance sourly through clear green orbs which gave the lie to the lines upon his face, the hairlessness of his skull. And wished, wished, wished that he could have stayed away, that he didn’t have to beggar his pride to deal with this hideously farcical situation.
“I imagine you know why I’m here, Lucius Cornelius,” said Scaurus, chin up, eyes direct.
“I believe I do,” said Sulla, and said no more.
“I have come to apologize for the conduct of my wife, and to assure you that, having spoken to you, I will proceed to make it impossible for my wife to embarrass you further.’’ There! It was out. And he was still alive, hadn’t died of shame. But at the back of Sulla’s calm dispassionate gaze he fancied he discerned a faint contempt; imaginary, perhaps, but it was that which turned Scaurus into Sulla’s enemy.
“I’m very sorry, Marcus Aemilius.” Say something, Sulla! Make it easier for the old fool! Don’t leave him sitting there with his pride in tatters! Remember what Aurelia said! But the words refused to come out. They milled inchoate within his mind and left his tongue a thing of stone, silent.
“It will be better for everyone concerned if you leave Rome. Take yourself off to Spain,” Scaurus said finally. “I hear that Lucius Cornelius Dolabella can do with competent help.”
Sulla blinked with exaggerated surprise. “Can he? I hadn’t realized things were so serious! However, Marcus Aemilius, it isn’t possible for me to uproot myself and go to Further Spain. I’ve been in the Senate now for nine years, it’s time I sought election as a praetor.”
Scaurus swallowed, but strove to continue seeming pleasant. “Not this year, Lucius Cornelius,” he said gently. “Next year, or the year after. This year you must leave Rome.”
“Marcus Aemilius, I have done nothing wrong!” Yes, you have, Sulla! What you are doing at this very moment is wrong, you’re treading all over him! “I am three years past the age for a praetor, my time grows short. I shall stand this year, which means I must stay in Rome.”
“Reconsider, please,” said Scaurus, rising to his feet.
“I cannot, Marcus Aemilius.”
“If you stand, Lucius Cornelius, I assure you, you won’t get in. Nor will you get in next year, or the year after that, or the year after that,” said Scaurus evenly. “So much I promise you. Believe my promise! Leave Rome.”
“I repeat, Marcus Aemilius, I am very sorry. But remain in Rome to stand for praetor, I must,” said Sulla.
And so it had all fallen out. Injured in both auctoritas and dignitas though he may have been, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus Princeps Senatus was still able to marshal more than enough influence to ensure that Sulla was not elected a praetor. Other, lesser men saw their names entered on the fasti; nonentities, mediocrities, fools. But praetors nonetheless.
*
It was from his niece Aurelia that Publius Rutilius Rufus learned the true story, and he in turn had passed the true story on to Gaius Marius. That Scaurus Princeps Senatus had set his face against Sulla’s becoming a praetor was obvious to everyone; the reason why was less obvious. Some maintained it was because of Dalmatica’s pathetic crush on Sulla, but after much discussion, it was generally felt this was too slight an explanation. Having given her ample time to see the error of her ways for herself (he said), Scaurus then dealt with the girl (kindly yet firmly, he said), and made no secret of it among his friends and in the Forum.
“Poor little thing, it was bound to happen,” he said warmly to several senators, making sure there were plenty more drifting in the background well within hearing distance. “I could wish she had picked someone other than a mere creature of Gaius Marius’s, but ... He’s a pretty fellow, I suppose.”
It was very well done, so well done that the Forum experts and the members of the Senate decided the real reason behind Scaurus’s opposition to Sulla’s candidacy lay in Sulla’s known association with Gaius Marius. For Gaius Marius, having been consul an unprecedented six times, was in eclipse. His best days were in the past, he couldn’t even gather sufficient support to stand for election as censor. Which meant that Gaius Marius, the so-called Third Founder of Rome, would never join the ranks of the most exalted consulars, all of whom had been censors. Gaius Marius was a spent force in Rome’s scheme of things, a curiosity more than a threat, a man who wasn’t cheered by anyone higher than the Third Class.
Rutilius Rufus poured himself more wine. “Do you really intend to go to Pessinus?” he asked of Marius.
“Why not?”
“Why so? I mean, I could understand Delphi, or Olympia, or even Dodona. But Pessinus! Stuck out there in the middle of Anatolia — in Phrygia! The most backward, superstition-riddled, uncomfortable hole on earth! Not a decent drop of wine or a road better than a bridle track for hundreds of miles! Uncouth shepherds to right and to left, wild men from Galatia milling on the border! Really, Gaius Marius! Is it Battaces you’re anxious to see in his cloth-of-gold outfit with the jewels in his beard? Summon him to Rome again! I’m sure he’d be only too delighted to renew his acquaintance with some of our more modern matrons— they haven’t stopped weeping since he left.”
Marius and Sulla were both laughing long before Rutilius Rufus reached the end of this impassioned speech; and suddenly the constraint of the evening was gone, they were at ease with each other and in perfect accord.
“You’re going to have a look at King Mithridates,” said Sulla, and didn’t make it a question.
The eyebrows writhed; Marius grinned. “What an extraordinary thing to say! Now why would you think that, Lucius Cornelius?”
“Because I know you, Gaius Marius. You’re an irreligious old fart! The only vows I’ve ever heard you make were all to do with kicking legionaries up the arse, or conceited tribunes of the soldiers up the same. There’s only one reason why you’d want to drag your fat old carcass to the Anatolian wilderness, and that’s to see for yourself what’s going on in Cappadocia, and just how much King Mithridates has to do with it,” said Sulla, smiling more happily than he had in many months.
Marius turned to Rutilius Rufus, startled. “I hope I’m not so transparent to everyone as I am to Lucius Cornelius!”
It was Rutilius Rufus’s turn to smile. “I very much doubt that anyone else will even guess,” he said. “I for one believed you—you irreligious old fart!”
Without volition (or so it seemed to Rutilius Rufus), Marius’s head turned to Sulla, and back they were discussing some grand new strategy. “The trouble is, our sources of information are completely unreliable,” Marius said eagerly. “I mean, who of any worth or ability has been out in that part of the world in years? New Men scrambled up as far as praetor—no one I’d rely on to make an accurate report. What do we really know?”
“Very little,” said Sulla, utterly absorbed. “There have been some inroads into Galatia by King Nicomedes of Bithynia on the west and Mithridates on the east. Then a few years ago old Nicomedes married the mother of the little King of Cappadocia—she was the regent at the time, I think. And Nicomedes started calling himself King of Cappadocia.”
“That he did,” said Marius. “I suppose he thought it unfortunate when Mithridates instigated her murder and put the child back on the throne.’’ He laughed softly. ‘ ‘No more King Nicomedes of Cappadocia! I don’t know how he thought Mithridates would let him get away with it, considering that the murdered Queen was the sister of Mithridates! ‘‘
“And her son rules there still, as—oh, they have such exotic names! An Ariarathes?” asked Sulla.
“The seventh Ariarathes, to be exact,” said Marius.
“What do you think is going on?” asked Sulla, his curiosity whetted by Marius’s evident knowledge of these tortuous eastern relationships.
“I’m not sure. Probably nothing, beyond the normal squabbling between Nicomedes of Bithynia and Mithridates of Pontus. But I fancy he’s a most interesting fellow, young King Mithridates of Pontus. I’d like to meet him. After all, Lucius Cornelius, he’s not much more than thirty years of age, yet he’s gone from having no territory other than Pontus itself to owning the best part of the lands around the Euxine Sea. My skin is crawling. I have a feeling he’s going to mean trouble for Rome,” said Marius.
Deeming it high time he entered the conversation, Publius Rutilius Rufus put his empty wine cup down on the table in front of his couch with a loud bang, and seized his opportunity. “I suppose you mean Mithridates has his eye on our Roman Asia Province,” he said, nodding wisely. “Why wouldn’t he want it? So enormously rich! And the most civilized place on earth—well, it’s been Greek since before the Greeks were Greek! Homer lived and worked in our Asia Province, can you imagine it?”
“I’d probably find it easier to imagine it if you started to accompany yourself on a lyre,” said Sulla, laughing.
“Now be serious, Lucius Cornelius! I doubt King Mithridates thinks of our Roman Asia Province as a joke—nor must we, even in jest.” Joke—jest; Rutilius Rufus paused to admire his verbal virtuosity, and lost his chance to dominate the conversation.
“I don’t think there can be any doubt that Mithridates is slavering at the thought of owning our Asia Province,” said Marius.
“But he’s an oriental,” said Sulla positively. “All the oriental kings are terrified of Rome—even Jugurtha, who was far more exposed to Rome than any eastern king, was terrified of Rome. Look at the insults and indignities Jugurtha put up with before he went to war against us. We literally forced him to war.”
“Oh, I think Jugurtha always intended to go to war against us,” said Rutilius Rufus.
“I disagree,” said Sulla, frowning. “I think he dreamed of going to war against us, but understood it could be nothing but a dream. It was we who forced the war upon him when Aulus Albinus entered Numidia looking for loot. In fact, that’s how our wars usually begin! Some gold-greedy commander who shouldn’t be let lead a parade of children is given Roman legions to lead, and, off he goes looking for loot—not for Rome’s sake, but for the sake of his own purse. Carbo and the Germans, Caepio and the Germans, Silanus and the Germans—the list is endless.”
“You’re getting away from the point, Lucius Cornelius,” said Marius gently.
“Sorry, so I am!” Unabashed, Sulla grinned at his old commander affectionately. “Anyway, I think the situation in the east is very similar to the situation in Africa as it was before Jugurtha went to war against us. We all know that Bithynia and Pontus are traditional enemies, and we all know that both King Nicomedes and King Mithridates would love to expand, at least within Anatolia. And in Anatolia there are two wonderfully rich lands which make their royal mouths water—Cappadocia, and our Roman Asia Province. Ownership of Cappadocia gives a king swift access to Cilicia, and fabulously rich growing soil. Ownership of our Roman Asia Province gives a king unparalleled coastal access onto the Middle Sea, half a hundred superb seaports, and a fabulously rich hinterland. A king wouldn’t be human if he didn’t hunger after both lands.”
“Well, Nicomedes of Bithynia I don’t worry about,” said Marius, interrupting. “He’s tied hand and foot to Rome, and he knows it. Nor do I think that—for the present, at any rate—our Roman Asia Province is in any danger. It’s Cappadocia.”
Sulla nodded. “Exactly. Asia Province is Roman. And I don’t think King Mithridates is so different from the rest of his oriental colleagues that he’s shed his fear of Rome enough to attempt to invade our Asia Province, misgoverned shambles though it might be. But Cappadocia isn’t Roman. Though it does fall within our sphere, it seems to me that both Nicomedes and young Mithridates have assumed Cappadocia is a little too remote and a little too unimportant for Rome to go to war about. On the other hand, they move like thieves to steal it, concealing their motive behind puppets and relatives.”
There came a grunt from Marius. “I wouldn’t call old King Nicomedes’s marrying the Queen Regent of Cappadocia furtive!”
“Yes, but that situation didn’t last long, did it? King Mithridates was outraged enough to murder his own sister! He had her son back on the Cappadocian throne quicker than you can say Lucius Tiddlypuss.”
“Unfortunately it’s Nicomedes is our official Friend and Ally, not Mithridates,” said Marius. “It’s a pity I wasn’t in Rome when all that was going on.”
“Oh, come now!” said Rutilius Rufus indignantly. “The kings of Bithynia have been officially entitled Friend and Ally for over fifty years! During our last war against Carthage, so too was the King of Pontus an official Friend and Ally. But this Mithridates’s father destroyed the possibility of friendship with Rome when he bought Phrygia from Manius Aquillius’s father. Rome hasn’t had relations with Pontus since. Besides which, it’s impossible to grant the status of Friend and Ally to two kings at loggerheads with each other unless that status prevents war between them. In the case of Bithynia and Pontus, the Senate decided awarding Friend and Ally status to both kings would only make matters worse between them. And that in turn meant rewarding Nicomedes of Bithynia because the record of Bithynia is better than Pontus.”
“Oh, Nicomedes is a silly old fowl!” said Marius impatiently. “He’s been ruling for over fifty years, and he wasn’t a child when he eliminated his tata from the throne, either. I’d guess his age at over eighty. And he exacerbates the Anatolian situation!”
“By behaving like a silly old fowl, I presume is what you mean.” The retort was accompanied by a near-purple look from Rutilius Rufus’s eyes, very like his niece Aurelia’s, and just as direct, if a little softer. “Do you not think, Gaius Marius, that you and I are very nearly of an age to be called silly old fowls?”
“Come, come, no ruffled feathers, now!” said Sulla, grinning. “I know what you mean, Gaius Marius. Nicomedes is well into his senescence, whether he’s capable of ruling or not—and one must presume he is capable of ruling. It’s the most Hellenized of all the oriental courts, but it’s still oriental. Which means if he dribbled on his shoes just once, his son would have him off the throne. Therefore he has retained his watchfulness and his cunning. However, he’s querulous and he’s grudging. Whereas across the border in Pontus is a man hardly thirty—vigorous, intelligent, aggressive and cocksure. No, Nicomedes can hardly be expected to give Mithridates his due, can he?”
“Hardly,” agreed Marius. “I think we can be justified in assuming that if they do come to open blows, it will be an unequal contest. Nicomedes has only just managed to hang on to what he had at the beginning of his reign, while Mithridates is a conqueror. Oh yes, Lucius Cornelius, I must see this Mithridates!” He lay back on his left elbow and gazed at Sulla anxiously. “Come with me, Lucius Cornelius, do! What’s the alternative? Another boring year in Rome, especially with Piggle-wiggle prating in the Senate, while the Piglet takes all the credit for bringing his tata home.”
But Sulla shook his head. “No, Gaius Marius.”
“I hear,” said Rutilius Rufus, nibbling the side of his fingernail idly, “that the official letter recalling Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle from his exile in Rhodes is signed by the senior consul, Metellus Nepos, and none other than the Piglet, if you please! Of the tribune of the plebs Quintus Calidius, who obtained the recall decree, not a mention! Signed by a very junior senator who is a privatus into the bargain!”
Marius laughed. “Poor Quintus Calidius! I hope the Piglet paid him handsomely for doing all the work.” He looked at Rutilius Rufus. “They don’t change much over the years, do they, the clan Caecilius Metellus? When I was a tribune of the plebs, they treated me like dirt too.”
“Deservedly,” said Rutilius Rufus. “All you did was to make life hard for every Caecilius Metellus in politics at that time! And after they thought they had you in their toils, at that! Oh, how angry was Dalmaticus!”
At the sound of that name Sulla flinched, was conscious of a flush mounting to his cheeks. Her father, Piggle-wiggle’s dead older brother. How was she, Dalmatica? What had Scaurus done to her? From the day Scaurus had come to see him at his home, Sulla had never set eyes on her. Rumor had it she was forbidden ever to leave Scaurus’s house again. “By the way,” he said loudly, “I heard from an impeccable source that there’s going to be a marriage of great convenience for the Piglet.”
Reminiscences stopped at once.
“I haven’t heard about it!” said Rutilius Rufus, a little put out; he considered his sources the best in Rome.
“It’s true nevertheless, Publius Rutilius.”
“So tell me!”
Sulla popped an almond into his mouth and munched for a moment before speaking. “Good wine, Gaius Marius,” he said, filling his cup from the flagon placed close at hand when the servants had been dismissed. Slowly Sulla added water to the wine.
“Oh, put him out of his misery, Lucius Cornelius, do!” sighed Marius. “Publius Rutilius is the biggest old gossip in the Senate.”
“I agree that he is, but you must admit it made for highly entertaining letters while we were in Africa and Gaul,” said Sulla, smiling.
“Who?” cried Rutilius Rufus, not about to be deflected.
“Licinia Minor, younger daughter of none other than our urban praetor, Lucius Licinius Crassus Orator himself.’’
“You’re joking!” gasped Rutilius Rufus.
“No, I’m not.”
“But she can’t be old enough!”
“Sixteen the day before the wedding, I hear.”
“Abominable!” growled Marius, eyebrows interlocked.
“Oh really, it’s getting beyond all justification!” said Rutilius Rufus, genuinely concerned. “Eighteen is the proper age, and not a day before should it be! We’re Romans, not oriental cradle snatchers!”
“Well, at least the Piglet is only in his early thirties,” said Sulla casually. “What about Scaurus’s wife?”
“The least said about that, the better!” snapped Publius Rutilius Rufus. His temper died. “Mind you, one has to admire Crassus Orator. There’s no shortage of money for dowries in that family, but just the same, he’s done very well with his girls. The older one gone to Scipio Nasica, no less, and now the younger one to the Piglet, only son and heir of. I thought that Licinia was bad enough, at seventeen married to a brute like Scipio Nasica. She’s pregnant, you know.”
Marius clapped his hands for the steward. “Go home, both of you! When the conversation degenerates to nothing more than old women’s gossipy tidbits, we’ve exhausted all other avenues. Pregnant! You ought to be down in the nursery with the women, Publius Rutilius!”
*
All the children had been brought to Marius’s house for this dinner, and all were asleep when the party broke up. Only Young Marius remained where he was; the others had to be taken home by their parents. Two big litters stood outside in the lane, one to accommodate Sulla’s children, Cornelia Sulla and Young Sulla, the other for Aurelia’s three, Julia Major called Lia, Julia Minor called Ju-ju, and Young Caesar. While the adult men and women stood talking low-voiced in the atrium, a team of servants carried the sleeping children out to the litters and placed them carefully inside.
The man carrying Young Caesar looked unfamiliar to Julia, automatically counting; then she stiffened, clutched Aurelia by the arm convulsively.
“That’s Lucius Decumius!” she gasped.
“Of course it is,” said Aurelia, surprised.
“Aurelia, you really shouldn’t!”
“Nonsense, Julia. Lucius Decumius is a tower of strength to me. I don’t have a nice respectable journey home, as you well know. I go through the middle of a den of thieves, footpads, the gods know what—for even after seven years, I don’t! It isn’t often that I’m lured out of my own home, but when I am, Lucius Decumius and a couple of his brothers always come to bring me home. And Young Caesar isn’t a heavy sleeper. Yet when Lucius Decumius picks him up, he never stirs.”
“A couple of his brothers!” whispered Julia, horrified.
“Do you mean to say that there are more at home like Lucius Decumius?”
“No!” said Aurelia scornfully. “I mean his brothers in the crossroads college—his minions, Julia.” She looked cross. “Oh, I don’t know why I come to these family dinners on the rare occasions when I do come! Why is it that you never seem to understand that I have my life very nicely under control, and don’t need all this fussing and clucking?”
Julia said no more until she and Gaius Marius went to bed, having settled the household down, banished the slaves to their quarters, locked the door onto the street, and made an offering to the trio of gods who looked after every Roman home—Vesta of the hearth, the Di Penates of the storage cupboards, and the Lar Familiaris of the family.
“Aurelia was very difficult today,” she said then.
Marius was tired, a sensation he experienced a great deal more often these days than of yore, and one which shamed him. So rather than do what he longed to do—namely to roll over on his left side and go to sleep—he lay on his back, settled his wife within his left arm, and resigned himself to a chat about women and domestic problems. “Oh?” he asked.
“Can’t you bring Gaius Julius home? Aurelia is growing into an old retired Vestal Virgin, all—I don’t know! Sour. Crabby. Juiceless! Yes, that’s the right word, juiceless,” said Julia. “And that child is wearing her out.”
“Which child?” mumbled Marius.
“Her twenty-two-month-old son, Young Caesar. Oh, Gaius Marius, he is astonishing! I know such children are born occasionally, but I’ve certainly never met one before, nor even heard of one among our friends. I mean, all we mothers are happy if our sons know what dignitas and auctoritas are after their fathers have taken them for their first trip to the Forum at age seven! Yet this little mite knows already, though he’s never even met his father! I tell you, husband, Young Caesar is truly an astonishing child.”
She was warming up; another thought occurred to her, of sufficient moment to make her wriggle, bounce up and down. “Ah! I was talking to Crassus Orator’s wife, Mucia, yesterday, and she was saying that Crassus Orator is boasting of having a client with a son like Young Caesar.’’ She dug Marius in the ribs. “You must know the family, Gaius Marius, because they come from Arpinum.”
He hadn’t really followed any of this, but the elbow had completed what the wriggle and bounce had begun, and he was now awake enough to say, “Arpinum? Who?” Arpinum was his home, there lay the lands of his ancestors.
“Marcus Tullius Cicero. Crassus Orator’s client and the son have the same name.”
“Unfortunately I do indeed know the family. They’re some sort of cousins. Litigious-minded lot! Stole a bit of our land about a hundred years ago, won the court case. We haven’t really spoken to them since.” His eyelids fell.
“I see.” Julia cuddled closer. “Anyway, the boy is eight now, and so brilliant he’s going to study in the Forum. Crassus Orator is predicting that he’ll create quite a stir. I suppose when Young Caesar is eight, he’ll create quite a stir too.”
“Huh!” said Marius, yawning hugely.
She dug her elbow in again. “You, Gaius Marius, are going off to sleep! Wake up!”
His eyes flew open, he made a rumbling noise in the back of his throat. “Care to race me round the Capitol?” he asked.
Giggling, she settled down once more. “Well, I haven’t met this Cicero boy, but I have met my nephew, little Gaius Julius Caesar, and I can tell you, he isn’t... normal. I know we mostly reserve that word for people who are mentally defective, but I don’t see why it can’t mean the opposite as well.”
“The older you get, Julia, the more talkative you get,” complained the weary husband.
Julia ignored this. “Young Caesar isn’t two years old yet, but he’s about a hundred! Big words and properly phrased sentences—and he knows what the big words mean too!”
And suddenly Marius was wide awake, no longer tired. He lifted himself up to look at his wife, her serene face softly delineated by the little flame of a night lamp. Her nephew! Her nephew named Gaius! The Syrian Martha’s prophecy, revealed to him the first time he ever saw the crone, in Gauda’s palace at Carthage. She had predicted that he would be the First Man in Rome, and that he would be consul seven times. But, she had added, he would not be the greatest of all Romans. His wife’s nephew named Gaius would be! And he had said to himself at the time, Over my dead body. No one is going to eclipse me. Now here was the child, a living fact.
He lay back again, his tiredness translated to aching limbs. Too much time, too much energy, too much passion had he put into his battle to become the First Man in Rome, to stand by tamely and see the luster of his name dimmed by a precocious aristocrat who would come into his own when he, Gaius Marius, was too old or too dead to oppose him. Greatly though he loved his wife, humbly though he admitted that it was her aristocratic name which had procured him that first consulship, still he would not willingly see her nephew, blood of her blood, rise higher than he himself had.
Of consulships he had won six, which meant there was a seventh yet to come. No one in Roman public life seriously believed that Gaius Marius could ever regain his past glory, those halcyon years when the Centuries had voted him in, three times in absentia, as a pledge of their conviction that he, Gaius Marius, was the only man who could save Rome from the Germans. Well, he had saved them. And what thanks had he got? A landslide of opposition, disapproval, destructiveness. The ongoing enmity of Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, of Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle, of a huge and powerful senatorial faction united in no other way than to bring down Gaius Marius. Little men with big names, appalled at the idea that their beloved Rome had been saved by a despised New Man—an Italian hayseed with no Greek, as Metellus Numidicus Piggle-wiggle had put it many years before.
Well, it wasn’t over yet. Stroke or no stroke, Gaius Marius would be consul a seventh time—and go down in the history books as the greatest Roman the Republic had ever known. Nor was he going to let some beautiful, golden-haired descendant of the goddess Venus step into the history books ahead of himself—the patrician Gaius Marius was not, the Roman Gaius Marius was not.
“I’ll fix you, boy!” he said aloud, and squeezed Julia.
“What was that?” she asked.
“In a few days we’re leaving for Pessinus, you and I and our son,” he said.
She sat up. “Oh, Gaius Marius! Really? How wonderful! Are you sure you want to take us with you?”
“I’m sure, wife. I don’t care a rush what the conventions say. We’re going to be away for two or three years, and that’s too long a time at my age to spend without seeing my wife and son. If I were a younger man, perhaps. And, since I’m journeying as a privatus, there’s no official obstacle to my taking my family along with me.” He chuckled. “I’m footing the bill myself.”
“Oh, Gaius Marius!” She could find nothing else to say.
“We’ll have a look at Athens, Smyrna, Pergamum, Nicomedia, a hundred other places.”
“Tarsus?” she asked eagerly. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to travel the world!”
He still ached, but the sleepiness surged back overwhelmingly. Down went his eyelids; his lower jaw sagged.
For a few more moments Julia chattered on, then ran out of superlatives, and sat hugging her knees happily. She turned to Gaius Marius, smiling tenderly. “Dear love, I don’t suppose... ?” she asked delicately.
Her answer was his first snore. Good wife of twelve years that she was, she shook her head gently, still smiling, and turned him onto his right side.